We’re still alone in the house.
I tilt the bottle and let the Coke burn down my throat, icy, liquid crack. Five minutes. Ten. Twenty. The Johnnie Walker spinning has slowed to a carousel.
I focus hard on the single object in front of me, a lovely Asian vase trailing with ivy. Better.
I reach out and finger a leaf to see if it’s real.
That’s when I see it.
A tiny dot, barely visible, in the center of the turquoise peacock painted in full bloom.
A camera eye.
Dr. Greco has been recording me.
25
I don’t say goodbye. I walk out of the doctor’s house half-tanked, horizon tilting. I have no business behind the wheel, but I drive, the things I shouldn’t have told her like a trail of dirty exhaust. About an hour into the blur of the drive back, two thoughts emerge.
Does she tape everyone who sits down on her balcony, or was that special, just for me?
Exactly what kind of book is she writing?
When I finally pull into the driveway of the Blue House, I want to strip off my leg, drink a quart of water, and sleep off the nagging bang of a migraine in my right temple. Instead, a tense still life is hanging out on my front porch.
Finn leans against one of the columns, arms crossed. His backpack, the one still colored by pale dust from our Moroccan honeymoon, sits at his feet.
A skinny bleached blonde who could be mistaken for a hundred thousand other skinny bleached blondes has her legs crossed in my red Adirondack chair, a hiked skirt showing plenty of thigh.
The pitcher of tea tells the story. Bits of melting ice are floating on top like mini-glaciers.
They’ve been waiting for a while.
A white SUV is parked at the curb with a Go Lions! bumper sticker on the rear window. The woman’s, I’m guessing, and a sign she’s a local.
I inch the truck to a stop beside Finn’s blue convertible. He is already animating the picture, slinging his backpack over his shoulder and striding toward me. The woman hovers behind on the porch, a long navy-blue fingernail in her mouth, chewing.
Two breasts like caramel scoops are popping out of her pink tank. Two taut legs. Two pretty feet. Two of everything. A tiny snake with a red head or the stem of a rose—hard to tell from here—scrolls twice around one of her ankles.
Not Finn’s type. They can’t be together. Or maybe he’s figured out he needs to change types.
“Where’ve you been?” Finn is two feet in front of me, a fine thread of irritation running through his voice. Too close. I hope he can’t smell the booze.
I’ve been chasing my father’s boots, I want to say. Running a phone number from his drawer to a dead end in the middle of nowhere. But I don’t.
“Why aren’t you answering your phone?” he demands. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I bailed out Wyatt Branson. I drove him home a couple of hours ago because he doesn’t have his truck. They towed it from Birch Street, eight blocks from the girl’s house, to an impound in Dallas. Just to make things difficult.”
Two pictures settle in my head.
Wyatt and Finn on a six-mile country ride in the intimate space of a two-seat BMW, an invisible me in the middle.
And Wyatt, now holed up again at the Branson place. Alone.
“My partners asked me to thank you for the referral. You’ve probably doubled my year-end bonus. Wyatt even says he can pay.”
His tone is stiff and cool, as if his tongue wasn’t in my belly button last night.
“Have you really decided to defend him yourself?” I can’t keep the incredulity out of my voice.
“That decision will take care of itself if Wyatt isn’t careful,” he replies evenly. “They’ve had to call in extra operators to handle the police phone lines. People were publicly threatening to take Wyatt out if the cops set him loose. And now he’s loose. If Wyatt kills somebody in this town in self-defense, even if he’s shooting from under his own covers, it’s not going to matter. We’re in primal territory. Or as your partner put it, ‘He poked the rattlesnake nest.’”
“You know Rusty. Full of redneck hyperbole and believes only half of it. The charges may not even stick.” Except, in my heart, I know Rusty isn’t wrong. The Wyatt-bashing documentary lit the match. This incident with Lizzie threw on the gasoline.
Trumanell’s heart is shaking the ground under our feet. The town is ready to turn the final page of its ugly fairy tale, whatever the price.
“I hear you,” I say. “I do. I’ll talk to Rusty about some form of protection for Wyatt. But … can the two of us figure out a time in the next few days to talk? About … last night?”
When he doesn’t answer, I point to the porch. “Is she someone I should worry about?”
“I came back to gather up a few things I need. Plates. Cups. Hammer. The woman pulled up as I was about to leave.”
Plates. Cups. Hammer.
I’m. Leaving. You.
“Whatever she has to say,” Finn says, “she only wants to say to you. I waited with her because she was so upset when she first arrived. She only stopped pacing about fifteen minutes ago. She went for some mints in her purse and I saw a gun. Does every woman in this fucking state have a gun?”
“What’s her name?”
“She didn’t tell me anything. Except that I didn’t put enough sugar in the tea.” He tosses his backpack in the passenger seat of the convertible, lifts a long leg over the door, and settles in behind the wheel.
He looks every bit the killer Dallas defense lawyer, not the transplanted son of a slightly racist Chicago plumber and a librarian with a love of Mark Twain. Not the boy who walked an autistic neighbor to Catholic school every morning, or the guy who looked a little like John Krasinski when he slid onto a Hyde Park barstool to flirt with the only girl in the room minus a leg.
I want so badly to ask him to stay. Except I have no right. I’ve screwed around on him. I’ve put him second and third and fourth behind Wyatt, Daddy, and Trumanell.
Finn punches the ignition and adjusts his Oakleys. He’s sucking in his cheeks, emphasizing the bones, creating little hollows.
His tell. I’m not going to like what he’s about to say.
“You want to know what Wyatt Branson told me on our little ride?” He’s staring straight ahead, through the glass. “I’ll tell you what he told me. He told me that when it comes to your feelings for him, I shouldn’t mistake grief for love. Guilt for passion. He’s a son of a bitch. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong. I’ve just got to figure out if that matters.”
26
Nine porch steps are suddenly a tall climb. I’m blinking back tears from Finn’s parting shot. My temple feels like someone is hammering a spike in it every time my foot clunks the wood.
The closer I get, the more certain I am that I know nothing about the woman on my porch. But if she’s one of the 10.8 million on earth who streamed The Tru Story last month, she thinks she knows plenty about me.
It doesn’t matter that the roach of a journalist was careful to emphasize that some of his “reporting” was just “mortar for the legend.”
Like how I supposedly thread a wildflower in my hair every June 7 since Trumanell disappeared, underneath, where no one can see.