Page 155 of Ruthless Creatures

I look at allmy paintingshanging on the walls.

And I remember the movie David and I watched the week before we were supposed to get married as we were sitting up in bed.

It was a crime drama calledTraffic. There were several differentinterconnected stories, all of them set around the illegal drug trade. A judge has a crack-addicted daughter. Two DEA agents protect an informant.

A drug king’s wife carries on the business when he’s sent to jail.

Catherine Zeta-Jones played the part of the drug king’s wife. She looked amazing, of course. But there was one scene where she visits her husband in jail, complaining that she and her kids have no money because the government has seized all their bank accounts.

Her husband, staying very cool, knowing the guards are watching and every word they’re saying is being recorded, says something casual along the lines of, “Maybe sell a few things. We have a lot of expensive stuff.” Significant pause. “Look into the paintings.”

Then he gives her thislook.

She, being a drug king’s wife, knows what the look means.

And it doesn’t mean sell the fucking paintings.

So she goes around investigating all the artwork in the house and finds microfilm hidden in the frames that detail dozens of secret offshore bank accounts where her husband had parked most of their illegal cash.

At that point in the movie, David turned to me and said, “Smart idea. Don’t you think?”

I have no recollection of my response, but I do remember he was giving me the same look the drug king gave his wife.

I whisper, “Jesus, David. That was a stretch.”

Then I go from room to room, ripping down paintings from the walls.

I examine the frames, front and back. I examine the canvases, front and back. I examine the mattings, the mount boards, the backing boards. In a frenzy, I tear apart dozens upon dozens of pieces of artwork.

I find jack shit.

Forty-five minutes later, I’m desperate.

Kage will be back any second, and I’ll have to explain what I’m doing. So I go around kicking over chairs and smashing lamps until it looks like I was having a good old-fashioned breakdown instead of searching for hidden treasure.

When I’m at my wits’ end, I stand in the middle of the living room, looking around at the wreckage, wondering what I’ve missed.

Then my gaze falls on the picture above the fireplace.

I should have started there first.

The painting is one I made as a gift for David’s birthday one year. He loved this particular spot in an alpine meadow overlooking Lake Tahoe called Chickadee Ridge. In the winter and spring, you can go there with a handful of birdseed and the little birdies will fly right over and perch on your outstretched hand to feed. It’s a beautiful, magical place, and the painting reflects its quiet majesty.

Of all the landscapes I ever painted when we were together, this one was David’s favorite.

I say to the painting, “You scheming piece of shit.”

A wife.Andkids.

And I almost married him.

How I wish now that he would’ve fallen off the side of the mountain like I thought he did and smashed his lying head in.

I know that sometime soon, I’ll need intensive therapy to unravel this. Probably lots of it. Probably for the rest of my life. But right now, I’m in a weird kind of Neverland. The “real” world doesn’t exist.

Finding David—Damon—has become my only reality.

I take the painting from the wall and lay it facedown on the floor. I remove the wooden backboard, exposing the frame and the back of the canvas…