Diary (12 page)

July 25

ALL THE HOUSES
along Gum Street and Larch Street, they look so grand the first time you see them. All of them three or four stories tall with white columns, they all date from the last economic boom, eighty years ago. A century. House after house, they sit back among branching trees as big as green storm clouds, walnuts and oaks. They line Cedar Street, facing each other across rolled lawns. The first time you see them, they look so rich.

“Temple fronts,” Harrow Wilmot told Misty. Starting in about 1798, Americans built simple but massive Greek Revival façades. By 1824, he says, when William Strickland designed the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, there was no going back. After that, houses large and small had to have a row of fluted columns and a looming pediment roof across the front.

People called them “end houses” because all this fancy detail was confined to one end. The rest of the house was plain.

That could describe almost any house on the island. All façade. Your first impression.

From the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to the smallest cottage, what architects called “the Greek cancer” was everywhere.

“For architecture,” Harrow said, “it was the end of progress and the beginning of recycling.” He met Misty and Peter at the bus station in Long Beach and drove them down to the ferry.

The island houses, they're all so grand until you see how the paint's peeled and heaping around the base of each column. On the roof, the flashing is rusted and hangs off the edge in bent red strips. Brown cardboard patches windows where the glass is gone.

Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.

No investment is yours forever. Harry Wilmot told her that. The money was already running out.

“One generation makes the money,” Harrow told her once. “The next generation protects the money. The third runs out of it. People always forget what it takes to build a family fortune.”

Peter's scrawled words: “. . . your blood is our gold . . .”

Just for the record, while Misty drives to meet Detective Stilton, the whole three-hour drive to Peter's warehousing facility, she puts together everything she can remember about Harrow Wilmot.

The first time Misty saw Waytansea Island was while visiting with Peter, when his father drove them around in the old family Buick. All the cars in Waytansea were old, clean and polished, but their seats were patched with clear strapping tape so the stuffing stayed inside. The padded dashboard was cracked from too much sun. The chrome trim and the bumpers were spotted and pimpled with rust from the salt air. The paint colors were dull under a thin layer of white oxide.

Harrow had thick white hair combed into a crown over his forehead. His eyes were blue or gray. His teeth were more yellow than white. His chin and nose, sharp and jutting out. The rest of him, skinny, pale. Plain. You could smell his breath. An old island house with his own rotting interior.

“This car's ten years old,” he said. “That's a lifetime for a car at the shore.” He drove them down to the ferry and they waited at the dock, looking across the water at the dark green of the island. Peter and Misty, they were out of school for the summer, looking for jobs, dreaming of living in a city, any city. They'd talked about dropping out and moving to New York or Los Angeles. Waiting for the ferry, they said they might study art in Chicago or Seattle. Someplace they could each start a career. Misty remembers she had to slam her car door three times before it would stay shut.

This was the car where Peter tried to kill himself.

The car you tried to kill yourself in. Where you took those sleeping pills.

The same car she's driving now.

Stenciled down the side now, the bright yellow words say, “Bonner & Mills—When You're Ready to Stop Starting Over.”

What you don't understand you can make mean anything.

On the ferry that first day, Misty sat in the car while Harrow and Peter stood at the railing.

Harrow leaned close to Peter and said, “Are you sure she's the one?”

Leaned close to you. Father and son.

And Peter said, “I've seen her paintings. She's the real deal . . .”

Harrow raised his eyebrows, his corrugator muscle gathering the skin of his forehead into long wrinkles, and he said, “You know what this means.”

And Peter smiled, but only by lifting his levator labii, his sneer muscle, and he said, “Yeah, sure.
Fucking lucky me
.”

And his father nodded. He said, “That means we'll be rebuilding the hotel finally.”

Misty's hippie mom, she used to say it's the American dream to be so rich you can escape from everyone. Look at Howard Hughes in his penthouse. William Randolph Hearst in San Simeon. Look at Biltmore. All those lush country homes where rich folks exile themselves. Those homemade Edens where we retreat. When that breaks down, and it always does, the dreamer returns to the world.

“Scratch any fortune,” Misty's mom used to say, “and you'll find blood only a generation or two back.” Saying this was supposed to make their trailer lifestyle better.

Child labor in mines or mills, she'd say. Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant.

Despite her mom, Misty thought her whole future was ahead of her.

At the coma center, Misty parks for a minute, looking up at the third row of windows. Peter's window.

Your window.

These days, Misty's clutching the edge of everything she walks past, doorframes, countertops, tables, chair backs. To steady herself. Misty can't carry her head more than halfway off her chest. Anytime she leaves her room, she has to wear sunglasses because the light hurts so much. Her clothes hang loose, billowing as if there's nothing inside. Her hair . . . there's more of it in the brush than her scalp. Any of her belts can wrap twice around her new waist.

Spanish soap opera skinny.

Her eyes shrunken and bloodshot in the rearview mirror, Misty could be Paganini's dead body.

Before she gets out of the car, Misty takes another green algae pill, and her headache spikes when she swallows it with a can of beer.

Just inside the glass lobby doors, Detective Stilton waits, watching her cross the parking lot. Her hand clutching every car for balance.

While Misty climbs the front steps, one hand grips the rail and pulls her forward.

Detective Stilton holds the door open for her, saying, “You don't look so hot.”

It's the headache, Misty tells him. It could be her paints. Cadmium red. Titanium white. Some oil paints are loaded with lead or copper or iron oxide. It doesn't help that most artists will twist the brush in their mouth to make a finer point. In art school, they're always warning you about Vincent van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. All those painters who went insane and suffered so much nerve damage they painted with a brush tied to their dead hand. Toxic paints, absinthe, syphilis.

Weakness in your wrists and ankles, a sure sign of lead poisoning.

Everything is a self-portrait. Including your autopsied brain. Your urine.

Poisons, drugs, disease. Inspiration.

Everything is a diary.

Just for the record, Detective Stilton is scribbling all this down. Documenting her every slurred word.

Misty needs to shut up before they put Tabbi in state custody.

They check in with the woman at the front desk. They sign the day's log and get plastic badges to clip on their coats. Misty's wearing one of Peter's favorite brooches, a big pinwheel of yellow rhinestones, the jewels all chipped and cloudy. The silver foil has flaked off the back of some stones so they don't sparkle. They could be broken bottles off the street.

Misty clips the plastic security badge next to the brooch.

And the detective says, “That looks old.”

And Misty says, “My husband gave it to me when we were dating.”

They're waiting for the elevator when Detective Stilton says, “I'll need proof that your husband has been here for the past forty-eight hours.” He looks from the blinking elevator floor numbers to her and says, “And you might want to document your whereabouts for that same period.”

The elevator opens and they step inside. The doors close. Misty presses the button for the third floor.

Both of them looking at the doors from the inside, Stilton says, “I have a warrant to arrest him.” He pats the front of his sport coat, just over the inside pocket.

The elevator stops. The doors open. They step out.

Detective Stilton flips open his notebook and reads it, saying, “Do you know the people at 346 Western Bayshore Drive?”

Misty leads him down the hallway, saying, “Should I?”

“Your husband did some remodeling work for them last year,” he says.

The missing laundry room.

“And how about the people at 7856 Northern Pine Road?” he says.

The missing linen closet.

And Misty says yeah. Yes. She saw what Peter did there, but no, she didn't know the people.

Detective Stilton flips his notebook shut and says, “Both houses burned last night. Five days ago, another house burned. Before that, another house your husband remodeled was destroyed.”

All of them arson, he says. Every house that Peter sealed his hate graffiti inside for someone to find, they're all catching fire. Yesterday the police got a letter from some group claiming responsibility. The Ocean Alliance for Freedom. OAFF for short. They want a stop to all coastline development.

Following her down the long linoleum hallway, Stilton says, “The white supremacy movement and the Green Party have connections going way back.” He says, “It's not a long stretch from protecting nature to preserving racial purity.”

They get to Peter's room and Stilton says, “Unless your husband can prove he's been here the night of every fire, I'm here to arrest him.” And he pats the warrant in his jacket pocket.

The curtain is pulled shut around Peter's bed. Inside it, you can hear the rushing sound of the respirator pumping air. You can hear the soft blip of his heart monitor. You can hear the faint tinkle of something Mozart from his earphones.

Misty throws back the curtain around the bed.

An unveiling. An opening night.

And Misty says, “Be my guest. Ask him anything.”

In the middle of the bed, a skeleton's curled on its side, papier-mâchéd in waxy skin. Mummified in blue-white with dark lightning bolts of veins branching just under the surface. The knees are pulled up to the chest. The back arches so the head almost touches the withered buttocks. The feet point, sharp as whittled sticks. The toenails long and dark yellow. The hands knot under so tight the fingernails cut into bandages wrapped to protect each wrist. The thin knit blanket is pushed to the bottom of the mattress. Tubes of clear and yellow loop to and from the arms, the belly, the dark wilted penis, the skull. So little muscle is left that the knees and elbows, the bony feet and hands look huge.

The lips—shiny with petroleum jelly—pull back to show the black holes of missing teeth.

With the curtain open, there's the smell of it all, the alcohol swabs, the urine, the bedsores and sweet skin cream. The smell of warm plastic. The hot smell of bleach and the powdery smell of latex gloves.

The diary of you.

The respirator's ribbed blue plastic tube hooks into a hole halfway down the throat. Strips of white surgical tape hold the eyes shut. The head is shaved for the brain pressure monitor, but black scruffy hair bristles on the ribs and in the hammock of loose skin between the hipbones.

The same as Tabbi's black hair.

Your black hair.

Holding the curtain back, Misty says, “As you can see, my husband doesn't get out much.”

Everything you do shows your hand.

Detective Stilton swallows, hard. The levator labii superioris pulls his top lip up to his nostrils, and his face goes down into his notebook. His pen gets busy writing.

In the little cabinet next to the bed, Misty finds the alcohol swabs and rips the plastic cover off one. Coma patients are graded according to what's called the Glasgow Coma Scale, she tells the detective. The scale runs from fully awake to unconscious and unresponsive. You give the patient verbal commands and see if he can respond by moving. Or by speaking. Or by blinking his eyes.

Detective Stilton says, “What can you tell me about Peter's father?”

“Well,” Misty says, “he's a drinking fountain.”

The detective gives her a look. Both eyebrows squeezed together. The corrugator muscles doing their job.

Grace Wilmot dropped a wad of money on a fancy brass drinking fountain in Harrow's memory. It's on Alder Street where it meets Division Avenue, near the hotel, Misty tells him. Harrow's ashes, she scattered them in a ceremony out on Waytansea Point.

Detective Stilton is scribbling all this in his notebook.

With the alcohol swab, Misty wipes the skin clean around Peter's nipple.

Misty lifts the earphones off his head and takes the face in both her hands, settling it in the pillow so he looks up at the ceiling. Misty unhooks the yellow pinwheel brooch from her coat.

The lowest score you can get on the Glasgow Coma Scale is a three. This means you never move, you never speak, you never blink. No matter what people say or do to you. You don't react.

The brooch opens into a steel pin as long as her little finger, and Misty polishes the pin with the alcohol swab.

Detective Stilton's pen stops, still on the page of his notebook, and he says, “Does your daughter ever visit?”

And Misty shakes her head.

“Does his mother?”

And Misty says, “My daughter spends most of her time with her grandmother.” Misty looks at the pin, polished silver and clean. “They go to tag sales,” Misty says. “My mother-in-law works for a service that finds pieces of china for people in discontinued patterns.”

Misty peels the tape off Peter's eyes.

Off your eyes.

Misty holds his eyes open with her thumbs and leans close to his face, shouting, “Peter!”

Misty shouts, “How did your father really die?”