And so it was decided. Every Tuesday night, I bought a Snickers bar. I didn’t buy two or three or four at a time. I didn’t buy them on Mondays or Saturdays. I bought one every Tuesday night, and he caught it on Wednesday afternoon, and I won and won and won.
But in those missing hours, I apparently did something I would never, ever consider doing. I ate his candy bar. There were traces of it in my vomit at the hospital.
I was committed to my ritual with Roosevelt. To winning. Did I eat the candy bar that night because I thought that I would never run a race again?
I grab a plastic snack bag out of the pantry shelf and seal the wrapper inside. Did he touch this? Did he stand under my window, snacking? My cell phone rings out from the living room couch, disturbing the silence that is everywhere except my chest.
Hastings, William.
“It’s late, Bill.” No hello.
“The day got away from me,” he says. “I just want to be sure you remember to be at the UNT lab tomorrow by 9:45, fifteen minutes before the techs start the process on the bones.”
How could I forget? I want to shout it at him, but instead say: “I’m driving myself.” This has to be the reason he called. He seems determined to pick me up.
Bill lets a couple of seconds elapse. “Joanna wouldn’t tell me what over the phone, but she says the forensic anthropologist has already found something.”
Tessie, 1995
“How is the drawing at home going?” He asks this before my butt hits the cushion.
“I forgot to bring any of them with me.” A lie. The drawings, nine new ones, are right where I want them-in a red Macy’s shirt box in my closet labeled Xtra Tampons, sure to dissuade my nosy little brother.
The phone on his desk suddenly buzzes. The emergency buzz, one of my favorite sounds in the world because it sucks minutes away from me.
“I’m sorry, Tessie,” he says. “Excuse me for just a moment. I’ve just checked in a patient at the hospital and was expecting a few questions from the nurse.”
The doctor’s voice travels over from the other side of the room. I can make out a few words. Elavil. Klonopin. Shouldn’t he be doing this privately? I’m really trying hard not to hear because I don’t want to imagine a person like me on the other end and get emotionally involved. So I focus on other things, like trying to match the doctor’s lazy drawl with Lydia’s description of him.
It was Lydia’s idea. Yesterday, with my blessing, she had hopped the bus to the TCU campus and sneaked into one of the doctor’s late afternoon summer classes: Anastasia Meets Agatha Christie: Exploring the Gray Matter About Amnesia.
When she told me the class title, I cringed a little. Too gimmicky. But then, I was looking for reasons to be critical.
If Lydia stuck on the big rounded plastic frames she wore when her contacts itched, she could easily disappear into a crowd of college students. Lydia’s father told her once that she was one of those people born thirty, and repeated it often, which Lydia carried around like a mortal wound. Me, well… I can’t tell Lydia but I feel a little uncomfortable around her dad these days.
Through our formative years, Mr. Bell concocted a kick-ass chili recipe, and hauled us to the shooting range, and whipped us around Lake Texoma in the unsinkable Molly every Labor Day and July 4th. But he was moody and known to strike out. And, since I turned fourteen, his eyes sometimes hesitated in the wrong places. Maybe he was just being more honest than most men greeted with puberty in bloom. Probably better to know, I reasoned, and wear longer shorts at her house.
Last night, after her successful day of spying and some of my dad’s leftover Frito pie, Lydia had been in especially good spirits. “Did you know that Agatha Christie went missing for eleven days in 1926 and no one had a clue where she was?” she had asked me breathlessly, from the corner of my bed.
I had her pictured in the usual position: legs pretzeled into an easy lotus, her pink-flowered Doc Martens lost somewhere on the floor, a hot pink scrunchy holding up a mountain of black hair. Pink was Lydia’s color.
A recap of the day’s events in the O.J. trial buzzed in our ears as background. It was impossible to get away from it. Daddy didn’t like a TV perched on top of my dresser, certainly didn’t like a bloody soundtrack, but he had relented instantly when I told him the constant noise made me feel less alone. That I wasn’t really listening to it.
It was only a half-lie. I found something soothing about Marcia Clark’s methodical voice. How could anyone not believe her?
“Agatha kissed her daughter goodnight and disappeared,” Lydia had continued. “They thought she maybe drowned herself in this pond called the Silent Pool because that’s where they found her wrecked car.”
“The Silent Pool?” I was skeptical. It was how anyone sane had to be with Lydia at least part of the time.
“Really. You can read it yourself.” She thrust a piece of paper at me. If it had been anyone else, this would have seemed like a mean poke. But it was Lydia. My vision was less gray when she was around. Lighter, like I was splayed flat on the tickly grass, staring up into late summer dusk. I let my fingers grasp her tangible proof that Agatha Christie lived out a page in her novels, as if it were important.
“Anyway, that’s where they found her car,” Lydia repeated. “The other thought was that her a-hole of a cheating husband killed her and abandoned the car there. While all of this was going on, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even took one of her gloves to a medium to try to figure out where she’d gone. It was on the front of The New York Times.” More rustling of paper. “But she showed up. It turned out she had amnesia. For eleven days.”
“This was the focus of his lecture?” It was comforting, and somehow not.
“Uh-huh. I was intrigued by the class title, so I stopped off at the library before. When I got to class, your doctor was talking about the etiology of the fugue state and how it’s related to dissociative amnesia.”
It would be very hard to live in Lydia’s head. I imagined it blindingly bright and chaotic, like an exploding star. Both sides of her brain constantly at war. Because brilliant, steady Lydia was an addict when it came to murder and celebrities. The O.J. trial, her LSD. Any inane detail got her high. Like the other night, giggling about how O. J. Simpson had asked the cops for a glass of orange juice after the Bronco chase, followed up by ten minutes of her railing about the jury not getting the concept of restriction fragment length polymorphism.
“So what happened to her?” Trying to shuttle things along because I was curious, but wanting to know whether my doctor appeared to be a manipulative asshole.
“She was found in a spa hotel under an assumed name. She claimed not to recognize pictures of herself in the newspaper. Some doctors said she was suicidal, in a psychogenic trance. That’s like a fugue state, thus the title of your doctor’s class.”
“I’d rather think of her as a nice old lady writing cozy mysteries by the fire.”
“I know. It’s kind of like finding out that Edna St. Vincent Millay slept around and was a morphine addict. Ednas and Agathas should be true to their names.”
I’d laughed, something close to the way I used to, and imagined it drifting under the bedroom door, smoothing out a tight wrinkle in my father’s face.