Panting, panting and dragging her huge fiberglass leg, her ball and chain, back toward the window, Misty says, “It was Tabbi.” Misty says, “Outside.”
Her catheter is pulled out again, pee squirted everywhere.
Paulette gets to her feet. She's making a nasty face, her risorius muscles cinching her face tight around her nose while she dries her hands on her dark skirt. She tucks her blouse back tight into her waistband and says, “No, Misty. No it wasn't.” And she picks up the room service menu.
Misty has to get downstairs. To get outside. She's got to find Tabbi. Paulette has to help lift the cast. They've got to get Dr. Touchet to cut it off.
And Paulette shakes her head and says, “If they take off that cast, you'll be crippled for life.” She goes to the window and shuts it. She locks it and pulls the curtains.
And from the floor, Misty says, “Please. Paulette, help me up.”
But Paulette taps her foot. She fishes an order pad out of the side pocket in her skirt and says, “The kitchen is out of the whitefish.”
And just for the record, Misty's still trapped.
Misty's trapped, but her kid could be alive.
Your kid.
“A steak,” Misty says.
Misty wants the thickest piece of beef they can find. Cooked well done.
August 24
WHAT MISTY REALLY WANTS is a steak knife. She wants a serrated knife to cut through the side of this leg cast, and she wants Paulette not to notice when the knife's missing from her tray after dinner. Paulette doesn't notice, and she doesn't lock the door from the outside, either. Why bother when Misty's hobbled by a ton of fucking fiberglass.
All night, Misty's in bed, picking and hacking. Misty's sawing at the cast. Digging with the knife blade and scooping the fiberglass shavings into her hand, throwing them under the bed.
Misty's a convict digging herself out of a very small prison, a prison felt-tip-penned with Tabbi's flowers and birds.
It takes until midnight to cut from her waist, halfway down her thigh. The knife keeps slipping, stabbing and lancing into her side. By the time she gets to her knee, Misty's falling asleep. Scabbed and crusted in dried blood. Glued to the sheets. By three in the morning, she's only partway down her calf. She's almost free, but she falls asleep.
Something wakes her up, the knife still in her hand.
It's another longest day of the year. Again.
The noise, it's a car door slamming shut in the parking lot. If Misty holds the split cast closed, she can hobble to the window and look. It's the beige county government car of Detective Stilton. He's not outside, so he must be in the hotel lobby. Maybe looking for her.
Maybe this time he'll find her.
With the steak knife, Misty starts hacking again. Hacking and half asleep, she stabs her calf muscle. The blood floods out, dark red against her white, white skin, her leg sealed inside too long. Misty hacks again and stabs her shin, the blade going through thin skin, stuck into the bone.
Still hacking, the knife throws blood and splinters of fiberglass. Fragments of Tabbi's flowers and birds. Bits of her hair and skin. With both hands, Misty grabs the edge on each side of the split. She pries the cast open until her leg is half out. The ragged edges pinch her, biting into the hacked skin, the needles of fiberglass digging.
Oh, dear sweet Peter, nobody has to tell you how this hurts.
Can you feel this?
Her fingers stuck with splinters of fiberglass, Misty grips the ragged edges and pulls them apart. Misty bends her knee, forcing it up out of the straight cast. First her pale kneecap, smeared with blood. The way a baby's head appears. Crowning. A bird breaking out of its eggshell. Then her thigh. Her child being born. Finally her shin breaks up, out of the shattered cast. With one shake, her foot is free, and the cast slips, rolls, slumps, and crashes to the floor.
A chrysalis. A butterfly emerging, bloody and tired. Reborn.
The cast hitting the floor is so loud the curtains shake. A framed hotel picture flaps against the wall. With her hands pressed over her ears, Misty waits for someone to come investigate. To find her free and lock her door from the outside.
Misty waits for her heart to beat three hundred times, fast. Counting. Then, nothing. Nothing happens. Nobody comes.
Slow and smooth, Misty makes her leg straight. Misty bends her knee. Testing. It doesn't hurt. Holding on to the night table, Misty swings her legs off the bed and flexes them. With the bloody steak knife, she cuts the loops of surgical tape that hold her catheter to her good leg. Pulling the tube out of her, she loops it in one hand and sets it aside.
It's one, three, five careful steps to the closet, where she takes out a blouse. A pair of jeans. Hanging there, inside a plastic wrapper, is the white satin dress Grace has sewn for her art show. Misty's wedding dress, born again. When she steps into the jeans and works the button and the zipper, when she reaches for the blouse, the jeans fall to the floor. That's how much weight she's lost. Her hips are gone. Her ass is two empty sacks of skin. The jeans sit around her ankles, smeared with the blood from the steak knife cuts in each leg.
There's a skirt that fits, but not one of her own. It's Tabbi's, a plaid, pleated wool skirt that Grace must've picked out.
Even her shoes feel loose, and Misty has to ball her toes into a knot to keep her feet inside.
Misty listens until the hall outside her door sounds empty. She heads for the stairs, the skirt sticking to the blood on her legs, her shaved pubic hair snagging on her panties. With her toes clenched, Misty walks down the four flights to the lobby. There, people wait at the front desk, standing in the middle of their luggage.
Out through the lobby doors, you can still see the beige county government car in the parking lot.
A woman's voice says, “Oh my God.” It's some summer woman, standing near the fireplace. With the pastel fingernails of one hand hooked inside her mouth, she stares at Misty and says, “My God, your legs.”
In one hand, Misty still holds the bloody steak knife.
Now the people at the front desk turn and look. A clerk behind the desk, a Burton or a Seymour or a Kincaid, he turns and whispers behind his hand to the other clerk and she picks up the house phone.
Misty heads for the dining room, past the pale looks, people wincing and looking away. Summer women peeking from between their spidery fingers. Past the hostess. Past tables three, seven, ten, and four, there's Detective Stilton, sitting at table six with Grace Wilmot and Dr. Touchet.
It's raspberry scones. Coffee. Quiche. Grapefruit halved in bowls. They're having breakfast.
Misty gets to them, clutching the bloody knife, and says, “Detective Stilton, it's my daughter. My daughter, Tabbi.” Misty says, “I think she's still alive.”
His grapefruit spoon halfway to his mouth, Stilton says, “Your daughter died?”
She drowned, Misty tells him. He has to listen. A week, three weeks ago, Misty doesn't know. She's not sure. She's been locked in the attic. They put this big cast on her leg so she couldn't escape.
Her legs under the plaid wool, they're coated and running with blood.
By now the whole dining room's watching. Listening.
“It's a plot,” Misty says. With both hands, she reaches out to calm the spooked look on Stilton's face. Misty says, “Ask Angel Delaporte. Something terrible is about to happen.”
The blood dried on her hands. Her blood. The blood from her legs soaking through her plaid skirt.
Tabbi's skirt.
A voice says, “You've ruined it!”
Misty turns, and it's Tabbi. In the dining room doorway, she's wearing a frilly blouse and tailored black slacks. Her haircut pageboy short, she has an earring in one ear, the red enameled heart Misty saw Will Tupper rip out of his earlobe a hundred years ago.
Dr. Touchet says, “Misty, have you been drinking again?”
Tabbi says, “Mom . . . my skirt.”
And Misty says, “You're not dead.”
Detective St
ilton dabs his mouth with his napkin. He says, “Well, that makes one person who's not dead.”
Grace spoons sugar into her coffee. She pours milk and stirs it, saying, “So you really think it's these OAFF people who committed the murder?”
“Killed Tabbi?” Misty says.
Tabbi comes to the table and leans against her grandmother's chair. There's some nicotine yellow between her fingers as she lifts a saucer, studying the painted border. It's gold with a repeating wreath of dolphins and mermaids. Tabbi shows it to Grace and says, “Fitz and Floyd. The Sea Wreath pattern.”
She turns it over, reads the bottom, and smiles.
Grace smiles up at her, saying, “You're getting so I can't praise you enough, Tabitha.”
Just for the record, Misty wants to hug and kiss her kid. Misty wants to hug her and run to the car and drive straight to her mom's trailer in Tecumseh Lake. Misty wants to wave good-bye with her middle finger to this whole fucking island of genteel lunatics.
Grace pats an empty chair next to her and says, “Misty, come sit down. You look distraught.”
Misty says, “Who did OAFF kill?”
The Ocean Alliance for Freedom. Who burned Peter's graffiti in all the beach houses.
Your graffiti.
“That's what I'm here about,” the detective says. He takes the notebook out of his inside jacket pocket. He flips it open on the table and gets his pen ready to write. Looking at Misty, he says, “If you wouldn't mind answering a few questions?”
About Peter's vandalism?
“Angel Delaporte was murdered last night,” he says. “It could be a burglary, but we're not ruling anything out. All's we know is he was stabbed to death in his sleep.”
In her bed.
Our bed.
Tabbi's dead, then she's alive. The last time Misty saw her kid, Tabbi was on this very table, under a sheet and not breathing. Misty's knee is broken, then it's fine. One day Misty can paint, and then she can't. Maybe Angel Delaporte was her husband's boyfriend, but now he's dead.
Your boyfriend.
Tabbi takes her mother's hand. She leads Misty to the empty seat. She pulls out the chair, and Misty sits.
“Before we start . . .” Grace says. She leans across the table to tap Detective Stilton on his shirt cuff, and she says, “Misty's art show opens three days from now, and we're counting on you being there.”
My paintings. They're here somewhere.
Tabbi smiles up at Misty, and slips a hand into her grandmother's hand. The peridot ring, sparkling green against the white linen tablecloth.
Grace's eyes flicker toward Misty, and she winces like someone walking into a spiderweb, her chin tucked and her hands touching the air. Grace says, “So much has been unpleasant on the island lately.” She inhales, her pearls rising, then sighs and says, “I'm hoping the art show will give us all a fresh start.”
August 24 . . .
and One-Half
IN AN ATTIC BATHROOM, Grace runs water into the tub, then goes out to wait in the hallway. Tabbi stays in the room to watch Misty. To guard her own mother.
Just for the record, just this summer, it feels as if years have gone by. Years and years. The girl Misty saw from her window, flirting. This girl, she could be a stranger with yellow fingers.
Misty says, “You really shouldn't smoke. Even if you're already dead.” What they don't teach you in art school is how to react when you find out your only child has connived to break your heart. For now, with just Tabbi and her mother in the bathroom, maybe it's a daughter's job to piss off her mother.
Tabbi looks at her face in the bathroom mirror. She licks her index finger and uses it to fix the edge of her lipstick. Not looking at Misty, she says, “You might be more careful, Mother. We don't need you anymore.”
She picks a cigarette out of a pack from her pocket. Right in front of Misty, she flicks a lighter and takes a puff.
Her panties loose and baggy on her stick legs, Misty slips them off under the skirt and kicks them free of her shoes, saying, “I loved you a lot more when you were dead.”
On her cigarette hand, the ring from her grandmother, the peridot flashes green in the light from above the sink. Tabbi stoops to lift the bloody plaid skirt off the floor. She holds it between two fingers and says, “Granmy Wilmot needs me to get ready for the art show.” Saying as she leaves, “For your show, Mother.”
In the bathtub, the cuts and scratches from the steak knife, they fill with soap and sting until Misty grits her teeth. The dried blood turns the bathwater milky pink. The hot water gets the bleeding started again, and Misty ruins a white towel, staining it with red smears while she tries to dry off.
According to Detective Stilton, a man called the police station on the mainland this morning. He wouldn't give his name, but he said Angel Delaporte was dead. He said the Ocean Alliance for Freedom would keep killing tourists until the crowds quit stressing the local environment.
The silverware as big as garden tools. The ancient bottles of wine. The old Wilmot paintings, none of it was taken.
In her attic bedroom, Misty dials her mom's phone number in Tecumseh Lake, but the hotel operator comes on the line. A cable is broken, the operator says, but it should be fixed soon. The house phone still works. Misty just can't call the mainland.
When she checks under the edge of the carpet, her envelope of tip money is gone.
Tabbi's peridot ring. The birthday gift from her grandmother.
The warning Misty ignored: “Get off the island before you can't.”
All the hidden messages people leave so they won't be forgotten. The ways we all try to talk to the future. Maura and Constance.
“You'll die when they're done with you.”
It's easy enough to get into room 313. Misty's been a maid, Misty Wilmot, queen of the fucking slaves. She knows where to find the passkey. The room's a double, a queen-size bed with a view of the ocean. It's the same furniture as in every guest room. A desk. A chair. A chest of drawers. On the luggage stand is an open suitcase of some summer person. Slacks and flowered silk hangs in the closet. A damp bikini is flopped over the shower curtain rod.
Just for the record, it's the best job of wallpapering Misty's ever seen. Plus, it's not bad paper, the wallpaper in room 313, pastel green stripes alternating with rows of pink cabbage roses. A design that looked ancient the day it was printed. It's stained with tea to look yellowed with age.
What gives it away is the paper's too perfect. Too seamless and even and straight, up and down. They've matched the seams too well. It's definitely not Peter's work.
Not your work. Dear sweet lazy Peter, who never took any art very serious.
Whatever Peter left here for people to find, sealed inside this room, when he drywalled over the door, it's gone now. Peter's little time capsule or time bomb, the people of Waytansea Island have erased it. The way Mrs. Terrymore erased the library books. The same way the mainland houses have all been burned. The work of OAFF.
The way Angel Delaporte is dead. Stabbed in bed, in his sleep.
In Misty's bed. Your bed. With nothing taken, and no sign of a break-in.
Just for the record, the summer people could walk in at any time. To find Misty hiding here, clutching a bloody knife in one hand.
With the serrated blade, Misty picks at a seam and peels away a strip of wallpaper. Using the sharp tip, Misty peels off another strip. Peeling away a third long, slow strip of wallpaper, Misty can read:
“. . . in love with Angel Delaporte, and I'm sorry but I will not die for . . .”
And just for the record, this is not what she really wanted to find.
August 24 . . .
and Three-Quarters
WITH THE WHOLE WALL shredded, all the old cabbage roses and pale green stripes peeled away in long strips, here's what Peter left for people to find.
What you left.
“I'm in love with Angel Delaporte, and I'm sorry but I will not die for our cause.” Written around and around the
walls, it says, “I won't let you kill me the way you've killed all the painters' husbands since Gordon Kincaid.”
The room's littered with curls and shreds of wallpaper. Dusty with the dried glue. You hear voices in the hallway, and Misty waits frozen in the wrecked room. Waiting for the summer people to open their door.
Across the wall, it's written, “I don't care about our traditions anymore.”
It says, “I don't love Misty Marie,” it says, “but she doesn't deserve to be tortured. I love our island, but we have to find a new way to save our way of life. We can't keep harvesting people.”
It's written, “This is ritual mass murder, and I won't condone it.”
The summer people, their stuff is buried, the luggage and cosmetics and sunglasses. Buried in shredded trash.
“By the time you find this,” the writing says, “I'll be gone. I'm leaving with Angel tonight. If you're reading this, then I'm sorry, but it's already too late. Tabbi will have a better future if her generation has to fend for itself.”
Written under the strips of wallpaper, it says, “I'm genuinely sorry for Misty.”
You've written, “It's true I never loved her, but I don't hate her enough to complete our plan.”
It's written, “Misty deserves better than this. Dad, it's time we set her free.”
The sleeping pills Detective Stilton said Peter had taken. The prescription Peter didn't have. The suitcase he'd packed and put in the trunk. He was planning to leave us. To leave with Angel.
You were planning to leave.
Somebody drugged him and left him in the car with the engine running, shut in the garage for Misty to find. Somebody didn't know about the suitcase, packed and ready in the trunk for his getaway. They didn't know the gas tank was half empty.
“Dad,” meaning Harrow Wilmot. Peter's father, who's supposed to already be dead. Since before Tabbi was born.