by Ninie Hammon
When Bailey heard the knock at the front door, she was certain she’d find the sheriff on the other side. He hadn’t said as much, but she would have been surprised if he hadn’t shown up sometime today “to check on her.”
And maybe to give her back the handgun he had illegally confiscated. If she had him pegged right, and she wasn’t usually wrong about such things, he was a man who couldn’t abide shadings of right and wrong, gray spaces wide and deep between what was legal and what wasn’t. For a man like that, keeping her gun might have been allowed by his conscience for a little while. But she was certain there was a finite limit on that time and it was probably over.
She opened the door. On the other side of the screen was the old man, T.J. Hamilton, his large friend whose name was Hobbs or something like that, and of course, the adorable dog whose name was Sparky the Wonder Dog.
“You have got to be kidding me.” She was so totally flabbergasted, those were the only words she could force out between her lips. “You … again. What part of ‘leave me alone’ don’t you understand?”
“We got to talk.”
“No, we don’t have to talk.” She felt rage rising up again in her chest. “We don’t have anything to say to each other.”
What was he doing here? She had only seen him one time, talked to him for a few minutes on her front porch. Then he had so inserted himself into her affairs that he was a part of everything that came after.
He was the reason she was still here, still alive and not in some quiet place of dark oblivion that she had longed for every moment of every day since soon had become a meaningless word. It was his fault. He’d shown up at her door with that painting…
The painting.
“You know what, you’re right, we do have to talk … correction, I have something to say to you. Or rather to give to you.”
She turned away from the door and went to the china cabinet on the wall next to the window. She bent down and felt around, found the edge of the painting and dragged it out into the light.
Why had she kept it? She could have thrown it away, destroyed it, burned it up. Why was it still here?
She didn’t know the answers to those questions, blamed the omission on the jumble in her brain, which in truth had been clearing more every day, and couldn’t reasonably be used as an excuse for much of anything anymore.
The truth still in the husk was that she had not gotten rid of the painting because she was still in some state of denial about its very existence. She’d shoved it out of sight the moment she saw it the day she walked back into this house and into life from that fuzzy time in the hospital which had left her mind in the state of disarray she had to get ordered before she could begin to plan suicide.
And part of the ordering of that thought process was to deal with this painting and with the old man on her porch who had shown up out of nowhere. Well, she’d dispatch him right back to nowhere.
As she lifted the painting off the floor, she noticed details about it she had not attended to before. She had been so mesmerized by the face — her face or the face of her doppelganger image — in the portrait that she hadn’t examined any other facet of it. Now, she saw the battered frame and it registered with her. The flaking paint, the old canvas.
The old man had said his mother had painted it. His mother. That had seemed so outrageously ridiculous she had dismissed it out of hand at the time. But now it was clear to her that the painting was, indeed, old. Maybe not old enough for his mother to have painted it, but old. It was not something some artist had created a couple of months ago.
So where had the old man gotten the painting? And why … yeah, a much better question. Why had he gotten it, from whatever source, and hauled it over here the night she was…?
He’d told her not to do it, not to shoot herself. Had known what she was planning because of the image of her dead in that painting.
That was crazy. It couldn’t possibly be.
The mosquito bite. The mosquito bite!
Nope, she absolutely was not going there.
Then the anger returned in such a flood it washed away all questions and all implications. She didn’t give a rip in Aunt Annie’s corset why he had brought the painting to her house, why he had gotten it who knew where, why he seemed determined to insert himself into her life whether she liked it or not.
What difference did it make?
What she wanted now — with a white-hot, laser focus — was only one thing: to get rid of the painting, the old man, his friend … even the adorable dog. To evict them from her life and her world and never see any of them again. Ever.
In the grip of that clarifying rage, she marched to the door, flung the screen open so abruptly the old man had to leap back to avoid being whacked in the face with it. She threw the painting out onto the porch where it landed on a corner and split apart, the old frame buckling under the force of the impact, the ancient canvas ripping down the side, the whole of it crumpling in a heap beside the wicker rocking chair.
“This is not mine,” she shouted, not caring that she sounded more or less unhinged. “It does not belong to me. It is yours and I want you to get it off my porch, off my property, out of my yard. Take it, take yourselves, take your dog and get out of here and never — do you hear me, I said never — bother me again.”
The old man started to speak but she was on a roll now and had no intention of letting him interrupt her.
“Because if you don’t, if you ever bother me again, if you ever get within a hundred yards of me again, I will have you arrested. I have already filed for a restraining order against you.”
That was a lie, of course, but the moment the words leapt out of her mouth she realized she was an idiot for not having done so and she determined to remedy that omission as soon as she got the old man off her porch. She would go to the courthouse, to the too-nice-to-be-real sheriff and tell him that the old man and his friend were stalking her, harassing her, and she wanted a judge to tell them to leave her alone.
She made a show of looking at the watch on her wrist.
“You have exactly thirty seconds to turn around, get off my porch and off my property, or I swear by everything I hold dear in this world I will see you” — she glared at the other man whose name she couldn’t remember — “both of you behind bars!”
She stood there trembling, waiting for the two of them to scramble away, dragging the adorable dog behind them.
Instead, the old man said to the dog, “Sparky, sit.”
The dog sat.
Then the old man smiled, actually smiled, and held out to her a piece of paper. When she didn’t take it from his hand, he held it up for her to see.
“Recognize this, do you?”
It was … looked like a survey, like that idiot survey the nurse had insisted she fill out the morning before she was released from the hospital. Yes, that’s what it was. There was the frowny face she’d drawn on it, the barest minimum of disapproval she dared to display.
Where did he get…? Why…?
Wordlessly, he turned the piece of paper over. On the back of the survey form were pencil marks, some kind of sketch.
“You drew this.” He shook the paper to indicate the marks on the back of the form. “You don’t likely remember drawing it because you wasn’t thinking about it at the time.”
Somehow, the old man had a way of sucker-punching her, coming at her with such an unexpected blow she was always off balance. She fought to maintain her focus, but found it slipping away.
“And not only was you not thinking about it when you drew it, but you drew it with your left hand.”
“That’s absurd. I’m right-handed.”
Don’t do it. Don’t let him draw you in.
“So was my mama.”
Oh, boy, here we go again. The his-mother-the-artist song and dance.
She discovered to her dismay that his latest jab and parry had muddied her resolve. The rage that had carried her along in a full-frontal assault h
ad ebbed, leaving behind confusion and a vague sense of unease that felt like a cold stone in her belly.
Neither confusion nor unease carried sufficient force to propel the old man off the porch. She sensed he knew that because he seemed to soften.
“I don’t mean you no harm, I swear I don’t. What’s going on here … it’s a mystery to me, same as it is to you.”
She looked at him, suddenly emotionally exhausted.
“You’re crazy.”
“No ma’am, I am not. But it’s not gonna be long before you start to b’lieve you are unless you hear me out.”
She was done. Finished. No longer had the energy to resist.
“Fine. Talk. Say your piece. Babble out whatever lunacy has infected your mind. If I listen, if I hear you out, will you leave? Will you promise to leave then and not come back?”
“Before I go, I need you to do more than listen. I need you to—” He exchanged a glance with the big man behind him who had not yet spoken a single word. “I need you to paint me a picture.”
Chapter Thirteen
The woman with a small bandage on her right temple seated on the chair across from him seemed so frail, looked so delicate and fragile the slightest breeze might blow her away.
After T.J.’d met her on the porch that afternoon painting a kidney or a liver or whatever it was, he had described Jessie Cunningham, aka Bailey Donahue, told Dobbs she was “sad, sunken and sick.” And that’d been before she put a bullet in her brain. A bullet that was still here — or so Sheriff McGreggor had told them, said it could move at any moment and kill her.
And yet here he and T.J. were about to upset her, might even cause her so much distress it’d dislodge the bullet and complete the task she had set out to do when she put the Smith & Wesson revolver to her temple and pulled the trigger.
Maybe the two of them ought to tip their hats to her, tell her to have a nice day, have a nice life, turn and walk away. If they did what they’d come here to do, it might be that in trying to save her life, they would kill her.
He and T.J. had talked about that … and talked about that … and talked about that. Wore the subject out.
In the end, they’d both decided — well, mostly he had decided and T.J. had gone along — that the alternative to telling her was worse. They both knew what was going to happen to her, both saw what she couldn’t — her future looming like a black tsunami rising out of the ocean, poised to come crashing down and destroy her. That would surely kill her. Like it had killed T.J.’s mother.
T.J. hadn’t been able to help his mother, Dobbs had argued passionately for half the morning, but he could help this woman. He — they — could reassure her that even though none of them understood what was happening, she was not going crazy, was not a witch, as T.J.’s mother had come to believe she was.
He’d talked T.J. into reaching out to try to stop the suicide his mother had predicted, and now they had a responsibility to this woman they’d saved to see this through to the end with her. Wherever the end might be.
Dobbs had said all that to T.J. Multiple times. T.J.’d finally agreed, or said he did to shut Dobbs up. Either way, it amounted to the same thing: they had to explain to Bailey Donahue what had already happened and what was about to happen. And since Dobbs had been the one who’d shoved that boat out into the water, T.J.’d handed him the oar and said he had to take the first turn rowing.
He squared his shoulders and was about to launch into the spiel he’d put together in his head. Before he could get started, she lifted her hand in a gesture that seemed to take in everything and nothing.
“Why?” she said, then let her hand drop uselessly into her lap.
That was the first thing she’d said since she’d pushed open the screen door and allowed him, T.J. and Sparks to enter. They had left the painting on the porch where she’d thrown it, didn’t need it anymore to convince her that there was something going on here that was unexplainable.
In the beat of silence that followed her question, Sparky worked his magic. Hopping down off the couch where he’d been curled up beside T.J., he padded over to Bailey, put his head up next to her leg and began to nudge his nose under her hand, urging her to pet him. She obliged, absently stroking the top of the dog’s head, which was all the invitation Sparky needed to hop up into the chair beside her, plop down and lay his whole head in her lap. She relaxed into the motion of stroking his fur.
Sometimes, Dobbs believed T.J.’s dog was smarter than any human, and right now he was certain the animal’s unfailingly accurate intuition had guided him to do the one thing, the only possible thing in the universe that would get Bailey Donahue to relax and be willing to hear what he and T.J. had to say.
Dobbs consciously resisted the urge to clear his throat, like an orator in front of a crowd.
“You don’t know T.J., but if you asked around about him in Kavanaugh County, you’d learn quick that he’s as respected and admired as any human being for two hundred miles in every direction.” T.J. made to shush him, but Dobbs waved him off. “I tell you that so you know that what he’s about to tell you, what the two of us are about to tell you, is as real as any one of those medals, a handful of them, the Marine Corps pinned on his chest.” He could tell T.J. really wanted to shut him up then. “The ones he keeps locked up in a metal box in his garage and pretends for all the world they don’t exist.”
Dobbs gestured with his chin toward the open front door.
“That picture out on your porch, T.J.’s mama painted it when he and I were eleven years old. It was the last one she ever painted, but it was no different from the others, the ones she painted and then burned. I didn’t even know T.J.’d kept her last painting until he came home from walking Sparky more than a week ago and said he’d found the woman in the painting. That he’d met you here on the porch that afternoon. The fact that we’re having this conversation right now is a wonder to T.J. and me. His mama painted pictures of lots of people after she fell and hit her head, but she didn’t sit down and talk to any of them about it. She couldn’t because all those people were dead.”
He saw T.J.’s eyes shift from engaged and present to that thousand-yard stare he got, and Dobbs knew he was remembering.
When Dobbs got to the part about how T.J.’s mama couldn’t tell anybody about the images she painted, T.J.’s memory served up to him unbidden images from the one and only time she ever did.
The sound of the back door banging shut jars T.J. from sleep. Pa’s home. He’s been gone for three days, helping the Wimset brothers get their small tobacco crop to the tobacco auction in Fairmont.
Pa is drunk, of course. Likely spent every dime the Wimsets paid him buying round after round of cheap whiskey at Taffy’s Tavern. But he doesn’t hear his father collide with furniture as he staggers across the kitchen to his bedroom door, doesn’t hear the big man call out, his speech slurred, “Eulalie, where you at? Ain’t you gone welcome your man home with a big kiss?” Or her scurrying feet and whispered words, telling him he’s gonna wake T.J. and the other children which, of course, he already has. Soothing him, cajoling him to keep him in his jovial frame of mind. He needs to be kept cheerful at all costs because Samuel Hamilton’s mood could turn dark in an eye blink, could go from surly to mean and violent between one breath and the next. And that was a bad thing. A really bad thing.
“Eulalie,” his father calls out into the dark house. “Come here to me, woman.”
T.J. feels ice form in his veins. He has heard that tone of voice before and it is as dangerous as the rattle of a coiled rattlesnake.
Pa sounds cold sober.
T.J. scoots out of bed, turning to Luke, the oldest of the “littles,” the younger brothers who sleep with him.
“Shhhhh. You and Jacob stay in bed. Don’t get up, neither one of you. No matter what you hear, stay in bed. You understand me?”
He can see the moon shining on their two faces, eyes wide, fearful, as they nod.
Then T.J. crawls across t
he loft floor and peers over the edge into the single large room below it where light now flows out from the lantern his mother has carried in from the bedroom.
“I’m right here, Sam,” she says, hurrying to put the lantern on the table. Pa hasn’t moved from the doorway. Looms in the shadows there.
“You want some cold buttermilk? I got—”
Pa takes two large strides toward her and slaps her, backhands her with such force that she literally flies through the air from the blow, collides with one of the kitchen chairs and crumples in a heap on the floor.
She says nothing, just looks up at him with doleful eyes, her split lip pouring blood down her chin. T.J. clenches his hands into fists at his sides.
He once tried to stand up to his father when he was beating his mother. Rushed into the room and dived at the man in a flying tackle that his father shook off like he was a pesky deer fly that had landed on his hand.
“You leave her alone,” he had cried at the big man, scrambling to his feet and placing himself between his father and his mother, who was on her knees on the floor where his father had knocked her.
“No, T.J.!” she’d cried and reached out to him. He’d turned to look at her and never saw the blow coming. He woke up some time later, the side of his face on fire, his right eye swollen shut and a cut above his left eye where he had been knocked into the cabinet door.
His mama had made him swear he would never do that again. He reaches up now and feels the scar above his eye, grits his teeth and remains silent.
His father steps to where his mother is lying on her side on the floor, grabs her hair and pulls her upright into a kneeling position. Then he leans close and spits words into her face.
“You almost got me hung,” he growls, then calls her all manner of foul names, words T.J. has never heard come out of the mouth of any other human being except his father.
“What … what are you talking about, Sam?” His mother’s voice is small, the words slightly garbled. The blow must have knocked some of her teeth loose.