“Mrs. Wright?” I said again, and then I knew. She wasn’t sleeping. And this wasn’t real. I must be the one sleeping.
“Kathleen?” I shrieked, falling back from my haunches. I caught myself instinctively, but felt a sharp slice, almost a tug, and yanked my hand away, scrambling and shrieking like death was biting and it was going to take me too. The seat of my freshly washed jeans were wet. I’d sat in some water and there was glass on the floor. It was just glass. Not death. But Kathleen Wright was dead and someone had covered her up, knowing she was dead.
I yanked a dish towel from the counter and realized I’d uncovered the pies—beautiful pies, all laid out on the counter. Four of them. There was a piece missing from the apple pie. I stared at the missing section for a second, wondering if Kathleen had sampled her baking before she died. It suddenly made the moment real and all the more tragic, and I turned away, wrapping my bleeding hand and clamoring for Kathleen’s old phone on the wall. I had to step over her to get to it, and that’s when I started to shake.
I dialed 911, just like we’re all told to do in an emergency. It didn’t take too many rings before an operator was there, an efficient-voiced woman, asking me all types of questions. I rattled off answers, even as my mind moved on to the horror I still hadn’t faced. Where was Moses? I could smell paint. I could smell paint and I had heard someone. Paint meant Moses. I set the phone down, the operator still talking, asking me something that I’d already answered. Then I walked through the little door that led to the family room on wooden legs, my rear-end wet, my hand bleeding, my heart on pause.
He was covered in paint—head, arms and clothing streaked with blue and yellow, doused in red and orange, splattered with purple and black. He still wore the clothes he’d worn when he left me that morning, though nothing looked the same. The tail of his shirt was the only part that was untucked, strangely enough. But that wasn’t the strangest thing. Not by far. The walls were covered in paint too, but there was nothing splattered or haphazard about the paint on the walls.
It was both manic and mesmerizing, it was controlled chaos and detailed dementia. Moses had painted right over the pictures and the windows too. The curtains were streaked with paint, incorporated into the pictures like he couldn’t stop to pull them aside. From the amount of wall space he’d covered, he’d been at it for hours. There was graffiti and horses and people I’d never seen before. There were hallways and pathways and doorways and bridges, as if Moses was running from one place to the next, painting every inexplicable thing he saw. There was a woman’s face over a laundry basket. Her long, blonde hair streamed out around her and the basket was full of babies. It was both beautiful and bizarre, one image becoming another and another, without rhyme or reason. And there Moses stood, staring at the wall in front of him, a section of white yet to be filled, his hands by his sides.
And then he looked at me, his eyes hollow and rimmed with circles so dark they made his burnished skin look pale in comparison. The streaks of paint across his face made him look like a weary warrior returning from battle, only to find devastation at his doorstep.
And I ran to him.
I’ve thought back on that moment so many times since then. Replayed it on a loop. The way I ran to him. The way I threw my arms around him, filled with compassion, completely unafraid. I held onto him as he stood there shivering, muttering something to himself. I think I asked him to tell me what happened. I don’t remember exactly. I just remember he was freezing, icy to the touch, and I asked him if he was cold. And he laughed, just a brief, incredulous laugh. Then he shoved me away so hard that I fell back again, stumbling and then falling to the floor, my injured hand leaving a bloody smear across the pale carpet. There were slashes of paint everywhere, and my bloody handprint looked unremarkable. Completely unremarkable.
Moses wrapped his arms around his head, shielding his eyes, and repeated something about water, over and over. His lips were the only part of his face I could see and I watched them move around the words.
“Water is white when it’s angry. Blue when it’s calm. Red when the sun sets, black at midnight. And water is clear when it falls. Clear when it washes through my head and out my fingertips. Water is clear and it washes all the colors away, it washes all the pictures away.”
I couldn’t take anymore. The 911 operator had told me to wait. But I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t stay in that house for one more second.
And for the very first time, I ran away from him.
Moses
I WOKE UP IN A PADDED ROOM. Not a cell. A room. But it might as well have been. When I came to they took my clothes, documented any wounds or marks on my skin, and gave me a pair of pale yellow scrubs to wear and socks to put on my feet. I was informed I could earn back my clothes as I followed the rules. Various people came to see me. Doctors, therapists, psychiatrists with little medical charts. They all tried to talk to me, but I was too numb to talk. And they all left eventually.
I was alone in my room for three days with meals brought in to me, some pencils to write with, and a lined notebook. Nobody wanted me to paint here. They wanted me to talk. To write in notebooks. To write and write. The more I wrote, the happier they were, until they read what I’d written and thought I was being uncooperative. But words were hard for me. If they let me paint, I could express myself. I was instructed to “journal” all my feelings. I was asked to explain what happened at my grandmother’s house on Thanksgiving Day. Wasn’t there a song about Grandma and Thanksgiving? I was sure there was and wrote it a few times in the notebook they provided.