I pulled the pillow out from under my head and groaned into it, trying to smother the memory of her stunned face and her wide brown eyes, locked on mine. She was all grown up, with slightly fuller hips and breasts but a leanness to her face that made her cheekbones more prominent, as if youthful flesh had fled her face and settled in better places. She was a woman, straight-backed and steady-eyed. Even when she saw me and realized who I was, she hadn’t shrunk or slunk away.
But seeing me had rocked her. Just like it rocked me. I saw it in the way her mouth tightened and her hands clenched. I saw it in the lift of her chin and the flash in her eyes. And then she’d looked away, dismissing me. When the elevator came to rest and the doors slid open, she stepped out without a second glance, long, jean-clad legs moving in a way that was both achingly familiar and totally new. And the doors shut without me getting off, even though we’d reached the top floor. I’d missed my floor. I hadn’t wanted to get off and walk away. So I let her walk away instead. Little good that had done. I didn’t know why she was there or what she was doing. And she hadn’t smiled and given me a quick hug like old friends did when they ran into each other after many years.
I was glad. Her actual response was more telling. It mirrored my own. If she’d smiled and exchanged empty small talk, I would have had to make an appointment with Dr. Andelin. Several appointments. It might have wrecked me. Georgia had haunted me for more than six years, and from the look on her face when I’d stepped on the elevator, my memory hadn’t left her alone either. There was solace in that. Miserable solace, but solace.
I lifted my pillow and peeked under my arm to see if he was gone. I breathed out gratefully. The little bat had flown. I bunched the pillow under my neck and switched sides.
I cursed and shot up from my bed, flinging the pillow wildly. He hadn’t left. He’d just moved. He’d moved so close I could see the length of his lashes and the curve of his top lip and the way the Velcro on his black cape curled up at the edges.
He smiled, revealing a row of small white teeth and a dimple in his right cheek. I immediately regretted my string of curses and then swore again, the same words at the same volume.
I felt the butterfly wings of a visiting thought tickle the backs of my eyes and I threw up my hands in surrender.
“Fine. Show me your pictures. I’ll paint a few and slap them on my fridge. I don’t know who you are, so I can’t exactly send them to your folks, but go right ahead. Let me see ‘em.”
The fluttering butterfly nudges became fully extended wings that spread through my mind and filled my head with a white horse whose hind quarters were dappled in black and brown, as if an artist had started to fill in the white space only to get distracted and leave the job undone.
The horse whinnied and galloped around a little enclosure and I felt the little boy’s pleasure watching her toss her white mane and stamp her pretty feet.
Calico. I felt her name as he called out to her, the word wrapped around the memory in the only way I could hear it. The horse trotted around the enclosure and then drew close, so close that her long nose grew huge in my mind’s eye. I felt her breath against my palm, and realized not only could I hear the little boy talking to her as he once must have done, but I could feel the stroke of his hand, as if it were my own as he drew it from the patch between her eyes to the snuffling nostrils that bumped at my chest. Not my chest. His chest. He shared the memory so clearly, so perfectly that I sat on the fence with him, and felt and heard the things he’d seen.
“The smartest fastest horse in all of Cactus County.” Again I felt his voice in my head. Not spoken. Just heard. Just there, woven through the memory as if I’d caught not just a snapshot, but a video clip. The sound was muffled and muted, like a home video with the sound turned too far down. But it was there, part of the memory, a little voice narrating the scene.
And then the butterfly memory flitted up and away, and for a moment my mind was empty and blank like a broken TV screen.
Sometimes the dead showed me the strangest things—things that didn’t make sense. Nickels or plants or a bowl of mashed potatoes. I rarely understood what they wanted to convey—only that they wanted to communicate something. Over time I’d come to the conclusion that the mundane wasn’t mundane to them. The things they showed me always represented a memory or a moment that had somehow been meaningful. How, I didn’t always know, but it had become clear that the simplest things were the most important things, and objects themselves weren’t really important at all. The dead didn’t care about land or money or the heirloom that had been passed down through the generations. But they cared desperately about the people they left behind. And it was the people that called them back. Not because the dead weren’t adjusting, but because their loved ones weren’t. The dead weren’t angry or lost. They knew exactly what was up. It was the living that didn’t have a clue. Most of the time, I myself didn’t have a clue, and trying to figure out what the dead wanted from me was taxing, to say the least. And I didn’t like dead kids.
The child stared, his deep brown eyes soulful and serious, waiting for something from me.
“No. I don’t want any part of this. I don’t want you here. Go away.” I spoke firmly, and immediately another image pushed into my mind, clearly the child’s response to my refusal. This time, I clamped my eyes closed and pushed back violently, picturing walls of water tumbling down, covering the exposed earth—the dry land, the channel that allowed people to cross from one side to the other. I had the power to part the waters. And I had the power to call them back again. Just like Gi told me, just like the Biblical Moses. When I opened my eyes the little boy was gone, washed away in the Red Sea. The Red, I-Don’t-Want-to-See.
Moses