Duma Key

At one point during my interview with Mary Ire, she said discovering in my middle age that I could paint with the best of them must have been like having someone give me the keys to a souped-up muscle car - a Roadrunner or a GTO. I said yes, it was like that. At another point she said it must have been like having someone give me the keys to a fully furnished house. A mansion, really. I said yes, like that, too. And if she had gone on? Said it must have been like inheriting a million shares of Microsoft stock, or being elected ruler for life of some oil-rich (and peaceful) emirate in the mideast? I would have said yeah, sure, you bet. To soothe her. Because those questions were about her. I could see the longing look in her eyes when she asked them. They were the eyes of a kid who knows the closest she's ever going to get to realizing her dream of the high trapeze is sitting on the bleachers at the Saturday matinee performance. She was a critic, and lots of critics who aren't called to do what they write about grow jealous and mean and small in their disappointment. Mary wasn't like that. Mary still loved it all. She drank whiskey from a water-glass and wanted to know what it was like when Tinker Bell flew out of nowhere and tapped you on the shoulder and you discovered that, even though you were on the wrinkle-neck side of fifty, you had suddenly gained the ability to fly past the face of the moon. So even though it wasn't like having a fast car or being handed the keys to a fully furnished house, I told her it was. Because you can't tell anyone what it's like. You can only talk around it until everyone's exhausted and it's time to go to sleep.

But Elizabeth had known what it was like.

It was in her drawings, then in her paintings.

It was like being given a tongue when you had been mute. And more. Better. It was like being given back your memory, and a person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you. Even from that first line - that incredibly brave first line meant to show where the Gulf met the sky - she had understood that seeing and memory were interchangeable, and had set out to mend herself.

Perse hadn't been in it. Not at first.

I was sure of that.

v

For the next four hours, I slipped in and out of Libbit's world. It was a wonderful, frightening place to be. Sometimes I scribbled words - The gift is always hungry, start with what you know - but mostly it was pictures. Pictures were the real language we shared.

I understood her family's quick arc from amazement to acceptance to boredom. It had happened partly because the girl was so prolific, maybe more because she was part of them, she was their little Libbit, and there's always that feeling that no good can come out of Nazareth, isn't there? But their boredom only made her hunger stronger. She looked for new ways to wow them, sought new ways of seeing.

And found them, God help her.

I drew birds flying upside-down, and animals walking on the swimming pool.

I drew a horse with a smile so big it ran off the sides of its face. I thought it was right around then that Perse had entered the picture. Only -

"Only Libbit didn't know it was Perse," I said. "She thought-"

I thumbed back through her drawings, almost to the beginning. To the round black face with the smiling mouth. At first glance I had dismissed this one as Elizabeth's portrait of Nan Melda, but I should have known better - it was a child's face, not a woman's. A doll's face. Suddenly my hand was printing NOVEEN beside it in strokes so hard that Elizabeth's old canary-yellow pencil snapped on the last stroke of the second N. I threw it on the floor and grabbed another.

It was Noveen that Perse had spoken through first, so as not to frighten her little genius. What could be less threatening than a little black girl-dolly who smiled and wore a red kerchief around her head, just like the beloved Nan Melda?

And was Elizabeth shocked or frightened when the doll began to speak on its own? I didn't think so. She might have been fiercely talented in that one narrow way, but she was still only a child of three.

Noveen told her things to draw, and Elizabeth -

I grabbed my sketch-pad again. Drew a cake lying on the floor. Splattered on the floor. Little Libbit thought that prank was Noveen's idea, but it had been Perse, testing Elizabeth's power. Perse experimenting as I had experimented, trying to find out how powerful this new tool might be.

Next had come the Alice.

Because, her doll whispered, there was treasure and a storm would uncover it.

So not an Alice at all, not really. And not an Elizabeth, because she hadn't been Elizabeth yet - not to her family, not to herself. The big blow of '27 had been Hurricane Libbit.

Because Daddy would like finding a treasure. And because Daddy needed to think of something besides -

"She's made her bed," I said in a harsh voice that didn't sound like my own. "Let her sleep in it."

- besides how mad he was at Adie for running off with Emery, that Celluloid Collar.