I pray that if someone’s hunting Angel, I’ll find the hunter first.
The sun has dropped neatly into its hole. I can barely make out the shape of my truck in the dark. The barbed wire fence has virtually disappeared. I stop, breathless, inches from its tiny knives.
Devil’s rope. That’s how my uncle described barbed wire from the pulpit—evil that was tricky, almost invisible, until you were already caught. Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald—the most unspeakable evidence of man’s capacity for sin.
I maneuver the fence easily. It’s not even close to the obstacles I’ve used to test my leg. No one expects my agility, an advantage as a cop. Nine times out of ten, the bad guys aim for my prosthetic leg. It is my good leg they should be thinking about if they really want to hurt me. Take out that one, and it’s game over.
The silhouette of Wyatt’s head in the truck window is not visible. The highway, so desperate an hour ago, is already going to sleep.
“Who did you kill?” It slithers at me from the dark.
My hand jumps to my gun and rests there. Wyatt, out of the truck. Close. I can’t make out his face in the shadows. But his mint gum, I can almost taste it.
“Jesus, Wyatt,” I say shakily. “Give a girl some warning. I killed a bird. A very evil bird.”
“If you say so,” he says. “You’re the cop. Cops are the deciders. Let’s go. Trumanell is going to be worried. I didn’t tell her I’d be gone this long.”
If he’d just stopped at let’s go. If Trumanell’s name wasn’t dropped in the air like a casual match.
“Are you fucking with me?” My voice is low, barely restrained.
“What do you mean? I feel like you’re fucking with me.”
“I mean, are you fucking with me? About this place? The dandelions? About Trumanell? Do you really believe she is in the here and now, picking flowers, washing dishes, wearing her hair down, singing Adele, free as a bird, quoting goddamn Shakespeare and Mister Rogers to keep you from trying to kill yourself and join her?”
“I wouldn’t say she’s free,” he says, after a second.
A mockingbird calls out in the dark. It could be confused about the time of day. It could be warning all the other birds that there is a killer out here.
Wyatt steps forward. The earth folds in like a box. All that exists is the foot of space between us. I’m struck by his face, like always.
Tonight, I see the shadow of Trumanell. I see the kind of looks that make you royalty in a small town no matter what you came from.
“You need to ask what you’ve always wanted to ask,” Wyatt says. “Which is whether I killed True.”
Then he disappears in the white, white light.
10
The eighteen-wheeler swerves out of nowhere, way over the line, tossing me like I’m as insignificant as a paper doll. Wyatt yanks me back from the edge of the highway, into his arms. It’s not the first time I’ve realized that I’m scared both in and out of them.
It is a profound thing, to know a boy his whole life. Moments flash in my brain like they are my last. Wyatt’s tough little face in our kindergarten picture. The note that he handed me as a young boy at my mother’s funeral. His off-key singing when he’d belt out “Werewolves of London” in the truck or “Amazing Grace” in church. His leap and grab for a winning catch. My turquoise nails resting on his skin, shiny with lake water.
The eighteen-wheeler is long gone, probably unaware that it almost finished the job on me. I’m still pressed against Wyatt’s chest, my face crammed in his shoulder. His hand is tracing along my back, down the curve of my hip. There is the old, familiar feeling of the two of us being everything in nothing. Guilt and sex and adrenaline are humming. A hundred bees want out from under my skin.
He pushes me away first. Orders me to get in the truck, to take a breath. Says he’s driving. He wrenches the truck onto the highway while I wonder when I became the kind of person who ever let myself think that if we’d kissed as children, it wouldn’t be cheating, that on the fate-time continuum, it was already sealed and done. How I allowed a burst of terror right now to push us into our old pattern, him at the wheel.
Wyatt is driving fast, one hand on the midnight position, blasting the kind of shallow pop song he hates. It means we are not going to talk about what just happened. Wyatt has always been a man of few words, unless he is making something up. He told me once that the lies are in the adverbs.
I roll down the window and lose myself in the blur of road even though the road almost swallowed me whole.
I’m sixteen again. Two good legs. Grass tickling my knees.
I’m pursing my lips and blowing with all the breath I can. A hundred fluffy helicopter seeds are flying, ready to populate the earth like bunnies. Wyatt stands inches away, ignoring me. His head’s swiveling, searching the field, on alert, like always.
One stubborn dandelion seed is left, like the holdout juror in a trial. I want Wyatt to love me forever. I blow again, even though I’ve already lost.
The seed trembles. But it stays. Certain. My wish, denied.
That’s when Wyatt turns around and sees. He slaps the stem out of my hand, angry.
I’ve never known why.
I jerk my head back in the window of the truck, not wanting to remember.
When we pull up to the Branson place, the windows are square black eyes, opaque and shiny in the headlights. Wyatt turns off the ignition, slides out with me still in the passenger seat, and closes the door. I struggle to make out his path in the dimness. Not a single light goes on in the house.
A sharp rap at my window. I jerk my head. Wyatt’s face. He’s gesturing, something gripped in one hand.
He wants me to roll down the window. I do, halfway.
He pushes a paper bag through. “This is Angel’s,” he says. “Let’s make this goodbye, Odette. The last one.”
“What is your fucking deal with dandelions?” It’s out of my mouth before I can think.
“Goodbye, Odette.” He’s melting into the dark.
I throw open the truck door, furious. He doesn’t get to decide.
“Did you kill Trumanell?” I shout. “Did you kill your father? What in the hell were you going to do with Angel?”
I don’t expect a response. I stalk over to the driver’s side and slam the door. It vibrates in my gut, like it used to when we slammed doors and fought about lesser things than murder.
My hands grip the wheel. I don’t touch the ignition. I wait for a light to go on in the house because that’s what polite people in small towns do after they drop someone off.
Five minutes turns to ten. Fifteen.
The house, still pitch black.
Is he OK?
Am I OK?
I reach for the bag in the passenger seat. I tug out a scarf. Its cheap glamour shimmers like hot coals.
Gold sequins. One missing for every three that stayed. I picture Angel in the doorway at Maggie’s, with the blue scarf tied over her eye. I know what this is for, and it hurts.
This scarf is every mini-skirt I never wore. I examine the scarf’s flip side, made of black polyester, and feel around until I find the tag. Too faded to read. What did I expect? Her name in marker? An address?