Duma Key(153)

I shook my head. "Don't know. Her pictures may tell me."

"Just as long as you don't get in over your head and discover you can't get back to shore," Wireman said. "That's what happened to those two little girls."

"I know it," I said.

Jack pointed his finger at me. "Take care of yourself. Man-law."

I nodded and pointed back. "Man-law."

Chapter 15 Intruder

i

Twenty minutes later I sat in Little Pink with my sketch-pad on my lap and the red picnic basket beside me. Directly ahead, filling the western-facing window with light, was the Gulf. Far below me was the murmur of the shells. I had set my easel aside and covered my paint-splattered work-table with a piece of toweling. I laid the remains of her freshly sharpened colored pencils on top of it. There wasn't much left of those pencils, which were fat and somehow antique, but I thought there'd be enough. I was ready.

"Bullshit I am," I said. I was never going to be ready for this, and part of me was hoping nothing would happen. I thought something would, though. I thought that was why Elizabeth had wanted me to find her drawings. But how much of what was inside the red basket did she actually remember? My guess was that Elizabeth had forgotten most of what had happened to her when she was a child even before the Alzheimer's came along to complicate things. Because forgetting isn't always involuntary. Sometimes it's willed.

Who would want to remember something so awful that it had made your father scream until he bled? Better to stop drawing completely. To just go cold turkey. Better to tell people you can hardly even draw stick figures, that when it comes to art you're like wealthy alums who support their college sports teams: if you can't be an athlete, be an athletic supporter. Better to put it out of your mind completely, and in your old age, creeping senility will take care of the rest.

Oh, some of that old ability may still remain like scar-tissue on the dura of the brain from an old injury (caused by falling out of a pony-trap, let's say) and you might have to find ways to let that out once in awhile, to express it like a build-up of pus from an infection that will never quite heal. So you get interested in other people's art. You become, in fact, a patron of the arts. And if that's still not enough? Why, maybe you begin to collect china figures and buildings. You begin to build yourself a China Town. No one will call creating such tableaux art, but it's certainly imaginative, and the regular exercise of the imagination its visual aspect in particular is enough to make it stop.

Make what stop?

The itch, of course.

That damnable itch.

I scratched at my right arm, passed through it, and for the ten thousandth time found only my ribs. I flipped back the cover of my pad to the first sheet.

Start with a blank surface.

It called to me, as I was sure such blank sheets had once called to her.

Fill me up. Because white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember. Make. Show. Draw. And when you do, the itch will go away. For awhile the confusion will subside.

Please stay on the Key, she had said. No matter what happens. We need you.

I thought that might be true.

I sketched quickly. Just a few strokes. Something that could have been a cart. Or possibly a pony-trap, standing still and waiting for the pony.

"They lived here happily enough," I told the empty studio. "Father and daughters. Then Elizabeth fell out of the pony-trap and started to draw, the off-season hurricane exposed the debris field, the little girls drowned. Then the rest of them pop off to Miami, and the trouble stops. And, when they came back nearly twenty-five years later..."

Beneath the pony-trap I printed FINE. Paused. Added AGAIN. FINE AGAIN.

Fine, the shells whispered far below. Fine again.

Yes, they had been fine, John and Elizabeth had been fine. And after John died, Elizabeth had continued being fine. Fine with her art shows. Fine with her chinas. Then things had for some reason begun to change again. I didn't know if the deaths of Wireman's wife and daughter had been a part of that change, but I thought they might have been. And about his arrival and mine on Duma Key I thought there was no question. I had no rational reason for believing that, but I did.

Things on Duma Key had been okay... then strange... then for a long time they'd been okay again. And now...

She's awake.

The table is leaking.

If I wanted to know what was happening now, I had to know what had happened then. Dangerous or not, I had to.

ii

I picked up her first drawing, which wasn't a drawing at all but just an uncertain line running across the middle of the paper. I took it in my left hand, closed my eyes, and then pretended I was touching it with my right, just as I had with Pam's HANDS OFF gardening gloves. I tried to see my right fingers running over that hesitant line. I could sort of but I felt a kind of despair. Did I mean to do this with all of the pictures? There had to be twelve dozen, and that was a conservative estimate. Also, I wasn't exactly being overwhelmed with psychic information.

Take it easy. Rome wasn't built in an hour.

I decided a little Radio Free Bone couldn't hurt and might help. I got up, holding the ancient piece of paper in my right hand, and of course it went fluttering to the floor because there was no right hand. I bent to pick it up, thinking I had the saying wrong, the saying was Rome wasn't built in a day.

But Melda says nour.