The Law of Moses

Chapter One - Part Two

I knew all about messed up kids by the time I met Moses. My parents were foster parents to lots of messed up kids. They'd been taking in kids all my life. I had two older sisters and an older brother who were out of the house by the time I was six. I'd been kind of an oops and I ended up being raised with lots of kids who weren't my siblings and who came in and out of my life in stages and revolving doors. Maybe that was why my parents and Kathleen Wright, Jennifer Wright's grandma and Moses's great-grandma, had lots of conversations about Moses sitting at our kitchen table. I heard lots of things I probably had no business knowing. Especially that summer.

The old lady was taking Moses in for good. He would be eighteen in a month and everyone else was ready to wash their hands of him. He'd spent time with her every summer since he was little, and she was confident they would do well together if everyone would just butt out and let her do her thing. She didn't seem concerned about the fact that the month Moses turned eighteen she had turned eighty.

I knew who he was and remembered him from summer to summer, though I'd never spent any time with him. It was a small town and kids notice each other. Grandma Wright would bring him to church for the few Sundays he was in town. He was in my Sunday school class and we all enjoyed staring at him while the teacher tried to coax him into participating. He never did. He just sat in his little metal folding chair like he'd been heavily bribed to do so, his oddly-colored eyes roving here and there, his hands twisting in his lap. And when it was over he would race for the door and out into the sunshine, heading straight for home without waiting for his great-grandma. I would try to race him, but he always managed to get out of his seat and out of the door faster than I could. Even then I was chasing him.

Sometimes, Moses and his grandma would go for bike rides and walks and she'd haul him into the pool in Nephi almost every day, which had always made me so jealous because I was lucky if I got to go more than a few times all summer. Levan had a fishing hole up Chicken Creek canyon that I rode my bike to and swam in when I was desperate, though my parents had forbidden me to do so because it was so cold and deep and murky – dangerous even. But drowning was preferable to never swimming at all, and I'd managed not to drown so far.

As Moses got older, there were some summers when he didn't come to Levan at all. It had been two years since he'd been back, though Kathleen had been pushing for him to come stay with her permanently for a long time. The family told her he would be too much for her to handle. They told her he was "too emotional, too explosive, too temperamental." But apparently, they were all exhausted and they gave in. So Moses moved to Levan.

We were both entering our senior year, though I was young for my grade and he was a full year older. We both had summer birthdays; Moses turned eighteen July 2nd and I turned seventeen August 28th. But Moses didn't look eighteen. In the two years since I'd seen him last, he'd grown into his feet and his eyes. He was tall with broad shoulders and clearly-defined, ropy muscles that covered his lean frame, and his light eyes, strong cheekbones, and angled jaw made him look more like an Egyptian prince than a gang banger, which rumors claimed he was.

Moses struggled with his school work, and had difficulty concentrating and holding still; his family even claimed he had seizures and hallucinations, which they attempted to control with various medications. I heard his grandma telling my mom that he could be moody and irritable, that he had difficulty sleeping, and that he zoned out a lot. She said he was extremely intelligent, brilliant even, and she said he could paint like nothing and no one she'd ever seen before. But all the medication they had him on to help him focus and sit still in school made him slow and sluggish and made his art dark and frightening. Mrs. Wright told my mother she was taking him off all the pills.

"They turn him into a zombie," I heard her say. "I'm willing to take my chances with a kid who can't hold still and can't stop painting. In my day, that wasn't a bad thing."

I thought a zombie sounded a little safer. For all his beauty, Moses Wright was scary looking. With his tapered body covered in bronze skin and those funky-colored light eyes, he reminded me of a jungle cat. Sleek, dangerous, silent. At least a zombie moves slowly. Jungle cats pounce. Being around Moses Wright was like befriending a panther, and I admired the old lady for taking him on. In fact, she had more courage than anyone I knew.

I was the youngest in my family—my siblings were grown and gone—and one of only three girls my age in the whole town, which made me a loner more often than I liked, especially considering neither of the other girls liked horses and rodeo the way I did. We were friendly enough, but not friendly enough to spend time together or pass the boring summer days together.

It was an especially hot summer, I remember that well. We'd had the driest spring ever recorded, which led to summer wildfires popping up all over the west. Farmers were praying for rain and the sizzling nerves and sky-rocketing temperatures made tempers short and self-control shorter. There'd also been a rash of violence throughout the clustered counties of central Utah, a couple of girls had gone missing in two different counties, though one was thought to have run away with her boyfriend and the other was almost eighteen and her home life was bad. People assumed they were okay, but there had been a few similar disappearances in the last ten or fifteen years that had never been resolved, and it made parents edgy and a little more watchful, and my parents were no exception.

I'd grown restless and resentful, itchy in my own skin, eager to be done with school and on with life. I was a barrel racer and I wanted to hitch the horse trailer to my truck and follow the rodeo circuit, seeking freedom with only my horses, my projected rodeo winnings, and the open road. I wanted that so badly. But at seventeen, with disappearing females in the forefront of their minds, my parents wouldn't let me go on my own, and they weren't in any position to take me. They promised me we'd figure something out when I graduated and turned eighteen. But graduation was so far away, and summer stretched out in front of me like a dry, empty desert. I was so thirsty for something else. Maybe that was it. Maybe that was the reason I waded in too far, the reason I got in way over my head.

Whatever it was, when Moses came to Levan, he was like water – cold, deep, unpredictable, and, like the pond up the canyon, dangerous, because you could never see what was beneath the surface. And just like I'd done all my life, I jumped in head first, even though I'd been forbidden. But this time, I drowned.

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