Diary

Another girl Misty knew in art school, she performed a three-act play with puppets in her own mouth. These were little costumes you could slip over your tongue. You’d hold the extra costumes inside your cheek, the same as the wings to a stage. Between scene changes, you’d just close your lips as a curtain. Your teeth, the footlights and proscenium arch. You’d slip your tongue into the next costume. After doing a three-act play, she’d have stretch marks all around her mouth. Her orbicularis oris stretched all out of shape.

One night in a gallery, doing a tiny version of The Greatest Story Ever Told, this girl almost died when a tiny camel slipped down her throat. These days, she was probably rolling in grant money.

Peter with his praise for all of Misty’s pretty houses, he was so wrong. Peter who said she should hide away on the island, paint only what she loved, his advice was so fucked.

Your advice, your praise was so very, very fucked.

According to you, Maura Kincaid washed fish in a cannery for twenty years. She potty- trained her kids, weeded her garden, then one day she sits down and paints a masterpiece. The bitch. No graduate degree, no studio time, but now she’s famous forever. Loved by millions of people who will never meet her.

Just for the record, the weather today is bitter with occasional fits of jealous rage.

Just so you know, Peter, your mother’s still a bitch. She’s working part-time for a service that finds people pieces of china after their pattern is discontinued. She overheard some rich summer woman, just a tanned skeleton in a knit-silk pastel tank dress, sitting at lunch and saying, “What’s the point of being rich here if there’s nothing to buy?”

Since Grace heard this, she’s been hounding your wife to paint. To give people something they can clamor to own. Like somehow Misty could pull a masterpiece out of her ass and earn the Wilmot family fortune back.

Like she could save the whole island that way.

Tabbi’s birthday is coming up, the big thirteen, and there’s no money for a gift. Misty’s saving her tips until there’s enough money for them to go live in Tecumseh Lake. They can’t live in the Waytansea Hotel forever. Rich people are eating the island alive, and she doesn’t want Tabbi to grow up poor, pressured by rich boys with drugs.

By the end of summer, Misty figures they can bail. About Grace, Misty doesn’t know. Your mother must have friends she can live with. There’s always the church that can help her. The Ladies Altar Society.

Here around them in church are the stained-glass saints, all of them pierced with arrows and hacked with knives and burning on bonfires, and now Misty pictures you. Your theory about suffering as a means to divine inspiration. Your stories about Maura Kincaid.

If misery is inspiration, Misty should be reaching her prime.

Here, with the whole island around her kneeling in prayer for her to paint. For her to be their savior.

The saints all around them, smiling and performing miracles in their moments of pain, Misty reaches out to take a hymnal. This is one book among dozens of dusty old hymnals, some without covers, some of them trailing frayed satin ribbons. She takes one at random and opens it. And, nothing.

She flips through the pages, but there’s nothing. Just prayers and hymns. No special secret messages scribbled inside.

Still, when she goes to put it back, carved there in the wood of the pew where the hymnal hid it, a message says: “Leave this island before you can’t.”

It’s signed Constance Burton .

July 8

ON THEIR FIFTH REAL DATE, Peter was matting and framing the picture Misty had painted.

You, Peter, you were telling Misty, “This. This picture. It will hang in a museum.”

The picture, it was a landscape showing a house wrapped in porches, shaded with trees. Lace curtains hung in the windows. Roses bloomed behind a white picket fence. Blue birds flew through shafts of sunlight. A ribbon of smoke curled up from one stone chimney. Misty and Peter were in a frame shop near campus, and she was standing with her back to the shop’s front window, trying to block if anybody might see in.

Misty and you.

Blocking if anybody might see her painting.

Her signature was at the bottom, below the picket fence, Misty Marie Kleinman . The only thing missing was a smiling face. A heart dotting the i in Kleinman.

“Maybe a museum of kitsch,” she said. This was just a better version of what she’d been painting since childhood. Her fantasy village. And seeing it felt worse than seeing the worst, most fat naked picture of yourself ever. Here it was, the trite little heart of Misty Marie Kleinman. The sugary dreams of the poor, lonely six-year-old kid she’d be for the rest of her life. Her pathetic, pretty rhinestone soul.

The trite little secret of what made her feel happy.

Misty kept peeking back over one shoulder to make sure no one was looking in. No one was seeing the most cliche, honest part of her, painted here in watercolors.