You never did.
But Peter said every four generations, a boy from the island would meet a woman he'd have to marry. A young art student. Like an old fairy tale. He'd bring her home, and she'd paint so well it would make Waytansea Island rich for another hundred years. He'd sacrifice his life, but it was just one life. Just once every four generations.
Peter had shown Angel Delaporte his junk jewelry. He'd told Angel the old custom, how the woman who responded to the jewelry, who was attracted and trapped by it, that would be the fairy-tale woman. Every boy in his generation had to enroll in art school. He had to wear a piece of the jewelry, scratched and rusted and tarnished. He had to meet as many women as possible.
You had to.
Dear sweet closeted bisexual Peter.
The “walking peter” Misty's friends tried to warn her about.
The brooches, they pinned through their foreheads, their nipples. Navels and cheekbones. The necklaces, they'd thread through holes in their noses. They calculated to be revolting. To disgust. To prevent any woman from admiring them, and they each prayed another boy would meet the rumored woman. Because the day one unlucky boy married this woman, the rest of his generation would be free to live their own lives. And so would the next three generations.
Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves.
Instead of progress, the island was stuck in this repeating loop. Recycling the same ancient success. Period revival. This same ritual.
It was Misty the unlucky boy would meet. Misty was their fairy-tale woman.
There on the hotel stairs, Angel told her this. Because he could never understand why Peter had left and gone off to marry her. Because Peter could never tell him. Because Peter never loved her, Angel Delaporte says.
You never loved her.
You shit sack.
And what you can't understand you can make mean anything.
Because Peter was only fulfilling some fabled destiny. A superstition. An island legend, and no matter how hard Angel tried to talk him out of it, Peter insisted that Misty was his destiny.
Your destiny.
Peter insisted that his life should be wasted, married to a woman he never loved, because he'd be saving his family, his future children, his entire community from poverty. From losing control of their small, beautiful world. Their island. Because their system had worked for hundreds of years.
Collapsed there on the stairs, Angel says, “That's why I hired him to work on my house. That's why I've followed him here.” Misty and him on the stairs, her cast stretched out between them, Angel Delaporte leans in close, his breath full of red wine, and says, “I just want you to tell me why he sealed those rooms. And why the room here—room 313—here in this hotel?”
Why did Peter sacrifice his life to marry her? His graffiti, it wasn't a threat. Angel says it was a warning. Why was Peter trying to warn everyone?
A door opens into the stairwell above them, and a voice says, “There she is.” It's Paulette, the desk clerk. It's Grace Wilmot and Dr. Touchet. It's Brian Gilmore, who runs the post office. And old Mrs. Terrymore from the library. Brett Petersen, the hotel manager. Matt Hyland from the grocery store. It's the whole village council coming down the stairs toward them.
Angel leans close, clutching her arm, and says, “Peter didn't kill himself.” He points up the stairs and says, “They did. They murdered him.”
And Grace Wilmot says, “Misty dear. You need to get back to work.” She shakes her head, clucking her tongue, and says, “We're so, so close to being done.”
And Angel's hands, his leather driving gloves let go. He backs off, now a step lower, and says, “Peter warned me.” Glancing from the crowd above them to Misty, to the crowd, he backs off, saying, “I just want to know what's happening.”
From behind her, the hands are closing around her shoulders, her arms, and lifting.
And Misty, all she can say is, “Peter was gay?”
You're gay?
But Angel Delaporte is stumbling backward, down the stairs. He stumbles to the next floor lower, still shouting up the stairwell, “I'm going to the police!” He shouts, “The truth is, Peter was trying to save people from you!”
August 23
HER ARMS ARE NOTHING but loose ropes of skin. Across the back of her neck, the bones feel bundled together with dried tendons. Inflamed. Sore and tired. Her shoulders hanging from the spine at the base of her skull. Her brain could be a baked black stone inside her head. Her pubic hair's growing back, scratchy and pimpled around her catheter. With a new piece of paper in front of her, a blank canvas, Misty picks up a brush or a pencil, and nothing will happen. When Misty sketches, forcing her hand to make something, it's a stone house. A rose garden. Just her own face. Her self-portrait diary.
Fast as her inspiration came, it's gone.
Someone slips the blindfold off her head, and the sunlight from the dormer window makes her squint. It's so blinding bright. It's Dr. Touchet here with her, and he says, “Congratulations, Misty. It's all over.”
It's what he said when Tabbi was born.
Her homemade immortality.
He says, “It might take a few days before you can stand,” and he slips an arm around her back, hooked under her arms, and lifts Misty to her feet.
On the windowsill, someone's left Tabbi's shoe box full of junk jewelry. The glittering, cheap bits of mirror, cut into diamond shapes. Every angle reflecting light in a different direction. Dazzling. A little bonfire, there in the sun bouncing off the ocean.
“By the window?” the doctor says. “Or would you rather be in bed?”
Instead of “in bed,” Misty hears dead.
The room is just how Misty remembers it. Peter's pillow on the bed, the smell of him. The paintings are, all of them, gone. Misty says, “What have you done with them?”
The smell of you.
And Dr. Touchet steers her to
