The Law of Moses(28)

“Moses parted the waters of the Red Sea. You know that story too, right?” My grandmother spoke urgently, somehow understanding that I was fighting with something she couldn’t see. “You know how he parted the waters so the people could walk across?”

I grunted in response as flashing images flipped through my head in rapid succession, like the girl who lingered nearby had opened a thousand page book in my head and made the pages turn at a dizzying speed. I groaned and Gigi held on tighter.

“Moses! You have to bring the waters back down, just like Moses did in the Bible. Moses parted the waters, just like you can do. You part the waters, and people cross over. But you can’t let everyone cross whenever they want. You have to bring the waters back down. You can bring the waters back down and wash all the pictures away!”

“How?” I moaned, not even fighting anymore.

“What color is the water?” she insisted.

And I tried to imagine how that much water would look, rising up in enormous walls, held back by an invisible hand. Immediately the flipping images Molly was shoving into my skull slowed.

“Water is white,” I bit out. “Water is white when it’s angry.” I was suddenly so angry my temples throbbed and my hands shook. I was so tired of never having a minute’s peace.

“What else? Water isn’t always angry,” Gigi insisted. “What other colors?”

“Water is white when it’s angry. It’s red when the sun sets. It’s blue when it’s calm. It’s black when it’s night. It’s clear when it falls.” I was babbling, but it felt good. I was fighting back and my head felt clearer. Just like the water.

“So let the water fall. Let it come crashing down. Let it flow through your head and out your eyes. Water is clear when it washes the pain away, clear when it cleanses. Water has no color. Let it take the colors away.”

I could almost feel it, the walls tumbling down, being spun up inside it, the way I’d been churned in the surf the time I’d gone to the ocean when I was twelve. I had gotten beat up by the waves. But there had been no pictures inside the waves. No people. There had been nothing but water and breathlessness and raw, natural power. And I had loved it.

“What does it sound like, Moses? What does the water sound like?”

Niagara. It sounded like the falls. I’d heard the sound of the waterfall in Hawaii as it fell around Ms. Murray and the man she loved. Ray. Ray had shown me the inside of the waterfall. It had been so loud that there was no other sound but the water. And it had roared in my head then. Now it roared again.

“It sounds like a lion. It sounds like a storm.”

“So let the wall of sound fall down around you.” Gigi was speaking directly into my ear, yet I could barely hear her, as if we, too, stood inside a waterfall that was so loud all other sound disappeared.

I let myself get lost in the sound. Lost in the best way. Freed from myself, from my head. From the pictures.

I saw those towering walls of water held back by the hand of a God who could do all things, a God who had done as one Moses asked, long before I lived. And I asked Him to do it again. I asked God to release the water. And Molly disappeared completely.





Georgia



MOSES STOPPED GOING to school for good after the cops pulled him out of class because of the painting he’d plastered under the overpass. I stayed away from him for four weeks. For almost a solid month, I kept my distance. And he never sought me out. I didn’t know why I thought he would. But there were rules about this kind of thing, weren’t there? You didn’t have sex and then never call, never come by. You didn’t take someone’s virginity in the most epic, earthshattering way and go about your business. Or maybe he did.

But I knew he had felt what I felt that night. I knew he did. I couldn’t be the only one. And those feelings were wearing me down. The desire, the overwhelming need to do it all over, to let him cover me and make me do all the things I had sworn I wouldn’t do again was getting the best of me. I was absolutely miserable, and the Wednesday before Thanksgiving I couldn’t stand it anymore. I drove to the old mill and found his jeep, parked up close to the old rear entrance. He had to be about done with the clean-up he’d been hired to do. But he was here now, and I scribbled a note on the back of a service check-up I found in the glove compartment of Myrtle and I wrote –

Moses,

Meet me at the barn when you’re done.

~Georgia

I didn’t want to sign my name, but I wasn’t even confident enough to assume he would know it was me without my signature. Then I put the note under his windshield wipers, the words facing down so that if he missed it when he came out, he could almost read it right through the window, sitting in the driver’s seat.

Then I scurried back to my house, made sure I smelled like roses with fresh breath and clean undies and I tried not to think about how pathetic I was, how disappointed I was in myself as I put a little mascara on my lashes, staring into my own eyes, purposely not seeing myself.

I waited in the barn for an hour. My dad came out once, and I almost gave myself away, turning with a huge grin only to see him instead of Moses. I was instantly filled with terror that my dad would know something was up and disappointment that Moses still hadn’t come. There was a storm coming and as the weather turned colder, we often brought the horses in for the night. Lucky and Sackett, along with Dolly, Reba and Merle—the horses my parents used exclusively for equine therapy—were cozy in individual stalls, all of them brushed down and better groomed than they’d ever been. They gave me cover, and my dad fell for it. And I felt like a harlot when he headed back to the house, not a worry in his greying head, thinking his tomboy daughter was safe from the neighbor boy. Sadly, I probably was. But he wasn’t safe from me. And yet, there was not enough shame to make me leave the barn.