Your poor, bitter wife looks at a wooden box in Grace’s hands. Pale wood under yellowed varnish with brass corners and hinges tarnished almost black, the box has legs that fold out from each side to make it an easel.
Grace offers the box, gripped in both her blue, lumpy hands, and says, “You’ll be needing these.” She shakes the box. The stiff brushes and old tubes of dried-up paint and broken pastels rattle inside. “To start painting,” Grace says. “When it’s time.”
And your wife, who doesn’t have the spare time to throw a fit, she just says, “Leave it.”
Peter Wilmot, your mother is fucking useless.
Grace smiles and opens her eyes wide. She holds the box higher, saying, “Isn’t that your dream?” Her eyebrows lifted, her corrugator muscle at work, she says, “Ever since you were a little girl, didn’t you always want to paint?”
The dream of every girl in art school. Where you learn about wax pencils and anatomy and wrinkles.
Why Grace Wilmot is even cleaning, God only knows. What they need to do is pack. This house: your house: the sterling silver tableware, the forks and spoons are as big as garden tools. Above the dining room fireplace is an oil painting of Some Dead Wilmot. In the basement is a glittering poisonous museum of petrified jams and jellies, antique homemade wines, Early American pears fossilized in amber syrup. The sticky residue of wealth and free time.
Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.
Instead of packing anything of value, something they could sell, Grace brings this old box of paints. Tabbi has her shoe box of junk jewelry, her dress-up jewelry, brooches and rings and necklaces. A layer of loose rhinestones and pearls roll around in the bottom of the shoe box. A box of sharp rusted pins and broken glass. Tabbi stands against Grace’s arm. Behind her, just even with the top of Tabbi’s head, the door says “Tabbi, age twelve” and this year’s date written in fluorescent pink felt-tipped pen.
The junk jewelry, Tabbi’s jewelry, it belonged to these names.
All that Grace has packed is her diary. Her red leather diary and some light summer clothes, most of them pastel hand-knit sweaters and pleated silk skirts. The diary, it’s cracked red leather with a little brass lock to keep it shut. Stamped in gold across the cover, it says “Diary.”
Grace Wilmot, she’s always after your wife to start a diary.
Grace says, Start painting again.
Grace says, Go. Get out and visit the hospital more.
Grace says, Smile at the tourists.
Peter, your poor, frowning ogre of a wife looks at your mother and daughter and she says, “Four o’clock. That’s when Mr. Delaporte comes to get the keys.”
This isn’t their house, not anymore. Your wife, she says, “When the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the four, if it’s not packed or locked up by then, you’ll never see it again.”
Misty Marie, her wineglass has at least a couple swallows left in it. And seeing it there on the dining room table, it looks like the answer. It looks like happiness and peace and comfort. Like Waytansea Island used to look.
Standing here inside the front door, Grace smiles and says, “No Wilmot ever leaves this house forever.” She says, “And no one who comes here from the outside stays for long.”
Tabbi looks at Grace and says, “Granmy, quand est-ce qu’on revient ?”
And her grandmother says, “En trois mois,” and pats Tabbi’s head. Your old, useless mother goes back to feeding lint to the vacuum cleaner.
Tabbi starts to open the front door, to take her suitcase to the car. That rusted junk pile stinking of her father’s piss.
Your piss.
And your wife asks her, “What did your grandmother just tell you?”
And Tabbi turns to look back. She rolls her eyes and says, “God! Relax, Mom. She only said you look pretty this morning.”
Tabbi’s lying. Your wife’s not stupid. These days, she knows how she really looks.
What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.
Then, when she’s alone again, Mrs. Misty Marie Wilmot, when no one’s there to see, your wife goes up on her tiptoes and stretches her lips toward the back of the door. Her fingers spread against the years and ancestors. The box of dead paints at her feet, she kisses the dirty place under your name where she remembers your lips would be.
July 1
JUST FOR THE RECORD, Peter, it really sucks how you tell everybody your wife’s a hotel maid. Yeah, maybe two years ago she used to be a maid.
Now she happens to be the assistant supervisor of the dining room servers. She’s “Employee of the Month” at the Waytansea Hotel. She’s your wife, Misty Marie Wilmot, mother of your child, Tabbi. She almost, just about, nearly has an undergraduate degree in fine art. She votes and pays taxes. She’s queen of the fucking slaves, and you’re a brain-dead vegetable with a tube up your ass in a coma, hooked to a zillion very expensive gadgets that keep you alive.
Dear sweet Peter, you’re in no position to call anybody a fat fucking slob.
With your kind of coma victims, all the muscles contract. The tendons cinch in tighter and tighter. Your knees pull up to the chest. Your arms fold in, close to your gut. Your feet, the calves contract until the toes point screaming straight down, painful to even look at. Your hands, the fingers curl under with the fingernails cutting the inside of each wrist.
Every muscle and tendon getting shorter and shorter. The muscles in your back, your spinal erectors, they shrink and pull your head back until it’s almost touching your ass.
Can you feel this?
You all twisted and knotted up, this is the mess Misty drives three hours to see in the hospital. And that doesn’t count the ferry ride. You’re the mess Misty’s married to.
This is the worst part of her day, writing this. It was your mother, Grace, who had the bright idea about Misty keeping a coma diary. It’s what sailors and their wives used to do, Grace said, keep a diary of every day they were apart. It’s a treasured old seafaring tradition. A golden old Waytansea Island tradition. After all those months apart, when they come back together, the sailors and wives, they trade diaries and catch up on what they missed. How the kids grew up. What the weather did. A record of everything. Here’s the everyday shit you and Misty would bore each other with over dinner. Your mother said it would be good for you, to help you process through your recovery. Someday, God willing, you’ll open your eyes and take Misty in your arms and kiss her, your loving wife, and here will be all your lost years, written here in loving detail, all the details of your kid growing up and your wife longing for you, and you can sit under a tree with a nice lemonade and have a nice time catching up.
Your mother, Grace Wilmot, she needs to wake up from her own kind of coma.
Dear sweet Peter. Can you feel this?
Everyone’s in their own personal coma.
What you’ll remember from before, nobody knows. One possibility is all your memory is wiped out. Bermuda triangulated. You’re brain-damaged. You’ll be born a whole new person. Different, but the same. Reborn.
Just for the record, you and Misty met in art school. You got her pregnant, and you two moved back to live with your mother on Waytansea Island. If this is stuff you know already, just skip ahead. Skim over it.
What they don’t teach you in art school is how your whole life can end when you get pregnant.
You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying.
And just in case you forgot, you’re one chicken-shit piece of work. You’re a selfish, half- assed, lazy, spineless piece of crap. In case you don’t remember, you ran the fucking car in the fucking garage and tried to suffocate your sorry ass with exhaust fumes, but no, you couldn’t even do that right. It helps if you start with a full gas tank.