by Amy Harmon
“Moses?” Tag pulled me from my thoughts.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way . . . but, if, you know, there’s more, and it’s not bad. It’s not scary. It’s not the zombie apocalypse. It’s not fire and brimstone . . . at least, not as far as you can tell, then why do you stay?” His voice was so quiet and filled with emotion, I wasn’t sure if anything I said would help him. And prophet or not, I wasn’t sure I knew the answer. It took me a minute of thinking, but I finally had a response that felt true.
“Because I’ll still be me,” I answered. “And you’ll still be you.”
“What do you mean?”
“We can’t escape ourselves, Tag. Here, there, half-way across the world, or in a psych ward in Salt Lake City. I’m Moses and you’re Tag. And that part never changes. So either we figure it out here or we figure it out there. But we still gotta deal. And death won’t change that.”
Moses
MOLLY TAGGERT’S REMAINS were taken back to Dallas for burial, David Taggert Sr. decided to put his ranch up for sale, and Tag and I were both scheduled for release from the Montlake Psychiatric Facility. I had some money and my clothing, though I hadn’t needed either during my stay. My clothes had been boxed up and sent to Montlake when my grandmother’s possessions were divvied among her children, at least the possessions she hadn’t left to me.
A lawyer had been allowed in to see me about two weeks after I’d been admitted. He’d told me about my grandmother. Told me she had died of natural causes, a stroke. And then he told me she’d left me ten acres on the north end of town, her house, her car, and everything in her bank account, which wasn’t much. I didn’t want Gigi’s house, not if she wasn’t in it. Gigi wouldn’t expect me to go back. The sheriff had made it clear that no one wanted me back. I asked the lawyer if I could sell it.
The lawyer didn’t think anyone would buy it. The land would sell—he already had a buyer—but no one would want the house. Small towns and tragedy were like that. I asked him if he could have it boarded up for me, which he did. When it was all said and done, house boarded up, Gi’s funeral paid for, my medical bills—the part not covered by the state—cleared, the land, my Jeep, and Gigi’s old car sold, the lawyer brought me the key to her house and a check for five thousand dollars. It was more money than I expected, more money than I’d ever had, and not enough to get me very far.
I imagined my extended family liked me even less now than they had before, and I knew I wouldn’t be welcomed into any of their homes, which was fine. I didn’t want to be there, truthfully. But I didn’t know where I would go either. So when Tag brought it up the night before we were both free to leave, I didn’t have much to say.
“When you get out, where you gonna go?” Tag asked at dinner, his eyes on his food, his arms on the table. He could eat almost as much as I could, and I was pretty sure Montlake’s kitchen staff would enjoy a little reprieve when we left.
I didn’t want to talk about this with Tag. I really didn’t want to talk about it with anyone. So I fixed my gaze to the left of Tag’s head, out the window, letting him know I was ready for the conversation to end. But Tag persisted.
“You’re eighteen now. You are officially out of the system. So where you gonna go, Mo?” I don’t know why he thought he could call me Mo. I hadn’t given him permission. But he was like that. Worming his way into my space. Kind of like Georgia used to.
My eyes flickered back to Tag briefly, and then I shrugged as if it wasn’t important.
I’d been here for months. Through Christmas, through New Year’s, and into February. Three months in a mental institution. And I wished I could stay.
“Come with me,” Tag said, tossing down his napkin and pushing his tray away.
I reared back, stunned. I remembered the sound of Tag crying, the wails that echoed down the hall as he was brought in to the psych ward the night he was admitted. He’d arrived almost a month after I did. I had lain in bed and listened to the attempts to subdue him. At the time, I hadn’t realized it was him. I only put two and two together later, when he told me about what brought him to Montlake. I thought about the way he’d come at me with his fists flying, rage in his eyes, almost out of his head with pain in the session with Dr. Andelin. Tag interrupted my train of thought when he continued speaking.
“My family has money. We don’t have much else. But we have tons of money. And you don’t have shit.” I held myself stiffly, waiting. It was true. I didn’t have shit. Tag was my friend, the first real friend, other than Georgia, that I’d ever had. But I didn’t want Tag’s shit. The good shit or the bad, and Tag had plenty of both.
“I need someone to make sure I don’t kill myself. I need someone who’s big enough to restrain me if I decide I need to get shitfaced. I’ll hire you to spend every waking minute with me until I figure out how to stay clean without wanting to slit my wrists.”
I tipped my head to the side, confused. “You want me to restrain you?”
Tag laughed. “Yeah. Hit me in the face, throw me to the ground. Kick the shit out of me. Just make sure I stay clean and alive.”
I wondered for a moment if I could do that to Tag. Hit him, throw him to the ground. Hold him down until the need for drink or death passed. I was big. Strong. But Tag wasn’t exactly small. Surprisingly, the idea didn’t really appeal anymore. My doubt must have shown on my face because Tag was talking again.
“You need someone who believes you. I do. It’s got to get old always having people thinking you’re psychotic. I know you’re not. You need somewhere to go, and I need someone to come with me. It’s not a bad trade. You wanted to travel. And I’ve got nothing better to do. The only thing I’m good at is fighting, and I can fight anywhere.” He smiled and shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t trust myself to be alone just yet. And if I go back home to Dallas I’ll drink. Or I’ll die. So I need you.”
He said that so easily. “I need you.” I wondered how it was possible that a tough kid like Tag, someone who fought for the fun of it, could admit that to anyone. Or believe it. I’d never needed anyone. Not really. And I’d never said those words to anyone. “I need you” felt like “I love you,” and it scared me. It felt like breaking one of my laws. But at that moment, with the morning looming large, with freedom at my fingertips, I had to admit, I probably needed Tag too.
We would make an odd pair. A black artist and a white cowboy. It sounded like the start to one of those jokes about three men going into a bar. But it was just the two of us. And Tag was right. We were both stuck. Lost. With nothing to hold us down and no direction. I just wanted my freedom, and Tag didn’t want to be alone. I needed his money, and he needed my company, sad as it usually was.
“We’ll just keep running, Moses. How did you say it? Here, there, on the other side of the world? We can’t escape ourselves. So we stick together until we find ourselves, all right? Until we figure out how to deal.”
Georgia
I DIDN’T KNOW HOW to break the news, and I didn’t know how to admit to my parents that they were right and I was wrong. I wasn’t an adult. I was a helpless little girl, something I’d never wanted to be. Something I’d always laughed in the face of. I had been tough all my life. I had reveled in being tough, in being as strong as the boys. But I hadn’t been as strong. I’d been weak. So damn weak.
I had been weak, and my weakness had created a child, a child who had no father. Maybe Moses hadn’t abandoned me—how could he when he’d never belonged to me? I felt abandoned, though. Abandoned and so very alone. In his defense, maybe he was more alone, maybe he was the one who was truly abandoned, but I couldn’t think about him, and when he didn’t come back, it was easier to be angry.
Moses became a faceless man. It was the only way I could cope. I erased his image from my mind. And I refused to think about him. Unfortunately, the faceless man and I had created a faceless child that grew and grew inside of me until it was impossible to keep him hidden anymore. And I broke down in t
ears, something I’d been doing a lot more of, and told my mom what had happened between me and Moses. She sat on my bed, listening to me talk, the Georgia Shepherd I’d always been—tough, determined, and opinionated—turning into a waffling, quivering woman-child. When I finished, my mother was so still. Shocked. She didn’t put her arms around me. When I dared look in her face she was just sitting, staring at the wall where Moses had painted a man transforming into a white horse. I wondered if I had just become something else before her eyes too.
Even with her shock and her cold reception to my confession, it was a relief to unburden myself. After months alone with my secret, months that had been the most terrible of my life, months of fear and despair, of worry for Moses, for myself, and mostly for a child I refused to give a face to, I laid it all at her feet and selfishly didn’t care whether I was turning her world upside down. I just couldn’t carry it anymore.
When we told my dad, he was the one who melted my mother’s heart. He stood and walked over to me and pulled me up into his arms. And my mother cried. That’s when I knew it was going to be all right and that’s when I gave up on Moses coming back.
Seven years later…
Georgia
A CROWD WAS GATHERED around the wall across from the elevators, making it hard to decipher who was waiting to go up and who was watching. A mural was being painted, and I couldn’t see the artist at work, but the depth of the crowd made me think it might be something special to see if only I had the time or inclination to stand around in a hospital and watch paint dry. The elevator binged and the waiting crowd shifted a little, separating the waiters from the watchers and when the doors slid open I waited patiently for the elevator to empty so I could wedge myself inside and stand quietly with the others while I climbed the floors to my father’s bedside.
Dad had been diagnosed with cancer the week before, and his doctors had moved aggressively. He’d had a large tumor removed from his stomach the day before, and his doctors were hopeful and gave him good odds of being cancer free. They’d gotten most of it, it hadn’t spread, and they had started him on a chemo regimen to get the rest. But we were all scared. Mom was emotional, and I’d ended up spending the night with the two of them, even though I should have been home, keeping things going, and looking after the horses. I wasn’t much help at the hospital, that was for sure. I’d slipped out earlier in the morning and gone back to the hotel room that Mom and I hadn’t really needed, considering we both spent the night dozing in chairs in Dad’s hospital room. But I’d needed a shower, a nap, and some room to breathe, and after I got all three, I was back, ready to spell my mother if I could convince her to step away and do the same.
Hospitals made me lightheaded and elevators did too, so I found a place at the back, called out my floor to a girl who was helpfully pushing buttons, and waited for the doors to close on the silent occupants. We were being entertained by an instrumental version of Garth Brook’s “Friends in Low Places,” which at one point in my life would have made me howl in outrage and loudly provide the lyrics to all the occupants of the elevator so that a truly great song would not be reduced to easy listening. But today it just made me sigh and wonder what the world was coming to.
The elevator doors began to slide toward each other and my eyes rose up to the lights that signaled the stops when a hand shot between the space and the elevator doors bounced back in affront. My boots made me tall—taller than my natural 5’9”—and I stood directly in the center of the car with my back pressed against the mirrored wall. People shifted immediately, making room for one more, but there was nothing blocking my view or my face when Moses Wright stepped onto the elevator. For a few seconds, maybe more, we stood five feet apart, face to face. The doors slid shut at his back, but he didn’t look away. He seemed stunned, floored even. And I wondered if my face registered the same shock. I wished he would turn and face the door, the way normal people did. But he wasn’t normal, never had been, and he remained motionless, staring at me, until I broke eye contact and fixed my eyes on the place where the ceiling and walls came together in the right-hand corner and focused on breathing so I wouldn’t start screaming.
The elevator bounced lightly to a stop, and the doors opened again, allowing people to shuffle and shift. I stepped to my left as the space cleared, moving as far from Moses as I could get, putting a heavy-set man in a ball-cap between us. Moses maneuvered himself into the corner opposite mine, though I refused to turn and see if he was ignoring me as intently as I was ignoring him.
Floor after floor, the shuffling and rearranging continued as people came and went, and I wondered who Moses was there to see while I prayed we wouldn’t get off on the same floor. When we reached the top floor and Moses still stood in the corner, with only two other occupants riding with us, I followed them out, my back so stiff I didn’t know if I could walk, certain that Moses would be right behind me. But he wasn’t.
When the elevator doors closed behind me, I sneaked a peek over my right shoulder, wondering if I had possibly missed his exit. But there was no one there but me as the down arrow chimed and the elevator whirred and began to descend. I wondered if he’d ridden to the top just to make me uncomfortable.
It had been almost seven years. A lifetime. Or two. Or three. His life, my life, our life. All three had been altered beyond recognition. But he hadn’t changed that much. He was still Moses. A little taller, maybe. More muscular, possibly. Older, definitely. But twenty-five was too young to be described that way. He still wore his hair shaved in a barely-there crop, clean and tight, revealing the shape of his well-formed head. Very little had changed about his appearance—his eyes, the wide mouth, the angles of his face and jaw. All of it was exactly as I remembered. Exactly as I remembered, though I’d rarely allowed him time in my memories. Eventually I’d had to cut him loose. I’d had to make him as faceless as the people in the picture he’d sent me, the picture of the woman and the child that had become so precious to me, yet mocked me every time I looked at it.
He’d dropped off the face of the earth. Just disappeared. They whisked him away that terrible Thanksgiving morning, and beyond that picture, I never saw or heard from him again. He was just gone. And because of that, because it had been so long, maybe it should have taken me a minute to recognize him, to react. But it hadn’t. I’d taken one look and my heart had sounded a deafening gong that was still reverberating loudly in my head and down my limbs, making me vibrate and shake and look around for a chair. But there was nothing but long hallways and rows of doors, and I slid down the wall until my butt hit the floor, pulling my long legs into my heaving chest so I had somewhere to rest my head. Moses Wright. I felt like I’d seen a ghost. And I didn’t believe in ghosts.
Moses
MY VISITOR WORE BATMAN pajamas and his feet were bare. He was small, but I didn’t spend enough time with kids to know exactly how small—he could be anywhere from three to five, though I would guess younger rather than older. His hair was a mass of dark curls and his brown eyes were solemn and a little too big for his small face. He just stood there, at the foot of my bed, and as I eyed him wearily, he tilted his head and looked at me as if I were the reason he was there. I was always the reason they were there. The heat on my neck blazed and I reflexively moved my fingers, wishing I had a pencil, some chalk, something to get this over with as soon as possible. It had been a while. I had almost started believing my walls were impenetrable, unless I purposely lifted them.
I’d fallen asleep early, comforted by the rain that drummed softly against the tin roof and the wind that made the warehouse walls slightly shiver. I’d found the space almost two years ago, and it suited me. It was in downtown Salt Lake City, situated close to the old Grand Central Train station in a refurbished district that was still caught somewhere between restoration and dilapidation. There was a homeless shelter around the block to my right and a high-end day spa around the block to my left. Two blocks north there was a row of mansions built in the early 1900s, two bloc
ks south there was a strip mall. The area was a conglomeration of everything, completely confused, and therefore, immediately comfortable. The warehouse had been partially converted to office space, but because of the residential area that butted up to the back, the owner was able to put an apartment on each floor.
I took the top floor apartment and all the open space that went with it, filling the exposed walls and beams with paintings that I had learned were easy to sell, especially when they were personalized. People came to see me from all over the world. I communed with their dead, painted what I saw, and those people went home with an original Moses Wright. And I made a killing doing it. No pun intended.
I’d built a reputation for myself. And I had a waiting list a mile long and a secretary to go with it. Tag had been my secretary in the early days. It had been his idea, after all. We’d been back-packing through Europe when disaster struck and we’d had our stuff stolen while we slept on a train. By the time we got off the train in Florence, I’d made a thousand Euros and Tag had enjoyed a romp with a rich Italian girl who had lost her mother the year before. The girl spoke fluent English, and she literally threw money at me as I rattled off a list of things there was no way I could possibly know unless her mother was showing me. Which she was, in colorful pictures and pastels, very similar to the landscape outside the train windows. The Italian girl cried all the way through our “session” and kissed my cheeks when I was done, but of course it was Tag who got laid, even though I’d sketched a quick drawing of the girl dancing in the surf, the way her mother remembered her best.