Diary, Page 20

  The Industrial Revolution meets the guardian angel.

  Poor her, the assembly line of miracles. For all eternity.

  Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, just for the record.

  Harrow said, “You always keep a diary. In every incarnation. That's how we can anticipate your moods and reactions. We know every move you'll make.”

  Harrow looped a strand of pearls around Grace's wrist and fastened the clasp, saying, “Oh, we need you to come back and start the process, but we don't necessarily want you to complete your karmic cycle.”

  Because that would be killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Yeah, her soul would go on to other adventures, but three generations later the island would be poor again. Poor and crowded with rich outsiders.

  Art school doesn't teach you how to escape your soul being recycled.

  Period revival. Her own homemade immortality.

  “In fact,” Harrow said, “the diary you're keeping right now, Tabbi's great-great-grandchildren will find it extremely useful in dealing with you the next time around.”

  Misty's own great-great-great-grandchildren.

  Using her book. This book.

  “Oh, I remember,” Grace said. “When I was a very little girl. You were Constance Burton, and I used to love it when you'd take me kite flying.”

  Harrow said, “Under one name or another, you're the mother of us all.”

  Grace said, “You've loved us all.”

  To Harrow, Misty said, Please. Just tell me what's going to happen. Will the paintings explode? Will the hotel collapse into the ocean? What? How does she save everyone?

  And Grace shook her pearl bracelet down around her hand and said, “You can't.”

  Most fortunes, Harrow says, are founded on the suffering and death of thousands of people or animals. Harvesting something. He gives Grace something shining gold and holds out one hand, his jacket sleeve pulled back.

  And Grace holds the two ends of his cuff together and inserts a cuff link, saying, “We've just found a way to harvest rich people.”

  August 27 . . .

  and Three-Quarters

  THE AMBULANCES are already waiting outside the Waytansea Hotel. The television news crew hoists a broadcast dish from the top of its van. Two police cars are nosed up to the hotel front steps.

  Summer people edge between the parked cars. Leather pants and little black dresses. Dark glasses and silk shirts. Gold jewelry. Above them, the corporate signs and logos.

  Peter's graffiti: “. . . your blood is our gold . . .”

  Between Misty and the crowd, a newscaster stands on camera. With the crowd milling behind him, the people climbing the hotel steps and entering the lobby, the newscaster says, “Are we on?” He puts two fingers of one hand to his ear. Not looking into the camera, he says, “I'm ready.”

  Detective Stilton sits behind the wheel of his car, Misty beside him. Both of them watch Grace and Harrow Wilmot climb the front steps, Grace lifting her long dress with the fingertips of one hand. Harrow holds her other hand.

  Misty watches them. The cameras watch them.

  And Detective Stilton says, “They won't try anything. Not with this kind of exposure.”

  The oldest generation of every family, the Burtons and Hylands and Petersens, the aristocracy of Waytansea Island, they fall in line with the summer crowds entering the hotel, their chins held high.

  Peter's warning: “. . . we will kill every one of God's children to save our own.”

  The newscaster on camera, he lifts a microphone to his mouth and says, “Police and county officials have given a green light to tonight's reception on the island.”

  The crowd disappears into the dim green velvet landscape of the lobby, the forest clearing among polished, varnished tree trunks. The thick shafts of sunlight stabbing into the gloom, heavy as crystal chandeliers. The humped sofa shapes of boulders covered in moss. The campfire, so much like a fireplace.

  Detective Stilton says, “You want to go in?”

  Misty tells him no. It's not safe. She's not making the same mistake she's always made. Whatever that mistake would be.

  According to Harrow Wilmot.

  The newscaster says, “Everyone who's anyone is arriving here tonight.”

  And there, then there's a girl. A stranger. Someone else's child with short dark hair, climbing the steps to the hotel lobby. The flash of her peridot ring. Misty's tip money.

  It's Tabbi. Of course it's Tabbi. Misty's gift to the future. Peter's way to keep his wife on the island. The bait to get her into a trap. A moment, a green flash, and Tabbi's gone inside the hotel.

  August 27 . . .

  and Seven-Eighths

  TODAY IN THE DARKNESS of the dim forest clearing, the green velvet landscape inside the lobby doors, the hotel's fire alarm goes off. One long ringing bell, it comes out the front doors so loud the newscaster has to shout, “Well, this sounds like trouble.”

  The summer people, the men, their hair all combed back, dark and wiry with some styling product. The women all blond. They shout to be heard over the alarm's din.

  Misty Wilmot, the greatest artist throughout history, she's grabbing her way through the crowd, clawing and pulling herself toward the stage in the Wood and Gold Dining Room. Clutching at the elbows and hipbones of these skinny people. The whole wall behind the stage draped and ready for the unveiling. The mural, her work still hidden. Sealed. Her gift to the future. Her time bomb.

  Her million smears of paint put together the right way. The urine of cows eating mango leaves. The ink sacs from cuttlefish. All that chemistry and biology.

  Her kid somewhere in this mob of people. Tabbi.

  The alarm ringing and ringing, Misty steps up on a chair. She steps up on a table, table six where Tabbi was laid out dead, where Misty found out about Angel Delaporte being stabbed to death. Standing above the crowd in her white dress, people looking up, summer men grinning up at her, Misty's not wearing any underwear.

  Her born-again wedding dress tucked between her bony thighs, Misty shouts, “Fire!”

  Heads turn. Eyes look up at her. In the dining room doorway, Detective Stilton appears and starts swimming through the crowd.

  Misty shouts, “Get out! Save yourselves!” Misty shouts, “If you stay here, something terrible will happen!”

  Peter's warnings. Misty sprays them out above the crowd.

  “We will kill every one of God's children to save our own.”

  The curtain looming behind her, covering the whole wall, her own self-portrait, what Misty doesn't know about herself. What she doesn't want to know.

  The summer people look up, their corrugator muscles contracted, their eyebrows pulled together. Their lips pulled thin and down by triangularis muscle.

  The fire alarm stops ringing, and for as long as it takes to draw the next breath, all you can hear is the ocean outside, each wave hiss and burst.

  Misty is shouting for everybody to shut up. Everybody, just listen. Shouting, she knows what she's talking about. She's the greatest artist of all time. The reincarnation of Thomas Gainsborough and Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt. She shouts how her soul has been Michelangelo and da Vinci and Rembrandt.

  Then a woman shouts, “It's her, the artist. It's Misty Wilmot.”

  And a man shouts, “Misty honey, enough with the drama.”

  The woman shouts, “Pull down the curtain, and let's get this over with.”

  The man and woman shouting, they're Harrow and Grace. Between them, they each hold Tabbi by one hand. Tabbi, her eyes are taped shut.

  “Those people,” Misty shouts, pointing at Grace and Harrow. Her hair hanging in her face, Misty shouts, “Those evil people, they used their son to get me pregnant!”

  Misty shouts, “They're holding my kid!”

  She shouts, “If you see what's behind this curtain, it will be too late!”

  And Detective Stilton gets to the chair. One step, and he's up. Another step, and he's beside her on table six. The huge cur
tain hanging behind them. The truth about everything just inches away.

  “Yes,” another woman shouts. An old island Tupper, her sea turtle neck sagging into the lace collar of her dress, she shouts, “Show us, Misty!”

  “Show us,” a man shouts, an old island Woods, leaning on his cane.

  Stilton reaches one hand behind his back. He says, “You almost had me thinking you were the sane one.” And his hand comes out holding handcuffs. He's clicking them on her, pulling Misty away, past Tabbi with her eyes taped shut, past all the summer people shaking their heads. Past the aristocrats of Waytansea Island. Back through the forest glade of the green velvet lobby.

  “My kid,” Misty says. “She's still in there. We have to get her out.”

  And Detective Stilton gives her to a deputy in a brown uniform and says, “Your daughter who you said was dead?”

  They faked her death. Everyone watching, they're just statues of themselves. Their own self-portraits.

  Outside the hotel, at the foot of the porch steps, the deputy opens the back door of a patrol car. Detective Stilton says, “Misty Wilmot, you're under arrest for the attempted murder of your husband, Peter Wilmot, and the murder of Angel Delaporte.”

  Blood was all over her the morning after Angel was stabbed in her bed. Angel about to steal her husband away. Misty, the one who found Peter's body in the car.

  Strong hands shove her into the backseat of the patrol car.

  And from inside the hotel, the newscaster says, “Ladies and gentlemen, it's the moment of the unveiling.”

  “Take her. Print her. Book her,” the detective says. He slaps the deputy on the back and says, “I'm going back inside to see what all this fuss has been about.”

  August 28

  ACCORDING TO PLATO, we live chained inside a dark cave. We're chained so all we can see is the back wall of the cave. All we can see are the shadows that move there. They could be the shadows of something moving outside the cave. They could be the shadows of people chained next to us.

  Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow.

  Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.

  The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight.

  The camera obscura.

  Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down. Distorted by the mirror or the lens it comes through. Our limited personal perception. Our tiny body of experience. Our half-assed education.

  How the viewer controls the view. How the artist is dead. We see what we want. We see how we want. We only see ourselves. All the artist can do is give us something to look at.

  Just for the record, your wife's under arrest. But she's done it. They've done it. Maura. Constance. And Misty. They've saved her kid, your daughter. She's saved herself. They've saved everyone.

  The deputy in his brown uniform, he drove Misty back over the ferry to the mainland. Along the way, the deputy read her rights. He passed her off to a second deputy, who took her fingerprints and wedding ring. Misty still in her wedding dress, that deputy took her bag and high-heeled shoes.

  All her junk jewelry, Maura's jewelry, their jewelry, it's all back in the Wilmot house in Tabbi's shoe box.

  This second deputy gave her a blanket. The deputy was a woman her own age, her face a diary of wrinkles starting around her eyes and webbed between her nose and mouth. The deputy looked at the forms Misty was filling out, and she said, “Are you the artist?”

  And Misty said, “Yeah, but just for the rest of this lifetime. Not after that.”

  The deputy walked her down an old concrete hallway to a metal door. She unlocked the door, saying, “It's after lights-out.” She swung the metal door open and stepped aside, and it's right there Misty saw it.

  What they don't teach you in art school. How you're still always trapped.

  How your head is the cave, your eyes the cave mouth. How you live inside your head and only see what you want. How you only watch the shadows and make up your own meaning.

  Just for the record, it was right there. In the tall square of light from the open cell door, written on the far wall of the little cell, it said:

  If you're here, you've failed again. It's signed Constance.

  The handwriting cupped and spread, loving and nurturing, all of it's her handwriting. In this place Misty's never been before, but where she ends up, again and again. It's then she hears the sirens, long and far way. And the deputy says, “I'll be back to check on you in a little.” The deputy steps out and locks the door.

  There's a window high up in one wall, too high for Misty to reach, but it must face the ocean and Waytansea Island.

  In the flickering orange light from the window, the dancing light and shadow on the concrete wall opposite the window, in this light Misty knows everything Maura knew. Everything Constance knew. Misty knows how they've all been fooled. The same way she knew how to paint the mural. The way Plato says we already know everything, we just need to remember it. What Carl Jung calls the universal subconscious. Misty remembers.

  The way the camera obscura focuses an image on a canvas, how the box camera works, the little cell window projects a mess of orange and yellow, flames and shadows in a shape on the far wall. All you can hear are the sirens, all you can see are the flames.

  It's the Waytansea Hotel on fire. Grace and Harrow and Tabbi inside.

  Can you feel this?

  We were here. We are here. We will always be here.

  And we've failed again.

  September 3—

  The First-Quarter Moon

  OUT ON WAYTANSEA POINT, Misty parks the car. Tabbi sits beside her, each of Tabbi's arms wrapped around an urn. Her grandparents. Your parents. Grace and Harrow.

  Sitting next to her daughter in the front seat of the old Buick, Misty rests a hand on Tabbi's knee and says, “Honey?”

  And Tabbi turns to look at her mother.

  Misty says, “I've decided to legally change our names.” Misty says, “Tabbi, I need to tell people what really happened.” Misty squeezes Tabbi's skinny knee, her white stockings sliding over her kneecap, and Misty says, “We can go live with your grandma in Tecumseh Lake.”

  Really, they could go live anywhere now. They're rich again. Grace and Harrow, and all the village old people, they left millions in life insurance. Millions and millions, tax free and safe in the bank. Drawing enough interest to keep them safe for another eighty years.

  Detective Stilton's search dog, two days after the fire, the dog dug into the mountain of carbonized wood. The first three stories of the hotel gutted to the stone walls. The concrete turned to green-blue glass by the heat. What the dog smelled, cloves or coffee, led rescue workers to Stilton, dead in the basement below the lobby. The dog, shaking and peeing, his name is Rusty.

  The images are worldwide. The bodies spread out on the street in front of the hotel. The charred corpses, black and crusted, cracked and showing the meat cooked inside, wet and red. In every shot, every camera angle, there's a corporate logo.

  Every second of video shows the blackened skeletons laid out in the parking lot. A total of one hundred and thirty-two so far, and above them, over them, somewhere in the frame, you see some corporate name. Some slogan or smiling mascot. A cartoon tiger. A vague, upbeat motto.

  “Bonner & Mills—When You're Ready to Stop Starting Over.”

  “Mewtworx—Where Progress Is Not Staying in One Place.”

  What you don't understand, you can make mean anything.

  Some island car silk-screened with an advertisement is parked in every news shot. Some piece of paper trash, a cup or napkin is printed with a corporate name. You can read a billboard. Islanders are wearing their lapel buttons or T-shirts, doing television interviews with the twisted smoking bodies in the background. Now the financial services and cab
le television networks and drug companies are paying fat kill fees to buy back all their advertising. To erase their names from the island.

  Add this money to the insurance, and Waytansea Island is richer than it's ever been.

  Sitting in the Buick, Tabbi looks at her mother. She looks at the urns she holds in the crook of each arm. Her zygomatic major pulls her lips toward each ear. Tabbi's cheeks swell up to lift her bottom eyelids just a little. With her arms hugging the ashes of Grace and Harrow, she's her own little Mona Lisa. Smiling and ancient, Tabbi says, “If you tell, then I tell.”

  Misty's artwork. Her child.

  Misty says, “What will you tell?”

  Still smiling, Tabbi says, “I set fire to their clothes. Granmy and Granby Wilmot taught me how, and I set them on fire.” She says, “They taped my eyes so I wouldn't see, so I'd get out.”

  In the bits of news video that survive, all you can see is the smoke rolling out of the lobby doors. This is moments after the mural was unveiled. The firemen rush in and don't come out. None of the police or guests come out. Every second of the time stamp on the video, the fire is bigger, the flames whipping orange rags out of the windows. A police officer crawls across the porch to peek in the window. He stoops there, looking inside. Then he stands. The smoke blowing him in the face, the flames blowtorching his clothes and hair, he steps over the windowsill. Not blinking. Not flinching. His face and hands on fire. The police officer smiles at what he sees inside and walks toward it without looking back.

  The official story is the dining room fireplace caused it. The hotel's policy that the fire always had to burn, no matter how warm the weather, that's how the fire started. People died a step away from open windows. Their dead bodies found an arm's length away from exit doors. Dead, they were found creeping, crawling, crowding toward the wall in the dining room where the mural burned. Toward the center of the fire. Whatever the policeman saw through the porch window.

  No one even tried to escape.

  Tabbi says, “When my father asked me to run away with him, I told Granmy.” She says, “I saved us. I saved the future of the whole island.”