July 15
   IF THE FIRST MAN who looks at your boobs in four years turns out to be a cop, take a drink. If it turns out he already knows what you look like naked, take another drink.
   Make that drink a double.
   Some guy sits at table eight in the Wood and Gold Room, just some your-aged guy. He’s beefy with stooped shoulders. His shirt fits okay, a little tight across his gut, a white poly-cotton balloon that bumps over his belt a little. His hair, he’s balding at the temples, and his recessions trail back into long triangles of scalp above each eye. Each triangle is sunburned bright red, making long pointed devil’s horns that poke up from the top of his face. He’s got a little spiral notebook open on the table, and he’s writing in it while he watches Misty. He’s wearing a striped tie and a navy blue sport coat.
   Misty takes him a glass of water, her hand shaking so hard you can hear the ice rattle. Just so you know, her headache is going on its third day. Her headache, it’s the feeling of maggots rooting into the big soft pile of her brain. Worms boring. Beetles tunneling.
   The guy at table eight says, “You don’t get a lot of men in here, do you?”
   His aftershave has the smell of cloves. He’s the man from the ferry, the guy with the dog who thought Misty was dead. The cop. Detective Clark Stilton. The hate crimes guy.
   Misty shrugs and gives him a menu. Misty rolls her eyes at the room around them, the gold paint and wood paneling, and says, “Where’s your dog?” Misty says, “Can I get you anything to drink?”
   And he says, “I need to see your husband.” He says, “You’re Mrs. Wilmot, aren’t you?”
   The name on her name tag, pinned to her pink plastic uniform—Misty Marie Wilmot.
   Her headache, it’s the feeling of a hammer tap, tap, tapping a long nail into the back of your head, a conceptual art piece, tapping harder and harder in one spot until you forget everything else in the world.
   Detective Stilton sets his pen down on his notebook and offers his hand to shake, and he smiles. He says, “The truth is, I am the county’s task force on hate crimes.”
   Misty shakes his hand and says, “Would you like some coffee?”
   And he says, “Please.”
   Her headache is a beach ball, pumped full of too much air. More air is being forced in, but it’s not air. It’s blood.
   Just for the record, Misty’s already told the detective that Peter’s in the hospital.
   You’re in a hospital.
   On the ferry the other evening, she told Detective Stilton how you were crazy, and you left your family in debt. How you dropped out of every school and stuck jewelry through your body. You sat in the car parked in your garage with the engine running. Your graffiti, all your ranting and sealing up people’s laundry rooms and kitchens, it was all just another symptom of your craziness. The vandalism. It’s unfortunate, Misty told the detective, but she’s been screwed on this as bad as anybody.
   This is around three o’clock, the lull between lunch and dinner.
   Misty says, “Yeah. Sure, go see my husband.” Misty says, “Did you want coffee?”
   The detective, he looks at his pad while he writes and asks, “Did you know if your husband was part of any neo-Nazi organization? Any radical hate groups?”
   And Misty says, “Was he?” Misty says, “The roast beef is good here.”
   Just for the record, it’s kinda cute. Both of them holding pads, their pens ready to write. It’s a duel. A shoot-out.
   If he’s seen Peter’s writing, this guy knows what Peter thought of her naked. Her dead fish breasts. Her legs crawling with veins. Her hands smelling like rubber gloves. Misty Wilmot, queen of the maids. What you thought of your wife.
   Detective Stilton writes, saying, “So you and your husband weren’t very close?”
   And Misty says, “Yeah, well, I thought we were.” She says, “But go figure.”
   He writes, saying, “Are you aware if Peter’s a member of the Ku Klux Klan?”
   And Misty says, “The chicken and dumplings is pretty good.”
   He writes, saying, “Are you aware if such a hate group exists on Waytansea Island?”
   Her headache tap, tap, taps the nail into the back of her head.
   Somebody at table five waves, and Misty says, “Could I get you some coffee?”
   And Detective Stilton says, “Are you okay? You don’t look so hot right now.”
   Just this morning over breakfast, Grace Wilmot said she feels terrible about the spoiled chicken salad—so terrible that she made Misty an appointment to see Dr. Touchet tomorrow. A nice gesture, but another fucking bill to pay.
   When Misty shuts her eyes, she’d swear her head is glowing hot inside. Her neck is one cast-iron muscle cramp. Sweat sticks together the folds of her neck skin. Her shoulders are bound, pulled up tight around her ears. She can only turn her head a little in any direction, and her ears feel on fire.
   Peter used to talk about Paganini, possibly the best violin player of all time. He was tortured by tuberculosis, syphilis, osteomyelitis in his jaw, diarrhea, hemorrhoids, and kidney stones. Paganini, not Peter. The mercury that doctors gave him for the syphilis poisoned him until his teeth fell out. His skin turned gray-white. He lost his hair. Paganini was a walking corpse, but when he played the violin, he was beyond mortal.
   He had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a congenital disease that left his joints so flexible he could bend his thumb back far enough to touch his wrist. According to Peter, what tortured him made him a genius.
   According to you.
   Misty brings Detective Stilton an iced tea he didn’t order, and he says, “Is there some reason why you’re wearing sunglasses indoors?”
   And jerking her head at the big windows, she says, “It’s the light.” She refills his water and says, “It hurts my eyes today.” Her hand shakes so much she drops her pen. One hand clamped to the edge of the table for support, she stoops to pick it up. She sniffs and says, “Sorry.”
   And the detective says, “Do you know an Angel Delaporte?”
   And Misty sniffs and says, “Want to order now?”
   Stilton’s handwriting, Angel Delaporte should see it. His letters are tall, soaring up, ambitious, idealistic. The writing slants hard to the right, aggressive, stubborn. His heavy pressure against the page shows a strong libido. That’s what Angel would tell you. The tails of his letters, the lowercase y ’s and g ’s, hang straight down. This means determination and strong leadership.
   Detective Stilton looks at Misty and says, “Would you describe your neighbors as hostile to outsiders?”
   Just for the record, if you have masturbation down to less than three minutes because you share a bathtub with fourteen people, take another drink.
   In art theory, you learn that women look for men with prominent brows and large, square chins. This was some study a sociologist did at West Point Academy. It proved that rectangular faces, deep-set eyes, and ears that lie close to their heads, this is what makes men attractive.
   This is how Detective Stilton looks, plus a few extra pounds. He’s not smiling now, but the wrinkles that crease his cheeks and his crow’s-feet prove he smiles a lot. He smiles more than he frowns. The scars of happiness. It could be his extra weight, but the corrugator wrinkles between his eyes and the brow-lift wrinkles across his forehead, his worry lines, are almost invisible.
   All that, and the bright red horns on his forehead.
   These are all little visual cues you respond to. The code of attraction. This is why we love who we love. Whether or not you’re consciously aware of them, this is the reason we do what we do.
   This is how we know what we don’t know.
   Wrinkles as handwriting analysis. Graphology. Angel would be impressed.
   Dear sweet Peter, he grew his black hair so long because his ears stuck out.
   Your ears stick out.
   Tabbi’s ears are her father’s. Tabbi’s long dark hair is his.
   Yours.
   Stilton says, “Life’s changing around here and plenty of people won’t like that. If your husband isn’t acting alone, we could see assault. Arson. Murder.”
   All Misty has to do is look down, and she starts to fall. If she turns her head, her vision blurs, the whole room smears for a moment.
   Misty tears the detective’s check out of her pad and lays it on the table, saying, “Will there be anything else?”
   “Just one more question, Mrs. Wilmot,” he says. He sips his glass of iced tea, watching her over the rim. And he says, “I’d like to talk to your in-laws—your husband’s parents—if that’s possible.”
   Peter’s mother, Grace Wilmot, is staying here in the hotel, Misty tells him. Peter’s father, Harrow Wilmot, is dead. Since about thirteen or fourteen years ago.
   Detective Stilton makes another note. He says, “How did your father-in-law die?”
   It was a heart attack, Misty thinks. She’s not sure.
   And Stilton says, “It sounds like you don’t know any of your in-laws very well.”
   Her headache tap, tap, tapping the back of her skull, Misty says, “Did you say if you wanted some coffee?”

July 16
   DR. TOUCHET SHINES a light into Misty’s eyes and tells her to blink. He looks into her ears. He looks up her nose. He turns out the office lights while he makes her point a flashlight into her mouth. The same way Angel Delaporte’s flashlight looked into the hole in his dining room wall. This is an old doctor’s trick to illuminate the sinuses, they spread out, glowing red under the skin around your nose, and you can check for shadows that mean blockage, infections. Sinus headaches. He tilts Misty’s head back and peers down her throat.
   He says, “Why do you say it was food poisoning?”
   So Misty tells him about the diarrhea, the cramps, the headaches. Misty tells him everything except the hallucination.
   He pumps up the blood pressure cuff around her arm and releases the pressure. With her every heartbeat, they both watch the pressure spike on the dial. The pain in her head, the throb matches every pulse.
   Then her blouse is off, and Dr. Touchet’s holding one of her arms up while he feels inside the armpit. He’s wearing glasses and stares at the wall beside them while his fingers work. In a mirror on one wall, Misty can watch them. Her bra looks stretched so tight the straps cut into her shoulders. Her skin rolls over the waistband of her slacks. Her necklace of junk jewelry pearls, as it wraps around the back of her neck, the pearls disappear into a deep fold of fat.
   Dr. Touchet, his fingers root, tunnel, bore into her armpit.
   The windows of the examining room are frosted glass, and her blouse hangs on a hook on the back of the door. This is the same room where Misty had Tabbi. Pale green tiled walls and a white tiled floor. It’s the same examination table. Peter was born here. So was Paulette. Will Tupper. Matt Hyland. Brett Petersen. So was everyone on the island under the age of fifty. The island’s so small, Dr. Touchet is also the mortician. He prepared Peter’s father, Harrow, before his funeral. His cremation.
   Your father.
   Harrow Wilmot was everything Misty wanted Peter to become. The way men want to meet their prospective mother-in-law so they can judge how their fiancée will look in another twenty years, that’s what Misty did. Harry would be the man Misty would be married to in her middle age. Tall with gray sideburns, a straight nose, and a long cleft chin.
   Now when Misty closes her eyes and tries to picture Harrow Wilmot, what she sees is his ashes being scattered from the rocks on Waytansea Point. A long gray cloud.
   If Dr. Touchet uses this same room for embalming, Misty doesn’t know. If he lives long enough, he’ll prepare Grace Wilmot. Dr. Touchet was the physician on the scene when they found Peter.
   When they found you.
   If they ever pull the plug, he’ll probably prepare the body.
   Your body.
   Dr. Touchet feels underneath each arm. Rooting around for nodes. For cancer. He knows just where to press your spine to make your head tilt back. The fake pearls folded deep in the back of her neck. His eyes, the irises are too far apart for him to be looking at you. He hums a tune. Focusing somewhere else. You can tell he’s used to working with dead people.
   Sitting on the examination table, watching them both in the mirror, Misty says, “What used to be out on the point?”
   And Dr. Touchet jumps, startled. He looks up, eyebrows arched with surprise.
   As if some dead body just spoke.
   “Out on Waytansea Point,” Misty says. “There’s statues, like it used to be a park. What was it?”
   His finger probes deep between the tendons on the back of her neck, and he says, “Before we had a crematorium in this area, that was our cemetery.” This would feel good except his fingers are so cold.
   But Misty didn’t see any tombstones.
   His fingers probing for lymph nodes under her jaw, he says, “There’s a mausoleum dug into the hill out there.” His eyes staring at the wall, he frowns and says, “At least a couple centuries ago. Grace could tell you more than I could.”
   The grotto. The little stone bank building. The state capitol with its fancy columns and carved archway, all of it crumbling and held together with tree roots. The locked iron gate, the darkness inside.
   Her headache tap, tap, taps the nail in deeper.
   The diplomas on the examining room’s green tiled wall are yellowed, cloudy under glass. Water-stained. Flyspecked. Daniel Touchet, M.D. Holding her wrist between two fingers, Dr. Touchet checks her pulse against his wristwatch.
   His triangularis pulling both corners of his mouth down in a frown, he puts his cold stethoscope between her shoulder blades. He says, “Misty, I need you to take a deep breath and hold it.”
   The cold stab of the stethoscope moves around her back.
   “Now let it out,” he says. “And take another breath.”
   Misty says, “Did you know, did Peter ever have a vasectomy?” She breathes again, deep, and says, “Peter told me that Tabbi was a miracle from God so I wouldn’t abort.”
   And Dr. Touchet says, “Misty, how much are you drinking these days?”
   This is such a small fucking town. And poor Misty Marie, she’s the town drunk.
   “A police detective came into the hotel,” Misty says. “He was asking if we had the Ku Klux Klan out here on the island.”
   And Dr. Touchet says, “Killing yourself is not going to save your daughter.”
   He sounds like her husband.
   Like you, dear sweet Peter.
   And Misty says, “Save my daughter from what ?” Misty turns to meet his eyes and says, “Do we have Nazis out here?”
   And looking at her, Dr. Touchet smiles and says, “Of course not.” He goes to his desk and picks up a folder with a few sheets of paper in it. Inside the folder, he writes something. He looks at a calendar on the wall above the desk. He looks at his watch and writes inside the folder. His handwriting, the tail of every letter hanging low, below the line, subconscious, impulsive. Greedy, hungry, evil, Angel Delaporte would say.
   Dr. Touchet says, “So, are you doing anything different lately?”
   And Misty tells him yes. She’s drawing. For the first time since college, Misty’s drawing, painting a little, mostly watercolors. In her attic room. In her spare time. She’s put up her easel so she can see out the window, down the coastline to Waytansea Point. She works on a picture every day. Working from her imagination. The wish list of a white trash girl: big houses, church weddings, picnics on the beach.
   Yesterday Misty worked until she saw it was dark outside. Five or six hours had just disappeared. Vanished like a missing laundry room in Seaview. Bermuda triangulated.
   Misty tells Dr. Touchet, “My head always hurts, but I don’t feel as much pain when I’m painting.”
   His desk is painted metal, the kind of steel desk you’d see in the office of an engineer or accountant. The kind with drawers that slide open on smooth rollers and close with thunder and a loud boom. The blotter is green felt. Above it on the wall are the calendar, the old diplomas.
   Dr. Touchet with his spotted, balding head and a few long brittle hairs combed from one ear to the other, he could be an engineer. With his thick round glasses in their steel frames, his thick wristwatch on a stretch-metal band, he could be an accountant. He says, “You went to college, didn’t you?”
   Art school, Misty tells him. She didn’t graduate. She quit. They moved here when Harrow died, to look after Peter’s mother. Then Tabbi came along. Then Misty fell asleep and woke up fat and tired and middle-aged.
   The doctor doesn’t laugh. You can’t blame him.
   “When you studied history,” he says, “did you cover the Jains? The Jain Buddhists?”
   Not in art history, Misty tells him.
   He pulls open one of the desk drawers and takes out a yellow bottle of pills. “I can’t warn you enough,” he says. “Don’t let Tabbi within ten feet of these.” He pops open the bottle and shakes a couple into his hand. They’re clear gelatin capsules, the kind that pull apart into two halves. Inside each one is some loose, shifting dark green powder.
   The peeling message on Tabbi’s windowsill: You’ll die when they’re done with you.
   Dr. Touchet holds the bottle in her face and says, “Only take these when you have pain.” There isn’t a label. “It’s an herbal compound. It should help you focus.”
   Misty says, “Has anybody ever died from Stendhal syndrome?”
   And the doctor says, “These are green algae mostly, some white willow bark, a little bee pollen.” He puts the capsules back in the bottle and snaps it shut. He sets the bottle on the table, next to her thigh. “You can still drink,” he says, “but only in moderation.”
   Misty says, “I only drink in moderation.”
   And turning back to his desk, he says, “If you say so.”
   Fucking small towns.
   Misty says, “How did Peter’s dad die?”
   And Dr. Touchet says, “What did Grace Wilmot tell you?”
   She didn’t. She’s never mentioned it. When they scattered the ashes, Peter told Misty it was a heart attack. Misty says, “Grace said it was a brain tumor.”
   And Dr. Touchet says, “Yes, yes it was.” He closes his metal desk drawer with a boom. He says, “Grace tells me you demonstrate a very promising talent.”
   Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit.
   Misty askes about those Buddhists he mentioned.
   “Jain Buddhists,” he says. He takes the blouse off the back of the door and hands it to her. Under each sleeve, the fabric is ringed with dark sweat stains. Dr. Touchet moves around beside Misty, holding the blouse for her to slip each arm inside.
   He says, “What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.”

July 17
   WHEN THEY WERE in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait. It might look like Saint George and the Dragon or The Rape of the Sabine Women, but the angle you use, the lighting, the composition, the technique, they’re all you. Even the reason why you chose this scene, it’s you. You are every color and brushstroke.
   Peter used to say, “The only thing an artist can do is describe his own face.”
   You’re doomed to being you.
   This, he says, leaves us free to draw anything, since we’re only drawing ourselves.
   Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It’s all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand.
   Everything is a self-portrait.
   Everything is a diary.
   With the fifty dollars from Angel Delaporte, Misty buys a round ox-hair number 5 watercolor brush. She buys a puffy number 4 squirrel brush for painting washes. A round number 2 camel-hair brush. A pointed number 6 cat’s-tongue brush made of sable. And a wide, flat number 12 sky brush.
   Misty buys a watercolor palette, a round aluminum tray with ten shallow cups, like a pan for baking muffins. She buys a few tubes of gouache watercolors. Cyprus green, viridian lake green, sap green, and Winsor green. She buys Prussian blue, and a tube of madder carmine. She buys Havannah Lake black and ivory black.
   Misty buys milky white art masking fluid for covering her mistakes. And piss-yellow lifting preparation for painting on early so mistakes will wipe off. She buys gum arabic, the amber color of weak beer, to keep her colors from bleeding together on the paper. And clear granulation medium to give the colors a grainy look.
   She buys a pad of watercolor paper, fine-grained cold-press paper, 19 by 24 inches. The trade name for this size is a “Royal.” A 23-by-28-inch paper is an “Elephant.” Paper 26.5 by 40 inches is called a “Double Elephant.” This is acid-free, 140-pound paper. She buys art boards, canvas stretched and glued over cardboard. She buys boards sized “Super-Royal” and “Imperial” and “Antiquarian.”
   She gets all this to the cash register, and it’s so far beyond fifty dollars she has to put it on a credit card.
   When you’re tempted to shoplift a tube of burnt sienna, it’s time to take one of Dr. Touchet’s little green algae pills.
   Peter used to say that an artist’s job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything. You shuffle and reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble.
   If you’re at work and every table in your section is waiting for something, but you’re still hiding out in the kitchen sketching on scraps of paper, it’s time to take a pill.
   When you present people with their dinner check and on the back you’ve drawn a little study in light and shadow—you don’t even know where it’s supposed to be, this image just came into your mind. It’s nothing, but you’re terrified of losing it. Then it’s time to take a pill.
   “These useless details,” Peter used to say, “they’re only useless until you connect them all together.”
   Peter used to say, “Everything is nothing by itself.”
   Just for the record, today in the dining room, Grace Wilmot was standing with Tabbi in front of the glass cabinet that covers most of one wall. Inside it, china plates sit on stands under soft lights. Cups sit on saucers. Grace Wilmot points to them one at a time. And Tabbi points with her index finger and says, “Fitz and Floyd . . . Wedgwood . . . Noritake . . . Lenox . . .”
   And shaking her head, Tabbi folds her arms and says, “No, that’s not right.” She says, “The Oracle Grove pattern has a border of fourteen-carat gold. Venus Grove has twenty-four carat.”
   Your baby daughter, an expert in extinct china patterns.
   Your baby daughter, a teenager now.
   Grace Wilmot reaches over and loops a few stray hairs behind Tabbi’s ear, and she says, “I swear, this child is a natural.”
   With a tray of lunches on her shoulder, Misty stops long enough to ask Grace, “How did Harrow die?”
   And Grace looks away from the china. Her orbicularis oculi muscle making her eyes wide, she says, “Why do you ask?”
   Misty mentions her doctor’s appointment. Dr. Touchet. And how Angel Delaporte thinks Peter’s handwriting says something about his relationship with his dad. All the details that look like nothing standing alone.
   And Grace says, “Did the doctor give you any pills to take?”
   The tray is heavy and the food’s getting cold, but Misty says, “The doc says Harrow had liver cancer.”
   Tabbi points and says, “Gorham . . . Dansk . . .”
   And Grace smiles. “Of course. Liver cancer,” she says. “Why are you asking me?” She says, “I thought Peter told you.”
   Just for the record, the weather today is foggy with widely conflicting stories about your father’s cause of death. No detail is anything by itself.
   And Misty says, she can’t talk. Too busy. It’s the lunch rush. Maybe later.
   In art school, Peter used to talk about the painter James McNeill Whistler, and how Whistler worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, sketching the coastline settings for proposed lighthouses. The problem was, Whistler wouldn’t stop doodling little figure studies in the margins. He drew old women, babies, beggars, anything he saw on the street. He did his job, documenting land for the government, but he couldn’t ignore everything else. He couldn’t let anything slip away. Men smoking pipes. Children rolling hoops. He collected all of it in doodles around the margin of his official work. Of course, the government canned him for it.
   “Those doodles,” Peter used to say, “they’re worth millions today.”
   You used to say.
   In the Wood and Gold Room, they serve butter in little crocks, only now each pad has a little picture carved in it. A little figure study.
   Maybe it’s a picture of a tree or the particular way a hillside in Misty’s imagination slopes, right to left. There’s a cliff, and a waterfall from a hanging canyon, and a small ravine full of shade and mossy boulders and vines around the thick trunks of trees, and by the time she’s imagined it all and sketched it on a paper napkin, people are coming to the bus station to refill their own cups of coffee. People tap their glasses with forks to get her attention. They snap their fingers. These summer people.
   They don’t tip.
   A hillside. A mountain stream. A cave in a riverbank. A tendril of ivy. All these details come to her, and Misty just can’t let them go. By the end of her dinner shift, she has shreds of napkins and paper towels and credit card receipts, each one with some detail drawn on it.
   In her attic room, in the heap of paper scraps, she’s collected the patterns of leaves and flowers she’s never seen. In another heap, she has abstract shapes that look like rocks and mountaintops on the horizon. There are the branching shapes of trees, the cluster of bushes. What could be briers. Birds.
   What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.
   When you sit on the toilet for hours, sketching nonsense on a sheet of toilet paper until your ass is ready to fall out—take a pill.
   When you just stop going down to work altogether, you just stay in your room and phone for room service. You tell everyone you’re sick so you can stay up all night and day sketching landscapes you’ve never seen, then it’s time to take a pill.
   When your daughter knocks and begs you for a good-night kiss, and you keep telling her to go to bed, that you’ll be there in a minute, and finally her grandmother takes her away from the door, and you can hear her crying as they go down the hallway—take two pills.
   When you find the rhinestone bracelet she’s pushed under the door, take another.
   When nobody seems to notice your bad behavior, they just smile and say, “So, Misty, how’s the painting coming along?” it’s pill time.
   When the headaches won’t let you eat. Your pants fall down because your ass is gone. You pass a mirror and don’t recognize the thin, sagging ghost you see. Your hands only stop shaking when you’re holding a paintbrush or a pencil. Then take a pill. And before you’re half through the bottle, Dr. Touchet leaves another bottle at the front desk with your name on it.
   When you just cannot stop working. When completing this one project is all you can imagine. Then take a pill.
   Because Peter’s right.
   You’re right.
   Because everything is important. Every detail. We just don’t know why yet.
   Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes.
   Everything you do shows your hand.
   Peter used to say, an artist’s job is to pay attention, collect, organize, archive, preserve, then write a report. Document. Make your presentation. The job of an artist is just not to forget.

July 21—The Third-Quarter Moon
   ANGEL DELAPORTE holds up one painting, then another, all of them watercolors. They’re different subjects, some just the outline of a strange horizon, some of them are landscapes of sunny fields. Pine forests. The shape of a house or a village in the middle distance. In his face, only Angel’s eyes move, jumping back and forth on every sheet of paper.
   “Incredible,” he says. “You look terrible, but your work . . . my God.”
   Just for the record, Angel and Misty, they’re in Oysterville. This is somebody’s missing family room. They’ve crawled in through another hole to take pictures and see the graffiti.
   Your graffiti.
   The way Misty looks, how she can’t get warm, even wearing two sweaters, her teeth chatter. How her hand shakes when she holds a picture out to Angel, she makes the stiff watercolor paper flap. It’s some intestinal bug lingering from her case of food poisoning. Even here in a dim sealed room with only the light filtered through the drapes, she’s wearing sunglasses.
   Angel drags along his camera bag. Misty brings her portfolio. It’s her old black plastic one from school, a thin suitcase with a zipper that goes around three sides so you can open it and lay it flat. Thin straps of elastic hold watercolor paintings to one side of the portfolio. On the other side, sketches are tucked in pockets of different sizes.
   Angel’s snapping pictures while Misty opens the portfolio on the sofa. When she takes out her pill bottle, her hand’s shaking so much you can hear the capsules rattle inside. Pinching a capsule out of the bottle, she tells Angel, “Green algae. It’s for headaches.” Misty puts the capsule in her mouth and says, “Come look at some pictures and tell me what you think.”
   Across the sofa, Peter’s spray-painted something. His black words scrawl across framed family photos on the wall. Across needlepoint pillows. Silk lampshades. He’s pulled the pleated drapes shut and spray-painted his words across the inside of them.
   You have.
   Angel takes the bottle of pills out of her hand and holds it up to light from the window. He shakes the bottle, the capsules inside. He says, “These are huge.”
   The gelatin capsule in her mouth is getting soft, and inside you can taste salt and tinfoil, the taste of blood.
   Angel hands her the flask of gin from his camera bag, and Misty gulps her bitter mouthful. Just for the record, she drank his booze. What you learn in art school is there’s an etiquette to drugs. You have to share.
   Misty says, “Help yourself. Take one.”
   And Angel pops the bottle open and shakes out two. He slips one in his pocket, saying, “For later.” He swallows the other with gin and makes a terrible gagging face, leaning forward with his red and white tongue stuck out. His eyes squeezed shut.
   Immanuel Kant and his gout. Karen Blixen and her syphilis. Peter would tell Angel Delaporte that suffering is his key to inspiration.
   Getting the sketches and watercolors spread out across the sofa, Misty says, “What do you think?”
   Angel sets each picture down and lifts the next. Shaking his head no. Just a hair side to side, a kind of palsy. He says, “Simply unbelievable.” He lifts another picture and says, “What kind of software are you using?”
   Her brush? “Sable,” Misty says. “Sometimes squirrel or oxtail.”
   “No, silly,” he says, “on your computer, for the drafting. You can’t be doing this with hand tools.” He taps his finger on the castle in one painting, then taps on the cottage in another.
   Hand tools?
   “You don’t use just a straightedge and a compass, do you?” Angel says. “And a protractor? Your angles are identical, perfect. You’re using a stencil or a template, right?”
   Misty says, “What’s a compass?”
   “You know, like in geometry, in high school,” Angel says, spreading his thumb and forefinger to demonstrate. “It has a point on one leg, and you put a pencil in the other leg and use it to draw perfect curves and circles.”
   He holds up a picture of a house on a hillside above the beach, the ocean and trees just different shades of blue and green. The only warm color is a dot of yellow, a light in one window. “I could look at this one forever,” he says.
   Stendhal syndrome.
   He says, “I’ll give you five hundred dollars for it.”
   And Misty says, “I can’t.”
   He takes another from the portfolio and says, “Then how about this one?”
   She can’t sell any of them.
   “How about a thousand?” he says. “I’ll give you a thousand just for this one.”
   A thousand bucks. But still, Misty says, “No.”
   Looking at her, Angel says, “Then I’ll give you ten thousand for the whole batch. Ten thousand dollars. Cash.”
   Misty starts to say no, but—
   Angel says, “Twenty thousand.”
   Misty sighs, and—
   Angel says, “Fifty thousand dollars.”
   Misty looks at the floor.
   “Why,” Angel says, “do I get the feeling that you’d say no to a million dollars?”
   Because the pictures aren’t done. They’re not perfect. People can’t see them, not yet. There are more she hasn’t even started. Misty can’t sell them because she needs them as studies for something bigger. They’re all parts of something she can’t see yet. They’re clues.
   Who knows why we do what we do.
   Misty says, “Why are you offering me so much money? Is this some kind of test?”
   And Angel zippers open his camera bag and says, “I want you to see something.” He takes out some shiny tools made of metal. One is two sharp rods that join at one end to make a V. The other is a half circle of metal, shaped like a D and marked with inches along the straight side.
   Angel holds the metal D against a sketch of a farmhouse and says, “All your straight lines are absolutely straight.” He sets the D flat against a watercolor of a cottage, and her lines are all perfect. “This is a protractor,” he says. “You use it to measure angles.”
   Angel sets the protractor against picture after picture and says, “Your angles are all perfect. Perfect ninty-degree angles. Perfect forty-five-degree angles.” He says, “I noticed this on the chair painting.”
   He picks up the V-shaped tool and says, “This is a compass. You use it to draw perfect curves and circles.” He stabs one pointed leg of the compass in the center of a charcoal sketch. He spins the other leg around the first leg and says, “Every circle is perfect. Every sunflower and birdbath. Every curve, perfect.”
   Angel points at her pictures spread across the green sofa, and he says, “You’re drafting perfect figures. It isn’t possible.”
   Just for the record, the weather today is getting really, really pissy right about now.
   The only person who doesn’t expect Misty to be a great painter, he’s telling her it’s impossible. When your only friend says no way can you be a great artist, a naturally talented, skilled artist, then take a pill.
   Misty says, “Listen, my husband and I both went to art school.” She says, “We were trained to draw.”
   And Angel asks, was she tracing a photograph? Was Misty using an opaque projector? A camera obscura?
   The message from Constance Burton: “You can do this with your mind.”
   And Angel takes a felt-tipped pen from his camera bag and gives it to her, saying, “Here.” He points at the wall and says, “Right there, draw me a circle with a four-inch diameter.”
   With the pen, without even looking, Misty draws him a circle.
   And Angel sets the straight edge of the protractor, the edge marked in inches, against the circle. And it’s four inches. He says, “Draw me a thirty-seven-degree angle.”
   Slash, slash, and Misty marks two intersecting lines on the wall.
   He sets on the protractor and it’s exactly thirty-seven degrees.
   He asks for an eight-inch circle. A six-inch line. A seventy-degree angle. A perfect S curve. An equilateral triangle. A square. And Misty sketches them all in an instant.
   According to the straightedge, the protractor, the compass, they’re all perfect.
   “Do you see what I mean?” he says. He pokes the point of his compass in her face and says, “Something’s wrong. First it was wrong with Peter, and now it’s wrong with you.”
   Just for the record, it seems Angel Delaporte liked her loads better when she was just the fat fucking slob. A maid at the Waytansea Hotel. A sidekick he could lecture about Stanislavski or graphology. First she’s Peter’s student. Then Angel’s.
   Misty says, “The only thing I see is how you can’t deal with my maybe having this incredible natural gift.”
   And Angel jumps, startled. He looks up, eyebrows arched with surprise.
   As if some dead body just spoke.
   He says, “Misty Wilmot, would you just listen to yourself?”
   Angel shakes his compass point at her and says, “This isn’t just talent.” He points his finger at the perfect circles and angles doodled on the wall and says, “The police need to see this.”
   Stuffing the paintings and sketches back in her portfolio, Misty says, “How come?” Zippering it shut, she says, “So they can arrest me for being too good an artist ?”
   Angel takes his camera out and cranks to the next frame of film. He snaps a flash attachment to the top. Watching her through the viewfinder, he says, “We need more proof.” He says, “Draw me a hexagon. Draw me a pentagram. Draw me a perfect spiral.”
   And with the felt-tipped pen, Misty does one, then the next. The only time her hands don’t shake is when she draws or paints.
   On the wall in front of her, Peter’s scrawled: “. . . we will destroy you with your own neediness and greed . . .”
   You scrawled.
   The hexagon. The pentagram. The perfect spiral. Angel snaps a picture of each.
   With the flash blinding them, they don’t see the homeowner stick her head through the hole. She looks at Angel standing there, snapping photos. Misty, drawing on the wall. And the homeowner clutches her own head in both hands and says, “What the hell are you doing? Stop!” She says, “Has this become an ongoing art project for you people?”

July 24
   JUST SO YOU KNOW, Detective Stilton phoned Misty today. He wants to pay Peter a little visit.
   He wants to pay you a little visit.
   On the phone, he says, “When did your father-in-law die?”
   The floor around Misty, the bed, her whole room, it’s cluttered with wet balls of watercolor paper. The crumpled wads of azure blue and Winsor green, they fill the brown shopping bag she brought her art supplies home in. Her graphite pencils, her colored pencils, her oils and acrylics and gouache watercolors, she’s wasted them all to make trash. Her greasy oil pastels and chalky soft pastels, they’re worn down to just nubs so small you can’t hold them anymore. Her paper’s almost gone.
   What they don’t teach you in art school is how to hold a telephone conversation and still paint. Holding the phone in one hand and a brush in her other, Misty says, “Peter’s dad? Fourteen years ago, right?”
   Smearing the paints with the side of her hand, blending with the pad of her thumb, Misty’s as bad as Goya, setting herself up for lead encephalopathy. Deafness. Depression. Topical poisoning.
   Detective Stilton, he says, “There’s no record that Harrow Wilmot ever died.”
   To give her brush a sharp point, Misty twists it in her mouth. Misty says, “We scattered his ashes.” She says, “It was a heart attack. Maybe a brain tumor.” Against her tongue, the paint tastes sour. The color feels gritty between her back teeth.
   And Detective Stilton says, “There’s no death certificate.”
   Misty says, “Maybe they faked his death.” She’s all out of guesses. Grace Wilmot and Dr. Touchet, this whole island is about image control.
   And Stilton says, “Who do you mean, they ?”
   The Nazis. The Klan.
   With a number 12 camel-hair sky brush, she’s putting a perfect wash of blue above the trees on a perfect jagged horizon of perfect mountains. With a number 2 sable brush, she’s putting sunlight on the top of each perfect wave. Perfect curves and straight lines and exact angles, so fuck Angel Delaporte.
   Just for the record, on paper, the weather is what Misty says it will be. Perfect.
   Just for the record, Detective Stilton says, “Why do you think your father-in-law would fake his death?”
   Misty says she’s just joking. Of course Harry Wilmot’s dead.
   With a number 4 squirrel brush, she’s dabbing shadows into the forest. Days she’s wasted locked up here in this room, and nothing she’s done is half as good as the sketch of a chair she did while shitting her pants. Out on Waytansea Point. Being menaced by a hallucination. With her eyes shut, food-poisoned.
   That only sketch, she’s sold it for a lousy fifty bucks.
   On the phone, Detective Stilton says, “Are you still there?”
   Misty says, “Define there .”
   She says, “Go. See Peter.” She’s putting perfect flowers in a perfect meadow with a number 2 nylon brush. Where Tabbi is, Misty doesn’t know. If Misty’s supposed to be at work right now, she doesn’t care. The only fact she’s sure about is she’s working. Her head doesn’t hurt. Her hands don’t shake.
   “The problem is,” Stilton says, “the hospital wants you to be present when I see your husband.”
   And Misty says she can’t. She has to paint. She has a thirteen-year-old kid to raise. She’s on the second week of a migraine headache. With a number 4 sable brush, she’s wiping a band of gray-white across the meadow. Paving over the grass. She’s excavating a pit. Sinking in a foundation.
   On the paper in front of her, the paintbrush kills trees and hauls them away. With brown paint, Misty cuts into the slope of the meadow. Misty regrades. The brush plows under the grass. The flowers are gone. White stone walls rise out of the pit. Windows open in the walls. A tower goes up. A dome swells over the center of the building. Stairs run down from the doorways. A railing runs along the terraces. Another tower shoots up. Another wing spreads out to cover more of the meadow and push the forest back.
   It’s Xanadu. San Simeon. Biltmore. Mar a Lago. It’s what people with money build to be protected and alone. The places people think will make them happy. This new building is just the naked soul of a rich person. It’s the alternate heaven for people too rich to get into the real thing.
   You can paint anything because the only thing you ever reveal is yourself.
   And on the phone, a voice says, “Can we say three o’clock tomorrow, Mrs. Wilmot?”
   Statues appear along the perfect roofline of one wing. A pool opens in one perfect terrace. The meadow is almost gone as a new flight of steps runs down to the edge of the perfect woods.
   Everything is a self-portrait.
   Everything is a diary.
   And the voice on the phone says, “Mrs. Wilmot?”
   Vines scramble up the walls. Chimneys sprout from the slates on the roof.
   And the voice on the phone says, “Misty?” The voice says, “Did you ever request the medical examiner’s records for your husband’s suicide attempt?” Detective Stilton says, “Do you know where your husband might have gotten sleeping pills?”
   Just for the record, the problem with art school is that it can teach you technique and craft, but it can’t give you talent. You can’t buy inspiration. You can’t reason your way to an epiphany. Develop a formula. A road map to enlightenment.
   “Your husband’s blood,” Stilton says, “was loaded with sodium phenobarbital.”
   And there’s no evidence of drugs at the scene, he says. No pill bottle or water. No record of Peter ever having a prescription.
   Still painting, Misty asks where this is going.
   And Stilton says, “You might think about who’d want to kill him.”
   “Only me,” Misty says. Then she wishes she hadn’t.
   The picture is finished, perfect, beautiful. It’s no place Misty’s ever seen. Where it came from, she has no idea. Then, with a number 12 cat’s-tongue brush full of ivory black, she wipes out everything in sight.

July 25
   ALL THE HOUSES along Gum Street and Larch Street, they look so grand the first time you see them. All of them three or four stories tall with white columns, they all date from the last economic boom, eighty years ago. A century. House after house, they sit back among branching trees as big as green storm clouds, walnuts and oaks. They line Cedar Street, facing each other across rolled lawns. The first time you see them, they look so rich.
   “Temple fronts,” Harrow Wilmot told Misty. Starting in about 1798, Americans built simple but massive Greek Revival façades. By 1824, he says, when William Strickland designed the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, there was no going back. After that, houses large and small had to have a row of fluted columns and a looming pediment roof across the front.
   People called them “end houses” because all this fancy detail was confined to one end. The rest of the house was plain.
   That could describe almost any house on the island. All façade. Your first impression.
   From the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to the smallest cottage, what architects called “the Greek cancer” was everywhere.
   “For architecture,” Harrow said, “it was the end of progress and the beginning of recycling.” He met Misty and Peter at the bus station in Long Beach and drove them down to the ferry.
   The island houses, they’re all so grand until you see how the paint’s peeled and heaping around the base of each column. On the roof, the flashing is rusted and hangs off the edge in bent red strips. Brown cardboard patches windows where the glass is gone.
   Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.
   No investment is yours forever. Harry Wilmot told her that. The money was already running out.
   “One generation makes the money,” Harrow told her once. “The next generation protects the money. The third runs out of it. People always forget what it takes to build a family fortune.”
   Peter’s scrawled words: “. . . your blood is our gold . . .”
   Just for the record, while Misty drives to meet Detective Stilton, the whole three-hour drive to Peter’s warehousing facility, she puts together everything she can remember about Harrow Wilmot.
   The first time Misty saw Waytansea Island was while visiting with Peter, when his father drove them around in the old family Buick. All the cars in Waytansea were old, clean and polished, but their seats were patched with clear strapping tape so the stuffing stayed inside. The padded dashboard was cracked from too much sun. The chrome trim and the bumpers were spotted and pimpled with rust from the salt air. The paint colors were dull under a thin layer of white oxide.
   Harrow had thick white hair combed into a crown over his forehead. His eyes were blue or gray. His teeth were more yellow than white. His chin and nose, sharp and jutting out. The rest of him, skinny, pale. Plain. You could smell his breath. An old island house with his own rotting interior.
   “This car’s ten years old,” he said. “That’s a lifetime for a car at the shore.” He drove them down to the ferry and they waited at the dock, looking across the water at the dark green of the island. Peter and Misty, they were out of school for the summer, looking for jobs, dreaming of living in a city, any city. They’d talked about dropping out and moving to New York or Los Angeles. Waiting for the ferry, they said they might study art in Chicago or Seattle. Someplace they could each start a career. Misty remembers she had to slam her car door three times before it would stay shut.
   This was the car where Peter tried to kill himself.
   The car you tried to kill yourself in. Where you took those sleeping pills.
   The same car she’s driving now.
   Stenciled down the side now, the bright yellow words say, “Bonner & Mills—When You’re Ready to Stop Starting Over.”
   What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.
   On the ferry that first day, Misty sat in the car while Harrow and Peter stood at the railing.
   Harrow leaned close to Peter and said, “Are you sure she’s the one?”
   Leaned close to you. Father and son.
   And Peter said, “I’ve seen her paintings. She’s the real deal . . .”
   Harrow raised his eyebrows, his corrugator muscle gathering the skin of his forehead into long wrinkles, and he said, “You know what this means.”
   And Peter smiled, but only by lifting his levator labii, his sneer muscle, and he said, “Yeah, sure. Fucking lucky me .”
   And his father nodded. He said, “That means we’ll be rebuilding the hotel finally.”
   Misty’s hippie mom, she used to say it’s the American dream to be so rich you can escape from everyone. Look at Howard Hughes in his penthouse. William Randolph Hearst in San Simeon. Look at Biltmore. All those lush country homes where rich folks exile themselves. Those homemade Edens where we retreat. When that breaks down, and it always does, the dreamer returns to the world.
   “Scratch any fortune,” Misty’s mom used to say, “and you’ll find blood only a generation or two back.” Saying this was supposed to make their trailer lifestyle better.
   Child labor in mines or mills, she’d say. Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant.
   Despite her mom, Misty thought her whole future was ahead of her.
   At the coma center, Misty parks for a minute, looking up at the third row of windows. Peter’s window.
   Your window.
   These days, Misty’s clutching the edge of everything she walks past, doorframes, countertops, tables, chair backs. To steady herself. Misty can’t carry her head more than halfway off her chest. Anytime she leaves her room, she has to wear sunglasses because the light hurts so much. Her clothes hang loose, billowing as if there’s nothing inside. Her hair . . . there’s more of it in the brush than her scalp. Any of her belts can wrap twice around her new waist.
   Spanish soap opera skinny.
   Her eyes shrunken and bloodshot in the rearview mirror, Misty could be Paganini’s dead body.
   Before she gets out of the car, Misty takes another green algae pill, and her headache spikes when she swallows it with a can of beer.
   Just inside the glass lobby doors, Detective Stilton waits, watching her cross the parking lot. Her hand clutching every car for balance.
   While Misty climbs the front steps, one hand grips the rail and pulls her forward.
   Detective Stilton holds the door open for her, saying, “You don’t look so hot.”
   It’s the headache, Misty tells him. It could be her paints. Cadmium red. Titanium white. Some oil paints are loaded with lead or copper or iron oxide. It doesn’t help that most artists will twist the brush in their mouth to make a finer point. In art school, they’re always warning you about Vincent van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. All those painters who went insane and suffered so much nerve damage they painted with a brush tied to their dead hand. Toxic paints, absinthe, syphilis.
   Weakness in your wrists and ankles, a sure sign of lead poisoning.
   Everything is a self-portrait. Including your autopsied brain. Your urine.
   Poisons, drugs, disease. Inspiration.
   Everything is a diary.
   Just for the record, Detective Stilton is scribbling all this down. Documenting her every slurred word.
   Misty needs to shut up before they put Tabbi in state custody.
   They check in with the woman at the front desk. They sign the day’s log and get plastic badges to clip on their coats. Misty’s wearing one of Peter’s favorite brooches, a big pinwheel of yellow rhinestones, the jewels all chipped and cloudy. The silver foil has flaked off the back of some stones so they don’t sparkle. They could be broken bottles off the street.
   Misty clips the plastic security badge next to the brooch.
   And the detective says, “That looks old.”
   And Misty says, “My husband gave it to me when we were dating.”
   They’re waiting for the elevator when Detective Stilton says, “I’ll need proof that your husband has been here for the past forty-eight hours.” He looks from the blinking elevator floor numbers to her and says, “And you might want to document your whereabouts for that same period.”
   The elevator opens and they step inside. The doors close. Misty presses the button for the third floor.
   Both of them looking at the doors from the inside, Stilton says, “I have a warrant to arrest him.” He pats the front of his sport coat, just over the inside pocket.
   The elevator stops. The doors open. They step out.
   Detective Stilton flips open his notebook and reads it, saying, “Do you know the people at 346 Western Bayshore Drive?”
   Misty leads him down the hallway, saying, “Should I?”
   “Your husband did some remodeling work for them last year,” he says.
   The missing laundry room.
   “And how about the people at 7856 Northern Pine Road?” he says.
   The missing linen closet.
   And Misty says yeah. Yes. She saw what Peter did there, but no, she didn’t know the people.
   Detective Stilton flips his notebook shut and says, “Both houses burned last night. Five days ago, another house burned. Before that, another house your husband remodeled was destroyed.”
   All of them arson, he says. Every house that Peter sealed his hate graffiti inside for someone to find, they’re all catching fire. Yesterday the police got a letter from some group claiming responsibility. The Ocean Alliance for Freedom. OAFF for short. They want a stop to all coastline development.
   Following her down the long linoleum hallway, Stilton says, “The white supremacy movement and the Green Party have connections going way back.” He says, “It’s not a long stretch from protecting nature to preserving racial purity.”
   They get to Peter’s room and Stilton says, “Unless your husband can prove he’s been here the night of every fire, I’m here to arrest him.” And he pats the warrant in his jacket pocket.
   The curtain is pulled shut around Peter’s bed. Inside it, you can hear the rushing sound of the respirator pumping air. You can hear the soft blip of his heart monitor. You can hear the faint tinkle of something Mozart from his earphones.
   Misty throws back the curtain around the bed.
   An unveiling. An opening night.
   And Misty says, “Be my guest. Ask him anything.”
   In the middle of the bed, a skeleton’s curled on its side, papier-mâchéd in waxy skin. Mummified in blue-white with dark lightning bolts of veins branching just under the surface. The knees are pulled up to the chest. The back arches so the head almost touches the withered buttocks. The feet point, sharp as whittled sticks. The toenails long and dark yellow. The hands knot under so tight the fingernails cut into bandages wrapped to protect each wrist. The thin knit blanket is pushed to the bottom of the mattress. Tubes of clear and yellow loop to and from the arms, the belly, the dark wilted penis, the skull. So little muscle is left that the knees and elbows, the bony feet and hands look huge.
   The lips—shiny with petroleum jelly—pull back to show the black holes of missing teeth.
   With the curtain open, there’s the smell of it all, the alcohol swabs, the urine, the bedsores and sweet skin cream. The smell of warm plastic. The hot smell of bleach and the powdery smell of latex gloves.
   The diary of you.
   The respirator’s ribbed blue plastic tube hooks into a hole halfway down the throat. Strips of white surgical tape hold the eyes shut. The head is shaved for the brain pressure monitor, but black scruffy hair bristles on the ribs and in the hammock of loose skin between the hipbones.
   The same as Tabbi’s black hair.
   Your black hair.
   Holding the curtain back, Misty says, “As you can see, my husband doesn’t get out much.”
   Everything you do shows your hand.
   Detective Stilton swallows, hard. The levator labii superioris pulls his top lip up to his nostrils, and his face goes down into his notebook. His pen gets busy writing.
   In the little cabinet next to the bed, Misty finds the alcohol swabs and rips the plastic cover off one. Coma patients are graded according to what’s called the Glasgow Coma Scale, she tells the detective. The scale runs from fully awake to unconscious and unresponsive. You give the patient verbal commands and see if he can respond by moving. Or by speaking. Or by blinking his eyes.
   Detective Stilton says, “What can you tell me about Peter’s father?”
   “Well,” Misty says, “he’s a drinking fountain.”
   The detective gives her a look. Both eyebrows squeezed together. The corrugator muscles doing their job.
   Grace Wilmot dropped a wad of money on a fancy brass drinking fountain in Harrow’s memory. It’s on Alder Street where it meets Division Avenue, near the hotel, Misty tells him. Harrow’s ashes, she scattered them in a ceremony out on Waytansea Point.
   Detective Stilton is scribbling all this in his notebook.
   With the alcohol swab, Misty wipes the skin clean around Peter’s nipple.
   Misty lifts the earphones off his head and takes the face in both her hands, settling it in the pillow so he looks up at the ceiling. Misty unhooks the yellow pinwheel brooch from her coat.
   The lowest score you can get on the Glasgow Coma Scale is a three. This means you never move, you never speak, you never blink. No matter what people say or do to you. You don’t react.
   The brooch opens into a steel pin as long as her little finger, and Misty polishes the pin with the alcohol swab.
   Detective Stilton’s pen stops, still on the page of his notebook, and he says, “Does your daughter ever visit?”
   And Misty shakes her head.
   “Does his mother?”
   And Misty says, “My daughter spends most of her time with her grandmother.” Misty looks at the pin, polished silver and clean. “They go to tag sales,” Misty says. “My mother-in-law works for a service that finds pieces of china for people in discontinued patterns.”
   Misty peels the tape off Peter’s eyes.
   Off your eyes.
   Misty holds his eyes open with her thumbs and leans close to his face, shouting, “Peter!”
   Misty shouts, “How did your father really die?”
   Her spit dotting his eyes, his pupils two different sizes, Misty shouts, “Are you part of some neo-Nazi ecoterrorist gang?”
   Turning to look at Detective Stilton, Misty shouts, “Are you sneaking out every night to burn down houses?”
   Misty shouts, “Are you an oaf?”
   The Ocean Alliance for Freedom.
   Stilton folds his arms and drops his chin to his chest, watching her out of the tops of his eyes. The orbicularis oris muscles around his lips clamp his mouth into a thin straight line. The frontalis muscle lifts his eyebrows so his forehead folds into three wrinkles from temple to temple. Wrinkles that weren’t there before now.
   With one hand, Misty pinches Peter’s nipple and pulls it up, stretching it out to a long point.
   With the other hand, Misty drives the pin through. Then she pulls the pin out.
   The heart monitor blips every moment, not one beat more fast or slow.
   Misty says, “Peter darling? Can you feel this?” And again Misty drives the pin through.
   So you can feel fresh pain every time. The Stanislavski Method.
   Just so you know, there’s so much scar tissue this is tough as pushing a pin through a tractor tire. The nipple skin stretches forever before the pin pops out the other side.
   Misty shouts, “Why did you kill yourself?”
   Peter’s pupils stare up at the ceiling, one wide open and the other a pinhole.
   Then two arms come around her from behind. Detective Stilton. They pull her away. Her shouting, “Why the fuck did you bring me here?”
   Stilton pulls her away until the pin Misty’s holding pulls out, little by little, until it pulls free. Her shouting, “Why the fuck did you get me pregnant?”

July 28—The New Moon
   MISTY’S FIRST BATCH of birth control pills, Peter monkeyed with. He replaced them with little cinnamon candies. The next batch he just flushed down the toilet.
   You flushed down the toilet. By accident, you said.
   After that, student health services wouldn’t refill her prescription for another thirty days. They got her fitted for a diaphragm, and a week later Misty found a little hole poked through the center of it. She held it up to the window to show Peter, and he said, “Those things don’t last forever.”
   Misty said she just got it.
   “They wear out,” he said.
   Misty said his penis wasn’t so big it hit her cervix and punched a hole in her diaphragm.
   Yourpenis isn’t that big.
   After that, Misty kept running out of spermicidal foam. This was costing her a fortune. Each can, Misty used maybe one time and then she’d find it empty. After a few cans, Misty came out of the bathroom one day and asked Peter, was he messing with her foam?
   Peter was watching his Spanish soap operas, where all the women had waists so small they could be wet rags wrung dry. They lugged around giant breasts behind spaghetti straps. Their eyes smeared with glitter makeup, they were supposed to be doctors and lawyers.
   Peter said, “Here,” and he reached around behind his neck with both hands. He pulled something from inside the collar of his black T-shirt and held it out. This was a shimmering necklace of pink rhinestones, strands of ice-cold pink, all pink flash and sparkle. And he said, “You want this?”
   And Misty was struck stupid as his Spanish bimbos. All she could do was reach out and take one end of the necklace in each hand. In the bathroom mirror, it sparkled against her skin. Looking at the necklace in the mirror, touching it, Misty heard the prattle of Spanish from the other room.
   Misty yelled, “Just don’t touch my foam anymore. Okay?”
   All Misty heard was Spanish.
   Of course, her next period never came. After the first couple days, Peter brought her a box of pregnancy test sticks. These were the kind you pee on. They’d show a yes or no if you’re knocked up. The sticks weren’t sealed in any paper wrappers. They all smelled like pee. They already showed a “no” for not pregnant.
   Then Misty saw how the bottom of the box had been pulled open and then taped shut. To Peter, standing, waiting outside the bathroom door, Misty said, “You just bought these today?”
   Peter said, “What?”
   Misty could hear Spanish.
   When they’d fuck, Peter kept his eyes shut, panting and heaving. When he came, his eyes squeezed shut, he’d shout, “Te amo!”
   Through the bathroom door, Misty shouted, “Did you pee on these?”
   The doorknob turned, but Misty had it locked. Then, through the door, Peter’s voice said, “You don’t need those. You’re not pregnant.”
   And Misty asked, so where was her monthly visit from dot?
   “Right here,” his voice said. Then fingers poked through the crack under the door. They were shoving something white and soft. “You dropped these on the floor,” he said. “Take a good look at them.”
   It was her panties, spotted with fresh blood.

July 29—The New Moon
   JUST FOR THE RECORD, the weather today is heavy and scratchy and it hurts every time your wife tries to move.
   Dr. Touchet’s just left. He’s spent the past two hours wrapping her leg in strips of sterile cloth and clear acrylic resin. Her leg, from the ankle to the crotch, is one straight fiberglass cast. It’s her knee, the doctor said.
   Peter, your wife is a klutz.
   Misty is the klutz.
   She’s carrying a tray of Waldorf salads from the kitchen into the dining room when she trips. Right in the kitchen doorway, her feet go out from under her, and Misty, the tray, the plates of Waldorf salad, it all goes headfirst onto table eight.
   Of course, the whole dining room gets up to come look at her covered in mayonnaise. Her knee looks fine, and Raymon comes out of the kitchen and helps her to her feet. Still, the knee is sprained, says Dr. Touchet. He comes an hour later, after Raymon and Paulette help her up the stairs to her room. The doctor holds an ice pack on the knee, then offers Misty a cast in neon yellow, neon pink, or plain white.
   Dr. Touchet’s squatting at her feet while Misty sits in a straight chair with her leg propped on a footstool. He’s moving the ice pack, looking for signs of swelling.
   And Misty asks him, did he fill out Harrow’s death certificate?
   Misty asks, did he prescribe sleeping pills for Peter?
   The doctor looks at her for a moment, then goes back to icing her leg. He says, “If you don’t relax, you may never walk again.”
   Her leg, it already feels fine. It looks fine. Just for the record, her knee doesn’t even hurt.
   “You’re in shock,” Touchet says. He brings a briefcase, not a black doctor’s bag. It’s the kind of briefcase a lawyer would carry. Or a banker. “For you, a cast would be prophylactic,” he says. “Without it, you’ll be running around with that police detective, and your leg will never heal.”
   Such a small town, the whole Waytansea Island wax museum is spying on her.
   Somebody knocks at the door, and then Grace and Tabbi come into the room. Tabbi says, “Mom, we brought you more paints,” and she holds a plastic shopping bag in each hand.
   Grace says, “How is she?”
   And Dr. Touchet says, “If she stays in this room the next three weeks, she’ll be fine.” He starts winding gauze around the knee, layers and layers of gauze, thicker and thicker.
   Just so you know, the moment Misty found herself on the floor, when people came to help her, as they carried her upstairs, even while the doctor squeezed and flexed her knee, Misty kept saying, “What did I trip over?”
   There’s nothing there. There’s really nothing near that doorway to trip over.
   After that, Misty thanked God this happened at work. No way could the hotel beef about her missing work.
   Grace says, “Can you wiggle your toes?”
   Yes, Misty can. She just can’t reach them.
   Next, the doctor wraps the leg in strips of fiberglass.
   Tabbi comes over and touches the huge fiberglass log with her mother’s leg lost somewhere inside it, and she says, “Can I sign my name on it?”
   “Give it a day to dry,” the doctor says.
   Misty’s leg straight out in front of her, it must weigh eighty pounds. She feels fossilized. Embedded in amber. An ancient mummy. This is going to be a real ball and chain.
   It’s funny, the way your mind tries to make sense out of chaos. Misty feels terrible about it now, but the moment Raymon came out of the kitchen, as he put his arm under her and lifted, she said, “Did you just trip me?”
   He brushed the Waldorf salad, the apple chunks and chopped walnuts, out of her hair, and he said, “Cómo?”
   What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.
   Even then, the kitchen door was propped open and the floor there was clean and dry.
   Misty said, “How did I fall?”
   And Raymon shrugged and said, “On your culo .”
   All the kitchen guys standing around, they laughed.
   Now, up in her room, her leg cocooned in a heavy white piñata, Grace and Dr. Touchet lift Misty under each arm and steer her over to the bed. Tabbi gets her green algae pills out of her purse and sets them on the bedside table. Grace unplugs the telephone and loops the cord, saying, “You need peace and quiet.” Grace says, “There’s nothing wrong with you that a little art therapy won’t cure,” and she starts taking things out of the shopping bags, tubes of paint and brushes, and setting them in piles on the dresser.
   Out of his briefcase, the doctor takes a syringe. He wipes Misty’s arm with cold alcohol. Better her arm than her nipple.
   Can you feel this?
   The doctor fills the syringe from a bottle and sticks the needle in her arm. He pulls it out and gives her a wad of cotton to stop any blood. “It’s to help you sleep,” he says.
   Tabbi sits on the edge of the bed and says, “Does it hurt?”
   No, not a bit. Her leg feels fine. The shot hurt more.
   The ring on Tabbi’s finger, the sparkling green peridot, it catches light from the window. The rug edges along the bottom of the window, and under the rug’s where Misty’s hidden her tip money. Their ticket home to Tecumseh Lake.
   Grace puts the phone into an empty shopping bag and holds her hand out to Tabbi. She says, “Come. Let’s give your mother a rest.”
   Dr. Touchet stands in the open door and says, “Grace? If I could talk to you, in private?”
   Tabbi gets off the bed, and Grace leans down to whisper in her ear. Then Tabbi nods her head, fast. She’s wearing the heavy pink necklace of shimmering rhinestones. It’s so wide it must feel as heavy around her neck as the cast does around her mother’s leg. A sparkling millstone. A junk jewelry ball and chain. Tabbi undoes the clasp and brings it to the bed, saying, “Hold up your head.”
   She reaches a hand past each of Misty’s shoulders and snaps the necklace around her mother’s neck.
   Just for the record, Misty’s not an idiot. Poor Misty Marie Kleinman knew the blood on her panties was Peter’s. But right now, at this moment, she’s so glad she didn’t abort her child.
   Your blood.
   Why Misty said yes to marrying you—she doesn’t know. Why does anyone do anything? Already she’s melting into the bed. Every breath is slower than the last. Her levator palpebrae muscles have to work hard to keep her eyes open.
   Tabbi goes to the easel and takes down a tablet of drawing paper. She brings the paper and a charcoal pencil and puts them on the blankets beside her mother, saying, “For in case you get inspiration.”
   And Misty gives her a slow-motion kiss on the forehead.
   Between the cast and the necklace, Misty feels pinned to the bed. Staked out. A sacrifice. An anchoress.
   Then Grace takes Tabbi’s hand and they go out to Dr. Touchet in the hallway. The door closes. It’s so quiet, Misty’s not sure if she hears right. But there’s an extra little click.
   And Misty calls, “Grace?” Misty calls, “Tabbi?” In slow motion, Misty says, “Hey there? Hello?” Just for the record, they’ve locked her in.

July 30
   THE FIRST TIME Misty wakes up after her accident, her pubic hair’s gone and a catheter is inside her, snaking down her good leg to a clear plastic bag hooked to the bedpost. Bands of white surgical tape strap the tube to her leg skin.
   Dear sweet Peter, nobody has to tell you how that feels.
   Dr. Touchet’s been at work again.
   Just for the record, waking up on drugs with your pubic hair shaved and something plastic stuck in your vagina doesn’t necessarily make you a real artist.
   If it did, Misty would be painting the Sistine Chapel. Instead she’s wadding up another wet sheet of 140-pound watercolor paper. Outside her little dormer window, the sun’s baking the sand on the beach. The waves hiss and burst. Seagulls tremble, hanging in the wind, hovering white kites, while kids make sand castles and splash in the rising tide.
   It would be one thing to trade all her sunny days for a masterpiece, but this . . . her day’s been just one shitty smeared mistake after another. Even with her full-leg cast and her little bag of piss, Misty wants to be outside. As an artist, you organize your life so you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that’s no guarantee you’ll create anything worth all your effort. You’re always haunted by the idea you’re wasting your life.
   The truth is, if Misty were on the beach, she’d be looking up at this window, dreaming of being a painter.
   The truth is, wherever you choose to be, it’s the wrong place.
   Misty’s half standing at her easel, balanced on a tall stool, looking out the window toward Waytansea Point, Tabbi’s sitting in the patch of sunlight at her feet, coloring her cast with felt-tipped pens. That’s what hurts. It’s bad enough Misty spent most of her childhood hiding indoors, coloring in books, dreaming of being an artist. Now she’s modeling this bad behavior for her kid. All the mud pies Misty missed baking, now Tabbi’s going to miss. Whatever it is teenagers do. All the kites Misty didn’t fly, the games of tag Misty skipped, all the dandelions Misty didn’t pick, Tabbi is making her same mistake.
   The only flowers Tabbi’s seen, she found with her grandmother, painted around the rim of a teacup.
   School starts in a few weeks, and Tabbi’s still so pale from staying inside.
   Misty’s brush making another mess on the page in front of her, Misty says, “Tabbi honey?”
   Tabbi sits, rubbing a red pen on the cast. The resin and cloth is so thick, Misty can’t feel a thing.
   Misty’s smock is one of Peter’s old blue work shirts with a rusted fur clip of fake rubies on the front pocket. Fake rubies and glass diamonds. Tabbi’s brought the box of dress-up jewelry, all the junk brooches and bracelets and single earrings that Peter gave Misty in school.
   That you gave your wife.
   Misty’s wearing your shirt, and she tells Tabbi, “Why don’t you run outside for a few hours?”
   Tabbi switches the red pen for a yellow one, and she says, “Granmy Wilmot said for me not to.” Coloring, Tabbi says, “She told me to stay with you as long as you’re awake.”
   This morning, Angel Delaporte’s brown sports car pulled into the hotel’s gravel parking lot. Wearing a wide straw beach hat, Angel got out and walked up to the front porch. Misty kept expecting Paulette to come up from the front desk and say she had a visitor, but no. A half hour later, Angel came out the hotel’s front doors and walked down the porch steps. With one hand, he held his hat in place as he tilted his head back and scanned the hotel windows, the clutter of signs and logos. Corporate graffiti. Competing immortalities. Then Angel put on his sunglasses, slipped into his sports car, and drove away.
   In front of her is another painted mess. Her perspective is all wrong.
   Tabbi says, “Granmy told me to help you get inspired.”
   Instead of painting, Misty should be teaching her child some skill—bookkeeping or cost analysis or television repair. Some realistic way she can pay her bills.
   Sometime after Angel Delaporte drove away, Detective Stilton drove up in a plain beige county government car. He walked into the hotel, then went back to his car a few minutes later. He stood in the parking lot, shading his eyes with one hand, staring up at the hotel, looking from window to window, but not seeing her. Then he drove away.
   The mess in front of her, the colors are running and smudged. The trees could be microwave relay towers. The ocean could be volcano lava or cold chocolate pudding or just six bucks’ worth of gouache watercolors, wasted. Misty tears off the sheet and wads it into a ball. Her hands are almost black with wadding up her failures all day. Her head aches. Misty closes her eyes and presses a hand to her forehead, where she feels it stick with wet paint.
   Misty drops the wadded painting on the floor.
   And Tabbi says, “Mom?”
   Misty opens her eyes.
   Tabbi’s colored birds and flowers down the length of her cast. Blue birds and red robins and red roses.
   When Paulette brings up their lunch on a room service cart, Misty asks if anyone has tried to phone from the front desk. Paulette shakes out the cloth napkin and tucks it into the collar of the blue work shirt. She says, “Sorry, nobody.” She takes the warming cover off a plate of fish and says, “Why do you ask?”
   And Misty says, “No reason.”
   Now, sitting here with Tabbi, with flowers and birds crayoned on her leg, Misty knows she’ll never be an artist. The picture she sold Angel, it was a fluke. An accident. Instead of crying, Misty just pees a few drips into her plastic tube.
   And Tabbi says, “Close your eyes, Mom.” She says, “Color with your eyes closed, like you did on my birthday picnic.”
   Like she did when she was little Misty Marie Kleinman. Her eyes closed on the shag carpet in the trailer.
   Tabbi leans close and whispers, “We were hiding in the trees and peeking at you.” She says, “Granmy said we had to let you get inspiration.”
   Tabbi goes to the dresser and gets the roll of masking tape that Misty uses to hold paper on the easel. She tears off two strips and says, “Now close your eyes.”
   Misty has nothing to lose. She can indulge her kid. Her work couldn’t get any worse. Misty closes her eyes.
   And Tabbi’s little fingers press a strip of tape over each eyelid.
   The way her father’s eyes are taped shut. To keep them from drying out.
   Your eyes are taped shut.
   In the dark, Tabbi’s fingers put a pencil in Misty’s hand. You can hear as she sets a drawing pad on the easel and lifts the cover sheet. Then her hands take Misty’s and carry the pencil until it touches the paper.
   The sun from the window feels warm. Tabbi’s hand lets go, and her voice in the dark says, “Now draw your picture.”
   And Misty’s drawing, the perfect circles and angles, the straight lines Angel Delaporte says are impossible. Just by the feeling, it’s perfect and right. What it is, Misty has no idea. The way a stylus moves itself across a Ouija board, the pencil takes her hand back and forth across the paper so fast Misty has to grip it tight. Her automatic writing.
   Misty’s just able to hold on, and she says, “Tabbi?”
   The tape tight over her eyes, Misty says, “Tabbi? Are you still there?”

August 2
   THERE’S A LITTLE TUG between Misty’s legs, a little pull deep inside her when Tabbi snaps the bag off the end of Misty’s catheter and takes it down the hall to the bathroom. She empties the bag into the toilet and washes it. Tabbi brings it back and snaps it onto the long plastic tube.
   She does all this so Misty can keep working in the pitch dark. Her eyes taped. Blind.
   There’s just the feel of warm sunshine from the window. The moment the paintbrush stops, Misty says, “This is done.”
   And Tabbi slips the drawing off the easel and clips on a new sheet of paper. She takes the pencil when it looks dull and gives Misty a sharp one. She holds out a tray of pastel crayons, and Misty feels them blind, greasy piano keys of color, and picks one.
   Just for the record, every color Misty picks, every mark she makes, is perfect because she’s stopped caring.
   For breakfast, Paulette brings up a room service tray, and Tabbi cuts everything into single bites. While Misty works, Tabbi puts the fork into her mother’s mouth. With the tape over her face, Misty can only open her mouth so far. Just wide enough to suck her paintbrush into a sharp point. To poison herself. Still working, Misty doesn’t taste. Misty doesn’t smell. After a few bites of breakfast, she’s had enough.
   Except for the scratch of the pencil on paper, the room is quiet. Outside, five floors down, the ocean waves hiss and burst.
   For lunch, Paulette brings up more food Misty doesn’t eat. Already the leg cast feels loose from all the weight she’s lost. Too much solid food would mean a trip to the toilet. It would mean a break in her work. Almost no white is left on the cast, Tabbi has covered it with so many flowers and birds. The fabric of her smock is stiff with slopped paint. Stiff and sticking to her arms and breasts. Her hands are crusted with dried paint. Poisoned.
   Her shoulders ache and pop, and her wrist grinds inside. Her fingers are numb around a charcoal pencil. Her neck spasms, cramping up along each side of her spine. Her neck feels the way Peter’s neck looks, arched back and touching his butt. Her wrists feel the way Peter’s look, twisted and knotted.
   Her eyes taped shut, her face is relaxed so it won’t fight the two strips of masking tape that run from her forehead down across each eye, down her cheeks to her jaw, then down to her neck. The tape keeps the orbicularis oculi muscle around her eye, the zygomatic major at the corner of her mouth, it keeps all her facial muscles relaxed. With the tape, Misty can open her lips just a sliver. She can only talk in a whisper.
   Tabbi puts a drinking straw in her mouth and Misty sucks some water. Tabbi’s voice says, “No matter what happens, Granmy says you have to keep doing your art.”
   Tabbi wipes around her mother’s mouth, saying, “I need to go pretty soon.” She says, “Please don’t stop, no matter how much you miss me.” She says, “Do you promise?”
   And still working, Misty whispers, “Yes.”
   “No matter how long I’m gone?” Tabbi says.
   And Misty whispers, “I promise.”