But I didn’t feel Gigi. I didn’t see her. I saw my mother. I saw Georgia’s grandfather, I saw the girl named Molly and the man named Mel Butters who died inside his barn. He had his horses with him and he was happy. His happiness mocked me now, and I raged at him as I ran past his images of long rides and summer sunsets. He drew away immediately. I felt Ray, the man who loved Ms. Murray. He was worried about her and that worry pulsed out of him in grey waves. She wasn’t doing well. The picture we made for her didn’t comfort her.
I felt all their lives and their memories and I pushed them aside, trying to find my grandmother. There were others too. People I’d felt, pictures I’d seen before, memories that weren’t my own. These were people who had come to me over the years. People of all ages, of all colors. There was the Polynesian boy and his sister, Teo and Kalia, gang members who died in a turf war with the same gang I ran with for almost a year before being sent to live with Gigi. I’d resented losing that sense of belonging, though it had been a charade. I’d resented it like I resented all the other times I was uprooted. The brother and his sister tried to slow me down, to share their pictures of a younger sibling who was left behind, but I kept running, looking for Gigi.
As always, there were the lurkers, the gritty black smear that sat at the corner of my vision whenever I let myself get too deep. I never got too close or looked inside them. They stayed far away from the translucence that surrounded the people who showed me their lives. I wasn’t sure, but I suspected the lurkers were the dead who couldn’t let go, the dead who didn’t believe in an afterlife, so refused to see the life after, even though it glowed like a sea of candles and beckoned them sweetly. Maybe they couldn’t see it.
The sex, violence, and desperation of the kids in the gang, many who had abandoned all light, was a decadent cesspool for the lurkers. They were like a swarm around those kids. The longer I was in the gang, the better I could see them. Since coming to Levan, they’d stayed away.
And then there were people I didn’t know, people I’d never touched, people who had never touched me. There were generations of them, standing back to back in a long endless line, and they smiled at me like I was home. But I couldn’t find Gigi. And Gigi was home.
“Gigi!” I screamed, and my throat was so dry and sore that I stopped running through the world no one else seemed to be able to see. My head stopped spinning, but I was covered in paint. I had been painting the whole time I searched for my grandmother. The walls of Gigi’s house were covered in images that morphed from one to another without rhyme or reason. I’d painted the man I was certain was my great-grandfather, Gigi’s husband, a man I’d never met. I’d seen him in recent days. I’d seen him just beyond Gi’s right shoulder, shimmering, as if he was waiting for her to join him. Now his face was there among the others.
And there were so many others. I’d painted lurkers swarming the four corners of the room with hollow eyes and mournful faces. And between the faces of those I recognized and those I did not were grasping hands, burning barns, crashing waves and lightning. My mother’s face was there too, holding a basket, like she thought she needed to illustrate who she was. As if I didn’t know. I’d seen her a thousand times in my head. There were gang signs on the walls too, as if Teo and Kalia were warning me away. Red swirled into black, black swirled into grey, grey swirled into white, until the images stopped where I now stood.
“Moses! Moses, where are you?”
Georgia. Georgia was in the house. Georgia was in the kitchen. I heard her breathless rush of words, calling first to me and then babbling into the phone, telling whoever she was talking to that Kathleen Wright was “lying on the kitchen floor.”
“I think she’s dead. I think she’s been dead for a while. I can’t tell what happened to her, but she’s very, very cold,” she cried.
I wondered how that was possible, when I’d just covered her with a blanket. I wanted to go to Georgia. She was afraid. She hadn’t seen death before, not like me. But I was strangely numb, and my mind spun dizzily, still caught somewhere between the ground on which I stood and the Red Sea in my head.
But then she came to me, just like she always did. She found me. She wrapped her arms around me and started to cry. She pressed her face into my chest, ignoring the splotches of red, purple, and black that stained my shirt and smeared across her cheek.
“Oh, Moses. What happened? What happened here?”
But I couldn’t cry with her. I couldn’t move. I had to pull down the water. Gigi wasn’t coming back with me. I couldn’t find her, and I couldn’t stay any longer, not on the far side of the bank where there were only colors and questions.
Georgia pulled away, her face streaked with paint and confusion. “What’s wrong Moses? You’ve been painting. Why? Why, Moses? And you’re so cold. How can you be so cold?” Her teeth chattered as if she was truly chilled by my presence.
I laughed helplessly. I wasn’t cold. I was on fire. I wondered suddenly if Georgia had felt the ice in my hands, because that was the only place I was cold. I was hot. Burning. My neck and ears were on fire and my head was a raging inferno. So I concentrated on the walls of water, the towering sides of the channel in my mind, the channel that I needed to close. I didn’t answer Georgia. I couldn’t. I pushed away from her, blocking her out as I sought to block out the rest of them.
“Water is white when it’s angry. Blue when it’s calm. Red when the sun sets, black at midnight. And water is clear when it falls. Clear when it washes through my head and out my fingertips. Water is clear and it washes all the colors away, it washes all the pictures away.” I didn’t realize I was speaking until Georgia touched me. I pushed her away, needing to concentrate. I was pulling it down. The walls were starting to fall. I just needed to concentrate a little harder. Then I felt the ice start to spread from my hands up my arms and across my back, cooling my neck and calming my breath. And I was floating in it. The relief was so great my legs shook and finally, I reached out for Georgia. I could touch her now. I wanted nothing more than to hold onto her now. But just like the pictures in my head, Georgia was gone.