Something wakes her up, the knife still in her hand.
It’s another longest day of the year. Again.
The noise, it’s a car door slamming shut in the parking lot. If Misty holds the split cast closed, she can hobble to the window and look. It’s the beige county government car of Detective Stilton. He’s not outside, so he must be in the hotel lobby. Maybe looking for her.
Maybe this time he’ll find her.
With the steak knife, Misty starts hacking again. Hacking and half asleep, she stabs her calf muscle. The blood floods out, dark red against her white, white skin, her leg sealed inside too long. Misty hacks again and stabs her shin, the blade going through thin skin, stuck into the bone.
Still hacking, the knife throws blood and splinters of fiberglass. Fragments of Tabbi’s flowers and birds. Bits of her hair and skin. With both hands, Misty grabs the edge on each side of the split. She pries the cast open until her leg is half out. The ragged edges pinch her, biting into the hacked skin, the needles of fiberglass digging.
Oh, dear sweet Peter, nobody has to tell you how this hurts.
Can you feel this?
Her fingers stuck with splinters of fiberglass, Misty grips the ragged edges and pulls them apart. Misty bends her knee, forcing it up out of the straight cast. First her pale kneecap, smeared with blood. The way a baby’s head appears. Crowning. A bird breaking out of its eggshell. Then her thigh. Her child being born. Finally her shin breaks up, out of the shattered cast. With one shake, her foot is free, and the cast slips, rolls, slumps, and crashes to the floor.
A chrysalis. A butterfly emerging, bloody and tired. Reborn.
The cast hitting the floor is so loud the curtains shake. A framed hotel picture flaps against the wall. With her hands pressed over her ears, Misty waits for someone to come investigate. To find her free and lock her door from the outside.
Misty waits for her heart to beat three hundred times, fast. Counting. Then, nothing. Nothing happens. Nobody comes.
Slow and smooth, Misty makes her leg straight. Misty bends her knee. Testing. It doesn’t hurt. Holding on to the night table, Misty swings her legs off the bed and flexes them. With the bloody steak knife, she cuts the loops of surgical tape that hold her catheter to her good leg. Pulling the tube out of her, she loops it in one hand and sets it aside.
It’s one, three, five careful steps to the closet, where she takes out a blouse. A pair of jeans. Hanging there, inside a plastic wrapper, is the white satin dress Grace has sewn for her art show. Misty’s wedding dress, born again. When she steps into the jeans and works the button and the zipper, when she reaches for the blouse, the jeans fall to the floor. That’s how much weight she’s lost. Her hips are gone. Her ass is two empty sacks of skin. The jeans sit around her ankles, smeared with the blood from the steak knife cuts in each leg.
There’s a skirt that fits, but not one of her own. It’s Tabbi’s, a plaid, pleated wool skirt that Grace must’ve picked out.
Even her shoes feel loose, and Misty has to ball her toes into a knot to keep her feet inside.
Misty listens until the hall outside her door sounds empty. She heads for the stairs, the skirt sticking to the blood on her legs, her shaved pubic hair snagging on her panties. With her toes clenched, Misty walks down the four flights to the lobby. There, people wait at the front desk, standing in the middle of their luggage.
Out through the lobby doors, you can still see the beige county government car in the parking lot.
A woman’s voice says, “Oh my God.” It’s some summer woman, standing near the fireplace. With the pastel fingernails of one hand hooked inside her mouth, she stares at Misty and says, “My God, your legs.”
In one hand, Misty still holds the bloody steak knife.
Now the people at the front desk turn and look. A clerk behind the desk, a Burton or a Seymour or a Kincaid, he turns and whispers behind his hand to the other clerk and she picks up the house phone.
Misty heads for the dining room, past the pale looks, people wincing and looking away. Summer women peeking from between their spidery fingers. Past the hostess. Past tables three, seven, ten, and four, there’s Detective Stilton, sitting at table six with Grace Wilmot and Dr. Touchet.
It’s raspberry scones. Coffee. Quiche. Grapefruit halved in bowls. They’re having breakfast.
Misty gets to them, clutching the bloody knife, and says, “Detective Stilton, it’s my daughter. My daughter, Tabbi.” Misty says, “I think she’s still alive.”
His grapefruit spoon halfway to his mouth, Stilton says, “Your daughter died?”
She drowned, Misty tells him. He has to listen. A week, three weeks ago, Misty doesn’t know. She’s not sure. She’s been locked in the attic. They put this big cast on her leg so she couldn’t escape.
Her legs under the plaid wool, they’re coated and running with blood.
By now the whole dining room’s watching. Listening.
“It’s a plot,” Misty says. With both hands, she reaches out to calm the spooked look on Stilton’s face. Misty says, “Ask Angel Delaporte. Something terrible is about to happen.”
The blood dried on her hands. Her blood. The blood from her legs soaking through her plaid skirt.
Tabbi’s skirt.
A voice says, “You’ve ruined it!”
Misty turns, and it’s Tabbi. In the dining room doorway, she’s wearing a frilly blouse and tailored black slacks. Her haircut pageboy short, she has an earring in one ear, the red enameled heart Misty saw Will Tupper rip out of his earlobe a hundred years ago.
Dr. Touchet says, “Misty, have you been drinking again?”
Tabbi says, “Mom ... my skirt.”
And Misty says, “You’re not dead.”
Detective Stilton dabs his mouth with his napkin. He says, “Well, that makes one person who’s not dead.”
Grace spoons sugar into her coffee. She pours milk and stirs it, saying, “So you really think it’s these OAFF people who committed the murder?”
“Killed Tabbi?” Misty says.
Tabbi comes to the table and leans against her grandmother’s chair. There’s some nicotine yellow between her fingers as she lifts a saucer, studying the painted border. It’s gold with a repeating wreath of dolphins and mermaids. Tabbi shows it to Grace and says, “Fitz and Floyd. The Sea Wreath pattern.”
She turns it over, reads the bottom, and smiles.
Grace smiles up at her, saying, “You’re getting so I can’t praise you enough, Tabitha.”
Just for the record, Misty wants to hug and kiss her kid. Misty wants to hug her and run to the car and drive straight to her mom’s trailer in Tecumseh Lake. Misty wants to wave good-bye with her middle finger to this whole fucking island of genteel lunatics.
Grace pats an empty chair next to her and says, “Misty, come sit down. You look distraught.”
Misty says, “Who did OAFF kill?”
The Ocean Alliance for Freedom. Who burned Peter’s graffiti in all the beach houses.
Your graffiti.
“That’s what I’m here about,” the detective says. He takes the notebook out of his inside jacket pocket. He flips it open on the table and gets his pen ready to write. Looking at Misty, he says, “If you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions?”
About Peter’s vandalism?
“Angel Delaporte was murdered last night,” he says. “It could be a burglary, but we’re not ruling anything out. All’s we know is he was stabbed to death in his sleep.”
In her bed.
Our bed.
Tabbi’s dead, then she’s alive. The last time Misty saw her kid, Tabbi was on this very table, under a sheet and not breathing. Misty’s knee is broken, then it’s fine. One day
Misty can paint, and then she can’t. Maybe Angel Delaporte was her husband’s boyfriend, but now he’s dead.
Your boyfriend.