Crystal stroked Chai’s back and then twittered her fingers at Oolong, who still lay stretched out on the couch.
“Come here Oolong, come get the petties.”
Oolong ignored her.
“It’s too late,” Bette said. “She’s a grudge-holder, that one. You’ll be lucky to get a sniff on your deathbed.”
“I guess I’ll have to ask Wes to bribe her with some fish tacos.”
Bette scowled and mimed sticking a finger down her throat.
“In all seriousness, Crystal. This guy sounds a little over the top. The poetry, the longing for you over centuries. I mean, who talks like that?”
Crystal turned on her side, propping her head in her hand.
“I love it. I do. I love him, Bette. I’m completely in love with him.”
Bette raised her eyebrows but said nothing.
“Okay, well, how about his family? Or friends? Have you met anyone in his life?”
Crystal shook her head.
“His mom left when he was young. His dad was more of a part-time dad who worked all the time. He died when Wes was seventeen and Wes started moving around the country, sleeping on people’s floors, playing music and writing poetry.”
“Which all sounds very romantic, but also means Wes has some problems. I mean you know that, right? Crystal, you have a better read on people than anyone I’ve ever met. He has to be affected by those things. A mother who abandoned him and a negligent father.”
Crystal sighed, wishing for once that Bette could just accept someone at face value.
“He’s good, Bette. His heart is good. He should be scarred by what happened to him. We’re scarred by what happened to us. No one makes it to adulthood without being shaped by everything that came before. Should I judge him for that? Run away because he had a hard childhood?” Crystal demanded.
Bette sighed and held up her hands.
“Okay, I’m sorry. I don’t believe in fairytales, Crystal. You know that. But maybe he’s the real thing. I want to meet him, though. When are you bringing him over for dinner?”
Crystal grinned.
“Maybe this week. Let me talk to him.”
“So, this is Frasier Gorge,” Crystal said, marveling out the window as Wes maneuvered his Jeep Wagoneer up the winding forest road. "How have I never heard of this place?”
“Top secret,” Wes told her. “The closest we get to the top of the world in the flat plains of central Michigan. I’ve heard it called a lover’s lane. Maybe the universe didn’t want you to discover it until you found your great lover.”
“Mmm.” She snuggled against him. “I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather experience it with than you. Did you have a lover’s lane in high school, Wes?”
He turned onto a grassy trail, his headlights illuminating a path barely carved from the dense forest.
“Sundrops Park,” he said. “On most Friday nights, there’d be a dozen cars parked there, windows so steamed up, you’d think there were locomotives inside.”
Crystal laughed and reached into Wes’s lap, rubbing his thigh. “I’ve never seen the inside of a car when it’s all steamed up. Maybe we could make that happen tonight?”
“Yes, please,” he murmured, and kissed the top of her head. “Your wish is my command.”
He parked the car, and Crystal climbed out. The forest bustled behind them, but in front of them, a grassy space, trampled by cars, sat overlooking the forest and sky. Frasier Gorge plummeted a hundred or more feet into more dense woods, green-black beneath the purpling sky.
A flood of exhilaration poured through her as she surveyed the miles of wilderness stretched before her and further, the distant lights of the city. It was a secret paradise, a cliff tucked amid long flat farmlands and concrete cities.
Crystal tilted her head to look at the sky. Wes walked behind her and pressed his chest into her back, wrapping his arms around her and tracing his fingertips over her jaw and down her neck.
He kissed her ear.
“Tell me what you feel,” he whispered.
She craned her head back further, traced the curve of the sky with her eyes.
“Like a single fleck of dust floating down from the stars. Held, immersed, free.”
14
Now
Bette opened her door to find Officer Hart standing on the porch.
“I wanted to drop off this box of stuff from your sister’s car. The Volkswagen won’t be released for another week, but we’ve gone through this already. There’s a journal, which we photocopied, and a few other personal items.”
Bette took the box with trembling hands.
“Come in,” she told him.
Hart followed her into the house.
Bette set the box on the table and peeled back the flaps. The first thing she saw was the faded photograph Crystal kept tucked behind her steering wheel, blocking the speedometer. It was an image of her and Bette, hand in hand, on a Lake Michigan Beach. Their mother had taken the photo. Their dad had been scouring the shoreline for Petoskey stones, wading knee deep into the water to pluck them from the sandy depths.
Gritting her teeth, she took the picture out. A faint residue of light powder smudged the edges where the police had dusted for fingerprints.
“I can’t lose my sister,” Bette gasped, clutching the picture. “I can’t be without a mom and a sister. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t…” Bette cried as she spoke, unable to keep it together, unable to plaster on her strong face.
Chai, distinguishable only by her single black ear, plodded from the living room and gazed mistrustfully at Officer Hart.
Everything within Bette twisted. She wanted to rip things from the walls. She wanted to pull out the pain, somehow make it stop, but she couldn’t. There was no way to make it stop and proof, evidence, the truth, that might be worse yet. Right now, she held a shred of something, not hope, no, nothing close to hope existed in her tense, desperate body, but something… something other than complete despair.
Hart didn’t touch her. He watched, tensed, his eyes filled with the unfathomable truth that Bette didn’t want to see.
He regularly told people their loved ones were dead. She could see it on his face. He wasn't a stranger to her desperate grief.
“Can I call your dad, Bette? Or someone else? A friend?” he asked.
“My sister,” she screamed, dropping the picture and pulling at her long dark hair. “Call my sister.” The shriek turned into a wail and she crumpled to the floor, tucked her legs into her body and buried her face in her knees.
“Call my sister,” she mumbled again because that was the only person who could make it right.
“Bette, I’d like you go see Dr. Bliss,” Homer said.
He’d walked in with paper bags of Chinese food as Bette was having a meltdown and had proceeded to brew a pot of coffee and see Officer Hart out.
Bette narrowed her eyes at him, her hands wrapped around her mug like it contained the last shreds of her sanity. She’d opted for the World’s-Best-Mother mug that Crystal always chose when she visited.
“Are you serious?” she asked, barking a derisive laugh.
She and Crystal had joked many times about Dr. Bliss. His name alone ignited peals of hysterical laughter in the sisters. He was a dry, monotone man with painted pictures of elk hanging from his beige office walls.
Their father had chosen him as their child psychiatrist after their mother’s death because he knew Dr. Bliss from the university. The doctor couldn’t have been a more inappropriate child psychiatrist. He used words like bereavement and functional impairment. There hadn’t been a single colorful item in his office.