The fluttering butterfly nudges became fully extended wings that spread through my mind and filled my head with a white horse whose hind quarters were dappled in black and brown, as if an artist had started to fill in the white space only to get distracted and leave the job undone.
The horse whinnied and galloped around a little enclosure and I felt the little boy’s pleasure watching her toss her white mane and stamp her pretty feet.
Calico. I felt her name as he called out to her, the word wrapped around the memory in the only way I could hear it. The horse trotted around the enclosure and then drew close, so close that her long nose grew huge in my mind’s eye. I felt her breath against my palm, and realized not only could I hear the little boy talking to her as he once must have done, but I could feel the stroke of his hand, as if it were my own as he drew it from the patch between her eyes to the snuffling nostrils that bumped at my chest. Not my chest. His chest. He shared the memory so clearly, so perfectly that I sat on the fence with him, and felt and heard the things he’d seen.
“The smartest fastest horse in all of Cactus County.” Again I felt his voice in my head. Not spoken. Just heard. Just there, woven through the memory as if I’d caught not just a snapshot, but a video clip. The sound was muffled and muted, like a home video with the sound turned too far down. But it was there, part of the memory, a little voice narrating the scene.
And then the butterfly memory flitted up and away, and for a moment my mind was empty and blank like a broken TV screen.
Sometimes the dead showed me the strangest things—things that didn’t make sense. Nickels or plants or a bowl of mashed potatoes. I rarely understood what they wanted to convey—only that they wanted to communicate something. Over time I’d come to the conclusion that the mundane wasn’t mundane to them. The things they showed me always represented a memory or a moment that had somehow been meaningful. How, I didn’t always know, but it had become clear that the simplest things were the most important things, and objects themselves weren’t really important at all. The dead didn’t care about land or money or the heirloom that had been passed down through the generations. But they cared desperately about the people they left behind. And it was the people that called them back. Not because the dead weren’t adjusting, but because their loved ones weren’t. The dead weren’t angry or lost. They knew exactly what was up. It was the living that didn’t have a clue. Most of the time, I myself didn’t have a clue, and trying to figure out what the dead wanted from me was taxing, to say the least. And I didn’t like dead kids.
The child stared, his deep brown eyes soulful and serious, waiting for something from me.
“No. I don’t want any part of this. I don’t want you here. Go away.” I spoke firmly, and immediately another image pushed into my mind, clearly the child’s response to my refusal. This time, I clamped my eyes closed and pushed back violently, picturing walls of water tumbling down, covering the exposed earth—the dry land, the channel that allowed people to cross from one side to the other. I had the power to part the waters. And I had the power to call them back again. Just like Gi told me, just like the Biblical Moses. When I opened my eyes the little boy was gone, washed away in the Red Sea. The Red, I-Don’t-Want-to-See.
Moses
BUT APPARENTLY ELI COULD FLOAT. That was his name. I saw it, written in wriggling, poorly-formed letters on a light-colored surface. EL i
Eli wasn’t swallowed up in the waters I called down. He came back. Again. And then again. I even tried to take a trip, as if that had ever worked. Here, there, half-way across the world, there’s no escaping yourself . . . or the dead, Tag reminded me when I complained, throwing my duffle in the back of my truck. The truck was new and smelled of leather and made me want to drive and drive and never stop. I rode with open windows and pounding music to reinforce my walls. But as I headed toward the Salt Flats west of the valley, Eli appeared in the middle of the road, his little black cape blowing in the wind as if he were truly standing there, a forlorn little bat boy in the middle of an empty highway. I ended up turning around and going home, seething at the intrusion, wondering how in the hell he was finding all my cracks.
He showed me a book with a worn cover and dog eared pages, a woman’s voice faint and muffled, speaking the words to the story as Eli turned the pages. Eli sat in her lap, his head pressed up to her chest, and I could feel her wrapped around him, as if I sat there too, in the well created by her crisscrossed legs. He showed me the horse, Calico, and the image of jean-clad legs walking past the table as if he sat beneath it in his own little fort. Random things that meant nothing to me and everything to him.
When he woke me at three a.m. with dreamy images of sunsets and horse rides, seated in front of a woman whose hair tickled his cheeks when he turned his face, I tossed back my covers and began to paint. I worked frantically, desperate to be rid of the child that wouldn’t let me be. The picture in my head was one of my own making. Eli hadn’t put it there, but I could see how they must have looked, the fair mother with her dark-headed son, his head tucked against her chest, seated in front of her on the horse with all the colors. The pair on the horse were moving away, moving toward the sunset spilling over the hills, the colors rich yet blurred, reminiscent of Monet, looking at beauty through a pane of wavy glass, discernable yet elusive. It was my way of keeping the viewer at a distance, allowing them to appreciate without intruding, observe without being a part. It reminded me of the way I’d come to see the dead and the images they shared with me. It was the way I coped. It was the way I kept myself intact.