I’d like to believe that Rusty is handing me control right now because what I decide here at the foot of this staircase matters.
It doesn’t.
The sign-makers are already posting their own pictures. The police report accusing Wyatt of officially stalking two young girls has leaked to the highest bidder. Reporters with cellphone cameras will start alighting again like wasps on Lizzie’s doorstep tomorrow morning. They’ll try even harder this time. They’ll paw through new and old yearbooks and compare Trumanell’s and Lizzie’s cheerleading jump skills—the Spread Eagle, the Herkie, the Hurdler.
The high-tech graphic of Lizzie’s face from The Tru Story will get new life, excerpted and played again and again on Facebook and Twitter. People will watch a magic high-tech wand remove Lizzie’s brown contacts, strip the bleach out of her hair, remove the raccoon of blue eyeliner, and slim off the extra ten pounds she wears on purpose. They’ll see that she and Trumanell share parts of the same puzzle: a nose that’s a little big, eyes that are a little too close, a puffy bottom lip that appears forever stung by something mean. Imperfect pieces that when put together make something beautiful and original.
Lizzie is already permanently stitched into the myth, whether there’s a good reason or not. God help her, she is the new rallying cry. She’s Wyatt’s last stand.
I point my gun up the staircase and nod to Rusty.
“Just us,” I say.
On the first step, I imagine Wyatt dead, strung up to a ceiling fan by a drunken gang of boy-men. On steps two and three, I picture him crouching at the top of the stairs, listening to our steady ascent.
On four and five, I wonder if he’d shoot me. On step six, I think he wouldn’t. On step seven, I think he would. On eight, I think he is watching, but somewhere else—on his cellphone in the barn, or in one of his hand-dug ditches, or flopped on a bed in a motel room a hundred miles away.
On nine and ten and eleven, my head is ready to burst with the silence.
Our flashlight beams skitter down the upstairs hall like mice. The doors, four of them, all closed.
Wyatt started drawing special maps of this house and property when he was very young. Eventually, he hid them inside a sliced-open section of the upholstery in the backseat of his pickup. They crumpled and crackled underneath us, while we ground our hips into the leather.
All his boyhood hiding spots were on those maps. Planks nailed into trees. Ditches he dug out in the field. He determined inches and feet, yards and miles, the time it took to get from house to field, and barn to tree. He wore shirts the brown of turned earth, the green of leaves, the yellow of winter grass, the black of night, all for camouflage.
Trumanell was the bright red or pink or orange dot you could see running, the self-appointed decoy.
Then one night Frank Branson sifted dirt out of his fist into Wyatt’s mashed potatoes and asked him whether he was digging his own grave out in that field or Trumanell’s. He made a bonfire of two of Wyatt’s maps in an iron skillet in the front yard.
I told Daddy all of this ugly history, when it was too late, six months after Trumanell and my leg were gone. I begged him for forgiveness. It was my fault, all of it—I didn’t tell you because I thought you wouldn’t let me see Wyatt anymore.
I’ll never forget the length of my father’s silence, or the shortness of his response.
“Your limp is a habit,” he said. “In your head.”
He slammed the door on his way out.
My father could be a son of a bitch.
But I don’t limp now.
I place my hand on the knob of Trumanell’s room.
31
In the old crime scene photos, Trumanell’s walls were Ocean Blue. She was saving for her first trip to Galveston beach, which her father didn’t know about.
My fingers flip the wall switch.
I’m not prepared for it to work. I’m blinking rapidly in the glare, off my game. Rusty, sheltered behind me, has already shoved his sunglasses in place.
“Let there be light,” Rusty mutters. “Fucking bastard and his fucking games.”
He’s already down the hall, flicking switches, kicking open doors, yanking another shower curtain.
I scan the room in slow motion. A double bed with rumpled flowered sheets, The World’s Best Book of Quotes on the floor, a half-glass of water on the bedside table, the overpowering citrusy fragrance of either bad perfume or good air freshener.
The closet door, shut. I keep my gun pointed at it, eyes still roving.
In photographs taken on June 7, 2005, these walls were covered.
Necklaces and track medals hanging off hooks. A signed Kelly Clarkson photo. A Go Lions! homecoming mum with tiny cowbells and yellow and black ribbons, one that patiently spells Trumanell in glitter all the way down to the final l.
Tiny lights strung around the square of the ceiling. A pink sleep shirt that said Dream dripping off the back of a door.
One yellow and one black cheerleader pompom in a basket in the corner. An intricate old quilt of Mama Pat’s and an oversized fuzzy pink pillow on the bed. A math book from a community college course. A blue comb marking page 62 in The Talented Mr. Ripley.
One homecoming queen crown.
Two hundred and eight bobby pins.
One fitted sheet with a stain of raspberry jam.
I’ve read down the list of things they took out of here a dozen times.
This was a pretty room. A normal room. For all his cruelty, Frank Branson allowed his daughter a refuge.
The room disappeared with Trumanell. The walls are now white and mostly bare. A single painting hangs over the bed. It used to hang downstairs in the hall.
It’s Andrew Wyeth’s most famous, a woman in half-crawl at the bottom of a hill, stretching toward an old gray house not all that different from this one. Wyeth’s Christina’s World—an ode to his real-life muse, who was crippled but refused to ever use a wheelchair. She moved on the ground like a crab.
Now it makes me shiver. I see what I didn’t see at sixteen. I see an omen. I see myself in her crippled legs and defiance. I see Trumanell in the tight braid and the longing.
I see beauty and entrapment.
Andrew Wyeth said he wondered later if he should have painted the field empty, with only the sense of Christina being there. Standing here, I understand that for the first time. Trumanell is filling up every molecule in this room.
My gun is still trained on the closet door. My eyes glued to the bed.
Frank Branson used to pull up a chair by his children’s beds and sit for hours. He carried a very particular odor with him, not unpleasant, of whiskey, barn, and mint leaves he’d chew from the garden. Trumanell and Wyatt had it timed—how long his smell would linger so they’d know if he’d left and they could open their eyes.
I blink back tears. Two children. Communicating in the dark, not making a sound, in their beds, under the creaky porch, in that goddamn field. Soldiers.
“Odette.” Rusty is at my back, breathing hard enough to tickle a strand of hair on my cheek. “All clear up here. Do you know where the breaker box is? Is it in the house? The attic, maybe? Is there a basement? Outside?” He grips my arm. “Odette. Are you all right? What’s wrong with you?” He follows the aim of my gun. “Did you check the closet?”