Georgia nodded. She knew. Everybody did.
“Gigi would tell me the stories to fill my head with better things. But it wasn’t until she started showing me artwork that things started to change. She had a book with religious art in it. Someone had donated it to the church and Gi brought it home so that nobody at church would see all those paintings of naked white people and get offended. She colored all the naked parts in with a black Sharpie.”
Georgia laughed, and I felt the air lodge in my throat. Her laugh was throaty and soft, and it made my heart swell like a balloon in my chest, fuller and fuller until I had to sneak breaths around its increased size.
“So you liked the pictures?” Georgia prodded after I stayed frozen and silent too long.
“Yes.”Georgia laughed again.
“Not the naked people.” I felt ridiculous and actually felt my face get hot. “I liked the beauty. The color. The anguish.”
“The anguish?” Georgia’s voice rose in question.
“It was an anguish that had nothing to do with me. An anguish everyone could see. Not just me. And I wasn’t expected to make it all go away.”
Georgia’s gaze touched on my face like a whisper and drifted away almost immediately, drawn to my tracing fingers.
“Have you ever seen the face of the Pieta?” I wanted her eyes on me again and I got what I wanted.
“What’s the Pieta?” she asked.
“It’s a sculpture by Michelangelo. A sculpture of Mary holding Jesus. Her son. After he died,” I paused, wondering why I was telling her this. I seriously doubted she cared. But I found myself continuing anyway.
“Her face, Mary’s face . . . it’s so beautiful. So peaceful. I don’t like the rest of the sculpture as much. But Mary’s face is exquisite. When I can’t take the stuff in my head, I think about her face. And I fill my mind with other things too. I think about the color and light of a Manet, the details of a Vermeer—Vermeer includes the tiniest things in his paintings, little cracks in the walls, a stain on a collar, a single nail, and there is such beauty in those little things, in the perfect ordinariness of them. I think about those things and I push out the images I can’t control, the things I don’t want to see, but am forced to see . . . all the time.” I stopped talking. I was almost panting. My mouth felt strange, numb, like I’d surpassed my daily word limit, and my lips and tongue were weak from overuse. I didn’t remember the last time I’d talked so much all at once.
“The perfect ordinariness . . .” Georgia breathed, and she lifted her hand and followed the wet path my finger made, as if she, too, could paint. Then she looked at me solemnly.
“I’m a very ordinary girl, Moses. I know that I am. And I always will be. I can’t paint. I don’t know who Vermeer is, or Manet for that matter. But if you think ordinary can be beautiful, that gives me hope. And maybe sometime you’ll think about me when you need an escape from the hurt in your head.”
Her brown eyes looked black in the shadowed light, the same color as the water we were immersed in, and I reached blindly for something to hold onto, something to keep me from falling into them. Georgia’s right hand was still pressed to the wall beside mine, and I found myself tracing her fingers, like a child traces their hand with a crayon, up and down and around until I paused at the base of her thumb. And then I continued on, letting my fingers dance up her arm, feather light, until I reached her shoulder. I traced the fine bones at her collar as my fingers glided to the opposite side and back down her other arm. When I found her fingers, I slid mine in-between, interlocking them tightly. I waited for her to lean in, to press her mouth to mine, to lead, as she was prone to do. But she stayed still, holding my hand beneath the surface of the water, watching me. And I gave in. Anxiously.
Her lips were wet and cool against mine, and I imagine mine felt the same. But the heat inside her mouth welcomed me like a warm embrace, and I sank into the softness with a sigh that would have embarrassed me had she not matched it with one of her own.
Georgia
MOSES AND I WATCHED as my parents conducted a therapy session with a small group of addicts from a rehab center in Richfield, about an hour south of Levan. Every other week, the van would pull up and the young people would pile out—kids ranging from my age to their early twenties—and for two hours, my parents would bring them out to the round corral and let them interact with the horses in a series of activities designed to help the kids make connections to their own lives.
I helped with the sessions with autistic kids and the kids who rode horses for physical rehab, but when the clients were my age or older, my parents didn’t like me involved in the counseling, even if it was just to work with the horses. So I’d wandered over to Kathleen’s, knowing Moses should be done with work, and coaxed him to the backyard with a couple of Cokes and two pieces of lemon meringue pie Kathleen had been happy to part with. She liked me, and I knew it, and she was incredibly helpful in maneuvering Moses when he pretended to not want my company or lemon meringue pie when we both knew darn well he wanted both.