The Law of Moses (9 page)

“Now shut the door so no one sees the light.”

I obeyed immediately.

“Cool, huh?”

It was kind of cool, I had to admit. The light threw our shadows across the wall, and Georgia danced in front of it for a second, making us both laugh.

“You’re gonna fall,” I warned as she broke into a segment of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” choreography, the part everyone knows with the zombie arms and the side toe taps. The ledge was not wide enough for dancing, but Georgia apparently didn’t agree. I yanked my shirt over my head, set it on our towels, and stared down at the black, glass-smooth surface, waiting for further instruction. I wasn’t jumping in first.

Georgia pulled off her T-shirt and tossed her shorts to the side, baring everything but the little that was covered by a baby blue bikini, and I forgot about the water or the fact that there was probably a creature living beneath the surface who liked dark meat. Georgia could save me. I would gladly let Georgia save me if she wore that suit. Her body was long and lean, with surprising curves and swells where a girl should curve and swell. But the best part was the way she seemed unconcerned and unbothered by it all, as if she was absolutely fine with the way her body looked and had no need to strut or pose or seek my approval.

She reached for my hand, and I jerked away, not wanting her to pull me in before I was good and ready.

“We’ll go together. The first jump is always the best. The water feels amazing, you’ll see.” I didn’t yield, and she kept her hand out-stretched, waiting.

“Come on, Moses. I’ll let you lead,” she said, her voice bouncing silkily off the metal walls, the sound more alluring than any singer on any mic in any nightclub across the country. Suddenly, I needed to get in the water or I was going to embarrass myself in my thin shorts. I grabbed her hand and without warning, plunged us both into the inky depths. Georgia’s squeal was muffled as the water covered my head, and I released her hand so I could fight my way to the surface.

We both came up sputtering, me from fear, Georgia from laughter, and it didn’t take me long until I had abandoned the fear and was laughing with her. She spurred me on, splashing and talking and playing in the flickering shadows that danced on the walls. We swam for a long time, unconcerned with the lateness of the hour, unafraid of discovery, strangely at ease with one another.

It wasn’t until I braced my arms on the ledge, my legs kicking out behind me in the water, resting momentarily, that I noticed the light bouncing off the water gave the wall in front of me an iridescent sheen. I reached my hand out to touch it, tracing the watery reflection with my finger, wondering how I could recreate the sheen with paint. Georgia moved to my side, holding onto the ledge, watching my finger as it painted invisible lines.

“When you paint . . . do you know what you’re going to paint before you start . . . or do you just let your heart take over?” she asked softly. It was a good question—a sweet question—and her sweetness unlocked something in me that I kept guarded most of the time. Still, I chose my words carefully, not wanting her to know everything about me, not wanting to ruin the moment with ugly truths, yet not wanting to lie and ruin the memory when the moment had passed.

“There are so many things that I see . . . that I don’t want to see. Images that come into my mind that I would rather not think about. Hallucinations, visions, or maybe just an overly vivid imagination. My brain might be cracked, but it’s not just my brain. The sky is cracked too, and I can sometimes see what’s on the other side.”

I sneaked a look at Georgia, wondering if I’d scared her with that last confession. But she didn’t look scared. She looked intrigued, fascinated. Beautiful. So I kept talking, encouraged.

“When I was younger I was scared a lot. When I would visit Gi, she would try to tell me stories to calm me down. Bible stories. She even told me about a baby named Moses. A baby found in a basket just like me. That’s how I got my name, you know.”

Georgia nodded. She knew. Everybody did.

“Gigi would tell me the stories to fill my head with better things. But it wasn’t until she started showing me artwork that things started to change. She had a book with religious art in it. Someone had donated it to the church and Gi brought it home so that nobody at church would see all those paintings of naked white people and get offended. She colored all the naked parts in with a black Sharpie.”

Georgia laughed, and I felt the air lodge in my throat. Her laugh was throaty and soft, and it made my heart swell like a balloon in my chest, fuller and fuller until I had to sneak breaths around its increased size.

“So you liked the pictures?” Georgia prodded after I stayed frozen and silent too long.

“Yes.”Georgia laughed again.

“Not the naked people.” I felt ridiculous and actually felt my face get hot. “I liked the beauty. The color. The anguish.”

“The anguish?” Georgia’s voice rose in question.

“It was an anguish that had nothing to do with me. An anguish everyone could see. Not just me. And I wasn’t expected to make it all go away.”

Georgia’s gaze touched on my face like a whisper and drifted away almost immediately, drawn to my tracing fingers.

“Have you ever seen the face of the Pieta?” I wanted her eyes on me again and I got what I wanted.

“What’s the Pieta?” she asked.

“It’s a sculpture by Michelangelo. A sculpture of Mary holding Jesus. Her son. After he died,” I paused, wondering why I was telling her this. I seriously doubted she cared. But I found myself continuing anyway.

“Her face, Mary’s face . . . it’s so beautiful. So peaceful. I don’t like the rest of the sculpture as much. But Mary’s face is exquisite. When I can’t take the stuff in my head, I think about her face. And I fill my mind with other things too. I think about the color and light of a Manet, the details of a Vermeer—Vermeer includes the tiniest things in his paintings, little cracks in the walls, a stain on a collar, a single nail, and there is such beauty in those little things, in the perfect ordinariness of them. I think about those things and I push out the images I can’t control, the things I don’t want to see, but am forced to see . . . all the time.” I stopped talking. I was almost panting. My mouth felt strange, numb, like I’d surpassed my daily word limit, and my lips and tongue were weak from overuse. I didn’t remember the last time I’d talked so much all at once.

“The perfect ordinariness . . .” Georgia breathed, and she lifted her hand and followed the wet path my finger made, as if she, too, could paint. Then she looked at me solemnly.

“I’m a very ordinary girl, Moses. I know that I am. And I always will be. I can’t paint. I don’t know who Vermeer is, or Manet for that matter. But if you think ordinary can be beautiful, that gives me hope. And maybe sometime you’ll think about me when you need an escape from the hurt in your head.”

Her brown eyes looked black in the shadowed light, the same color as the water we were immersed in, and I reached blindly for something to hold onto, something to keep me from falling into them. Georgia’s right hand was still pressed to the wall beside mine, and I found myself tracing her fingers, like a child traces their hand with a crayon, up and down and around until I paused at the base of her thumb. And then I continued on, letting my fingers dance up her arm, feather light, until I reached her shoulder. I traced the fine bones at her collar as my fingers glided to the opposite side and back down her other arm. When I found her fingers, I slid mine in-between, interlocking them tightly. I waited for her to lean in, to press her mouth to mine, to lead, as she was prone to do. But she stayed still, holding my hand beneath the surface of the water, watching me. And I gave in. Anxiously.

Her lips were wet and cool against mine, and I imagine mine felt the same. But the heat inside her mouth welcomed me like a warm embrace, and I sank into the softness with a sigh that would have embarrassed me had she not matched it with one of her own.

Georgia

MOSES AND I WATCHED as my parents conducted a therapy session with a small group of addicts from a rehab center in Richfield, about an hour south of Levan. Every other week, the van would pull up and the young people would pile out—kids ranging from my age to their early twenties—and for two hours, my parents would bring them out to the round corral and let them interact with the horses in a series of activities designed to help the kids make connections to their own lives.

I helped with the sessions with autistic kids and the kids who rode horses for physical rehab, but when the clients were my age or older, my parents didn’t like me involved in the counseling, even if it was just to work with the horses. So I’d wandered over to Kathleen’s, knowing Moses should be done with work, and coaxed him to the backyard with a couple of Cokes and two pieces of lemon meringue pie Kathleen had been happy to part with. She liked me, and I knew it, and she was incredibly helpful in maneuvering Moses when he pretended to not want my company or lemon meringue pie when we both knew darn well he wanted both.

Moses and I couldn’t hear what was being said from where we sat, stretched out on Kathleen’s back lawn, but we had a decent view, and I knew we weren’t close enough to attract the attention of my parents, even though we could still see the class being conducted. Being my normal nosy self, I was trying to make out which kids were still hanging around and which ones had either graduated from the ninety day program or been released. I made a mental catalogue of the ones who looked like they were miserable and the ones who were making progress.

“What do you call them . . . the different colors? Aren’t there different names?” Moses asked suddenly, his eyes trained on the horses milling about the enclosure. He held a paint brush in his hands as if he’d grabbed it out of habit, and he wove it between his fingers like a drummer of a rock band twirls his drumsticks.

“There are so many colors and kinds. I mean, they’re all horses, obviously, but each color combination has a different name.” I pointed to a reddish horse in the corner. “That red one there? Merle? He’s a Sorrel, and Sackett is a Palomino. Dolly is a Bay, and Lucky is a Black.”

“A Black?”

“Yes. He’s solid black,” I answered easily.

“Well, that one’s easy enough.” Moses laughed a little.

“Yep. There are greys, blacks, browns, whites. Reba’s an Appaloosa, the greyish one with spots on her rump. We don’t like to label them by their colors in equine therapy though. And we don’t call the horses by their names. We don’t even tell the clients if the horses are male or female.”

“Why? Not politically correct?” Moses quipped. He laughed again, and I poked at him, liking that he seemed interested, even relaxed. Now if I could only get him inside the corral.

“Because you want the client to identify with the horse. You want the client to put their own labels on the horse. If a horse is exhibiting a certain behavior that you want the client to identify with, you don’t want the client to have any preconceived ideas about who or what that horse is. That horse needs to be whoever the client needs it to be.” I sounded just like my mother, and mentally patted myself on my back for being able to explain something that I’d grown up hearing but never had to put into words until now.

“That doesn’t really make any sense.”

“Okay. For instance, let’s say you have mother issues.”

Moses shot me a look that said, “Don’t go there!” So of course I did.

“Let’s say you are in a therapy session where you are discussing your feelings about your mother. And the horse starts exhibiting certain behaviors that suddenly clarify your behavior . . . or your mother’s behavior. If we’ve already labeled that horse as Gordie and said he’s a boy, you might not be able to identify your mother with that horse. In a therapy session, the only labels the horses get are the ones the client gives them.”

“So you wouldn’t want me to notice that the Palomino horse, the one with the white mane and the tan body, looks like you and that she’s always making a nuisance of herself?”

“Sackett?” I was outraged on Sackett’s behalf more than my own. “Sackett isn’t annoying! And Sackett’s a
he
, which just proves my point about pre-conceived ideas. If you knew he was a he and not a she, you wouldn’t be able to label him as Georgia and say mean things. Sackett is wise! Whenever things get really deep, you can always count on Sackett being right in the thick of things.” I heard the affront in my voice and I glowered at Moses for a moment before launching my own attack.