“What?”
“I haven’t seen Molly in years . . . not since Montlake. Last night I ended up painting a mural of David and Goliath, like something from a Sunday School story, instead of painting the picture I’d been commissioned to paint. Now I’m behind. And I blame you.”
“Me?” I was only half listening as I backed out of the parking lot and began to drive. I didn’t know where I was going.
“Yeah. You. The David in my mural looks suspiciously like you. So your dead sister is obviously trying to tell me something. That, or she doesn’t like your chosen profession.”
“David kicked Goliath’s ass, remember? Nothing to worry about.” I was conducting the conversation from a very mechanical, detached side of my brain, and I observed myself talking to Moses even as my thoughts were bouncing in a million different directions.
“I don’t think Goliath’s ass was involved,” Moses growled. “If I remember right, it was his head. Goliath took a blow between the eyes.”
“Yeah . . . right. That must be it. I got cracked between the eyes with a bottle of beer last night.” Was it just last night? “Guy laid my head open. I have a few stitches. I’m impressed, Mo. So now you’re a psychic too?”
“You okay?” There it was again. The demand to tell him everything.
“Yeah. All stitched up. Doesn’t even hurt.” I wasn’t lying. It didn’t hurt. But I was skirting the truth. I wasn’t okay. Not at all.
“Well, that’s not surprising. You have the hardest head of anyone I know. What happened?”
“Just someone heckling Millie while she was dancing. I grabbed him to throw him out, and he nailed me in the head.” I didn’t want Mo saying I told you so. He’d never liked Morgan. So I left Morgan’s name out of it.
“Millie?” he asked.
“Millie,” I answered.
He was quiet for a heartbeat, and I waited, wondering what he was stewing over.
“You there yet, Tag?” he asked.
“Where?”
A huge sigh seeped through the phone’s speaker.
“Are you there yet?” he said again, louder, slower, so damn pushy.
“Yeah. I’m there. I love her. Is that what you want me to say?” My hands started to shake, and suddenly I couldn’t see the road. A horn blared behind me, and I realized I had drifted out of my lane.
I swerved and swiped at my eyes, trying not to kill myself, at least not yet.
“I don’t care what you say. I already knew. I’m happy for you, man. She’s kind of a miracle.”
“Yeah. She is.” The tears were streaming down my cheeks, and I gripped the wheel with both hands.
“I wasn’t sure you’d get one . . . or even that you needed one. But you did. We both did. How the hell did that happen?” He had relaxed with my confession, and I could hear the smile in his voice.
“You believe in miracles, Mo?” I wasn’t smiling. I was searching.
“I got no choice. I’ve seen too much.”
“You think I’ll get more than one?” It was all I could do to spit the words out.
“More than one miracle? Why? Millie’s not enough?” He laughed at me, but I heard the surprise too.
Millie was more than enough. I wasn’t greedy. I just wanted to be around to enjoy my miracle.
Moses
TAG HAD ENDED that phone call too quickly. I should have realized something was wrong. But I could tell he was driving and had let him go without protest. I had thought he sounded off, but he’d had me on speaker, and everything sounds a little distorted when you’re hearing someone that way. I thought that was all it was. I told myself that was all it was. I don’t know when I started believing my own lies.
I had grown complacent with the dead. I painted them in pretty pictures, and they no longer hounded me like they once had. They weren’t portends of destruction. They didn’t look like zombies or haunt the halls of my house. They had become manageable. Life had become sweet and soft. Georgia had done that for me. She’d settled me and smoothed out my edges, and with the loss of those edges I guess I wasn’t as sharp as I used to be.
So when I saw Molly Taggert, a soft mirage from the corner of my eye, I refused to be suspicious. Eight years, almost nine? It’d been a long time since she’d demanded my attention. I was in the middle of something, communing with the dead of a wealthy client. His dead were not particularly interested in keeping in touch, and I was pushing, opening myself up wider, trying to find inspiration, something worthy of a paint brush, something I could work with. So far, they were giving me the middle finger, and I didn’t think that would please my client.
I told myself seeing Molly was nothing more than happenstance, that I’d simply opened myself up wide and attracted an old ghost who knew how to slip around my walls. She had flooded my mind with color, streaks of red fear and blue despair shot with purple-hued passion and green regret, all washed in white and dipped in black. Before I knew it, I was painting something completely irrational, completely at odds with the girl we’d laid to rest, years before.
Two hours later, I stepped back from the canvas and stared, dumbfounded, at the picture I’d created. It looked like something from one of my Grandma Kathleen’s books, the ones she’d taken from the church library because they were a tad too erotic and disturbing for the people in the pews. It was David and Goliath in violent detail, and the details were troubling, the details were specific, and I’d let myself miss them.