The record playing right now outside this jail cell is “Amazing Grace.” The crowd has rolled into a rousing version that is leaking through every crack in the walls.
My uncle told me that a slave trader wrote that hymn in the 1700s. The man was an obscene human being most of his life, maybe all of it. But it doesn’t matter. We worship that song. Our souls are saved with it. We sing it to bury our dead. It’s like everything else: The whole dark truth is drowned out by a catchy melody.
“Odette, are you OK?”
I wrench my hand from Wyatt’s. “I have to go.”
I’m at the door of the cell, fumbling with the lock, when I hear him spit.
“I never met your husband,” Wyatt drawls, “but if he shows up here on my side, not pointing a gun to my head, he’s the kind of man you should not fuck around on in parking lots.” Whatever concern was in Wyatt’s voice seconds ago, it’s gone.
I turn around slowly, still a little dizzy. Wyatt is using his thumb to swirl his spit in circles in his palm, just like I asked. Sensual. Sarcastic.
Wyatt will hold his own with Rusty, and with Finn. He may even win.
I’m the only one certain to lose. What I will lose is one of them. Or all of them.
“Let’s be clear.” My voice cuts the chill air. “Finn’s not on your side. But for whatever reason, he’s still on mine.”
19
I’m tangled in the sheets, half-conscious, a movie playing on the back of my eyelids.
Under a Christmas tree, the cardboard box Santa is ho-ho-hoing.
In a field, Trumanell tans herself in a glass coffin, dandelions roped around her feet and wrists.
In the park, I’m leaping to catch a tiny red ball that holds Angel’s voice.
I will myself to stay under the veil just a little longer so I can wrench back control.
I slap my hand over the Santa’s mouth to shut him up. I slam a hammer into the coffin of glass to free Trumanell. I catch and swallow the tiny ball so I can speak for Angel.
My eyes fly open, suddenly wide-awake, choking to get out Angel’s words. Water is running somewhere, hard and fast. The shower. No one belongs here anymore but me. Someone is in the Blue House.
I am in bed with my leg off, at my most vulnerable. A wave of panic rolls over me that I can’t explain to people who can throw two working legs over the side of the bed in seconds.
I don’t know whether Oscar Pistorius murdered his girlfriend in a violent rage when he fired four hollow-point bullets into her body through a bathroom door. Only he does. But the legs-off, middle-of-the-night panic that was part of his defense—that part, I understand.
The sunrise is cracking through the blinds. I snatch my gun off the table. I slide off the bed and grab my crutches, bypassing my leg, which I tossed on the floor with my uniform a few short hours ago after leaving Wyatt at the station. The bathroom door is cracked. I nudge it open.
Finn is leaning back in the shower, eyes closed, his face drowning in the spray of the showerhead. It reveals the fragile state of my mind and marriage that it didn’t even occur to me it could be him.
He runs a hand over his dripping face. When he opens his eyes, he doesn’t seem all that surprised to see his pissed-off wife with a gun in her hand. He considers me through the glass with the same steady gaze that I remember from the first time I stripped off everything for him, including my leg. He could have had any other girl in the bar where we met, most of them gyrating on a dance floor. “You’re beautiful,” he’d told me that night. “Perfect.”
I place the gun on the counter, heart still racing. I push open the shower door and drop the crutches. I’m wearing an old Cubs T-shirt of his that I dug out of the dirty laundry after he left. He reaches out to brace me because I’ve given him no choice.
I wrap my arms around him, the spray blinding me, his shirt plastered to my body like a second skin.
“You scared me,” I say.
“There have to be rules,” he mutters into my hair, pulling me close. “I’m not here to stay.”
I nod.
“Are you in love with him?” Finn doesn’t wait for an answer. He leans down and catches my lips.
A minute later, we are falling soaking wet into the bed, a blur of motion in the mirror that Finn hates. We are old movie stars racing out of a whitecapped ocean and dropping to the sand. Young lovers running in from the rain.
Finn never cared about the fantasy.
He knows I can’t run in the rain without slipping. I can’t stand upright in a torrent of waves.
He always understood that everything for me, for everyone like me, is about not falling.
For a long time, he saw me as perfection, as something he was afraid he’d break. I saw myself as something broken that didn’t need fixing. Neither of us, it turned out, was right.
Finn tugs off my sopping shirt. I pull his head to my breasts, and the musky, familiar scent of his shampoo makes my eyes sting with tears. I worry that my few minutes with another man is a stain that’s permanently set.
Finn’s urgency and anger, my guilt and mute pleading, the cold slap of my wet hair, the heat pouring from his skin—all of it, a beautiful and terrifying electricity. There is nothing careful or contained about what’s happening right now.
This is what I want, isn’t it?
The mirror crashes to the floor.
It is good luck for Finn and me, or very, very bad.
My leg wakes me up.
There’s a knife in it.
Except the knife is a phantom. There is a permanent imprint in my brain of the leg that my father retrieved from the surgeon and buried somewhere he’d never tell me. Sometimes, like right now, the buried leg feels more real than the one I can touch. I wince, glancing at the clock: 8:32 A.M. I breathe in and out, in and out, until the pain subsides a little.
I carefully lift Finn’s arm from around my waist, and he rolls over, groaning, not wanting to wake up. Maybe he isn’t ready to face me. I have questions he has every right not to answer. What will become of Wyatt now? What will become of us?
Six hours ago, Rusty had nodded curtly when I ventured out of the cell. A new cop I don’t like much named Gabriel was perched on the corner of Rusty’s desk, his eyes tracking my every move. Rusty had tossed me a one-finger salute. On the way out, I had placed my full right palm over Trumanell’s face on the poster and held it there a few beats. That was my salute back.
Both Rusty and Gabriel were high on my suspect list of who might have broken into my father’s locked drawer. It was nagging at me, the idea that someone in that room could have taken a piece of the puzzle.
I had waited in the parking lot for Finn, slouched in the truck until the lights of his blue Beemer swung into the back lot of the police station. By the time he arrived, only a few straggling protesters were left. He’d disappeared into the station, and I’d swerved out of the lot for home.
My leg is throbbing. I so badly want to pull out the knife.
I used to think it was Wyatt’s imagination that made him believe the arm his father broke could warn him when bad things were coming. That was before. Now, I’m wondering if my leg and his arm could get together and agree which way to go.
I abandoned Wyatt after Trumanell disappeared. He finished out high school in a mental rehabilitation unit, haggling with lawyers, cops, therapists. I visited him twice in two years. He sat in a garden of tidy red and white impatiens, every blade of grass poisoned to a beautiful green instead of in the wild brown field where we belonged.