“Gigi!” I shook her and patted her cheek. But her head just lolled a little to the side and her eyes stayed closed. She lay on the kitchen floor, a heap of fragile limbs wrapped in her quilted robe. A broken glass lay at her side in three fat pieces, sharp islands in a large pool of blood tinged water. She’d hit her head when she fell, and the blood had merged with the water from her glass. It wasn’t a lot of blood. It was as if she was dead before she hit the ground; the blood spilt looked insufficient, almost. Death should require more blood.
When I’d come home the night before, I’d gone straight up to the bathroom and then from there, straight to my room. I’d lain in bed trying to hold out on Georgia. She’d stayed scarce for a month. And now she wanted me? It made me angry. And yet I wanted to see her. I wanted to see her so bad. I finally gave in, threw on my jeans and a shirt and crept out of the house, not wanting to wake Gi.
What if she’d lain here all night?
I laid my head against her chest, and I waited, willing her heart to resume its beat against my ear. But she felt cold. And her heart stayed quiet. She was cold. Without realizing what I was doing, I ran for a blanket and covered her up, tucking the blanket around her body securely.
“Gigi!” I closed my eyes, needing her to tell me what to do. I could see people who were dead. I saw them all the time. I needed to see Gigi. I needed her to tell me what happened. I needed her to take me with her.
I got my brushes. Assembled my paints. And I sat next to her and waited for her to come back to me, however she could. And when she did I would fill her walls with all her pictures. I would paint each day of her life until this one—this last terrible day—and she would tell me what the hell I was supposed to do now. I opened myself up, wide open like a gaping canyon with sharp edges and steep cliffs. I parted the waters, and as I concentrated, the walls of water grew so high I couldn’t see where they ended. Whatever wanted to cross could come. Everyone. Anybody. Just as long as they brought Gi back across.
But I didn’t feel Gigi. I didn’t see her. I saw my mother. I saw Georgia’s grandfather, I saw the girl named Molly and the man named Mel Butters who died inside his barn. He had his horses with him and he was happy. His happiness mocked me now, and I raged at him as I ran past his images of long rides and summer sunsets. He drew away immediately. I felt Ray, the man who loved Ms. Murray. He was worried about her and that worry pulsed out of him in grey waves. She wasn’t doing well. The picture we made for her didn’t comfort her.
I felt all their lives and their memories and I pushed them aside, trying to find my grandmother. There were others too. People I’d felt, pictures I’d seen before, memories that weren’t my own. These were people who had come to me over the years. People of all ages, of all colors. There was the Polynesian boy and his sister, Teo and Kalia, gang members who died in a turf war with the same gang I ran with for almost a year before being sent to live with Gigi. I’d resented losing that sense of belonging, though it had been a charade. I’d resented it like I resented all the other times I was uprooted. The brother and his sister tried to slow me down, to share their pictures of a younger sibling who was left behind, but I kept running, looking for Gigi.
As always, there were the lurkers, the gritty black smear that sat at the corner of my vision whenever I let myself get too deep. I never got too close or looked inside them. They stayed far away from the translucence that surrounded the people who showed me their lives. I wasn’t sure, but I suspected the lurkers were the dead who couldn’t let go, the dead who didn’t believe in an afterlife, so refused to see the life after, even though it glowed like a sea of candles and beckoned them sweetly. Maybe they couldn’t see it.
The sex, violence, and desperation of the kids in the gang, many who had abandoned all light, was a decadent cesspool for the lurkers. They were like a swarm around those kids. The longer I was in the gang, the better I could see them. Since coming to Levan, they’d stayed away.
And then there were people I didn’t know, people I’d never touched, people who had never touched me. There were generations of them, standing back to back in a long endless line, and they smiled at me like I was home. But I couldn’t find Gigi. And Gigi was home.
“Gigi!” I screamed, and my throat was so dry and sore that I stopped running through the world no one else seemed to be able to see. My head stopped spinning, but I was covered in paint. I had been painting the whole time I searched for my grandmother. The walls of Gigi’s house were covered in images that morphed from one to another without rhyme or reason. I’d painted the man I was certain was my great-grandfather, Gigi’s husband, a man I’d never met. I’d seen him in recent days. I’d seen him just beyond Gi’s right shoulder, shimmering, as if he was waiting for her to join him. Now his face was there among the others.
And there were so many others. I’d painted lurkers swarming the four corners of the room with hollow eyes and mournful faces. And between the faces of those I recognized and those I did not were grasping hands, burning barns, crashing waves and lightning. My mother’s face was there too, holding a basket, like she thought she needed to illustrate who she was. As if I didn’t know. I’d seen her a thousand times in my head. There were gang signs on the walls too, as if Teo and Kalia were warning me away. Red swirled into black, black swirled into grey, grey swirled into white, until the images stopped where I now stood.
“Moses! Moses, where are you?”
Georgia. Georgia was in the house. Georgia was in the kitchen. I heard her breathless rush of words, calling first to me and then babbling into the phone, telling whoever she was talking to that Kathleen Wright was “lying on the kitchen floor.”
“I think she’s dead. I think she’s been dead for a while. I can’t tell what happened to her, but she’s very, very cold,” she cried.