“What? What’s so funny?” His baffled amusement was hard to resist, and I found myself smiling even as I wiped my eyes.
“That’s what they’re all trying to tell me. I never understood it before. The random items. The everyday stuff. It’s always driven me crazy.” He choked on the words, trying to speak around the mirth. And it really wasn’t that funny. In fact, maybe it wasn’t funny at all.
I just shook my head, still smiling at his wheezing laughter. “I don’t understand.”
“Do you know how many times I’ve painted a still life of the most mundane thing? Mundane things that never made sense, but that people, the dead, seemed to care about. Buttons and cherries, red roses and cotton sheets on the clothes line. Once I painted a picture of a worn-out running shoe.” He clasped his hands over his head, the laughter abating as the truth seemed to sink in. “And I always just assumed it had this great meaning that I just couldn’t grasp. The families love that stuff. They come see me, I paint whatever their loved ones show me. They leave happy, I make money. But I never understood. I’ve always felt like I was missing something.”
I wasn’t smiling anymore. My chest hurt and I couldn’t decide whether it was joy or pain that made it ache.
“And I was missing something, wasn’t I?” Moses shook his head. He turned in a circle, almost as if he couldn’t believe he’d just solved the puzzle that wasn’t ever really much of a mystery.
“They’re telling me what they miss. They’re telling me their greats. Just like Eli . . . aren’t they, Georgia?”
Moses
THE PAIN WAS A ROLLING, all-consuming wave inside of me. It had started small. Just an ache in my back and a weakness in my legs. I ignored it, pretending I still had time. It was early yet. But as the hours passed and darkness fell, the heat from the street found its way into my belly, and I was ripping at my clothes trying to escape the searing pain. I was being burned alive. I tried to run from it when it paused for breath, and it would abate as if it lost track of me for a few minutes. But it always found me again, and the wave of pressure and pain would roll me under.
But worse than the pain was the niggling fear in the back of my jumbled brain. I’d prayed so hard, just like I had been taught. I’d prayed for forgiveness and redemption, for strength and for a chance to start over. And mostly I prayed for cover. But I had a feeling my prayers didn’t rise much farther than the simmering air above my head.
It hurt. It hurt so much. I just needed it to stop hurting.
So I begged for a pardon. Just something to take me away for a minute, something to help me hide. Just for a minute. Just something that would give me one last moment of peace, something to help me face what came next.
But there was no cover granted, and when the fog lifted and the fever broke, I looked down into his face and knew my scarlet sins would never be as white as snow.
I came awake with a start, breathing hard, the pain of the dream still gripping my stomach and curling my legs and arms into my chest.
“What the hell was that?” I groaned, sitting up in my bed and wiping the sweat from my forehead. It felt like the dream I’d had about Eli and Stewy Stinker, the dream that wasn’t a dream. And then I’d woken up and seen the girl, the girl Lisa Kendrick said was her cousin. She’d walked through my house and touched the wall. And I’d made the connection.
But I didn’t see the connection yet. Not this time. I stood from my bed and stumbled to the bathroom, washing my face and throat with cold water, trying to ease the heat on my skin that always came with episodes like this.
It hadn’t been my pain—in the dream—it hadn’t been my pain. It had been a woman. A girl . . . and she was having a baby. Her thoughts and her agony and then the child in her arms as she’d looked down into his squalling face all indicated child birth. His squalling face? I suppose that was right. She’d thought of the child as a boy.
Maybe it was Eli, showing me his birth, the way he’d shown me his bedtime ritual. But that didn’t seem right either. It hadn’t been Eli’s eyes I’d looked through. It hadn’t been Eli’s thoughts in my head. But nothing with Eli had been like any other experience I’d ever had. The connection was different. More intense, more detailed. More everything. So maybe it was possible.
But it didn’t feel right. Eli showed me images and perspectives relative and relevant to his understanding. As an infant, being born into the world, he would not have had that perspective. It was Georgia’s perspective. It was as if I was looking through her eyes, feeling her emotions, her pain. Her despair. She had been filled with fear and despair. I hated that. I hated that she had felt so alone. Eli should have been celebrated. But in the dream, there was no joy or celebration. Just fear. Just pain.
And maybe it was just a dream.
That was possible too. Maybe I wanted to rewrite history so badly that my subconscious had re-created a moment that fed into my guilt and my regret, putting me there, in the room with Georgia as Eli had come into the world. I mopped at the water on my neck and walked down the stairs without turning on any lights, needing a glass of water or maybe something stronger.
I’d left the lamp on in the family room. I’d sanded down the entire wall where the girl had revealed her face. Last night I’d painted it again, covering Molly and Sylvie and the other, nameless, somewhat faceless girls beyond them with a thick coat of yellow. I wanted yellow in the room. No more plain white. I was tired of white. I got a beer from the fridge and held the can against my face, eyeing the cheerful, buttery wall, thankfully devoid of any dead faces. For now. I would paint the other walls when morning came.