Part 8 (2/2)

Thom posed little threat in these days. He was ashamed and yet so sated that it was like a bloat, making him sweet as he tended to my body, his favorite toy. He worked to heal it, same as I was, readying it for rough play. I was safe with Thom; right now, Ro Grandee was the danger.

I was back in her house, with the pretty ocean blue coverlet and sheers she'd picked, her willow-patterned china in the kitchen, the remnants of her light perfume tainting the air of the bathroom. I'd lived inside her familiar, comfortable skin for years, until it was me, until I had no choice in it. But to let myself be Ro again now was suicide, the only irrevocable sin. The drugs that held me back in the hospital were holding me too still in her territory. I felt her as a creep, growing on back over me like fungus. It could not be allowed.

When Thom brought my breakfast on a tray, I handed him back the Percocet and said, ”Could you bring me a couple, three Motrin, please? And a great big cup of coffee?”

I downed the coffee and ate every bite of my cheese eggs. Thom left for work, and I could feel myself waking up, truly waking, as last night's pill spent itself in my bloodstream and was replaced by the caffeine. The first thing I realized was that I was filthy, covered in a waxy coat of my own mank. My hair was limp and greasy. I creaked to my feet and took a long shower, scrubbing myself so hard that it was like being peeled. I made the water scalding hot. When I got out, I was pink under my fading bruises.

I opened the closet and got an eyeful of Ro's swirly skirts in springtime colors. Sweet flats with bows and buckles and embroidered daisies. Clingy lightweight sweaters, all long-sleeved. I slammed the closet door, as repulsed by these things as if they had been hand-sewn from human skin. I went to my dresser instead and dug out a long-sleeved T-s.h.i.+rt and a pair of the old Levi's that I wore on heavy cleaning days.

The jeans were pale blue and baby soft from a thousand was.h.i.+ngs, and they sat easy against my bruises. My rib cage pinged as I s.h.i.+fted, and I could tell by how the jeans fit that I'd gone barn-cat scrawny. Still, I felt whole and ready for movement, but only from the neck down. My wet hair was a heavy reminder, pulling at my sore scalp. I dried it on cool, then I bundled it away into a low ponytail and braided it. It still felt like the braid had a barbell tied to the end. I pulled it over my shoulder, where it hung past my breast, heavy and hers.

I didn't want it touching me. I wanted none of Ro's things touching me, and the long hair my husband loved felt like a most offensive bit of Ro-ness. I strode to the kitchen and yanked my meat shears out of the butcher-block knife rack on the counter. I thought I could lop that braid off in one fell swoop, but it was too thick. I had to squeeze the handles open and shut and saw at it with the blades to get it off of me. Finally the last connecting hairs yielded, and the braid slithered down my back to the floor. My head felt so suddenly light that it was like being dizzy.

The braided cable of hair looked like a long, glossy pet that had coiled up at my feet. It was sleek and dark, more than a foot long, so thick that I doubted I could get my finger and thumb wrapped all the way around it. I looked down at it and felt no remorse. I felt no connection to it at all. It was nothing more than a brown black rope that Thom could d.a.m.n well never hang me from again.

I picked up the braid and walked back to the bathroom. I think I meant to put it in the trash, but I caught sight of myself in the mirror and stopped. I was ten pounds too thin and two shades paler than paper. My shorn hair hung around my face in a ragged tangle, longer on the right side than the left. I had kaleidoscope eyes, spinning with a hundred different colors of pure, naked crazy. For the first time in years, I was face-to-face with Rose Mae Lolley. Even my clothes were hers, faded and ill used enough to have been found in a church box. I was cold all over, predatory, and it showed in my face. Every line of my body said, Down to black business, up to absolutely nothing good. Down to black business, up to absolutely nothing good.

I'd been Rose Mae in accidental flashes over the years, most recently in the ditch at Wildcat Bluff. This was the face Jim Beverly had seen, I felt certain, that night we got drunk and ran through the woods, and the rustle of ferns and branches was the crack and snap of tiny bones. Thom knew this face, too. It had been reflected in the mirror of his gaze the first night I met him, back when I was slinging eggs and corned-beef hash at Duff's Diner. Stirring spit into his date's drink had been a stopgap measure to keep me from boiling half her face off with a pot of scalding coffee. He'd known what he was getting, same as I had. But those were forays, a creature taking peeks and darts out of its pretty, placid home.

In the mirror I was as ugly and iridescent as a de-sh.e.l.led hermit crab, fleshy and exposed. I hadn't been this nakedly myself since the morning I left Fruiton, Alabama.

When Jim left me, it was as if he'd ripped my skin off and toted it down the highway with him. The very air stung me. I wandered the halls of my school drugged with loss and rage. I stopped turning in my work. Tests were pa.s.sed out, and I sat through them, not even lifting my pencil. It was all I could do to hold myself still with the air and suns.h.i.+ne touching the raw and blinking object that I was. Graduation came, and I sat home through it, knowing I had flunked and not caring. I sat through summer like it was a prison sentence.

I thought I might hear from Jim on my birthday. I held myself afloat with the idea: He would call. He would tell me-and only me-where he was. He would say he'd only been waiting for me to turn eighteen, so that no one could come looking for us.

The day came, and the phone stayed silent. Then my father clocked me a good one for the high crime of walking to the kitchen, my back to him, when he was thinking he might speak to me. Kidney shot. I lay on the floor where he had put me, and I understood that Jim would not rescue me. If I stayed in Fruiton, this was my life. This was all I could be. No dear and worthy girl could be rebuilt under my father's fists.

I packed a canvas duffel bag and slept a fitful few hours until the Greyhound station opened. Daddy was pa.s.sed out on the sofa, dreaming like a dog with his bare feet hanging off the edge and twitching as he chased down rabbits or naughty daughters. I had a little money of my own, but I decided that final punch would cost him the nine dollars in his wallet as well as the sacred ”whiskey twenty” he kept in his bedside table for emergencies.

There was leftover Tuna Helper in the fridge and half a pan of mac 'n' cheese, too. It could be days before he ran out of things to microwave and realized I was gone. I wanted him to realize sooner.

There was a big print of s.h.i.+ps in a harbor hanging above the sofa, over Daddy. It had been my mother's. As a girl, I used to pretend she'd stepped into it and gotten on a s.h.i.+p and gone someplace that I could follow, the way Lucy and Edmund had floated across a painted ocean back to Narnia. I was grown up now, and I understood she left on purpose, through the front door. I was about to follow her lead.

I looked at the print, all that deep blue water hanging over Daddy's head. I thought about the gas can in the carport, how it would slosh, unwieldy, if I lifted it and carried it back here. It was more than half-full because Daddy never fed the mower. It was cool inside our small brick house in the hour before dawn. A fire sounded nice.

Instead I turned myself, went to his room, and I stole his pistols. I took Pawpy's both for protection and as a punishment; it was just about the only thing of Pawpy's Daddy had. I took both his newer ones to hock, as if they were my rightful dowry. I'd have taken his deer gun, too, but it didn't fit down in my duffel.

My last act was to dig a shedding Crayola paintbrush out of my childhood toy box. I took a coffee mug to the neighbor's yard and scooped up a generous cupful of the dog c.r.a.p that had leaked out from their dyspeptic standard poodle. I took these tools back to the sofa and used them to write, ”Later, Gater,” onto the hanging print of s.h.i.+ps at harbor. The s.h.i.+ps and the docks were brown, and the sea was a storm dark blue. The words were hard to see, and I wondered how long he would stagger around the house, hung over and gagging, checking his shoes and sniffing and cussing, before he found my billet-doodoo.

Considering he was pa.s.sed out helpless, considering that I had a swollen kidney and two loaded guns, considering how raw I was, he was d.a.m.n lucky that was all I did. If he had stirred, if he had so much as cracked an eye, he would have seen the face that I was seeing in the mirror now. If he'd said the wrong word to me in that moment, then as sure as G.o.d made all the pretty fishes, I'd have put a hole in him.

I reached out and touched the mirror, disbelieving. The girl inside the gla.s.s reached at the exact same time, raising her hand on her side to meet mine, fingertip to fingertip. The gla.s.s was showing me an accurate reflection, showing me that she-I-was way too easy to read. I had to camouflage myself.

I rummaged through Ro's flowered handbag to find the keys to my hand-me-down Buick. I drove downtown, still clutching the coil of my hair, to a place called Artisan Salon and Day Spa. I knew Charlotte Grandee paid this place a small fortune to keep her hooves sanded down and her gray covered. I had never so much as stepped inside. Thrifty Ro got her split ends trimmed at a place called Mister Clips for eight meager dollars. I did my pedicures at home. Artisan wasn't a place we could afford, but that one glimpse in the mirror had told me a faked smile and some Maybelline blusher wouldn't cover half my sins. d.a.m.n the cost; Thom owed me this, and more. h.e.l.l, all the Grandees owed me. I circled Amarillo's small blocks until I found a parking s.p.a.ce that would hold my ancient tank of a car.

I walked into the ultramod reception room, and the lone blonde waiting to have her frosty tips refreshed gasped at the sight of me and looked away fast. One manicured hand raised itself involuntarily to touch her own thick curls, like she was scared whatever had happened to me might be catching.

I looked past her to the young man behind the apple green check-in station and said, ”Do you take walk-ins?”

He looked up, his mouth already shaping the word no no, but when he saw me, his lips froze into a kissing shape around the unsaid word. I had the long rope of my former hair coiled around one wrist, and I lifted it and let it unfurl and dangle.

The air came out of him so fast that it made a woofing noise, and he said, ”What did you do?” He sounded slightly awed.

”I had a bad idea,” I said.

”I'll say,” he agreed, fervent.

I was used to men looking at me, but not like this. I felt my eyebrows come together, and I blinked hard. ”I'm not getting out of the house much, these days. I haven't...” I swallowed so loud that it sounded like gulping, and then I felt my mouth opening up again. ”My husband died. Quite recently.” Instantly I had to fight to keep an inappropriate grin from spreading across my face.

I had not spent my week on bed rest making up drug-induced, cheerful Disney-rip-off songs about a world with no Thom Grandee in it. My only thought had been how to find Jim. Test-driving widowhood with the salon's tanned G.o.dlet-style receptionist as my witness was my way of saying exactly and out loud why I was looking for my lost love. The boldness of it, the truth of it, moved through my body like a wave of black pleasure. It was the confirmation of a thing that had already been decided, a long time ago, in an airport. Maybe even by someone else.

The receptionist said, ”This is clearly an emergency.” He had big hazel eyes, shaped very round, with a down tilt to them that made them seem sadder for me than he probably was. ”Let me see what I can do.”

The blonde said, ”Rexy, I am in a hurry today...,” giving me a sidelong glance. It was the look a well-fed person who was enjoying an excellent cold lamb sandwich might give a homeless fellow or a hungry dog.

”Faye will be ready for you in five,” Rexy told her. ”Maybe four.” He turned back to me and said, mostly for her benefit, ”You, my dear, you are past what Faye can do. Miles past. I suspect you've crossed the border and left Faye-country altogether. You require Peter.”

The blonde's eyebrows lifted and she looked me up and down, clearly wondering what made Rexy think I rated. I looked back, bottom lip atremble, and I made my eyes go big and soulful, like those single-teared orphans that get painted onto black velvet. Her gaze broke first. She picked up a glossy magazine and put it up in front of her face, a wall I couldn't climb over. It was Architectural Digest Architectural Digest, and Charlotte Grandee got that chichi rag every month. I realized this blond thing probably knew Charlotte. They certainly looked of a set, and this was Charlotte's spa.

I wasn't worried, though. I currently looked nothing like the pretty Ro Grandee in the wedding photo at Charlotte's house, and the G.o.dlet hadn't asked my name. If I so much as whispered the word Grandee Grandee, though, I had no doubt this blond creature would be on the phone with Charlotte before the door had closed entirely behind me. She'd be delighted to reveal that Charlotte's low-rent Alabama daughter-in-law had been seen poor meing her way into Artisan via the fictional death of her eldest boy. I might enjoy that, actually. But it would be tempting fate to let Thom's mother hear this fiction right before I made it fact.

Rexy came back and said to me, ”Follow me now, hon.” The blonde made a huffy throat noise, and Rexy gave her a s.h.i.+t-eating grin, his teeth as white and square as peppermint Chiclets. ”Faye will come for you in bare seconds, Sheila. She has sworn.”

I followed him through the archway down a long moss green hallway lit by wall sconces. There were doorways on both sides, some closed with signs on them that said things like ”Shhh... Ma.s.sage in process!” and ”Aromatherapy Room.”

I whispered, ”I'm sorry about...”

”Pish, Sheila? Bottle blondes on the wrong side of forty need us more than we need them, believe it. She's about sixty percent s.p.a.ckle as it stands.”

I chuckled, but now I was thinking about how much folks like to bond over a bit of gossip, how nasty good it could feel to talk ugly about outsiders with your own kind. That must be how my mother had found me. She'd asked her own kind.

Fruiton was a small town, and if a single person had seen me toting my gun-stuffed duffel bag to the Greyhound station at dawn, stomping away from the remains of my life, then the whole town as good as knew. The right people, if asked, would have been happy to relay this information to her.

I followed Rexy all the way to the back, to a more brightly lit, deeper green room with a gleaming sink and a sleek black stylist's chair. He presented me to a short, slim man beside it who looked way too young to be cutting hair.

”This is Peter. I leave you in his capable hands,” Rexy said.

Peter's hair was an artful tousle of multishaded gold. Up close, I could see fine lines mapped around his eyes and two deep creases framing his full lips, so he had to be at least into his thirties.

He looked at me and tsked, then said to Rexy's back, ”You weren't exaggerating.” He walked forward and circled me, then reached down and grabbed the braid I was still holding in the middle. He lifted it without taking it out of my hand, feeling the weight. Then he let the hair go and touched the ragged ends where I'd cut it off, his soft fingers brus.h.i.+ng my cheek. I found myself leaning into the touch like a petting-hungry stray cat.

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