He said, “I didn’t do it.”
I said, “I know.”
By the time he got back home, I was in college in Chicago, studying abroad, working internships, trying to be a whole person with one leg.
Wyatt was painting his house with Chantilly Lace, talking to Trumanell, and sleeping with a pretty Mexican girl named Sofia with a half-moon tattoo who regularly smudged his house with sage. At least that’s what Sofia told The Dallas Morning News when they interviewed her, the day after teenagers burned a swastika in his field large enough for passengers in an American Airlines plane to comment on from the air.
I focus on Finn’s breath, as steady and comforting as the drum of a dryer going around. I apologize silently for bringing Wyatt into our bed.
My phone buzzes on the dresser. Private caller.
I grab it quickly, not wanting to wake Finn.
“Hello?” I say softly.
The seconds tick. I hold my breath. Because, on the other end, I feel Trumanell.
Heaving, sticky sobs cut the silence.
I understand only one word in all the noise.
Her name.
20
“Who is this?” I breathe out.
I’m whispering into an empty cave. A hang-up. The word Trumanell pricked any ridiculous bubble of hope that she still existed.
Because the voice sounded like a man, and not one I recognized.
I push myself up on the edge of the mattress, still trying not to disturb Finn.
I didn’t recognize the crying, either.
As a cop, I’ve figured out that crying is almost as unique a print as a voice or the pad of a finger. Wailing, bawling, keening, mewling, moaning, sobbing—you never know what’s going to explode from someone’s throat. Large men with deep voices can squeak. The smallest men can let out the most guttural roars. Women, especially, are terrific at faking it.
This cry did not make me feel sad or sympathetic or tricked. I feel assaulted.
I consider waking Finn, but what could he do? Instead, I grab my crutches and maneuver around the pieces of broken mirror. I turn on the shower and steep myself in hot water until I can’t hear that sob anymore. After twenty minutes, I stand naked in front of the mirror and run fingers through long, loose curls. I finger on pale lip gloss with steady fingers.
I trained myself to cry differently after I lost my leg. Softly, so my father didn’t hear. As a girl, I stared in this same mirror at my stump until I didn’t cry at all.
I’ve never heard Finn cry. His father advised him that whenever he felt like crying, he should pinch the web of skin between his thumb and pointer finger as hard as he could and silently recite the planets in order.
I heard Wyatt cry just once—behind his door at the rehabilitation unit when I shut it behind me for the last time.
I close the door of the walk-in closet and drop to the stool.
Trumanell is the phantom.
Angel is alive.
I need to keep my focus.
I dial an old familiar number. We’ll meet at the lake. Two hours.
I begin the process of attaching a cold piece of titanium.
I wish, not for the first time, that my leg felt the same every day, like I was attaching skis and sliding out into the powder. There is no way to hurry this routine. Every morning, it’s the same tedious chore.
Rubbing ointment on my skin, so I don’t chafe. Pulling on the liner that covers the stump. The sock that covers the liner. Snapping the leg in place. Wandering down the hallway carpet, adjusting it, shaking things out.
Air pressure, heat, cold, blisters, whether it’s morning or night, the way my brain is processing pain and emotion—all of these things and more decide whether I’ll have a bad amputee day or a good one. They tell me that someday flesh and computer could join seamlessly, transforming the life of amputees. Today is not that day.
Finn is still asleep, flat on his stomach, naked and exposed. Part of me wants to count a finger down the knots of his spine, kiss the smooth white curve of his hip, hold him forever. The other part wants to shove his scar-free body off the bed and ask him why he is really here. Why he was ever here.
Erudite. Fair. Charismatic. I’ve heard all these descriptors about the man I married, who shocked everyone he knew when he abandoned a thriving law practice in Chicago to marry me, a college girl in her senior year, six years younger, who his parents described to everyone as “physically handicapped.”
It happened so fast. We nuzzled in a bar. Daddy fell over dead at his desk. I stood with Finn before a bored judge at Dallas City Hall and promised to be faithful forever.
“Eight minutes,” I’d said to Finn in our last fight. “It was eight stupid minutes.”
“Five years,” he shot back. “It was five fucking years of marriage.” And then, incredulously: “Did you put a stopwatch to it? Here’s a tip: Cheating takes a second. Make that a millisecond.”
All the words were stuck in my throat. I love you. Please don’t leave. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.
But there was something that held those words back. A quality in his voice I couldn’t quite put a finger on, a larger disappointment that his investment in me did not pay off.
It struck me for the first time that Finn could have been lying the night he first sat down beside me at the bar. He might have known exactly who he was seducing—not a random girl with one leg but the infamous one out of a bloody Texas legend.
Maybe, like Rusty, Finn has always been hoping to be a part of a missing girl’s redemption. Maybe his instant attraction wasn’t to me but to the Trumanell glitter that won’t come off.
I thought that Trumanell wasn’t part of my marriage, that Finn was my big step away. But maybe she has been here all along, an invisible bridesmaid, constantly rewriting our vows.
One thing is sure. No one’s motives have ever been on the table when it comes to Trumanell. Not Daddy’s. Not Wyatt’s. Not Rusty’s.
Not Finn’s.
Not mine.
21
I trace my finger over the decrepit spine of my grandmother’s Betty Crocker cookbook. It’s been tucked into the shelf under the kitchen sink since I can remember.
Big Red, she called it. My grandmother told me that everything I ever needed to know about chopping and boiling and beating was in Big Red.
Cooking, she said, was a violent art.
I wonder what she’d call Big Red now. What she’d call me.
I tell myself to hurry. I have maybe fifteen minutes alone with the cookbook before Finn wanders in for the coffee I’m brewing. Another hour before I need to leave for the lake.
I slide into a chair and flip open the cover.
There is raspberry jam in the first picture. Except it’s not on a biscuit. It’s staining the pink sheets of Trumanell’s unmade bed. The crime scene techs thought it was her blood when they took this photograph. They were wrong about that but not about the stain in the downstairs bathtub, which is the bright spot of color in the next picture.
I pass over newspaper clippings from the case and surreptitiously copied reports from the official file. I stop to reread a short, funny poem Trumanell wrote titled “How Do Woodpeckers Not Get Headaches?”
I finger three clear bags, stapled in place, but don’t open them. One contains the Cherries in the Snow lipstick Trumanell once slipped me in church by dropping it in the collection plate; another holds a bobby pin and a strand of brown hair; the third is sprinkled inside with the tiniest bit of glitter.