Diary

  Around the room, it's written, “Don't unveil the devil's work.”

  Written there, it says, “Destroy all her paintings.”

  What they don't teach you in art school is how to make sense of a nightmare.

  It's signed Peter Wilmot.

  August 25

  IN THE HOTEL dining room, a crew of island people are hanging Misty's work, all her paintings. But not separate, they fit together, paper and canvas, to form a long mural. A collage. The crew keeps the mural covered as they assemble it, only letting one edge show, just enough to attach the next row of paintings. What it is, you can't tell. What could be a tree, could really be a hand. What looks like a face, might be a cloud. It's a crowd scene or a landscape or a still life of flowers and fruit. The moment they add a piece to the mural, the crew moves a drape to cover it.

  All you can tell is it's huge, filling the longest wall of the dining room.

  Grace is with them, directing. Tabbi and Dr. Touchet, watching.

  When Misty goes to look, Grace stops her with one blue, lumpy hand and says, “Have you tried on that dress I made you?”

  Misty just wants to look at her painting. It's her work. Because of the blindfold, she has no idea what she's done. What part of herself she's showing to strangers.

  And Dr. Touchet says, “That wouldn't be a very good idea.” He says, “You'll see it opening night, with the rest of the crowd.”

  Just for the record, Grace says, “We're moving back into the house this afternoon.”

  Where Angel Delaporte was killed.

  Grace says, “Detective Stilton gave his all clear.” She says, “If you'll pack, we can take your things for you.”

  Peter's pillow. Her art supplies in their pale wood box.

  “It's almost over, my dear,” Grace says. “I know exactly how you feel.”

  According to the diary. Grace's diary.

  With everyone busy, Misty goes to the attic, to the room Grace and Tabbi share. Just for the record, Misty's already packed, and stealing the diary from Grace's room. She's carrying her suitcase down to the car. Misty, she's still dusted with dried wallpaper glue. Paper shreds of pale green stripes and pink roses in her hair.

  The book that Grace is always reading, studying, with its red cover and gold script across the front, it's supposed to be the diary of a woman who lived on the island a hundred years ago. The woman in Grace's diary, she was forty-one years old and a failed art student. She'd got pregnant and dropped out of art school to get married on Waytansea Island. She didn't love her new husband as much as she loved his old jewelry and the dream of living in a big stone house.

  Here was a ready-made life for her, an instant role to step into. Waytansea Island, with all its tradition and ritual. All of it worked out. The answers for everything.

  The woman was happy enough, but even a hundred years ago the island was filling up with wealthy tourists from the city. Pushy, needy strangers with enough money to take over. Just as her family money was running out, her husband shot himself while cleaning a gun.

  The woman was sick with migraine headaches, exhausted and throwing up everything she ate. She worked as a maid in the hotel until she tripped on the stairs and became bedridden, one of her legs splinted inside a massive plaster cast. Trapped with nothing to do, she started to paint.

  Just like Misty, but not Misty. This imitation Misty.

  Then, her ten-year-old son drowns.

  After one hundred paintings, her talent and ideas seemed to disappear. Her inspiration dwindles away.

  Her handwriting, wide and long, she's what Angel Delaporte would call a giving, caring person.

  What you don't learn in art school is how Grace Wilmot will follow you around and write down everything you do. Turn your life into this kind of sick fiction. Here it is. Grace Wilmot is writing a novel patterned after Misty's life. Oh, she's changed a few bits. She gave the woman three kids. Grace made her a maid instead of a dining room server. Oh, it's all very coincidental.

  Just for the record, Misty's waiting in line at the ferry, reading this shit in Harrow's old Buick.

  The book says how most of the village has moved into the Waytansea Hotel, turning it into a barracks. A refugee camp for island families. The Hylands do everyone's laundry. The Burtons do all the cooking. The Petersens, all the cleaning.

  There doesn't look like one original thought in any of it.

  Just by reading this shit, Misty's probably going to make it come true. Self-fulfill the prophecy. She'll start living into someone's idea for how her life should go. But sitting here, she can't stop reading.

  Within Grace's novel, the woman narrator finds a diary. The diary she finds seems to follow her own life. She reads how her artwork is hung in a huge show. On the night it opens, the hotel is crowded with summer tourists.

  Just for the record, dear sweet Peter, if you've recovered from your coma, this might put you right back there. The simple fact is Grace, your mother, is writing about your wife, making her out to be some drunken slut.

  This has got to be how Judy Garland felt when she read Valley of the Dolls.

  Here in line at the ferry dock, Misty's waiting for a ride to the mainland. Sitting here in the car where Peter almost died, or almost ran off and left her, Misty's sitting here in a hot line of summer people. Her suitcase packed and in the trunk. The white satin dress included.

  The same way your suitcase was in the trunk.

  That's where the diary ends. The last entry is just before the art show. After that . . . there's nothing.

  Just so you don't feel bad about yourself, Misty's leaving your kid the way you were abandoning them both. You're still married to a coward. The same way she was ready to run away when she thought the bronze statue would kill Tabbi—the only person on the island Misty gives a shit for. Not Grace. Not the summer people. There's nobody here Misty needs to save.

  Except Tabbi.

  August 26

  JUST FOR THE RECORD, you're still one chicken-shit piece of work. You're a selfish, half-assed, lazy, spineless piece of crap. Yeah, sure, you were planning to save your wife, but you were also going to dump her. Stupid brain-damaged fuck that you are. Dear sweet stupid you.

  But now, Misty knows just how you felt.

  Today is your 157th day as a vegetable. And her first.

  Today, Misty drives the three hours to see you and sit by your bedside.

  Just for the record, Misty asks you, “Is it okay to kill strangers to prop up a way of life just because the people who live it are the people you love?”

  Well, thought you loved.

  The way people are coming to the island, more and more every summer, you see more litter. The fresh water is in shorter and shorter supply. But of course, you can't cap growth. It's anti-American. Selfish. It's tyrannical. Evil. Every child has the right to a life. Every person has the right to live where they can afford. We're entitled to pursue happiness wherever we can drive to, fly to, sail to, to hunt it down. Too many people rushing to one place, sure, they ruin it—but that's the system of checks and balances, the way the market adjusts itself.

  This way, wrecking a place is the only way to save it. You have to make it look horrible to the outside world.

  There is no OAFF. There's only people fighting to preserve their world from more people.

  Part of Misty hates these people who come here, invaders, infidels, crowding in to wreck her way of life, her daughter's childhood. All these outsiders, trailing their failed marriages and stepchildren and drug habits and sleazy ethics and phony status symbols, these aren't the kind of friends Misty wants to give her kid.

  Your kid.

  Their kid.

  To save Tabbi, Misty could let happen what always happens, Misty could just let it happen again. The art show. Whatever it is, she could let the island myth run its course. And maybe Waytansea would be saved.

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

  Or maybe they can give Tab
bi something better than a future of no challenges, a calm, secure life of peace.

  Sitting here with you now, Misty leans over and kisses your puffy red forehead.

  It's okay that you never loved her, Peter. Misty loved you.

  At least for believing she could be a great artist, a savior. Something more than a technical illustrator or commercial artist. More than human, even. Misty loves you for that.

  Can you feel this?

  Just for the record, she's sorry about Angel Delaporte. Misty's sorry you were raised inside such a fucked-up legend. She's sorry she ever met you.

  August 27—

  The New Moon

  GRACE TWIRLS HER HAND in the air between them, her fingernails ridged and yellow under clear polish, and she says, “Misty dear, turn around so I can see how the back hangs.”

  Misty's first time to confront Grace, the evening of the art show, the first thing Grace says is, “I knew that dress would look wonderful on you.”

  This is in the old Wilmot house on Birch Street. There, the doorway to her old bedroom is sealed behind a sheet of clear plastic and yellow police tape. A time capsule. A gift to the future. Through the plastic, you can see the mattress is gone. The shade is gone from the bedside lamp. A spray of something dark ruins the wallpaper above the headboard. The handwriting of blood pressure. The doorframe and windowsill, the white paint is smudged with black fingerprint powder. Deep, fresh tracks from a vacuum cleaner crisscross the rug. The invisible dust of Angel Delaporte's dead skin, it's all been sucked up for DNA testing.

  Your old bedroom.

  On the wall above the empty bed is the painting Misty did of the antique chair. Her eyes closed out on Waytansea Point. The hallucination of the statue coming to kill her. Blood sprayed across it.

  With Grace now, in her bedroom across the hallway, Misty says not to try anything funny. The mainland police are parked right outside, waiting for them. If Misty's not out there in ten minutes, they'll come in, guns blazing.

  Grace, she sits on the shiny pink-padded stool in front of her huge vanity table, her perfume bottles and jewelry spread out around her on the glass top. Her silver hand mirror and hairbrushes.

  The souvenirs of wealth.

  And Grace says, “Tu es ravissante ce soir.” She says, “You look pretty this evening.”

  Misty has cheekbones now. And collarbones. Her shoulders are bony and white and stick out, coat-hanger-straight, from the dress that was her wedding dress in its previous life. The dress falls from a shred over one shoulder, white stain draped in folds, already loose and billowing since Grace measured her only a few days ago. Or weeks. Her bra and panties, they're so big Misty's done without. Misty's almost as thin as her husband, the withered skeleton with machines pumping air and vitamins through him.

  Thin as you.

  Her hair is longer than before her knee accident. Her skin is blanched pale from so much time inside. Misty has a waist and sunken cheeks. Misty has a single chin, and her neck looks long and stringy with muscle.

  She's starved until her teeth and eyes look huge.

  Before the showing tonight, Misty called the police. Not just Detective Stilton, Misty called the state patrol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Misty said that OAFF would be attacking the art show tonight, at the hotel on Waytansea Island. After them, Misty called the fire department. Misty told them, seven or seven-thirtyish tonight, there would be a disaster on the island. Bring ambulances, she told them. Then she called the television news and told them to bring a crew with the biggest, strongest relay truck they had. Misty called the radio stations. She called everybody but the Boy Scouts.

  In Grace Wilmot's bedroom, in that house with the legacy of names and ages written just inside the front door, Misty tells Grace how tonight, her plan is ruined. The firemen and police. The television cameras. Misty's invited the whole world, and they'll all be at the hotel for the unveiling.

  And clipping an earring on one ear, Grace looks at Misty reflected in the vanity mirror and says, “Of course you did, but you called them the last time.”

  Misty says, What does Grace mean by last time?

  “And we really wish you wouldn't,” Grace says. She's smoothing her hair with the palms of her lumpy hands, saying, “You only make the final death toll higher than it needs to be.”

  Misty says there won't be a death toll. Misty says how she stole the diary.

  From behind her, a voice says, “Misty dear, you can't steal what's already yours.”

  The voice behind her. A man's voice. It's Harrow, Harry, Peter's father.

  Your father.

  He's wearing a tuxedo, his white hair combed into a crown on his square head, his nose and chin sharp and jutting out. The man Peter was supposed to become. You can still smell his breath. The hands that stabbed Angel Delaporte to death in her bed. That burned the houses Peter wrote inside, trying to warn people away from the island.

  The man who tried to kill Peter. To kill you. His son.

  He's standing in the hallway, holding Tabbi's hand. Your daughter's hand.

  Just for the record, it seems like a lifetime ago that Tabbi left her. Ran out of her grip to grab the cold hand of a man Misty thought was a killer. The statue in the woods. The old cemetery on Waytansea Point.

  Grace has both elbows in the air, her hands behind her neck fastening a strand of pearls, and she says, “Misty dear, you remember your father-in-law, don't you?”

  Harrow leans down to kiss Grace's cheek. Standing, he says, “Of course she remembers.”

  The smell of his breath.

  Grace holds her hands out, clutching the air, and says, “Tabbi, come give me a kiss. It's time the grown-ups went to their party.”

  First Tabbi. Then Harrow. Another thing they don't teach you in art school is what to say when people come back from the dead.

  To Harrow, Misty says, “Aren't you supposed to be cremated?”

  And Harrow lifts his hand to look at his wristwatch. He says, “Actually, not for another four hours.”

  He shoots his shirt cuff to hide the watch and says, “We'd like to introduce you to the crowd tonight. We're counting on you to say a few words of welcome.”

  Still, Misty says, he knows what she'll tell everyone. To run. To leave the island and not come back. What Peter tried to tell them. Misty will tell them one man is dead and another is in a coma because of some crazy island curse. The second they get her onstage, she'll shout “Fire.” She'll do her damnedest to clear the room.

  Tabbi steps up beside Grace, sitting on the vanity stool. And Grace says, “Nothing would make us happier.”

  Harrow says, “Misty dear, give your mother-in-law a kiss.” He says, “And please, forgive us. We won't bother you again after tonight.”

  August 27 . . .

  and One-Half

  THE WAY HARROW told Misty. The way he explained the island legend is she can't not succeed as an artist.

  She's doomed to fame. Cursed with talent. Life after life.

  She's been Giotto di Bondone, then Michelangelo, then Jan Vermeer.

  Or Misty was Jan van Eyck and Leonardo da Vinci and Diego Velázquez.

  Then Maura Kincaid and Constance Burton.

  And now she's Misty Marie Wilmot, but only her name changes. She has always been an artist. She will always be an artist.

  What they don't teach you in art school is how your whole life is about discovering who you already were.

  Just for the record, this is Harrow Wilmot talking. Peter's crazy killer father. The Harry Wilmot who's been hiding out since before Peter and Misty got married. Before Tabbi was born.

  Your crazy father.

  If you believe Harry Wilmot, Misty's the finest artists who've ever lived.

  Two hundred years ago, Misty was Maura Kincaid. A hundred years ago, she was Constance Burton. In that previous life, Constance saw some jewelry worn by one of the island sons while he was on tour in Europe. It was a ring that had been Maura's. By accident, he found
her and brought her back. After Constance died, people saw how her diary matched Maura's. Their lives were identical, and Constance had saved the island the way Maura had saved it.

  How her diary matched her earlier diary. How her every diary will match the diary before. How Misty will always save the island. With her art. That's the island legend, according to Harrow. It's all her doing.

  A hundred years later—when their money was dwindling—they sent the island sons to find her. Again and again, we've brought her back, forced her to repeat her previous life. Using the jewelry as bait, Misty would recognize it. She'd love it and not know why.

  They, the whole wax museum of Waytansea Island, they knew she'd be a great painter. Given the right kind of torture. The way Peter always said the best art comes from suffering. The way Dr. Touchet says we can connect to some universal inspiration.

  Poor little Misty Marie Kleinman, the greatest artist of all time, their savior. Their slave. Misty, their karmic cash cow.

  Harrow said how they use the diary of the previous artist to shape the life of the next. Her husband has to die at the same age, then one of her children. They could fake the death, the way they did with Tabbi, but with Peter—well, Peter forced their hand.

  Just for the record, Misty's telling all this to Detective Stilton while he drives to the Waytansea Hotel.

  Peter's blood full of the sleeping pills he never took. The death certificate that didn't exist for Harrow Wilmot. Misty says, “It's got to be inbreeding. These people are lunatics.”

  “The blessing is,” Harrow told her, “you forget.”

  With every death, Misty forgets who she was—but the islanders pass the story along from one generation to the next. They remember so they can find her and bring her back. For the rest of eternity, every fourth generation, just as the money runs out . . . When the world threatens to invade, they'll bring her back and she'll save their future.

  “The way you always did, you always will,” Harrow said.

  Misty Marie Wilmot, queen of the slaves.