The Law of Moses(31)

The sex, violence, and desperation of the kids in the gang, many who had abandoned all light, was a decadent cesspool for the lurkers. They were like a swarm around those kids. The longer I was in the gang, the better I could see them. Since coming to Levan, they’d stayed away.

And then there were people I didn’t know, people I’d never touched, people who had never touched me. There were generations of them, standing back to back in a long endless line, and they smiled at me like I was home. But I couldn’t find Gigi. And Gigi was home.

“Gigi!” I screamed, and my throat was so dry and sore that I stopped running through the world no one else seemed to be able to see. My head stopped spinning, but I was covered in paint. I had been painting the whole time I searched for my grandmother. The walls of Gigi’s house were covered in images that morphed from one to another without rhyme or reason. I’d painted the man I was certain was my great-grandfather, Gigi’s husband, a man I’d never met. I’d seen him in recent days. I’d seen him just beyond Gi’s right shoulder, shimmering, as if he was waiting for her to join him. Now his face was there among the others.

And there were so many others. I’d painted lurkers swarming the four corners of the room with hollow eyes and mournful faces. And between the faces of those I recognized and those I did not were grasping hands, burning barns, crashing waves and lightning. My mother’s face was there too, holding a basket, like she thought she needed to illustrate who she was. As if I didn’t know. I’d seen her a thousand times in my head. There were gang signs on the walls too, as if Teo and Kalia were warning me away. Red swirled into black, black swirled into grey, grey swirled into white, until the images stopped where I now stood.

“Moses! Moses, where are you?”

Georgia. Georgia was in the house. Georgia was in the kitchen. I heard her breathless rush of words, calling first to me and then babbling into the phone, telling whoever she was talking to that Kathleen Wright was “lying on the kitchen floor.”

“I think she’s dead. I think she’s been dead for a while. I can’t tell what happened to her, but she’s very, very cold,” she cried.

I wondered how that was possible, when I’d just covered her with a blanket. I wanted to go to Georgia. She was afraid. She hadn’t seen death before, not like me. But I was strangely numb, and my mind spun dizzily, still caught somewhere between the ground on which I stood and the Red Sea in my head.

But then she came to me, just like she always did. She found me. She wrapped her arms around me and started to cry. She pressed her face into my chest, ignoring the splotches of red, purple, and black that stained my shirt and smeared across her cheek.

“Oh, Moses. What happened? What happened here?”

But I couldn’t cry with her. I couldn’t move. I had to pull down the water. Gigi wasn’t coming back with me. I couldn’t find her, and I couldn’t stay any longer, not on the far side of the bank where there were only colors and questions.

Georgia pulled away, her face streaked with paint and confusion. “What’s wrong Moses? You’ve been painting. Why? Why, Moses? And you’re so cold. How can you be so cold?” Her teeth chattered as if she was truly chilled by my presence.

I laughed helplessly. I wasn’t cold. I was on fire. I wondered suddenly if Georgia had felt the ice in my hands, because that was the only place I was cold. I was hot. Burning. My neck and ears were on fire and my head was a raging inferno. So I concentrated on the walls of water, the towering sides of the channel in my mind, the channel that I needed to close. I didn’t answer Georgia. I couldn’t. I pushed away from her, blocking her out as I sought to block out the rest of them.

“Water is white when it’s angry. Blue when it’s calm. Red when the sun sets, black at midnight. And water is clear when it falls. Clear when it washes through my head and out my fingertips. Water is clear and it washes all the colors away, it washes all the pictures away.” I didn’t realize I was speaking until Georgia touched me. I pushed her away, needing to concentrate. I was pulling it down. The walls were starting to fall. I just needed to concentrate a little harder. Then I felt the ice start to spread from my hands up my arms and across my back, cooling my neck and calming my breath. And I was floating in it. The relief was so great my legs shook and finally, I reached out for Georgia. I could touch her now. I wanted nothing more than to hold onto her now. But just like the pictures in my head, Georgia was gone.





Georgia



WHEN I BURST THROUGH THE DOOR into the kitchen, the screen banging loudly, my mom whirled as if to reprimand me. But she must have seen something in my face. She set the bowl of potatoes down with a clatter.

“Martin!” She called for my dad as I stumbled toward her.

She’d been trying to keep everything warm on the stove. When Moses and Kathleen hadn’t shown up at eleven, we wondered a little. Kathleen Wright wasn’t the type to be late. At all. By 11:15 my mother was calling her house. But the phone just rang and rang, and Mom started to fret about cold turkey and mashed potatoes. So I volunteered to run over and see if Mrs. Wright needed help with anything and to hurry her and Moses along. She had insisted on bringing the pies for dessert even though my mom had resisted, saying they were our guests.

I hadn’t wanted to go. I felt raw and tired, and I didn’t need to see Moses any sooner than I had to. I already didn’t know how we were going to sit across from each other without a scarlet letter appearing on my chest. Moses would handle it fine. He just wouldn’t say anything. And I would sweat and squirm and not be able to taste anything I ate. Which made me angry and gave me courage as I flew out the door, the dusting of snow we’d gotten over night crunching beneath my boots. My Wranglers were stiff and clean, my best blouse pressed, and my hair carefully arranged in perfect waves. I even wore make-up. All dressed up for Thanksgiving and no one to see me. It was rude to be late for Thanksgiving dinner, and I picked up my pace as I neared Kathleen’s little, grey brick house and stomped up the front steps.