Via Dolorosa(73)
“Is your hand all right?” Granger asked suddenly, nodding toward his bandaged arm.
“I sprained it. It’ll be okay.” But he wasn’t thinking about his arm; he was thinking about Isabella, and how she had made some comment last night down in Sea Pines about how his mural had become a topic of conversation at the hotel. Isabella Rosales. What had she said exactly? He could not remember…
“You said you wanted to ask me something, Nick?” Granger said.
Snapping back to reality, Nick said, “Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I hope—I mean, I hope this doesn’t sound insulting—an imposition…”
“Not at all.”
“Myles,” he said. “Your son. I know he wrote letters home to you from time to time when we were in Iraq.”
“Yes.” And something behind the elder Granger’s eyes appeared to immediately film over.
“I was wondering if you could recall Myles ever mentioning anything about, well…” He considered how to proceed. “Did he ever say anything about suffering from delusions? Like—I don’t know—like periods of time that seemed to slide together and make no sense? Or…or maybe that he was seeing things he couldn’t understand, or that didn’t belong in the real world?”
Granger only looked at him. After what felt like an eternity, the old man said, “I’m not sure I know what you mean, Nick…”
“Yeah,” he said, offered a nervous chuckle, “I’m not sure I know, either.”
“Well I don’t recall anything like that in any of Myles’s letters…”
“Maybe he mentioned severe headaches? Something like that?”
Shaking his head, the bell captain again said, “No, nothing like that. Not that I can remember, anyway.”
“Do you still have them?” Nick asked.
“The letters? Of course.”
“Would you mind if I took a look through them? I’ve just…I’ve…I’ve been curious about something lately and I, well, I just wanted to see…” He couldn’t say anymore.
“Are you feeling all right, Nick?” Granger sounded genuinely concerned.
“Yeah, I was just thinking…”
“Yes,” Granger said, not needing an explanation. “I can bring them to you this evening.”
“That would be wonderful.”
“Nick,” Granger said, “there is still something on your mind. What is it?”
“Never mind.” He championed a smile. “You’ve been really good to me, Mr. Granger.”
“You were my son’s hero,” Granger said. “That makes you mine.”
The words resonated with profound irony.
After Granger had gone, Nick sat for some time by himself at the table by the window. To his right, he could see the cicada still on the glass, now joined by two others. Looking up, he watched for some time the drone of Roger back and forth behind the bar. A young couple had taken up two stools on the other side of the bar during his conversation with Granger; they were now talking to each other in dreamy, hushed voices. He hadn’t known anything about Roger’s daughter Faye having drowned in Calibogue Sound. Still, he could not help but wonder what he must have said to poor Roger that had caused him to retreat so completely from him. Should he say something?
Another shadow fell across the length of his table. He turned and squinted his eyes and looked out the window, suddenly anticipating either Emma or Isabella standing on the other side of the glass. But no one was there; it was just the wind-rustled movement of the island palms.
After paying his bill and deciding to say nothing to Roger (at least for the time being), he found himself standing toward the rear of the hotel lobby, staring up at the mural. The passage of each minute strengthened in him the mounting certainty that it had indeed been Isabella who had complained about the mural to the hotel manager. Fresh anger flared up inside him. Yet, despite his anger, he could see the truth of it, too: that somehow, somewhere along the way, the mural had become a brutal, ferocious thing after all. How had it happened? He had taken a beautiful island landscape, lush and green and idyllic, and had marred it, ruined it—had transformed it into a desolate desert panorama. An outcropping of glossy stone had morphed into a heap of steaming tanks, still smoking with artillery fire; groups of sunbathers and adventurous young children, previously scaling the length of the bulkhead over the water, their arms splayed in representation of airplane wings, had turned into cold, faceless, helmeted soldiers hefting across the dunes with rifles in their hands and their packs on their backs. The black mark he had painted over the face of Myles Granger was still there—only now the figure simply conveyed a sense of brutal decapitation. Looking at it, he felt a chill emanate from the soles of his feet, straight up through his unsteady knees, and disperse throughout the entirety of his body. The distinction between tropical paradise and desert holocaust was suddenly nonexistent. Had he painted this monstrosity? Had he painted this?
Still, his anger toward Isabella would not subside. And two minutes later he found himself riding the elevator up to her floor. When the doors slid open, the hallway looked oddly dark. Peering down the corridor, he could see that most of the lights were out. Shadows of potted plants and a dusty Coke machine at the end of the hall crossed each other like latticework. Daylight fell dull and disheartening through the dirty windowpanes at either end of the hall.