I nodded. The girl’s name was Molly. And she was definitely dead. She kept showing me things. Not about her death. About her life. I hoped now she would leave me alone. This had been going on long enough. I had no idea why she’d come to me at all. Usually there had to be some connection. I’d never met Molly. But she would go now, I hoped. Paint them and they leave. It was the way I acknowledged them. And usually that was enough.
“So you being out here in the middle of the night, painting her . . . That’s weird too,” Georgia said bravely, her eyes holding mine.
I nodded again. “Are you afraid, Georgia?”
She just looked at me like she was trying to get in my head. My little horse whisperer, trying to whisper to me. I shook my head, trying to clear it. She wasn’t my horse whisperer. She wasn’t my anything.
“Yeah. I’m afraid. I’m afraid for you, Moses. Because everyone is going to see this. The police are going to see this. And people are going to think you did something to that girl.”
“That’s what they think everywhere I go, Georgia. I’m used to it.”
“Do you always paint dead people?”
Her voice rang out like a whip, and I felt the truth slash across my face with all the crack and sting that secrets wield.
I stepped back, stunned that she had so easily unraveled this piece of me. I walked toward my Jeep, wanting nothing more than to run, run, run and keep running. Why couldn’t I just keep running? I had seven months until the school year was up, but I was working on my GED and saving up all my money. Seven months. And then, as much as I loved Gi, as much as the thought of never seeing Georgia again hurt me, I was leaving this funny little town with all its nosy people with their suspicious minds, interfering hands, and busy mouths. And I would keep moving, painting as I went. I didn’t know how I would survive, but I would, and I would be free. As free as I’d ever be.
Georgia trotted behind me, “You painted a picture of my grandpa on the side of our barn. He’s been dead for twelve years. I was five when he died. You painted the lightning on Charlotte Butter’s barn too. Her husband was killed in a lightning storm in that barn. You painted a man named Ray on Ms. Murray’s whiteboard and I found out that Ms. Murray’s fiancé was named Ray. He was killed in a freak accident two weeks before their wedding. You’ve been painting the walls inside the old mill. I saw those too. I don’t recognize the faces you painted, but they’re all dead too, aren’t they?”
There was no way I could answer her without telling her everything. I wanted to tell her everything. But I knew better. So I just kept walking.
“Moses! Wait! Please, please, please don’t keep walking away from me!” she cried in frustration, so close to tears I could almost hear them gathering behind her eyes. My heart ached and my will shattered. I did the only thing I knew would make her forget her questions, make her forget her doubt in me. Make us both forget.
I let her catch me.
And when she did, I turned to meet her and wrapped my arms around her so tightly that our hearts pressed together and found a similar rhythm. Mine pounded into her breasts and hers pushed right back against my chest, challenging me like she always did. I kissed her lips over and over, letting the color of her mouth drench my troubled mind, drowning out the pictures in my head, until there was only Georgia, only rose-colored kisses and moonlight, only heat. I touched her body and warmed my hands against her skin until her questions just floated away on the wind. And the girl I had painted on the concrete underpass kept her face lifted to the sky and left us alone.
Georgia
I DITCHED SCHOOL BEFORE the day ended and took Myrtle on a drive-by of the overpass so I could get a look at Moses’s painting it in the daylight before they made him cover it up.
It was so beautiful. The girl laughed at an unknown admirer, her face tipped up as if toward the sun, and her hair flew around her shoulders. It almost made me jealous, and I was ashamed of my small feelings. But Moses had seen her like this. How that was possible, I didn’t know. But he was the artist, and she was his muse, however briefly. And I didn’t like that. I wanted to be his one and only. It was my face I wanted in his head.
I sat staring at the laughing girl, brought to life on a lonely underpass with spray paint and the genius of a modern-day Michelangelo. Or maybe Van Gogh. Hadn’t Van Gogh been the crazy one? The girl Moses had painted was so full of life I was certain she couldn’t be dead. But Moses thought she was. The thought made my stomach clench and my legs feel like cold jelly. Not because she was dead—that was horrible—but because Moses seemed to know. No one looking at it could possibly think Moses was mocking someone’s grief or that his art was violent. But it was weird. And nobody knew what to do with him. He never denied any of it. But he didn’t defend himself either.
And last night. Last night, I was scared and angry and confused. He had seemed so unattainable. So frustratingly distant! So when he turned on me suddenly and kissed me, holding me so tight that there was no distance at all . . . something inside me gave way. And when he tossed down his coat and we fell to the ground, hands and mouths and cumbersome clothing pushed and pulled aside to uncover the something beneath that kept us apart, I didn’t protest and he didn’t stop.
I grew up on a farm with horses. I had a very clear, graphic knowledge of the mechanics of the act. But nothing prepared me for the feelings, for the need, for the intense sensations, for the power, for the sweet agony. We occupied a space so primal and so ripe with the present that our heartbeats became a deafening metronome, denting time, marking the moment. I was so filled with wonder that I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t even close my eyes.