The Law of Moses (19 page)

Terrence just stared at my fuller chest with a sneer and I realized that my plan had backfired a little. The heels practically put my boobs at his eye level. I ended up taking them off and resigning myself to dancing in my bare feet and pretending Terrence Anderson was Kenny Chesney—Kenny was a little guy and a famous country singer, and he was plenty hot. Sadly, I found my tastes had changed dramatically, and cowboys and country singers, however hot, had taken a backseat to eccentric artists in mental institutions.

Moses

WE DIDN’T REVISIT it right away. Not with Dr. Andelin anyway. Tag and I were both put on isolation for three days due to the slug fest. Neither of us were allowed out of our rooms, and I was journaling with pictures once again, explaining “my thoughts and feelings” through my drawings. Dr. Andelin brought me a stack of sketch pads. Good ones. Not computer paper. And he brought grease pencils too. I don’t think he asked permission. I think he was thanking me. I liked the non-verbal appreciation far better than anything he could have said, especially since I hadn’t done it to make him happy. But I made sure to show my gratitude in my own way.

I drew and drew until my fingers cramped and my eyes wouldn’t focus. And when I was done I had sheets and sheets of still life drawings and portraits. Umbrellas and pebbles in a stream and Noah Andelin in his neat little beard, laughing and looking up from the page at a woman who was gone but not forgotten. When I presented the pictures to the doctor on his next visit, he took them reverently and spent our entire session thumbing through them, not talking at all. It was the best session yet.

On the third day of isolation, Tag sprinted into my room and shut the door.

I stared at him balefully. I was kind of under the impression the door was locked. I hadn’t even checked to see. I felt stupid for just sitting in a room for three days behind an unlocked door.

“They stroll the hall every few minutes. But that’s all. That was ridiculously easy. I should have come sooner,” he said, and sat down on my bed. “I’m David Taggert, by the way. But you can call me Tag.” He didn’t act like he wanted to engage in a brawl, which was a little disappointing.

If he didn’t want to fight, I wanted him to leave. I immediately went back to the picture I was working on. I felt Molly there, just beyond the water, her image flickering through the falls, and I sighed heavily. I was weary of Molly. I was even wearier of her brother. Both were incredibly stubborn and obnoxious.

“You’re a crazy son-of-a bitch,” he stated without preamble.

I didn’t even raise my head from the picture I was drawing with the nub of a grease pencil. I was trying to make my supplies last. I was going through them too fast.

“That’s what people say, don’t they? They say you’re crazy. But I don’t buy it, man. Not anymore. You’re not crazy. You’ve got skills. Mad skills.”

“Mad. Crazy. Don’t they mean the same thing?” I murmured. Madness and genius were closely related. I wondered what skills he was talking about. He hadn’t seen me paint.

“Nah, man,” he said. “They aren’t. Crazy people need to be in places like this. You don’t belong here.”

“I think I probably do.”

He laughed, clearly surprised. “You think you’re crazy?”

“I think I’m cracked.” That’s what Georgia said. But she hadn’t seemed to mind. Not until the cracks had gotten so wide she’d fallen in one and gotten hurt.

Tag tilted his head quizzically, but when I didn’t continue, he nodded. “Okay. Maybe we’re all cracked. Or bent. I sure as hell am.”

“Why?” I found myself asking. Molly was hovering again and I drew faster, helplessly filling the page with her face.

“My sister’s gone. And it’s my fault. And until I know what happened to her, I’m never gonna be able to get straight. I’ll be bent forever.” His voice was so soft I wasn’t sure he meant for me to hear the last part.

“Is this your sister?” I asked reluctantly. I held up my sketch pad.

Tag stared. Then he stood. Then he sat down again. And then he nodded.

“Yeah,” he choked. “That’s my sister.”

And he told me everything.

It turns out, David Taggert’s father was a Texas oil man who’d always wanted to be a rancher. When Tag started getting in trouble and getting drunk every weekend, Tag’s father had retired, sold some of his shares for millions and, among other things, purchased a fifty acre ranch in Sanpete County, Utah, where Tag’s mother was from, and moved the family there. He was sure if he could get Tag and his older sister, Molly, away from their old scene, he would be able to clean them up. Tag’s father thought it would be a good move for the whole family. Open space, lots of work to keep them busy, and good, wholesome people all around them. And there was plenty of money to grease the operation.

But the kids hadn’t thrived. They’d rebelled. Tag’s older sister, Molly, ran away and was never heard from again. The younger girls, twins, ended up following their mother back to Dallas when she filed for divorce. Turns out she liked Dallas better, too, and blamed her husband for her oldest daughter’s disappearance. Then it was just Tag and his old man. And lots of money, space, and cattle. Tag struggled to stay sober, but when he wasn’t drinking, he was drowning in guilt and eventually tried to kill himself. Several times. Which landed him in the psych ward with me.

“She took off. We don’t really know why. She was doing better than anyone. I think she took some of my shit. I wasn’t just drinking, you know. I had pills stashed everywhere. I don’t know why she took it. Maybe her problem was worse than I thought. Maybe she just wanted to take it so I couldn’t get it.”

I waited, letting him talk. I didn’t know how she died any more than he did. That wasn’t what the dead wanted to share. They wanted to show me their lives. Not their deaths. Not ever.

“She’s dead. Isn’t she? You can see her so that means she’s dead.”

I nodded.

“I need you to tell me where she is, Moses. I need you to find out.”

“It doesn’t work that way. I don’t see the whole picture. Just pieces. I don’t always even know who the person belongs to. If I’m in a group, it could be anyone. They don’t speak. At all. And if they do, I can’t hear them. They show me things. And I don’t always know why. In fact, I never know why. I just paint.”

“You knew with Dr. Andelin!”

“His dead wife followed him around during the group session! And she showed them having sex, okay? It didn’t take much to decipher that one!” I was getting agitated and Tag was moving in on me like he was getting ready to do battle.

“They show me pieces. Memories. And I don’t always interpret them correctly. I don’t interpret them at all, you know? I’m not Sherlock Holmes.”

He shoved me and I resisted the urge to shove back. “So you’re telling me that you’ve seen my sister before and you had no idea she was mine?”

“I saw Molly long before I ever met you!”

The truth of the statement suddenly slammed home.

I had seen Molly long before I’d ever met David Taggert.

And that didn’t make any sense. It never happened like that. The dead that came through were always a result of my contact with the people close to them.

“She went away. I painted her face on an overpass and she went away.” I’d seen her the night Gigi died. But that didn’t count. That night, I’d seen every dead face that had haunted my life since the beginning. I just hadn’t seen Gi.

“And she came back?”

“Yes. But I think she came back because of you.”

“And what does she do?” Tag was yelling now, frustrated, his hands fisted in his dark hair, his green eyes blazing. I knew he wanted to start swinging. Not because he was actually angry at me, but because he had no idea what to do with his emotion. And I understood that.

“She shows me things. Just like they all do.” I lowered my voice and kept my eyes level. It felt a little strange talking someone else down.

“Please. Please, Moses.” Tag was suddenly battling back the tears, and I resisted the urge to start a fight, to push him down and pummel him just to get him back to the Tag that wanted to hit me and called me a crazy son-of-a bitch.

I turned away from him and sank down on my haunches, bracing myself against the wall, but my eyes found the picture of Molly staring up from my sketch book that I’d tossed to the floor. She smiled back at me, a heart-breaking illusion of happy-ever-after. There was no happy-ever-after. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my head, blocking out Tag and the smiling face of his dead sister. And I raised the water.

I focused on Molly Taggert, blonde hair flying just like Georgia’s. I immediately lost concentration and felt the same old slice in my gut that I felt whenever I allowed her memory in. But with the thought of Georgia, the overpass I’d painted came into focus, the place where I’d taken Georgia’s virginity and permanently lost a part of myself.

Immediately, I needed to paint, and I swore viciously, yelling at Tag to throw me the sketchbook and a pencil. It wasn’t the same, but I had to have something. My hands got icy and my neck burned and in my mind I watched as the strip of land became pale and flat as the water split in half and was sucked into two towering walls, leaving not a single drop behind to moisten the ground.

They’d made me cover Molly’s image on the overpass with paint. The Sheriff’s Department had supplied me with a gallon of flat grey paint that covered the upsetting truth that children disappeared and the world was a scary place. But as I watched, the paint started to peel as if pulled by imaginary hands, revealing Molly once again in swirling lines and twinkling eyes and a smile that I could now see was identical to Tag’s. We never saw what was obvious until we were hit over the head with it.

And then images started to flood my mind, the same images Molly always fed me.

“She always shows me that damn math test!” My arms were flying, and I drew the test with Molly’s name in flowing script at the top.

The math test fluttered away as if Molly had whipped it out of my hands. I hadn’t shown the proper appreciation for that red A circled at the top. Tag wasn’t the only one in the family with a temper, apparently. The A in the circle became a star, just a simple golden star that morphed into a night sky with stars shooting and exploding, like she was staring up at a light show, so glorious and color-filled that I cursed the pencil in my hand and begged Tag to bring me something else.

Then Molly showed me fields, fields that looked just like the fields around the overpass and I tried not to curse in frustration. Instead, I drew the long golden strands of wheat in those fields, blending them with Molly’s hair as she raced through my mind, until the wheat became weeds that brushed against the concrete overpass.

“Stop! Moses!” Tag was shaking my shoulders and slapping at my face. “What the hell, man! You’re drawing on the walls!” Tag’s voice faded off. “Actually, I don’t give a shit if you draw on the walls.”

But the connection was gone, and I was dazed. I was pissed too, and stepped back from the wild, star-filled sky, smudged and shaded and half-finished before me. If I would have had paint

I was breathing too hard, and so was Tag, as if he’d crossed to the other side with me and had run, chasing his sister through fields of wheat that led to nowhere and made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.

He looked down at the images I’d tossed around the room and started picking them up, one at a time.

“A math test? With an A circled at the top?”

“It’s red. The A is red.” I hadn’t been able to illustrate that with the pencil.

“And this overpass is in Nephi?”

I nodded.

“Nephi’s only about an hour from Sanpete. You knew that, right?”

I nodded again. And Nephi was fifteen minutes north of Levan. All the kids from Levan were bussed to school in Nephi. It was practically the same town. And I wasn’t going near either of them. Tag could beg and plead, and his angry green eyes could explode in his head, and I still wasn’t going back.

“What’s with the fields?”

“There are fields surrounding the overpass. There’s a truck stop, a couple gas stations, a cheap motel and a burger joint a little farther down by the off-ramp, but that’s all. It’s fields and a freeway, and that’s pretty much it.”

“And what’s this?” Tag pointed at the wall where my pencil had proven frustratingly insufficient at conveying the exploding colors and streaks of light.