I look over at Coral, who’s now standing next to the hood of his truck, her fingers playing delicately with strands of her hair. I see the first color of bruises blooming where Mantis grabbed her wrists. I feel her pale eyes on me. I look for some sign in them. Some signal that she would like me to stay here with her. Some sign that she would like me to tell Mantis to leave. Some sign that she would like me to rescue her, take her away in her car. Tell me what to do, Coral. I’ll do whatever you want me to do. But her eyes remain impassive. If anything, I get the feeling that she wants me to leave. And I’m too afraid to speak my heart, my conscience out loud. I think of the way her legs looked at the lake, the explosive marks. I think of the way he grabbed her arms just now. Hard. Ruthless.
Could Mantis be hurting her?
I shove this thought away. He was scared just now. That was all. Panicked. I was panicked, too.
“Alright,” I say and take the keys from his hand. In a fog.
And then I leave her. There, with him.
I stay out on the commons, in view of the dirt parking lot, when I get back to Lupine Valley. After all that has happened, after all that was said, I want to make sure she gets back alright. I try to seem casual, leafing through a book I can’t concentrate on enough to truly read.
I’m chatting distractedly with Old Gus when I see the red pickup pull into the lot. I watch Mantis and Coral talk for a few minutes in the front seats. Then Coral gets out, her hands bandaged. Mantis calls something out to her as she leaves the truck, but she doesn’t turn back or answer him. His face turns angry as he watches her go. He slams his hand on the steering wheel then peels out backward, kicking up a cloud of dirt, and rumbles off back down the dirt road. Old Gus turns his camera on Coral as she climbs the hill toward the commons. He snaps photo after photo. I try to tell him gently not to do that, to leave her be today, but he keeps on. She just keeps on walking, pays us no mind.
“Gus—I need to talk to you,” I tell him when she’s out of earshot.
“Ayuh, okay,” he says, camera directed down at my feet.
I lift my eyes to see Coral arriving at Moss’s cabin. I watch him appear in the doorway and greet her warmly. I watch him take her inside and close the door.
August 24, 1988
Mantis got fired yesterday.
When I got back to LV that afternoon, after the incident in the woods with Mantis and Coral, I told Gus about the volatile dynamic I had witnessed between the two of them. I told him how scary it had been. I told him about the bruises on Coral’s body. The way he had grabbed her. Gus looked at me very seriously as I told him these things. I didn’t outright say that Mantis gave her those marks—but Gus drew his own conclusions, and quickly. Like he’d been waiting for something like this all along. When Mantis showed up for work the next day, Gus was waiting for him in the Village Commons. He fired him, right then and there, in front of everyone, in the heart of the community. He wanted everyone to know, to see. Mantis erupted. He shouted at Old Gus, who, with infinite patience, simply held up his hand, closed his eyes, and sighed into the onslaught. When Old Gus refused to take it back, Mantis pushed the old man hard enough that he fell on his ass. River, Toad, and a few of the other guys had to rush in to help Old Gus up and to run Mantis off. Coral clung to Moss, crying, screaming that she was sorry. Moss stood by stoically. Maybe even smugly. I tried to approach Mantis to apologize, to help him exit with whatever grace he could, but he turned his gnashing teeth and frigid gaze on me in a way that made me pull up short.
“This is a bunch of bullshit!” Mantis bellowed over his shoulder as he was escorted, bodily, down to the parking lot. Everyone clustered in the commons, watching in frightened amazement. “This fucking town can never forget and let a man fucking live! I didn’t do anything! Not now! Not then!”
When they got him to his truck, he threw their arms off and got in as fast as he could. He gunned it so hard out of here that he kicked up some rocks that hit River, which made a small nick in his forehead that started to bleed.
Coral was inconsolable and refused to see me. It felt desperate, her anguish. Like there was something calamitous in what I had set in motion.
“It’s just a job, Cor,” I’d tried to call to her as Moss pushed me, gently, out of Focus. “He’ll be alright!” She kept on wailing, telling me I didn’t understand. That I would never understand. She kept wailing, Why did you have to say anything? Why did you open your mouth?
And that’s when Moss closed the door in my face.
September 10, 1988
The scraps of paper come from many different sources. Hotel notepads. The Yellow Pages. Notebooks. Bill envelopes with the little plastic window. Takeout menus from Thelma’s Landing. Roughly ripped from their original contexts, they take on the look and texture of feathers, especially at a distance, especially when gathered in a clutch. Coral’s notes. This is mostly how she communicates now. She won’t speak, at least not with me. It’s unnerving, watching her float around the grounds, a slip of a girl with a baby belly, all paleness and blondness, like she could fade into the ether, like she’s made of nothing at all. She steers clear, mostly. Keeps to herself. Keeps to Moss. She’ll sometimes look at me from across the commons, but there is nothing in her expression for me to latch on to. Sometimes it’s like she doesn’t even recognize me. Even see me.
Everything has splintered. Ash left us for Miami as we knew he would, Barley and Trillium for school as we knew they would. The one new painting recruit this term, a guy in his forties from Santa Fe dubbed Thorn, doesn’t much like to hang with the rest of us. I think he finds us frivolous. Too young. Something. He comes to class three times per week as scheduled, but there is no more playful cadre of painters. No more group hangs around the bonfire. No more sharing bourbon and gin and ghost stories. There is no more spiritual clubhouse.
What there is, is me and Zeph. Hopefully always.
What there is, is Moss and Coral. Constant.
What there is, is me and Moss. Uneasy siblings, doing our best by each other.
Broken-down, half-hearted triangulations.
And Mantis? He’s gone from Lupine Valley, but I can still sometimes feel him here, like an enormous oak tree whose massive branches and consuming leaves blot out the sun. I have this terrible feeling that Coral still sees him outside these grounds, so it’s like it was all for nothing, ultimately. At least when he was here, I could check in on him. On her. On them, together. Moss neither confirms nor denies what he knows on the subject. He has become a priest with her these days, self-righteous, almost Hippocratic. What he and Coral speak about is between them and them alone. I fear what was once a confessional is now an echo chamber. But I don’t know. I never know. And that is the problem. I’m not alone in this.
Brady started casually showing up to “surprise” Coral with flowers or lunch once or twice a week. But I can tell in his eyes it’s done out of anxiety. A fear. That he may be watching his partner crumble before him. His face betrays his real intentions: Are you alive? Are you alright? Do you promise to come back to me at the end of the day? I watch him leave and wish I had the courage to say, I understand. What can we do? What should we do? But I don’t.
Moss found Coral’s first note pinned to his door with a tack about two weeks ago. A message was written on it:
Moss a verdant kind of softness
—Sep88. CD.
Then the next day I found one pinned on my door with a nail:
Juniper galled by cedar apple rust
—Sep88. CD.
Compared to Moss’s, I didn’t know what to think. But it didn’t seem entirely neighborly.
Since those first instances, the volume of notes has ballooned, and their territory has expanded like a fungus. Gus now finds them stabbed into the front of his cabin like Martin Luther’s theses. Zephyr, too. Students are finding them in kilns, ready to be burned up before they’re ev
en read; folded and tied into the limbs of trees like Christmas ornaments; staked into latrine doors with fishhooks that are straightened to look like tiny harpoons. Random slips meant for no one, meant for everyone. Cryptic little things no one knows quite what to make of. Are they poems? Prophecies?
Playful nothings? Worrying somethings?
Bough down the earth’s knee tree’s knee down bow
—Sep88. CD.
Weave your own waiver or never get out
—Sep88. CD.
Imagine having it grow inside you just imagine
—Sep88. CD.
Not one not one is bigger than this idea
—Sep88. CD.
Curtain calls the curtain when the last one makes the time dear
—Sep88. CD.
No one ever really disappears; no one is erased
—Sep88. CD.
Cretin creation creator you are a disemboweler of hearts
—Sep88. CD.
And on and on.
October 22, 1988
The Lupine Valley grounds are aflame with autumn leaves, the boughs above me buoyant sprays of Skittles that drop and embed themselves into the moist, forgiving soil. I breathe in the living, earthy midday air as I make my way back from the mess hall with a cup of fire-roasted cinnamon apple slices. Some of the artists went out and got cornstalk bundles and pumpkins from the local farmer’s market yesterday, so those are set up outside some of the cabins and studios, giving everything a festive, small-town air. We all seem to carry around thermoses filled with black coffee now, our little woodstoves getting seasoned a few hours a day in the run-up to deep fall and winter. The air is cool, dry, and delicious. The whole scene is so idyllic here that it might as well be a paint-by-number.
Zephyr is on a Greenville Sherpa run for me and her and Moss and should be back any minute. I had such a breakthrough this morning on an abstract painting I’ve been working on that I feel lighter than air. The pressure lifted, the skies cleared, and suddenly the confident, vibrant strokes came from me with surety. I can’t wait to show Zeph. I can’t wait to get back into Motif and smell the oil paint. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this way.
As I pass through the commons, I watch a Rubenesque woman paint directly on a nearly nude middle-aged man’s body. Orange Crush. Midnight black. She’s making a tiger of him.
As I approach Motif, I see a little square is pinned to the door. I walk up onto the steps and look at the thing. And then I keep looking at it. I take it down from the door, turn, and sit down on the steps. I put my rapidly cooling cup of apples down.
I’m holding a Polaroid in my hands, one that Zephyr had taken of me down on Kress Beach in July. It’s usually tacked up above my desk. In it, my short, curly hair is frothing, my freckles pronounced. My Coors Light muscle tee is wet with lake water and hangs down to cut across my upper thighs. My legs are naked. I’m pointing at the camera and smiling, mouth half open in playful protest. It’s one of my favorite pictures from the summer, one of the few of me I’ve ever liked. I think I like it so much because Zephyr excised and immortalized this moment in which I felt so happy just to be looking at her.
But my eyes have been scratched out. Where they should be are ragged white gouges. I can see angry scratch marks in the plastic, grooves made as if with a sewing needle or an inkless pen tip. On the white part that you hold at the bottom, a note has been scrawled:
He’s coming. He’s here. But do you see?
—Sep88. CD.
A hard lump forms in my throat.
October 27, 1988
“I’m not sure she even really works here anymore, if you know what I mean.” Moss laughs gently. He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor of his cabin, gathering up sheaf after sheaf of drawing paper. Most of the drawings are of Coral. His muse.
“Coral got fired?” I ask, lying on my side in his bed, smoking a joint. For a moment the idea of Coral being gone is a relief. It’s almost one in the morning, and I should really go home to Zephyr.
“Nah, nothing like that. She’s still technically employed, you know. But she doesn’t exactly…work. She comes in and everything. Is at Lupine Valley all day most days. Not really on time, but she does ramble in at some point each morning. Makes her appearance before Old Gus. Sometimes she just walks around the grounds for hours. I’ve found her down in the clearing. I’ve found her out on the Ledge a few times. A little too close to the edge, if you want to know the truth. A little too curious about it.” He gives me a knowing look. “But mostly she comes here.” He shrugs. I nod.
“And you all do what exactly?” I can feel myself growing agitated despite my buzz.
“Art mostly. And talk. We both—”
“So she does deign to speak to you?” I interrupt. Moss looks over at me.
“Of course she does. We understand each other,” he says. “And I didn’t get her friend fired.”
“I really thought at the time that he might have been hurting her! What was I supposed to do?” I spit.
“But you didn’t know for sure,” he says. We just look at each other. “And Coral never said he did—”
“It’s not always easy to admit—”
“Right,” he says dismissively.
“Based on what I could see, the evidence I had—”
“Evidence,” he mocks. “Fucking Nancy Drew over here. On the case.”
“Fuck off,” I tell him.
“Fuck you,” he replies, smirking. We settle into a simmering silence. I’m pissed off. Moss just looks amused. “We talk and we sketch a lot,” he goes on, like we never raised our voices. “She’s been sketching like a fiend lately. Birds. All these fucking birds. Still with the birds.” He shakes his head and crawls across the floor to a stack of notepads under his desk. He pulls the pads toward him and then tosses them across the floor to me. “This is her stuff.” He sets down an enamel lantern near me. I sit up reluctantly, feeling pretty spaced, pretty tired. I slide off the bed and rest my back against its side, dropping the tiny remaining blunt into a stagnant glass of water nearby. I pick up the brown lantern and look at the spiffy bumper sticker on it. WELCOME TO BAH HAHBAH.
“What the fuck is bah habah? Bahhabah? Bah—what the fuck is this?” I cough.
“You gotta ease up on them doobies, bro.” He laughs at me. “It’s a Mainer joke. That half-touristy, half-hoity-toity coastal town, Bar Harbor? Think of the accent.” I read it over and over again.
“Ha, that is funny,” I cackle. Moss looks at me dubiously.
“It’s Coral’s. She leaves it here sometimes. She likes the light it gives for sketching,” he says. The lantern somehow feels ominous to me now, knowing it’s hers. Coral the Silent. Coral the Defacer of Polaroids. I start looking. At these birds in these books. Coral’s birds. There are hundreds of them. Mostly in black or gray shades. Pen or charcoal or pencil.
Some of the black birds are hyperrealistic. Astonishingly done. Others are jagged, rough, done in an addled hand. Some of the drawings are of parts of birds—a head, a wing, a taloned foot. I flip the pages of the sketchpad and see that both sides of the paper are covered with iteration upon iteration of birds. Horrid, dark, evil-looking birds. I flip and I flip, the black marks on the pages becoming a blur.
“There’s…more of these?” I ask him, a muted, buried alarm clanging somewhere deep within me.
“Oh, yes.” He points at four or five thick sketchpads.
“All—all of these?” My mouth is cottony and slow.
“All of them. All birds. Birds and birds and birds and birds.” Moss watches me pull the pads to me. Watches me work my way through them.
“Moss,” I say, my voice quiet. “Is she okay?” I look up at him. He sighs and shrugs.
“What do you think, Junebug?” His tone says: We both know Coral is not ever really “okay.” Never has been.
> “But doesn’t she seem worse to you?”
“Oh, sure,” he agrees. “Getting pregnant did it. Not being able to leave here, go to school.”
I run my fingers across the sheets of paper softly. I swallow. “She went into my cabin when I was gone, Moss. Defaced a picture and then pinned it up outside for me to find. I mean, what the fuck is that?” I shake my head, pushing her drawings away from me. “And all these notes. Those—those little poems or whatever everywhere.”
“A little acting out, I guess.” He shrugs. My jaw tightens. Moss crawls under his desk and withdraws an empty wine bottle, puts it on top of his desk. He turns to look at me, back against his desk drawers. I glower at him. He just crosses his arms over his chest, looking entertained.
“Do they still hang out?” I ask.
“Who?”
“Coral and Mantis.”
“Yes,” he says, his tone flat. I sigh and rub my hands up and down my face.
“Mantis probably hates me,” I say.
“Probably,” Moss says, in no way trying to comfort me.
“Do you think she takes her medications?” I lift my face from my hands. “Do you think she still goes to therapy?” I close the sketchpad resting in my lap, chew on my lip. Moss pulls at his beard gently, over and over, and looks away.
“I think that she’s doing what works for her. I think she’s doing what she needs to do,” he tells me.
“Brady has certainly been making his presence known since all that went down,” I murmur, my eyes half focused on the steady flame of the lantern. Moss makes an annoyed, scoffing sound.
“No shit,” he says. “He comes here every day during lunch to check up on her.”
“Not every day.”
“Just about.”
“Maybe he’s right to do that,” I reply, biting my thumbnail. “She’s not exactly the most stable right now. And she is carrying his child.” Maybe Brady was right about Mantis, about not trusting him, trying to keep his distance. Wanting Coral to do the same. Maybe Brady is good for her. Straightforward. Steady. Moss is neurotic, self-involved. Mantis is overbearing, calculating, possibly violent. I’m—I dunno what I am. A coward? And here Coral is, surrounding herself with all of us. Us and our fake names. Our drinking problems and desperate desires for validation.
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