“She always shows me that damn math test!” My arms were flying, and I drew the test with Molly’s name in flowing script at the top.
The math test fluttered away as if Molly had whipped it out of my hands. I hadn’t shown the proper appreciation for that red A circled at the top. Tag wasn’t the only one in the family with a temper, apparently. The A in the circle became a star, just a simple golden star that morphed into a night sky with stars shooting and exploding, like she was staring up at a light show, so glorious and color-filled that I cursed the pencil in my hand and begged Tag to bring me something else.
Then Molly showed me fields, fields that looked just like the fields around the overpass and I tried not to curse in frustration. Instead, I drew the long golden strands of wheat in those fields, blending them with Molly’s hair as she raced through my mind, until the wheat became weeds that brushed against the concrete overpass.
“Stop! Moses!” Tag was shaking my shoulders and slapping at my face. “What the hell, man! You’re drawing on the walls!” Tag’s voice faded off. “Actually, I don’t give a shit if you draw on the walls.”
But the connection was gone, and I was dazed. I was pissed too, and stepped back from the wild, star-filled sky, smudged and shaded and half-finished before me. If I would have had paint
I was breathing too hard, and so was Tag, as if he’d crossed to the other side with me and had run, chasing his sister through fields of wheat that led to nowhere and made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.
He looked down at the images I’d tossed around the room and started picking them up, one at a time.
“A math test? With an A circled at the top?”
“It’s red. The A is red.” I hadn’t been able to illustrate that with the pencil.
“And this overpass is in Nephi?”
I nodded.
“Nephi’s only about an hour from Sanpete. You knew that, right?”
I nodded again. And Nephi was fifteen minutes north of Levan. All the kids from Levan were bussed to school in Nephi. It was practically the same town. And I wasn’t going near either of them. Tag could beg and plead, and his angry green eyes could explode in his head, and I still wasn’t going back.
“What’s with the fields?”
“There are fields surrounding the overpass. There’s a truck stop, a couple gas stations, a cheap motel and a burger joint a little farther down by the off-ramp, but that’s all. It’s fields and a freeway, and that’s pretty much it.”
“And what’s this?” Tag pointed at the wall where my pencil had proven frustratingly insufficient at conveying the exploding colors and streaks of light.
I shrugged. “Fireworks?”
“It was Fourth of July weekend,” Tag whispered.
I shrugged again. “I don’t know, Tag. I don’t know anything other than what she showed me.”
“Why doesn’t she just tell you where she is?”
“Because it doesn’t work that way. Why?” Tag was getting frustrated again.
“That’s like asking me why I can’t live in the ocean. Or why I can’t bench a thousand pounds or . . . why I can’t fly, for hell’s sake! I just can’t. And no amount of focus or study or attention to detail is going to make those things possible. It is what it is!”
I picked up my sketch pad and realized I’d ripped every last page out, including the pictures that had nothing to do with Molly Taggert. Those pages were also tossed around the room. And there were no blank pages left. I started gathering them, despondent that I was going to be repainting walls again. Tag followed behind me, still clinging to the pages he’d picked up.
“She’s got to be there,” he said softly, and I stopped gathering and looked back at him. His eyes were bright and his shoulders were set.
“Maybe she is.” I shrugged helplessly. I didn’t want anything to do with any of it. “But can you imagine if they find her? Especially if I pointed them in that direction? They will throw my ass in jail. Do you understand that? They will think I did it.” I didn’t say killed her. It felt too cold to say it to his face, though we both knew what we were talking about.
Suddenly the door to my room swung open and Chaz barreled in, alarm marring his friendly face and robbing him of his ever-present white smile. Relief quickly replaced the alarm as he realized no blood had been spilled, and neither of us were incapacitated on the floor.
“Mr. Taggert. You are not supposed to be in here!” he huffed. Then he saw my grease painting and swore. “Not again, man! You were doin’ so well.”
I shrugged. “I ran out of paper.”
Chaz ushered Tag out, and he didn’t resist, but at the door he paused.
“Thank you, Moses.”
Chaz looked surprised at the exchange, but tugged on Tag, all the same.
“I’ll take the blame for the drawing on the wall. I’m sure everyone will believe me.” Tag winked, and Chaz and I both laughed.
Moses
TAG WASN’T THE ONLY ONE who made a habit of sneaking into my room for private sessions. Word started to get around about what I could do. What I could see. What I could paint.
Carol, a psychiatrist in her fifties who never seemed fazed by anything and was married to her work, had lost a brother to suicide when she was twelve. It was what had led her to work with the mentally ill. That same brother started showing me roller skates and a scruffy stuffed rabbit with a missing ear. So I told her what I saw. She hadn’t believed me at first, so I told her that her brother loved potato salad, the color purple, Johnny Carson, and could only play one song on his ukulele, which he played and sang to her each night before she went to sleep. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” That was the song. She had taken me off the antipsychotics the next day.