Diary

It says: “... it’s not my job to kill anybody. She’s the executioner ...”

To get the look of pain just right, Misty says how the sculptor Bernini sketched his own face while he burned his leg with a candle. When Gericault painted The Raft of the Medusa, he went to a hospital to sketch the faces of the dying. He brought their severed heads and arms back to his studio to study how the skin changed color as it rotted.

The wall booms. It booms again, the drywall and paint shivering under her touch. The homeowner on the other side kicks the wall again with her canvas boat shoes and the framed flowers and birds rattle against the yellow wallpaper. Against the scrawls of black spray paint. She shouts, “You can tell Peter Wilmot he’s going to jail for this shit.”

Beyond all this, the ocean waves hiss and burst.

Her fingers still tracing your words, trying to feel how you felt, Misty says, “Have you ever heard of a local painter named Maura Kincaid?”

From behind his camera, Angel says, “Not much,” and clicks the shutter. He says, “Wasn’t Kincaid linked to Stendhal syndrome?”

And Misty takes another drink, a burning swallow, with tears in her eyes. She says, “Did she die from it?”

And still flashing pictures, Angel looks at her through his camera and says, “Look here.” He says, “What you said about being an artist? Your anatomy stuff? Smile the way a real smile should look.”

July 4

JUST SO YOU KNOW, this looks so sweet. It’s Independence Day, and the hotel is full. The beach, teeming. The lobby is crowded with summer people, all of them milling around, waiting for the fireworks to launch from the mainland.

Your daughter, Tabbi, she has a strip of masking tape over each eye. Blind, she’s clutching and patting her way around the lobby. From the fireplace to the reception desk, she’s whispering, “... eight, nine, ten ...” counting her steps from each landmark to the next.

The summer outsiders, they jump a little, startled by her little hands copping a feel. They give her tight-lipped smiles and step away. This girl in a sundress of faded pink and yellow plaid, her dark hair tied back with a yellow ribbon, she’s the perfect Waytansea Island child. All pink lipstick and nail polish. Playing some lovely and old-fashioned game.

She runs her open hands along a wall, feeling across a framed picture, fingering a bookcase.

Outside the lobby windows, there’s a flash and a boom. The fireworks shot from the mainland, arching up and out toward the island. As if the hotel were under attack.

Big pinwheels of yellow and orange flame. Red bursts of fire. Blue and green trails and sparks. The boom always comes late, the way thunder follows lightning. And Misty goes to her kid and says, “Honey, it’s started.” She says, “Open your eyes and come watch.”

Her eyes still taped shut, Tabbi says, “I need to learn the room while everyone’s here.” Feeling her way from stranger to stranger, all of them frozen and watching the sky, Tabbi’s counting her steps toward the lobby doors and the porch outside.

July 5

ON YOUR FIRST REAL DATE, you and Misty, you stretched a canvas for her.

Peter Wilmot and Misty Kleinman, on a date, sitting in the tall weeds in a big vacant lot. The summer bees and flies drifting around them. Sitting on a plaid blanket Misty brought from her apartment. Her box of paints, made of pale wood under yellowed varnish with brass corners and hinges tarnished almost black, Misty has the legs pulled out to make it an easel.

If this is stuff you already remember, skip ahead.

If you remember, the weeds were so high you had to stomp them down to make a nest in the sun.

It was spring term, and everyone on campus seemed to have the same idea. To weave a compact disc player or a computer mainframe using only native grasses and sticks. Bits of root. Seedpods. You could smell a lot of rubber cement in the air.

Nobody was stretching canvas, painting landscapes. There was nothing witty in that. But Peter sat on that blanket in the sun. He opened his jacket and pulled up the hem of his baggy sweater. And inside, against the skin of his chest and belly, there was a blank canvas stapled around a stretcher bar.

Instead of sunblock, you’d rubbed a charcoal pencil under each eye and down the bridge of your nose. A big black cross in the middle of your face.

If you’re reading this now, you’ve been in a coma for God knows how long. The last thing this diary should do is bore you.

When Misty asked why you carried the canvas inside your clothes, tucked up under your sweater like that ...

Peter said, “To make sure it would fit.”

You said that.

If you remember, you’ll know how you chewed a stalk of grass. How it tasted. Your jaw muscles big and squared, first on one side, then on the other as you chewed around and around. With one hand, you dug down between the weeds, picking out bits of gravel or clods of dirt.