“I made Odette listen to the Turnpike Troubadours until she loved them as much as I did,” Rusty is saying. “I take it you know this, but Goodbye Normal Street was our anthem. Lust and desperation in a small town. Whenever we’d hit a bad domestic, one of us would say it under our breath, ‘Goodbye Normal Street.’” He swerves onto the highway. “Music makes life bearable to me. She made life bearable.”
“Odette isn’t alive,” I say.
“I know,” he replies.
54
When I reach the cemetery gates, I’m sucking at humid air, a sharp ping on my right side. The sun has about three minutes left.
Go ahead, dark. Come. Everything bad that ever happened to me has happened while the sun was out. Here in the dark with a couple of acres of dead people, I can be just another stone angel kneeling. I can clap my hands in prayer and be still, while someone walks right past me. I’ve done it before, by my mother’s grave.
It was a 3.8-mile run out here in 95-degree heat, a lot of it on dirt road. The GPS on my phone didn’t map the ruts. One of my knees is bleeding from a little tumble. The scratch on my arm from the barbed wire has opened up.
I think my heels are bloody, too, because sweat doesn’t feel that thick. I drop down on the nearest flat grave marker—sorry, Dexter Daniel Hughes—and yank off my cheap new running shoes. I examine my feet. They’re a complete mess—a perfectly disgusting Facebook post if I did that sort of thing and if I weren’t afraid my father would recognize even the torn-up skin on my toes.
Yes, Rusty, I’m a girl always running. And something made me decide to run back here.
An hour and a half ago, Rusty did exactly what I wanted—he dropped me off at the Dairy Queen. He didn’t act like he cared where I was going to sleep. He said I could come get my car tomorrow morning by eight in the parking lot of the library in the center of town. I’m certain that he or his partner will be waiting when I do. So now I have to decide if I can get by without one.
Until I was sure Rusty had taken off, I got lost in the Walmart next door to the Dairy Queen. I bought a bottle of water, more sour gummies, a little flashlight, running shoes, socks, shorts, and a $7 T-shirt that says Be Kind across the chest in gold sequins. I wonder what Odette would think if she knew people have had to be reminded of that for the last five years.
In the bathroom, I changed from my dress and flip-flops, stuffing them into the Walmart bag along with the hamburger and onion rings Rusty bought me as part of his pretend little truce.
Now my toes are playing in the cool grass, but my heels are still on fire. Not a thing out here is moving but the lights of two distant planes that look like they’re on a path to collide.
I dig through the Walmart bag for my flip-flops, abandon the crappy running shoes on Dexter’s slab, turn on my flashlight. This place is an obstacle course of gravestones, piles of dirt, waiting rectangular holes, trees trying to push up rotting dead people with their roots.
When my heel squishes into the muddy grass over the bones of a Sweet Baby Grace, age 4, it doesn’t bother me in the least. Cemeteries are where I think best. From ages ten to twelve, I liked to lie down on top of my mother’s grave and go to sleep. That’s where my aunt, drunk and pissed off, would sometimes find me at four in the morning.
My mother and I used to take walks in a different kind of cemetery, a field a couple of miles from our trailer. Cactus popped out of the ground as far as we could see. She’d say we were walking through the devil’s gravestones—that the yellow dandelions poking up around prickly evil were reminders of resurrection.
Wish big. That was what she told me, while we sat on rocks and blew dandelions. Her big wish was a black granite countertop.
I’m almost certain I passed this same shepherd with the broken nose a few minutes ago. I’ve been lost in enough cemeteries to know that it always feels like the graves are moving around, playing a sneaky game of chess.
On Sunday, the Bat Queen seemed to tower over everything. Now I’m coming up behind the shoulder of every angel and Virgin Mary like I’m looking for a lost friend in a dark club.
I’m about to give up when I almost trip over her.
A black-and-yellow blanket is draped like a Christmas tree skirt around her ankles. Presents are spread out underneath: stuffed animals, a baby doll with a hollow O for a mouth, a Batgirl figurine and a Princess Barbie still in their boxes, fake red carnations spray-glued with glitter, a crucifix stuck in the ground.
I run the flashlight up the stone folds of the dress to her face. Someone has shimmied up her and strung a silver broken-heart necklace around her neck.
All of these gifts are new, since the unveiling. After the memorial, cops were everywhere cleaning up stuffed animals and mementoes and sticking them in black garbage bags. A city worker had climbed a ladder to remove the pink lei and Mardi Gras beads that had been ring-tossed around her neck from the back of the crowd.
I pick up a sign knocked over on the ground and jam it back in place.
Leave Your Love Only. Thank You, The Mayor
This seems like permission to unwrap the blanket from around the Bat Queen’s ugly feet and use it for myself. I lay it out in front of her like a picnic blanket. A black bat is crocheted into a yellow oval in the center. The universal signal for distress. I sit in the middle of it and finish off the cold hamburger and onion rings. I lick the sugar off a sour gummy snake.
I reach over for the largest teddy bear, a white one holding a red heart in his paws, and stuff him under my head as a pillow. I close my eyes.
I see Odette the Warrior on her last night. The sharp outline of her shadow. The headlights of her truck smoking into the field.
I don’t think Odette was whacked on the back of the head or took a knife from behind. I think Odette fought. I think she saw her killer’s face before she died, and it was someone she knew.
I think she lost because she was a good person, not because she had only one leg.
Odette hesitated before deciding her killer should die, just like my mother did.
When my father raised his shotgun, my mother was focused on me. She hesitated, too, and that was her mistake.
I won’t hesitate.
It wouldn’t matter if Odette gave me a list with a hundred nice words.
I’m just not as good a person.
When my eyelids flip open, I’m flat on hard ground, staring straight up at the sky. One of the statue’s wings is stabbing a black triangle out of the moon. I’m not sure what woke me, but there’s a sense something did. I sit up. The moon is a full pie again.
A pair of headlights is weaving along the cemetery road, bouncing off the trees, maybe two hundred yards away. I flatten myself against the statue. As a longtime member of the midnight mourners, I know I’m not the only one to spend lonely nights by a grave. I wait for the lights to turn off, down another path.
They don’t. The lights are bouncing bigger, brighter, right at the statue. I don’t have time to pick up the blanket. I grab my plastic bag and roll my body into the shadow of a mausoleum. I crawl another fifty yards before picking a tree to hide behind.
It’s a car, not a pickup, but I can’t make out what kind or color. Gray maybe? Green? The headlights blink out, which gives me a nice black bath. A car door shuts quietly. I slide over for a better view. A shadow is kneeling by the statue but definitely not praying. It’s busy. Picking up the presents and tossing them in a box.