Rusty presses his lips to the microphone so close it vibrates in my stomach. “Unless you’ve got something to offer, stay the fuck out of my case.”
It feels like he’s talking right at me.
He gives a nod to two pretty little twin girls with his red hair.
They yank off the white sheet.
I can see just the tip of a stone wing from here. The line of people, curving around hundreds of graves, reminds me of an endless, colorful snake.
I’m lucky that the old lady’s friend was lost in the crush. She needed an extra hand on her elbow, and I was the closest thing she could grab. She knocked her cane around to maneuver us to a better place in line. When she asks, I tell her I’m Angie.
The news crews have been allowed to reposition up at the statue for close-ups of people weeping as they pay respects. That’s the first thing that’s worrying me.
I always keep my head down when cameras are around. I actually think of myself as a dove. My father has killed plenty of them, and doves are notoriously hard to kill. He always said to never shoot at the mass, always stick with your one bird. Focus on it until it falls. That’s how I imagine him hunting me, with a whole lot of patience.
A man in a lime green vest hands us each a tiny bag of wildflower seeds and says that when we reach the front, we should throw them at the statue “gently, in the manner we would a bride.” The old lady tells me that when I’m a bride, the only thing I should want thrown at me is money. She tells me that my skirt should be four inches longer and that letting the straps of my purple bra show is an open invitation for a boy to unhook it.
We move up a few feet, and she’s no longer focused on me. It’s like the waters part. I can see the whole monster thing. I read that the sculptor was provided a giant chunk of stone from the Branson field and told to free the spirits of Trumanell and Odette.
What he found is a freak show—the offspring of Daenerys Targaryen if she mated with her brother and one of her dragons. Wings are sprouting off each side. A crown of flowers is settled on a long trail of hair. There aren’t two faces, just one, and it’s polished smooth and blank.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” the old lady asks me. “The empty face representing their unfinished lives and unexplained disappearance? The crown representing Trumanell’s near-goddess status in this town and her deep love of nature? The wings representing Odette’s courage and her freedom to soar now that she no longer needs two legs?”
“It certainly is,” I lie enthusiastically. “It could be in the Louvre.”
Too much, I think. She eyes me suspiciously, and I instantly feel stripped, like she knows everything. She knows I’m lying about my name. She knows I keep jerking my head to the left to see if anything’s coming because there’s a hole on that side of my face.
She knows I lived in a trailer park where most people never even heard of the Louvre, but where there’s no faster education on earth. Take away an eye, and you get a Ph.D. Add a year in a group home with pissed-off girls who feel like thrown-away Kleenex, and it’s a study abroad on every planet in the universe.
“Most girls your age would pronounce that Loover,” she’s saying. “Whom do you belong to? Take off those sunglasses so I can see your face.”
“I’m Laura Jackson’s girl.” It stumbles out like the truth.
Confidence. I push the sunglasses up on my head and stare straight into her foggy blue eyes. My instinct after I first lost my eye was to look away—like if I couldn’t see into somebody else’s eyes, they couldn’t see into mine. Big mistake. Then people know something is wrong. So I’ve worked at it. I’ve been whittling away at my Oklahoma accent, too, even though it’s always there, a worm wanting out of a hole.
“You’re a pretty girl,” she announces. “You shouldn’t be hiding behind those big glasses. I used to be just as pretty. I was the first homecoming queen in this town. More than sixty years ago. I rode around all night in the back of a pickup, waving my hand off, just like Trumanell Branson, thinking life was all mine. Life is never yours. You are just renting it out while the landlord in the sky ups the price until you can’t pay anymore. But what are you going to do? Like Charles Manson said, we’re all living with the death penalty.”
There’s a sharp jab of a finger in my back. The woman behind us, impatient.
It’s our turn. A hand-printed sign orders us to stick to a time limit. Ten seconds each.
I glance up. And up. Fifteen feet, at least.
They have no eyes to see.
No mouth to breathe.
I drop to my knees. The cameras draw closer.
My seeds clink against stone feet.
I stay my full ten seconds and more, until the old lady pokes me with her cane. I want to run, but the words chiseled into the pedestal remind me why I have to stay.
We will wait forever.
Not me.
I’m coming after you, you son of a bitch.
39
When I track down the old lady’s companion in the middle of the line to reunite them, he throws his arms around me and says most girls my age would not have taken the trouble. I decide he is about the right age to be the old lady’s son, but isn’t.
The front of his shirt declares the dates of Odette’s birth and disappearance. Odette was twenty-six, a meaningless number when it comes to the effect you can have on the world.
Amy Winehouse died at twenty-seven. Jesus, thirty-three. Joan of Arc, nineteen. Pocahontas, twenty. Anne Frank, fifteen.
It makes me feel better to think about them, like Odette’s part of a heroic posse. And to know that it’s not such a joke for me to try to grab a small piece of justice at eighteen with a list of names, a map, six words, and one eye.
It turns out that I am smart with one eye. I can draw and paint with one eye. Play the guitar with one eye. Pass my driver’s test the first time out with one eye. Make out with boys with one eye, although I’ve always pretended to have two. Boys never notice I don’t have two exactly perfect eyes when I am happy to show them two exactly perfect breasts.
Looking over my shoulder is literally the most natural thing in the world to me. I’m hyper-vigilant. I hug the shadows. And I’m shit out of nowhere, as my aunt used to say. I’m pretty sure Odette’s killer doesn’t even know I exist. Sometimes I’m not sure I exist.
The old lady gives me an awkward pat goodbye. She tells me to keep up my art vocabulary. She says, “I will not forget you, Angie,” and I feel a prickle of guilt.
I’ve had a lot of names over the years.
Things like Angie that I make up on the spot, for one-time-only use.
Things people nicknamed me, like Angel.
Peephole. Hole in One. Fifty-Fifty.
The Girl with One Eye being the laziest and most common.
Official ones, like my birth name, Montana Shirley Cox. Every child on my mother’s side going back three generations has been given a first name for a state, city, or country plus a middle name for a dead relative.
My mother’s name was Georgia, but she’s also dead, so if I ever have a child, I wonder if he or she will be named almost 100 percent geographically.
At the group home, I used to travel around the globe in my head, picking cities, while I focused on a spider carcass that hung from the ceiling over my bunk. For my first baby girl, I liked the name Cheyenne Georgia, although Seville Georgia was a contender. For a boy, Camden or Harlem George.