The Law of Moses

by Amy Harmon

  “I think I’m cracked.” That’s what Georgia said. But she hadn’t seemed to mind. Not until the cracks had gotten so wide she’d fallen in one and gotten hurt.

  Tag tilted his head quizzically, but when I didn’t continue, he nodded. “Okay. Maybe we’re all cracked. Or bent. I sure as hell am.”

  “Why?” I found myself asking. Molly was hovering again and I drew faster, helplessly filling the page with her face.

  “My sister’s gone. And it’s my fault. And until I know what happened to her, I’m never gonna be able to get straight. I’ll be bent forever.” His voice was so soft I wasn’t sure he meant for me to hear the last part.

  “Is this your sister?” I asked reluctantly. I held up my sketch pad.

  Tag stared. Then he stood. Then he sat down again. And then he nodded.

  “Yeah,” he choked. “That’s my sister.”

  And he told me everything.

  It turns out, David Taggert’s father was a Texas oil man who’d always wanted to be a rancher. When Tag started getting in trouble and getting drunk every weekend, Tag’s father had retired, sold some of his shares for millions and, among other things, purchased a fifty acre ranch in Sanpete County, Utah, where Tag’s mother was from, and moved the family there. He was sure if he could get Tag and his older sister, Molly, away from their old scene, he would be able to clean them up. Tag’s father thought it would be a good move for the whole family. Open space, lots of work to keep them busy, and good, wholesome people all around them. And there was plenty of money to grease the operation.

  But the kids hadn’t thrived. They’d rebelled. Tag’s older sister, Molly, ran away and was never heard from again. The younger girls, twins, ended up following their mother back to Dallas when she filed for divorce. Turns out she liked Dallas better, too, and blamed her husband for her oldest daughter’s disappearance. Then it was just Tag and his old man. And lots of money, space, and cattle. Tag struggled to stay sober, but when he wasn’t drinking, he was drowning in guilt and eventually tried to kill himself. Several times. Which landed him in the psych ward with me.

  “She took off. We don’t really know why. She was doing better than anyone. I think she took some of my shit. I wasn’t just drinking, you know. I had pills stashed everywhere. I don’t know why she took it. Maybe her problem was worse than I thought. Maybe she just wanted to take it so I couldn’t get it.”

  I waited, letting him talk. I didn’t know how she died any more than he did. That wasn’t what the dead wanted to share. They wanted to show me their lives. Not their deaths. Not ever.

  “She’s dead. Isn’t she? You can see her so that means she’s dead.”

  I nodded.

  “I need you to tell me where she is, Moses. I need you to find out.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. I don’t see the whole picture. Just pieces. I don’t always even know who the person belongs to. If I’m in a group, it could be anyone. They don’t speak. At all. And if they do, I can’t hear them. They show me things. And I don’t always know why. In fact, I never know why. I just paint.”

  “You knew with Dr. Andelin!”

  “His dead wife followed him around during the group session! And she showed them having sex, okay? It didn’t take much to decipher that one!” I was getting agitated and Tag was moving in on me like he was getting ready to do battle.

  “They show me pieces. Memories. And I don’t always interpret them correctly. I don’t interpret them at all, you know? I’m not Sherlock Holmes.”

  He shoved me and I resisted the urge to shove back. “So you’re telling me that you’ve seen my sister before and you had no idea she was mine?”

  “I saw Molly long before I ever met you!”

  The truth of the statement suddenly slammed home.

  I had seen Molly long before I’d ever met David Taggert.

  And that didn’t make any sense. It never happened like that. The dead that came through were always a result of my contact with the people close to them.

  “She went away. I painted her face on an overpass and she went away.” I’d seen her the night Gigi died. But that didn’t count. That night, I’d seen every dead face that had haunted my life since the beginning. I just hadn’t seen Gi.

  “And she came back?”

  “Yes. But I think she came back because of you.”

  “And what does she do?” Tag was yelling now, frustrated, his hands fisted in his dark hair, his green eyes blazing. I knew he wanted to start swinging. Not because he was actually angry at me, but because he had no idea what to do with his emotion. And I understood that.

  “She shows me things. Just like they all do.” I lowered my voice and kept my eyes level. It felt a little strange talking someone else down.

  “Please. Please, Moses.” Tag was suddenly battling back the tears, and I resisted the urge to start a fight, to push him down and pummel him just to get him back to the Tag that wanted to hit me and called me a crazy son-of-a bitch.

  I turned away from him and sank down on my haunches, bracing myself against the wall, but my eyes found the picture of Molly staring up from my sketch book that I’d tossed to the floor. She smiled back at me, a heart-breaking illusion of happy-ever-after. There was no happy-ever-after. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my head, blocking out Tag and the smiling face of his dead sister. And I raised the water.

  I focused on Molly Taggert, blonde hair flying just like Georgia’s. I immediately lost concentration and felt the same old slice in my gut that I felt whenever I allowed her memory in. But with the thought of Georgia, the overpass I’d painted came into focus, the place where I’d taken Georgia’s virginity and permanently lost a part of myself.

  Immediately, I needed to paint, and I swore viciously, yelling at Tag to throw me the sketchbook and a pencil. It wasn’t the same, but I had to have something. My hands got icy and my neck burned and in my mind I watched as the strip of land became pale and flat as the water split in half and was sucked into two towering walls, leaving not a single drop behind to moisten the ground.

  They’d made me cover Molly’s image on the overpass with paint. The Sheriff’s Department had supplied me with a gallon of flat grey paint that covered the upsetting truth that children disappeared and the world was a scary place. But as I watched, the paint started to peel as if pulled by imaginary hands, revealing Molly once again in swirling lines and twinkling eyes and a smile that I could now see was identical to Tag’s. We never saw what was obvious until we were hit over the head with it.

  And then images started to flood my mind, the same images Molly always fed me.

  “She always shows me that damn math test!” My arms were flying, and I drew the test with Molly’s name in flowing script at the top.

  The math test fluttered away as if Molly had whipped it out of my hands. I hadn’t shown the proper appreciation for that red A circled at the top. Tag wasn’t the only one in the family with a temper, apparently. The A in the circle became a star, just a simple golden star that morphed into a night sky with stars shooting and exploding, like she was staring up at a light show, so glorious and color-filled that I cursed the pencil in my hand and begged Tag to bring me something else.

  Then Molly showed me fields, fields that looked just like the fields around the overpass and I tried not to curse in frustration. Instead, I drew the long golden strands of wheat in those fields, blending them with Molly’s hair as she raced through my mind, until the wheat became weeds that brushed against the concrete overpass.

  “Stop! Moses!” Tag was shaking my shoulders and slapping at my face. “What the hell, man! You’re drawing on the walls!” Tag’s voice faded off. “Actually, I don’t give a shit if you draw on the walls.”

  But the connection was gone, and I was dazed. I was pissed too, and stepped back from the wild, star-filled sky, smudged and shaded and half-finished before me. If I would have had paint

  I was breathing too hard, and so was Tag, as if he’d crossed to the
other side with me and had run, chasing his sister through fields of wheat that led to nowhere and made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.

  He looked down at the images I’d tossed around the room and started picking them up, one at a time.

  “A math test? With an A circled at the top?”

  “It’s red. The A is red.” I hadn’t been able to illustrate that with the pencil.

  “And this overpass is in Nephi?”

  I nodded.

  “Nephi’s only about an hour from Sanpete. You knew that, right?”

  I nodded again. And Nephi was fifteen minutes north of Levan. All the kids from Levan were bussed to school in Nephi. It was practically the same town. And I wasn’t going near either of them. Tag could beg and plead, and his angry green eyes could explode in his head, and I still wasn’t going back.

  “What’s with the fields?”

  “There are fields surrounding the overpass. There’s a truck stop, a couple gas stations, a cheap motel and a burger joint a little farther down by the off-ramp, but that’s all. It’s fields and a freeway, and that’s pretty much it.”

  “And what’s this?” Tag pointed at the wall where my pencil had proven frustratingly insufficient at conveying the exploding colors and streaks of light.

  I shrugged. “Fireworks?”

  “It was Fourth of July weekend,” Tag whispered.

  I shrugged again. “I don’t know, Tag. I don’t know anything other than what she showed me.”

  “Why doesn’t she just tell you where she is?”

  “Because it doesn’t work that way. Why?” Tag was getting frustrated again.

  “That’s like asking me why I can’t live in the ocean. Or why I can’t bench a thousand pounds or . . . why I can’t fly, for hell’s sake! I just can’t. And no amount of focus or study or attention to detail is going to make those things possible. It is what it is!”

  I picked up my sketch pad and realized I’d ripped every last page out, including the pictures that had nothing to do with Molly Taggert. Those pages were also tossed around the room. And there were no blank pages left. I started gathering them, despondent that I was going to be repainting walls again. Tag followed behind me, still clinging to the pages he’d picked up.

  “She’s got to be there,” he said softly, and I stopped gathering and looked back at him. His eyes were bright and his shoulders were set.

  “Maybe she is.” I shrugged helplessly. I didn’t want anything to do with any of it. “But can you imagine if they find her? Especially if I pointed them in that direction? They will throw my ass in jail. Do you understand that? They will think I did it.” I didn’t say killed her. It felt too cold to say it to his face, though we both knew what we were talking about.

  Suddenly the door to my room swung open and Chaz barreled in, alarm marring his friendly face and robbing him of his ever-present white smile. Relief quickly replaced the alarm as he realized no blood had been spilled, and neither of us were incapacitated on the floor.

  “Mr. Taggert. You are not supposed to be in here!” he huffed. Then he saw my grease painting and swore. “Not again, man! You were doin’ so well.”

  I shrugged. “I ran out of paper.”

  Chaz ushered Tag out, and he didn’t resist, but at the door he paused.

  “Thank you, Moses.”

  Chaz looked surprised at the exchange, but tugged on Tag, all the same.

  “I’ll take the blame for the drawing on the wall. I’m sure everyone will believe me.” Tag winked, and Chaz and I both laughed.

  Moses

  TAG WASN’T THE ONLY ONE who made a habit of sneaking into my room for private sessions. Word started to get around about what I could do. What I could see. What I could paint.

  Carol, a psychiatrist in her fifties who never seemed fazed by anything and was married to her work, had lost a brother to suicide when she was twelve. It was what had led her to work with the mentally ill. That same brother started showing me roller skates and a scruffy stuffed rabbit with a missing ear. So I told her what I saw. She hadn’t believed me at first, so I told her that her brother loved potato salad, the color purple, Johnny Carson, and could only play one song on his ukulele, which he played and sang to her each night before she went to sleep. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” That was the song. She had taken me off the antipsychotics the next day.

  Buffie Lucas was a no-nonsense psych tech who should have been on Broadway. She sang as she worked and could do Aretha Franklin better than Aretha Franklin could do Aretha Franklin. She’d lost her parents within three months of each other. When I asked her if her mom had given her a quilt made out of all her concert T-shirts before she died, she had stopped mid-song. Then she smacked me and made me promise not to hold anything back.

  People came, and they brought gifts. Paper and grease pencils, water colors and chalk, and about two months into my stay, Dr. June brought me a letter from Georgia. I’d done something that pleased Dr. June, and I suppose she was trying to reward me. I hadn’t meant to please her. I didn’t especially like Dr. June. But she’d seen a picture I’d drawn of Gigi. I’d meant to hide it and then hadn’t been able to bring myself to put it away. It was a chalk drawing. Simple and beautiful, just like Gi always was. In the picture she was folded around a child, though I told myself the child wasn’t me. June had stared at it, and then raised her eyes to mine.

  “This is beautiful. Touching. Tell me about it.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell you what I see,” Dr. June said.

  I shrugged.

  “I see a child and a woman who love each other very much.”

  I shrugged again.

  “Is this you?”

  “Does it look like me?”

  She looked down at the drawing and then back at me. “It looks like a child. You were a child once.”

  I didn’t respond and she continued.

  “Is this your grandmother?” she asked.

  “I suppose it could be,” I conceded.

  “Did you love her?”

  “I don’t love anyone.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  I sighed and asked a question of my own. “Do you miss your sister?”

  “Yes I do.” She nodded as she spoke. “And I think you miss your grandmother.”

  I nodded. “Okay. I miss my grandmother.”

  “That’s healthy, Moses.”

  “Okay.” Awesome. I was healed. Hallelujah.

  “Is she the only one you miss?”

  I stayed silent, unsure of where she was leading me.

  “She keeps coming back, you know.”

  I waited.

  “Georgia. Every week. She comes. And you don’t want to see her?”

  “No.” I suddenly felt dizzy.

  “Can you tell me why?”

  “Georgia thinks she loves me.” I winced at the admission, and Dr. June’s eyes widened slightly. I’d just given her a meaty, dripping spoonful of psyche stew, and she was salivating over it.

  “And you don’t love her?” she said, trying not to drool.

  “I don’t love anyone,” I responded immediately. Hadn’t I already said that? I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself. It both pleased and bothered me that Georgia had been so persistent. And it bothered me that I was pleased. It bothered me that my pulse had quickened and that my palms were damp. It bothered me that at the mention of her name, I had immediately felt that rush of color behind my eyes, reminiscent of the kaleidoscope Georgia’s kisses had always created in my head.

  “I see. Why?” Dr. June asked.

  “I just don’t. I’m broken, I guess.” Cracked.

  She nodded, almost agreeing with me.

  “Do you think you might love someone someday?”

  “I don’t plan on it.”

  She nodded again and persisted for a while, but finally her time was up, and she’d really only gotten that one spoonful, which made me happy.

  “That
’s enough for today,” she said, standing briskly, folder in hand.

  She slid an envelope from the back of the file and set it carefully on the table in front of me.

  “She wanted me to give this to you. Georgia did. I told her I wouldn’t. I told her if you had wanted to contact her, you would have. I think that hurt her. But it’s the truth, isn’t it?” I felt a flash of anger that June had been rude to Georgia, and was bothered once again that I was bothered.

  “But I decided to give it to you and let you choose whether or not you wanted to read it.” She shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

  I stared at the letter for a long time after Dr. June ended our session. I was sure that was what she had expected. She thought I would give in and read it, I was sure of that too. But she didn’t understand my laws.

  I tossed the letter in the trash and gathered up the drawings Dr. June had been flipping through. The one of Gi was there on top, and the intertwined figures made me pause. I pulled Georgia’s letter back out of the trash, painstakingly unsealed it, and drew the single handwritten page from inside without letting myself focus on the curving letters and the swooping G at the bottom that began her name. Then I carefully folded the picture of Gi, the way Gi enfolded the child in the drawing. The child that wasn’t me, not anymore at least. The child could be Georgia now, and Gi could look after her. Then I took the drawing and tucked it inside the envelope. I wrote Georgia’s address on the outside and when Chaz brought me my dinner that night I asked him if he would make sure it got sent.

  I slipped Georgia’s letter beneath my mattress where I wouldn’t have to see it, where I wouldn’t have to feel it, where I wouldn’t have to acknowledge it.

  Georgia

  HIS NAME WASN’T in the top left-hand corner but the envelope said Montlake and it was his handwriting that slashed across the envelope. Georgia Shepherd, PO Box 5, Levan Utah, 84639. Moses and I had had a discussion about Levan and her post office boxes, and apparently Moses hadn’t forgotten it. The only mail boxes anyone had at their homes in Levan were for the Daily Herald, a newspaper most of Levan subscribed to, if only for the Sunday comics and the coupon inserts. The Daily Herald was delivered by paper boys or families and it was delivered door to door. But the actual mail was delivered to the little brick post office on the main drag and distributed to the keyed, ornate boxes inside. My family had one of the lower numbers because we’d inherited our box as it was passed down through the Shepherd line.