She lifted a hand to the windowpane and moved close, as if she were watching the scene unfold before her.
“My father turned back and saw it. He cursed and stomped over to me, setting his own buckets down. Taking mine, too, before he whacked me on the side of the head. My ear rang for days after.”
Greta put a hand to her right ear and winced.
"‘Cover it up,’ he yelled. He was going back to the house for a shovel. I dropped to my knees and scooped snow in my already numb hands. You’d think it would be easy, wouldn’t you? Burying a little blood in the snow. Just the opposite. It’s like painting a red wall white. Coat after coat and the red still shows. That blood was like a fire burning through every layer of snow I heaped on it. Eventually my dad came back, and by then I was so cold I couldn’t open and close my hands, but I knew after he buried that blood, I still had to carry the bucket. If I dropped the second one, I‘d spend three nights in the cellar.
“So, as he shoveled snow on the blood, I pulled off my gloves and stuck my hands into my pants, and into my underwear. It was about the only space warm on my body. I carried the bucket to the chamber, and we dumped the blood. When we got home, my hands were like blocks of ice. The tip of my right pinkie had no feeling at all. A few days later, Mrs. Martel told my father I had frostbite on it, and I’d better see the doctor. We didn’t have a primary physician. The medical doctor who worked at the asylum came in and treated me. The tip of my pinkie had turned black.”
Greta walked to the bed and thrust her hand in Crystal’s face. The tip was flat rather than curved.
“They cut it off in a surgical room at the asylum. Afterward, the doctor gave me a lollipop — but when my father saw it, he threw it in the trash and screamed at the doctor for feeding me garbage.”
“That’s terrible,” Crystal told her, and she meant it.
A part of her hated this woman, but another part of her grieved for her suffering.
“Do you understand it?” Crystal asked. “The thing in the woods?”
Greta cocked her head to the side. That sheaf of white blonde hair falling over one cold gray eye. She chuckled and tucked the hair behind her ear.
“He keeps a diary. Did you know that?” Greta asked.
Crystal gazed at her, puzzled. And then realized Greta had shifted to Weston.
Crystal had never seen Weston’s diary, though she’d watched him write poems and thoughts on napkins and slips of paper. He pressed them into something, of course, but she’d never seen the book itself.
Greta pulled a leather journal from a large black purse she’d deposited by the door.
“I bought this for him. I had it engraved with his initials, and I gave it to him on our fifth anniversary. And what did he write in it?” Greta asked lightly, holding the journal by its spine.
Crystal watched slips of paper, dried flowers, and even a fortune from a cookie fall out.
She knew what the fortune said: “Love, because it is the only true adventure.”
He’d read it out loud, lying on his back in Crystal’s bed, his head nestled in her lap. They’d made love, and then Weston had gone for Chinese takeout.
The tiny white slip floated down and wedged between two floorboards. It took Crystal’s breath away, and a spasm of anguish snaked through her chest.
“He wrote about meeting you. About your hair, the color of the setting sun, and your eyes luminous and hypnotic.” Greta rolled her own eyes. “He called mine as expansive and turbulent as the sea crashing against rocks when I first met him.”
Greta flipped the pages, glancing back and forth between Crystal and the book.
“You didn’t think you were the first woman he felt that way about?”
Crystal said nothing. But no, she hadn’t presumed that Weston hadn’t loved before. She herself had loved before. Never with the intensity she experienced with Weston, but she knew he had loved before. And she could see why he fell in love with Greta. She was a beautiful mystery, a poisonous flower.
“What happens after I’m gone?” Crystal asked.
A little smile played on Greta’s lips.
“Nothing much, except my husband starts making it home for dinner again.”
46
1973
Greta Claude
Greta didn’t bother cleaning up her hairstyle, despite her aunt’s insistence that she looked like a molting chicken and Peter’s stare of disgust.
When she walked into school, the other students gaped at her. Some of them laughed and snickered. A few looked troubled.
To her surprise, Matt stopped at her locker.
“I like the new look,” he told her. “Very Joan Jett.”
Greta thought of asking, “Who?” but didn’t care to know.
“Can I walk you to class?” Matt asked.
Greta looked at Matt with guarded eyes, but he didn’t flinch from her stare. After a moment, she nodded.
As they walked, he told her about the football team, his brother and sister, and how he hoped to become a veterinarian someday.
Greta had never had a boyfriend. Her father had forbidden it, and life on the asylum grounds didn’t offer many eligible bachelors. There were orderlies and doctors. More than a few had taken second glances at Greta, but she’d never considered them as romantic prospects.
Her father knew everything that went on at the Northern Michigan Asylum, and he would have punished her for such a violation.
The first time Matt kissed her, Greta had gone stiff in his arms. His mouth was warm and soft, his touch tender, but her skin crawled as she remembered her Uncle Peter’s hands groping her body, pinching and squeezing.
She’d pushed him away and run into the park, to the circle of rocks.
She hadn’t cried. Greta rarely cried, but the emotions had risen, huge, like waves crashing against rocks.
When Matt found her, he hugged her and petted her hair and murmured nice things until slowly she told him why she’d run away. She told him how her uncle had raped her for months. Matt had been furious. He’d hugged her tightly and sworn he’d protect her.
And he did. He confronted Peter the next day, carrying his father’s shotgun when he arrived at the trailer to pick Greta up for a date. He’d pointed the barrel square at Peter’s chest and said if he ever touched Greta again, he’d get a bullet in the heart.
Her uncle had listened. He didn’t rape her again, but he did other things to hurt her. He put dirt in her shampoo and threw her new shoes on the porch to get rained on. He stole her books from her backpack and ripped the pages out. He deleted phone messages from Matt and often unplugged the phone from the wall when her aunt was at work, and closed it in the bedroom with him while he drank and watched television.
Greta had thought it would disgust Matt when she revealed her uncle’s abuse. Instead, it had the opposite effect. He seemed to fall more in love with her. He surrounded her, coddled her. He picked her up and dropped her off. Bought her flowers and candy and little pieces of jewelry from the gift store in town. He loved her fiercely and hopelessly, and soon she owned him. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her. Well, almost nothing.
Greta had known she would kill Peter since the first morning he’d crept into her bedroom. She might have asked Matt to do it. She could have convinced him, but she also recognized in Matt a weakness. He believed in a certain moral code. If he murdered Peter, he would confess. Even if the police accepted the death as an accident, the deed would haunt Matt until he purged his conscience.