When I finally got home, I wanted to retreat to the coldest place on the planet or at least my husband’s arms. It turned out, those were the same things.
“I never knew you to be surprised at the vile nature of human beings,” Finn had said from the bed, while he watched me strip off my uniform. “We kill indiscriminately, always have, always will. People we love, people we don’t know, sisters, brothers, wives, children, best friends, neighbors, rats, snakes. We kill for fun out of car windows and deer blinds, for fifteen minutes of fame, because a bumper sticker says Zero Percent Republican, because the TV is too fucking loud. I’d say tomorrow will be different, but it will be the same.” He turned over and closed his eyes.
Finn’s a good guy. I married him, first and foremost, because he couldn’t lie without the vein in his forehead popping. So he never lied.
It’s not that he was wrong. But at that moment, I didn’t want to hear life was hopeless. I didn’t want a lecture from a clear-eyed lawyer who also had a rotten day.
So I went to the bar.
Wyatt brushed by.
I grabbed his arm right as he opened his pickup door.
The second Wyatt entered me in that parking lot was a welcome shot of pain, long overdue.
Now Wyatt is massaging that same arm I grabbed, the one his father broke when he was ten by pushing him off a tractor. He says that arm has told him things ever since.
The rubbing means he’s bothered. There’s so much I know about Wyatt that I wish I didn’t. So many reasons I think he’s innocent even with a strange girl trembling on his couch and acid rolling in my gut.
“I found her lying off the highway,” he’s saying. “She was wishing on dandelions, probably for someone to pick her up. It’s as simple as that. I have no idea how she got there. I think maybe she’s running.”
The girl whips her head up at his last sentence. That’s when I see the drooped lid, the squint, the flash of bloodshot red. I work hard to control the muscles of my mouth, keeping my own eyes blank and unsurprised, because that’s what I’d want.
My heart is suddenly so quiet I wonder if it’s beating. I tighten my grip on the gun, keeping it focused on Wyatt. I turn to the girl. “It’s going to be OK, honey. What’s your name?”
“Good luck on that,” Wyatt says. “She hasn’t said a word. I’m calling her Angel.”
“Wyatt. Over by Lila.”
“Come on, Odette.” He takes a step, tightening up on me. “You aren’t going to shoot me. There’s nothing here that can’t be settled without a gun. And you know what they’ll do if you call this in. I’ll be staring at metal bars. It will kick stuff up that’s just now settled down after that piece of shit TV documentary about True.”
The girl’s hair straggles to her thin shoulders. No shoes. Why didn’t he call this in right away? Did he touch her? I need to think all the things I’d think if this was someone I didn’t know.
“I’m taking her.” I strain to keep my cop voice.
“You can’t dump her in the system.”
“I’ll find out where she belongs. That’s my job.”
“Does she look like she belongs to somebody good? Are you going to be the girl I know today? Or a cop like all the rest? She needs that eye fixed. You think social services will jump on that? You throw her in the system and kids will tear her apart. Popeye. Evil Eye. Blackbeard. My daddy got called everything in the book.”
Stop. Talking. I blink back the imagery of Frank Branson’s eyes, one empty and brown, the other a treacherous piece of blue ice. He deserved every name he was called.
He could have afforded a prosthesis that matched the color of the other eye, that fit better, that didn’t roll around, that didn’t come out of some quack’s drawer of eyeballs, only a grade above a cheap marble collection. Wyatt’s father, though, was a twisted piece of work.
He once convinced Wyatt, at age four, while sitting across from him in a Dairy Queen booth, that he was a figment of Wyatt’s imagination—all because a waitress brought Wyatt his strawberry milkshake but forgot to bring his father’s.
Frank Branson used and reveled in the raw material presented to him.
Angel is raw material.
Wyatt is his son.
Wyatt claims he picked up this girl with one eye, sitting in a bed of dandelions. Wyatt hates dandelions, killing them across his property with a vengeance that bordered on obsession. He hated his daddy. He hates this town. Sometimes he even hates me.
“Where’s Trumanell?” I ask.
“Right there. Sitting on the stairs.”
The girl’s breath catches, an animal squeak, the first sound I’ve heard from her.
I rip my glance from the staircase. That was a mistake, asking Wyatt about Trumanell. I need to hold the girl in the normal. Hold Wyatt in the normal.
“Show her that you have something in common,” Wyatt orders. “I’ll give her up easy, carry her to your car, if you show her you’ve lost something, too. That you’re not like all the rest. I’m trusting you, Odette. Not to be like all the rest.”
The girl is straightening up, assessing us, her eye on my gun. Wyatt’s not facing the wall like I want, but he’s compromising, hands in the air, like a cat baring his belly to a big dog, knowing he’s still in charge.
“Are you going to show her or not?” he asks.
I stare at him for a few long seconds. I holster the gun.
I drop beside her on the couch and offer a reassuring smile. I prop out my left leg and tug up the stiff fabric of my uniform. I strip off the sleeve. The sock.
Angel reaches over and runs a finger down, not saying a word.
It shouldn’t make me shiver, her flesh on my metal, but it does.
7
At sixteen, I had two flesh-and-blood legs. I used to throw them around Wyatt’s waist while we stared up at the black universe, the moon a big shiny dime, lovers in the bed of a truck.
On the night Trumanell disappeared, I used them together for the last time—to run for my life.
Wyatt and I were supposed to play a game of Scrabble on the night of June 7, 2005—our forty-sixth date, which I’d been marking off on a calendar. I think about that all the time—how ordinary it is in the polite South to walk into somebody else’s house, with secrets and monsters you know all about, and trust that the biggest argument while you’re there will be over whether thanx is now a legit word on the Scrabble board or if this is the best lemon pound cake you’ve ever put in your mouth.
I never made it inside that night. Wyatt cracked open his front door when I knocked and told me to run, to not ask questions. I saw panic on his face and a dark sedan in the shadows of the driveway.
I heard no screams, no gunshots. The air was fat and ugly—either the prelude to something terrible or the afterlude of it. As soon as I jumped back in my car, I tried to call my father, but the service was terrible out on that stretch of land.
An hour later, two miles away, a man found my pickup, flipped in a ditch, my leg crushed, radio slurring, blood watering the grass.
I think Wyatt saved me that night by telling me to run. He thinks he broke me. He certainly broke himself.
While a surgeon carved on my leg, Wyatt was found wandering around the lake, out of his mind, speaking gibberish. People said that fact, and a few smears of blood out at the house, were clear signs that Trumanell and Frank Branson were both dead, and that Wyatt did it. But they couldn’t prove anything.