July 5
   ON YOUR FIRST REAL DATE, you and Misty, you stretched a canvas for her.
   Peter Wilmot and Misty Kleinman, on a date, sitting in the tall weeds in a big vacant lot. The summer bees and flies drifting around them. Sitting on a plaid blanket Misty brought from her apartment. Her box of paints, made of pale wood under yellowed varnish with brass corners and hinges tarnished almost black, Misty has the legs pulled out to make it an easel.
   If this is stuff you already remember, skip ahead.
   If you remember, the weeds were so high you had to stomp them down to make a nest in the sun.
   It was spring term, and everyone on campus seemed to have the same idea. To weave a compact disc player or a computer mainframe using only native grasses and sticks. Bits of root. Seedpods. You could smell a lot of rubber cement in the air.
   Nobody was stretching canvas, painting landscapes. There was nothing witty in that. But Peter sat on that blanket in the sun. He opened his jacket and pulled up the hem of his baggy sweater. And inside, against the skin of his chest and belly, there was a blank canvas stapled around a stretcher bar.
   Instead of sunblock, you’d rubbed a charcoal pencil under each eye and down the bridge of your nose. A big black cross in the middle of your face.
   If you’re reading this now, you’ve been in a coma for God knows how long. The last thing this diary should do is bore you.
   When Misty asked why you carried the canvas inside your clothes, tucked up under your sweater like that . . .
   Peter said, “To make sure it would fit.”
   You said that.
   If you remember, you’ll know how you chewed a stalk of grass. How it tasted. Your jaw muscles big and squared, first on one side, then on the other as you chewed around and around. With one hand, you dug down between the weeds, picking out bits of gravel or clods of dirt.
   All Misty’s friends, they were weaving their stupid grasses. To make some appliance that looked real enough to be witty. And not unravel. Unless it had the genuine look of a real prehistoric high-technology entertainment system, the irony just wouldn’t work.
   Peter gave her the blank canvas and said, “Paint something.”
   And Misty said, “Nobody paint paints. Not anymore.”
   If anybody she knew still painted at all, they used their own blood or semen. And they painted on live dogs from the animal shelter, or on molded gelatin desserts, but never on canvas.
   And Peter said, “I bet you still paint on canvas.”
   “Why?” Misty said. “Because I’m retarded? Because I don’t know any better?”
   And Peter said, “Just fucking paint.”
   They were supposed to be above representational art. Making pretty pictures. They were supposed to learn visual sarcasm. Misty said they were paying too much tuition not to practice the techniques of effective irony. She said a pretty picture didn’t teach the world anything.
   And Peter said, “We’re not old enough to buy beer, what are we supposed to teach the world?” There on his back in their nest of weeds, one arm behind his head, Peter said, “All the effort in the world won’t matter if you’re not inspired.”
   In case you didn’t fucking notice, you big boob, Misty really wanted you to like her. Just for the record, her dress, her sandals and floppy straw hat, she was all dressed up for you. If you’d just touch her hair you’d hear it crackle with hair spray.
   She wore so much Wind Song perfume she was attracting bees.
   And Peter set the blank canvas on her easel. He said, “Maura Kincaid never went to fucking art school.” He spit a wad of green slobber, picked another weed stem and stuck it in his mouth. His tongue stained green, he said, “I bet if you painted what’s in your heart, it could hang in a museum.”
   What was in her heart, Misty said, was pretty much just silly crap.
   And Peter just looked at her. He said, “So what’s the point of painting anything you don’t love?”
   What she loved, Misty told him, would never sell. People wouldn’t buy it.
   And Peter said, “Maybe you’d be surprised.”
   This was Peter’s theory of self-expression. The paradox of being a professional artist. How we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell. We want creativity to be a system of cause and effect. Results. Marketable product. We want dedication and discipline to equal recognition and reward. We get on our art school treadmill, our graduate program for a master’s in fine arts, and practice, practice, practice. With all our excellent skills, we have nothing special to document. According to Peter, nothing pisses us off more than when some strung-out drug addict, a lazy bum, or a slobbering pervert creates a masterpiece. As if by accident.
   Some idiot who’s not afraid to say what they really love.
   “Plato,” Peter says, and he turns his head to spit green slobber into the weeds. “Plato said: ‘He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration in the belief that craftsmanship alone suffices will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.’ ”
   He stuck another weed in his mouth and chewed, saying, “So what makes Misty Kleinman a maniac?”
   Her fantasy houses and cobblestone streets. Her seagulls circling the oyster boats as they came back from the shoals she’d never seen. The window boxes overflowing with snapdragons and zinnias. No way in fucking hell was she going to paint that crap.
   “Maura Kincaid,” Peter says, “didn’t pick up a paintbrush until she was forty-one years old.” He started taking paintbrushes out of the pale wood box, twisting the ends sharp. He said, “Maura got hitched to a good old Waytansea Island carpenter, and they had a couple kids.” He took out her tubes of paint, setting them next to the brushes there on the blanket.
   “It wasn’t until her husband died,” Peter said. “Then Maura got sick, really sick, with consumption or something. Back then, being forty-one made you an old lady.”
   It wasn’t until one of her kids died, he said, that Maura Kincaid ever painted a picture. He said, “Maybe people have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.”
   You told Misty all this.
   You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist.
   You were digging in your pocket while you said this. You were fishing something out.
   You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Brontë sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O’Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.
   “According to Thomas Mann,” Peter said, “‘Great artists are great invalids.’ ”
   And there on the blanket, you set something. There, surrounded by tubes of paint and paintbrushes, was a big rhinestone brooch. Big around as a silver dollar, the brooch was clear glass gems, tiny polished mirrors in a pinwheel of yellow and orange, all of them chipped and cloudy. There on the plaid blanket, it seemed to explode the sunlight into sparks. The metal was dull gray, gripping the rhinestones with tiny sharp teeth.
   Peter said, “Are you hearing any of this?”
   And Misty picked up the brooch. The sparkle reflected straight into her eyes, and she was blinded, dazzled. Disconnected from everything here, the sun and weeds.
   “It’s for you,” Peter said, “for inspiration.”
   Misty, her reflection showed shattered a dozen times in every rhinestone. A thousand pieces of her face.
   To the sparkling colors in her hand, Misty said, “So tell me.” She said, “How did Maura Kincaid’s husband die?”
   And Peter, his teeth green, he spit green into the tall weeds around them. The black cross on his face. He licked his green lips with his green tongue, and Peter said, “Murder.” Peter said, “They murdered him.”
   And Misty started to paint.

July 6
   JUST FOR THE RECORD, the cruddy old library with its wallpaper peeling at every seam and dead flies inside all the milk-glass lights hanging from the ceiling, everything you can remember is still here. If you can remember it. The same shabby world globe, yellowed to the color of soup. The continents carved into places like Prussia and the Belgian Congo. They still have the framed sign that says “Anyone Caught Defacing Library Books Will Be Prosecuted.”
   Old Mrs. Terrymore, the librarian, she wears the same tweed suits, except now she has a lapel button as big as her face that says “Find Yourself in a New Future with Owens Landing Financial Services!”
   What you don’t understand, you can make mean anything.
   People all over the island are wearing this same kind of button or T-shirt, selling some advertising message. They get a little prize or cash award if they’re seen wearing it. Turning their bodies into billboards. Wearing baseball caps with 1-800 telephone numbers.
   Misty’s here with Tabbi, looking for books about horses and insects her teacher wants her to read before Tabbi starts seventh grade this fall.
   No computers. No connections to the Internet or database terminals means no summer people. No lattes allowed. No videotapes or DVDs to check out. Nothing permitted above a whisper. Tabbi’s off in the kids’ section, and your wife’s in her own personal coma: the art book section.
   What they teach you in art school is that famous old masters like Rembrandt and Caravaggio and van Eyck, they just traced. They drew the way Tabbi’s teacher won’t let her. Hans Holbein, Diego Velázquez, they sat in a velvet tent in the murky dark and sketched the outside world that shined in through a small lens. Or bounced off a curved mirror. Or like a pinhole camera, just projected into their tiny dark room through a little hole. Projecting the outside world onto the screen of their canvas. Canaletto, Gainsborough, Vermeer, they stayed there in the dark for hours or days, tracing the building or naked model in the bright sunlight outside. Sometimes they even painted the colors straight over the projected colors, matching the shine of a fabric as it fell in projected folds. Painting an exact portrait in a single afternoon.
   Just for the record, camera obscura is Latin for “dark chamber.”
   Where the assembly line meets the masterpiece. A camera using paint instead of silver oxide. Canvas instead of film.
   They spend all morning here, and at some point Tabbi comes to stand next to her mother. Tabbi’s holding a book open in her hands and says, “Mom?” Her nose still on the page, she tells Misty, “Did you know it takes a fire of at least sixteen-hundred degrees lasting seven hours to consume the average human body?”
   The book’s got black-and-white photos of burn victims curled into the “pugilist position,” their charred arms pulled up in front of their faces. Their hands are clenched into fists, cooked by the heat of the fire. Charred black prizefighters. The book’s called Fire Forensic Investigation .
   Just for the record, today’s weather is nervous disgust with tentative apprehension.
   Mrs. Terrymore looks up from her desk. Misty tells Tabbi, “Put it back.”
   Today in the library, in the art section, your wife’s touching books at random on the reference shelf. For no reason, she opens a book, and it says how when an artist used a mirror to throw an image onto canvas, the image would be reversed. This is why everyone in so many old-master paintings is left-handed. When they used a lens, the image would be upside down. Whatever way they saw the image, it was distorted. In this book, an old woodcut print shows an artist tracing a projection. Across the page, someone’s written, “You can do this with your mind.”
   It’s why birds sing, to mark their territory. It’s why dogs pee.
   The same as the bottom of the table in the Wood and Gold Dining Room, Maura Kincaid’s life-after-death message:
   “Choose any book at the library,” she wrote.
   Her lasting effect in pencil. Her homemade immortality.
   This new message is signed Constance Burton .
   “You can do this with your mind.”
   At random, Misty pulls down another book and lets it fall open. It’s about the artist Charles Meryon, a brilliant French engraver who became schizophrenic and died in an asylum. In one engraving of the French Marine Ministry, a classic stone building behind a row of tall fluted columns, the work looks perfect until you notice a swarm of monsters decending from the sky.
   And written across the clouds above the monsters, in pencil, it says: “We are their bait and their trap.” Signed Maura Kincaid .
   With her eyes closed, Misty walks her fingers across the spines of books on the shelf. Feeling the ridges of leather and paper and cloth, she pulls out a book without looking and lets it fall open in her hand.
   Here’s Francisco Goya, poisoned by the lead in his bright paints. Colors he applied with his fingers and thumbs, scooping them out of tubs until he suffered from lead encephalopathy, leading to deafness, depression, and insanity. Here on the page is a painting of the god Saturn eating his children—a murky mix of black around a bug-eyed giant biting the arms off a headless body. In the white margin of the page, someone’s written: “If you’ve found this, you can still save yourself.”
   It’s signed Constance Burton .
   In the next book, the French painter Watteau shows himself as a pale, spindly guitar player, dying of tuberculosis as he was in real life. Across the blue sky of the scene, is written: “Do not paint them their pictures.” Signed Constance Burton .
   To test herself, your wife walks across the library, past the old librarian watching through little round glasses of black wire. In her arms, Misty’s carrying the books on Watteau, Goya, the camera obscura, all of them open and nested one inside the next. Tabbi looks up, watching from a table heaped with kids’ books. In the literature section, Misty closes her eyes again and walks, trailing her fingers across the old spines. For no reason, she stops and pulls one out.
   It’s a book about Jonathan Swift, about how he developed Ménière’s syndrome and his life was ruined by dizziness and deafness. In his bitterness, he wrote the dark satires Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, suggesting the British could survive by eating the increasing flood of Irish children. His best work.
   The book falls open to a page where someone has written: “They would have you kill all of God’s children to save theirs.” It’s signed Maura Kincaid .
   Your wife, she wedges this new book inside the last book, and closes her eyes again. Carrying her armload of books, she reaches out to touch another book. Misty walks her fingers from spine to spine. Her eyes closed, she steps forward—into a soft wall and the smell of talcum powder. When she looks, there’s dark red lipstick in a white powdered face. A green cap across a forehead, above it a head of curly gray hair. Printed on the cap, it says, “Call 1-800-555-1785 for Complete Satisfaction.” Below that, black-wire eye glasses. A tweed suit.
   “Excuse me,” a voice says, and it’s Mrs. Terrymore, the librarian. She’s standing there, arms folded.
   And Misty takes a step back.
   The dark red lipstick says, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t destroy the books by piling them together that way.”
   Poor Misty, she says she’s sorry. Always the outsider, she goes to put them on a table.
   And Mrs. Terrymore, with her hands open, clutching, she says, “Please, let me reshelve them. Please.”
   Misty says, not yet. She says she’d like to check them out, and while the two women wrestle over the armload, one book slips out and slams flat on the floor. Loud as a slap across your face. It flaps open to where you can read: “Do not paint them their pictures.”
   And Mrs. Terrymore says, “I’m afraid those are reference books.”
   And Misty says, No they’re not. Not all of them. You can read the words: “If you’ve found this, you can still save yourself.”
   Through her black-wire glasses, the librarian sees this and says, “Always more damage. Every year.” She looks at a tall clock in a dark walnut case, and she says, “Well, if you don’t mind, we’ve closed early today.” She checks her wristwatch against the tall clock, saying, “We closed ten minutes ago.”
   Tabbi’s already checked out her books. She’s standing by the front door, waiting, and calls, “Hurry, Mom. You have to be at work.”
   And with one hand, the librarian fishes in the pocket of her tweed jacket and brings out a big pink gum eraser.

July 7
   THE STAINED-GLASS windows of the island church, little white trash Misty Marie Kleinman, she could draw them before she could read or write. Before she’d ever seen stained glass. She’d never been inside a church, any church. Godless little Misty Kleinman, she could draw the tombstones in the village cemetery out on Waytansea Point, drawing the dates and epitaphs before she knew they were numbers and words.
   Now, sitting here in church services, it’s hard for her to remember what she first imagined and what she saw for real after she’d arrived. The purple altar cloth. The thick wood beams black with varnish.
   It’s all what she imagined as a kid. But that’s impossible.
   Grace beside her in the pew, praying. Tabbi on the far side of Grace, both of them kneeling. Their hands folded.
   Grace’s voice, her eyes closed and her lips muttering into her hands, she says, “Please let my daughter-in-law return to the artwork she loves. Please don’t let her squander the glorious talent God has given her . . .”
   Every old island family around them, muttering in prayer.
   Behind them, a voice is whispering, “. . . please, Lord, give Peter’s wife what she needs to start her work . . .”
   Another voice, Old Lady Petersen, is praying, “. . . may Misty save us before the outsiders get any worse . . .”
   Even Tabbi, your own daughter, is whispering, “God, make my mom get her act together and get started on her art . . .”
   All the Waytansea Island waxworks are kneeling around Misty. The Tuppers and Burtons and Niemans, they’re all eyes-closed, knotting their fingers together and asking God to make her paint. All of them thinking she has some secret talent to save them.
   And Misty, your poor wife, the only sane person here, she just wants to—well, all she wants is a drink.
   A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. And repeat.
   She wants to yell for everybody to just shut up with their goddamn prayers.
   If you’ve reached middle age and you see how you’re never going to be the big famous artist you dreamed of becoming and paint something that will touch and inspire people, really touch and move them and change their lives. You just don’t have the talent. You don’t have the brains or inspiration. You don’t have any of what it takes to create a masterpiece. If you see how your whole portfolio of work is just grand stony houses and big pillowy flower gardens—the naked dreams of a little girl in Tecumseh Lake, Georgia—if you see how anything you could paint would just be adding more mediocre shit to a world already crammed with mediocre shit. If you realize you’re forty-one years old and you’ve reached the end of your God-given potential, well, cheers.
   Here’s mud in your eye. Bottoms up.
   Here’s as smart as you’re ever going to get.
   If you realize there’s no way you can give your child a better standard of living—hell, you can’t even give your child the quality of life that your trailer park mom gave you—and this means no college for her, no art school, no dreams, nothing except for waiting tables like her mom . . .
   Well, it’s down the hatch.
   This is every day in the life of Misty Marie Wilmot, queen of the slaves.
   Maura Kincaid?
   Constance Burton?
   The Waytansea school of painters. They were different, born different. Those artists who made it look so easy. The point is some people have talent, but most people don’t. Most people, we’re going to top out with no glory, no perks. Folks like poor Misty Marie, they’re limited, borderline dummies, but nothing enough to get a handicapped parking space. Or get any kind of Special Olympic Games. They just pay the bulk of taxes but get no special menu at the steak house. No oversized bathroom stall. No special seat at the front of the bus. No political lobby.
   No, your wife’s job will be to applaud other people.
   In art school, one girl Misty knew, she ran a kitchen blender full of wet concrete until the motor burned out in a cloud of bitter smoke. This was her statement about life as a housewife. Right now, that girl is probably living in a loft eating organic yogurt. She’s rich and can cross her legs at the knee.
   Another girl Misty knew in art school, she performed a three-act play with puppets in her own mouth. These were little costumes you could slip over your tongue. You’d hold the extra costumes inside your cheek, the same as the wings to a stage. Between scene changes, you’d just close your lips as a curtain. Your teeth, the footlights and proscenium arch. You’d slip your tongue into the next costume. After doing a three-act play, she’d have stretch marks all around her mouth. Her orbicularis oris stretched all out of shape.
   One night in a gallery, doing a tiny version of The Greatest Story Ever Told, this girl almost died when a tiny camel slipped down her throat. These days, she was probably rolling in grant money.
   Peter with his praise for all of Misty’s pretty houses, he was so wrong. Peter who said she should hide away on the island, paint only what she loved, his advice was so fucked.
   Your advice, your praise was so very, very fucked.
   According to you, Maura Kincaid washed fish in a cannery for twenty years. She potty-trained her kids, weeded her garden, then one day she sits down and paints a masterpiece. The bitch. No graduate degree, no studio time, but now she’s famous forever. Loved by millions of people who will never meet her.
   Just for the record, the weather today is bitter with occasional fits of jealous rage.
   Just so you know, Peter, your mother’s still a bitch. She’s working part-time for a service that finds people pieces of china after their pattern is discontinued. She overheard some rich summer woman, just a tanned skeleton in a knit-silk pastel tank dress, sitting at lunch and saying, “What’s the point of being rich here if there’s nothing to buy?”
   Since Grace heard this, she’s been hounding your wife to paint. To give people something they can clamor to own. Like somehow Misty could pull a masterpiece out of her ass and earn the Wilmot family fortune back.
   Like she could save the whole island that way.
   Tabbi’s birthday is coming up, the big thirteen, and there’s no money for a gift. Misty’s saving her tips until there’s enough money for them to go live in Tecumseh Lake. They can’t live in the Waytansea Hotel forever. Rich people are eating the island alive, and she doesn’t want Tabbi to grow up poor, pressured by rich boys with drugs.
   By the end of summer, Misty figures they can bail. About Grace, Misty doesn’t know. Your mother must have friends she can live with. There’s always the church that can help her. The Ladies Altar Society.
   Here around them in church are the stained-glass saints, all of them pierced with arrows and hacked with knives and burning on bonfires, and now Misty pictures you. Your theory about suffering as a means to divine inspiration. Your stories about Maura Kincaid.
   If misery is inspiration, Misty should be reaching her prime.
   Here, with the whole island around her kneeling in prayer for her to paint. For her to be their savior.
   The saints all around them, smiling and performing miracles in their moments of pain, Misty reaches out to take a hymnal. This is one book among dozens of dusty old hymnals, some without covers, some of them trailing frayed satin ribbons. She takes one at random and opens it. And, nothing.
   She flips through the pages, but there’s nothing. Just prayers and hymns. No special secret messages scribbled inside.
   Still, when she goes to put it back, carved there in the wood of the pew where the hymnal hid it, a message says: “Leave this island before you can’t.”
   It’s signed Constance Burton .

July 8
   ON THEIR FIFTH REAL DATE, Peter was matting and framing the picture Misty had painted.
   You, Peter, you were telling Misty, “This. This picture. It will hang in a museum.”
   The picture, it was a landscape showing a house wrapped in porches, shaded with trees. Lace curtains hung in the windows. Roses bloomed behind a white picket fence. Blue birds flew through shafts of sunlight. A ribbon of smoke curled up from one stone chimney. Misty and Peter were in a frame shop near campus, and she was standing with her back to the shop’s front window, trying to block if anybody might see in.
   Misty and you.
   Blocking if anybody might see her painting.
   Her signature was at the bottom, below the picket fence, Misty Marie Kleinman . The only thing missing was a smiling face. A heart dotting the i in Kleinman.
   “Maybe a museum of kitsch,” she said. This was just a better version of what she’d been painting since childhood. Her fantasy village. And seeing it felt worse than seeing the worst, most fat naked picture of yourself ever. Here it was, the trite little heart of Misty Marie Kleinman. The sugary dreams of the poor, lonely six-year-old kid she’d be for the rest of her life. Her pathetic, pretty rhinestone soul.
   The trite little secret of what made her feel happy.
   Misty kept peeking back over one shoulder to make sure no one was looking in. No one was seeing the most cliché, honest part of her, painted here in watercolors.
   Peter, God bless him, he just cut the mat and centered the painting inside it.
   You cut the mat.
   Peter set up the miter saw on the shop’s workbench, and he cut the lengths for each side of the frame. The painting, when Peter looked at it, half his face smiled, the zygomatic major pulling up one side of his mouth. He only lifted the eyebrow on that side. He said, “You got the porch railing perfect.”
   Outside, a girl from art school walked by on the sidewalk. This girl, her latest “work” was stuffing a teddy bear with dog shit. She worked with her hands inside blue rubber gloves so thick she could almost not bend her fingers. According to her, beauty was a stale concept. Superficial. A cheat. She was working a new vein. A new twist on a classic Dada theme. In her studio, she had the little teddy bear already gutted out, its fake fur spread open autopsy-style, ready to turn into art. Her rubber gloves smeared with brown stink, she could hardly hold the needle and red suture thread. Her title for all this was: Illusions of Childhood .
   Other kids in art school, kids from rich families, the kids who traveled and saw real art in Europe and New York, all of them did this kind of work.
   Another boy in Misty’s class, he was masturbating, trying to fill a piggy bank with sperm before the end of the year. He lived off dividends from a trust fund. Another girl drank different colors of egg temperas, then drank syrup of ipecac that made her vomit her masterpiece. She drove to class on a moped from Italy that cost more than the trailer where Misty grew up.
   In the frame shop that morning, Peter fitted the corners of the frame together. He dabbed glue with his bare fingers and drilled holes in each corner for the screws.
   Still standing between the window and the workbench, her shadow blocking the sunlight, Misty said, “You really think it’s good?”
   And Peter said, “If you only knew . . .”
   You said that.
   Peter said, “You’re in my light. I can’t see.”
   “I don’t want to move,” Misty told him. “People outside might see.”
   All the dog shit and jack-off and barf. Running the glass cutter across the glass, never taking his eyes off the little cutting wheel, a pencil tucked in the hair behind one ear, Peter said, “Just smelling super gross doesn’t make their work art.”
   Snapping the glass into two pieces, Peter said, “Shit is an esthetic cliché.” He said how the Italian painter Piero Manzoni canned his own shit, labeled “100% Pure Artist’s Shit,” and people bought it.
   Peter was watching his hands so hard that Misty had to watch. She wasn’t watching the window, and behind them they heard a bell ring. Somebody’d walked into the shop. Another shadow fell over the workbench.
   Without looking up, Peter went, “Hey.”
   And this new guy said, “Hey.”
   The friend was maybe Peter’s age, blond with a patch of chin hairs, but not what you’d call a beard. Another student from the art school. He was another rich kid from Waytansea Island, and he stood, his blue eyes looking down at the painting on the workbench. He smiled Peter’s same half smile, the look of somebody laughing over the fact he had cancer. The look of someone facing a firing squad of clowns with real guns.
   Not looking up, Peter buffed the glass and fit it into the new frame. He said, “See what I mean about the picture?”
   The friend looked at the house wrapped in porches, the picket fence and blue birds. The name Misty Marie Kleinman. Half smiling, shaking his head, he said, “It’s the Tupper house, all right.”
   It was a house Misty had just made up. Invented.
   In one ear, the friend had a single earring. An old piece of junk jewelry, in the Waytansea Island style of Peter’s friends. Buried in his hair, it was fancy gold filigree around a big red enamel heart, flashes of red glass, cut-glass jewels twinkled in the gold. He was chewing gum. Spearmint, from the smell.
   Misty said, “Hi.” She said, “I’m Misty.”
   And the friend, he looked at her, giving her the same doomed smile. Chewing his gum, he said, “So is this her? Is she the mythical lady?”
   And slipping the picture into the frame, behind the glass, looking only at his work, Peter said, “I’m afraid so.”
   Still staring at Misty, his eyes jumping around every part of her, her hands and legs, her face and breasts, the friend cocked his head to one side, studying. Still chewing his gum, he said, “Are you sure she’s the right one?”
   Some magpie part of Misty, some little princess part, couldn’t take her eyes off the guy’s glittery red earring. The sparkling enamel heart. The flash of red from the cut-glass rubies.
   Peter fitted a piece of backing cardboard behind the picture and sealed it around the edge with tape. Running his thumb over the tape, sealing it down, he said, “You saw the painting.” He stopped and sighed, his chest getting big, then collapsing, and he said, “I’m afraid she’s the real deal.”
   Misty, Misty’s eyes were pinned inside the blond tangle of the friend’s hair. The red flash of the earring there, it was Christmas lights and birthday candles. In the sunlight from the shopwindow, the earring was Fourth of July fireworks and bouquets of Valentine’s Day roses. Looking at the sparkle, she forgot she had hands, a face, a name.
   She forgot to breathe.
   Peter said, “What’d I tell you, man?” He was looking at Misty now, watching her spellbound by the red earring, and Peter said, “She can’t resist the old jewelry.”
   The blond guy saw Misty staring back at him, and both his blue eyes swung sideways to see where Misty’s eyes were pinned.
   In the earring’s cut-glass sparkle, in there was the sparkle of champagne Misty had never seen. There were the sparks of beach bonfires, spiraling up to summer stars Misty could only imagine. In there was the flash of crystal chandeliers she had painted in each fantasy parlor.
   All the yearning and idiot need of a poor, lonely kid. Some stupid, unenlightened part, not the artist but the idiot in her, loved that earring, the bright rich shine of it. The glitter of sugary hard candy. Candy in a cut-glass dish. A dish in a house she’d never visited. Nothing deep or profound. Just everything we’re programmed to adore. Sequins and rainbows. Those bangles she should’ve been educated enough to ignore.
   The blond, Peter’s friend, he reached one hand up to touch his hair, then his ear. His mouth dropped open, so fast his gum fell out onto the floor.
   Your friend.
   And you said, “Careful, dude, it looks like you’re stealing her away from me . . .”
   And the friend, his fingers fumbled, digging in his hair, and he yanked the earring. The pop made them all wince.
   When Misty opened her eyes, the blond guy was holding out his earring, his blue eyes filled with tears. His torn earlobe hung in two ragged pieces, forked, blood dripping from both points. “Here,” he said, “take it.” And he threw the earring toward the workbench. It landed, gold and fake rubies scattering red sparks and blood.
   The screw-on back was still on the post. It was so old, the gold back had turned green. He’d yanked it off so fast the earring was tangled in blond hairs. Each hair still had the soft white bulb where it pulled out at the root.
   One hand cupped over his ear, blood running from between his fingers, the guy smiled. His corrugator muscle pulling his pale eyebrows together, he said, “Sorry, Petey. It looks like you’re the lucky guy.”
   And Peter lifted the painting, framed and finished. Misty’s signature at the bottom.
   Your future wife’s signature. Her bourgeois little soul.
   Your future wife already reaching for the bloody spot of red sparkle.
   “Yeah,” Peter said, “fucking lucky me.”
   And still bleeding, one hand clamped over his ear, the blood running down his arm to drip from his pointed elbow, Peter’s friend backed up a couple steps. With his other hand, he reached for the door. He nodded at the earring and said, “Keep it. A wedding present.” And he was gone.

July 9
   THIS EVENING, Misty is tucking your daughter into bed when Tabbi says, “Granmy Wilmot and I have a secret.”
   Just for the record, Granmy Wilmot knows everybody’s secrets.
   Grace sits through church service and elbows Misty, telling her how the rose window the Burtons donated for their poor, sad daughter-in-law—well, the truth is Constance Burton gave up painting and drank herself to death.
   Here’s two centuries of Waytansea shame and misery, and your mother can repeat every detail. The cast-iron benches on Merchant Street, the ones made in England, they’re in memory of Maura Kincaid, who drowned trying to swim the six miles to the mainland. The Italian fountain on Parson Street—it’s in honor of Maura’s husband.
   The murdered husband, according to Peter.
   According to you.
   The whole village of Waytansea, this is their shared coma.
   Just for the record, Mother Wilmot sends her love.
   Not that she ever wants to visit you.
   Tucked in bed, Tabbi rolls her head to look out the window and says, “Can we go on a picnic?”
   We can’t afford it, but the minute you die, Mother Wilmot’s got a drinking fountain picked out, brass and bronze, sculpted like a naked Venus riding a conch shell sidesaddle.
   Tabbi brought her pillow when Misty moved them into the Waytansea Hotel. They all brought something. Your wife brought your pillow, because it smells like you.
   In Tabbi’s room, Misty sits on the edge of the bed, combing her kid’s hair through her fingers. Tabbi has her father’s long black hair and his green eyes.
   Your green eyes.
   She has a little room she shares with her grandmother, next to Misty’s room in the attic hallway of the hotel.
   Almost every old family has rented out their house and moved into the hotel attic. The rooms papered with faded roses. The wallpaper peeling along every seam. There’s a rusty sink and a little mirror bolted to the wall in each room. Two or three iron beds in every room, their paint chipped, their mattresses soft and sagging in the middle. These are the cramped rooms, under the sloping ceilings, behind their little windows, dormers like rows of little doghouses in the hotel’s steep roof. The attic is a barracks, a refugee camp for nice white gentry. People to-the-manor-born now share a bathroom down the hall.
   These people who’ve never held a job, this summer, they’re waiting tables. As if everyone’s money ran out at the same time, this summer every blue-blood islander is carrying luggage at the hotel. Cleaning hotel rooms. Shining shoes. Washing dishes. A service industry of blue-eyed blonds with shining hair and long legs. Polite and cheerful and eager to run fetch a fresh ashtray or decline a tip.
   Your family—your wife and child and mother—they all sleep in sagging, chipped iron beds, under sloping walls with the hoarded silver and crystal relics of their former genteel life.
   Go figure, but all the island families, they’re smiling and whistling. As if this were some adventure. A zany lark. As if they’re just slumming in the service industry. As if this tedious kind of bowing and scraping isn’t going to be the rest of their lives. Their lives and their children’s lives. As if the novelty won’t wear off after another month. They’re not stupid. It’s just that none of them have ever been poor. Not like your wife, she knows about having pancakes for dinner. Eating government-surplus cheese. Powdered milk. Wearing steel-toed shoes and punching a goddamn time clock.
   Sitting there with Tabbi, Misty says, “So, what’s your secret?”
   And Tabbi says, “I can’t tell.”
   Misty tucks the covers in around the girl’s shoulders, old hotel sheets and blankets washed until they’re nothing but gray lint and the smell of bleach. The lamp beside Tabbi’s bed is her pink china lamp painted with flowers. They brought it from the house. Most of her books are here, the ones that would fit. They brought her clown paintings and hung them above her bed.
   Her grandmother’s bed is close enough Tabbi could reach out and touch the quilt that covers it with velvet scraps from Easter dresses and Christmas clothes going a hundred years back. On the pillow, there’s her diary bound in red leather with “Diary” across the cover in scrolling gold letters. All Grace Wilmot’s secrets locked inside.
   Misty says, “Hold still, honey,” and she picks a stray eyelash off Tabbi’s cheek. Misty rubs the lash between two fingers. It’s long like her father’s eyelashes.
   Your eyelashes.
   With Tabbi’s bed and her grandmother’s, two twin beds, there’s not much room left. Mother Wilmot brought her diary. That, and her sewing basket full of embroidery thread. Her knitting needles and crochet hooks and embroidery hoops. It’s something she can do while she sits in the lobby with her old lady friends or outside on the boardwalk above the beach in good weather.
   Your mother’s just like all the other fine old Mayflower families, getting their wagons into a circle at the Waytansea Hotel, waiting out the siege of awful strangers.
   Stupid as it sounds, Misty brought her drawing tools. Her pale wood box of paints and watercolors, her paper and brushes, it’s all piled in a corner of her room.
   And Misty says, “Tabbi honey?” She says, “You want to maybe go live with your Grandma Kleinman over by Tecumseh Lake?”
   And Tabbi rolls her head back and forth, no, against her pillow until she stops and says, “Granmy Wilmot told me why Dad was so pissed off all the time.”
   Misty tells her, “Don’t say ‘pissed off,’ please.”
   Just for the record, Granmy Wilmot is downstairs playing bridge with her cronies in front of the big clock in the wood-paneled room off the lobby. The loudest sound in the room will be the big pendulum ticktocking back and forth. Either that or she’s sitting in a big red leather wing chair next to the lobby fireplace, reading with her thick magnifying glass hovering over each page of a book in her lap.
   Tabbi tucks her chin down against the satin edge of the blanket, and she says, “Granmy told me why Dad doesn’t love you.”
   And Misty says, “Of course your daddy loves me.”
   And of course she’s lying.
   Outside the room’s little dormer window, the breaking waves shimmer under the lights of the hotel. Far down the coast is the dark line of Waytansea Point, a peninsula of nothing but forest and rock jutting out into the shimmering ocean.
   Misty goes to the window and puts her fingertips on the sill, saying, “You want it open or shut?” The white paint on the windowsill is blistered and peeling, and she picks at it, wedging paint chips under her fingernail.
   Rolling her head back and forth on her pillow, Tabbi says, “No, Mom.” She says, “Granmy Wilmot says Dad never loved you for real. He only pretended love to bring you here and make you stay.”
   “To bring me here?” Misty says. “To Waytansea Island?” With two fingers, she scratches off the loose flecks of white paint. The sill underneath is brown varnished wood. Misty says, “What else did your grandmother tell you?”
   And Tabbi says, “Granmy says you’re going to be a famous artist.”
   What you don’t learn in art theory is how too big a compliment can hurt more than a slap in the face. Misty, a famous artist. Big fat Misty Wilmot, queen of the fucking slaves.
   The white paint is flaking off in a pattern, in words. A wax candle or a finger of grease, maybe gum arabic, it makes a negative message underneath. Somebody a long time ago wrote something invisible here that new paint can’t stick to.
   Tabbi lifts some strands of her hair and looks at the ends, so close-up her eyes go crossed. She looks at her fingernails and says, “Granmy says we should go on a picnic out on the point.”
   The ocean shimmers, bright as the bad costume jewelry Peter wore in art school. Waytansea Point is nothing but black. A void. A hole in everything.
   The jewelry you wore in art school.
   Misty makes sure the window’s locked, and she brushes the loose paint chips into the palm of one hand. In art school, you learn the symptoms of adult lead poisoning include tiredness, sadness, weakness, stupidity—symptoms Misty has had most of her adult life.
   And Tabbi says, “Granmy Wilmot says everyone will want your pictures. She says you’ll do pictures the summer people will fight over.”
   Misty says, “Good night, honey.”
   And Tabbi says, “Granmy Wilmot says you’ll make us a rich family again.” Nodding her head, she says, “Dad brought you here to make the whole island rich again.”
   The paint chips cupped in one hand, Misty turns out the light.
   The message on the windowsill, where the paint flaked off, underneath it said, “You’ll die when they’re done with you.” It’s signed Constance Burton .
   Flaking off more paint, the message says, “We all do.”
   As she bends to turn off the pink china lamp, Misty says, “What do you want for your birthday next week?”
   And a little voice in the dark, Tabbi says, “I want a picnic on the point, and I want you to start painting again.”
   And Misty tells the voice, “Sleep tight,” and kisses it good night.

July 10
   ON THEIR TENTH DATE, Misty asked Peter if he’d messed with her birth control pills.
   They were in Misty’s apartment. She was working on another painting. The television was on, tuned to a Spanish soap opera. Her new painting was a tall church fitted together out of cut stone. The steeple was roofed with copper tarnished dark green. The stained-glass windows were complicated as spiderwebs.
   Painting the shiny blue of the church doors, Misty said, “I’m not stupid.” She said, “A lot of women would notice the difference between a real birth control pill and the little pink cinnamon candies you switched them with.”
   Peter had her last painting, the house with the white picket fence, the picture he’d framed, and he’d stuffed it up under his baggy old sweater. Like he was pregnant with a very square baby, he waddled around Misty’s apartment. His arms straight down at his sides, he was holding the picture in place with his elbows.
   Then fast, he moved his arms a little and the painting dropped out. A heartbeat from the floor, from the glass breaking into a mess, Peter caught it between his hands.
   You caught it. Misty’s painting.
   She said, “What the fuck are you doing?”
   And Peter said, “I have a plan.”
   And Misty said, “I’m not having kids. I’m going to be an artist.”
   On television, a man slapped a woman to the ground and she lay there, licking her lips, her breasts heaving inside a tight sweater. She was supposed to be a police officer. Peter couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. What he loved about Spanish soap operas is you could make what people say mean anything.
   And stuffing the painting up under his sweater, Peter said, “When?”
   And Misty said, “When what?”
   The painting dropped out, and he caught it.
   “When are you going to be an artist?” he said.
   Another reason to love Spanish soap operas was how fast they could resolve a crisis. One day, a man and woman were hacking at each other with butcher knives. The next day, they were kneeling in church with their new baby. Their hands folded in prayer. People accepted the worst from each other, screaming and slapping. Divorce and abortion were just never a plot option.
   If this was love or just inertia, Misty couldn’t tell.
   After she graduated, she said, then she’d be an artist. When she’d put together a body of work and found a gallery to show her. When she’d sold a few pieces. Misty wanted to be realistic. Maybe she’d teach art at the high school level. Or she’d be a technical draftsman or an illustrator. Something practical. Not everybody could be a famous painter.
   Stuffing the painting inside his sweater, Peter said, “You could be famous.”
   And Misty told him to stop. Just stop.
   “Why?” he said. “It’s the truth.”
   Still watching the television, pregnant with the painting, Peter said, “You have such talent. You could be the most famous artist of your generation.”
   Watching some Spanish commercial for a plastic toy, Peter said, “With your gift, you’re doomed to be a great artist. School for you is a waste of time.”
   What you don’t understand, you can make mean anything.
   The painting dropped out, and he caught it. He said, “All you have to do is paint.”
   Maybe this is why Misty loved him.
   Loved you.
   Because you believed in her so much more than she did. You expected more from her than she did from herself.
   Painting the tiny gold of the church doorknobs, Misty said, “Maybe.” She said, “But that’s why I don’t want kids . . .”
   Just for the record, it was kind of cute. All of her birth control pills being replaced with little heart-shaped candies.
   “Just marry me,” Peter said. “And you’ll be the next great painter of the Waytansea school.”
   Maura Kincaid and Constance Burton.
   Misty said how only two painters didn’t count as a “school.”
   And Peter said, “It’s three, counting you.”
   Maura Kincaid, Constance Burton, and Misty Kleinman.
   “Misty Wilmot, ” Peter said, and he stuffed the painting inside his sweater.
   You said.
   On television, a man shouted “Te amo . . . Te amo . . .” again and again to a dark-haired girl with brown eyes and feathery long eyelashes while he kicked her down a flight of stairs.
   The painting dropped out of his sweater, and Peter caught it again. He stepped up beside Misty, where she was working on the details of the tall stone church, the flecks of green moss on the roof, the red of rust on the gutters. And he said, “In that church, right there, we’ll get married.”
   And duh-duh-dumb little Misty, she said how she was making the church up. It didn’t really exist.
   “That’s what you think,” Peter said. He kissed the side of her neck and whispered, “Just marry me, the island will give you the biggest wedding anybody’s seen in a hundred years.”

July 11
   DOWNSTAIRS, it’s past midnight, and the lobby is empty except for Paulette Hyland behind the desk. Grace Wilmot would tell you how Paulette’s a Hyland by marriage, but before that she was a Petersen, although her mother’s a Nieman descended from the Tupper branch. That used to mean a lot of old money on both sides of her family. Now Paulette’s a desk clerk.
   Far across the lobby, sunk in the cushion of a red leather wing chair, is Grace, reading beside the fireplace.
   The Waytansea lobby is decades of stuff, all of it layered together. A garden. A park. The wool carpet is moss green over granite tile quarried nearby. The blue carpet coming down the stairs is a waterfall flowing around landings, cascading down each step. Walnut trees, planed and polished and put back together, they make a forest of perfect square columns, straight rows of dark shining trees that hold up a forest canopy of plaster leaves and cupids.
   A crystal chandelier hangs down, a solid beam of sunlight that breaks into this forest glade. The crystal doohickeys, they look tiny and twinkly so high up, but when you’re on a tall ladder cleaning them, each crystal is the size of your fist.
   Swags and falls of green silk almost cover the windows. Daytime, they turn the sunlight into soft green shade. The sofas and chairs are overstuffed, upholstered into flowering bushes, shaggy with long fringe along the bottom. The fireplace could be a campfire. The whole lobby, it’s the island in miniature. Indoors. An Eden.
   Just for the record, this is the landscape where Grace Wilmot feels most at home. Even more than her own home. Her house.
   Your house.
   Halfway across the lobby, Misty’s edging between sofas and little tables, and Grace looks up.
   She says, “Misty, come sit by the fire.” She looks back into her open book and says, “How is your headache?”
   Misty doesn’t have a headache.
   Open in Grace’s lap is her diary, the red leather cover of it, and she peers at the pages and says, “What is today’s date?”
   Misty tells her.
   The fireplace is burned down to a bed of orange coals under the grate. Grace’s feet hang down in brown buckle shoes, her toes pointed, not reaching the floor. Her head of long white curls hangs forward over the book in her lap. Next to her chair, a floor lamp shines down, and the light bounces bright off the silver edge of the magnifying glass she holds over each page.
   Misty says, “Mother Wilmot, we need to talk.”
   And Grace turns back a couple pages and says, “Oh dear. My mistake. You won’t have that terrible headache until the day after tomorrow.”
   And Misty leans into her face and says, “How dare you set my child up to have her heart broken?”
   Grace looks up from her book, her face loose and hanging with surprise. Her chin is tucked down so hard her neck is squashed into folds from ear to ear. Her superficial musculo-aponeurotic system. Her submental fat. The wrinkled platysmal bands around her neck.
   Misty says, “Where do you get off telling Tabbi that I’m going to be a famous artist?” She looks around, and they’re still alone, and Misty says, “I’m a waitress, and I’m keeping a roof over our heads, and that’s good enough. I don’t want you filling my kid with expectations that I can’t fulfill.” The last of her breath tight in her chest, Misty says, “Do you see how this will make me look?”
   And a smooth, wide smile flows across Grace’s mouth, and she says, “But Misty, the truth is you will be famous.”
   Grace’s smile, it’s a curtain parting. An opening night. It’s Grace unveiling herself.
   And Misty says, “I won’t.” She says, “I can’t.” She’s just a regular person who’s going to live and die ignored, obscure. Ordinary. That’s not such a tragedy.
   Grace shuts her eyes. Still smiling, she says, “Oh, you’ll be so famous the moment—”
   And Misty says, “Stop. Just stop.” Misty cuts her off, saying, “It’s so easy for you to build up other people’s hope. Don’t you see how you’re ruining them?” Misty says, “I’m a darn good waitress. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not the ruling class anymore. We’re not the top of the heap.”
   Peter, your mother’s problem is she’s never lived in a trailer. Never stood in a grocery line with food stamps. She doesn’t know how to be poor, and she’s not willing to learn.
   Misty says, there’s worse things they can do than raise Tabbi to fit into this economy, to be able to find a job in the world she’ll inherit. There’s nothing wrong with waiting tables. Cleaning rooms.
   And Grace lays a strip of lacy ribbon to mark her place in the diary. She looks up and says, “Then why do you drink?”
   “Because I like wine,” Misty says.
   Grace says, “You drink and run around with men because you’re afraid.”
   By men she must mean Angel Delaporte. The man with the leather pants who’s renting the Wilmot house. Angel Delaporte with his graphology and his flask of good gin.
   And Grace says, “I know exactly how you feel.” She folds her hands on the diary in her lap and says, “You drink because you want to express yourself and you’re afraid.”
   “No,” Misty says. She rolls her head to one shoulder and looks at Grace sideways. Misty says, “No, you do not know how I feel.”
   The fire next to them, it pops and sends a spiral of sparks up the chimney. The smell of smoke drifts out past the fireplace mantel. Their campfire.
   “Yesterday,” Grace says, reading from the diary, “you started saving money so you could move back to your hometown. You’re saving it in an envelope, and you tuck the envelope under the edge of the carpet, near the window in your room.”
   Grace looks up, her eyebrows lifted, the corrugator muscle pleating the spotted skin across her forehead.
   And Misty says, “You’ve been spying on me?”
   And Grace smiles. She taps her magnifying glass against the open page and says, “It’s in your diary.”
   Misty tells her, “That’s your diary.” She says, “You can’t write someone else’s diary.”
   Just so you know, the witch is spying on Misty and writing everything down in her evil red leather record book.
   And Grace smiles. She says, “I’m not writing it. I’m reading it.” She turns the page and looks through her magnifying glass and says, “Oh, tomorrow looks exciting. It says you’ll most likely meet a nice policeman.”
   Just for the record, tomorrow Misty is getting the lock on her door changed. Pronto.
   Misty says, “Stop. One more time, just stop.” Misty says, “The issue here is Tabbi, and the sooner she learns to live a regular life with a normal everyday job and a steady, secure, ordinary future, the happier she’ll be.”
   “Like doing office work?” Grace says. “Grooming dogs? A nice weekly paycheck? Is that why you drink?”
   Your mother.
   Just for the record, she deserved this:
   You deserve this:
   And Misty says, “No, Grace.” She says, “I drink because I married a silly, lazy, unrealistic dreamer who was raised to think he’d marry a famous artist someday and couldn’t deal with his disappointment.” Misty says, “You, Grace, you fucked up your own child, and I’m not letting you fuck up mine.”
   Leaning in so close she can see the face powder in Grace’s wrinkles, her rhytides, and the red spidery lines where Grace’s lipstick bleeds into the wrinkles around her mouth, Misty says, “Just stop lying to her or I swear I’ll pack my bags and take Tabbi off the island tomorrow.”
   And Grace looks past Misty, looking at something behind her.
   Not looking at Misty, Grace sighs. She says, “Oh, Misty. It’s too late for that .”
   Misty turns and behind her is Paulette, the desk clerk, standing there in her white blouse and dark pleated skirt, and Paulette says, “Excuse me, Mrs. Wilmot?”
   Together—both Grace and Misty—they say, Yes?
   And Paulette says, “I don’t want to interupt you.” She says, “I just need to put another log on the fire.”
   And Grace shuts the book in her lap and says, “Paulette, we need you to settle a disagreement for us.” Lifting her frontalis muscle to raise just one eyebrow, Grace says, “Don’t you wish Misty would hurry up and paint her masterpiece?”
   The weather today is partly angry, leading to resignation and ultimatums.
   And Misty turns to leave. She turns a little and stops.
   The waves outside hiss and burst.
   “Thank you, Paulette,” Misty says, “but it’s time everybody on the island just accepted the fact that I’m going to die a big fat nobody.”

July 12
   IN CASE YOU’RE CURIOUS, your friend from art school with the long blond hair, the boy who tore his earlobe in half trying to give Misty his earring, well, he’s bald now. His name’s Will Tupper, and he runs the ferryboat. He’s your-aged and his earlobe still hangs in two points. Scar-tissued.
   On the ferry this evening coming back to the island, Misty is standing on deck. The cold wind is putting years on her face, stretching and drying her skin. The flat dead skin of her stratum corneum. She’s just drinking a beer in a brown paper bag when this big dog noses up next to her. The dog’s sniffing and whining. His tail’s tucked, and his throat is working up and down inside his furry neck as he swallows something over and over.
   She goes to pet him and the dog pulls away and pees right there on the deck. A man comes over, holding a leash looped in one hand, and he asks her, “Are you all right?”
   Just poor fat Misty in her own beer-induced coma.
   As if. Like she’s going to stand here in a puddle of dog pee and tell some strange man her whole fucking life story on a boat with a beer in one hand and sniffing back tears. As if Misty can just say—well, since you asked, she just spent another day in somebody’s sealed-off laundry room, reading gibberish on the walls while Angel Delaporte snapped flash pictures and said her asshole husband is really loving and protective because he writes his u ’s with the tail pointing up in a little curl, even when he’s calling her an “. . . avenging evil curse of death . . .”
   Angel and Misty, they were rubbing butts all afternoon, her tracing the words sprayed on the walls, the words saying: “. . . we accept the dirty flood of your money . . .”
   And Angel was asking her, “Do you feel anything?”
   The homeowners were bagging their family toothbrushes for laboratory analysis, for septic bacteria. For a lawsuit.
   On board the ferry, the man with his dog says, “Are you wearing something from a dead person?”
   Her coat’s what Misty is wearing, her coat and shoes, and pinned on the lapel is one of the god-awful big costume jewelry pins Peter gave her.
   Her husband gave her.
   You gave her.
   All afternoon in the sealed laundry room, the words written around the walls said: “. . . will not steal our world to replace the world you’ve ruined . . .”
   And Angel said, “The handwriting is different here. It’s changing.” He snapped another picture and cranked to the next frame of film, saying, “Do you know what order your husband worked on these houses?”
   Misty told Angel how a new owner should move in only after the full moon. According to carpenter tradition, the first to enter a new house should always be the family’s favorite pet. Then should enter the family’s cornmeal, the salt, the broom, the Bible, and the crucifix. Only then can the family and their furniture move in. According to superstition.
   And Angel, snapping pictures, said, “What? The cornmeal’s supposed to walk in by itself?”
   Beverly Hills, the Upper East Side, Palm Beach, these days, Angel Delaporte says, even the best part of any city is just a deluxe luxury suite in hell. Outside your front gates, you still have to share the same gridlocked streets. You and the homeless drug addicts, you still breathe the same stinking air and hear the same police helicopters chasing criminals all night. The stars and moon erased by the lights from a million used car lots. Everyone crowds the same sidewalks, scattered with garbage, and sees the same sunrise bleary and red behind smog.
   Angel says that rich people don’t like to tolerate much. Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn’t pretty and perfect. You can’t put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.
   That quest for something pretty. A cheat. A cliché. Flowers and Christmas lights, it’s what we’re programmed to love. Someone young and lovely. The women on Spanish television with big boobs and a tiny waist like they’ve been twisted three times. The trophy wives eating lunch at the Waytansea Hotel.
   The words on the walls say: “. . . you people with your ex-wives and stepchildren, your blended families and failed marriages, you’ve ruined your world and now you want to ruin mine . . .”
   The trouble is, Angel says, we’re running out of places to hide. It’s why Will Rogers used to tell people to buy land: Nobody’s making it anymore.
   This is why every rich person has discovered Waytansea Island this summer.
   It used to be Sun Valley, Idaho. Then it was Sedona, Arizona. Aspen, Colorado. Key West, Florida. Lahaina, Maui. All of them crowded with tourists and the natives left waiting tables. Now it’s Waytansea Island, the perfect escape. For everyone except the people already living there.
   The words say: “. . . you with your fast cars stuck in traffic, your rich food that makes you fat, your houses so big you always feel lonely . . .”
   And Angel says, “See here, how his writing is crowded. The letters are squeezed together.” He snaps a picture, cranks the film, and says, “Peter’s very frightened of something.”
   Mr. Angel Delaporte, he’s flirting, putting his hand over hers. He gives her the flask until it’s empty. All this is just fine so long as he doesn’t sue her like all your other clients from the mainland. All the summer people who lost bedrooms and linen closets. Everybody whose toothbrush you stuck up your butt. Half the reason why Misty gifted the house so fast to the Catholics was so nobody could put a lien against it.
   Angel Delaporte says our natural instinct is to hide. As a species, we claim ground and defend it. Maybe we migrate, to follow the weather or some animal, but we know it takes land to live, and our instinct is to stake our claim.
   It’s why birds sing, to mark their territory. It’s why dogs pee.
   Sedona, Key West, Sun Valley, the paradox of a half million people going to the same place to be alone.
   Misty still tracing the black paint with her index finger, she says, “What did you mean when you talked about Stendhal syndrome?”
   And still snapping pictures, Angel says, “It’s named after the French writer Stendhal.”
   The words she’s tracing, they say, “. . . Misty Wilmot will send you all to hell . . .”
   Your words. You fucker.
   Stanislavski was right, you can find fresh pain every time you discover what you pretty much already know.
   Stendhal syndrome, Angel says, is a medical term. It’s when a painting, or any work of art, is so beautiful it overwhelms the viewer. It’s a form of shock. When Stendhal toured the Church of Santa Croce in Florence in 1817, he reported almost fainting from joy. People feel rapid heart palpitations. They get dizzy. Looking at great art makes you forget your own name, forget even where you’re at. It can bring on depression and physical exhaustion. Amnesia. Panic. Heart attack. Collapse.
   Just for the record, Misty thinks Angel Delaporte is a little full of shit.
   “If you read contemporary accounts,” he says, “Maura Kincaid’s work supposedly brought about a kind of mass hysteria.”
   “And now?” Misty says.
   And Angel shrugs, “Search me.” He says, “From what I’ve seen, it’s okay, just some very pretty landscapes.”
   Looking at her finger, he says, “Do you feel anything?” He snaps another picture and says, “Funny how tastes change.”
   “. . . we’re poor,” Peter’s words say, “but we have what every rich person craves . . . peace, beauty, quiet . . .”
   Your words.
   Your life after death.
   Going home tonight, it’s Will Tupper who gives Misty the beer in the paper bag. He lets her drink on deck despite the rules. He asks if she’s working on any paintings lately. Any landscapes, maybe?
   On the ferryboat, the man with the dog, he says the dog’s trained to find dead people. When somebody dies, they give off this huge stink of what the man calls epinephrine. He said it’s the smell of fear.
   The beer in the brown bag Misty is holding, she just drinks it and lets him talk.
   The man’s hair, the way it recedes above each temple, the way the skin on his exposed scalp is bright red from the cold wind, it looks like he has devil’s horns. He has devil’s horns, and his whole face is red and squinting into wrinkles. Dynamic wrinkling. Lateral canthal rhytides.
   The dog twists his head back over one shoulder, trying to get away from her. The man’s aftershave has the smell of cloves. Hooked on his belt, under the edge of his jacket, you can see a pair of chromed handcuffs.
   Just for the record, the weather today is increasing turmoil with a possible physical and emotional breakdown.
   Holding his dog’s leash, the man says, “Are you sure you’re okay?”
   And Misty tells him, “Trust me, I’m not dead.”
   “Maybe just my skin’s dead,” she says.
   Stendhal syndrome. Epinephrine. Graphology. The coma of details. Of education.
   The man nods at her beer in the brown paper bag, and he says, “You know you’re not supposed to drink in public?”
   And Misty says, What? Is he a cop?
   And he says, “You know? As a matter of fact, yeah, I am.”
   The guy flips open his wallet to flash her a badge. Engraved on the silver badge, it says: Clark Stilton. Detective. Seaview County Hate Crimes Task Force .

July 13—The Full Moon
   TABBI AND MISTY, they’re walking through the woods. This is the tangle of land out on Waytansea Point. It’s alders here, generations of trees grown and fallen and sprouting again out of their own dead. Animals, maybe deer, have cut a path that winds around the heaps of complicated trees and edges between rocks big as architecture and padded with thick moss. Above all this, the alder leaves come together in a shifting bright green sky.
   Here and there, sunlight breaks through in shafts as big around as crystal chandeliers. Here’s just a messier version of the lobby of the Waytansea Hotel.
   Tabbi wears a single old earring, gold filigree and a haze of sparkling red rhinestones around a red enameled heart. It’s pinned through her pink sweatshirt, like a brooch, but it’s the earring that Peter’s blond friend tore out of his ear. Will Tupper from the ferry.
   Your friend.
   She keeps the junk jewelry in a shoe box under her bed and wears it on special days. The chipped glass rubies pinned to her shoulder glitter with the bright green above them. The rhinestones, spotted with dirt, they reflect pink from Tabbi’s sweatshirt.
   Your wife and kid, they step over a rotting log that’s crawling with ants, stepping around ferns that brush Misty’s waist and flop on Tabbi’s face. They’re quiet, looking and listening for birds, but there’s nothing. No birds. No little frogs. No sounds except the ocean, the hiss and burst of waves somewhere else.
   They push through a thicket of green stalks, something with soft yellow leaves rotting around its base. You have to look down with every step because the ground’s slippery and puddled with water. How long Misty’s been walking, keeping her eyes on the ground, holding branches so they don’t whip Tabbi, Misty doesn’t know how long, but when she looks up, a man’s standing there.
   Just for the record, her levator labii muscles, the snarl muscles, the fight-or-flight muscles, all spasm, all those smooth muscles freeze into the landscape of growling, Misty’s mouth squared so all her teeth show.
   Her hand grabs the back of Tabbi’s shirt. Tabbi, she’s still looking down at the ground, walking forward, and Misty yanks her back.
   And Tabbi slips and pulls her mother to the ground, saying, “Mom.”
   Tabbi pressed to the wet ground, the leaves and moss and beetles, Misty crouched over her, the ferns arch above them.
   The man is maybe another ten steps ahead, and facing away from them. He doesn’t turn. Through the curtain of ferns, he must be seven feet tall, dark and heavy with brown leaves in his hair and mud splashed up his legs.
   He doesn’t turn, but he doesn’t move. He must’ve heard them, and he stands, listening.
   Just for the record, he’s naked. His naked butt is right there.
   Tabbi says, “Let go, Mom. There’s bugs.”
   And Misty shushes her.
   The man waits, frozen, one hand held out at waist height as if he’s feeling the air for movement. No birds sing.
   Misty’s crouched, squatting with her hands open against the muddy ground, ready to grab Tabbi and run.
   Then Tabbi slips past her, and Misty says, “No.” Reaching fast, Misty clutches the air behind her kid.
   It’s one, maybe two seconds before Tabbi gets to the man, puts her hand in his open hand.
   In that two seconds, Misty knows she’s a shitty mother.
   Peter, you married a coward. Misty’s still here, crouched. If anything, Misty’s leaning back, ready to run the other way. What they don’t teach you in art school is hand-to-hand combat.
   And Tabbi turns back, smiling, and says, “Mom, don’t be such a spaz.” She wraps both her hands around the man’s one outstretched hand and pulls herself up so she can swing her legs in the air. She says, “It’s just Apollo, is all.”
   Near the man, almost hidden in fallen leaves, is a dead body. A pale white breast with fine blue veins. A severed white arm.
   And Misty’s still crouched here.
   Tabbi drops from the man’s hand and goes to where Misty’s looking. She brushes leaves off a dead white face and says, “This is Diana.”
   She looks at Misty crouching and rolls her eyes. “They’re statues, Mom.”
   Statues.
   Tabbi comes back to take Misty’s hand. She lifts her mom’s arm and pulls her to her feet, saying, “You know? Statues . You’re the artist.”
   Tabbi pulls her forward. The standing man is dark bronze, streaked with lichen and tarnish, a naked man with his feet bolted to a pedestal buried in the bushes beside the trail. His eyes have recessed irises and pupils, Roman irises, cast into them. His bare arms and legs are perfect in proportion to his torso. The golden mean of composition. Every rule of art and proportion applied.
   The Greeks’ formula for why we love what we love. More of that art school coma.
   The woman on the ground is broken white marble. Tabbi’s pink hand brushes the leaves and grass back from the long white thighs, the coy folds of the pale marble groin meet at a carved leaf. The smooth fingers and arms, the elbows without a wrinkle or crease. Her carved marble hair hangs in sculpted white curls.
   Tabbi points her pink hand at an empty pedestal across the path from the bronze, and she says, “Diana fell down a long time before I met her.”
   The man’s bronze calf muscle feels cold, but cast with every tendon defined, every muscle thick. As Misty runs her hand up the cold metal leg, she says, “You’ve been here before?”
   “Apollo doesn’t have a dick,” Tabbi says. “I already looked.”
   And Misty yanks her hand back from the leaf cast over the statue’s bronze crotch. She says, “Who brought you here?”
   “Granmy,” Tabbi says. “Granmy brings me here all the time.”
   Tabbi stoops to rub her cheek against the smooth marble cheek of the Diana.
   The bronze statue, Apollo, it must be a nineteenth-century reproduction. Either that or late eighteenth century. It can’t be real, not an actual Greek or Roman piece. It would be in a museum.
   “Why are these here?” Misty says. “Did your grandmother tell you?”
   And Tabbi shrugs. She holds out her hand toward Misty and says, “There’s more.” She says, “Come, and I can show you.”
   There is more.
   Tabbi leads her through the woods that circle the point, and they find a sundial lying in the weeds, crusted a thick dark green with verdigris. They find a fountain as wide across as a swimming pool, but filled with windfall branches and acorns.
   They walk past a grotto dug into a hillside, a dark mouth framed in mossy pillars and blocked with a chained iron gate. The cut stone is fitted into an arch that rises to a keystone in the middle. Fancy as a little bank building. The front of a moldy, buried state capitol building. It’s cluttered with carved angels that hold stone garlands of apples, pears, and grapes. Stone wreaths of flowers. All of it streaked with dirt, it’s cracked and pried apart by tree roots.
   In between are plants that shouldn’t be here. A climbing rose chokes an oak tree, scrambling up fifty feet to bloom above the tree’s crown. Withered yellow tulip leaves are wilted in the summer heat. A towering wall of sticks and leaves turns out to be a huge lilac bush.
   Tulips and lilacs aren’t native to here.
   None of this should be here.
   In the meadow at the center of the point, they find Grace Wilmot sitting on a blanket spread over the grass. Around her bloom pink and blue bachelor buttons and little white daisies. The wicker picnic hamper is open, and flies buzz over it.
   Grace rises to her knees, holding out a glass of red wine, and says, “Misty, you’re back. Come take this.”
   Misty takes the wine and drinks some. “Tabbi showed me the statues,” Misty says. “What used to be here?”
   Grace gets to her feet and says, “Tabbi, get your things. It’s time for us to go.”
   Tabbi picks up her sweater off the blanket.
   And Misty says, “But we just got here.”
   Grace hands her a plate with a sandwich on it and says, “You’re going to stay and eat. You’re going to have the whole day to do your art.”
   The sandwich is chicken salad, and it feels warm from sitting in the sun. The flies landed on it, but it smells okay. So Misty takes a bite.
   Grace nods at Tabbi and says, “It was Tabbi’s idea.”
   Misty chews and swallows. She says, “It’s a sweet idea, but I didn’t bring any supplies.”
   And Tabbi goes to the picnic hamper and says, “Granmy did. We packed them to surprise you.”
   Misty drinks some wine.
   Anytime some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you’re a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink. That’s the Misty Wilmot Drinking Game.
   “Tabbi and I are going on a mission,” Grace says.
   And Tabbi says, “We’re going to tag sales .”
   The chicken salad tastes funny. Misty chews and swallows and says, “This sandwich has a weird taste.”
   “That’s just cilantro,” Grace says. She says, “Tabbi and I have to find a sixteen-inch platter in Lenox’s Silver Wheat Spray pattern.” She shuts her eyes and shakes her head, saying, “Why is it that no one wants their serving pieces until their pattern is discontinued?”
   Tabbi says, “And Granmy is going to buy me my birthday present. Anything I want.”
   Now, Misty is going to be stuck out here on Waytansea Point with two bottles of red wine and a batch of chicken salad. Her heap of paints and watercolors and brushes and paper, she hasn’t touched them since her kid was a baby. The acrylics and oils have to be hard by now. The watercolors, dried up and cracked. The brushes stiff. All of it useless.
   Misty included.
   Grace Wilmot holds her hand out and says, “Tabbi, come along. Let’s leave your mother to enjoy her afternoon.”
   Tabbi takes her grandmother’s hand, and the two of them start back across the meadow to the dirt road where they left the car parked.
   The sun’s warm. The meadow’s up high enough that you can look down and see the waves hiss and burst on the rocks below. Down the coastline, you can see the town. The Waytansea Hotel is a smudge of white clapboard. You can almost see the little dormer windows of the attic rooms. From here, the island looks pleasant and perfect, not crowded and busy with tourists. Ugly with billboards. It looks how the island must’ve looked before the rich summer people arrived. Before Misty arrived. You can see why people born here never move away. You can see why Peter was so ready to protect it.
   “Mom,” Tabbi calls out.
   She’s running back from her grandmother. Both her hands are clutching at her pink sweatshirt. Panting and smiling, she gets to where Misty is sitting on the blanket. The gold filigree earring in her hands, she says, “Hold still.”
   Misty holds still. A statue.
   And Tabbi stoops to pin the earring through her mother’s earlobe, saying, “I almost forgot until Granmy reminded me. She says you’ll need this.” The knees of her blue jeans are muddy and stained green from when Misty panicked and pulled them to the ground, when Misty tried to save her.
   Misty says, “You want a sandwich to take with you, honey?”
   And Tabbi shakes her head, saying, “Granmy told me not to eat them.” Then she turns and runs away, waving one arm over her head until she’s gone.

July 14
   ANGEL HOLDS THE SHEET of watercolor paper, pinching the corners with the tips of his fingers. He looks at it and looks at Misty and says, “You drew a chair?”
   Misty shrugs and says, “It’s been years. It was the first thing that came to me.”
   Angel turns his back to her, holding the picture so the sunlight hits it from different angles. Still looking at it, he says, “It’s good. It’s very good. Where did you find the chair?”
   “I drew it from my imagination,” Misty says, and she tells him about being stranded out on Waytansea Point all day with just her paints and two bottles of wine.
   Angel squints at the picture, holding it so close he’s almost cross-eyed, and he says, “It looks like a Hershel Burke.” Angel looks at her and says, “You spent the day in a grassy meadow and imagined a Hershel Burke Renaissance Revival armchair?”
   This morning, a woman in Long Beach called to say she was repainting her laundry room so they’d better come see Peter’s mess before she got started.
   Right now, Misty and Angel are in the missing laundry room. Misty’s sketching the fragments of Peter’s doodles. Angel’s supposed to be photographing the walls. The minute Misty opened her portfolio to take out a sketch pad, Angel saw the little watercolor and asked to see it. Sunlight comes through a window of frosted glass, and Angel holds the picture in that light.
   Spray-painted across the window, it says: “. . . set foot on our island and you’ll die . . .”
   Angel says, “It’s a Hershel Burke, I swear. From 1879 Philadelphia. Its twin is in the Vanderbilt country house, Biltmore.”
   It must’ve stuck in Misty’s memory from Art History 101, or the Survey of Decorative Arts 236 or some other useless class from art school. Maybe she saw it on television, a video tour of famous houses on some public television program. Who knows where an idea comes from. Our inspiration. Why do we imagine what we imagine.
   Misty says, “I’m lucky I drew anything. I got so sick. Food poisoning.”
   Angel’s looking at the picture, turning it. The corrugator muscle between his eyebrows contracts into three deep wrinkles. His glabellar furrows. His triangularis muscle pulls his lips until marionette lines run down from each corner of his mouth.
   Sketching the doodles off the walls, Misty doesn’t tell Angel about the stomach cramps. That entire sucky afternoon, she tried to sketch a rock or a tree, and crumpled the paper, disgusted. She tried to sketch the town in the distance, the church steeple and clock on the library, but crumpled that. She crumpled a shitty picture of Peter she tried to draw from memory. She crumpled a picture of Tabbi. Then, a unicorn. She drank a glass of wine and looked for something new to ruin with her lack of talent. Then ate another chicken salad sandwich with its weird cilantro taste.
   Even the idea of walking into the dim woods to sketch a falling, crumbling statue made the little hairs stand up behind her neck. The fallen sundial. That locked grotto. Christ. Here in the meadow, the sun was warm. The grass was humming with bugs. Somewhere beyond the woods, the ocean waves hissed and burst.
   Just looking into the dark edges of the forest, Misty could imagine the towering bronze man parting the brush with his stained arms and watching her with his pitted blind eyes. As if he’s killed the marble Diana and cut the body to pieces, Misty could see him stalking out of the treeline toward her.
   According to the rules of the Misty Wilmot Drinking Game, when you start thinking a naked bronze statue is going to bend its metal arms around you and crush you to death with its kiss while you claw your fingernails off and beat your hands bloody against its mossy chest—well, it’s time you took another drink.
   When you find yourself half naked and shitting in a little hole you dig behind a bush, then wiping your ass with a linen hotel napkin, then take another drink.
   The stomach cramps hit, and Misty was sweating. Her head spiked in pain with every heartbeat. Her guts shifted, and she couldn’t drop her underwear fast enough. The mess splashed around her shoes and against her legs. The smell gagged her, and Misty pitched forward, her open hands against the warm grass, the little flowers. Black flies found her from miles away, crawling up and down her legs. Her chin dropped to her chest, and a double handful of pink vomit heaved out on the ground.
   When you find yourself, a half hour later, with shit still running down your leg, a cloud of flies around you, take another drink.
   Misty doesn’t tell Angel any of that part.
   Her sketching and him taking pictures here in the missing laundry room, he says, “What can you tell me about Peter’s father?”
   Peter’s dad, Harrow. Misty loved Peter’s dad. Misty says, “He’s dead. Why?”
   Angel snaps another picture and cranks the film forward in his camera. He nods at the writing on the wall and says, “The way a person makes their i means so much. The first stroke means their attachment to their mother. The second stroke, the downstroke, means their father.”
   Peter’s dad, Harrow Wilmot, everybody called him Harry. Misty only met him the one time she came to visit before they were married. Before Misty got pregnant. Harry took her on a long tour of Waytansea Island, walking and pointing out the peeling paint and saggy roofs on the big shingled houses. Using a car key, he picked loose mortar from between the granite blocks of the church. They saw how the Merchant Street sidewalks were cracked and buckled. The storefronts streaked with growing mold. The closed hotel looked black inside, most of it gutted by a fire. The outside, shabby with its window screens rusted dark red. The shutters crooked. The gutters sagging. Harrow Wilmot kept saying, “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” He said, “No matter how well we invest it, this is how long the money ever lasts.”
   Peter’s father died after Misty went back to college.
   And Angel says, “Can you get me a sample of his handwriting?”
   Misty keeps sketching the doodles, and she says, “I don’t know.”
   Just for the record, being smeared with shit and naked in the wilderness, spattered with pink vomit, this does not necessarily make you a real artist.
   And neither do hallucinations. Out on Waytansea Point, with the cramps and the sweat rolling out of her hair and down the sides of her face, Misty started seeing things. With the hotel napkins she was trying to clean herself up. She rinsed her mouth with wine. Waved away the cloud of flies. The vomit still burned in her nose. It’s stupid, too stupid to tell Angel, but the shadows at the edge of the forest moved.
   The metal face was there in the trees. The figure took a step forward and the terrible weight of its bronze foot sunk into the soft edge of the meadow.
   If you go to art school, you know a bad hallucination. You know what a flashback is. You’ve done plenty of chemicals that can stay in your fatty tissues, ready to flood your bloodstream with bad dreams in broad daylight.
   The figure took another step, and its foot sunk into the ground. The sun made its arms bright green in places, dull brown in other places. The top of its head and its shoulders were heaped white with bird shit. The muscles in each bronze thigh stood up, tensed in high relief as each leg lifted, and the figure stepped forward. With each step, the bronze leaf shifted between its thighs.
   Now, looking at the watercolor picture sitting on top of Angel’s camera bag, it’s more than embarrassing. Apollo, the god of love. Misty sick and drunk. The naked soul of a horny middle-aged artist.
   The figure coming another step closer. A stupid hallucination. Food poisoning. It naked. Misty naked. Both of them filthy in the circle of trees around the meadow. To clear her head, to make it go away, Misty started sketching. To concentrate. It was a drawing of nothing. Her eyes closed, and Misty put the pencil to the pad of watercolor paper and felt it scratching there, laying down straight lines, rubbing with the side of her thumb to create shaded contour.
   Automatic writing.
   When her pencil stopped, Misty was done. The figure was gone. Her stomach felt better. The mess had dried enough she could brush the worst of it away and bury the napkins, her ruined underwear, and her crumpled drawings. Tabbi and Grace arrived. They’d found their missing teacup or cream pitcher or whatever. By then the wine was gone. Misty was dressed and smelling a little better.
   Tabbi said, “Look. For my birthday,” and held out her hand to show a ring shining on one finger. A square green stone, cut to sparkle. “It’s a peridot,” Tabbi said, and she held it above her head, making it catch the sunset.
   Misty fell asleep in the car, wondering where the money came from, Grace driving them back along Division Avenue to the village.
   It wasn’t until later that Misty looked at the sketch pad. She was as surprised as anybody. After that, Misty just added a few colors, watercolors. It’s amazing what the subconscious mind will create. Something from her growing up, some picture from art history lessons.
   The predictable dreams of poor Misty Kleinman.
   Angel says something.
   Misty says, “Pardon?”
   And Angel says, “What will you take for this?”
   He means money. A price. Misty says, “Fifty?” Misty says, “Fifty dollars ?”
   This picture Misty drew with her eyes closed, naked and scared, drunk and sick to her stomach, it’s the first piece of art she’s ever sold. It’s the best thing Misty has ever done.
   Angel opens his wallet and takes out two twenties and a ten. He says, “Now what else can you tell me about Peter’s father?”
   For the record, walking out of the meadow, there were two deep holes next to the path. The holes were a couple of feet apart, too big to be footprints, too far apart to be a person. A trail of holes went back into the forest, too big, too far apart to be anybody walking. Misty doesn’t tell Angel that. He’d think she was crazy. Crazy, like her husband.
   Like you, dear sweet Peter.
   Now, all that’s left of her food poisoning is a pounding headache.
   Angel holds the picture close to his nose and sniffs. He scrunches his nose and sniffs it again, then slips the picture into a pocket on the side of his camera bag. He catches her watching and says, “Oh, don’t mind me. I thought for a second I smelled shit.”