Black Water Read online

  Jessie wouldn’t go through that again. She was done. She would not miss another of Bethany’s birthdays because she would be dead before the third anniversary of the arrival of the bright light, the comet that lit up the whole sky and showered sparkling embers over every day, so brilliant Jessie surely must have wandered a world shrouded by clouds the previous twenty-seven years.

  The comet was still lighting the world. But Jessie would no longer watch it streak across the sky. Not after tonight.

  She sat very still, even held her breath, waiting. Surely, there’d be some emotion now. She’d cry, sob, scream, wail, throw things. Howl at the moon. Something! She was about to die, for crying out loud, she ought to feel something. She’d expected that here at the end, the final few steps before the abyss, a grand surge of emotion would well up in her chest as tall and powerful as a tsunami about to hit the beach.

  She waited.

  Nothing.

  Then she realized that “nothing” was all the emotion she had left. She had cried herself to sleep every night after … had screamed and … she’d done it all, maxed out all her emotional capital. Broke the bank. Now she had nothing left but a big empty vault with a couple of pennies lying on the floor. She’d spent it all. She was emotionally bankrupt.

  Soon.

  That word once had promised a reunion with her daughter. Now, the word promised an end to longing for it.

  The knock on Jessie’s door was so startling she almost pulled the trigger. And she wasn’t ready, hadn’t quite screwed herself up to the actual thing, the doing of it. Who in the world could possibly be at the door in the middle of the night in a storm? In the dark? The electricity was off all up and down the street.

  She tried ignoring the knock, but it only became more insistent. After the third bang, bang, bang, she gave up, set the gun down on the table and headed to the door. As she did, it occurred to her she ought to be frightened, at least concerned. She didn’t know a soul in town. Wasn’t likely Avon calling. Or some little girl in a brown uniform hawking thin mints or snickerdoodles.

  She heard in her head the voice of one of the parade of foster mothers. “You find out who it is before you open the door, missy. It could be anybody on the other side. A serial killer, maybe. An axe murderer.”

  Jessie stifled a laugh. Parental programming was stickier than gum on your shoe. She was sitting at her kitchen table with a loaded pistol, ready to blow her own brains out, and she ought to make sure there wasn’t a killer on her front porch?

  She peeked through the curtains on the window in the door and couldn’t quite get the image she saw to fit into reality. There was an old man standing on her porch in a black rain slicker carrying a Coleman lantern.

  It was him, the old guy who had been at the house earlier. The man with the cute dog. When he saw her peek through the curtains, he called out.

  “I need to talk to you. Let me in.”

  She was flabbergasted.

  “What do you want?”

  “I done said — I want to talk to you. Now, you gonna let an old man who’s wet all the way to the bone stand out here on your porch and catch pneumonia?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You gonna let a little wet dog sit out here shivering?”

  He pointed down but she couldn’t see the dog at his feet.

  “Tell her you want to come in out of the rain, Sparky,” he said to the dog.

  The dog barked.

  Seriously? This was nuts.

  “Go away. Whatever it is you want can wait. Come back tomorrow.”

  “I ain’t going nowhere, and if I’s to wait to come back tomorrow, wouldn’t do neither one of us no good. It’d be too late.”

  What did he mean by that?

  “Now let me in. You think I’d come traipsing out here in the rain with my dog if what I wanted to tell you wasn’t,” he paused for a beat, “a matter of life and death?”

  The way he said that, in a kind of knowing way, sent chills down her spine.

  He couldn’t possibly know…

  “I promise I won’t take five minutes of your time. You got something to do that’s so important you ain’t got a spare five minutes for an old man and a wet dog?”

  Fine. Let him in. That was probably the only way to get rid of him.

  She released the deadbolt, stepped back from the door and pulled it open. The old man opened the screen door in a protesting squeal and the dog hopped into the house like he lived here. He jumped up and put his wet paws on her leg, his tail a wagging blur, begging for attention. He was wearing a hooded yellow raincoat snapped under his belly that appeared to have kept him reasonably dry. She leaned over, pushed the hood back and patted his head, marveling at how he looked like he was smiling. The dog was an irresistibly adorable little animal and that was obviously the point. Clearly, the old man got a lot of mileage out of how cute he was.

  Stepping inside behind the dog, the man stood dripping water off the slicker onto the puddles on the hardwood floor. What had he said his name was? Something long and odd and historical. Signers of the Constitution or something like that. But he went by initials. T.J., that was it.

  T.J. set the lantern down on the coffee table and turned the knob on it, sending out bright yellow light to chase shadows into the corners. Jessie had time to think that she must look like an under-a-bridge derelict, hadn’t combed her hair all day, when it occurred to her that it didn’t matter. She was going to look a whole lot worse after she blew the brains under the hair out onto the wall.

  The man reached down, unsnapped the dog’s raincoat and slipped it over his head. The dog did one of those full-body shakes that sent splatters of water from his legs, feet and tail off in every direction, then trotted over to the couch, hopped up on it and began to roll around on his back, like he was trying to dry off, staining the threadbare blue upholstery.

  When the man started unsnapping his own raincoat, she called a halt.

  “Whoa there, you don’t need to take your coat off. You’re not going to be here that long. Five minutes — remember?”

  The old man ignored her. He took his raincoat off, used the back of his hand to swipe excess water off it onto the growing puddle on the floor, then turned and hung the raincoat on the hook behind the door

  How did he know there was a hook there to hang a coat on?

  He must have caught the look.

  “My mama worked here when I was a kid, cleaning house for the Whittakers. She fell off a ladder in the kitchen…” He stopped. “I’ll get to that part later. Right now, I’ll settle for a soft drink since there ain’t no electricity to run the coffeemaker. But no ice. I got teeth so sensitive the least little bit of cold will send me off—”

  “Coffee? Soft drink? What happened to only five minutes?”

  He headed toward the kitchen and she moved quickly to block his path.

  “No,” she said, too loud. She didn’t want to have to explain why there was a loaded gun on her kitchen table. But she didn’t owe him an explanation. This was her house and that was her gun and it was her life she was about to end. None of this was any of his business.

  “I don’t have any soft drinks and even if I did … what are you doing here?”

  “Yes, I’d love to have a seat. Thanks for asking.”

  He went over to the couch and sat down beside the dog, idly rubbing the animal behind the ears.

  Jessie stood motionless, stunned.

  “What do you want?”

  “I only want to help you, that’s all.”

  “I don’t need any help. Do I look to you like I need help? All I need, all I want is for you to tell me whatever it is you have to say and then leave.”

  He looked at her for a long moment, like he was measuring what he was going to say or trying to decide how she was going to take it.

  “What I come to tell you is easy, don’t take but three words to say it.” He paused. “Don’t do it!”

  Her knees suddenly felt rubbe
ry, unstable.

  “Don’t do what?” she asked, the words husky because the wind had been knocked out of her.

  “You know what. Don’t take that gun that’s probably lying on the kitchen table right now and put it to your head … your right temple, actually, and pull the trigger. Don’t do it!”

  She sat down heavily in the wingback chair across from where he and the dog were seated on the couch. There was a great roaring sound in her ears.

  “How do you … what makes you think … I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Look, why don’t we skip the you arguin’ with me part and get right to the point.”

  He stood and turned toward the kitchen. “The gun’s in there on the table, ain’t it? And if I hadn’t shown up when I did, you likely would have done used it.”

  She would have stood to block his path but she couldn’t manage to make her legs work.

  He left the room, left the dog on the couch, his wet paws soaking the cushion. Left her sitting … was her mouth actually hanging open?

  The old man returned a few seconds later carrying the revolver. He held it as relaxed as if it were an extension of his hand, certainly more comfortable with the weapon than she was.

  “Little thing like this won’t make much of a hole in your skull, that’s for sure, but it’ll definitely get the job done.” He sat down beside his dog again, moving the gun idly from one hand to the other.

  She wanted to speak, but words wouldn’t form. All she could manage was a croaked, “How…?” before she ran out of air and couldn’t finish.

  “How do I know you’s plannin’ to kill yourself?”

  She could have sworn a small smile tried to sneak out onto his mouth from the corners.

  “Sweetie Pie, if you think you’re surprised that I know you’re ‘bout to try to commit suicide, you ain’t got no idea how surprised you gone be when you find out how I know.”

  Then the shadow of a smile disappeared. He set the gun down on the coffee table between them.

  “I didn’t just come here to tell you somethin’. I got something you need to see.”

  He stood, went back to the front door, opened it and the screen, reached out and picked up something that was leaning against the outside wall beside the screen. When he pulled it into the house, she saw that it was flat and square, wrapped in the plastic from a couple of garbage bags. It was a picture, or maybe only a frame, a painting.

  “Take a look at this here, and when you’re over the shock, we’ll talk about it.”

  The old man pulled the plastic bags off the canvas and held it out into the light from the lantern.

  For a moment, the image didn’t register. The light from the flickering candles she’d set out earlier sent shadows, faux butterflies to twirl and dance across the edges of the canvas that weren’t illuminated by the fierce, yellow glow of the lantern. They gave the image the sensation of movement, as if the surface of the canvas were alive.

  Then the fractured pieces of dark and light and shadow became an image. When it did, Jessie sucked air in through her teeth, suddenly so nauseous she was afraid she was about to chuck up the small piece of an apple that had been her supper into the puddle of water on the hardwood floor.

  The painting was a portrait of her. Of her dead, with a bloody bullet hole in her skull.

  The likeness was stunning, so perfect it might have been one of those digital photographs made to look like a painting. Except you could see the paint itself. In places around the edges it had begun to peel off. You could see the texture of the brush strokes on the surface of the canvas. Her eyes devoured the painting, trying to look at every detail as a separate entity and see the whole of the thing at the same time.

  The moles!

  The trio of moles!

  Chapter Five

  The “magic triangle.” That’s what that frat boy in her History 101 class at Tulane University had called the trio of moles on Jessie’s neck, said she’d been marked by elves, moderately original as pickup lines go.

  Jessie reached up now and touched them, though she hadn’t willed her hand to move.

  Then her hand began to move — again, without her bidding – up to her forehead, and the spinning of planet Earth ground to a halt. It stopped revolving around the sun. Time sucked in a gasp and stopped breathing altogether.

  The mosquito’d gotten her after all.

  She could feel the itchy bump.

  She could see the bump, too. There was a small pink dot, not merely a single brushstroke but shaded to give it depth, above the right eyebrow of the dead woman in the portrait.

  Staggering to her feet, Jessie pinballed off an end table and a wall and barely made it to the bathroom in time to vomit noisily into the toilet. She wretched until her stomach was empty, which didn’t take long, then dry-heaved until tears ran down her cheeks and dripped off her chin. When the reflexive heaving was over, she stood up shakily, got a whiff of the foul-smelling vomit in the toilet and quickly flushed it down before it made her nauseous again. Then she turned on the tap and ran cold water into the sink. She splashed it on her face and that helped to steady her. Gratefully, the flickering candle sitting on the back of the toilet didn’t offer enough light for her to get a good look at the face that peered back at her out of the gloom in the mirror over the sink. She took the hand towel from the rack and wiped her face, scrubbed it hard, as if she could somehow wipe the mosquito bite off her forehead. But it wasn’t the bite on her face she wanted to get rid of. It was the one on the painting.

  She finally shut off the water and walked unsteadily back into the living room, carefully avoiding looking directly at the painting that was now leaned up against a chair by the door, in shadow there, with candlelight butterflies flitting across its glossy surface. The old man was seated where he’d been when she left the room, the pistol resting comfortably in his right hand. The dog was curled up on the couch beside him, sound asleep.

  “Where did you get that painting?” Her voice sounded hollow and foreign in her own ears. She felt like a string on a guitar that was pulled so tight you couldn’t tell if the sound it was making was music or crying.

  “Out of the shed behind my house. I went in there and dug it out after I seen you here on the porch this afternoon.”

  What was a portrait of her doing in a shed…?

  “Why was … how did…?” Her thoughts were so fractured she couldn’t seem to piece them together well enough to form a complete sentence. Finally, she gasped, “Who painted it?”

  “My mama.”

  His mother.

  The other pieces of thought in her brain banged into the back of those words when they stopped dead in their tracks.

  His mother? What was he — sixty-five, seventy years old? If his mother had painted it, then the portrait must have been—

  “Exactly fifty-seven years old. That’s what you’s calculating in your head, how old it is. My mama painted it when I was eleven and I’ll turn sixty-nine come August.”

  “Are you telling me…?” There were more words, but they dangled off the end of the thought and she couldn’t manage to grab hold of them.

  How…? It was too preposterous. It couldn’t … She tried again. “Are you telling me that your mother painted this portrait more than half a century ago?”

  “Yes ma’am, that’s what I’m tellin’ you.”

  He might as well have told her Mount Rushmore was a naturally-occurring rock formation and Mother Teresa side-jobbed as a pole dancer.

  “My mama was an artist, you see.” He was speaking fast, the way you do when you might not have enough time to say all you have to say. “She started out sketchin’ faces and such with the stub of a pencil on grocery sacks while she waited by the dock — the old one, it ain’t there no more — for the boats to bring in fresh fish. After somebody give her a dollar for one of ‘em, and a dollar back then was like five hundred dollars today, my daddy used part of the money to buy her canvases and paints. If she
could get a whole dollar for a pencil drawin’ on a grocery sack, what could she get for a color picture, a painting! So she set up on the street corner every Saturday in front of Adams Drug Store. And she’d paint random faces. Caricatures. We didn’t call ‘em that, but that’s what they was. Little girls with exaggerated big eyes and pouty red lips or freckled-faced little boys with big ears and cowlicks. The folks who walked by looked at ‘em, could see how good she done and every now and then she’d sell one. And then one day, this couple of tourists asked would she paint a picture of their little boy. After that, they was always a line formed soon’s she got there of a morning.”

  In spite of herself, Jessie was drawn into the old man’s story.

  “What she earned paintin’ was what kept food on our table. My daddy drunk up every dime he made at the mill and woulda used her money, too, but he didn’t have no idea how much she made so she could hide most of it from him. Life woulda gone on like that and she never woulda painted that picture…” He gestured toward the painting but Jessie didn’t turn her head, couldn’t look at it anymore. “And you and me wouldn’t be here in this house fifty-seven years later having this conversation. But one day she was up on a ladder chasing cobwebs — right there in that kitchen.” He pointed to the room where Jessie’d been sitting at the table, holding a gun with a barrel that felt cold on the skin of her temple. “She was a maid when she could get the work, and that day she was helpin’ Mrs. Whittaker get ready for a Fourth of July party. Mrs. Whittaker heard a thump and run into the kitchen and found mama on the floor and the ladder turned over. She musta fell off, hit her head. They brought her home unconscious. She lay in the bed, still as death and we was sure she wasn’t never gonna wake up. Then one day, she opened her eyes. They popped open and she come back to us. But she was … different.”

  He stopped to take a breath and that was Jessie’s chance to interrupt him, to shut him up and make him leave. But she didn’t.

  “She started paintin’ pictures so different from what she done before … got up in the middle of the night and painted in the toolshed by the light of the moon…” He spoke the next words so softly she must have misunderstood, because she thought he said, “Or with no light at all.”