August 5
   BEING TIRED doesn’t make you done. Being hungry or sore doesn’t either. Needing to pee doesn’t have to stop you. A picture is done when the pencil and paint are done. The telephone doesn’t interrupt. Nothing else gets your attention. While the inspiration comes, you keep going.
   All day Misty’s working blind, and then the pencil stops and she waits for Tabbi to take the picture and give her a blank sheet of paper. Then nothing happens.
   And Misty says, “Tabbi?”
   This morning, Tabbi pinned a big cluster brooch of green and red glass to her mother’s smock. Then Tabbi stood still as Misty put the shimmering necklace of fat pink rhinestones around her daughter’s neck. A statue. In the sunlight from the window, they sparkled bright as forget-me-nots and all the other flowers Tabbi has missed this summer. Then Tabbi taped her mother’s eyes shut. That was the last time Misty saw her.
   Again, Misty says, “Tabbi honey?”
   And there’s no sound, nothing. Just the hiss and burst of each wave on the beach. With her fingers spread, Misty reaches out and feels the air around her. For the first time in days, she’s been left alone.
   The two strips of masking tape, they each start at her hairline and run down across her eyes to curve under her jaw. With the thumb and forefinger of each hand, Misty pinches the tape at the top and pulls each strip off, slow, until they both peel away. Her eyes flutter open. The sunlight is too bright for her to focus. The picture on the easel is blurred for a minute while her eyes adjust.
   The pencil lines come into focus, black against the white paper.
   It’s a drawing of the ocean, just offshore from the beach. Something floating. A person floating facedown in the water, a young girl with her long black hair spread out around her on the water.
   Her father’s black hair.
   Your black hair.
   Everything is a self-portrait.
   Everything is a diary.
   Outside the window, down on the beach, a mob of people wait at the edge of the water. Two people wade toward shore, carrying something between them. Something shiny flashes bright pink in the sunlight.
   A rhinestone. A necklace. It’s Tabbi they have by the ankles and under the arms, her hair hanging straight and wet into the waves that hiss and burst on the beach.
   The crowd steps back.
   And loud footsteps come down the hallway outside the bedroom door. A voice in the hallway says, “I have it ready.”
   Two people carry Tabbi up the beach toward the hotel porch.
   The lock on the bedroom door, it goes click, and the door swings open, and Grace is there with Dr. Touchet. Flashing bright in his hand is a dripping hypodermic needle.
   And Misty tries to stand, her leg cast dragging behind her. Her ball and chain.
   The doctor rushes forward.
   And Misty says, “It’s Tabbi. Something’s wrong.” Misty says, “On the beach. I’ve got to get down there.”
   The cast tips and its weight pulls her to the floor. The easel crashing over beside her, the glass jar of murky rinse water, it’s broken all around them. Grace comes to kneel, to take her arm. The catheter’s pulled out of the bag and you can smell her piss leaking out on the rug. Grace is rolling up the sleeve on her smock.
   Your old blue work shirt. Stiff with dried paint.
   “You can’t go down there in this state,” the doctor says. He’s holding the syringe and taps the air bubbles to the top, saying, “Really, Misty, there’s nothing you can do.”
   Grace forces Misty’s arm straight out, and the doctor drives in the needle.
   Can you feel this?
   Grace holds her by both arms, pinning her down. The brooch of fake rubies has come open and the pin is sunk into Misty’s breast, her blood red on the wet rubies. The broken jar. Grace and the doctor holding her to the rug, her piss spreads under them. It wicks up the blue shirt and stings her skin where the pin is stuck in.
   Grace, half on top of her, Grace says, “Misty wants to go downstairs now.” Grace isn’t crying.
   Her own voice deep with slow-motion effort, Misty says, “How the fuck do you know what I want?”
   And Grace says, “It’s in your diary.”
   The needle pulls out of her arm and Misty feels someone rubbing the skin around the shot. The cold feel of alcohol. Hands come under her arms and pull her until she’s sitting upright.
   Grace’s face, her levator labii superioris muscle, the sneer muscle, pulls her face in tight around her nose, and she says, “It’s blood. Oh, and urine, all over her. We can’t take her downstairs like this. Not in front of everyone.”
   The stink on Misty, it’s the smell of the old Buick’s front seat. The stink of your piss.
   Someone’s stripping the shirt off her, wiping her skin with paper towels. From across the room, the doctor’s voice says, “This is excellent work. Very impressive.” He’s leafing through her stack of finished drawings and paintings.
   “Of course they’re good,” Grace says. “Just don’t get them out of order. They’re all numbered.”
   Just for the record, no one mentions Tabbi.
   They’re tucking her arms into a clean shirt. Grace pulls a brush through her hair.
   The drawing on the easel, the girl drowned in the ocean, it’s fallen onto the floor and blood and piss is soaked through it from underneath. It’s ruined. The image gone.
   Misty can’t make a fist. Her eyes keep falling shut. The wet slip of drool slides out the corner of her mouth, and the stab in her breast fades away.
   Grace and the doctor, they heave her onto her feet. Outside in the hallway, more people wait. More arms come around her from both sides, and they’re flying her down the stairs in slow motion. They’re flying past the sad faces that watch from every landing. Paulette and Raymon and someone else, Peter’s blond friend from college. Will Tupper. His earlobe still in two sharp points. The whole Waytansea Island wax museum.
   It’s all so quiet, except her cast drags, thudding against every step.
   A crowd of people fill the lobby’s gloomy forest of polished trees and mossy carpet, but they fall back as she’s carried toward the dining room. Here’s all the old island families, the Burtons and Hylands and Petersens and Perrys. There’s not a summer face among them.
   Then the doors to the Wood and Gold Room swing open.
   On table six, a four-top near the windows, there’s something covered with a blanket. The profile of a little face, a little girl’s flat chest. And Grace’s voice says, “Hurry while she’s still conscious. Let her see. Lift the blanket.”
   An unveiling. A curtain going up.
   And behind Misty, all her neighbors crowd around to watch.

August 7
   IN ART SCHOOL, Peter once asked Misty to name a color. Any color.
   He told her to shut her eyes and hold still. You could feel him step up, close. The heat of him. You could smell his unraveling sweater, the way his skin had the bitter smell of semisweet baker’s chocolate. His own self-portrait. His hands pinched the fabric of her shirt and a cold pin scratched across her skin underneath. He said, “Don’t move or I’ll stick you by accident.”
   And Misty held her breath.
   Can you feel this?
   Every time they met, Peter would give her another piece of his junk jewelry. Brooches, bracelets, rings, and necklaces.
   Her eyes closed, waiting. Misty said, “Gold. The color, gold.”
   His fingers working the pin through the fabric, Peter said, “Now tell me three words that describe gold.”
   This was an old form of psychoanalysis, he told her. Invented by Carl Jung. It was based on universal archetypes. A kind of insightful party game. Carl Jung. Archetypes. The vast common subconscious of all humanity. Jains and yogis and ascetics, this was the culture Peter grew up with on Waytansea Island.
   Her eyes closed, Misty said, “Shiny. Rich. Soft.” Her three words that described gold.
   Peter’s fingers clicked the brooch’s tiny clasp shut, and his voice said, “Good.”
   In that previous life, in art school, Peter told her to name an animal. Any animal.
   Just for the record, the brooch was a gilded turtle with a big, cracked green gem for a shell. The head and legs moved, but one leg was gone. The metal was so tarnished it had already rubbed black on her shirt.
   And Misty pulled it out from her chest, looking at it, loving it for no good reason. She said, “A pigeon.”
   Peter stepped away and waved for her to walk along with him. They were walking through the campus, between brick buildings shaggy with ivy, and Peter said, “Now tell me three words that describe a pigeon.”
   Walking next to him, Misty tried to put her hand in his, but he clasped his together behind his back.
   Walking, Misty said, “Dirty.” Misty said, “Stupid. Ugly.”
   Her three words that described a pigeon.
   And Peter looked at her, his bottom lip curled in between his teeth, and his corrugator muscle squeezing his eyebrows together.
   That previous life, in art school, Peter asked her to name a body of water.
   Walking next to him, Misty said, “The St. Lawrence Seaway.”
   He turned to look at her. He’d stopped walking. “Name three adjectives describing it,” he said.
   And Misty rolled her eyes and said, “Busy, fast, and crowded.”
   And Peter’s levator labii superioris muscle pulled his top lip into a sneer.
   Walking with Peter, he asked her just one last thing. Peter said to imagine you’re in a room. All the walls are white, and there are no windows or doors. He said, “In three words, tell me how that room feels to you.”
   Misty had never dated anyone this long. For all she knew, this was the kind of veiled way that lovers interview each other. The way Misty knew Peter’s favorite flavor of ice cream was pumpkin pie, she didn’t think his questions meant anything.
   Misty said, “Temporary. Transitory.” She paused and said, “Confusing.”
   Her three words to describe a sealed white room.
   In her previous life, still walking with Peter, not holding hands, he told her how Carl Jung’s test worked. Each question was a conscious way to access the subconscious.
   A color. An animal. A body of water. An all-white room.
   Each of these, Peter said was an archetype according to Carl Jung. Each image represented some aspect of a person.
   The color Misty had mentioned, gold, that’s how she saw herself.
   She’d described herself as “Shiny. Rich. Soft,” Peter said.
   The animal was how we perceived other people.
   She perceived people as “Dirty. Stupid. Ugly,” Peter said.
   The body of water represented her sex life.
   Busy, fast, and crowded. According to Carl Jung.
   Everything we say shows our hand. Our diary.
   Not looking at her, Peter said, “I wasn’t thrilled to hear your answer.”
   Peter’s last question, about the all-white room, he says that room with no windows or doors, it represents death.
   For her, death will be temporary, transitory, confusing.

August 12—The Full Moon
   THE JAINS WERE a sect of Buddhists who claimed they could fly. They could walk on water. They could understand all languages. It’s said they could turn junk metal into gold. They could heal cripples and cure the blind.
   Her eyes shut, Misty listens while the doctor tells her all this. She listens and paints. Before dawn, she gets up so Grace can tape her face. The tape comes off after sunset.
   “Supposedly,” the doctor’s voice says, “the Jains could raise the dead.”
   They could do all this because they tortured themselves. They starved and lived without sex. This life of hardship and pain is what gave them their magic power.
   “People call this idea ‘asceticism,’ ” the doctor says.
   Him talking, Misty just draws. Misty works while he holds the paint she needs, the brushes and pencils. When she’s done he changes the page. He does what Tabbi used to.
   The Jain Buddhists were famous throughout the kingdoms of the Middle East. In the courts of Syria and Egypt, Epirus and Macedonia, as early as four hundred years before the birth of Christ, they worked their miracles. These miracles inspired the Essene Jews and early Christians. They astonished Alexander the Great.
   Doctor Touchet talking on and on, he says Christian martyrs were offshoots of the Jains. Every day, Saint Catherine of Siena would whip herself three times. The first whipping was for her own sins. Her second whipping was for the sins of the living. The third was for the sins of all dead people.
   Saint Simeon was canonized after he stood on a pillar, exposed to the elements, until he rotted alive.
   Misty says, “This is done.” And she waits for a new sheet of paper, a new canvas.
   You can hear the doctor lift the new picture. He says, “Marvelous. Absolutely inspired,” his voice fading as he carries it across the room. There’s a scratching sound as he pencils a number on the back. The ocean outside, the waves hiss and burst. He sets the picture beside the door, then his doctor’s voice comes back, close and loud, and he says, “Do you want paper again or a canvas?”
   It doesn’t matter. “Canvas,” Misty says.
   Misty hasn’t seen one of her pictures since Tabbi died. She says, “Where do you take them?”
   “Someplace safe,” he says.
   Her period is almost a week late. From starvation. She doesn’t need to pee on any pregnancy test sticks. Peter’s done his job, getting her here.
   And the doctor says, “You can start.” His hand closes around hers, and pulls it forward to touch the rough, tight cloth already prepped with a coat of rabbit-skin glue.
   The Jewish Essenes, he says, were originally a band of Persian anchorites that worshiped the sun.
   Anchorites. This is what they called the women sealed alive in the basements of cathedrals. Sealed in to give the building a soul. The crazy history of building contractors. Sealing whiskey and women and cats inside walls. Her husband included.
   You.
   Misty, trapped in her attic room, her heavy cast keeping her here. The door kept locked from the outside. The doctor always ready with a syringe of something if she gets uppity. Oh, Misty could write a book about anchorites.
   The Essenes, Dr. Touchet says, lived away from the regular world. They trained themselves by enduring sickness and torture. They abandoned their families and property. They suffered in the belief that immortal souls from heaven were baited to come down and take a physical form in order to have sex, drink, take drugs, overeat.
   Essenes taught the young Jesus Christ. They taught John the Baptist.
   They called themselves healers and performed all of Christ’s miracles—curing the sick, reviving the dead, casting out demons—for centuries before Lazarus. The Jains turned water into wine centuries before the Essenes, who did it centuries before Jesus.
   “You can repeat the same miracles over and over as long as no one remembers the last time,” the doctor says. “You remember that.”
   The same way Christ called himself a stone rejected by masons, the Jain hermits had called themselves logs rejected by all carpenters.
   “Their idea,” the doctor says, “is that the visionary must live apart from the normal world, and reject pleasure and comfort and conformity in order to connect with the divine.”
   Paulette brings lunch on a tray, but Misty doesn’t want food. Behind her closed eyelids, she hears the doctor eating. The scrape of the knife and fork on the china plate. The ice rattling in the glass of water.
   He says, “Paulette?” His voice full of food, he says, “Can you take those pictures there, by the door, and put them in the dining room with the others?”
   Someplace safe.
   You can smell ham and garlic. There’s something chocolate, too, pudding or cake. You can hear the doctor chew, and the wet sound of each swallow.
   “The interesting part,” the doctor says, “is when you look at pain as a spiritual tool.”
   Pain and deprivation. The Buddhist monks sit on roofs, fasting and sleepless until they reach enlightenment. Isolated and exposed to the wind and sun. Compare them to Saint Simeon, who rotted on his pillar. Or the centuries of standing yogis. Or Native Americans who wandered on vision quests. Or the starving girls in nineteenth-century America who fasted to death out of piety. Or Saint Veronica, whose only food was five orange seeds, chewed in memory of the five wounds of Christ. Or Lord Byron, who fasted and purged and made his heroic swim of the Hellespont. A romantic anorexic. Moses and Elijah, who fasted to receive visions in the Old Testament. English witches of the seventeenth century who fasted to cast their spells. Or whirling dervishes, exhausting themselves for enlightenment.
   The doctor just goes on and on and on.
   All these mystics, throughout history, all over the world, they all found their way to enlightenment by physical suffering.
   And Misty just keeps on painting.
   “Here’s where it gets interesting,” the doctor’s voice says. “According to split-brain physiology, your brain is divided like a walnut into two halves.”
   The left half of your brain deals with logic, language, calculation, and reason, he says. This is the half people perceive as their personal identity. This is the conscious, rational, everyday basis of our reality.
   The right side of your brain, the doctor tells her, is the center of your intuition, emotion, insight, and pattern recognition skills. Your subconscious.
   “Your left brain is a scientist,” the doctor says. “Your right brain is an artist.”
   He says people live their lives out of the left half of their brains. It’s only when someone is in extreme pain, or upset or sick, that their subconscious can slip into their conscious. When someone’s injured or sick or mourning or depressed, the right brain can take over for a flash, just an instant, and give them access to divine inspiration.
   A flash of inspiration. A moment of insight.
   The French psychologist Pierre Janet called this condition “the lowering of the mental threshold.”
   Dr. Touchet says, “Abaissement du niveau mental.”
   When we’re tired or depressed or hungry or hurting.
   According to the German philosopher Carl Jung, this lets us connect to a universal body of knowledge. The wisdom of all people over all time.
   Carl Jung, what Peter told Misty about herself. Gold. Pigeons. The St. Lawrence Seaway.
   Frida Kahlo and her bleeding sores. All great artists are invalids.
   According to Plato, we don’t learn anything. Our soul has lived so many lives that we know everything. Teachers and education can only remind us of what we already know.
   Our misery. This suppression of our rational mind is the source of inspiration. The muse. Our guardian angel. Suffering takes us out of our rational self-control and lets the divine channel through us.
   “Enough of any stress,” the doctor says, “good or bad, love or pain, can cripple our reason and bring us ideas and talents we can achieve in no other way.”
   All this could be Angel Delaporte talking. Stanislavski’s method of physical actions. A reliable formula for creating on-demand miracles.
   As he hovers close to her, the doctor’s breath is warm against the side of Misty’s face. The smell of ham and garlic.
   Her paintbrush stops, and Misty says, “This is done.”
   Someone knocks at the door. The lock clicks. Then Grace, her voice says, “How is she, Doctor?”
   “She’s working,” he says. “Here, number this one—eighty-four. Then, put it with the others.”
   And Grace says, “Misty dear, we thought you might like to know, but we’ve been trying to reach your family. About Tabbi.”
   You can hear someone lift the canvas off the easel. Footsteps carry it across the room. How it looks, Misty doesn’t know.
   They can’t bring Tabbi back. Maybe Jesus could or the Jain Buddhists, but nobody else could. Misty’s leg crippled, her daughter dead, her husband in a coma, Misty herself trapped and wasting away, poisoned with headaches, if the doctor is right she could be walking on water. She could raise the dead.
   A soft hand closes over her shoulder and Grace’s voice comes in close to her ear. “We’ll be dispersing Tabbi’s ashes this afternoon,” she says. “At four o’clock, out on the point.”
   The whole island, everybody will be there. The way they were for Harrow Wilmot’s funeral. Dr. Touchet embalming the body in his green-tiled examining room, with his steel accountant’s desk and the flyspecked diplomas on the wall.
   Ashes to ashes. Her baby in an urn.
   Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo’s David is just a million hits with a hammer. We’re all of us a million bits put together the right way.
   The tape tight over each eye, keeping her face relaxed, a mask, Misty says, “Has anyone gone to tell Peter?”
   Someone sighs, one long breath in, then out. And Grace says, “What would that accomplish?”
   He’s her father.
   You’re her father.
   The gray cloud of Tabbi will drift off on the wind. Drifting back down the coastline toward the town, the hotel, the houses and church. The neon signs and billboards and corporate logos and trademarked names.
   Dear sweet Peter, consider yourself told.

August 15
   JUST FOR THE RECORD, one problem with art school is it makes you so much less of a romantic. All that garbage about painters and garrets, it disappears under the load you have to learn about chemistry, about geometry and anatomy. What they teach you explains the world. Your education leaves everything so neat and tidy.
   So resolved and sensible.
   Her whole time dating Peter Wilmot, Misty knew it wasn’t him she loved. Women just look for the best physical specimen to father their children. A healthy woman is wired to seek out the triangle of smooth muscle inside Peter’s open collar because humans evolved hairless in order to sweat and stay cool while outrunning some hot and exhausted form of furry animal protein.
   Men with less body hair are also less likely to harbor lice, fleas, and mites.
   Before their dates, Peter would take a painting of hers. It would be framed and matted. And Peter would press two long strips of extrastrong double-sided mounting tape onto the back of the frame. Careful of the sticky tape, he’d tuck the painting up inside the hem of his baggy sweater.
   Any woman would love how Peter ran his hands through her hair. It’s simple science. Physical touch mimics early parent-child grooming practices. It stimulates your release of growth hormone and ornithine decarboxylase enzymes. Inversely, Peter’s fingers rubbing the back of her neck would naturally lower her levels of stress hormones. This has been proved in a laboratory, rubbing baby rats with a paintbrush.
   After you know about biology, you don’t have to be used by it.
   On their dates, Peter and Misty, they’d go to art museums and galleries. Just the two of them, walking and talking, Peter looking a little square in front, a little pregnant with her painting.
   There is nothing special in the world. Nothing magic. Just physics.
   Idiot people like Angel Delaporte who look for a supernatural reason for ordinary events, those people drive Misty nuts.
   Walking the galleries looking for a blank wall space, Peter was a living example of the golden section, the formula used by ancient Greek sculptors for perfect proportion. His legs were 1.6 times longer than his torso. His torso is 1.6 times longer than his head.
   Look at your fingers, how the first joint is longer than the second, then the second is longer than the end joint. The ratio is called Phi, after the sculptor Phidias.
   The architecture of you.
   Walking, Misty told Peter about the chemistry of painting. How physical beauty turns out to be chemistry and geometry and anatomy. Art is really science. Discovering why people like something is so you can replicate it. Copy it. It’s a paradox, “creating” a real smile. Rehearsing again and again a spontaneous moment of horror. All the sweat and boring effort that goes into creating what looks easy and instant.
   When people look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, they need to know that carbon black paint is the soot from natural gas. The color rose madder is the ground root of the madder plant. Emerald green is copper acetoarsenite, also called Paris green and used as an insecticide. A poison. Tyrian purple is made from clams.
   And Peter, he slid the painting out from under his sweater. Alone in the gallery with no one around to see, the painting of a stone house behind a picket fence, he pressed it to the wall. And there it was, the signature of Misty Marie Kleinman. And Peter said, “I told you someday your work would hang in a museum.”
   His eyes are deep Egyptian brown, the paint made from ground-up mummies, bone ash and asphalt, and used until the nineteenth century, when artists discovered that icky reality. After twisting years of brushes between their lips.
   Peter kissing the back of her neck, Misty said how when you look at the Mona Lisa, you need to remember that burnt sienna is just clay colored with iron and manganese and cooked in an oven. Sepia brown is the ink sacs from cuttlefish. Dutch pink is crushed buckhorn berries.
   Peter’s perfect tongue licked the back of her ear. Something, but not a painting, felt stiff inside his clothes.
   And Misty whispered, “Indian yellow is the urine of cattle fed mango leaves.”
   Peter wrapped one arm around her shoulders. With his other arm, he pressed the back of her knee so it buckled. He lowered her to the gallery’s marble floor, and Peter said, “ Te amo,Misty.”
   Just for the record, this came as a little surprise.
   His weight on top of her, Peter said, “You think you know so much,” and he kissed her.
   Art, inspiration, love, they’re all so easy to dissect. To explain away.
   The paint colors iris green and sap green are the juice of flowers. The color of Cappagh brown is Irish dirt, Misty whispered. Cinnabar is vermilion ore shot from high Spanish cliffs with arrows. Bistre is the yellowy brown soot of burnt beech wood. Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.
   Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
   Even while they kissed, you closed your eyes.
   And Misty kept hers open, not watching you, but the earring in your ear. Silver tarnished almost brown, holding a knot of square-cut glass diamonds, twinkling and buried in the black hair falling over your shoulders—that’s what Misty loved.
   That first time, Misty kept telling you, “The paint color Davy’s gray is powdered slate. Bremen blue is copper hydroxide and copper carbonate—a deadly poison.” Misty said, “Brilliant scarlet is iodine and mercury. The color bone black is charred bones . . .”

August 16
   THE COLOR BONE BLACK is charred bones.
   Shellac is the shit aphids leave on leaves and twigs. Drop black is burnt grapevines. Oil paints use the oil of crushed walnuts or poppy seeds. The more you know about art, the more it sounds like witchcraft. Everything crushed and mixed and baked, the more it could be cooking.
   Misty was still talking, talking, talking, but this was days later, in gallery after gallery. This was in a museum, with her painting of a tall stone church pasted to the wall between a Monet and a Renoir. With Misty sitting on the cold floor straddling Peter between her legs. It was late afternoon, and the museum was deserted. Peter’s perfect head of black hair pressed hard on the floor, he was reaching up, both his hands inside her sweater, thumbing her nipples.
   Both your hands.
   Behavioral psychologists say that humans copulate face-to-face because of breasts. Females with larger breasts attracted more partners, who insisted on breast play during intercourse. More sex bred more females, who inherited the larger breasts. That begat more face-to-face sex.
   Now, here on the floor, Peter’s hands, his breast play, his erection sliding around inside his pants, Misty’s thighs spread above him, she said how when William Turner painted his masterpiece of Hannibal crossing the Alps to slaughter the Salassian army, Turner based it on a hike he took in the Yorkshire countryside.
   Another example of everything being a self-portrait.
   Misty told Peter what you learn in art history. That Rembrandt slopped his paint on so thick that people joked you could lift each portrait by its nose.
   Her hair hung heavy with sweat down over her face. Her chubby legs trembled, exhausted but still holding her up. Dry-humping the lump in his pants.
   Peter’s fingers clutched her breasts tighter. His hips pushed up, and his face, his orbicularis oculi, squeezed his eyes shut. His triangularis pulled the corners of his mouth down so his bottom teeth showed. His coffee-yellowed teeth bit at the air.
   A hot wetness pulsed out of Misty, and Peter’s erection was pulsing inside his pants, and everything else stopped. They both stopped breathing for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven long moments.
   Then they both wilted. Withering. Peter’s body relaxed onto the wet floor. Misty’s flattened onto him. Both of them, their clothes were pasted together with sweat.
   The painting of the tall church looked down from the wall.
   And right then, a museum guard walked up.

August 20—The Third-Quarter Moon
   GRACE’S VOICE, in the dark, it tells Misty, “The work you’re doing will buy your family freedom.” It says, “No summer people will come back here for decades.”
   Unless Peter wakes up someday, Grace and Misty are the only Wilmots left.
   Unless you wake up, there won’t be any more Wilmots.
   You can hear the slow, measured sound of Grace cutting something with scissors.
   Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. There’s no point rebuilding the family fortune. Let the house go to the Catholics. Let the summer people swarm over the island. With Tabbi dead, the Wilmots have no stake in the future. No investment.
   Grace says, “Your work is a gift to the future, and anyone who tries to stop you will be cursed by history.”
   While Misty paints, Grace’s hands circle her waist with something, then her arms, her neck. It’s something that rubs her skin, light and soft.
   “Misty dear, you have a seventeen-inch waist,” Grace says.
   It’s a tape measure.
   Something smooth slips between her lips, and Grace’s voice says, “It’s time you took another pill.” A drinking straw pokes into her mouth, and Misty sips enough water to swallow the capsule.
   In 1819, Théodore Géricault painted his masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa . It showed the ten castaways that survived out of one hundred and forty-seven people left adrift on a raft for two weeks after their ship sank. At the time, Géricault had just abandoned his pregnant mistress. To punish himself, he shaved his head. He saw no friends for almost two years, never going out in public. He was twenty-seven and lived in isolation, painting. Surrounded by the dying people and cadavers he studied for his masterpiece. After several suicide attempts, he died at thirty-two.
   Grace says, “We all die.” She says, “The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”
   She runs the tape measure down the length of Misty’s legs.
   Something cold and smooth slides against Misty’s cheek, and Grace’s voice tells her, “Feel.” Grace says, “It’s satin. I’m sewing your gown for the opening.”
   Instead of “gown,” Misty hears shroud .
   Just from the feel, Misty knows it’s white satin. Grace is cutting down Misty’s wedding dress. Remaking it. Making it last forever. Born again. Reborn. Misty’s Wind Song perfume still on it, Misty recognizes herself.
   Grace says, “We’ve invited everyone. All the summer people. Your opening will be the biggest social event in a hundred years.”
   The same as her wedding. Our wedding.
   Instead of “opening,” Misty hears offering .
   Grace says, “You’re almost done. Only eighteen more paintings to complete.”
   To make an even one hundred.
   Instead of “done,” Misty hears dead .

August 21
   TODAY IN THE DARKNESS behind Misty’s eyelids, the hotel’s fire alarm goes off. One long ringing bell in the hallway, it comes through the door so loud Grace has to shout, “Oh, what is it now?” She puts a hand on Misty’s shoulder and says, “Keep working.”
   The hand squeezes, and Grace says, “Just finish this last picture. That’s all we need.”
   Her footsteps go away, and the door to the hall opens. The alarm is louder for a moment, ringing, shrill as the recess bell at Tabbi’s school. At her own grade school, growing up. The ringing is soft, again, as Grace shuts the door behind her. She doesn’t lock it.
   But Misty keeps painting.
   Her mom in Tecumseh Lake, when Misty told her about maybe marrying Peter Wilmot and moving to Waytansea Island, her mom told Misty that all big-money fortunes are based on fooling people and pain. The bigger the fortune, she said, the more people got hurt. For rich people, she said, the first marriage was just about reproduction. She asked, did Misty really want to spent the rest of her life surrounded by that kind of person?
   Her mom asked, “Don’t you want to be an artist anymore?”
   Just for the record, Misty told her, Yeah, sure.
   It wasn’t even that Misty was so in love with Peter. Misty didn’t know what it was. She just couldn’t go home to that trailer park, not anymore.
   Maybe it’s just a daughter’s job to piss off her mother.
   They don’t teach you that in art school.
   The fire alarm keeps ringing.
   The week Peter and Misty eloped, it was over Christmas break. That whole week, Misty let her mom worry. The minister looked at Peter and said, “Smile, son. You look as though you’re facing a firing squad.”
   Her mom, she called the college. She called the hospitals. One emergency room had the body of a dead woman, a young woman found naked in a ditch and stabbed a hundred times in the stomach. Misty’s mom, she spent Christmas Day driving across three counties to look at the mutilated dead body of this Jane Doe. While Peter and Misty marched down the main aisle of the Waytansea church, her mom held her breath and watched a police detective pull down the zipper on a body bag.
   Back in that previous life, Misty called her mom a couple days after Christmas. Sitting in the Wilmot house behind a locked door, Misty fingered the junk jewelry Peter had given her during their dating, the rhinestones and fake pearls. On her answering machine, Misty listened to a dozen panicked messages from her mom. When Misty finally got around to dialing their number in Tecumseh Lake, her mom just hung up.
   It was no big deal. After a little cry, Misty never called her mom again.
   Already Waytansea Island felt more like home than the trailer ever had.
   The hotel fire alarm keeps ringing, and through the door someone says, “Misty? Misty Marie?” There’s a knock. It’s a man’s voice.
   And Misty says, Yes?
   The alarm is loud with the door opening, then quiet. A man says, “Christ, it stinks in here!” And it’s Angel Delaporte come to her rescue.
   Just for the record, the weather today is frantic, panicked, and slightly rushed with Angel pulling the tape off her face. He takes the paintbrush out of her hand. Angel slaps her one time, hard on each cheek, and says, “Wake up. We don’t have much time.”
   Angel Delaporte slaps her the way you’d slap a bimbo on Spanish television. Misty all skin and bones.
   The hotel fire alarm just keeps ringing and ringing.
   Squinting against the sunlight from her one tiny window, Misty says, Stop. Misty says he doesn’t understand. She has to paint. It’s all she has left.
   The picture in front of her is a square of sky, smudged blue and white, nothing complete, but it fills the whole sheet of paper. Stacked against the wall near the doorway are other pictures, their faces to the wall. A number penciled on the back of each. Ninety-seven on one. Ninety-eight. Another is ninety-nine.
   The alarm just ringing and ringing.
   “Misty,” Angel says. “Whatever this little experiment is, you are done.” He goes to her closet and gets out a bathrobe and sandals. He comes back and sticks each of her feet in one, saying, “It’s going to take about two minutes for people to find out this is a false alarm.”
   Angel slips a hand under each of her arms and heaves Misty to her feet. He makes a fist and knocks it against her cast, saying, “What is this all about?”
   Misty asks, What is he here for?
   “That pill you gave me,” Angel says, “it gave me the worst migraine of my life.” He’s throwing the bathrobe over her shoulders and says, “I had a chemist analyze it.” Dropping each of her tired arms into a bathrobe sleeve, he says, “I don’t know what kind of doctor you have, but those capsules contain powdered lead with trace amounts of arsenic and mercury.”
   The toxic parts of oil paints: Vandyke red, ferrocyanide; iodine scarlet, mercuric iodide; flake white, lead carbonate; cobalt violet, arsenic—all those beautiful compounds and pigments that artists treasure but turn out to be deadly. How your dream to create a masterpiece will drive you nuts and then kill you.
   Her, Misty Marie Wilmot, the poisoned drug addict possessed by the devil, Carl Jung, and Stanislavski, painting perfect curves and angles.
   Misty says he doesn’t understand. Misty says, Tabbi, her daughter. Tabbi’s dead.
   And Angel stops. His eyebrows up in surprise, he says, “How?”
   A few days ago, or weeks. Misty doesn’t know. Tabbi drowned.
   “Are you sure?” he says. “It wasn’t in the newspaper.”
   Just for the record, Misty’s not sure of anything.
   Angel says, “I smell urine.”
   It’s her catheter. It’s pulled out. They’re leaving a trail of pee from her easel, out the room, and down the hallway carpet. Pee, and her cast dragging.
   “My bet,” Angel says, “is you don’t even need that leg in a cast.” He says, “You know that chair in the picture you sold me?”
   Misty says, “Tell me.”
   His arms around her, he’s dragging Misty through a door, into the stairwell. “That chair was made by the cabinetmaker Hershel Burke in 1879,” he says, “and shipped to Waytansea Island for the Burton family.”
   Her cast thuds on every step. Her ribs hurt from Angel’s fingers holding too tight, rooting and digging under her arms, and Misty tells him, “A police detective.” Misty says, “He said some ecology club is burning down all those houses Peter wrote inside.”
   “Burned,” Angel says. “Mine included. They’re all gone.”
   The Ocean Alliance for Freedom. OAFF for short.
   Angel’s hands still in their leather driving gloves, he drags her down another flight of stairs, saying, “You know this means something paranormal is happening, don’t you?”
   First, Angel Delaporte says, it’s impossible she could draw so well. Now it’s some evil spirit just using her as a human Etch A Sketch. She’s only good enough to be some demonic drafting tool.
   Misty says, “I thought you’d say that.”
   Oh, Misty, she knows what’s happening.
   Misty says, “Stop.” She says, “Just why are you here?”
   Why since the start of all this has he been her friend? What is it that keeps Angel Delaporte pestering her? Until Peter wrecked his kitchen, until Misty rented him her house, they were strangers. Now he’s pulling fire alarms and dragging her down a stairway. Her with a dead kid and a comatose husband.
   Her shoulders twist. Her elbows jerk up, hitting him around the face, smack in his missing eyebrows. To make him drop her. To make him leave her alone. Misty says, “Just stop.”
   There on the stairs, the fire alarm stops. It’s quiet. Only her ears still ring.
   You can hear voices from the hallway on each floor. A voice from the attic says, “Misty’s gone. She’s not in her room.”
   It’s Dr. Touchet.
   Before they go another step, Misty waves her fists at Angel. Misty whispers, “Tell me.” Collapsed on the stairs, she whispers, “Why are you fucking with me?”

August 21 . . . and One-Half
   ALL THE THINGS Misty loved about Peter, Angel loved them first. In art school, it was Angel and Peter, until Misty came along. They’d planned out their whole future. Not as artists, but as actors. It didn’t matter if they made money, Peter had told him. Told Angel Delaporte. Someone in Peter’s generation would marry a woman who’d make the Wilmot family and his whole community wealthy enough that none of them would have to work. He never explained the details of this system.
   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 a chair by the window. He lowers her into a blanket spread over the chair and says, “You’ve done another perfect job. We couldn’t ask for better.” He pulls the curtains back to show the ocean, the beach. The summer people crowding each other down to the water’s edge. The trash along the tide line. A beach tractor chugs along, dragging a roller. The steel drum rolls, imprinting the wet sand with a lopsided triangle. Some corporate logo.
   Next to the logo stamped in the sand, you can read the words: “Using your past mistakes to build a better future.”
   Somebody’s vague mission statement.
   “In another week,” the doctor says, “that company will pay a fortune to erase its name from this island.”
   What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.
   The tractor drags the roller, printing its message again and again until the waves wash it away.
   The doctor says, “When an airliner crashes, all the airlines pay to cancel their newspaper and television advertisements. Did you know that? None of them want to risk any association with that kind of disaster.” He says, “In another week, there won’t be a corporate sign on this island. They’ll pay anything it takes to buy their names back.”
   The doctor folds Misty’s dead hands in her lap. Embalming her. He says, “Now rest. Paulette will be up soon for your dinner order.”
   Just for the record, he goes to her night table and picks up the bottle of capsules. As he leaves, he slips the bottle into the side pocket of his suit jacket and doesn’t mention it. “Another week,” he says, “and the entire world will fear this place—but they’ll leave us alone.” Going out, he doesn’t lock the door.
   In her previous life, Peter and Misty, they’d sublet a place in New York when Grace called to say Harrow was dead. Peter’s father was dead and his mother was alone in their big house on Birch Street. Four stories tall with its mountain range of roofs, its towers and bay windows. And Peter said they had to go take care of her. To settle Harrow’s estate. Peter was the executor of the will. Just for a few months, he said. Then Misty was pregnant.
   They kept telling each other New York was still the plan. Then they were parents.
   Just for the record, Misty couldn’t complain. There was a little window of time, the first few years after Tabbi was born, when Misty could curl on the bed with her and not want anything else in the world. Having Tabbi made Misty part of something, of the Wilmot clan, of the island. Misty felt complete and more peaceful than she’d ever thought possible. The waves on the beach outside the bedroom window, the quiet streets, the island was far enough removed from the world that you stopped wanting. You stopped needing. Worrying. Wishing. Always expecting something more.
   She quit painting and smoking dope.
   She didn’t need to accomplish or become or escape. Just being here was enough.
   The quiet rituals of washing the dishes or folding clothes. Peter would come home, and they’d sit on the porch with Grace. They’d read to Tabbi until her bedtime. They’d creak in the old wicker furniture, the moths swarming the porch light. Deep inside the house, a clock would strike the hour. From the woods beyond the village, they might hear an owl.
   Across the water, the mainland towns were crowded, plastered with signs selling city products. People ate cheap food in the streets and dropped litter on the beach. The reason the island never hurt is—there was nothing there to do. There were no rooms to rent. No hotel. No summer houses. No parties. You couldn’t buy food because there was no restaurant. Nobody sold hand-painted seashells with “Waytansea Island” written on them in gold script. The beaches were rocky on the ocean side . . . muddy with oyster flats on the side that faced the mainland.
   About that time, the village council started work to reopen the closed hotel. It was crazy, using the last bit of everyone’s trust money, all the island families chipping in to rebuild the burned-out, crumbling old ruin that rose on the hillside above the harbor. Wasting the last of their resources to attract reams of tourists. Dooming their next generation to waiting tables, cleaning rooms, painting souvenir crap on seashells.
   It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness.
   We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
   Curled on the quilt, a part of every person for generations, Misty could put her arms around her daughter. Misty could hold her baby, her body cupped around Tabbi, as if she were still inside. Still part of Misty. Immortal.
   The sour milk smell of Tabbi, of her breath. The sweet smell of baby powder, almost powdered sugar. Misty’s nose tucked against the warm skin of her baby’s neck.
   Inside those years, they had no reason to hurry. They were young. Their world was clean. It was church on Sunday. It was reading books, soaking in the bathtub. Picking wild berries and making jelly at night, when the white kitchen was cool with a breeze, the windows up. They always knew the phase of the moon, but seldom the day of the week.
   Just for that little window of years, Misty could see how her life wasn’t an end. She was a means to the future.
   They’d stand Tabbi against the front doorframe. Against all the forgotten names still there. Those children, now dead. They’d mark her height with a felt-tipped pen.
   Tabbi, age four.
   Tabbi, age eight.
   Just for the record, the weather today is slightly maudlin.
   Here, sitting at the dormer window of her attic room in the Waytansea Hotel, the island is spread out under her, filthy with strangers and messages. Billboards and neon. Logos. Trademarks.
   The bed where Misty curled around Tabbi, trying to keep her inside. Angel Delaporte sleeps there now. Some crazy man. A stalker. In her room, in her bed, under the window with the hiss and burst of ocean waves breaking outside. Peter’s house.
   Our house. Our bed.
   Until Tabbi turned ten years old, the Waytansea Hotel was sealed, empty. The windows shuttered, with plywood bolted into each window frame. The doors boarded over.
   The summer Tabbi turned ten, the hotel opened. The village became an army of bellhops and waiters, maids and desk clerks. That was the year Peter started working off the island, doing drywall. Little remodeling jobs for summer people with too many houses to look after. With the hotel open, the ferry started to run all day, every day, cramming the island with tourists and traffic.
   After that, the paper cups and fast food wrappers arrived. The car alarms and long lines hunting for a place to park. The used diapers people left in the sand. The island went downhill until this year, until Tabbi turned thirteen, until Misty walked out to the garage to find Peter asleep in the car and the gas tank empty. Until people started calling to say their laundry room was gone, their guest bedroom missing. Until Angel Delaporte is exactly where he’s always wanted to be. In her husband’s bed.
   In your bed.
   Angel lying in her bed. Angel sleeping with her painting of the antique chair.
   Misty, with nothing. Tabbi, gone. Her inspiration, gone.
   Just for the record, Misty never told anyone, but Peter had packed a suitcase and hidden it in the car’s trunk. A suitcase to take along, a change of clothes for hell. It never made sense. Nothing Peter did in the past three years has made much sense.
   Outside her little attic window, down on the beach, kids are splashing in the waves. One boy wears a frilly white shirt and black pants. He’s talking to another boy, wearing just soccer shorts. They pass a cigarette back and forth, taking turns smoking it. The one boy in the frilly white shirt has black hair, just long enough to tuck behind his ears.
   On the windowsill is Tabbi’s shoe box of junk jewelry. The bracelets, the orphaned earrings and chipped old brooches. Peter’s jewelry. Rattling around in the box with the loose plastic pearls and glass diamonds.
   From her window, Misty looks down on the beach where she saw Tabbi for the last time. Where it happened. The boy with short dark hair is wearing an earring, something glittering gold and red. And with nobody to hear it, Misty says, “Tabbi.”
   Misty’s fingers gripping the windowsill, she pushes her head and shoulders out and shouts, “Tabbi?” Misty must be half out the window, ready to fall five stories to the hotel porch, and she yells, “Tabbi!”
   And it is. It’s Tabbi. With her hair cut. Flirting with some kid. Smoking.
   The boy just puffs on the cigarette and hands it back. He flips his hair and laughs with one hand over his mouth. His hair in the ocean wind, a flickering black flag.
   The waves hiss and burst.
   Her hair. Your hair.
   Misty twists through the little window, and the shoe box spills out. The box slides down the shingled roof. It hits the gutter and flips, and the jewelry flies. It falls, flashing red and yellow and green, flashing bright as fireworks and falling the way Misty’s about to, down to shatter on the concrete floor of the hotel porch.
   Only the hundred pounds of her cast, her leg embedded in fiberglass, keeps her from pitching out the window. Then two arms come around her, and a voice says, “Misty, don’t.” Someone pulls her back, and it’s Paulette. A room service menu is dropped on the floor. Paulette’s arms come around her from behind. Paulette’s hands lock together, and she swings Misty, spinning her around the solid weight of the full-leg cast, planting her facedown on the paint-stained carpet.
   Panting, panting and dragging her huge fiberglass leg, her ball and chain, back toward the window, Misty says, “It was Tabbi.” Misty says, “Outside.”
   Her catheter is pulled out again, pee squirted everywhere.
   Paulette gets to her feet. She’s making a nasty face, her risorius muscles cinching her face tight around her nose while she dries her hands on her dark skirt. She tucks her blouse back tight into her waistband and says, “No, Misty. No it wasn’t.” And she picks up the room service menu.
   Misty has to get downstairs. To get outside. She’s got to find Tabbi. Paulette has to help lift the cast. They’ve got to get Dr. Touchet to cut it off.
   And Paulette shakes her head and says, “If they take off that cast, you’ll be crippled for life.” She goes to the window and shuts it. She locks it and pulls the curtains.
   And from the floor, Misty says, “Please. Paulette, help me up.”
   But Paulette taps her foot. She fishes an order pad out of the side pocket in her skirt and says, “The kitchen is out of the whitefish.”
   And just for the record, Misty’s still trapped.
   Misty’s trapped, but her kid could be alive.
   Your kid.
   “A steak,” Misty says.
   Misty wants the thickest piece of beef they can find. Cooked well done.

August 24
   WHAT MISTY REALLY WANTS is a steak knife. She wants a serrated knife to cut through the side of this leg cast, and she wants Paulette not to notice when the knife’s missing from her tray after dinner. Paulette doesn’t notice, and she doesn’t lock the door from the outside, either. Why bother when Misty’s hobbled by a ton of fucking fiberglass.
   All night, Misty’s in bed, picking and hacking. Misty’s sawing at the cast. Digging with the knife blade and scooping the fiberglass shavings into her hand, throwing them under the bed.
   Misty’s a convict digging herself out of a very small prison, a prison felt-tip-penned with Tabbi’s flowers and birds.
   It takes until midnight to cut from her waist, halfway down her thigh. The knife keeps slipping, stabbing and lancing into her side. By the time she gets to her knee, Misty’s falling asleep. Scabbed and crusted in dried blood. Glued to the sheets. By three in the morning, she’s only partway down her calf. She’s almost free, but she falls asleep.
   Something wakes her up, the knife still in her hand.
   It’s another longest day of the year. Again.
   The noise, it’s a car door slamming shut in the parking lot. If Misty holds the split cast closed, she can hobble to the window and look. It’s the beige county government car of Detective Stilton. He’s not outside, so he must be in the hotel lobby. Maybe looking for her.
   Maybe this time he’ll find her.
   With the steak knife, Misty starts hacking again. Hacking and half asleep, she stabs her calf muscle. The blood floods out, dark red against her white, white skin, her leg sealed inside too long. Misty hacks again and stabs her shin, the blade going through thin skin, stuck into the bone.
   Still hacking, the knife throws blood and splinters of fiberglass. Fragments of Tabbi’s flowers and birds. Bits of her hair and skin. With both hands, Misty grabs the edge on each side of the split. She pries the cast open until her leg is half out. The ragged edges pinch her, biting into the hacked skin, the needles of fiberglass digging.
   Oh, dear sweet Peter, nobody has to tell you how this hurts.
   Can you feel this?
   Her fingers stuck with splinters of fiberglass, Misty grips the ragged edges and pulls them apart. Misty bends her knee, forcing it up out of the straight cast. First her pale kneecap, smeared with blood. The way a baby’s head appears. Crowning. A bird breaking out of its eggshell. Then her thigh. Her child being born. Finally her shin breaks up, out of the shattered cast. With one shake, her foot is free, and the cast slips, rolls, slumps, and crashes to the floor.
   A chrysalis. A butterfly emerging, bloody and tired. Reborn.
   The cast hitting the floor is so loud the curtains shake. A framed hotel picture flaps against the wall. With her hands pressed over her ears, Misty waits for someone to come investigate. To find her free and lock her door from the outside.
   Misty waits for her heart to beat three hundred times, fast. Counting. Then, nothing. Nothing happens. Nobody comes.
   Slow and smooth, Misty makes her leg straight. Misty bends her knee. Testing. It doesn’t hurt. Holding on to the night table, Misty swings her legs off the bed and flexes them. With the bloody steak knife, she cuts the loops of surgical tape that hold her catheter to her good leg. Pulling the tube out of her, she loops it in one hand and sets it aside.
   It’s one, three, five careful steps to the closet, where she takes out a blouse. A pair of jeans. Hanging there, inside a plastic wrapper, is the white satin dress Grace has sewn for her art show. Misty’s wedding dress, born again. When she steps into the jeans and works the button and the zipper, when she reaches for the blouse, the jeans fall to the floor. That’s how much weight she’s lost. Her hips are gone. Her ass is two empty sacks of skin. The jeans sit around her ankles, smeared with the blood from the steak knife cuts in each leg.
   There’s a skirt that fits, but not one of her own. It’s Tabbi’s, a plaid, pleated wool skirt that Grace must’ve picked out.
   Even her shoes feel loose, and Misty has to ball her toes into a knot to keep her feet inside.
   Misty listens until the hall outside her door sounds empty. She heads for the stairs, the skirt sticking to the blood on her legs, her shaved pubic hair snagging on her panties. With her toes clenched, Misty walks down the four flights to the lobby. There, people wait at the front desk, standing in the middle of their luggage.
   Out through the lobby doors, you can still see the beige county government car in the parking lot.
   A woman’s voice says, “Oh my God.” It’s some summer woman, standing near the fireplace. With the pastel fingernails of one hand hooked inside her mouth, she stares at Misty and says, “My God, your legs.”
   In one hand, Misty still holds the bloody steak knife.
   Now the people at the front desk turn and look. A clerk behind the desk, a Burton or a Seymour or a Kincaid, he turns and whispers behind his hand to the other clerk and she picks up the house phone.
   Misty heads for the dining room, past the pale looks, people wincing and looking away. Summer women peeking from between their spidery fingers. Past the hostess. Past tables three, seven, ten, and four, there’s Detective Stilton, sitting at table six with Grace Wilmot and Dr. Touchet.
   It’s raspberry scones. Coffee. Quiche. Grapefruit halved in bowls. They’re having breakfast.
   Misty gets to them, clutching the bloody knife, and says, “Detective Stilton, it’s my daughter. My daughter, Tabbi.” Misty says, “I think she’s still alive.”
   His grapefruit spoon halfway to his mouth, Stilton says, “Your daughter died?”
   She drowned, Misty tells him. He has to listen. A week, three weeks ago, Misty doesn’t know. She’s not sure. She’s been locked in the attic. They put this big cast on her leg so she couldn’t escape.
   Her legs under the plaid wool, they’re coated and running with blood.
   By now the whole dining room’s watching. Listening.
   “It’s a plot,” Misty says. With both hands, she reaches out to calm the spooked look on Stilton’s face. Misty says, “Ask Angel Delaporte. Something terrible is about to happen.”
   The blood dried on her hands. Her blood. The blood from her legs soaking through her plaid skirt.
   Tabbi’s skirt.
   A voice says, “You’ve ruined it!”
   Misty turns, and it’s Tabbi. In the dining room doorway, she’s wearing a frilly blouse and tailored black slacks. Her haircut pageboy short, she has an earring in one ear, the red enameled heart Misty saw Will Tupper rip out of his earlobe a hundred years ago.
   Dr. Touchet says, “Misty, have you been drinking again?”
   Tabbi says, “Mom . . . my skirt.”
   And Misty says, “You’re not dead.”
   Detective Stilton dabs his mouth with his napkin. He says, “Well, that makes one person who’s not dead.”
   Grace spoons sugar into her coffee. She pours milk and stirs it, saying, “So you really think it’s these OAFF people who committed the murder?”
   “Killed Tabbi?” Misty says.
   Tabbi comes to the table and leans against her grandmother’s chair. There’s some nicotine yellow between her fingers as she lifts a saucer, studying the painted border. It’s gold with a repeating wreath of dolphins and mermaids. Tabbi shows it to Grace and says, “Fitz and Floyd. The Sea Wreath pattern.”
   She turns it over, reads the bottom, and smiles.
   Grace smiles up at her, saying, “You’re getting so I can’t praise you enough, Tabitha.”
   Just for the record, Misty wants to hug and kiss her kid. Misty wants to hug her and run to the car and drive straight to her mom’s trailer in Tecumseh Lake. Misty wants to wave good-bye with her middle finger to this whole fucking island of genteel lunatics.
   Grace pats an empty chair next to her and says, “Misty, come sit down. You look distraught.”
   Misty says, “Who did OAFF kill?”
   The Ocean Alliance for Freedom. Who burned Peter’s graffiti in all the beach houses.
   Your graffiti.
   “That’s what I’m here about,” the detective says. He takes the notebook out of his inside jacket pocket. He flips it open on the table and gets his pen ready to write. Looking at Misty, he says, “If you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions?”
   About Peter’s vandalism?
   “Angel Delaporte was murdered last night,” he says. “It could be a burglary, but we’re not ruling anything out. All’s we know is he was stabbed to death in his sleep.”
   In her bed.
   Our bed.
   Tabbi’s dead, then she’s alive. The last time Misty saw her kid, Tabbi was on this very table, under a sheet and not breathing. Misty’s knee is broken, then it’s fine. One day Misty can paint, and then she can’t. Maybe Angel Delaporte was her husband’s boyfriend, but now he’s dead.
   Your boyfriend.
   Tabbi takes her mother’s hand. She leads Misty to the empty seat. She pulls out the chair, and Misty sits.
   “Before we start . . .” Grace says. She leans across the table to tap Detective Stilton on his shirt cuff, and she says, “Misty’s art show opens three days from now, and we’re counting on you being there.”
   My paintings. They’re here somewhere.
   Tabbi smiles up at Misty, and slips a hand into her grandmother’s hand. The peridot ring, sparkling green against the white linen tablecloth.
   Grace’s eyes flicker toward Misty, and she winces like someone walking into a spiderweb, her chin tucked and her hands touching the air. Grace says, “So much has been unpleasant on the island lately.” She inhales, her pearls rising, then sighs and says, “I’m hoping the art show will give us all a fresh start.”