Maggie insists that I spend the night and orders me, like a mother, to never set foot in the Blue House again. She hasn’t been inside for years. Finn kept her out. Odette’s crypt, she calls it, which I think is both freaky and accurate.
Maggie works pro bono for nonprofits now. No more strangers in her house. That means the guest room is almost always wide open. There are tears in her eyes when she tells me Odette’s disappearance … changed my whole view of the world.
Rod is still an emergency room doctor, working an overnight shift at the hospital. Tomorrow, she says, the three of us will sit down and figure things out. I know what this means—Rod will drive me home, back to Bunny. It sets off a calm panic, like my body is slowly filling with boiling water.
We watch Disney movies, make popcorn, swing in the back yard. Normal. After pizza, Maggie flips on cartoons, and I curl up with a sleepy girl under each arm.
At some point, around nine, Maggie says she has to make a call and disappears to the bedroom. She’s gone twenty minutes. Thirty.
When she returns, her eyes are red.
“My mother,” she says. “It’s tough. She had a stroke several years ago. I call her every night. The nurses at the home say the sound of my voice calms her down. Five minutes later, she doesn’t remember that I called. But it’s the moment, right? You have to live in the very moment.”
On-screen, a blue rabbit and a green coyote are hugging it out.
I want so much to believe in Maggie. In a happy world of animation.
Maggie tucks me under cool sheets like my mother used to, like I’m not too old for it. The same beige curtains that were here when I was thirteen hide me from the outside. It seems like time has never passed, like I’ve always been running in place.
Around midnight, Lola sneaks out of her bed to bring me a fuzzy purple blanket with tiny pink hearts. She pats my cheek again. Tells me to not let the bedbugs bite.
I try to sleep. To wait for tomorrow.
But the voice in my head is urgent, repeating two words over and over.
Get Betty.
63
The front porch light beams cold. The flag, slack. Every window, dark. No car in the driveway.
The Blue House. Odette’s crypt.
I’m sucking at the thick, muggy air. I can’t fill my lungs enough. My legs are floppy from running another three miles. My skin is shimmering in the moonlight. All the way here I thought about what I know for sure.
I know that Odette’s father’s boots had Trumanell’s blood on them.
I stumble into the alley and stick the key into the door. I flick the kitchen switch. I don’t care who sees the light through the curtains. What I fear is inside with me.
The blue plate is drying on the dish towel where I left it. Every chair is tucked neatly under the table. Nothing is out of place.
Nothing.
Not even the Betty Crocker cookbook.
Finn has returned it to the shelf.
Trumanell’s bloody handprint is still glued flat behind the plastic. As far as I can tell, with some fast flipping, nothing looks torn out.
I can finish. I can know every word Odette left behind.
Is there a reason Finn now wants me to?
I check under every bed, behind every door. I call Finn, but it goes straight to voicemail. I want to call Rusty, but I don’t trust him. I want to call Wyatt, see if he’s OK, but I don’t trust him. I want to call Maggie, but I don’t trust her.
What does Bunny say? If you trust no one, the problem is you?
I cram Betty into the backpack with the gun. I grab all my personal stuff from the bathroom and closet shelf and stuff it in there, too.
I am almost out the door when I am stopped by a smear of mud on the kitchen floor. I feel an overwhelming need to erase myself. To wipe away every trace that I existed here. Every sliver of lint, crumb of toast, drop of toothpaste spit.
I’m sponging my fingerprints off the kitchen faucet with a dish towel when I realize how stupid this is.
Blood from my blisters and scratches stains Odette’s sheets. My hair is curled up in her bathtub drain. My skin cells are caught in the tape on the boxes I packed.
I steady myself.
I press my hand flat and hard and defiant in the middle of the cold steel of the refrigerator door.
I was here.
Remember me.
I’m back in the closet with Betty.
Trying to be methodical, like when I study—to miss nothing this time. The words are all running together. My muscles ache so much I can barely move.
Even though I know one of Odette’s pink skirts is what’s tickling my cheek, every minute or so I swat it like a spider.
No sleep. Just rest. It will be OK to stay a few hours, read Betty, pull myself together. That’s what I tell myself. I will leave at sunrise before Maggie discovers the empty bed. Uber, taxi, a bus, hitchhike. There is always a way to run.
I’ve cracked the closet door just enough that a slit of light spills through from the bedside lamp across the room onto my leg. I left it on as a comfort, a tiny campfire. But I am not at all comforted.
I refocus on the entry in front of me. Odette is debunking that documentary, The Tru Story.
The Tru Story:Trumanell was into witchcraft.
Fact:The cheerleaders read palms as a fundraiser.
The Tru Story:Trumanell came to school with unexplained marks on her throat.
Fact:Temporary rosacea, eleventh grade.
The Tru Story:Trumanell tried to drown herself.
Fact:Trumanell was swimming underwater so long during a party at the lake that half the football team went diving for her. She came up laughing.
The Tru Story:A plumber heard knocking in the attic when he fixed a pipe for Wyatt a year after Trumanell disappeared. Wyatt said it was squirrels.
Fact:????
On another page, crazy free verse. Moon rising, corn whispering, truck whirling, leg dying. Sketched beside it, a grave with a marker that says, “Here lies a leg.”
Below that, words that break my heart the rest of the way.
My father said I could make my leg my excuse or my story.
This book is her story. Maybe the answer I’m supposed to find in here isn’t about why Odette died but how she lived. How sanity and insanity, torn tissue and good tissue, can work together to make a beautiful person.
I turn to the very last page, mostly illegible.
My eye skips to the bottom.
That’s when time has a big fat seizure.
When you shudder for no reason, it’s supposed to mean someone is walking over your grave. I think Odette is the one who shuddered. She felt the future five years ago. She felt me tickling these pages in the closet floor like they were the back of her neck.
Don’t give up.
That was the last thing she wrote. To herself. To me.
For the briefest moment, we are one tremor in the same quake of time.
And then I am alone again with a piece of paper and her words. Just like before.
64
I jerk awake, knocking over one of Odette’s legs, which knocks Betty off my lap, which scatters loose pages all over the floor.
Was there a noise? I remain perfectly still, every nerve screaming at me to get up. The only thing I hear is a thin, high ringing in my ears. I begin to pick up the pages on the floor as silently as possible.
The crayon drawing of the house and barn.