This morning, Angel Delaporte’s brown sports car pulled into the hotel’s gravel parking lot. Wearing a wide straw beach hat, Angel got out and walked up to the front porch. Misty kept expecting Paulette to come up from the front desk and say she had a visitor, but no. A half hour later, Angel came out the hotel’s front doors and walked down the porch steps. With one hand, he held his hat in place as he tilted his head back and scanned the hotel windows, the clutter of signs and logos. Corporate graffiti. Competing immortalities. Then Angel put on his sunglasses, slipped into his sports car, and drove away.

In front of her is another painted mess. Her perspective is all wrong.

Tabbi says, “Granmy told me to help you get inspired.”

Instead of painting, Misty should be teaching her child some skill—bookkeeping or cost analysis or television repair. Some realistic way she can pay her bills.

Sometime after Angel Delaporte drove away, Detective Stilton drove up in a plain beige county government car. He walked into the hotel, then went back to his car a few minutes later. He stood in the parking lot, shading his eyes with one hand, staring up at the hotel, looking from window to window, but not seeing her. Then he drove away.

The mess in front of her, the colors are running and smudged. The trees could be microwave relay towers. The ocean could be volcano lava or cold chocolate pudding or just six bucks’ worth of gouache watercolors, wasted. Misty tears off the sheet and wads it into a ball. Her hands are almost black with wadding up her failures all day. Her head aches. Misty closes her eyes and presses a hand to her forehead, where she feels it stick with wet paint.

Misty drops the wadded painting on the floor.

And Tabbi says, “Mom?”

Misty opens her eyes.

Tabbi’s colored birds and flowers down the length of her cast. Blue birds and red robins and red roses.

When Paulette brings up their lunch on a room service cart, Misty asks if anyone has tried to phone from the front desk. Paulette shakes out the cloth napkin and tucks it into the collar of the blue work shirt. She says, “Sorry, nobody.” She takes the warming cover off a plate of fish and says, “Why do you ask?”

And Misty says, “No reason.”

Now, sitting here with Tabbi, with flowers and birds crayoned on her leg, Misty knows she’ll never be an artist. The picture she sold Angel, it was a fluke. An accident. Instead of crying, Misty just pees a few drips into her plastic tube.

And Tabbi says, “Close your eyes, Mom.” She says, “Color with your eyes closed, like you did on my birthday picnic.”

Like she did when she was little Misty Marie Kleinman. Her eyes closed on the shag carpet in the trailer.

Tabbi leans close and whispers, “We were hiding in the trees and peeking at you.” She says, “Granmy said we had to let you get inspiration.”

Tabbi goes to the dresser and gets the roll of masking tape that Misty uses to hold paper on the easel. She tears off two strips and says, “Now close your eyes.”

Misty has nothing to lose. She can indulge her kid. Her work couldn’t get any worse. Misty closes her eyes.

And Tabbi’s little fingers press a strip of tape over each eyelid.

The way her father’s eyes are taped shut. To keep them from drying out.

Your eyes are taped shut.

In the dark, Tabbi’s fingers put a pencil in Misty’s hand. You can hear as she sets a drawing pad on the easel and lifts the cover sheet. Then her hands take Misty’s and carry the pencil until it touches the paper.

The sun from the window feels warm. Tabbi’s hand lets go, and her voice in the dark says, “Now draw your picture.”

And Misty’s drawing, the perfect circles and angles, the straight lines Angel Delaporte says are impossible. Just by the feeling, it’s perfect and right. What it is, Misty has no idea. The way a stylus moves itself across a Ouija board, the pencil takes her hand back and forth across the paper so fast Misty has to grip it tight. Her automatic writing.

Misty’s just able to hold on, and she says, “Tabbi?”

The tape tight over her eyes, Misty says, “Tabbi? Are you still there?”

August 2

THERE’S A LITTLE TUG between Misty’s legs, a little pull deep inside her when Tabbi snaps the bag off the end of Misty’s catheter and takes it down the hall to the bathroom. She empties the bag into the toilet and washes it. Tabbi brings it back and snaps it onto the long plastic tube.

She does all this so Misty can keep working in the pitch dark. Her eyes taped. Blind.

There’s just the feel of warm sunshine from the window. The moment the paintbrush stops, Misty says, “This is done.”

And Tabbi slips the drawing off the easel and clips on a new sheet of paper. She takes the pencil when it looks dull and gives Misty a sharp one. She holds out a tray of pastel crayons, and Misty feels them blind, greasy piano keys of color, and picks one.

Just for the record, every color Misty picks, every mark she makes, is perfect because she’s stopped caring.