The muscles in my thighs and legs suddenly cramp.
“Tessie, what’s happening?”
I can’t breathe. I have drawn my knees up to my chin. My fingers are in my ears.
“Why can’t I remember? Why can’t I remember?”
His arm is around me. He’s saying something. My head falls onto his shoulder. I feel him stiffen slightly, and then relax. His body is warm, a hot water bottle, like Daddy’s. I do not know or care if this is appropriate behavior for a therapist.
He is heat.
Tessa, present day
I spend forty-five minutes in the shower, but it doesn’t help. I pace the house. Open the refrigerator, swig out of the orange juice bottle, slam the door shut. Pick up my phone on the counter. Consider calling Charlie. Bill. Jo. Stop myself.
Punch around on Facebook. Stick my daughter’s old iPod into the speakers, and turn it way, way up so that Kelly Clarkson full vibrato is massaging my brain. Rearrange the kitchen canisters, the magazines, the mail, Charlie’s scattered papers and notebooks. Fold and refold a leftover piece of satin on the floor. Obsess over neat, exacting edges in a house where things usually roll around at the whims of a churlish tide.
I want, need to know the contents of the box unearthed seven hours ago near Lydia’s storm cellar. From my vantage point under the eaves, I couldn’t tell anything other than it was metal, about twelve inches square, and easy for a CSI to carefully lift out with blue-latex-covered hands. At that point, the cops began the process of clearing the back yard of extraneous people like me. In the rising clatter of voices, Jo didn’t even look my way. Bill and the assistant DA had reappeared and stood together off to the side of the hole, arms crossed, observing.
The knock at the door, three short raps, snaps me to attention. I glance down to see whether I’m decent. The answer is no. Bare legs and feet. The only thing covering me is one of Lucas’s old camouflage Army T-shirts that hits about four inches below a patch of lace that Victoria’s Secret calls underwear. No bra. I grab a pair of shorts out of the pile of clean clothes on the couch and hurriedly hop into them, one leg at a time.
Two more urgent raps.
The shorts are Charlie’s, and they ride high under the T-shirt so that it still appears that I’m wearing nothing. But, good enough.
I thrust my eye up to the peephole. Bill.
He is perfectly framed in the oval, as if he is standing in a tiny, tiny picture from another era. His hair is wet and slicked back. I can almost smell the soap.
I know he is not here to talk about Lydia. We almost kissed on that curb. This silent debate has been going on between us ever since he brushed his head on the Galveston sea glass dangling from the ceiling in my bedroom.
I open the door. He’s wearing faded Levi’s, and an easy, tentative smile that is going to get me in trouble tonight. I cannot stop staring at his mouth. He’s carrying a bottle of wine in each hand. One red, one white. Considerate, because he doesn’t know my preference, which is neither. On a night like this, I’m a beer girl all the way. The heat in the few feet between us is unmistakable now, flushing my skin. Pretenses, denials, the fact that I’m a mom of fourteen years and he’s probably still getting carded-all of it undeniably stripped away after I fell apart in his arms. Bill has barely said an unnecessary word to me since.
At this moment, we are the same people we were before we sat down on that curb, and two very different ones.
“This isn’t a good idea,” I say.
“No,” he says, and I open the door wider.
I have three important rules when it comes to sex.
I have to be in a committed relationship.
It cannot happen in my house, in my bed.
It must be dark.
Bill abandons the wine bottles on the hall table and kicks the door closed without saying anything. He pushes me back against the wall. His body is still chilled with night air, but his fingers and lips on my skin are like drifting flames. My arms are up around his neck, and I’m pressing my body into his, craning my neck up. I have not felt this certain I should be alive in a very long time. It’s making me slightly woozy.
He cradles my chin in one hand. His gaze is long enough and deliberate enough to assure me that he knows exactly what he’s doing. I think, If I look away now, if I stop this, it will still be OK, almost like it never happened. But he bends to kiss me again, and I am lost. I want this intimate dance in my hallway to go on forever. His hands have slipped under my T-shirt and are sliding up my back.
I don’t protest when he lifts me and carries me down the hall. I wrap my legs around his waist and keep my mouth on his.
In my room, he sets me down gently. His head brushes the glass again, setting off a trickle of muted music. He strips off my shirt. His shirt. Pulls me down onto my soft, messy sheets. We are instantly coiled, like people who have made love to each other hundreds of times. I close my eyes and swirl to the bottom of the river.
“Tessa, you beautiful girl,” he groans, his breath on my neck. “You drive me crazy.”
Crazy.
Maybe another one of his lines. Perhaps a last-ditch plea for one of us to come to our senses.
I pull away slightly, but not enough that he can see the scar near my collarbone. He’s been too busy so far to notice. I’m always so careful about this. Never too drunk on love or lust to forget. My hand reaches for the switch on the lamp by my bed, and stops. The bulb has cast his face in half-glow, half-shadow. Every cliché pops into my head. Light and dark, life and death, true and false, comedy and tragedy, good and evil, yin and yang.
Golden boy lawyer and girl marked by the devil.
I use one hand to tug at the pins holding up my hair. I know exactly what I’m doing, too. There is a look on his face that I will never forget, that I will hold on to forever, no matter what happens after tonight.
No matter whether we fail Terrell.
No matter whether my monster eats us both alive.
I reach over, and snap off the light.
This is the one rule I will not break tonight.
Sex is the only time I worship the dark.
“This one?” he asks. His finger is tracing the faint line on my ankle, and I shiver.
“From surgery. You know that I broke my ankle… that night. Please, come up here.” I tug at his hair, and he ignores me.
“And this?” He’s smothering the tiny butterfly above my right hip bone with the tip of his finger.
“An impulse right before the trial,” I say. I’m suddenly flooded with the memory of the exquisite pain of the needle. When I encounter people smothered in tattoos, chattering eagerly about the next one, I understand the addiction.
I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.
Lydia’s voice is ringing in my head. She quoted that line from Bleak House to a tattoo artist at a carnival on the state fairgrounds. Lydia was lying facedown on a fresh towel on a metal cot. The flap of the tent was closed, making it an oven. Lydia’s jeans were unbuttoned and slightly pulled down over the curve of her smooth white hip. I’d gone first, oddly brave. The wings of my tattoo were stinging, even more as I watched this stranger carve out Lydia’s identical twin butterfly.
Bill’s fingers are urging me back to the present. He is inching his way up my body slowly, exploring, as if he is clinically gathering evidence for court. It is the first sign in the last hour and a half that my brain is working.
My hair is covering the three-inch line above my left collarbone. He pushes it aside. He knows.
“Tell me about this one,” he says.
It is the scar I am the most ashamed of. It feels like my monster’s work as much as if he’d inked it himself. In reality, he drew none of my scars with his own hand. “The ER doctors panicked a little the night I was… found. Everybody did. The EMT carried me in the emergency room door in his arms, screaming. Later, my cardiologist was furious. He said I would have needed a pacemaker eventually but not that night. Not that soon. They used wires that would be tough to extract so they left it in.” My body stiffens slightly as he nuzzles my neck. This can’t be a surprise to him. “Poor little pacemaker girl. Al Vega rammed it home on the stand. Don’t you remember from the transcript?”