“Yes, but I wanted to hear it from you.”
So Bill is on the clock. The love spell is settling like dull party glitter.
“Should we call Jo and ask what was in the box at Lydia’s?” Changing the subject. Trying not to sound hurt.
“Trust me, she’ll call. Try not to think about it.
“What about Charlie’s father?” he asks abruptly. “Is he in the picture? I like to know when there’s competition.”
His question sounds an off note for me. “Lucas would say no one could compete. He’s generally quite full of himself. He’s a soldier. His ego keeps him alive.” I touch Bill’s cheek. “We haven’t been together for years. Not like this.”
Bill and I are uncomfortably working backward. It’s wrong. This is why I generally follow my sensible rules for sex. I’m leaning over to grab for the T-shirt on the floor when it occurs to me that I should adopt another rule: Never wear the Army shirt of one man while making love to another.
“Don’t leave,” Bill says softly. “I’ll shut up. Stay with me.” He’s yanking me down again, spooning his warm body against my back and tossing the comforter over us. I can’t resist the heat.
Sleep isn’t coming.
I nestle into Bill’s back. Close my eyes and drift.
I’m back in the tent, watching Lydia’s butterfly get its wings. The tattoo artist isn’t that old. Maybe twenty-five. She’s wearing a red, white, and blue halter top that shows a lot of skin. Her back is laced with old white scars, probably from a belt.
A four-word tattoo is flushed defiantly against the damaged canvas.
I am still here.
Tessie, 1995
“Tessie, are you listening?”
Always with the listening.
My lips are glued to the pin-striped straw of a Dairy Queen Dr Pepper. The leaves brushing the office window have turned a brilliant red in the last week. I’ve never seen a tree so lit up in August, like Monet has picked it out and struck a match to it. I figure God is using this tree as a reminder to be grateful that I’m not still blind. But he’s a fickle God or I wouldn’t have gone blind in the first place.
I rub at a smudge of mascara sweat stinging my eye. Lydia has been obsessed with trying new cosmetics lately, while I am busy trying to be the blur that no one notices. She had experimented on me until she perfected the blend to hide my half-moon scar-Maybelline Fair Stick 10 combined with a tube of something puke green and Cover Girl Neutralizer 730. She wrote all of this down for me, including the order in which I was to apply it, and then she made up herself in my bathroom mirror. She looked amazing when she finished. My dad once said, not meanly, that if Lydia didn’t open her mouth, every boy in school would be after her. While she added a layer of clear mascara and smacked on pink lip gloss, she told me all about Erica Jong and the zipless fuck. It is the first time I ever heard her use the f-word and it was like she’d fired a shot that killed our remaining childhood.
“Sex with a stranger,” she had explained. “No remorse. No guilt.” More and more, I feel like I’m the wheel spinning in the mud, while Lydia’s foot is on the gas.
The doctor interrupts my train of thought. “Tessie, what’s with you today? What are you thinking about?”
Zipless fucks. Scar recipes.
“I’m hot. Kind of bored.”
“OK, how about this. What is the emotion you have felt most of the time since you were here two days ago?” Since you hugged me on the couch and acted like a person?
“I don’t know.” I squirm. I hate this odd habit of his-starting an intimate conversation while standing five feet away.
“I think you feel guilt. Almost all of the time. Ever since the event. We keep skirting around it.”
I suck slowly out of my Styrofoam cup and stare at him. The event. Yep, still drives me crazy when he says it.
“Why would I feel guilty?”
“Because you believe you could have prevented what happened to you. Maybe even what happened to Merry.”
“I was sixteen years old. An athlete. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I’m sure I could have prevented this if I’d been paying attention. It’s not like I’m a two-year-old who could be tossed in a car like a pillow.”
He finally sits down across from me. “You’ve hit right on the problem, Tessie. You aren’t two or four or ten, Tessie. You are a teen-ager, so you think you’re pretty smart. More perceptive than adults, even. Your father. Your teachers. Me. In fact, I hate to tell you, but this is the smartest you will ever feel in your whole life.” Lydia hates the no-socks loafer look on men, and right now, so do I. I stare at his pearly ankle with the bone jutting out and think about how we are just a bunch of ugly parts. I feel so many conflicting emotions about this man. About males in general right now. If he really wanted to get anywhere, he’d ask about that.
“Rebecca thought she was smarter, too,” he says.
His daughter’s name hits the humid air like a grenade. I’m not bored anymore, if that was his intent.
“There is a reason you feel the need to blame yourself,” he continues. “From all accounts, you were a very careful girl. If you accept the blame-decide you took a rare misstep-you can reassure yourself this was not a random event. If you blame yourself, you can believe that you are still in control of your universe. You’re not. You never will be.”
“And what about you?” I ask. “I bet you still think your daughter is alive, when she’s decomposing in the muck of a river or being snacked on by coyotes. Let me enlighten you. Rebecca is dead.”
Tessa, present day
The sunrise is painting the bedroom pink. The best time of day for talking to angels and taking photographs, according to my grandfather. For admiring clouds that drift like feathers off a flamingo, according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
For shoving midnight monsters to the back of the closet.
Bill is sliding a long, skinny leg into his jeans. His back is bare, broad, wired with muscle. It’s been a long time since I woke up on a Saturday morning with someone in my bed who wasn’t furry or sick. I’m trying to identify the emotion in my gut. Scared, maybe. Hopeful?
Charlie isn’t due back on the bus for another couple of hours but she’s delivered a series of texts that dinged through a third, lazy round of lovemaking. I’m propped up against the headboard and am thumbing through them, the sheet modestly pulled up to my chest.
Third place
. Coach got ejected.
Forgot need tub of blue hair gel for bio lab Monday. Soooorry.
What’s for dinner?
Bill’s cell phone rings on the bedside table while I’m thinking about where to buy a tub of blue hair gel without returning to 1965. I pick up his phone and toss it over but not before I see the caller ID.
Bone Doc.
My throw across the tumbled comforter falls short, but Bill leans in, catches the phone anyway. Winks.
I remember the first time a man winked at me. Lydia was blowing out eleven candles, one to grow on, while I watched her father’s eye open and shut under the ragged brow that never quite filled in after an auto shop accident.