Via Dolorosa (39 page)

Mr. Granger’s shadow fell across the table. Polite, the bell captain stood without expression and nodded when Nick looked up.

“Good afternoon, Nicholas,” Granger said.

“Hi.”

“How’s everything?”

“Very good.”

“Emma?”

“She’s down by the water.”

“Yes,” Granger said, “it’s lovely today.” He extended a hand toward the empty chair at Nick’s table, but did not sit and did not ask about sitting. Instead, he said, “I hate to disturb you during lunch, Nicholas, but I needed to speak with you. I didn’t want it to wait. I know you’re going back to paint once you’re done here, so I didn’t want it to wait.”

“It’s no problem. Have a seat. I wanted to ask you something, too.”

Granger sat and folded his hands atop the table. The bell captain looked very small and compact sitting across from him at the table.

“The hotel manager, Mr.
Vastovets
, spoke with me last night, Nicholas. He expressed some concern about the mural.”

“I know it’s taking a while. I’m a little rusty. If it helps, I can—”

“No, no—it’s not that. You can take all the time you need.”

“Oh,” he said. “All right…”

“It’s just, Mr.
Vastovets
,” Granger said, shifting his eyes toward the floor, “he’s concerned that the mural is leaning further and further away from what you’d originally proposed and more toward—well—toward being a bit—uh…”

“Yes?”

“It’s become violent,” Granger said, his voice flat.

“He said it’s violent?”

“It
is
violent. Have you seen it?”

“Of course I’ve seen it. I’ve been painting it all morning.”

Granger’s eyes fell on Emma’s note. Then they turned back to Nick. The bell captain said, “You are an excellent painter, Nicholas. I’m genuinely glad we were able to work this out, and I’m even more glad that I finally got to meet the great Lieutenant. Mr.
Vastovets
, he wanted me to speak with you, Nick. He’s hoping—we’re hoping—we’re—if it’s
possible…”

“Have any of the guests complained?”

The question seemed to catch Granger off guard. “Complained?”

“Yes. To the manager. Have any of the guests complained?”

“Actually, yes,” Granger admitted. “I believe that was what prompted Mr.
Vastovets
to speak with me, and for me to speak with you.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know that.”

“Was it a woman—”

“I don’t know that, Nick. I wasn’t told. Mr.
Vastovets
simply said one of the guests commented to him that the mural was very brutal for the hotel. It is the first thing you see when you come into the lobby, you see, and it was our concern that, well, maybe…”

“I’m sorry,” Nick said.

“It’s just, it isn’t what you’d proposed when we first talked about the mural.”

“I understand.”

“It was supposed to be a serene—a serene, uh—”

“Yes, I understand.”

“You can fix it, right?” Granger looked hopeful.

“Of course.”

“We understand if it takes a little more time.”

“I will do it quickly,” he promised. “I’ll work all day today, fixing it.”

“Good,” Granger said, visibly relieved. “That’s good, Nick.”

For some reason, both their eyes had come to rest on Emma’s handwritten note. Self-conscious that all his and Emma’s innermost secrets could be betrayed by prolonged exposure to those few innocuous sentences, Nick gathered the note in his hands, folded it a number of times, and tucked it into the breast pocket of his shirt.

“Is your hand all right?” Granger asked suddenly, nodding toward his bandaged arm.

“I sprained it. It’ll be okay.” But he wasn’t thinking about his arm; he was thinking about Isabella, and how she had made some comment last night down in Sea Pines about how his mural had become a topic of conversation at the hotel. Isabella Rosales. What had she said exactly? He could not remember…

“You said you wanted to ask me something, Nick?” Granger said.

Snapping back to reality, Nick said, “Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I hope—I mean, I hope this doesn’t sound insulting—an imposition…”

“Not at all.”

“Myles,” he said. “Your son. I know he wrote letters home to you from time to time when we were in Iraq.”

“Yes.” And something behind the elder Granger’s eyes appeared to immediately film over.

“I was wondering if you could recall Myles ever mentioning anything about, well…” He considered how to proceed. “Did he ever say anything about suffering from delusions? Like—I don’t know—like periods of time that seemed to slide together and make no sense? Or…or maybe that he was seeing things he couldn’t understand, or that didn’t belong in the real world?”

Granger only looked at him. After what felt like an eternity, the old man said, “I’m not sure I know what you mean, Nick…”

“Yeah,” he said, offered a nervous chuckle, “I’m not sure I know, either.”

“Well I don’t recall anything like that in any of Myles’s letters…”

“Maybe he mentioned severe headaches? Something like that?”

Shaking his head, the bell captain again said, “No, nothing like that. Not that I can remember, anyway.”

“Do you still have them?” Nick asked.

“The letters? Of course.”

“Would you mind if I took a look through them? I’ve just…I’ve…I’ve been curious about something lately and I, well, I just wanted to see…” He couldn’t say anymore.

“Are you feeling all right, Nick?” Granger sounded genuinely concerned.

“Yeah, I was just thinking…”

“Yes,” Granger said, not needing an explanation. “I can bring them to you this evening.”

“That would be wonderful.”

“Nick,” Granger said, “there is still something on your mind. What is it?”

“Never mind.” He championed a smile. “You’ve been really good to me, Mr. Granger.”

“You were my son’s hero,” Granger said. “That makes you mine.”

The words resonated with profound irony.

After Granger had gone, Nick sat for some time by himself at the table by the window. To his right, he could see the cicada still on the glass, now joined by two others. Looking up, he watched for some time the drone of Roger back and forth behind the bar. A young couple had taken up two stools on the other side of the bar during his conversation with Granger; they were now talking to each other in dreamy, hushed voices. He hadn’t known anything about Roger’s daughter Faye having drowned in
Calibogue
Sound. Still, he could not help but wonder what he must have said to poor Roger that had caused him to retreat so completely from him. Should he say something?

Another shadow fell across the length of his table. He turned and squinted his eyes and looked out the window, suddenly anticipating either Emma or Isabella standing on the other side of the glass. But no one
was there; it was just the wind-rustled movement of the island palms.

After paying his bill and deciding to say nothing to Roger (at least
for the time being), he found himself standing toward the rear of the hotel
lobby, staring up at the mural. The passage of each minute strengthened
in him the mounting certainty that it had indeed been Isabella who
had complained about the mural to the hotel manager. Fresh anger flared
up inside him. Yet, despite his anger, he could see the truth of it, too:
that somehow, somewhere along the way, the mural had become a brutal,
ferocious thing after all. How had it happened? He had taken a beautiful
island landscape, lush and green and idyllic, and had marred it, ruined
it—had transformed it into a desolate desert panorama. An outcropping
of glossy stone had morphed into a heap of steaming tanks, still smoking
with artillery fire; groups of sunbathers and adventurous young children,
previously scaling the length of the bulkhead over the water, their arms
splayed in representation of airplane wings, had turned into cold, faceless,
helmeted soldiers hefting across the dunes with rifles in their hands
and their packs on their backs. The black mark he had painted over the
face of Myles Granger was still there—only now the figure simply conveyed
a sense of brutal decapitation. Looking at it, he felt a chill emanate from the soles of his feet, straight up through his unsteady knees, and disperse throughout the entirety of his body. The distinction between tropical paradise and desert holocaust was suddenly nonexistent. Had he painted this monstrosity?
Had he painted this?

Still, his anger toward Isabella would not subside. And two minutes
later he found himself riding the elevator up to her floor. When the doors
slid open, the hallway looked oddly dark. Peering down the corridor,
he could see that most of the lights were out. Shadows of potted plants
and a dusty Coke machine at the end of the hall crossed each other like
latticework. Daylight fell dull and disheartening through the dirty windowpanes
at either end of the hall.

For a split second, he thought he saw Isabella standing at the far
end of the hall, staring at him. Blinking his eyes, he took a quick step
forward and realized that he was, in fact, alone.

Yes,
he thought,
I am most certainly losing my mind.

He walked down the corridor, too conscious of the absolute silence.
Was the whole floor empty? The entire hotel? He stopped outside
Isabella’s door and knocked. Thinking he heard movement on the other
side of the door, he pushed himself back on his heels to see if the tiny
pinpoint of light behind the door’s peephole would suddenly go black.
It did not. His eyes dropped to the floor. He thought, too, that he saw
the shifting of shadows in the strip of dull light beneath the door. But he
could not be certain.

Knocking again: “Isabella?”

No one answered.

Something moved at the end of the hallway. Again, he thought it
was her…

“Isabella?”

Yet he was alone.

Outside, he searched futilely for her along the beach. The droning
chhhh
of the cicadas was unrelenting. Yes, she had complained about the
mural. Yes, he was certain of it. Though not for the reasons she had allegedly
given—she was not offended by any such violence, Nick knew—but
because it was all part of her game. Yes. Isabella Rosales’s game. It was
nothing new—was, in fact, part of the same game that required her to
alter her personality whenever Emma was around; the same game that
found her taunting and teasing him since the day of their initial meeting;
the same game that thrived on the total contradiction of who Isabella
Rosales really was. This was one more rule of the game. Did she feel
she owned him? Did she find some sort of perverse fulfillment in the
manipulation of him, and in facilitating his own personal destruction?
Had she set out from the very beginning to bring ruination upon him?
Pausing by the edge of the sea, feeling the slide of the icy water lap at his
toes, he thought of the way she had beaten the man known as Pygmalion
last night on the street—the glowing embers of her eyes flaring as she
slammed the ukulele down on him, down on him, down on him, and
kicked her feet at him as Nick dragged her away. He had thought her to
be crying when he finally got her tucked away safely in the alley between
the shops…but no, she had been
laughing.
So was he also part of her
game—perhaps the most important part…the
only
part?