“Uh,” she said again.
Red was seriously stoned.
I gave her a gentle smile. “Don’t worry, I’m not here because of the pot. I’m here about Reed Tolliver. Is Tessa here?”
Another young woman emerged from behind the chubby one and gently shouldered her out of the way, until their positions were reversed and Red was in the back and the new girl was in front.
“I’m Tessa,” she said. She was petite and compact, with the muscular body of a gymnast. Her hair was cut short, in that pixie style that can look masculine unless the wearer has feminine or delicate features.
Tessa had both; she looked like a fairy.
Thankfully, she didn’t seem stoned. Not even high.
“Um, let’s talk out here,” Tessa said. She was remarkably composed for someone who’d just been caught with a hell of a lot of weed in her house, if the volume of smoke was any indication of the girls’ stash.
I stood back as she whispered something to Red and then she joined me on the front porch. As the door closed behind Tessa, I saw Red’s face for a moment in the narrow space between the door and the jamb and she no longer looked stoned.
The young woman looked furious.
“Sorry about that. Lisey is really upset about the whole Reed thing. God knows, I am, too, but she’s having nightmares and anxiety attacks and stuff. I thought the weed might help,” Tessa said. “I have a medical license for it, so it’s okay, right? This is Colorado, after all.”
“You know what? Let’s just pretend I didn’t see it, okay? And don’t distribute anymore. I’m Officer Monroe.”
She nodded, very solemn. “It’s for my back. I hurt it on the bars last year and weed is the only thing that seems to relax my muscle spasms and lets me go on with my routine.”
“What are the bars?” I asked.
We had, by some unspoken agreement, begun to stroll the Cottage Inn grounds, and we made our way along the river. I was envious of Tessa’s T-shirt and shorts; my long black slacks were starting to stick to my legs from the sweat pouring down them.
“The trapeze bars. I’m a trapeze artist; I’ve been doing it for almost fifteen years and my back is just shot,” she said.
My jaw dropped. “Fifteen years? How old are you?”
She laughed. “I’m twenty-two. My parents got me started on the bars when I was seven. They had me in gymnastics when I was four.”
“Wow. That’s incredible. Tessa, I think you know I’m here about Reed. I’m so very sorry for your loss, and I’m hoping we can chat for a few minutes,” I said. The young woman was composed now but I knew that could change at any moment. Grief is a funny thing; it catches you when you least expect it.
We came across a muddy patch and skirted the edge. I started to slip and Tessa caught my elbow and held me up while I regained my balance. I’d noticed in the last few weeks that the Peanut had really messed with my center of gravity; I hadn’t been this prone to slipping and falling since I’d been a baby myself, learning to walk.
“How long have you been with the circus?”
“I was legally emancipated when I was sixteen and I joined up with Fellini’s about a year later,” she said. She leaped over another mud puddle and I walked around it, careful not to slip again.
“Rough home life?”
Tessa shrugged. “What’s rough? Compared to some, I guess; others, not so much. I’m still in touch with them, so I guess that says something. We were very poor; they still live in a trailer park in a tiny town in Idaho.
“How about you?” she continued. “That’s a gnarly scar you’ve got, what happened, bar fight?”
My hand went to my neck, as it does when my scar is mentioned. It begins at the base of my skull and travels around the right side of my neck, down over my collarbone, and onto my chest, in a rough half-circle of knotted, twisted flesh.
“No, it’s not from a bar fight. It was a car accident, when I was four,” I said. “It was Christmas Day and we were headed home from my grandmother’s house, in Denver. We hit black ice on the highway and skidded into the path of an oncoming semi.”
“God, how horrible,” Tessa said. She shivered. “I’ve never been in an accident. Do you remember it?”
I nodded. “Bits and pieces. I remember my mother screamed, and my dad, he was driving, he yelled at me to hold on. After the impact, though, it’s all sort of hazy.”
A lie, one I had told so often it rolled off my tongue as sweet as syrup.
In truth, I remember coming to, upside down, hanging in the car. Blood ran from my neck and face in a steady flow, and I had to wipe it from my eyes to see. The car was silent; my mother and father looked asleep.
But I knew they weren’t asleep.
I knew if they were alive, they’d have been frantically calling to me, helping me, urging me to pull myself out of the car.
Tessa noticed my silence.
She said, “Yeah, I don’t like to talk much about my family, either. It’s hard, you know, unless you’ve gone through it. And I’ve gone through some deep shit.”
She grew quiet, so I followed her lead. At the academy, we’d had some training in adolescent counseling, and on the job of course, I’d been exposed to a fair share of family crisis situations. But I still felt like I was walking on eggshells when it came to these things. Some kids like to be asked questions and talking seems to help. For others, prying is akin to picking at scabs; painful and apt to reopen old wounds that are desperately trying to heal.
We continued along the river until we came to a sandy beach about half the size of a baseball diamond. Tessa slipped off her flip-flops and went to the water’s edge and dipped a toe in. She gasped and then with a deep breath, waded into the river until the water lapped at her thighs.
“It’s freezing!” she squealed, and I believed her. The river was high with snowmelt and even the near constant heat we’d had this summer would have done little to warm the water.
I slipped off my shoes and socks and rolled my pants up above my knees. The first touch of the icy water took my breath away but then the cold wrapped itself around my swollen ankles and compressed them and I sighed loudly at how good it felt.
Tessa gave me a weird look.
“You’ll see, one day. It’s amazing, you spend your whole life getting to know your body and then along comes this alien-like thing and every part you thought you knew changes,” I told her.
To my shock, Tessa started weeping.
“I’m sorry,” she said as she wiped her eyes and lifted her T-shirt to her nose and blew mightily. “Reed and I talked about having kids one day. I wasn’t sure but he said it was something he’d always wanted, to be a dad.”
“Did he ever talk about his own dad? Or his mom?” I asked.
I walked with her out of the water and we sat on the sandy beach. We watched as a family of four strolled on the other side of the river, the two toddlers running to the river’s edge and then shrieking and running back to their parents.
Tessa closed her eyes. “The first time he mentioned his dad, it was an accident, like, he didn’t mean to say anything. When I asked him about it, he clammed up and said something like he had a lifetime of atoning to do and the sins of the father are the sins of the son.”
That surprised me. As far as I knew, Terence Bellington was an honest man. I’d never heard the slightest whispers of improper behavior, business, family, or otherwise.
“What did he mean by that?”
She tilted her head to the side, thinking. “You know, I’m not sure. I never got a chance to ask him. We were at some party, after a concert somewhere in Kansas, and we were drunk. He changed the subject real quick. I’d forgotten all about it, until you asked, just now.”
“What about his mom? Did Reed ever talk about her?”