I WORKED OFF EXCESS ENERGY by running in the evenings, but when I went for my runs I didn’t want to stop and make small talk, nor did I want people seeing my boobs bounce or making snide comments about my farmers tan in my running shorts. My arms and face were brown from working outside almost every day, but I wore Wranglers to work, and my legs weren’t even close to the same shade. Maybe all small towns were like Levan, but people made note of the littlest things, people noticed and commented and talked and shared . . . so I avoided the town and ran down through the fields, past the water tower and up past the old mill when I couldn’t sleep. And tonight I couldn’t sleep.
With my parents home again and things changing rapidly between Moses and me, I was anxious and unsettled. I wanted to be with Moses. Simple as that. And I was pretty sure that’s what he wanted too. But just like that summer seven years ago, Moses and I were hurtling forward at the speed of light, going from forgiveness to forever in days. And I couldn’t do that again. My dad was right about that. I was a woman now, a mother—or I had been. And I couldn’t act like that anymore. So I’d said goodnight to Moses and gone home early like a good little girl. But I wasn’t happy about it. It was definitely time to be moving out of Mom and Dad’s place.
I ran hard and I ran fast, the mini flashlights I carried in each hand streaking back and forth as my arms pumped a steady rhythm. My parents didn’t like me running alone, but I was too old to be asking permission to exercise, and the only danger in the fields came from skunks and distant coyotes, and the occasional rattlesnake. I’d had to hurdle one once. It had been dead. But I hadn’t known that until I’d seen it, still in the same spot, the next night. The skunks weren’t deadly and the coyotes were scared of me, so other than the snakes, I wasn’t too nervous.
The moon was so full my flashlights were unnecessary, and as I neared the old mill, heading into mile three of my five mile loop, the soft white sky backlit the old place and I studied it with new eyes. The old mill looked exactly the same. I wondered why Jeremiah Anderson had hired Moses to clean it out and pull down old partitions and demo interior walls if nothing was ever going to be done with it. The windows were still boarded up and the weeds were taller, but there wasn’t seven years of growth and neglect around the place. Someone was keeping an eye on it.
Whenever I ran by, I remembered the desperation I’d felt the night before Thanksgiving seven years ago, the night I’d waited outside for Moses before chickening out and leaving him a note. But I always ran on by, ignoring the sense of loss, the old longing. But now, with Moses back and hope on my horizon, I found myself stopping for a minute to catch my breath instead of running past. Since seeing the face peeking out of the peeling paint on the wall in Kathleen’s house weeks ago, I had been thinking about the walls at the old mill, about Moses’s paintings. Something was niggling in the back of my brain. I didn’t know if they were still there—brilliance hidden in a dark, dusty old building, boarded up where no one could see them. Someday, someone would want to see them. For me, someday was now. I picked my way through the old parking lot to the back door Moses had always used, sure that it would be locked up tight.
I checked the back service door and it was locked, just as I thought, just like it had been when I checked it that night. But when I checked above the door frame the key was exactly where Moses had always left it when he finished up each day. I fingered it, incredulous, and then slid the key into the deadbolt above the handle and turned it, still not believing it would actually open the door. But the door swung open with a screech of tired hinges, and without hesitation, I stepped inside. I don’t know why I couldn’t leave it alone. But I couldn’t. Now I was here, I had my flashlights, and there was something I wanted to see.
Beyond the back door was a cluster of small offices and then a larger room that was probably a break room of some sort. It was much darker inside without the moonlight spilling over everything, and I held my flashlights extended like twin light sabers, at the ready to take out anything I might come across. The deeper inside I went, the more it changed. The interior was different. Moses had torn down all the smaller workstations in the warehouse portion, and I paused, swinging the lights in large circles, trying to get my bearings. The paintings had been along the back wall, in the corner farthest from the main door, as if Moses had tried to be discreet.
The thought made me chuckle a little. Moses had been anything but discreet. Moses’s stint in Levan that six months in 2006 had been the equivalent of a never-ending fireworks display—all color, crash, the occasional small fire, and lots of smoky residue.
I kept my lights moving in big swaths, forward and out and back again, making sure I didn’t miss anything. The light in my right hand shot past something huddled against the far wall and I jumped, dropping the light and then kicking it toward the shadowy figure as I scrambled for it. It rolled in an arc, the heavier end rotating around the lighter handle. When it stopped it sent a stream of light in the direction I was headed, illuminating nothing but the concrete floor and a pair of legs.