The Law of Moses (25 page)

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

BUT APPARENTLY ELI COULD FLOAT. That was his name. I saw it, written in wriggling, poorly-formed letters on a light-colored surface
. E
L i

Eli wasn’t swallowed up in the waters I called down. He came back. Again. And then again. I even tried to take a trip, as if that had ever worked. Here, there, half-way across the world, there’s no escaping yourself . . . or the dead, Tag reminded me when I complained, throwing my duffle in the back of my truck. The truck was new and smelled of leather and made me want to drive and drive and never stop. I rode with open windows and pounding music to reinforce my walls. But as I headed toward the Salt Flats west of the valley, Eli appeared in the middle of the road, his little black cape blowing in the wind as if he were truly standing there, a forlorn little bat boy in the middle of an empty highway. I ended up turning around and going home, seething at the intrusion, wondering how in the hell he was finding all my cracks.

He showed me a book with a worn cover and dog eared pages, a woman’s voice faint and muffled, speaking the words to the story as Eli turned the pages. Eli sat in her lap, his head pressed up to her chest, and I could feel her wrapped around him, as if I sat there too, in the well created by her crisscrossed legs. He showed me the horse, Calico, and the image of jean-clad legs walking past the table as if he sat beneath it in his own little fort. Random things that meant nothing to me and everything to him.

When he woke me at three a.m. with dreamy images of sunsets and horse rides, seated in front of a woman whose hair tickled his cheeks when he turned his face, I tossed back my covers and began to paint. I worked frantically, desperate to be rid of the child that wouldn’t let me be. The picture in my head was one of my own making. Eli hadn’t put it there, but I could see how they must have looked, the fair mother with her dark-headed son, his head tucked against her chest, seated in front of her on the horse with all the colors. The pair on the horse were moving away, moving toward the sunset spilling over the hills, the colors rich yet blurred, reminiscent of Monet, looking at beauty through a pane of wavy glass, discernable yet elusive. It was my way of keeping the viewer at a distance, allowing them to appreciate without intruding, observe without being a part. It reminded me of the way I’d come to see the dead and the images they shared with me. It was the way I coped. It was the way I kept myself intact.

When I was finished, I stepped back and dropped my hands. My shirt and jeans were splattered with paint, my shoulders impossibly tight, and my hands aching. When I turned, Eli looked on, staring at the brushstrokes that, one by one, created life. Still life, but life all the same. It had to be enough. It had always been enough before.

But when Eli looked back at me, his brow was furrowed and his countenance troubled. And he shook his head slowly.

He showed me the soft light of a lamp that looked like a cowboy boot, the way it tossed light on the wall. His eyes were trained on the wall and I could see a woman’s shadow outlined in the light, and I watched as her shadow leaned in and kissed the child goodnight.

“Goodnight, Stewy Stinker!” she said, nuzzling the curve between his shoulder and his neck.

“Goodnight, Buzzard Bates!” he responded gleefully.

“Goodnight Skunk Skeeter!” she immediately shot back.

“Goodnight, Butch Bones!” Eli chortled.

I didn’t understand the nicknames, but they made me smile. The affection dripped from the memory like water spilling from a downspout. But I still pushed it back, slamming the black doors down on the touching display.

“No, Eli. No. I can’t give you that. I know you want your mother. But I can’t give you that. I can’t give her that. But I can give her this. You help me find her, and I’ll give her this.” I pointed at the drying picture I’d created for the persistent child. “I can give her your picture. You helped me make this. This is from you. I can give her this. You can give her this.”

Eli stared at my offering for several long heartbeats. And without warning, he was gone.

Moses

“IT’S BEAUTIFUL.” Tag lifted his chin toward the canvas on my easel. “Different from what you usually do.”

“Yeah. That’s because it didn’t come from his head. It came from mine.”

“The kid?”

“Yeah.” I rubbed my hands over the stubble on my head, anxious, and not sure why. Eli hadn’t come back. Maybe painting had worked after all.

Tag had wandered up, unannounced, uninvited, just like in the early days, and I was grateful for the intrusion. He would come up when he needed a sparring partner or something from my fridge or a piece of art to temporarily place in a prominent position to impress whichever female he had over for the evening.

But he’d already worked out, apparently, and I wouldn’t be taking any pent-up frustration out on him today. His hair was wet around the edges, curling and clinging to his neck and forehead, and sweat from his workout had soaked through his shirt and made it stick to his chest. Tag cleaned up well enough, slicking back his hair and donning an expensive suit when he was doing business, but he’d always been a little shaggy and rough-looking with a nose that had been broken a few too many times and hair that was always too long. I don’t know how he could stand the heat of having hair on his head. I never could, it suffocated me. Maybe it was the fact that every encounter with the dead scorched my neck and made my head swim, and my body burned energy like a furnace.

Tag pulled off his shirt and mopped at his face while helping himself to a bowl of my cereal and a huge glass of my orange juice. He sat down at my kitchen table like we were an old married couple and dug in without further comment on the picture I’d spent half the night creating.

Tag was better at friendship than I was. I rarely went downstairs to his place. I never ate his food or threw my sweaty clothes on his floor. But I was grateful that he did. I was grateful he came to me, and I never complained about the missing food or paintings or the random dirty sock that wasn’t mine. If it wasn’t for Tag making himself at home in my life, we wouldn’t be friends. I just didn’t know how, and he seemed to understand.

I finished my own bowl of cereal and pushed it away, my gaze wandering back to the easel.

“Why is she blonde?” Tag asked.

I felt my brow furrow and I shrugged at Tag. “Why not?”

“Well, the boy . . . he’s dark. I just wondered why you made her blonde,” Tag said reasonably, shoving another huge spoonful into his mouth.

“I’m dark . . . and my mother was blonde,” I responded matter-of-factly.

Tag stopped, his spoon paused in mid-air. I watched as a Cheerio made a desperate dive for freedom, plopping back in the bowl, safe for another few seconds.

“You never told me that.”

“I didn’t?”

“No. I know your mom left you in the laundromat. I know your life was shit growing up. I know you went and lived with your grandma before she died. I know her death messed you up pretty good, which is where I come in.” He winked. “I know you’ve always been able to see stuff other people can’t. And I know you can paint.”

My life in a nutshell.

Tag continued. “But I didn’t know your mom was blonde. Not that it matters. But you’re so dark, so I just assumed . . .”

“Yeah.”

“So . . . is the picture of you and your mom? Wasn’t she a small-town girl?”

“No. I mean . . . yeah. She was a small-town girl. A small-town
white
girl.” I emphasized white this time, just so we were clear. “But no. The picture is of Eli and his mother. But I don’t think it’s what he wanted.”

“The hills. The sunset. It kind of reminds me of Sanpete. Sanpete was beautiful when I wasn’t hung-over.”

“Levan too.”

I stared at the painting, the child and his mother on a horse named Calico, the woman tall and lean in the saddle, her blonde hair just a pale suggestion against the more vivid pinks and reds of the setting sun.

“She looks like Georgia,” I mused. The woman in my painting looked like Georgia from the back. I felt a sudden sinking in my chest and I stood, walking toward the picture, a picture I’d created in desperation, setting a stage and filling it with characters from my own head. Not from Eli’s head. It had nothing to do with Georgia. But my heart pounded and my breaths grew shallow.

“She looks like Georgia, Tag.” I said it again, louder, and I heard the panic in my voice.

“Georgia. The girl you never got over?”

“What?”

“Oh, come on, man!” Tag groaned, half-laughing. “I’ve known you for a long time. And in that time you’ve never been interested in a single woman. Not one. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were in love with me.”

“I saw her last Friday. I saw her at the hospital.” I couldn’t even argue with him. I felt sick, and my hands were shaking so much that I interlocked my fingers and hung them around my neck to hide the tremors.

Tag seemed as stunned as I had been. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“I saw her. And she saw me. And . . . and now, I’m seeing this little kid.” I took off running for my bedroom with Tag on my heels and terror thrumming through my veins like I’d just been injected with something toxic.

I pulled my old backpack down off my closet shelf and started ripping things out of it. My passport, a grease pencil, a stray peanut, a coin purse with random currencies that had never been cashed in.

“Where is it?” I raged, unzipping pockets and rifling through every compartment of the old bag, like an addict searching for a pill.

“What are you looking for?” Tag stood back and watched me tear my closet apart with equal parts fascination and concern.

“The letter. The letter! Georgia wrote me a letter when I was at Montlake. And I never opened it. But I kept it! It was here!”

“You put it in one of those tubes in Venice,” Tag answered easily, and sat down on my bed, his elbows braced on his knees, watching me come unglued.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Because you dragged that envelope around forever. You’ll be lucky if it’s still in one piece.”

I was already digging deeper in my closet, pulling out tubes of rolled art that I’d picked up in my travels and then never took the time to frame or display. We’d sent stuff to Tag’s father from all over the world, and he stuck it in a spare room. When we’d settled in, he’d brought it to us. Four years of travels and purchases, and the loot had filled the back of his horse trailer. We’d promptly deposited it all in a storage unit, not especially interested in going through it all. Fortunately, the tube Tag was referring to should still be somewhere in my closet, because he was right. I’d kept it with me, dragging it around like a prized locket that I never even opened. Maybe because it had never been opened, it never seemed right to set it aside.