Duma Key(141)

"It's not a joke," I muttered, bending closer... only bending closer did no good. I was seeing this picture through four aggravating levels of obfuscation: the photograph, the newspaper reproduction of the photograph, the Xerox of the newspaper reproduction of the photograph... and time itself. Over eighty years of it, if I had the math right.

"What's not a joke?" Wireman asked.

"The way the size of the horse is exaggerated. And the carrot. Even the sunrays. It's a child's cry of glee, Wireman!"

"A hoax is what it is. Got to be. She would have been two! A child of two can't even make stick-figures and call em mommy and daddy, can she?"

"Was what happened to Candy Brown a hoax? Or what about the bullet that used to be in your brain? The one that's now gone?"

He was silent.

I tapped CHILD PRODIGY. "Look, they even had the right fancy term for it. Do you suppose if she'd been poor and black, they would have called her PICKANINNY FREAK and stuck her in a sideshow somewhere? Because I sort of do."

"If she'd been poor and black, she never would have made the paper at all. Or fallen out of a pony-trap to begin with."

"Is that what hap-" I stopped, my eye caught by the blurry photograph again. Now it was big sis I was looking at. Adriana.

"What?" Wireman asked, and his tone was What now?

"Her bathing suit. Look familiar to you?"

"I can't see very much, just the top. Elizabeth's holding her picture out in front of the rest."

"What about the part you can see?"

He looked for a long time. "Wish I had a magnifying glass."

"That would probably make it worse instead of better."

"All right, muchacho, it does look vaguely familiar... but maybe that's just an idea you put in my head."

"In all the Girl and Ship paintings, there was only one Rowboat Girl I was never sure of: the one in No. 6. The one with the orangey hair, the one in the blue singlet with the yellow stripe around the neck." I tapped Adriana's blurred image in the photocopy Mary Ire had given me. "This is the girl. This is the swimming suit. I'm sure of it. So was Elizabeth."

"What are we saying here?" Wireman asked. He was skimming the print, rubbing at his temples as he did so. I asked if his eye was bothering him.

"No. This is just so... so f**king..." He looked up at me, eyes big, still rubbing his temples. "She fell out of the goddam pony-trap and hit her head on a rock, or so it says here. Woke up in the doctor's infirmary just as they were getting ready to transport her to the hospital in St. Pete. Seizures thereafter. It says, 'The seizures continue for Baby Elizabeth, although they are moderating and seem to do her no lasting harm.' And she started painting pictures!"

I said, "The accident must have happened right after the big group portrait was taken, because she looks exactly the same, and they change fast at that age."

Wireman seemed not to notice. "We're all in the same rowboat," he said.

I started to ask him what he meant, then realized I didn't have to. " S , se or, " I said.

"She fell on her head. I shot myself in the head. You got your head crushed by a payloader."

"Crane."

He waved his hand as if to indicate this made no difference. Then he used the hand to grip my surviving wrist. His fingers were cold. "I have questions, muchacho. How come she stopped painting? And how come I never started?"

"I can't say for certain why she stopped. Maybe she forgot blocked it out or maybe she deliberately lied and denied. As for you, your talent's empathy. And on Duma Key, empathy got raised to telepathy."

"That's bullshi..." He trailed off.

I waited.

"No," he said. "No. It's not. But it's also completely gone. Want to know something, amigo?"

"Sure."

He cocked a thumb at the tense family group across the room from us. They had gone back to their discussion. Pop was now shaking his finger at Mom. Or maybe it was Sis. "A couple of months ago, I could have told you what that hoopdedoo was about. Now all I could do is make an educated guess."

"And probably come out in much the same place," I said. "Would you trade one for the other in any case? Your eyesight for the occasional thoughtwave?"

"God, no!" he said, then looked around the caff with an ironic, despairing, head-cocked smile. "I can't believe we're having this discussion, you know. I keep thinking I'll wake up and it'll all be as you were, Private Wireman, assume the position."

I looked him in the eye. "Ain't gonna happen."

x

According to the Weekly Echo, Baby Elizabeth (as she was referred to almost throughout) began her artistic endeavors on the very first day of her at-home convalescence. She quickly went on, "gaining skill and prowess with each passing hour, it seemed to her amazed father." She started with colored pencils ("Sound familiar?" Wireman asked), before progressing to a box of watercolors the bemused John Eastlake brought home from Venice.

In the three months following her accident, much of it spent in bed, she had done literally hundreds of watercolors, turning them out at a rate John Eastlake and the other girls found a little frightening. (If "Nan Melda" had an opinion, it wasn't offered in print.) Eastlake tried to slow her down on doctor's orders but this was counterproductive. It caused fretfulness, crying fits, insomnia, bouts of fever. Baby Elizabeth said when she couldn't draw or paint, "her head hurted." Her father said that when she did paint, "She ate like one of the horses she liked to draw." The article's author, one M. Rickert, seemed to find this endearing. Recalling my own eating binges, I found it all too familiar.