June 23
   A WOMAN CALLS FROM Seaview to say her linen closet is missing. Last September, her house had six bedrooms, two linen closets. She’s sure of it. Now she’s only got one. She comes to open her beach house for the summer. She drives out from the city with the kids and the nanny and the dog, and here they are with all their luggage, and all their towels are gone. Disappeared. Poof.
   Bermuda triangulated.
   Her voice on the answering machine, the way her voice screeches up, high, until it’s an air-raid siren by the end of every sentence, you can tell she’s shaking mad, but mostly she’s scared. She says, “Is this some kind of joke? Please tell me somebody paid you to do this.”
   Her voice on the machine, she says, “Please, I won’t call the police. Just put it back the way it was, okay?”
   Behind her voice, faint in the background, you can hear a boy’s voice saying, “Mom?”
   The woman, away from the phone, she says, “Everything’s going to be fine.” She says, “Now let’s not panic.”
   The weather today is an increasing trend toward denial.
   Her voice on the answering machine, she says, “Just call me back, okay?” She leaves her phone number. She says, “Please . . .”

June 25
   PICTURE THE WAY a little kid would draw a fish bone—the skeleton of a fish, with the skull at one end and the tail at the other. The long spine in between, it’s crossed with rib bones. It’s the kind of fish skeleton you’d see in the mouth of a cartoon cat.
   Picture this fish as an island covered with houses. Picture the kind of castle houses that a little girl living in a trailer park would draw—big stone houses, each with a forest of chimneys, each a mountain range of different rooflines, wings and towers and gables, all of them going up and up to a lightning rod at the top. Slate roofs. Fancy wrought-iron fences. Fantasy houses, lumpy with bay windows and dormers. All around them, perfect pine trees, rose gardens, and red brick sidewalks.
   The bourgeois daydreams of some poor white trash kid.
   The whole island was exactly what a kid growing up in some trailer park—say some dump like Tecumseh Lake, Georgia—would dream about. This kid would turn out all the lights in the trailer while her mom was at work. She’d lie down flat on her back, on the matted-down orange shag carpet in the living room. The carpet smelling like somebody stepped in a dog pile. The orange melted black in spots from cigarette burns. The ceiling was water-stained. She’d fold her arms across her chest, and she could picture life in this kind of place.
   It would be that time—late at night—when your ears reach out for any sound. When you can see more with your eyes closed than open.
   The fish skeleton. From the first time she held a crayon, that’s what she’d draw.
   The whole time this kid’s growing up, maybe her mom was never home. She never knew her dad, and maybe her mom worked two jobs. One at a shitty fiberglass insulation factory, one slopping food in a hospital cafeteria. Of course, this kid dreams of a place like this island, where nobody works except to keep house and pick wild blueberries and beachcomb. Embroider handkerchiefs. Arrange flowers. Where every day doesn’t start with an alarm clock and end with the television. She’s imagined these houses, every house, every room, the carved edge of each fireplace mantel. The pattern in every parquet floor. Imagined it out of thin air. The curve of each light fixture or faucet. Every tile, she could picture. Imagine it, late at night. Every wallpaper pattern. Every shingle and stairway and downspout, she’s drawn it with pastels. Colored it with crayons. Every brick sidewalk and boxwood hedge, she’s sketched it. Filled in the red and green with watercolors. She’s seen it, pictured it, dreamed of it. She’s wanted it so bad.
   Since as early as she could pick up a pencil, this was all she ever drew.
   Picture this fish with the skull pointed north and the tail south. The spine is crossed with sixteen rib bones, running east and west. The skull is the village square, with the ferryboat coming and going from the harbor that’s the fish’s mouth. The fish’s eye would be the hotel, and around it, the grocery store, the hardware supply, the library and church.
   She painted the streets with ice in the bare trees. She painted it with birds coming back, each gathering beach grass and pine needles to build a nest. Then, with foxgloves in bloom, taller than people. Then with even taller sunflowers. Then with the leaves spiraling down and the ground under them lumpy with walnuts and chestnuts.
   She could see it so clear. She could picture every room, inside every house.
   And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people. Especially not her own hippie mom, always tired and smelling like French fries and cigarette smoke.
   It got until Misty Kleinman gave up on ever being a happy person. Everything was ugly. Everyone was crass and just . . . wrong.
   Her name was Misty Kleinman.
   In case she’s not around when you read this, she was your wife. In case you’re not just playing dumb—your poor wife, she was born Misty Marie Kleinman.
   The poor idiot girl, when she was drawing a bonfire on the beach, she could taste ears of corn and boiled crabs. Drawing the herb garden of one house, she could smell the rosemary and thyme.
   Still, the better she could draw, the worse her life got—until nothing in her real world was good enough. It got until she didn’t belong anywhere. It got so nobody was good enough, refined enough, real enough. Not the boys in high school. Not the other girls. Nothing was as real as her imagined world. This got until she was going to student counseling and stealing money from her mom’s purse to spend on dope.
   So people wouldn’t say she was crazy, she made her life about the art instead of the visions. Really, she just wanted the skill to record them. To make her imagined world more and more accurate. More real.
   And in art school, she met a boy named Peter Wilmot. She met you, a boy from a place called Waytansea Island.
   And the first time you see the island, coming from anyplace else in the entire world, you think you’re dead. You’re dead and gone to heaven, safe forever.
   The fish’s spine is Division Avenue. The fish’s ribs are streets, starting with Alder, one block south of the village square. Next is Birch Street, Cedar Street, Dogwood, Elm, Fir, Gum, Hornbeam, all of them alphabetical until Oak and Poplar Streets, just before the fish’s tail. There, the south end of Division Avenue turns to gravel, and then mud, then disappears into the trees of Waytansea Point.
   This isn’t a bad description. That’s how the harbor looks when you arrive for the first time on the ferryboat from the mainland. Narrow and long, the harbor looks like the mouth of a fish, waiting to gobble you up in a story from the Bible.
   You can walk the length of Division Avenue, if you’ve got all day. Have breakfast at the Waytansea Hotel and then walk a block south, past the church on Alder Street. Past the Wilmot house, the only house on East Birch, with sixteen acres of lawn going right down to the water. Past the Burton house on East Juniper Street. The woodlots dense with oaks, each tree twisted and tall as a moss-covered lightning bolt. The sky above Division Avenue, in summer it’s green with dense, shifting layers of maple and oak and elm leaves.
   You come here for the first time, and you think all your hopes and dreams have come true. Your life will end happily ever after.
   The point is, for a kid who’s only ever lived in a house with wheels under it, this looks like the special safe place where she’ll live, loved and cared for, forever.
   For a kid who used to sit on shag carpet with a box of colored pencils or crayons and draw pictures of these houses, houses she’d never seen. Just pictures of the way she imagined them with their porches and stained-glass windows. For this little girl to one day see these houses for real. These exact houses. Houses she thought she’d only ever imagined . . .
   Since the first time she could draw, little Misty Marie knew the wet secrets of the septic tanks behind each house. She knew the wiring inside their walls was old, cloth-wrapped for insulation and strung through china tubes and along china posts. She could draw the inside of every front door, where every island family marked the names and height of each child.
   Even from the mainland, from the ferry dock in Long Beach, across three miles of salt water, the island looks like paradise. The pines so dark green they look black, the waves breaking against the brown rocks, it’s like everything she could ever want. Protected. Quiet and alone.
   Nowadays, this is how the island looks to a lot of people. A lot of rich strangers.
   For this kid who’d never swam in anything bigger than the trailer park pool, blinded by too much chlorine, for her to ride the ferry into Waytansea Harbor with the birds singing and the sun bouncing bright off the rows and rows of the hotel windows. For her to hear the ocean rolling into the side of the breakwater, and feel the sun so warm and the clean wind in her hair, smelling the roses in full bloom . . . the thyme and rosemary . . .
   This pathetic teenager who’d never seen the ocean, she’d already painted the headlands and the cliffs that hung high above the rocks. And she’d got them perfect.
   Poor little Misty Marie Kleinman.
   This girl came here as a bride, and the whole island came out to greet her. Forty, fifty families, all of them smiling and waiting their turn to shake her hand. A choir of grade school kids sang. They threw rice. There was a big dinner in her honor at the hotel, and everyone toasted her with champagne.
   From its hillside up above Merchant Street, the windows of the Waytansea Hotel, all six stories of them, the rows of windows and glassed-in porches, the zigzag lines of dormers in the steep roof, they were all watching her arrive. Everyone was watching her come to live in one of the big houses in the shady, tree-lined belly of the fish.
   Just one look at Waytansea Island, and Misty Kleinman figured it was worth kissing off her blue-collar mom. The dog piles and shag carpet. She swore never to set foot in the old trailer park. She put her plans for being a painter on hold.
   The point is, when you’re a kid, even when you’re a little older, maybe twenty and enrolled in art school, you don’t know anything about the real world. You want to believe somebody when he says he loves you. He only wants to marry you and take you home to live in some perfect island paradise. A big stone house on East Birch Street. He says he only wants to make you happy.
   And no, honestly, he won’t ever torture you to death.
   And poor Misty Kleinman, she told herself, it wasn’t a career as an artist that she wanted. What she really wanted, all along, was the house, the family, the peace.
   Then she came to Waytansea Island, where everything was so right.
   Then it turned out she was wrong.

June 26
   A MAN CALLS FROM the mainland, from Ocean Park, to complain that his kitchen is gone.
   It’s natural not to notice at first. After you live anywhere long enough—a house, an apartment, a nation—it just seems too small.
   Ocean Park, Oysterville, Long Beach, Ocean Shores, these are all mainland towns. The woman with the missing closet. The man with his bathroom gone. These people, they’re all messages on the answering machine, people who had some remodeling done on their vacation places. Mainland places, summer people. You have a nine-bedroom house you only see two weeks each year, it might take you a few seasons to notice you’re missing part. Most of these people have at least a half dozen houses. These aren’t really homes. These are investments. They have condos and co-ops. They have apartments in London and Hong Kong. A different toothbrush waits in every time zone. A pile of dirty clothes on every continent.
   This voice complaining on Peter’s answering machine, he says there was a kitchen with a gas range. A double oven in one wall. A big two-door refrigerator.
   Listening to him gripe, your wife, Misty Marie, she nods yes, a lot of things used to be different around here.
   It used to be you could catch the ferry just by showing up. It runs every half hour, to the mainland and back. Every half hour. Now you get in line. You wait your turn. Sit in the parking lot with a mob of strangers in their shiny sports cars that don’t smell like urine. The ferry comes and goes three or four times before there’s room for you on board. You, sitting all that time in the hot sun, in that smell.
   It takes you all morning just to get off the island.
   You used to walk into the Waytansea Hotel and get a window table, no problem. It used to be you never saw litter on Waytansea Island. Or traffic. Or tattoos. Pierced noses. Syringes washed up on the beach. Sticky used condoms in the sand. Billboards. Corporate tagging.
   The man in Ocean Park, he said how his dining room wall is nothing but perfect oak wainscoting and blue-striped wallpaper. The baseboard and picture molding and cove molding run seamless and unbroken from corner to corner. He knocked, and the wall is solid, plaster drywall on wood-frame construction. In the middle of this perfect wall is where he swears the kitchen door used to be.
   Over the phone, the Ocean Park man says, “Maybe this is my mistake, but a house has to have a kitchen? Doesn’t it? Isn’t that in the building code or something?”
   The lady in Seaview only missed her linen closet when she couldn’t find a clean towel.
   The man in Ocean Park, he said how he took a corkscrew from the dining room sideboard. He screwed a little hole where he remembered the kitchen door. He got a steak knife from the sideboard and stabbed the hole a little bigger. He has a little flashlight on his key chain, and he pressed his cheek to the wall and peeked through the hole he’d made. He squinted, and in the darkness was a room with words written across the walls. He squinted and let his eyes adjust, and there in the dark, all he could read were snatches:
   “. . . set foot on the island and you will die . . .” the words said. “. . . run as fast as you can from this place. They will kill all of God’s children if it means saving their own . . .”
   In where his kitchen should be, it says: “. . . all of you butchered . . .”
   The man in Ocean Park says, “You’d better come see what I found.” His voice on the answering machine says, “The handwriting alone is worth the trip.”

June 28
   THE DINING ROOM at the Waytansea Hotel, it’s named the Wood and Gold Dining Room because of its walnut paneling and gold brocade upholstery. The fireplace mantel is carved walnut with polished brass andirons. You have to keep the fire burning even when the wind blows from the mainland; then smoke backs up and coughs out the front. Soot and smoke slip out until you have to pull the batteries from every smoke detector. By then the whole hotel smells a little on fire.
   Every time someone asks for table nine or ten by the fireplace and then bitches about the smoke and how it’s too hot, and asks for a new table, you need to take a drink. Just a sip of whatever you’ve got. Cooking sherry works for your poor fat wife.
   This is a day in the life of Misty Marie, queen of the slaves.
   Another longest day of the year.
   It’s a game anybody can play. This is just Misty’s own personal coma.
   A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.
   In the Wood and Gold Dining Room, across from the fireplace, are windows that look down the coastline. Half the glazing putty has dried hard and crumbled until the cold wind whistles inside. The windows sweat. Moisture inside the room collects on the glass and trickles down into a puddle until the floor is soaked through and the carpet smells bad as a whale washed up on the beach for the last two weeks of July. The view outside, the horizon is cluttered with billboards, the same brand names, for fast food, sunglasses, tennis shoes, that you see printed on the litter that marks the tide line.
   Floating in every wave, you see cigarette butts.
   Every time someone asks for table fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen by the windows and then complains about the cold draft and the stink of the squishy wet carpet, when they whine for a new table, you need to take a drink.
   These summer people, their holy grail is the perfect table. The power seat. Placement. The place they’re sitting is never as good as where they aren’t. It’s so crowded, just getting across the dining room, you’re punched in the stomach by elbows and hipbones. Slapped with purses.
   Before we go any further, you might want to put on some extra clothes. You might want to stock up on some extra B vitamins. Maybe some extra brain cells. If you’re reading this in public, stop until you’re wearing your best good underwear.
   Even before this, you might want to get on the list somewhere for a donor liver.
   You can see where this is going.
   This is where Misty Marie Kleinman’s whole life has gone.
   You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying.
   Whenever anyone from the mainland comes in with a group of her friends, all of them thin and tanned and sighing at the woodwork and white tableclothes, the crystal bud vases filled with roses and fern and the silver-plate antique everything, anytime someone says, “Well, you should serve tofu instead of veal!” take a drink.
   These thin women, maybe on the weekends you’ll see a husband, short and dumpy, sweating so hard the black flock he sprays on his bald spot is running down the back of his neck. Thick rivers of dark sludge that stain the back of his shirt collar.
   Whenever one of the local sea turtles comes in clutching her pearls at her withered throat, old Mrs. Burton or Mrs. Seymour or Mrs. Perry, when she sees some skinny tanned summer women at her own personal favorite table since 1865 and says, “Misty, how could you? You know I’m always a regular here at noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Really, Misty . . .” then you need to take two drinks.
   When the summer people ask for coffee drinks with foamed milk or chelated silver or carob sprinkles or soy-based anything, take another drink.
   If they don’t tip, take another.
   These summer women. They wear so much black eyeliner they could be wearing glasses. They wear dark brown lip liner, then eat until the lipstick inside is worn away. What’s left is a table of skinny children, each with a dirty ring around her mouth. Their long hooked fingernails the pastel color of Jordan almonds.
   When it’s summer and you still have to stoke the smoking fireplace, remove an article of clothing.
   When it’s raining and the windows rattle in the cold draft, put on an article of clothing.
   A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.
   When Peter’s mother comes in with your daughter, Tabbi, and expects you to wait on your own mother-in-law and your own kid like their own personal slave, take two drinks. When they both sit there at table eight, Granmy Wilmot telling Tabbi, “Your mother would be a famous artist if she’d only try, ” take a drink.
   The summer women, their diamond rings and pendants and tennis bracelets, all their diamonds dull and greasy with sunblock, when they ask you to sing “Happy Birthday” to them, take a drink.
   When your twelve-year-old looks up at you and calls you “ma’am” instead of Mom . . .
   When her grandmother, Grace, says, “Misty dear, you’d have more money and dignity if you’d go back to painting . . .”
   When the whole dining room hears this . . .
   A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.
   Anytime Grace Wilmot orders the deluxe selection of tea sandwiches with cream cheese and goat cheese and walnuts chopped into a fine paste and spread on paper-thin toast, then she eats only a couple bites and leaves the rest to waste and then charges this and a pot of Earl Grey tea and a piece of carrot cake, she charges all this to you and you don’t even know she’s done this until your paycheck is only seventy-five cents because of all the deductions and some weeks you actually end up owing the Waytansea Hotel money, and you realize you’re a sharecropper trapped in the Wood and Gold Dining Room probably for the rest of your life, then take five drinks.
   Anytime the dining room is crowded with every little gold brocade chair filled with some woman, local or mainland, and they’re all bitching about how the ferry ride takes too long and there’s not enough parking on the island and how you never used to need a reservation for lunch and how come some people don’t just stay home because it’s just too, too much, all these elbows and needy, strident voices asking for directions and asking for nondairy creamer and sundresses in size 2, and the fireplace still has to be blazing away because that’s hotel tradition, then remove another article of clothing.
   If you’re not drunk and half naked by this point, you’re not paying attention.
   When Raymon the busboy catches you in the walk-in freezer putting a bottle of sherry in your mouth and says, “Misty, cariño . Salud !”
   When that happens, toast him with the bottle, saying, “To my brain-dead husband. To the daughter I never see. To our house, about to go to the Catholic church. To my batty mother-in-law, who nibbles Brie and green onion finger sandwiches . . .” then say, “ Te amo,Raymon.”
   Then take a bonus drink.
   Anytime some crusty old fossil from a good island family tries to explain how she’s a Burton but her mother was a Seymour and her father was a Tupper and his mother was a Carlyle and somehow that makes her your second cousin once removed, and then she flops a cold, soft, withered hand on your wrist while you’re trying to clear the dirty salad plates and she says, “Misty, why aren’t you painting anymore?” and you can see yourself just getting older and older, your whole life spiraling down the garbage disposal, then take two drinks.
   What they don’t teach you in art school is never, ever to tell people you wanted to be an artist. Just so you know, for the rest of your life, people will torture you by saying how you used to love to draw when you were young. You used to love to paint.
   A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.
   Just for the record, today your poor wife, she drops a butter knife in the hotel dining room. When she bends to pick it up, something’s reflected in the silver blade. It’s some words written on the underside of table six. On her hands and knees, she lifts the edge of the tablecloth. On the wood, there with the dried chewing gum and crumbs of snot, it says, “Don’t let them trick you again.”
   Written in pencil, it says, “Choose any book at the library.”
   Somebody’s homemade immortality. Their lasting effect. This is their life after death.
   Just for the record, the weather today is partly soused with occasional bursts of despair and irritation.
   The message under table six, the faint penciled handwriting, it’s signed Maura Kincaid .

June 29—The New Moon
   IN OCEAN PARK, the man answers his front door, a wineglass in one hand, some kind of bright orange wine filling it up to his index finger on the side of the glass. He’s wearing a white terry cloth bathrobe with “Angel” stitched on the lapel. He wears a gold chain tangled in his gray chest hair and smells like plaster dust. His other hand holds the flashlight. The man drinks the wine down to his middle finger, and his face looks puffy with dark chin stubble. His eyebrows are bleached or plucked until they’re almost not there.
   Just for the record, this is how they met, Mr. Angel Delaporte and Misty Marie.
   In art school, you learn that Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, the Mona Lisa, it has no eyebrows because they were the last detail the artist added. He was putting wet paint onto dry. In the seventeenth century, a restorer used the wrong solvent and wiped them off forever.
   A pile of suitcases sits just inside the front door, the real leather kind, and the man points past them, back into the house with his flashlight in hand, and says, “You can tell Peter Wilmot that his grammar is atrocious.”
   These summer people, Misty Marie tells them carpenters are always writing inside walls. It’s the same idea every man gets, to write his name and the date before he seals the wall with Sheetrock. Sometimes they leave the day’s newspaper. It’s tradition to leave a bottle of beer or wine. Roofers will write on the decking before they cover it with tar paper and shingles. Framers will write on the sheathing before they cover it with clapboard or stucco. Their name and the date. Some little part of themselves for someone in the future to discover. Maybe a thought. We were here. We built this. A reminder.
   Call it custom or superstition or feng shui.
   It’s a kind of sweet homespun immortality.
   In art history, they teach how Pope Pius V asked El Greco to paint over some nude figures Michelangelo had painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. El Greco agreed, but only if he could paint over the entire ceiling. They teach that El Greco is only famous because of his astigmatism. That’s why he distorted his human bodies, because he couldn’t see right, he stretched everybody’s arms and legs and got famous for the dramatic effect.
   From famous artists to building contractors, we all want to leave our signature. Our lasting effect. Your life after death.
   We all want to explain ourselves. Nobody wants to be forgotten.
   That day in Ocean Park, Angel Delaporte shows Misty the dining room, the wainscoting and blue-striped wallpaper. Halfway up one wall is a busted hole of curling, torn paper and plaster dust.
   Masons, she tells him, they’ll mortar a charm, a religious medal on a chain, to hang inside a chimney and keep evil spirits from coming down the flue. Masons in the Middle Ages would seal a live cat inside the walls of a new building to bring good luck. Or a live woman. To give the building a soul.
   Misty, she’s watching his glass of wine. She’s talking to it instead of his face, following it around with her eyes, hoping he’ll notice and offer her a drink.
   Angel Delaporte puts his puffy face, his plucked eyebrow, on the hole and says, “. . . the people of Waytansea Island will kill you the way they’ve killed everyone before . . .” He holds the little flashlight tight to the side of his head so it shines into the darkness. The bristling brass and silver keys hang down to his shoulder, bright as costume jewelry. He says, “You should see what’s written in here.”
   Slow, the way a child learns to read, Angel Delaporte stares into the dark and says, “. . . now I see my wife working at the Waytansea Hotel, cleaning rooms and turning into a fat fucking slob in a pink plastic uniform . . .”
   Mr. Delaporte says, “. . . She comes home and her hands smell like the latex gloves she has to wear to pick up your used rubbers . . . her blond hair’s gone gray and smells like the shit she uses to scrub out your toilets when she crawls into bed next to me . . .”
   “Hmm,” he says, and drinks his wine down to his ring finger. “That’s a misplaced modifier.”
   He reads, “. . . her tits hang down the front of her like a couple of dead carp. We haven’t had sex in three years . . .”
   It gets so quiet Misty tries to make a little laugh.
   Angel Delaporte holds out the flashlight. He drinks his bright orange wine down to where his pinkie finger is on the side of the glass, and he nods at the hole in the wall and says, “Read it for yourself.”
   His ring of keys is so heavy Misty has to make a muscle to lift the little flashlight, and when she puts her eye to the small, dark hole, the words painted on the far wall say:
   “. . . you’ll die wishing you’d never set foot . . .”
   The missing linen closet in Seaview, the missing bathroom in Long Beach, the family room in Oysterville, whenever people go poking around, this is what they find. It’s always Peter’s same tantrum.
   Your same old tantrum.
   “. . . you’ll die and the world will be a better place for . . .”
   In all these mainland houses Peter worked on, these investments, it’s the same filth written and sealed inside.
   “. . . die screaming in terible . . .”
   And behind her, Angel Delaporte says, “Tell Mr. Wilmot that he spelled terrible wrong.”
   These summer people, poor Misty, she tells them, Mr. Wilmot wasn’t himself for the last year or so. He had a brain tumor he didn’t know about for—we don’t know how long. Her face still pressed to the hole in the wallpaper, she tells this Angel Delaporte how Mr. Wilmot did some work in the old Waytansea Hotel, and now the room numbers jump from 312 to 314. Where there used to be a room, there’s just perfect, seamless hallway, chair molding, baseboard, new power outlets every six feet, top-quality work. All of it code, except the room sealed inside.
   And this Ocean Park man swirls the wine in his glass and says, “I hope room 313 wasn’t occupied at the time.”
   Out in her car, there’s a crowbar. They can have this doorway opened back up in five minutes. It’s just drywall is all, she tells the man. Just Mr. Wilmot going crazy.
   When she puts her nose in the hole and sniffs, the wallpaper smells like a million cigarettes came here to die. Inside the hole, you can smell cinnamon and dust and paint. Somewhere inside the dark, you can hear a refrigerator hum. A clock ticks.
   Written around and around the walls, it’s always this same rant. In all these vacation houses. Written in a big spiral that starts at the ceiling and spins to the floor, around and around so you have to stand in the center of the room and turn to read it until you’re dizzy. Until it makes you sick. In the light from the key ring, it says:
   “. . . murdered despite all your money and status . . .”
   “Look,” she says. “There’s your stove. Right where you thought.” And she steps back and gives him the little flashlight.
   Every contractor, Misty tells him, they’ll sign their work. Mark their territory. Finish carpenters will write on the subfloor before they lay the hardwood parquet or the carpet pad. They’ll write on the walls before the wallpaper or tile. This is what’s inside everybody’s walls, this record of pictures, prayers, names. Dates. A time capsule. Or worse, you could find lead pipes, asbestos, toxic mold, bad wiring. Brain tumors. Time bombs.
   Proof that no investment is yours forever.
   What you don’t really want to know—but you don’t dare forget.
   Angel Delaporte, his face pressed to the hole, he reads, “. . . I love my wife and I love my kid . . .” He reads, “. . . I won’t see my family pushed down and down the ladder by you low-life parasites . . .”
   He leans into the wall, his face twisting hard against the hole, and says, “This handwriting is so compelling. The way he writes the letter f in ‘set foot’ and ‘fat fucking slob,’ the top line is so long it overhangs the rest of the word. That means he’s actually a very loving, protective man.” He says, “See the k in ‘kill you’? The way the front leg is extralong shows he’s worried about something.”
   Grinding his face against the hole, Angel Delaporte reads, “. . . Waytansea Island will kill every last one of God’s children if it means saving our own . . .”
   He says, the way the capital I ’s are thin and pointed proves Peter’s got a keen sharp mind but he’s scared to death of his mother.
   His keys jingle as he pokes the little flashlight around and reads, “. . . I have danced with your toothbrush stuck up my dirty asshole . . .”
   His face jerks back from the wallpaper, and he says, “Yeah, that’s my stove all right.” He drinks the last of the wine, swishing it around, loud, in his mouth. He swallows it, saying, “I knew I had a kitchen in this house.”
   Poor Misty, she says she’s sorry. She’ll rip open the doorway. Mr. Delaporte, he probably wants to go get his teeth cleaned this afternoon. That, and maybe a tetanus shot. Maybe a gamma globulin, too.
   With one finger, Mr. Delaporte touches a big wet smear next to the hole in the wall. He puts his wineglass to his mouth and goes cross-eyed to find it empty. The dark, wet smear on the blue wallpaper, he touches it. Then he makes a nasty face and wipes his finger on the side of his bathrobe and says, “I hope Mr. Wilmot is heavily insured and bonded.”
   “Mr. Wilmot has been unconscious in the hospital for the last few days,” Misty says.
   Reaching a pack of cigarettes from his bathrobe pocket, he shakes one out and says, “So you run his remodeling firm now?”
   And Misty tries to laugh. “I’m the fat fucking slob,” she says.
   And the man, Mr. Delaporte says, “Pardon?”
   “I’m Mrs. Peter Wilmot.”
   Misty Marie Wilmot, the original shrewish bitch monster in the flesh. She tells him, “I was working at the Waytansea Hotel when you called this morning.”
   Angel Delaporte nods, looking at his empty wineglass. The glass, sweaty and smeared with fingerprints. He holds the wineglass up between them and says, “You want I should get you a drink?”
   He looks at where she pressed her face to his dining room wall, where she let one tear leak out and smeared his blue-striped wallpaper. A wet print of her eye, the crow’s-feet around her eye, her obicularis oculi behind bars. Still holding the unlit cigarette in one hand, he takes his white terry cloth belt in his other hand and scrubs at the tearstain. And he says, “I’ll give you a book. It’s called Graphology . You know, handwriting analysis.”
   And Misty, who really did think the Wilmot house, the sixteen acres on Birch Street, meant happily ever after, she says, “You want to maybe rent a place for the summer?” She looks at his wineglass and says, “A big old stone house. Not on the mainland, but out on the island ?”
   And Angel Delaporte, he looks back over his shoulder at her, at Misty’s hips, then her breasts inside her pink uniform, then her face. He squints and shakes his head a little and says, “Don’t worry, your hair’s not that gray.”
   His cheek and temple, all around his eye, he’s powdered with white plaster dust.
   And Misty, your wife, she reaches toward him, her fingers held open. Her palm turned up, the skin rashy and red, she tells him, “Hey, if you don’t believe I’m me,” she says, “you can smell my hand.”

June 30
   YOUR POOR WIFE, she’s racing from the dining room to the music room, grabbing up silver candlesticks, little gilded mantel clocks, and Dresden figurines and stuffing them in a pillowcase. Misty Marie Wilmot, after working the breakfast shift, now she’s looting the big Wilmot house on Birch Street. Like she’s a goddamn burglar in her own house, she’s snatching up silver cigarette boxes and pillboxes and snuffboxes. Off fireplace mantels and nightstands, she’s collecting saltcellars and carved-ivory knickknacks. She’s lugging around the pillowcase, heavy and clanking with gilded-bronze gravy boats and hand-painted porcelain platters.
   Still in her pink plastic uniform, sweat stains wet under each arm. Her name tag pinned to her chest, it lets all the strangers in the hotel call her Misty. Your poor wife. She works the same kind of shitty restaurant job her mom did.
   Unhappily ever after.
   After that, she’s running home to pack. She’s slinging around a string of keys as noisy as anchor chains. A string of keys like a cluster of iron grapes. These are long and short keys. Fancy notched skeleton keys. Brass and steel keys. Some are barrel keys, hollow like the barrel of a gun, some of them as big as a pistol, the kind a pissed-off wife might tuck in her garter and use to shoot an idiot husband.
   Misty is jabbing keys into locks to see if they’ll turn. She’s trying the locks on cabinets and closet doors. She’s trying key after key. Stab and twist. Jab and turn. And each time a lock pops open, she dumps the pillowcase inside, the gilded mantel clocks and silver napkin rings and lead crystal compotes, and she locks the door.
   Today is moving-out day. It’s another longest day of the year.
   In the big house on East Birch Street, everybody’s supposed to be packing, but no. Your daughter comes downstairs with a total of nothing to wear for the rest of her life. Your loony mother, she’s still cleaning. She’s somewhere in the house, dragging the old vacuum cleaner around, on her hands and knees, picking threads and bits of lint out of the rugs and feeding them into the vacuum hose. Like it matters a good goddamn how the rugs look. Like the Wilmot family will ever live here ever again.
   Your poor wife, that silly girl who came here a million years ago from some trailer park in Georgia, she doesn’t know where to begin.
   It’s not like the Wilmot family couldn’t see this coming. You don’t just wake up one day and find the trust fund empty. All the family money gone.
   It’s only noon, and she’s trying to put off her second drink. The second is never as good as the first. The first one is so perfect. Just a little breather. A little something to keep her company. It’s only four hours until the renter comes for the keys. Mr. Delaporte. Until they need to vacate.
   It’s not even a real drink drink. It’s a glass of wine, and she’s only had one, maybe two swallows. Still, just knowing it’s nearby. Just knowing the glass is still at least half full. It’s a comfort.
   After the second drink, she’ll take a couple aspirin. Another couple drinks, another couple aspirin, and this will get her through today.
   In the big Wilmot house on East Birch Street, just inside the front door, you’ll find what looks like graffiti. Your wife, she’s dragging around her pillowcase of loot when she sees it—some words scribbled on the back of the front door. The pencil marks there, the names and dates on the white paint. Starting from knee high, you can see dark little straight lines, and along each line a name and number:
   Tabbi, age five.
   Tabbi, who’s twelve now with lateral canthal rhytides around her eyes from crying.
   Or: Peter, age seven.
   That’s you, age seven. Little Peter Wilmot.
   Some scribbles say: Grace, age six, age eight, age twelve. They go up to Grace, age seventeen. Grace with her baggy jowls of submental fat and deep playsmal bands around her neck.
   Sound familiar?
   Does any of this ring a bell?
   These pencil lines, the crest of a flood tide. The years 1795 . . . 1850 . . . 1979 . . . 2003. Old pencils were thin sticks of wax mixed with soot and wrapped with string to keep your hands clean. Before that are just notches and initials carved in the thick wood and white paint of the door.
   Some other names on the back of the door, you won’t recognize. Herbert and Caroline and Edna, a lot of strangers who lived here, grown and gone. Infants, then children, adolescents, adults, then dead. Your blood relations, your family, but strangers. Your legacy. Gone, but not gone. Forgotten but still here to be discovered.
   Your poor wife, she’s standing just inside the front door, looking at the names and dates just one last time. Her own name not among them. Poor white trash Misty Marie, with her rashy red hands and her pink scalp showing through her hair.
   All this history and tradition she used to think would keep her safe. Insulate her, forever.
   This isn’t typical. She’s not a boozer. In case anybody needs to be reminded, she’s under a lot of stress. Forty-one fucking years old, and now she has no husband. No college degree. No real work experience—unless you count scrubbing the toilet . . . stringing cranberries for the Wilmot Christmas tree . . . All she’s got is a kid and a mother-in-law to support. It’s noon, and she’s got four hours to pack everything of value in the house. Starting with the silverware, the paintings, the china. Everything they can’t trust to a renter.
   Your daughter, Tabitha, comes down from upstairs. Twelve years old, and all she’s carrying is one little suitcase and a shoe box wrapped with rubber bands. With none of her winter clothes or boots. She’s packed just a half dozen sundresses, some jeans, and her swimsuit. A pair of sandals, the tennis shoes she’s wearing.
   Your wife, she’s snatching up a bristling ancient ship model, the sails stiff and yellowed, the rigging as fine as cobwebs, and she says, “Tabbi, you know we’re not coming back.”
   Tabitha stands in the front hallway and shrugs. She says, “Granmy says we are.”
   Granmy is what she calls Grace Wilmot. Her grandmother, your mother.
   Your wife, your daughter, and your mother. The three women in your life.
   Stuffing a sterling silver toast rack into her pillowcase, your wife yells, “Grace!”
   The only sound is the roar of the vacuum cleaner from somewhere deep in the big house. The parlor, maybe the sunporch.
   Your wife drags her pillowcase into the dining room. Grabbing a crystal bone dish, your wife yells, “Grace, we need to talk! Now!”
   On the back of the door, the name “Peter” climbs as high as your wife can remember, just higher than her lips can stretch when she stands on tiptoe in her black pair of high heels. Written there, it says “Peter, age eighteen.”
   The other names, Weston and Dorothy and Alice, are faded on the door. Smudged with fingerprints, but not painted over. Relics. Immortal. The heritage she’s about to abandon.
   Twisting a key in the lock of a closet, your wife throws back her head and yells, “Grace!”
   Tabbi says, “What’s wrong?”
   “It’s this goddamn key,” Misty says, “it won’t work.”
   And Tabbi says, “Let me see.” She says, “Relax, Mom. That’s the key to wind up the grandfather clock.”
   And somewhere the roar of the vacuum cleaner goes quiet.
   Outside, a car rolls down the street, slow and quiet, with the driver leaning forward over the steering wheel. His sunglasses pushed up on top of his face, he stretches his head around, looking for a place to park. Stenciled down the side of his car, it says, “Silber International—Beyond the Limits of Being You .”
   Paper napkins and plastic cups blow up from the beach with the deep thump and the word “fuck” set to dance music.
   Standing beside the front door is Grace Wilmot, smelling like lemon oil and floor wax. Her smoothed gray head of hair stops a little below the height she was at age fifteen. Proof she’s shrinking. You could take a pencil and mark behind the top of her head. You could write: “Grace, age seventy-two.”
   Your poor, bitter wife looks at a wooden box in Grace’s hands. Pale wood under yellowed varnish with brass corners and hinges tarnished almost black, the box has legs that fold out from each side to make it an easel.
   Grace offers the box, gripped in both her blue, lumpy hands, and says, “You’ll be needing these.” She shakes the box. The stiff brushes and old tubes of dried-up paint and broken pastels rattle inside. “To start painting,” Grace says. “When it’s time.”
   And your wife, who doesn’t have the spare time to throw a fit, she just says, “Leave it.”
   Peter Wilmot, your mother is fucking useless.
   Grace smiles and opens her eyes wide. She holds the box higher, saying, “Isn’t that your dream?” Her eyebrows lifted, her corrugator muscle at work, she says, “Ever since you were a little girl, didn’t you always want to paint?”
   The dream of every girl in art school. Where you learn about wax pencils and anatomy and wrinkles.
   Why Grace Wilmot is even cleaning, God only knows. What they need to do is pack. This house: your house: the sterling silver tableware, the forks and spoons are as big as garden tools. Above the dining room fireplace is an oil painting of Some Dead Wilmot. In the basement is a glittering poisonous museum of petrified jams and jellies, antique homemade wines, Early American pears fossilized in amber syrup. The sticky residue of wealth and free time.
   Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.
   Instead of packing anything of value, something they could sell, Grace brings this old box of paints. Tabbi has her shoe box of junk jewelry, her dress-up jewelry, brooches and rings and necklaces. A layer of loose rhinestones and pearls roll around in the bottom of the shoe box. A box of sharp rusted pins and broken glass. Tabbi stands against Grace’s arm. Behind her, just even with the top of Tabbi’s head, the door says “Tabbi, age twelve” and this year’s date written in fluorescent pink felt-tipped pen.
   The junk jewelry, Tabbi’s jewelry, it belonged to these names.
   All that Grace has packed is her diary. Her red leather diary and some light summer clothes, most of them pastel hand-knit sweaters and pleated silk skirts. The diary, it’s cracked red leather with a little brass lock to keep it shut. Stamped in gold across the cover, it says “Diary.”
   Grace Wilmot, she’s always after your wife to start a diary.
   Grace says, Start painting again.
   Grace says, Go. Get out and visit the hospital more.
   Grace says, Smile at the tourists.
   Peter, your poor, frowning ogre of a wife looks at your mother and daughter and she says, “Four o’clock. That’s when Mr. Delaporte comes to get the keys.”
   This isn’t their house, not anymore. Your wife, she says, “When the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the four, if it’s not packed or locked up by then, you’ll never see it again.”
   Misty Marie, her wineglass has at least a couple swallows left in it. And seeing it there on the dining room table, it looks like the answer. It looks like happiness and peace and comfort. Like Waytansea Island used to look.
   Standing here inside the front door, Grace smiles and says, “No Wilmot ever leaves this house forever.” She says, “And no one who comes here from the outside stays for long.”
   Tabbi looks at Grace and says, “Granmy, quand est-ce qu’on revient ?”
   And her grandmother says, “En trois mois,” and pats Tabbi’s head. Your old, useless mother goes back to feeding lint to the vacuum cleaner.
   Tabbi starts to open the front door, to take her suitcase to the car. That rusted junk pile stinking of her father’s piss.
   Your piss.
   And your wife asks her, “What did your grandmother just tell you?”
   And Tabbi turns to look back. She rolls her eyes and says, “God! Relax, Mom. She only said you look pretty this morning.”
   Tabbi’s lying. Your wife’s not stupid. These days, she knows how she really looks.
   What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.
   Then, when she’s alone again, Mrs. Misty Marie Wilmot, when no one’s there to see, your wife goes up on her tiptoes and stretches her lips toward the back of the door. Her fingers spread against the years and ancestors. The box of dead paints at her feet, she kisses the dirty place under your name where she remembers your lips would be.

July 1
   JUST FOR THE RECORD, Peter, it really sucks how you tell everybody your wife’s a hotel maid. Yeah, maybe two years ago she used to be a maid.
   Now she happens to be the assistant supervisor of the dining room servers. She’s “Employee of the Month” at the Waytansea Hotel. She’s your wife, Misty Marie Wilmot, mother of your child, Tabbi. She almost, just about, nearly has an undergraduate degree in fine art. She votes and pays taxes. She’s queen of the fucking slaves, and you’re a brain-dead vegetable with a tube up your ass in a coma, hooked to a zillion very expensive gadgets that keep you alive.
   Dear sweet Peter, you’re in no position to call anybody a fat fucking slob.
   With your kind of coma victims, all the muscles contract. The tendons cinch in tighter and tighter. Your knees pull up to the chest. Your arms fold in, close to your gut. Your feet, the calves contract until the toes point screaming straight down, painful to even look at. Your hands, the fingers curl under with the fingernails cutting the inside of each wrist. Every muscle and tendon getting shorter and shorter. The muscles in your back, your spinal erectors, they shrink and pull your head back until it’s almost touching your ass.
   Can you feel this?
   You all twisted and knotted up, this is the mess Misty drives three hours to see in the hospital. And that doesn’t count the ferry ride. You’re the mess Misty’s married to.
   This is the worst part of her day, writing this. It was your mother, Grace, who had the bright idea about Misty keeping a coma diary. It’s what sailors and their wives used to do, Grace said, keep a diary of every day they were apart. It’s a treasured old seafaring tradition. A golden old Waytansea Island tradition. After all those months apart, when they come back together, the sailors and wives, they trade diaries and catch up on what they missed. How the kids grew up. What the weather did. A record of everything. Here’s the everyday shit you and Misty would bore each other with over dinner. Your mother said it would be good for you, to help you process through your recovery. Someday, God willing, you’ll open your eyes and take Misty in your arms and kiss her, your loving wife, and here will be all your lost years, written here in loving detail, all the details of your kid growing up and your wife longing for you, and you can sit under a tree with a nice lemonade and have a nice time catching up.
   Your mother, Grace Wilmot, she needs to wake up from her own kind of coma.
   Dear sweet Peter. Can you feel this?
   Everyone’s in their own personal coma.
   What you’ll remember from before, nobody knows. One possibility is all your memory is wiped out. Bermuda triangulated. You’re brain-damaged. You’ll be born a whole new person. Different, but the same. Reborn.
   Just for the record, you and Misty met in art school. You got her pregnant, and you two moved back to live with your mother on Waytansea Island. If this is stuff you know already, just skip ahead. Skim over it.
   What they don’t teach you in art school is how your whole life can end when you get pregnant.
   You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying.
   And just in case you forgot, you’re one chicken-shit piece of work. You’re a selfish, half-assed, lazy, spineless piece of crap. In case you don’t remember, you ran the fucking car in the fucking garage and tried to suffocate your sorry ass with exhaust fumes, but no, you couldn’t even do that right. It helps if you start with a full gas tank.
   Just so you know how bad you look, any person in a coma longer than two weeks, doctors call this a persistent vegetative state. Your face swells and turns red. Your teeth start to drop out. If you’re not turned every few hours, you get bedsores.
   Today, your wife’s writing this on your one hundredth day as a vegetable.
   As for Misty’s breasts looking like a couple dead carp, you should talk.
   A surgeon implanted a feeding tube in your stomach. You’ve got a thin tube inserted into your arm to measure blood pressure. It measures oxygen and carbon dioxide in your arteries. You’ve got another tube inserted into your neck to measure blood pressure in the veins returning to your heart. You’ve got a catheter. A tube between your lungs and your rib cage drains any fluids that might collect. Little round electrodes stuck to your chest monitor your heart. Headphones over your ears send sound waves to stimulate your brain stem. A tube forced down your nose pumps air into you from a respirator. Another tube plugs into your veins, dripping fluids and medication. To keep them from drying out, your eyes are taped shut.
   Just so you know how you’re paying for this, Misty’s promised the house to the Sisters of Care and Mercy. The big old house on Birch Street, all sixteen acres, the second you die the Catholic church gets the deed. A hundred years of your precious family history, and it goes right into their pocket.
   The second you stop breathing, your family is homeless.
   But don’t sweat it, between the respirator and the feeding tube and the medication, you’re not going to die. You couldn’t die if you wanted to. They’re going to keep you alive until you’re a withered skeleton with machines just pumping air and vitamins through you.
   Dear sweet stupid Peter. Can you feel this?
   Besides, when people talk about pulling the plug, that’s pretty much just a figure of speech. This stuff all looks to be hardwired. Plus there’s the backup generators, the fail-safe alarms, the batteries, the ten-digit secret codes, the passwords. You’d need a special key to turn off the respirator. You’d need a court order, a malpractice liability waiver, five witnesses, the consent of three doctors.
   So sit tight. Nobody’s pulling any plugs until Misty figures a way out of this crappy mess you’ve left her in.
   Just in case you don’t remember, every time she comes to visit you, she wears one of those old junk jewelry brooches you gave her. Misty takes it off her coat and opens the pin of it. It’s sterilized with rubbing alcohol, of course. God forbid you get any scars or staph infections. She pokes the pin of the hairy old brooch—real, real slow—through the meat of your hand or your foot or arm. Until she hits a bone or it pokes out the other side. When there’s any blood, Misty cleans it up.
   It’s so nostalgic.
   Some visits, she sticks the needle in you, stabbing again and again. And she whispers, “Can you feel this?”
   It’s not as if you’ve never been stuck with a pin.
   She whispers, “You’re still alive, Peter. How about this ?”
   You sipping your lemonade, reading this under a tree a dozen years from now, a hundred years from now, you need to know that the best part of each visit is sticking in that pin.
   Misty, she gave you the best years of her life. Misty owes you nothing but a big fat divorce. Stupid, cheap fuck that you were, you were going to leave her with an empty gas tank like you always do. Plus, you left your hate messages inside everyone’s walls. You promised to love, honor, and cherish. You said you’d make Misty Marie Kleinman into a famous artist, but you left her poor and hated and alone.
   Can you feel this?
   You dear sweet stupid liar. Your Tabbi sends her daddy hugs and kisses. She turns thirteen in two weeks. A teenager.
   Today’s weather is partly furious with occasional fits of rage.
   In case you don’t remember, Misty brought you lambskin boots to keep your feet warm. You wear tight orthopedic stockings to force the blood back up to your heart. She’s saving your teeth as they fall out.
   Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn’t bother to torture you if she didn’t.
   You fucker. Can you feel this?

July 2
   OKAY, OKAY. FUCK.
   Just for the record, a big part of this mess is Misty’s fault. Poor little Misty Marie Kleinman. The little latchkey product of divorce with no parent at home most days.
   Everybody in college, all her friends in the fine arts program, they told her:
   Don’t.
   No, her friends said. Not Peter Wilmot. Not “the walking peter.”
   The Eastern School of Art, the Meadows Academy of Fine Arts, the Wilson Art Institute, rumor was Peter Wilmot had flunked out of them all.
   You’d flunked out.
   Every art school in eleven states, Peter went there and didn’t go to class. He never spent any time in his studio. The Wilmots had to be rich because he’d been in school almost five years and his portfolio was still empty. Peter just flirted with young women full-time. Peter Wilmot, he had long black hair, and he wore these stretched-out cable-knit sweaters the color of blue dirt. The seam was always coming open in one shoulder, and the hem hung down below his crotch.
   Fat, thin, young, or old women, Peter wore his ratty blue sweater and slouched around campus all day, flirting with every girl student. Creepy Peter Wilmot. Misty’s girlfriends, they pointed him out one day, his sweater unraveling at the elbows and along the bottom.
   Your sweater.
   Stitches had broken and holes were hanging open in the back, showing Peter’s black T-shirt underneath.
   Your black T-shirt.
   The only difference between Peter and a homeless mental outpatient with limited access to soap was his jewelry. Or maybe not. It was just weird cruddy old brooches and necklaces made from rhinestones. Crusted with fake pearls and rhinestones, these are big scratchy old wads of colored glass that hang off the front of Peter’s sweater. Big grandma brooches. A different brooch every day. Some days, it was a big pinwheel of fake emeralds. Then it would be a snowflake made of chipped glass diamonds and rubies, the wire parts turned green from his sweat.
   From your sweat.
   Junk jewelry.
   For the record, the first time Misty met Peter was at a freshman art exhibit where some friends and her were looking at a painting of a craggy stone house. On one side, the house opened into a big glass room, a conservatory full of palm trees. In through the windows, you could see a piano. You could see a man reading a book. A private little paradise. Her friends were saying how nice it looked, the colors and everything, and then somebody said, “Don’t turn around, but the walking peter is headed over here.”
   Misty said, “The what?”
   And somebody said, “Peter Wilmot.”
   Someone else said, “Do not make eye contact.”
   All her girlfriends said, Misty, do not even encourage him. Anytime Peter came into the room, every woman remembered a reason to leave. He didn’t really stink, but you still tried to hide behind your hands. He didn’t stare at your breasts, but most women still folded their arms. Watching any woman talk to Peter Wilmot, you could see how her frontalis muscle lifted her forehead into wrinkles, proof she was scared. Peter’s top eyelids would be half shut, more like someone angry than looking to fall in love.
   Then Misty’s friends, in the gallery that night, they scattered.
   Then she was standing alone with Peter in his greasy hair and the sweater and the old junk jewelry, who rocked back on his heels, his hands on his hips, and looking at the painting, he said, “So?”
   Not looking at her, he said, “You going to be a chicken and run away with your little friends?”
   He said this with his chest stuck out. His upper eyelids were half closed, and his jaw worked back and forth. His teeth ground together. He turned and fell back against the wall so hard the painting beside him went crooked. He leaned back, his shoulders squared against the wall, his hands shoved into the front pockets of his jeans. Peter shut his eyes and took a deep breath. He let it out, slow, opened his eyes to stare at her, and said, “So? What do you think?”
   “About the painting?” Misty said. The craggy stone house. She reached out and turned it straight again.
   And Peter looked sideways without turning his head. His eyes rolled to see the painting just past his shoulder, and he said, “I grew up next door to that house. The guy with the book, that’s Brett Petersen.” Then loud, he said, too loud, “I want to know if you’ll marry me.”
   That’s how Peter proposed.
   How you proposed. The first time.
   He was from the island, everybody said. The whole wax museum of Waytansea Island, all those fine old island families going back to the Mayflower Compact. Those fine old family trees where everybody was everybody’s cousin once removed. Where nobody’s had to buy any silverware since two hundred years ago. They ate something meat with every meal, and all the sons seemed to wear the same shabby old jewelry. Their kind-of regional fashion statement. Their old shingle and stone family houses towered along Elm Street, Juniper Street, Hornbeam Street, weathered just so by the salt air.
   Even all their golden retrievers were inbred cousins to each other.
   People said everything on Waytansea Island was just-so museum quality. The funky old ferryboat that held six cars. The three blocks of red brick buildings along Merchant Street, the grocer, the old library clock tower, the shops. The white clapboards and wraparound porches of the closed old Waytansea Hotel. The Waytansea church, all granite and stained glass.
   There in the art school gallery, Peter was wearing a brooch made from a circle of dirty blue rhinestones. Inside that was a circle of fake pearls. Some blue stones were gone, and the empty fittings looked sharp with ragged little teeth. The metal was silver, but bent and turning black. The point of the long pin, it stuck out from under one edge and looked pimpled with rust.
   Peter held a big plastic mug of beer with some sports team stenciled on the side, and he took a drink. He said, “If you’d never consider marrying me, there’s no point in me taking you to dinner, is there?” He looked at the ceiling and then at her and said, “I find this approach saves everybody a shitload of time.”
   “Just for the record,” Misty told him, “that house doesn’t exist. I made it up.”
   Misty told you.
   And you said, “You remember that house because it’s still in your heart.”
   And Misty said, “How the fuck do you know what’s in my goddamn heart?”
   The big stone houses. Moss on the trees. Ocean waves that hiss and burst below cliffs of brown rock. All that was in her little white trash heart.
   Maybe because Misty was still standing here, maybe because you thought she was fat and lonely and she hadn’t run away, you looked down at the brooch on your chest and smiled. You looked at her and said, “You like it?”
   And Misty said, “How old is it?”
   And you said, “Old.”
   “What kind of stones are those?” she said.
   And you said, “Blue.”
   Just for the record, it wasn’t easy to fall in love with Peter Wilmot. With you.
   Misty said, “Where did it come from?”
   And Peter shook his head a little bit, grinning at the floor. He chewed his bottom lip. He looked around at the few people left in the gallery, his eyes narrow, and he looked at Misty and said, “You promise you won’t be grossed out if I show you something?”
   She looked back over her shoulder at her friends; they were off by a picture across the room, but they were watching.
   And Peter whispered, his butt still against the wall, he leaned forward toward her and whispered, “You’ll need to suffer to make any real art.”
   Just for the record, Peter once asked Misty if she knew why she liked the art she liked. Why is it a terrible battle scene like Picasso’s Guernica can be beautiful, while a painting of two unicorns kissing in a flower garden can look like crap.
   Does anybody really know why they like anything?
   Why people do anything?
   There in the gallery, with her friends spying, one of the paintings had to be Peter’s, so Misty said, “Yeah. Show me some real art.”
   And Peter chugged some of his beer and handed her the plastic mug. He said, “Remember. You promised.” With both hands, he grabbed the ragged hem of his sweater and pulled it up. A theater curtain lifting. An unveiling. The sweater showed his skinny belly with a little hair going up the middle. Then his navel. The hair spread out sideways around two pink nipples starting to show.
   The sweater stopped, Peter’s face hidden behind it, and one nipple lifted up in a long point off his chest, red and scabbed, sticking to the inside of the old sweater.
   “Look,” Peter’s voice said from behind, “the brooch pins through my nipple.”
   Somebody let out a little scream, and Misty spun around to look at her friends. The plastic mug dropped out of her hands, hitting the floor with an explosion of beer.
   Peter dropped his sweater and said, “You promised.”
   It was her. The rusted pin was sunk in under one edge of the nipple, jabbed all the way under and coming out the other edge. The skin around it, smeared with blood. The hair pasted down flat with dried blood. It was Misty. She screamed.
   “I make a different hole every day,” Peter said, and he stooped to pick up the mug. He said, “It’s so every day I feel new pain.”
   Looking now, the sweater around the brooch was crusted stiff and darker with bloodstain. Still, this was art school. She’d seen worse. Maybe she hadn’t.
   “You,” Misty said, “you’re crazy.” For no reason, maybe shock, she laughed and said, “I mean it. You are vile.” Her feet in sandals, sticky and splashed with beer.
   Who knows why we like what we like?
   And Peter said, “You ever hear of the painter Maura Kincaid?” He twisted the brooch, pinned through his chest, to make it glitter in the white gallery light. To make it bleed. “Or the Waytansea school of painters?” he said.
   Why do we do what we do?
   Misty looked back at her friends, and they looked at her, their eyebrows raised, ready to come to the rescue.
   And she looked at Peter and said, “My name’s Misty,” and she held out her hand.
   And slow, Peter’s eyes still on hers, he reached up and opened the clasp behind the brooch. His face winced, every muscle pulled tight for a second. His eyes sewed shut with wrinkles, he pulled the long pin out of his sweater. Out of his chest.
   Out of your chest. Smeared with your blood.
   He snapped the pin closed and put the brooch in her palm.
   He said, “So, you want to marry me?”
   He said this like a challenge, like he was picking a fight, like a gauntlet thrown down at her feet. Like a dare. A duel. His eyes handled her all over, her hair, her breasts, her legs, her arms and hands, like Misty Kleinman was the rest of his life.
   Dear sweet Peter, can you feel this?
   And the little trailer park idiot, she took the brooch.

July 3
   ANGEL SAYS TO MAKE a fist. He says, “Hold out your index finger as if you’re about to pick your nose.”
   He takes Misty’s hand, her finger pointed straight, and he holds it so her fingertip just touches the black paint on the wall. He moves her finger so it traces the trail of black spray paint, the sentence fragments and doodles, the drips and smears, and Angel says, “Can you feel anything?”
   Just for the record, they’re a man and a woman standing close together in a small dark room. They’ve crawled in through a hole in the wall, and the homeowner’s waiting outside. Just so you know this in the future, Angel’s wearing these tight brown leather pants that smell the way shoe polish smells. The way leather car seats smell. The way your wallet smells, soaked with sweat after it’s in your back pocket while you’re driving on a hot summer day. That smell Misty used to pretend to hate, that’s how Angel’s leather pants smell pressed up against her.
   Every so often the homeowner standing outside, she kicks the wall and shouts, “You want to tell me what you two are up to in there?”
   Today’s weather is warm and sunny with a few scattered clouds and some homeowner called from Pleasant Beach to say she’d found her missing breakfast nook, and somebody had better come see right away. Misty called Angel Delaporte, and he met her when the ferry docked so they could drive together. He brings his camera and a bag full of lenses and film.
   Angel, you might remember, he lives in Ocean Park. Here’s a hint: You sealed off his kitchen. He says the way you write your m ’s, with the first hump larger than the second, that proves you value your own opinion above public opinion. How you do your lowercase h ’s, with the last stroke cutting back underneath the hump, shows you’re never willing to compromise. It’s graphology, and it’s a bona fide science, Angel says. After seeing these words in his missing kitchen, he asked to see some other houses.
   Just for the record, he says the way you make your lowercase g ’s and y ’s, with the bottom loop pulling to the left, that shows you’re very attached to your mother.
   And Misty told him, he got that part right.
   Angel and her, they drove to Pleasant Beach, and a woman opened the front door. She looked at them, her head tilted back so her eyes looked down her nose, her chin pushed forward and her lips pressed together thin, with the muscle at each corner of her jaw, each masseter muscle clenched into a little fist, and she said, “Is Peter Wilmot too lazy to show his face here?”
   That little muscle from her lower lip to her chin, the mentalis, it was so tense her chin looked pitted with a million tiny dimples, and she said, “My husband hasn’t stopped gargling since this morning.”
   The mentalis, the corrugator, all those little muscles of the face, those are the first things you learn in art school anatomy. After that, you can tell a fake smile because the risorius and platysma muscles pull the lower lip down and out, squaring it and exposing the lower teeth.
   Just for the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn’t such a great skill to have.
   In her kitchen, the yellow wallpaper peels back from a hole near the floor. The floor’s yellow tile is covered in newspapers and white plaster dust. Next to the hole’s a shopping bag bulging with scraps of busted plasterboard. Ribbons of torn yellow wallpaper curl out of the bag. Yellow dotted with little orange sunflowers.
   The woman stood next to the hole, her arms folded across her chest. She nodded at the hole and said, “It’s right in there.”
   Steelworkers, Misty told her, they’ll tie a branch to the highest peak of a new skyscraper or bridge to celebrate the fact that no one has died during construction. Or to bring prosperity to the new building. It’s called “tree topping.” A quaint tradition.
   They’re full of irrational superstitions, building contractors.
   Misty told the homeowner not to worry.
   Her corrugator muscle pulls her eyebrows together above her nose. Her levator labii superioris pulls her upper lip up into a sneer and flares her nostrils. Her depressor labii inferioris pulls her bottom lip down to show her lower teeth, and she says, “It’s you who should be worried.”
   Inside the hole, the dark little room’s lined on three sides with yellow built-in bench seats, sort of a restaurant booth with no table. It’s what the homeowner calls a breakfast nook. The yellow is yellow vinyl and the walls above the benches are yellow wallpaper. Scrawled across all this is the black spray paint, and Angel moves her hand along the wall where it says:
   “. . . save our world by killing this army of invaders . . .”
   It’s Peter’s black spray paint, broken sentences and squiggles. Doodles. The paint loops across the framed art, the lace pillows, the yellow vinyl bench seats. On the floor are empty cans with Peter’s black handprints, his spiraling fingerprints in paint, they’re still clutching each can.
   The spray-painted words loop across the little framed pictures of flowers and birds. The black words trail over the little lace throw pillows. The words run around the room in every direction, across the tiled floor, over the ceiling.
   Angel says, “Give me your hand.” And he balls Misty’s fingers together into a fist with just her index finger sticking out straight. He puts her fingertip against the black writing on the wall and makes her trace each word.
   His hand tight around hers, guiding her finger. The dark creep of sweat around the collar and under the arms of his white T-shirt. The wine on his breath, collecting against the side of Misty’s neck. The way Angel’s eyes stay on her while she keeps her eyes on the black painted words. This is how the whole room feels.
   Angel holds her finger against the wall, moving her touch along the painted words there, and he says, “Can you feel how your husband felt?”
   According to graphology, if you take your index finger and trace someone’s handwriting, maybe you take a wooden spoon or chopstick and you just write on top of the written words, you can feel exactly how the writer felt at the time he wrote. You have to study the pressure and speed of the writing, pressing as hard as the writer pressed. Writing as fast as it seems the writer did. Angel says this is all similar to Method acting. What he calls Konstantin Stanislavski’s method of physical actions.
   Handwriting analysis and Method acting, Angel says they both got popular at the same time. Stanislavski studied the work of Pavlov and his drooling dog and the work of neurophysiologist I. M. Sechenov. Before that, Edgar Allan Poe studied graphology. Everybody was trying to link the physical and the emotional. The body and the mind. The world and the imagination. This world and the next.
   Moving Misty’s finger along the wall, he has her trace the words: “. . . the flood of you, with your bottomless hunger and noisy demands . . .”
   Whispering, Angel says, “If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion.”
   Stanislavski, Sechenov, Poe, everybody was looking for some scientific method to produce miracles on demand, he says. An endless way to repeat the accidental. An assembly line to plan and manufacture the spontaneous.
   The mystical meets the Industrial Revolution.
   The way the rag smells after you polish your boots, that’s how the whole room smells. The way the inside of a heavy belt smells. A catcher’s mitt. A dog’s collar. The faint vinegar smell of your sweaty watchband.
   The sound of Angel’s breath, the side of her face damp from his whispering. His hand stiff and hard as a trap around her, squeezing her hand. His fingernails dig into Misty’s skin. And Angel says, “Feel. Feel and tell me what your husband felt.” The words: “. . . your blood is our gold . . .”
   The way reading something can be a slap in your face.
   Outside the hole, the homeowner says something. She knocks on the wall and says, louder, “Whatever it is you have to do, you’d better be doing it.”
   Angel whispers, “Say it.”
   The words say: “. . . you, a plague, trailing your failures and garbage . . .”
   Forcing your wife’s fingers along each letter, Angel whispers, “Say it.”
   And Misty says, “No.” She says, “It’s just crazy talk.”
   Steering her fingers wrapped tight inside his, Angel shoulders her along, saying, “It’s just words. You can say it.”
   And Misty says, “They’re evil. They don’t make sense.”
   The words: “. . . to slaughter all of you as an offering, every fourth generation . . .”
   Angel’s skin warm and tight around her fingers, he whispers, “Then why did you come see them?”
   The words: “. . . my wife’s fat legs are crawling with varicose veins . . .”
   Your wife’s fat legs.
   Angel whispers, “Why bother coming?”
   Because her dear sweet stupid husband, he didn’t leave a suicide note.
   Because this is part of him she never knew.
   Because she wants to understand who he was. She wants to find out what happened.
   Misty tells Angel, “I don’t know.”
   Old-school building contractors, she tells him, they’d never start a new house on a Monday. Only on a Saturday. After the foundation is laid, they’ll toss in a handful of rye seed. After three days, if the seed doesn’t sprout, they’ll build the house. They’ll bury an old Bible under the floor or seal it inside the walls. They’ll always leave one wall unpainted until the owners arrive. That way the devil won’t know the house is done until it’s already being lived in.
   Out of a pocket in the side of his camera bag, Angel takes something flat and silver, the size of a paperback book. It’s square and shining, a flask, curved so your reflection in the concave side is tall and thin. Your reflection in the convex side is squat and fat. He hands it to Misty, and the metal’s smooth and heavy with a round cap on one end. The weight shifts as something sloshes inside. His camera bag is scratchy gray fabric, covered with zippers.
   On the tall thin side of the flask, it’s engraved: To Angel—Te Amo .
   Misty says, “So? Why are you here?”
   As she takes the flask, their fingers touch. Physical contact. Flirting.
   Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with chances of betrayal.
   And Angel says, “It’s gin.”
   The cap unscrews and swings away on a little arm that keeps it attached to the flask. What’s inside smells like a good time, and Angel says, “Drink,” and his fingerprints are all over her tall, thin reflection in the polish. Through the hole in the wall, you can see the homeowner’s feet wearing suede loafers. Angel sets his camera bag so it covers the hole.
   Somewhere beyond all this, you can hear each ocean wave hiss and burst. Hiss and burst.
   Graphology says the three aspects of any personality show in our handwriting. Anything that falls below the bottom of a word, the tail of a lowercase g or y for example, that hints at your subconscious. What Freud would call your id. This is your most animal side. If it swings to the right, it means you lean to the future and the world outside yourself. If the tail swings to the left, it means you’re stuck in the past and looking at yourself.
   You writing, you walking down the street, your whole life shows in every physical action. How you hold your shoulders, Angel says. It’s all art. What you do with your hands, you’re always blabbing your life story.
   It’s gin inside the flask, the good kind that you can feel cold and thin down the whole length of your throat.
   Angel says the way your tall letters look, anything that rises above the regular lowercase e or x, those tall letters hint at your greater spiritual self. Your superego. How you write your l or h or dot your i, that shows what you aspire to become.
   Anything in between, most of your lowercase letters, these show your ego. Whether they’re crowded and spiky or spread out and loopy, these show the regular, everyday you.
   Misty hands the flask to Angel and he takes a drink.
   And he says, “Are you feeling anything?”
   Peter’s words say, “. . . it’s with your blood that we preserve our world for the next generations . . .”
   Your words. Your art.
   Angel’s fingers open around hers. They go off into the dark, and you can hear the zippers pull open on his camera bag. The brown leather smell of him steps away from her and there’s the click and flash, click and flash of him taking pictures. He tilts the flask against his lips, and her reflection slides up and down the metal in his fingers.
   Misty’s fingers tracing the walls, the writing says: “. . . I’ve done my part. I found her . . .”
   It says: “. . . it’s not my job to kill anybody. She’s the executioner . . .”
   To get the look of pain just right, Misty says how the sculptor Bernini sketched his own face while he burned his leg with a candle. When Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusa, he went to a hospital to sketch the faces of the dying. He brought their severed heads and arms back to his studio to study how the skin changed color as it rotted.
   The wall booms. It booms again, the drywall and paint shivering under her touch. The homeowner on the other side kicks the wall again with her canvas boat shoes and the framed flowers and birds rattle against the yellow wallpaper. Against the scrawls of black spray paint. She shouts, “You can tell Peter Wilmot he’s going to jail for this shit.”
   Beyond all this, the ocean waves hiss and burst.
   Her fingers still tracing your words, trying to feel how you felt, Misty says, “Have you ever heard of a local painter named Maura Kincaid?”
   From behind his camera, Angel says, “Not much,” and clicks the shutter. He says, “Wasn’t Kincaid linked to Stendhal syndrome?”
   And Misty takes another drink, a burning swallow, with tears in her eyes. She says, “Did she die from it?”
   And still flashing pictures, Angel looks at her through his camera and says, “Look here.” He says, “What you said about being an artist? Your anatomy stuff? Smile the way a real smile should look.”

July 4
   JUST SO YOU KNOW, this looks so sweet. It’s Independence Day, and the hotel is full. The beach, teeming. The lobby is crowded with summer people, all of them milling around, waiting for the fireworks to launch from the mainland.
   Your daughter, Tabbi, she has a strip of masking tape over each eye. Blind, she’s clutching and patting her way around the lobby. From the fireplace to the reception desk, she’s whispering, “. . . eight, nine, ten . . .” counting her steps from each landmark to the next.
   The summer outsiders, they jump a little, startled by her little hands copping a feel. They give her tight-lipped smiles and step away. This girl in a sundress of faded pink and yellow plaid, her dark hair tied back with a yellow ribbon, she’s the perfect Waytansea Island child. All pink lipstick and nail polish. Playing some lovely and old-fashioned game.
   She runs her open hands along a wall, feeling across a framed picture, fingering a bookcase.
   Outside the lobby windows, there’s a flash and a boom. The fireworks shot from the mainland, arching up and out toward the island. As if the hotel were under attack.
   Big pinwheels of yellow and orange flame. Red bursts of fire. Blue and green trails and sparks. The boom always comes late, the way thunder follows lightning. And Misty goes to her kid and says, “Honey, it’s started.” She says, “Open your eyes and come watch.”
   Her eyes still taped shut, Tabbi says, “I need to learn the room while everyone’s here.” Feeling her way from stranger to stranger, all of them frozen and watching the sky, Tabbi’s counting her steps toward the lobby doors and the porch outside.