The Law of Moses (41 page)

I felt the words as they rumbled through his throat, and then I brought his mouth to mine so that I could savor their aftertaste. Nothing had ever tasted so sweet. He lifted me in his arms and I wrapped myself around him—arms, legs, old Georgia and new Georgia. And with one arm anchoring my hips and one arm banded across my back, Moses kissed me like he had all the time in the world and no place in heaven or hell he’d rather be. When he finally lifted his head and moved his lips from my mouth to my neck I heard him whisper,

“Georgia’s eyes, Georgia’s hair, Georgia’s mouth, Georgia’s love. And Georgia’s long, long legs.”

Georgia

I WORKED OFF EXCESS ENERGY by running in the evenings, but when I went for my runs I didn’t want to stop and make small talk, nor did I want people seeing my boobs bounce or making snide comments about my farmers tan in my running shorts. My arms and face were brown from working outside almost every day, but I wore Wranglers to work, and my legs weren’t even close to the same shade. Maybe all small towns were like Levan, but people made note of the littlest things, people noticed and commented and talked and shared . . . so I avoided the town and ran down through the fields, past the water tower and up past the old mill when I couldn’t sleep. And tonight I couldn’t sleep.

With my parents home again and things changing rapidly between Moses and me, I was anxious and unsettled. I wanted to be with Moses. Simple as that. And I was pretty sure that’s what he wanted too. But just like that summer seven years ago, Moses and I were hurtling forward at the speed of light, going from forgiveness to forever in days. And I couldn’t do that again. My dad was right about that. I was a woman now, a mother—or I had been. And I couldn’t act like that anymore. So I’d said goodnight to Moses and gone home early like a good little girl. But I wasn’t happy about it. It was definitely time to be moving out of Mom and Dad’s place.

I ran hard and I ran fast, the mini flashlights I carried in each hand streaking back and forth as my arms pumped a steady rhythm. My parents didn’t like me running alone, but I was too old to be asking permission to exercise, and the only danger in the fields came from skunks and distant coyotes, and the occasional rattlesnake. I’d had to hurdle one once. It had been dead. But I hadn’t known that until I’d seen it, still in the same spot, the next night. The skunks weren’t deadly and the coyotes were scared of me, so other than the snakes, I wasn’t too nervous.

The moon was so full my flashlights were unnecessary, and as I neared the old mill, heading into mile three of my five mile loop, the soft white sky backlit the old place and I studied it with new eyes. The old mill looked exactly the same. I wondered why Jeremiah Anderson had hired Moses to clean it out and pull down old partitions and demo interior walls if nothing was ever going to be done with it. The windows were still boarded up and the weeds were taller, but there wasn’t seven years of growth and neglect around the place. Someone was keeping an eye on it.

Whenever I ran by, I remembered the desperation I’d felt the night before Thanksgiving seven years ago, the night I’d waited outside for Moses before chickening out and leaving him a note. But I always ran on by, ignoring the sense of loss, the old longing. But now, with Moses back and hope on my horizon, I found myself stopping for a minute to catch my breath instead of running past. Since seeing the face peeking out of the peeling paint on the wall in Kathleen’s house weeks ago, I had been thinking about the walls at the old mill, about Moses’s paintings. Something was niggling in the back of my brain. I didn’t know if they were still there—brilliance hidden in a dark, dusty old building, boarded up where no one could see them. Someday, someone would want to see them. For me, someday was now. I picked my way through the old parking lot to the back door Moses had always used, sure that it would be locked up tight.

I checked the back service door and it was locked, just as I thought, just like it had been when I checked it that night. But when I checked above the door frame the key was exactly where Moses had always left it when he finished up each day. I fingered it, incredulous, and then slid the key into the deadbolt above the handle and turned it, still not believing it would actually open the door. But the door swung open with a screech of tired hinges, and without hesitation, I stepped inside. I don’t know why I couldn’t leave it alone. But I couldn’t. Now I was here, I had my flashlights, and there was something I wanted to see.

Beyond the back door was a cluster of small offices and then a larger room that was probably a break room of some sort. It was much darker inside without the moonlight spilling over everything, and I held my flashlights extended like twin light sabers, at the ready to take out anything I might come across. The deeper inside I went, the more it changed. The interior was different. Moses had torn down all the smaller workstations in the warehouse portion, and I paused, swinging the lights in large circles, trying to get my bearings. The paintings had been along the back wall, in the corner farthest from the main door, as if Moses had tried to be discreet.

The thought made me chuckle a little. Moses had been anything but discreet. Moses’s stint in Levan that six months in 2006 had been the equivalent of a never-ending fireworks display—all color, crash, the occasional small fire, and lots of smoky residue.

I kept my lights moving in big swaths, forward and out and back again, making sure I didn’t miss anything. The light in my right hand shot past something huddled against the far wall and I jumped, dropping the light and then kicking it toward the shadowy figure as I scrambled for it. It rolled in an arc, the heavier end rotating around the lighter handle. When it stopped it sent a stream of light in the direction I was headed, illuminating nothing but the concrete floor and a pair of legs.

I shrieked, clutching at my remaining light and shooting it up and around so I could see what I was dealing with. Or who. The light touched on a face and I screamed again, making the light bobble and glance off yet another bowed head and then an upturned chin. The fear became giddy relief as the faces remained motionless and I realized I’d found Moses’s paintings, complete with dancing forms and intertwined bodies spread across a ten by twenty foot section of wall. I stooped and picked up my flashlight, grateful that my clumsiness hadn’t robbed me of the additional light.

It was almost whimsical, the painting. And it was much more cohesive than Moses’s smeared, terror-filled depictions on Kathleen Wright’s walls. The terror had been in Moses’s hand, not in his subjects, if that made any sense. He had been terrified, and it showed in every brush stroke. This was different. It was a cornucopia of delights, full of oddities and wonder, little puzzles and pieces all interspersed throughout the nonsensical display. And it
was
nonsensical. It brought to mind our discussion of favorite things and well-loved memories, and I wondered if I was simply seeing the five greats, multiplied by a dozen contributors who were also depicted on the wall. I trained my light on each part, trying to connect it with the next, wondering if it was just the darkness and the difficulty of illuminating the entire thing all at once that made it seem so new. I remembered some of it. But he’d clearly added more after the fact. I had seen it in October. He’d left at the end of November. And in that time his painting had grown.

And then I found her. The face that had stuck in my mind and bothered me throughout the last two weeks.

I centered both of my lights above her face so I could see her better, and she gazed down at me reproachfully, light spilling down over her head like she wore a biblical halo. I felt a little sick and more than a little shaken as I realized I did know her. It was the same face I’d seen on the newly painted wall the day I’d gone to retrieve my photo album from Moses. Maybe it was the angle or the expression on her face, but where the image had seemed merely familiar on Kathleen Wright’s wall, it was recognizable now. I had known her. Once.

The sound of old hinges being engaged ricocheted around the mostly empty space, and for a split second I couldn’t place the sound. Then I realized the back door, the door I’d come through only minutes before was being opened. I’d left the key in the lock.

Moses

THE LEVAN CHURCH was a cool old building with light colored brick, soaring steeple, and wide oak doors built in 1904. There had been some renovations done in the intervening years, and I thought it could use some stained glass, but I liked it. It always made me think of summers with Gi as a kid and the sound of the organ, peeling out over the community as I ran out the double doors and headed for home, eager for movement, desperate to be free of my tie and my shiny black church shoes.

I was restless. Anxious. I hadn’t seen Georgia since the day before, and other than a quick text message, complete with my five greats for the day and her smiling emoticon for a response, we hadn’t interacted.

I had a client come all the way to Levan for a session, and I’d spent the day painting a woman asleep at her desk, her hand clutching a pair of reading glasses, a messy pile of books nearby. Her mouth was slightly open, her hair gently curling against her cheek as she rested her pretty face on her slim arm and slept. The man who had commissioned me had told me how she often fell asleep that way, among her books, nodding off to dream land and never making it to their bed. His wife had died suddenly the previous spring, and he was lonely. Rich and lonely. The rich and lonely were my best clients, but I felt for him as we’d talked, and I hadn’t been as brusque or as blunt as usual when I had communicated the things I could see.

“I didn’t see the signs. All the warning signs were there . . . but I just didn’t want to see them,” he’d said. The woman had died of heart failure, and he was sure he could have prevented it if he’d been more proactive.

He’d left without his painting, which was the norm. I had some finishing touches to add and it needed a few days before it would be dry all the way through and I could send it to him. But he’d left happy. Satisfied, even. But I wasn’t happy or satisfied, and I set off on a walk I didn’t want to take in hopes of ridding myself of the excess energy that hummed beneath my skin. And I wanted to scout out Georgia’s house and see if she was around. I shot her a message with no response and ended up swinging past the church, the dry leaves scurrying around my feet like a mouse battalion, racing across the road as the wind caught them and pushed them onward.

My client had talked about a snow storm coming. But the night wasn’t especially cold, and it was still October. But Utah was like that. Snow one day, sunshine the next. The homes around the church were decorated for Halloween—ghosts twirling in the wind, fat pumpkins resting on porches, bats and spiders crawling up windows and hanging from trees. And when the organ started up, it was so Halloween appropriate I jumped a little and then cursed myself when I realized what I was hearing.

The lights were on at the church and a dark colored pick-up was parked close to the chapel doors. I stopped to listen and within a few bars knew exactly who was playing. I walked up the wide steps and pulled at the big oak door, hoping it was open, hoping I could sneak in the back and slide into a pew and listen to Josie play for a while. The door swung wide with a well-oiled sigh and I stepped into the rear foyer, my eyes immediately falling on the blonde at the organ and the man in the back row, closest to the foyer, listening to her play something so beautiful it made the hair rise on my arms and chills shiver down my spine.

I recognized him as the man in the cemetery, Josie’s husband, and I slid into the end of the pew he was sitting on. He was sitting right in the center, his arms stretched out on either side, his booted foot crossed at the knee, his dark eyes on his wife. When I sat down he turned those eyes on me and nodded once, a barely perceptible movement, and I decided I liked him just fine. I didn’t want to talk either. I wanted to listen.