“It was easy to find you. Max Durant of South Bend, Indiana. Born April third, 1968. Your dad, a former custodian at the University of Notre Dame. Your mom a career secretary in the History Department.” My heart plummets. I can’t breathe. I can’t quite make out her expression; she is all streaked and blurry. I cannot fathom how my face must look. Dumbfounded. “And their son, Max Durant, acclaimed artist at the institute in Boston. Not very subtle, Max, not even trying to hide.
“And then I knew what I had to do,” she whispers. “I changed my name legally to Audra Colfax—Gram’s maiden name. I applied to the institute under that name. All I had to do was ask politely that my recommendation letter writers respect my change of name, so they would refer to me as Audra Colfax in their letters. I told them something about family troubles. They didn’t press me. Same thing with all the other paperwork. I got new everything, legally: change of name, new social security card, new ID, all of it. And here we are. I think it’s better this way. I was never a Bouchard. And Dunn has a lot of baggage.” I can feel the tension of every muscle in her body radiating at me. “She was, at times, deeply troubled, my mother. But she had always figured out a way to manage. Until you. You killed her.”
“I didn’t kill her!” I shout, furious.
I did, didn’t I?
I did it. It was me.
But it wasn’t just me.
“You don’t understand,” I breathe, scrambling.
“I think I understand very well, M,” she growls.
“B-but there—you have to—” I’m almost hyperventilating. “There was another M!” She laughs at this, unbelieving.
“Another M?” Her voice drips with skepticism. She’s mocking me.
“Yes,” I breathe. “Yes. It wasn’t just me! I—I wasn’t even the worst of us! There was a third person. A man. Another M.” I heave, trying to explain. “Mantis. Mantis, we called him!”
“Mantis?” she asks as if the name sounds made up to her. She’s pausing. Waiting to hear more. She’s going to let me tell her more. So I dive in, headfirst. Into the deep end.
“There was a group of us here. We were friends. The painters group. Y-your mom and this other local, Mantis, were like honorary members. We all palled around. But Mantis was—was a difficult guy. Had a mean streak. One night, we were down here—just the three of us. Mantis was plastered.” I swallow, my breath struggling to keep up with my words. “I was high. Really, really high. Your mom was, I think, just depressed. About not getting to go to school because of—” I pull up. I gesture timidly at Audra. At Eveline. A hard silence grows between us. I continue before she pulls the fucking trigger, done with me.
“So we got to talking—and talking and talking—and in this sort of, um, vulnerable, weird state, we said some things. Some things we had been holding deep, deep down inside.” My voice is trembling and scratchy. I can remember my words from that night, my confessional—so desperate, so full of pathetic want. Craving greatness. Even now I remember the acute feeling I had—that it was just beyond reach. God—the things I promised to do to stop the unquenchable yearning. I sip the gin, sick but parched. Ashamed. “Your mom confessed that she planned to take her own life once—once you were, um, born. She wanted to be done.” I can hear her start to growl. “That’s what she told us, okay? That is honest-to-god what she said,” I emphasize, heart thudding. “And this guy—the other M, okay? The other M—he confessed that his girlfriend’s death, which had happened when they were both still in high school, had not been an accident. He’d shot her while out hunting. She was wearing white gloves, he took her for a deer, he said. He was convicted of manslaughter. Not murder. Everyone always had their doubts around here, I guess. But he was a murderer. He had planned it. Because this Ashley had slept with his brother, and he was mad. And this stupid fuck told us this!” Recounting it now, I can still barely believe it. It had been a shocking thing to hear. Terrifying, really.
“Ashley…” Audra murmurs thoughtfully. “Ashley Pelletier?” Something close to joy erupts in my chest. I can hardly believe it.
“Yes! Yes! Ashley Pelletier! That was it! So, you’ve, uh, you’ve heard of the case!” Relief washes through me. She’s going to understand. “Right, so—we all said this stuff. And it’s—it’s the kind of thing where as soon as it’s out there, in the open, you know you’ve entered into something serious. Like a covenant. To never say a word. About any of it. But unlike me, and unlike Mantis, Coral just could not keep her mouth shut,” I say, immediately regretting my phrasing. “I mean—” I hold up my hands, trying to show I understand my mistake. “She just, she had a hard time keeping it in. What she knew about Ashley burned in her. She was a good person, your mom.” I let this hang in the air between us. “So once it was clear Coral was too…unpredictable to keep something like that a secret, Mantis wanted to make sure she was gone.” Audra’s face is serious. She’s listening. I’ve really got her attention. “So he threatened her. Hovered. Reminded her she needed to stay quiet. Hurt her, even. And she hurt herself, too. It’s important for you to understand that. But he actually laid his hands on her. I never did. Do you understand? I never hurt your mother.”
“Oh my god,” Audra says, lowering her gun thoughtlessly as she listens. I nod and nod, seizing on any glimpse of daylight.
“He wanted to make her feel trapped here. So he hurt her, and he encouraged her to hurt herself. He made her feel like there really was no way out. That the only way out was…the ultimate way out. It was his plan, it was him.
“So Mantis and I both had vested interests, sure.” I nod vigorously, feeling like it’s important to be honest now. Completely honest. “But Coral saw herself in my work. She really saw herself. And I knew, even as it was happening, that what she was giving would become my breakthrough. But I really did see it as a way of helping her.” Coral and I spoke of it many times, in whispers, next to the potbellied stove in Focus. I pull my coat around me tighter. “I promised I would immortalize her forever. Capture her in her varied, difficult perfection. I just wanted to help her. Send her off on her terms. Follow through on a promise we made to each other.” I swallow, looking at Audra, trying to parse the smear in my vision she has become. “Then I painted it. She wanted me to.” We are silent together for a moment, Audra and I, steeped in the blackness of the night.
“I am not the villain, here,” I say gently. “Mantis is. You’ve got the wrong man. The wrong M.” I laugh nervously, erratically. I hear Audra laugh gently, too, and I feel like I’m finally getting through. It’s like she’s breaking from a fever. I exhale hard, relief creeping in.
“Max, Max, Max,” she sighs. She steps closer, to console me. To end this nightmare. “Oh, Max, I know all about Mantis.” She sounds sorry for me. She raises the gun and points it squarely at my head once more.
My mouth falls open. I don’t know what to say.
This one final pocket of oxygen left to me evaporates. I feel like I can’t breathe. She knows. She knows.
“The old Lupine Valley cook is close,” she tells me, a small smile curling onto her lips. “The washed-up, high school football star—your pal—is near. I’ve kept in touch—the old-fashioned way. Letters. Postmarked from Boston.” I swallow, feeling absolutely destroyed. More miserable than I ever have in my whole life. “Gee—I wonder if he thinks they’re from you?”
“What have you done?” I whisper, tears brimming. She just smiles at me.
“Don’t worry. He’s next.”
It feels like I’ve left my body.
Audra—the greatest demon, the queen. How could I have been so oblivious? So ignorant? How could Audra yet again be better than me? Even in this?
“You’ve had to lean on so many other people as a crutch—they’ve given you what little true art you’ve ever conjured. Misha. Coral. Chess. Oh, yes, I know all about Francesca. Second-years just love to gossip. And there are others. So many others. That
’s why your paintings have come out half decent over the years—because your subjects are worthwhile. Not your paintings themselves, you twat. They transcend you. They transcend you and your lack of vision and talent. Not the other way around.” Her voice is a smug growl. She is the devil incarnate. The devil. “You need them—they don’t need you,” she sneers.
Juniper on her cruelest night springs to mind. You need her. She doesn’t need you.
“My mom made your career. That painting of her—Animus. Coral Dunn made you!”
It’s like they sent Audra. My string of discarded lovers, Misha, Chess, these various broken toys—they flash through my mind; demons, all.
You had it right back in her studio, Max, old boy. Should have cut your own throat while you had the chance.
The startling voice comes from somewhere deep inside of me.
“I have something to offer you, Max.” Audra’s voice is like honey now. My eyes, which must be red as the devil, look right into her crystal-clear sepia ones, the ones I must blink and squint at to see. They look back into me, into everything. “In one form or another, the you that you have been will pass away from this earth tonight, Max. That much is certain. Max Durant as you know him now will not live to see morning. There is no getting away from this. Not this time. I’ve come for you.”
I’m crying; I can’t believe it. It is brilliant, toxic, the only thing I have left.
Audra tips her head to the side, her voice one of mercy.
“Now, this can happen in one of two ways. Are you listening?” She holds her finger up to me, wanting to make sure she has my attention. I nod, numb. “I can make it look like you attacked me. Drunk, jealous, ravenous, raving. And then I will hurt you. Not enough to kill you. No.” I can hear the smirk in her voice. That smile of hers. The one I love. The one I want to destroy. “That would be no fun. Just enough to hurt you badly. And then the real fireworks would begin. I will tell everyone about the way you acted up in my studio. I took pictures, Max, you fucking idiot.” She laughs right at me. “I will tell them how you attacked me. Threatened me. Because of what I know. Because of what I found out.” The meanness in her is intractable. “And I will tell them about every affair with every student you think is a secret. You think they don’t talk, Max? A lot of them do. I’ve gotten them to talk to me. Bon-Hwa. Lin. Julia.”
The face of each woman comes to me, a ghost. I was not a very nice man to any of them, in the end. Lin in particular could get me into big trouble. I grabbed her by her forearms a couple years ago during an argument. Hard. She took pictures of the bruises I left. She threatened me with them if I didn’t leave her alone—and if I didn’t write her a glowing letter of recommendation for a PhD program. We came to an understanding. Julia, I abandoned in New York City after an argument one night. She had to find her own way back to Boston. Bon-Hwa, I coerced into having an abortion.
I sit heavily against the trunk of the birch. Eviscerated.
“Most importantly, I will make sure the news about Coral gets out. I will make sure the connection between you and Coral’s death gets out. I have proof. You will lose everything. Your reputation. Your career. Your job at the institute. You will lose what esteem you have. Your minor fame. The painting that launched your career, degraded. Everything that you have built, everything that you have made of yourself, everything that you think that you are—gone. You will have no legacy. The institute will scrub themselves of you. As will so many other galleries and schools you’ve touched in the past. You may even go to prison.” Audra sighs. “A girl can dream.” Tears continue to leak from my eyes. “I will connect the dots for them. In any case, no one will remember your name in five years.” She is destroying me. Turning me to ashes. My life. My career. The decades I’ve spent building my reputation.
She’s right. It would all be gone.
There would be no coming back from that. Knowing everything that she knows, the connections she’s made. And Mantis apparently won’t survive her, either. There would be no one else to blame. They would believe her. I can’t imagine it would be that hard to prove it, or most of it, at least. Where I was in early 1989. The fact that I crossed paths with Coral Dunn. The fact that Coral Dunn died and I left town shortly thereafter. And if these notes—like the notes I saw pinned in this forest…like the notes that are worked into her thesis pieces up at the house…if there are more of those, explicit—it would all be over.
“Or. Or, Max.” Her voice is gentle as lavender. I look up at her. “You can concede defeat once and for all; save your legacy, and kill yourself.”
The offer, the option, the fact that it is coming from her stuns me. Punches me in the gut.
“Waving the white flag tonight would allow you to keep your good name intact. That would be the deal, Max, don’t you see? An eye for an eye. Your life for Coral’s. I’m not interested in much beyond that. Take your own life, and live on, through your work, forever.” She lets this settle in the silence between us. “Refuse, and live in shame as an outcast—career, reputation, relationships, and body dismantled—for the rest of your life.”
I think of my paintings hanging in various galleries and homes around the world. I think of how many might be taken down if the truth got out. How many would be shelved, stored, become dust collectors. I think of my glittering biographies taken down. Or worse, amended to inflect that my genius came with a large and irrevocable caveat. That my genius was really no genius at all; without my subjects, I am nothing.
She takes a step or two forward, bends down slightly, and looks me in the eyes. I can see her now, perfectly. We look at each other. And then her eyes flick up into the boughs of the birch. I look up with her. Accusing goldenrod ribbons billow in the breeze, soft, like dancers. Like crime scene tape. I close my eyes. I press the heel of my hand into my right eye socket, into the place where a seismic headache rocks me. I feel cracked wide open.
I told Coral so many things. How beautiful she was in winter light. How her tears made tracks on her face and inspired me. How her heaving sobs showed she was human in the highest order. That pain was good. Was beautiful. Beauty itself. That she couldn’t be an artist without letting her true self out. That I could capture her in it. I could capture her in her radiant, golden glow, the one that ultimately consumed her. And wouldn’t that be something? In the end?
He just returned one day, and Coral and I both understood. It was time. I stayed quiet as he returned from his exile. As he explained it to her. This was what she and I had been working toward the whole time anyway, even if we didn’t know it.
We went down to this clearing with this boulder and this birch. Together. He told her what she had to do. And I didn’t say anything.
I gave her comfort. Mantis told her to jump.
After, Mantis and I parted ways forever. He got to keep the truth about Ashley quiet, and I got the materials that would launch my career. We watched Coral go, and I gave her everlasting life. Through me. My work. My vision. Through Animus. We did that. Together.
I am crying so very, very hard now.
The soft scarf with the black tassels. The brown enamel lantern. The golden dove necklace. The raven, hung upside down.
Evie.
“Coral knew the truth of it,” I say. Audra takes a few steps back from me as I ease and clutch the birch in my effort to gain my feet. “I made her beautiful.”
“You made her dead, Max. Nothing more.” Audra is holding a rope with a looped end out to me. Like a plaything. The foothold to a tree house.
I shut my eyes tight.
Just like before, a hand is taken to help someone onto the boulder. I hold the rope. I listen to her instruction.
“You would really tell them everything if I—if I didn’t…?” The earth looks so far away from up on the boulder. My shaking hands slip the noose around my neck because I already know the answer. The fluttering strands of goldenrod in the boughs of th
e old birch lick my face, my shoulders. Audra smiles her crooked smile. She takes one hand from her gun and fishes something out from somewhere inside her dress—a pocket, a seam, I don’t know. She looks at the small square of paper she now holds for a moment and then approaches me carefully, extending her arm up so that I can see it. It’s a photograph. Of me. Of Coral. Neither of us is looking. I’m holding the door to my cabin open wearing a long shirt and paint-splattered workman’s pants. Barefoot. Shaggy hair, big beard. I’m holding a cigarette. Coral is climbing the steps to join me inside. It’s winter. So much white. And then her black coat. And then her red mittens. Blue cap. Her deep-yellow scarf with the black tassels. The one here in this clearing with us. It is undoubtedly her. It is undoubtedly me.
“An original Rowan Augustus McCue, this one. He gave it to my grandparents at her funeral. Wanted them to have a picture of Coral with her friend from Lupine Valley.” Old Gus. Taking those goddamned photos when you knew it and when you didn’t. She pulls her arm away from me, steps back. Puts the photo away. Regrips the gun. “So, yeah, I’d tell. In a heartbeat, Max. Have no doubt. If you don’t take care of this problem yourself, I will.”
I can’t allow it. I won’t allow it. The disgrace.
I’m scared. Terrified. But I think she is telling me the truth.
It’s a heavy necklace around my throat.
Audra’s pendant winks up at me. She is radiant. Like her mother.
THIS IS CORAL, ISN’T IT, MOSS?
I jump from the boulder.
Audra
Monday, October 22, 2018, early morning hours
I thought it would take a lot more coaxing. More shaming. More threatening of his legacy. More proof, even. Easy enough to provide, but still. More dragging him through his own historical mud. Turns out all he needed was a steadying hand.
I’ve been standing here for ten minutes. The birch creaks in the cold breeze. It sounds belligerently loud in the horrible silence. Max doesn’t flinch. I look at my watch. 2:16 a.m. I take Max’s knife, which I secreted away from him down at the lake, and toss it onto the ground beneath him, blade open. Snick. I look at the knife, at the lantern. The bottle of gin. A desperate man making his way to a dying spot.
Dark Things I Adore Page 27
