The Law of Moses(32)

I knocked several times and then entered, calling out as I did.

“Mrs. Wright? It’s Georgia.”

The first thing I noticed was the smell. It smelled like turpentine. Paint. It smelled like paint. And it didn’t smell like pies. It should have smelled like pies.

I stopped immediately. A little foyer lay beyond the front door, just big enough for a coat rack, a little bench, and a flight of stairs. To the left there was a tiny sitting room, to the right, the dining room, which sat off the kitchen. Along the back of the house was a big family room that Kathleen Wright’s husband had added on forty years ago. It was accessible by walking through the kitchen or walking through the tiny sitting room. The first floor rooms made a sloppy, misshapen circle around the miniscule foyer with the staircase leading up to a bathroom and three small bedrooms on the second floor. I looked up the stairs, wondering if I dared go up them. The house was so quiet.

Then I heard a soft, swishing sort of sound. Swish, swish, swish. And then a foot fall. And one more. I placed the sound almost immediately. I’d listened with closed eyes to that sound several nights in a row as Moses painted my room.

“Moses?” I called, and I stepped through the door into the little dining room. Three steps and I saw her. Kathleen Wright was laying on the kitchen floor, covered in a lacy quilt that looked as if it had been dragged from her bed.

“Kathleen?” My voice squeaked as it rose in question. Maybe I should have run to her side. But it was so bizarre. I guess I didn’t know what I was seeing. So I tip-toed, as if she were truly sleeping and I was intruding on her odd little nap.

I knelt by her side and pulled back the covers just a bit. Her grey curls were visible above the edge of the quilt, but I couldn’t see her face.

“Mrs. Wright?” I said again, and then I knew. She wasn’t sleeping. And this wasn’t real. I must be the one sleeping.

“Kathleen?” I shrieked, falling back from my haunches. I caught myself instinctively, but felt a sharp slice, almost a tug, and yanked my hand away, scrambling and shrieking like death was biting and it was going to take me too. The seat of my freshly washed jeans were wet. I’d sat in some water and there was glass on the floor. It was just glass. Not death. But Kathleen Wright was dead and someone had covered her up, knowing she was dead.

I yanked a dish towel from the counter and realized I’d uncovered the pies—beautiful pies, all laid out on the counter. Four of them. There was a piece missing from the apple pie. I stared at the missing section for a second, wondering if Kathleen had sampled her baking before she died. It suddenly made the moment real and all the more tragic, and I turned away, wrapping my bleeding hand and clamoring for Kathleen’s old phone on the wall. I had to step over her to get to it, and that’s when I started to shake.

I dialed 911, just like we’re all told to do in an emergency. It didn’t take too many rings before an operator was there, an efficient-voiced woman, asking me all types of questions. I rattled off answers, even as my mind moved on to the horror I still hadn’t faced. Where was Moses? I could smell paint. I could smell paint and I had heard someone. Paint meant Moses. I set the phone down, the operator still talking, asking me something that I’d already answered. Then I walked through the little door that led to the family room on wooden legs, my rear-end wet, my hand bleeding, my heart on pause.

He was covered in paint—head, arms and clothing streaked with blue and yellow, doused in red and orange, splattered with purple and black. He still wore the clothes he’d worn when he left me that morning, though nothing looked the same. The tail of his shirt was the only part that was untucked, strangely enough. But that wasn’t the strangest thing. Not by far. The walls were covered in paint too, but there was nothing splattered or haphazard about the paint on the walls.

It was both manic and mesmerizing, it was controlled chaos and detailed dementia. Moses had painted right over the pictures and the windows too. The curtains were streaked with paint, incorporated into the pictures like he couldn’t stop to pull them aside. From the amount of wall space he’d covered, he’d been at it for hours. There was graffiti and horses and people I’d never seen before. There were hallways and pathways and doorways and bridges, as if Moses was running from one place to the next, painting every inexplicable thing he saw. There was a woman’s face over a laundry basket. Her long, blonde hair streamed out around her and the basket was full of babies. It was both beautiful and bizarre, one image becoming another and another, without rhyme or reason. And there Moses stood, staring at the wall in front of him, a section of white yet to be filled, his hands by his sides.

And then he looked at me, his eyes hollow and rimmed with circles so dark they made his burnished skin look pale in comparison. The streaks of paint across his face made him look like a weary warrior returning from battle, only to find devastation at his doorstep.

And I ran to him.

I’ve thought back on that moment so many times since then. Replayed it on a loop. The way I ran to him. The way I threw my arms around him, filled with compassion, completely unafraid. I held onto him as he stood there shivering, muttering something to himself. I think I asked him to tell me what happened. I don’t remember exactly. I just remember he was freezing, icy to the touch, and I asked him if he was cold. And he laughed, just a brief, incredulous laugh. Then he shoved me away so hard that I fell back again, stumbling and then falling to the floor, my injured hand leaving a bloody smear across the pale carpet. There were slashes of paint everywhere, and my bloody handprint looked unremarkable. Completely unremarkable.