Stendhal syndrome. Epinephrine. Graphology. The coma of details. Of education.
The man nods at her beer in the brown paper bag, and he says, “You know you’re not supposed to drink in public?”
And Misty says, What? Is he a cop?
And he says, “You know? As a matter of fact, yeah, I am.”
The guy flips open his wallet to flash her a badge. Engraved on the silver badge, it says: Clark Stilton. Detective. Seaview County Hate Crimes Task Force .
July 13— The Full Moon
TABBI AND MISTY, they’re walking through the woods. This is the tangle of land out on Waytansea Point. It’s alders here, generations of trees grown and fallen and sprouting again out of their own dead. Animals, maybe deer, have cut a path that winds around the heaps of complicated trees and edges between rocks big as architecture and padded with thick moss. Above all this, the alder leaves come together in a shifting bright green sky.
Here and there, sunlight breaks through in shafts as big around as crystal chandeliers. Here’s just a messier version of the lobby of the Waytansea Hotel.
Tabbi wears a single old earring, gold filigree and a haze of sparkling red rhinestones around a red enameled heart. It’s pinned through her pink sweatshirt, like a brooch, but it’s the earring that Peter’s blond friend tore out of his ear. Will Tupper from the ferry.
Your friend.
She keeps the junk jewelry in a shoe box under her bed and wears it on special days. The chipped glass rubies pinned to her shoulder glitter with the bright green above them. The rhinestones, spotted with dirt, they reflect pink from Tabbi’s sweatshirt.
Your wife and kid, they step over a rotting log that’s crawling with ants, stepping around ferns that brush Misty’s waist and flop on Tabbi’s face. They’re quiet, looking and listening for birds, but there’s nothing. No birds. No little frogs. No sounds except the ocean, the hiss and burst of waves somewhere else.
They push through a thicket of green stalks, something with soft yellow leaves rotting around its base. You have to look down with every step because the ground’s slippery and puddled with water. How long Misty’s been walking, keeping her eyes on the ground, holding branches so they don’t whip Tabbi, Misty doesn’t know how long, but when she looks up, a man’s standing there.
Just for the record, her levator labii muscles, the snarl muscles, the fight-or-flight muscles, all spasm, all those smooth muscles freeze into the landscape of growling, Misty’s mouth squared so all her teeth show.
Her hand grabs the back of Tabbi’s shirt. Tabbi, she’s still looking down at the ground, walking forward, and Misty yanks her back.
And Tabbi slips and pulls her mother to the ground, saying, “Mom.”
Tabbi pressed to the wet ground, the leaves and moss and beetles, Misty crouched over her, the ferns arch above them.
The man is maybe another ten steps ahead, and facing away from them. He doesn’t turn. Through the curtain of ferns, he must be seven feet tall, dark and heavy with brown leaves in his hair and mud splashed up his legs.
He doesn’t turn, but he doesn’t move. He must’ve heard them, and he stands, listening.
Just for the record, he’s naked. His naked butt is right there.
Tabbi says, “Let go, Mom. There’s bugs.”
And Misty shushes her.
The man waits, frozen, one hand held out at waist height as if he’s feeling the air for movement. No birds sing.
Misty’s crouched, squatting with her hands open against the muddy ground, ready to grab Tabbi and run.
Then Tabbi slips past her, and Misty says, “No.” Reaching fast, Misty clutches the air behind her kid.
It’s one, maybe two seconds before Tabbi gets to the man, puts her hand in his open hand.
In that two seconds, Misty knows she’s a shitty mother.
Peter, you married a coward. Misty’s still here, crouched. If anything, Misty’s leaning back, ready to run the other way. What they don’t teach you in art school is hand-to-hand combat.
And Tabbi turns back, smiling, and says, “Mom, don’t be such a spaz.” She wraps both her hands around the man’s one outstretched hand and pulls herself up so she can swing her legs in the air. She says, “It’s just Apollo, is all.”
Near the man, almost hidden in fallen leaves, is a dead body. A pale white breast with fine blue veins. A severed white arm.
And Misty’s still crouched here.
Tabbi drops from the man’s hand and goes to where Misty’s looking. She brushes leaves off a dead white face and says, “This is Diana.”
She looks at Misty crouching and rolls her eyes. “They’re statues, Mom.”
Statues.
Tabbi comes back to take Misty’s hand. She lifts her mom’s arm and pulls her to her feet, saying, “You know? Statues . You’re the artist.”
Tabbi pulls her forward. The standing man is dark bronze, streaked with lichen and tarnish, a naked man with his feet bolted to a pedestal buried in the bushes beside the trail. His eyes have recessed irises and pupils, Roman irises, cast into them. His bare arms and legs are perfect in proportion to his torso. The golden mean of composition. Every rule of art and proportion applied.
The Greeks’ formula for why we love what we love. More of that art school coma.
The woman on the ground is broken white marble. Tabbi’s pink hand brushes the leaves and grass back from the long white thighs, the coy folds of the pale marble groin meet at a carved leaf. The smooth fingers and arms, the elbows without a wrinkle or crease. Her carved marble hair hangs in sculpted white curls.
Tabbi points her pink hand at an empty pedestal across the path from the bronze, and she says, “Diana fell down a long time before I met her.”
The man’s bronze calf muscle feels cold, but cast with every tendon defined, every muscle thick. As Misty runs her hand up the cold metal leg, she says, “You’ve been here before?”
“Apollo doesn’t have a dick,” Tabbi says. “I already looked.”
And Misty yanks her hand back from the leaf cast over the statue’s bronze crotch. She says, “Who brought you here?”
“Granmy,” Tabbi says. “Granmy brings me here all the time.”
Tabbi stoops to rub her cheek against the smooth marble cheek of the Diana.
The bronze statue, Apollo, it must be a nineteenth-century reproduction. Either that or late eighteenth century. It can’t be real, not an actual Greek or Roman piece. It would be in a museum.
“Why are these here?” Misty says. “Did your grandmother tell you?”
And Tabbi shrugs. She holds out her hand toward Misty and says, “There’s more.” She says, “Come, and I can show you.”
There is more.
Tabbi leads her through the woods that circle the point, and they find a sundial lying in the weeds, crusted a thick dark green with verdigris. They find a fountain as wide across as a swimming pool, but filled with windfall branches and acorns.
They walk past a grotto dug into a hillside, a dark mouth framed in mossy pillars and blocked with a chained iron gate. The cut stone is fitted into an arch that rises to a keystone in the middle. Fancy as a little bank building. The front of a moldy, buried state capitol building. It’s cluttered with carved angels that hold stone garlands of apples, pears, and grapes. Stone wreaths of flowers. All of it streaked with dirt, it’s cracked and pried apart by tree roots.
In between are plants that shouldn’t be here. A climbing rose chokes an oak tree, scrambling up fifty feet to bloom above the tree’s crown. Withered yellow tulip leaves are wilted in the summer heat. A towering wall of sticks and leaves turns out to be a huge lilac bush.
Tulips and lilacs aren’t native to here.
None of this should be here.
In the meadow at the center of the point, they find Grace Wilmot sitting on a blanket spread over the grass. Around her bloom pink and blue bachelor buttons and little white daisies. The wicker picnic hamper is open, and flies buzz over it.
Grace rises to her knees, holding out a glass of red wine, and says, “Misty, you’re back. Come take this.”