Duma Key(154)

I stopped, holding the sheet of paper in my left hand. The hand the crane hadn't been able to get to. Was that an actual memory, something that had come drifting out of the picture, or just something I'd made up? Just my mind, trying to be obliging?

"It's not a picture," I said, looking at the hesitant line.

No, but it tried to be a picture.

My ass went back onto the seat of my chair with a thump. It wasn't a voluntary act of sitting; it was more a case of my knees losing their lock and letting go. I looked at the line, then out the window. From the Gulf to the line. From the line to the Gulf.

She had tried to draw the horizon. It had been her first thing.

Yes.

I picked up my pad and seized one of her pencils. It didn't matter which one as long as it was hers. It felt too big, too fat, in my hand. It also felt just right. I began to draw.

On Duma Key, it was what I did best.

iii

I sketched a child sitting on a potty chair. Her head was bandaged. She had a drinking glass in one hand. Her other arm was slung around her father's neck. He was wearing a strap-style undershirt and had shaving cream on his cheeks. Standing in the background, just a shadow, was the housekeeper. No bracelets in this sketch, because she didn't always wear them, but the kerchief was wrapped around her head, the knot in front. Nan Melda, the closest thing to a mother Libbit ever knew.

Libbit?

Yes, that was what they called her. What she called herself. Libbit, little Libbit.

"The littlest one of all," I murmured, and flicked back the first page of the sketch-pad. The pencil too short, too fat, unused for over three-quarters of a century was the perfect tool, the perfect channel. It began to move again.

I sketched the little girl in a room. Books appeared on the wall behind her and it was a study. Daddy's study. The bandage was wound around her head. She was at a desk. She was wearing what looked like a housecoat. She had a

( ben- cil )

pencil in her hand. One of the colored pencils? Probably not not then, not yet but it didn't matter. She had found her thing, her focus, her m tier. And how hungry it made her! How ravenous!

She thinks I will have more paper, please.

She thinks I am ELIZABETH.

"She literally drew herself back into the world," I said, and my body broke out in gooseflesh from head to toe for hadn't I done the same? Hadn't I done exactly the same, here on Duma Key?

I had more work to do. I thought it was going to be a long and exhausting evening, but I felt I was on the verge of great discoveries, and what I felt wasn't fright not then but a kind of copper-mouthed excitement.

I bent down and picked up Elizabeth's third drawing. The fourth. The fifth. The sixth. Moving with greater and greater speed. Sometimes I stopped to draw, but mostly I didn't have to. The pictures were forming in my head, now, and the reason I didn't have to put them down on paper seemed clear to me: Elizabeth had already done that work, long ago, when she had been recovering from the accident that nearly killed her.

In the happy days before Noveen began to talk.

iv

At one point during my interview with Mary Ire, she said discovering in my middle age that I could paint with the best of them must have been like having someone give me the keys to a souped-up muscle car a Roadrunner or a GTO. I said yes, it was like that. At another point she said it must have been like having someone give me the keys to a fully furnished house. A mansion, really. I said yes, like that, too. And if she had gone on? Said it must have been like inheriting a million shares of Microsoft stock, or being elected ruler for life of some oil-rich (and peaceful) emirate in the mideast? I would have said yeah, sure, you bet. To soothe her. Because those questions were about her. I could see the longing look in her eyes when she asked them. They were the eyes of a kid who knows the closest she's ever going to get to realizing her dream of the high trapeze is sitting on the bleachers at the Saturday matinee performance. She was a critic, and lots of critics who aren't called to do what they write about grow jealous and mean and small in their disappointment. Mary wasn't like that. Mary still loved it all. She drank whiskey from a water-glass and wanted to know what it was like when Tinker Bell flew out of nowhere and tapped you on the shoulder and you discovered that, even though you were on the wrinkle-neck side of fifty, you had suddenly gained the ability to fly past the face of the moon. So even though it wasn't like having a fast car or being handed the keys to a fully furnished house, I told her it was. Because you can't tell anyone what it's like. You can only talk around it until everyone's exhausted and it's time to go to sleep.

But Elizabeth had known what it was like.

It was in her drawings, then in her paintings.

It was like being given a tongue when you had been mute. And more. Better. It was like being given back your memory, and a person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you. Even from that first line that incredibly brave first line meant to show where the Gulf met the sky she had understood that seeing and memory were interchangeable, and had set out to mend herself.

Perse hadn't been in it. Not at first.

I was sure of that.

v

For the next four hours, I slipped in and out of Libbit's world. It was a wonderful, frightening place to be. Sometimes I scribbled words The gift is always hungry, start with what you know but mostly it was pictures. Pictures were the real language we shared.