Georgia
I WORKED OFF EXCESS ENERGY by running in the evenings, but when I went for my runs I didn’t want to stop and make small talk, nor did I want people seeing my boobs bounce or making snide comments about my farmers tan in my running shorts. My arms and face were brown from working outside almost every day, but I wore Wranglers to work, and my legs weren’t even close to the same shade. Maybe all small towns were like Levan, but people made note of the littlest things, people noticed and commented and talked and shared . . . so I avoided the town and ran down through the fields, past the water tower and up past the old mill when I couldn’t sleep. And tonight I couldn’t sleep.
With my parents home again and things changing rapidly between Moses and me, I was anxious and unsettled. I wanted to be with Moses. Simple as that. And I was pretty sure that’s what he wanted too. But just like that summer seven years ago, Moses and I were hurtling forward at the speed of light, going from forgiveness to forever in days. And I couldn’t do that again. My dad was right about that. I was a woman now, a mother—or I had been. And I couldn’t act like that anymore. So I’d said goodnight to Moses and gone home early like a good little girl. But I wasn’t happy about it. It was definitely time to be moving out of Mom and Dad’s place.
I ran hard and I ran fast, the mini flashlights I carried in each hand streaking back and forth as my arms pumped a steady rhythm. My parents didn’t like me running alone, but I was too old to be asking permission to exercise, and the only danger in the fields came from skunks and distant coyotes, and the occasional rattlesnake. I’d had to hurdle one once. It had been dead. But I hadn’t known that until I’d seen it, still in the same spot, the next night. The skunks weren’t deadly and the coyotes were scared of me, so other than the snakes, I wasn’t too nervous.
The moon was so full my flashlights were unnecessary, and as I neared the old mill, heading into mile three of my five mile loop, the soft white sky backlit the old place and I studied it with new eyes. The old mill looked exactly the same. I wondered why Jeremiah Anderson had hired Moses to clean it out and pull down old partitions and demo interior walls if nothing was ever going to be done with it. The windows were still boarded up and the weeds were taller, but there wasn’t seven years of growth and neglect around the place. Someone was keeping an eye on it.
Whenever I ran by, I remembered the desperation I’d felt the night before Thanksgiving seven years ago, the night I’d waited outside for Moses before chickening out and leaving him a note. But I always ran on by, ignoring the sense of loss, the old longing. But now, with Moses back and hope on my horizon, I found myself stopping for a minute to catch my breath instead of running past. Since seeing the face peeking out of the peeling paint on the wall in Kathleen’s house weeks ago, I had been thinking about the walls at the old mill, about Moses’s paintings. Something was niggling in the back of my brain. I didn’t know if they were still there—brilliance hidden in a dark, dusty old building, boarded up where no one could see them. Someday, someone would want to see them. For me, someday was now. I picked my way through the old parking lot to the back door Moses had always used, sure that it would be locked up tight.
I checked the back service door and it was locked, just as I thought, just like it had been when I checked it that night. But when I checked above the door frame the key was exactly where Moses had always left it when he finished up each day. I fingered it, incredulous, and then slid the key into the deadbolt above the handle and turned it, still not believing it would actually open the door. But the door swung open with a screech of tired hinges, and without hesitation, I stepped inside. I don’t know why I couldn’t leave it alone. But I couldn’t. Now I was here, I had my flashlights, and there was something I wanted to see.
Beyond the back door was a cluster of small offices and then a larger room that was probably a break room of some sort. It was much darker inside without the moonlight spilling over everything, and I held my flashlights extended like twin light sabers, at the ready to take out anything I might come across. The deeper inside I went, the more it changed. The interior was different. Moses had torn down all the smaller workstations in the warehouse portion, and I paused, swinging the lights in large circles, trying to get my bearings. The paintings had been along the back wall, in the corner farthest from the main door, as if Moses had tried to be discreet.
The thought made me chuckle a little. Moses had been anything but discreet. Moses’s stint in Levan that six months in 2006 had been the equivalent of a never-ending fireworks display—all color, crash, the occasional small fire, and lots of smoky residue.
I kept my lights moving in big swaths, forward and out and back again, making sure I didn’t miss anything. The light in my right hand shot past something huddled against the far wall and I jumped, dropping the light and then kicking it toward the shadowy figure as I scrambled for it. It rolled in an arc, the heavier end rotating around the lighter handle. When it stopped it sent a stream of light in the direction I was headed, illuminating nothing but the concrete floor and a pair of legs.
I shrieked, clutching at my remaining light and shooting it up and around so I could see what I was dealing with. Or who. The light touched on a face and I screamed again, making the light bobble and glance off yet another bowed head and then an upturned chin. The fear became giddy relief as the faces remained motionless and I realized I’d found Moses’s paintings, complete with dancing forms and intertwined bodies spread across a ten by twenty foot section of wall. I stooped and picked up my flashlight, grateful that my clumsiness hadn’t robbed me of the additional light.
It was almost whimsical, the painting. And it was much more cohesive than Moses’s smeared, terror-filled depictions on Kathleen Wright’s walls. The terror had been in Moses’s hand, not in his subjects, if that made any sense. He had been terrified, and it showed in every brush stroke. This was different. It was a cornucopia of delights, full of oddities and wonder, little puzzles and pieces all interspersed throughout the nonsensical display. And it was nonsensical. It brought to mind our discussion of favorite things and well-loved memories, and I wondered if I was simply seeing the five greats, multiplied by a dozen contributors who were also depicted on the wall. I trained my light on each part, trying to connect it with the next, wondering if it was just the darkness and the difficulty of illuminating the entire thing all at once that made it seem so new. I remembered some of it. But he’d clearly added more after the fact. I had seen it in October. He’d left at the end of November. And in that time his painting had grown.
And then I found her. The face that had stuck in my mind and bothered me throughout the last two weeks.
I centered both of my lights above her face so I could see her better, and she gazed down at me reproachfully, light spilling down over her head like she wore a biblical halo. I felt a little sick and more than a little shaken as I realized I did know her. It was the same face I’d seen on the newly painted wall the day I’d gone to retrieve my photo album from Moses. Maybe it was the angle or the expression on her face, but where the image had seemed merely familiar on Kathleen Wright’s wall, it was recognizable now. I had known her. Once.
The sound of old hinges being engaged ricocheted around the mostly empty space, and for a split second I couldn’t place the sound. Then I realized the back door, the door I’d come through only minutes before was being opened. I’d left the key in the lock.
Moses
THE LEVAN CHURCH was a cool old building with light colored brick, soaring steeple, and wide oak doors built in 1904. There had been some renovations done in the intervening years, and I thought it could use some stained glass, but I liked it. It always made me think of summers with Gi as a kid and the sound of the organ, peeling out over the community as I ran out the double doors and headed for home, eager for movement, desperate to be free of my tie and my shiny black church shoes.
I was restless. Anxious. I hadn’t seen Georgia since the day before, and other than a quick text message, complete with my five greats for the day and her smiling emoticon for a response, we hadn’t interacted.
I had a client come all the way to Levan for a session, and I’d spent the day painting a woman asleep at her desk, her hand clutching a pair of reading glasses, a messy pile of books nearby. Her mouth was slightly open, her hair gently curling against her cheek as she rested her pretty face on her slim arm and slept. The man who had commissioned me had told me how she often fell asleep that way, among her books, nodding off to dream land and never making it to their bed. His wife had died suddenly the previous spring, and he was lonely. Rich and lonely. The rich and lonely were my best clients, but I felt for him as we’d talked, and I hadn’t been as brusque or as blunt as usual when I had communicated the things I could see.
“I didn’t see the signs. All the warning signs were there . . . but I just didn’t want to see them,” he’d said. The woman had died of heart failure, and he was sure he could have prevented it if he’d been more proactive.
He’d left without his painting, which was the norm. I had some finishing touches to add and it needed a few days before it would be dry all the way through and I could send it to him. But he’d left happy. Satisfied, even. But I wasn’t happy or satisfied, and I set off on a walk I didn’t want to take in hopes of ridding myself of the excess energy that hummed beneath my skin. And I wanted to scout out Georgia’s house and see if she was around. I shot her a message with no response and ended up swinging past the church, the dry leaves scurrying around my feet like a mouse battalion, racing across the road as the wind caught them and pushed them onward.
My client had talked about a snow storm coming. But the night wasn’t especially cold, and it was still October. But Utah was like that. Snow one day, sunshine the next. The homes around the church were decorated for Halloween—ghosts twirling in the wind, fat pumpkins resting on porches, bats and spiders crawling up windows and hanging from trees. And when the organ started up, it was so Halloween appropriate I jumped a little and then cursed myself when I realized what I was hearing.
The lights were on at the church and a dark colored pick-up was parked close to the chapel doors. I stopped to listen and within a few bars knew exactly who was playing. I walked up the wide steps and pulled at the big oak door, hoping it was open, hoping I could sneak in the back and slide into a pew and listen to Josie play for a while. The door swung wide with a well-oiled sigh and I stepped into the rear foyer, my eyes immediately falling on the blonde at the organ and the man in the back row, closest to the foyer, listening to her play something so beautiful it made the hair rise on my arms and chills shiver down my spine.
I recognized him as the man in the cemetery, Josie’s husband, and I slid into the end of the pew he was sitting on. He was sitting right in the center, his arms stretched out on either side, his booted foot crossed at the knee, his dark eyes on his wife. When I sat down he turned those eyes on me and nodded once, a barely perceptible movement, and I decided I liked him just fine. I didn’t want to talk either. I wanted to listen.
The music was so beautiful, so sweet, that I wished Eli was here, just so I could look at him while I listened, but he’d kept his distance all day, and I found I missed him, and the music made me miss him even more. When Josie was done with the piece, she looked up from the keys and shaded her eyes a bit with her hands. Only the dais was lit, casting the rest of the chapel in shadows and she called out to me in her sunny way.
“Moses? Is that you? Welcome! Samuel, this is Moses Wright, the artist I told you about. Moses, my husband, Samuel Yates. Don’t worry, Moses, Samuel won’t bite.”
Samuel leaned toward me, stretching out his right hand, and I stood and walked toward him until I could clasp it in my own. I sat back down a few feet from him, and Josie immediately started playing something new, leaving me and Samuel to make our own small talk, which neither of us seemed especially inclined to do. But he intrigued me, maybe because he seemed so comfortable with himself, so in love with his wife, and so at odds with this town we were both connected to. When he began to speak, I welcomed it.
“Are you here to paint?” he said simply. He had the slightest hint of something exotic in his voice. A cadence or a rhythm that made me think his native tongue was Navajo. Or maybe it was just his presence. The man definitely had a vibe going. I imagined he could be damn intimidating, but people had said the same thing about me.
“No. Just to listen.”
“Good. I like the walls the way they are.” There was a hint of humor there and I smiled, acknowledging it.
“Does she do this often?” I inclined my head toward the organ.
“No. We don’t live here. My grandfather died a few weeks ago. We came back for his funeral and to help my Grandma Nettie with a few things. We’re heading back to San Diego tomorrow. Josie does this for me. I fell in love with her in this building. Sitting right here, on this bench.”
His candor surprised me.
“I fell in love with her here too,” I said softly, and his eyes snapped to mine. I shook my head. “I was ten. Don’t worry. Her music just made church a little more bearable. I had my eye on another little blonde, even back then.”
“Georgia Shepherd is a damn fine horsewoman,” he said. So Josie had told him about me and Georgia too.
“She is.”
“My grandpa was a dyed-in-the-wool old-timer. Rodeo, ranching, women-belong-in-the-kitchen kind of man. But even he had to admit she was something else. Georgia rides like my Navajo grandma. Fearless. Beautiful. Like music.” He nodded toward Josie and the music she coaxed from the keys. We sat, listening for several minutes before he spoke again.
“I’m sorry about your boy.” His tone was simple, his voice hushed, and it was all I could do not to bow my head and weep. I met his eyes instead, and nodded.
“Thank you.”
I found Samuel’s simple condolence as overwhelming as it was welcome. Eli was my boy. And I’d lost him. His loss was fresh. His loss was recent. For me, he hadn’t died two years ago. He’d died three weeks ago. For me, he’d died in the field behind Georgia’s house as she told me about that terrible day, as I’d seen it all happen. And somehow, this man had given me the validation I didn’t know I needed.
“You’ve come back to make things right.” It was a statement not a question.
“Yes.”
“You’ve come back to claim what’s yours.”
“Yes,” I agreed again, softly.
“I had to do the same. I almost missed my chance with Josie. I almost lost her. I thought I had time. Don’t make that mistake, Moses.”
I nodded, not knowing their story, but wishing I did. I listened to the music for a moment longer and then stood, unable to sit still any longer, even with the beauty of the music and the quality of the company. I needed to see Georgia. I extended my hand once more toward Samuel, and he stood too, before he took it solemnly. He was tall like I was, and our eyes were level as I shared my own condolences.
“I’m sorry about your grandfather. You will miss him. But he’s okay. You know that, don’t you?”
Samuel tipped his head, considering me. I wished I’d left that last part off. But I could feel his grandfather’s presence like a warm blanket, and I wanted to thank Samuel in the only way I knew how.
“Yes. I believe that. We are glad he’s not suffering anymore. We knew it was coming and we were able to prepare.”
My heart started to pound and my palms were sweating. I felt the anxiousness I’d felt all day flood my arms and legs as the words of Samuel and my client clanged in my head—I almost lost her, I thought I had time. We knew it was coming. I didn’t want to see the signs. All the warning signs were there.
I ran out of the church, down the stairs, not caring whether Samuel and Josie Yates now thought I was as crazy as all the rumors claimed I was. I ran across the grass and sprinted toward home, trying not to consider what all the signs actually meant.
I thought Eli was there for me. I thought he was there to bring me back to Georgia. But I was back and Eli hadn’t gone. Eli still hovered around. He still hovered around Georgia. Just like my great-grandfather had hovered around Gi in the days before she died. Just like the dead had hovered around the kids in the cancer unit. Just like that.
What if Eli had come for Georgia?
And then there was the girl. The blonde girl. All the blonde girls. All the dead blonde girls. Georgia was blonde. Even my mother, my mother had tried to warn me. All the signs . . . I’d seen them, and I hadn’t wanted to see them. I should have known! This was my life, it had always been this way.
I ran, berating myself, terrified, until I reached Georgia’s house. I flew past her little truck, up the walk, and pounded on her door like the mad man I was. When no one immediately came to the door, I ran around the side to the pair of windows I knew belonged to Georgia’s bedroom. For all I knew, they’d remodeled the interior and I was going to get an eyeful of something unwelcome, but I was desperate. I pressed my face against the window and tapped, hoping someone, anyone, would hear. I could see through the slats on the blinds. The mural I’d painted so long ago leapt out at me in dizzying color and I wondered how Georgia had ever gotten a decent night’s sleep in that room.
“Georgia!” I yelled, frantic. A small lamp on the bedside table was on but no one was in the room. I ran back around to the front yard, determined to go inside, whether the door was opened to me or not.
Georgia was staggering up the walk in a pair of running shorts and a sweatshirt, her long hair swept up in a messy ponytail.
“Moses?” The relief in her voice matched the relief in my limbs, and I crossed the grass in three strides and grabbed her, wrapping her in my arms and sinking my face in her tousled hair, not caring whether I was overreacting. I had never been so relieved to be wrong.
“I was so afraid—” we said in unison. I pulled back slightly and stared down at her.
“I was so afraid,” she began again, and I moved one arm from around her back so I could smooth the hair from her face. She had a streak of something along one cheek, and her eyes were wide and her teeth were chattering. I realized she was shaking, and her arms were clamped around me as if she was trying to keep from falling.
“Georgia?” Mauna Shepherd stood in the doorway of her home with a rolling pin gripped tightly in her hands. I wondered briefly if she was baking or if she had actually grabbed it to defend herself against the man banging on her door.
“Are you okay, Georgia?” she asked, her eyes flying between us.
“Yeah, Mom. I am. But I’m going with Moses for a while. Don’t wait up.” Georgia’s voice was steady, but her body continued to shake, and I was gripped by fear all over again. Something had happened. I hadn’t been completely wrong.
Mauna Shepherd hesitated briefly and then nodded at Georgia.
“Okay. You know what you’re doing, girl.” She turned her attention my way. “Moses?”
“Yes ma’am?”
“I’ve had all the heartache I can take. Give me joy or go. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Good. And time would be good too. Give us all a little time. Especially Martin.”
I nodded but didn’t speak. But time was not something I was going to agree to. Time had never been my friend. And I didn’t trust her.