The Law of Moses

by Amy Harmon

  And I ran to him.

  I’ve thought back on that moment so many times since then. Replayed it on a loop. The way I ran to him. The way I threw my arms around him, filled with compassion, completely unafraid. I held onto him as he stood there shivering, muttering something to himself. I think I asked him to tell me what happened. I don’t remember exactly. I just remember he was freezing, icy to the touch, and I asked him if he was cold. And he laughed, just a brief, incredulous laugh. Then he shoved me away so hard that I fell back again, stumbling and then falling to the floor, my injured hand leaving a bloody smear across the pale carpet. There were slashes of paint everywhere, and my bloody handprint looked unremarkable. Completely unremarkable.

  Moses wrapped his arms around his head, shielding his eyes, and repeated something about water, over and over. His lips were the only part of his face I could see and I watched them move around the words.

  “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 couldn’t take anymore. The 911 operator had told me to wait. But I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t stay in that house for one more second.

  And for the very first time, I ran away from him.

  Moses

  I WOKE UP IN A PADDED ROOM. Not a cell. A room. But it might as well have been. When I came to they took my clothes, documented any wounds or marks on my skin, and gave me a pair of pale yellow scrubs to wear and socks to put on my feet. I was informed I could earn back my clothes as I followed the rules. Various people came to see me. Doctors, therapists, psychiatrists with little medical charts. They all tried to talk to me, but I was too numb to talk. And they all left eventually.

  I was alone in my room for three days with meals brought in to me, some pencils to write with, and a lined notebook. Nobody wanted me to paint here. They wanted me to talk. To write in notebooks. To write and write. The more I wrote, the happier they were, until they read what I’d written and thought I was being uncooperative. But words were hard for me. If they let me paint, I could express myself. I was instructed to “journal” all my feelings. I was asked to explain what happened at my grandmother’s house on Thanksgiving Day. Wasn’t there a song about Grandma and Thanksgiving? I was sure there was and wrote it a few times in the notebook they provided.

  “Over the river and through the woods, grandma has fallen down. The police save the day, and haul me away, from the shitty all-white town.”

  It made me sound cruel, writing about my grandma that way. But they weren’t entitled to know about Gi. And I kept her to myself. If I had to be an asshole to keep them out, I would.

  She was the only person who had been true and constant my entire life. The only one. And she was gone. And I couldn’t find her. She wasn’t with the others waiting on the other side for me to let them across. And I didn’t know how I felt about that. For the first time, Gi had abandoned me.

  The pencils I was supposed to write with were no longer than a couple inches; I could barely grip them between my index finger and my thumb, probably to make it harder to use them as weapons against myself or someone else. And they were dull. After my attempt at shocking them with my inappropriate levity, I didn’t write anymore, but on the third day, I ended up drawing on the walls. When I’d worked my way through the pencils and had nothing left, I sat on the mattress in the corner and waited.

  Dinner time came and an orderly named Chaz, a big, black man with a hint of Jamaica in his voice, was the usual suspect. I guessed they assigned him to me because he was bigger and blacker than I was. Always safer that way. Assign the black man to the black man. Typical white mentality. Especially in Utah where black men were outnumbered 1,000 to 1. Or something like that. I didn’t actually have a clue how many black people lived in Utah. I just knew it wasn’t very many.

  Chaz stopped in amazement, and my dinner tray hit the floor.

  Georgia

  THEY PUT MOSES in a hospital far away. It was a two hour drive from Levan to Salt Lake. They took Moses and his grandmother in the same ambulance, and I was horrified for his sake, but then I realized he wasn’t aware. They said he fought. They said it took three men to hold him down. And they stuck him with a tranquilizer.

  I heard the word crazy. Psycho. Murderer. Yes, that one too. And they took Moses away.

  Everybody said he killed his grandmother, ate a piece of Thanksgiving pie, and then painted the house. But even though I was afraid, afraid of what I’d seen and what I didn’t understand, I didn’t believe that.

  They did a full investigation into her death, but nobody had told me anything.

  Moses couldn’t come to his grandmother’s funeral. Her extended family did, and they all cried like they had killed her themselves. They sat on the pews in the Levan Chapel and there was no celebration, no joy of a life well-lived, even though Kathleen Wright deserved that. She’d outlived many of her friends, but not all. The whole town attended, though my angry mind accused many of wanting front row seats to the on-going drama that was Moses Wright. Mother and son, two peas in a pod. Moses would hate the comparison.

  Josie Jensen played a piano solo, which is the only thing I remember well. Ave Maria, requested specifically by Kathleen. Josie was a bit of a celebrity in town because of her musical abilities. She was only three years older than me, and I looked up to her. She was everything I wasn’t. Quiet, kind. Ladylike. Feminine. Musically gifted. But we had something in common now. We had both loved and lost, though nobody really knew it but me. Moses and I had been seen together, but nobody really knew how I felt.

  People still talked about Josie too, though they did so with shakes of their head and sad eyes. Eighteen months ago, Josie Jensen had lost her fiancé in a car accident. Kind of like Ms. Murray, but Josie was engaged to a local boy and only eighteen when it happened. The town had gone crazy for a while. Some said Josie had even gone crazy for a while, though crazy is subjective. You can be crazed with grief and not crazy at all.

  My mom had signed me up for piano lessons from Josie when I was thirteen, and I had tried, only to quickly come to the conclusion that we aren’t all born with the same talents, and piano was never going to be mine. I wondered if Moses had painted Josie’s fiancé’s face somewhere in town. It made me sick to think about it.

  A week after the funeral, Sheriff Dawson came by our house to officially tell me they had no idea who had tied me up the last night of the stampede. We weren’t surprised. We were only surprised he’d actually stopped by to tell us. It had been months, they hadn’t had any leads beyond Terrance Anderson, who had been cleared, and even though Sheriff Dawson couldn’t prove it one way or another, he seemed confident it was just a prank gone wrong.

  I didn’t have the energy to care one way or the other. There was a new tragedy in my life, and that night at the stampede was insignificant compared to having Moses tranquilized and hauled away. It was small compared to Kathleen Wright, covered in lace, lying dead on her kitchen floor, Thanksgiving pies sitting innocently on the counter. It was meaningless compared to the turmoil I now found myself in.

  It was then, with Sheriff Dawson sitting there in our kitchen just like he had the night of the stampede, that I found out Moses’s grandmother had died from a stroke. Not murder. A stroke. My parents sat back in their chairs in relief, never even looking at me, not having any idea what those words meant to me. Natural causes. Moses hadn’t hurt her. He had simply found her, like I had found her, and dealt with it in the way he dealt with death. He painted it.

  “Will they let him go now?” I asked. My parents and Sheriff Dawson looked at me in surprise. It was like they had forgotten I was there.

  “I don’t know,” Sheriff Dawson had hedged.

  “Moses is my friend. I might be his only friend in the world. He didn’t kill Kathleen. So why can’t he come home
?” The emotion was leaking out around my words and my parents mistook the emotion for post-traumatic stress. After all, I’d seen death up close.

  “He doesn’t really have a home to come back to. Though I heard Kathleen left him the house and everything in it. He’s eighteen already, far as I know, so he can be on his own.”

  “He’s not in the hospital anymore. He wasn’t injured. So where is he?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know exactly . . .”

  “Yes you do, Sheriff. Come on. Where is he?” I insisted.

  “Georgia!” My mom patted my arm and told me to calm down.

  Sheriff Dawson shoved his cowboy hat on his head and then took it off again. He seemed distressed and reluctant to tell me.

  “Is he in jail?”

  “No. No, he’s not. They’ve taken him to another facility in Salt Lake City. He’s in the psych ward.”

  I stared, not really understanding.

  “It’s a mental hospital, Georgia,” my mom said gently.

  My parents met my stunned gaze with sober faces and Sheriff Dawson stood abruptly, as if the whole thing had just gone beyond his pay grade. I found myself standing too, my legs shaking and my stomach swimming with nausea. I managed to make it to the bathroom without running, and was even able to lock the door behind me before I threw up the piece of pie mom had pressed upon me when she’d dished up a piece for Sheriff Dawson. Pie made me think of Kathleen Wright and tranquilizers.

  Moses

  “CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT THE ARTWORK MEANS?”

  I sighed heavily. The Asian doctor in the tan blazer, wearing the self-important spectacles she probably didn’t need, considered me over her rims, her pencil poised to make notes of my mental deterioration.

  “You need to talk to me, Moses. All of this will be so much easier for both of us.”

  “You wanted me to tell you what happened at my grandma’s house. That’s what happened.” I tossed my hand toward the wall.

  “Is she dead?” the doctor asked, staring at my grandmother’s death scene.

  “Yes.”

  “How did she die?”

  “I don’t know. She was laying on the kitchen floor when I came home that morning.”

  I should have known she was going to die. I had seen the signs. The nights leading up to her death I’d seen him hovering around her, the dead man who looked like the man in Gi’s wedding photo. My great-grandfather. I’d seen him twice, standing just beyond her right shoulder while she slept in her chair. And I’d seen him again, just behind her as she’d rolled out her pie crusts Wednesday afternoon when I headed to the old mill to finish the demolition. He had been waiting for her.

  But I didn’t tell the doctor that. Maybe I should though. Then I could tell her someone stood behind her shoulder, waiting for her to die too. Maybe it would scare her to death and she would leave me alone. But there wasn’t really anyone standing beyond her shoulder, so I held my tongue as she waited for me to speak.

  She wrote in her notebook for a minute.

  “How did that make you feel?”

  I wanted to laugh. Was she serious? How did that make me feel?

  “Sad,” I said with a sorrowful frown, batting my eyes at her ridiculous, clichéd question.

  “Sad,” she repeated dryly.

  “Very sad,” I amended in the same tone.

  “What went through your mind when you saw her?”

  I stood up from my chair and walked to the wall and leaned against it, completely shielding my grandmother from her clinical gaze. I closed my eyes for a minute, reaching out just a little, parting the waters just a crack. I focused on the woman’s shiny black head, her hair pulled back in a perfect, low ponytail.

  She asked me several more questions, but I was concentrating on raising the water. I wanted to find something to make her run, screaming. Something true.

  “Did you have a twin sister?” I asked suddenly, as an image of two little Asian girls in pigtails and matching dresses suddenly surfaced in my mind.

  “Wh-what?” she asked, dumbfounded.

  “Or maybe a cousin the same age. No. No. She’s your sister. She died, right?” I folded my arms and waited, letting the images unfold.

  The doctor pulled off her glasses and frowned at me. I had to give it to her. She didn’t rattle easily.

  “You had a visitor today. Georgia Shepherd was her name. She’s not on your list. Do you want to talk about Georgia instead?” she parried, trying to derail me.

  My heart shuddered when I heard her name. But I pushed Georgia away and thrust back.

  “How did that make you feel, losing your sister like that?” I asked, not breaking eye-contact with the doctor. “Was she crazy like me? Is that why you wanted to work with crazy people?” I gave her a wild-eyed, Jack Nicholson smile. She stood abruptly and excused herself.

  It was the first time I’d ever done something like that. It was strange and oddly wonderful. I had stopped caring if I was believed. If I never got out of the psych ward, I was fine with that. I was safe there at least. Gi was gone. Georgia was gone too. I’d made sure of that. It was the only thing I could do for Georgia now. She’d seen them put me in the ambulance. I’d fought. But as my eyes swam and the world spun, I’d seen her horrified, paint-streaked face. She was crying. And that was the last thing I saw before the world went dark.

  Now I was here. And I didn’t care anymore. It was all spilling out the cracks. Georgia teased me about my cracks, telling me I was cracked so the brilliance could spill out. And it was spilling out, brilliant and brutal.

  And so it continued for the next few weeks. The hardest part was when the therapist or doctor hadn’t lost anyone. There were people like that, and I had no one on the other side to use against them. To say I had the entire floor rattled would be putting it mildly. They tried to fix my cracks with medication, just like they’d done all my life, but the medication made the cracks wider, and short of putting me in a stupor, nothing they tried made me stop seeing the things I could see. And I started telling them all exactly what I could see. I didn’t do it out of love or compassion. I did it because I didn’t give a flying rat’s ass anymore. I didn’t break it to them gently either. I hit them over the head with it, Georgia style. In your face, tell you like it is.

  Georgia

  MY MOM HAD CONNECTIONS through her work with the foster system, and she found Moses for me. I don’t think she wanted to find him. But for whatever reason—maybe out a lifelong compassion for troubled kids or out of respect for Kathleen Wright—she tracked him down. We had to be on a list in order to see him. The list was comprised of doctors, immediate family, and people Moses had been allowed to add.

  My mom came with me the first time and we waited outside an official area while our names were relayed to another reception area on another floor. It was a building with different levels and pass codes and key pads. The reception area was as far as we got. We weren’t related and Moses hadn’t added any names to his list. I wondered if there had been any family to see him. I doubted it. My mom patted my hand and told me it was probably for the best. I nodded, but I knew it wasn’t best for Moses. I would keep trying without her.

  I skipped school and drove Myrtle to Salt Lake the next time I attempted a break in. Or a break out. I would take him away if he’d let me. It took me three hours to get there in that damn truck. I had to drive in the slow lane, pedal pressed all the way down, Myrtle shaking even worse than I was. I talked us both through it, patting Myrtle’s dash and telling her there was nothing to be afraid of. We would take it slow. Cars and trucks flew by me in a swarm of horns and angry fists. But I made it. And I went again the next week and the next and every week for a month after that. Week after week, Myrtle never could get over her nerves and Moses never did let me in.

  Finally, on my seventh week in a row, a woman came to the reception area and escorted me into a private meeting room. I’d noticed families being led to these rooms. My pulse sped up and my palms started to sweat
in anticipation. I had high hopes that I would finally be able to see Moses. I needed to see him. I needed to talk to him.

  “Georgia?” the lady looked down at her clipboard and smiled at me, though I could tell she wanted to get this over with. If she was a therapist or a psychologist, she needed to work on her poker face. She was impatient and had an irritated little wrinkle between her brows. Maybe it was because I was in cowboy boots and jeans, with my hair in a long, swinging braid. I probably looked easy to get rid of, easy to brush off and send away.

  “Yes?” I responded.

  “You aren’t on Moses’s list.”

  “Yes, ma’am. That’s what they tell me.”

  “So why do you keep coming?” She smiled again, but she also looked at her watch.

  “Because Moses is my friend.”

  “He doesn’t seem to feel that way.”

  The hurt that was now a constant companion grew a size bigger in my chest. I looked at her for a long second. So prim in her little white coat. I bet she liked wearing that coat. It probably made her feel powerful. I wondered if she wanted to hurt me or if she was just the kind of doctor who was comfortable dispensing bad news.

  “Georgia?” I guess she wanted me to respond to her statement. I fought the urge to rub my hands on my jeans, my nervous habit. The denim soothed me.

  “He never has. He’s always pushed me away. But he doesn’t have anyone else.” My voice didn’t sound very strong, and that seemed to please her.

  “He has us. We’re taking very good care of him. He’s making remarkable progress.”

  That was good. Remarkable progress was good. The ache in my chest eased a bit. “So what next?” I shrugged. “Where does he go from here?”

  “That’s up to Moses now.” How wonderfully vague.

  “Can I write him a letter? Could you give him a letter from me? Would that be okay?”