Words about Lucrece.
About me.
I was the crazy girl who did this.
Five names floated in the empty spaces, circled in heart balloons.
Brook E.
Margaret S.
Renata T.
Lisa C.
Emily W.
That’s how the policeman called our names, like a teacher reciting first-grade attendance.
I wrote those words, drew that awful thing, on the same day that I met Rosary Girl and Lisa, pre-med. I’d been only a few minutes late to my Shakespeare class after the police dismissed us. I raced there from the library, eager to turn in my final semester paper, a mad, rambling piece of crap.
The professor had assigned us to write a fifteen-page analysis of any Shakespeare poem. It would count as forty percent of our final grade. Most of the class settled on Venus and Adonis or “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” because those papers were for sale on campus for about seventy-five bucks. Twice that if you wanted an A.
I’d picked The Rape of Lucrece, the first words of Shakespeare that truly engaged me, a balm to my anger.
Here with a cockatrice’ dead-killing eye
He rouseth up himself and makes a pause;
While she, the picture of pure piety,
Like a white hind under the gripe’s sharp claws,
Pleads, in a wilderness where are no laws,
To the rough beast that knows no gentle right,
Nor aught obeys but his foul appetite.
I had no trouble getting the gist.
Where are no laws.
A cockatrice, I learned in a Google search ten years later, is a serpent hatched from a cock’s egg, with the power to kill with a glance.
I didn’t keep the red notebook for the drawing, an embarrassing, vengeful thing.
I kept the paper for the names.
The headlights flashed through the kitchen windows like a lighthouse strobe as Mike turned his cruiser into the driveway. I heard the crunch of his shoes on the pebble driveway, the clank of the mailbox opening and shutting on the front porch.
Familiar, safe sounds.
“Emily? What happened? Were we visited by a fairy?” The front door slammed behind him, and I counted the electronic pings as he punched the numeric code, my mother’s birthday plus a random 5 and a 3, into the keypad.
I had turned up the cozy factor in the living room. A few logs stacked by the garage now glowed in the stone fireplace, even though Mrs. Drury’s outdoor thermometer with the sunflower face pointed at 68 degrees. A couple of cheap candles flickered on the coffee table.
“Emily, where are you? Am I in the right house?”
“In the kitchen,” I called back. “Very funny.”
I whacked the bottom of a tomato soup can with a wooden spoon, releasing the congealed glob into the pan, then dumped in a mixture of water and milk from a Pyrex measuring cup. With the other hand, I stuck a pan of open-faced tuna and tomato melts into the oven, upgraded with five-grain bread and Havarti.
Mike’s black industrial backpack-he still wouldn’t concede to a briefcase-dropped from his shoulder to the linoleum floor. It held things with a dark history that I didn’t want to know about. I always imagined that if I stuck my hand in there, something inside would yank me into an abyss.
Mike walked up behind me and slid his arms around my waist.
“The place looks great.” He pressed warm lips against my neck and reached for my glass of red wine on the counter. His touch after a long day without it still left me a little breathless. In New York, pre-baby, we’d be on the floor by now.
“Hey, stop that.” I slapped his hand. “Get your own. I’m rationing. I measured six perfect ounces. As for the house, it wasn’t all me. Misty helped.”
“What?”
“Misty Rich dropped by. She spent most of the day here.” The easy mood cracked like the delicate glass it was, and he abruptly released me.
“Why do you look that way? Not that long ago, you were encouraging me to get out and make friends.”
“A lot has changed since then. Let’s talk about her after supper. The fire’s lit, the soup is simmering, the mood is light.”
“Now my mood sucks a little. You shut me out last night and you’re doing it again.”
“Thanks for the brew.” Mike popped the top of a Xingu he’d grabbed out of the refrigerator, a pricey black beer that he loved, my affectionate offering to lubricate the night.
“I was frustrated,” he said. “A computer crash prevented me from seeing what Billie rounded up from the national databases. A brand-new $3 million system, and it blows up. I spent two hours trying to get someone to fix it. The tech company that installed it didn’t send someone out until this morning. Their guy got the thing up and running in fifteen minutes. He’s now number three on my speed-dial. I promised I wouldn’t hesitate to rouse him out of dead sleep.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me that?”
“Baby, I’m stressed. Wondering if I should just quit this job, pay the contract penalty, and get us the hell out of here.” He took a swig of beer. “And it’s hitting me. That you might want to find her. What that entails.”
Her. No lead-up, but I didn’t need one. She hovered over us like a confused bird blown off-course. We’d avoided the subject since that night, never once broaching the obvious question of whether I could leave the daughter I’d abandoned to a life of fantasy.
“I don’t have any plans… to disrupt her.” I spoke haltingly, not sharing how often my fingers had poised for a Google search. Or that I’d sketched her face in my imagination, on napkins, on scrap pieces of paper, a million times.
“Sorry, move, I’m burning the tuna melts.” I pulled out the pan and dropped it on the stove, shutting the oven door with my knee. “Get the paper plates and napkins, will you? The bowls are on the stove. Help yourself.”
After a few efficient seconds, we clinked his beer and my wineglass in lieu of saying grace and settled in to another of my 1950s suppers. Belmont, secretly renamed Golden Turd in my head, joined the party and rubbed against Mike’s legs. My husband, everyone’s hero. Last night in bed, Belmont actually spooned him, flipping over when Mike did.
“So if the computer’s up and running now, what did you find?” I asked.
“We ran about thirty names from the files found at Caroline’s. It turned up what you’d expect. DUIs. A little tax evasion. Shoplifting. Harry Dunn’s corporate shenanigans in Houston, which I already knew about. Completely denies it, by the way.” He slugged the last of his beer. “It’s Caroline Warwick who turns out to be very interesting. She’s not the widow she claims to be. Her husband and son are alive. So is a sister.”
My mouth dropped open in the middle of a bite and I rescued the piece of tuna dripping down my chin. I don’t know what I was expecting, but not this. “She specifically told me her family was dead.”
“She apparently told everyone that for years.”
“I don’t understand. Why would she go to such elaborate lengths to reinvent herself? Where are her husband and son now?”
“She grew up in Kentucky, which is where her husband still lives, in their house.” That meshed, I thought, with the portrait of the horse and her musical Southern accent.
“Her husband’s name is Richard Deacon. They separated twenty years ago and divorced a few years later. Richard stayed in Hazard. Caroline reverted back to her maiden name.”
Richard. Dickie. The Hater. I knew of Hazard. It was in one of the most poverty-stricken areas in the country. I couldn’t for a second picture Caroline there.
“Her son still lives in Hazard, too? What’s his name?”