It was true I wanted more than his help as a scientist, though. I wanted wine and kissing under bridges. I wanted his big hands buried in my hair, and I wanted to be with him in Paris. Hell, I wanted to be under him in Paris. It was only that I had no idea how to get to there from here. I’d never seduced anyone. I’d never even tried. I felt my cheeks heat up, and she nodded, like my blush was confirmation.
“So what. So I like him,” I said, hating that she had me on the defensive. “Is that so awful?”
“Yes. It’s awful,” she said, like she was explaining something obvious. She moved so she could look at me, up and down, appraising me like I was bad cattle. I was getting angry now, too. Her gaze was so intimate, it felt insulting. “You’re angling for Bridget’s place?” she asked. I’d never heard the name, but of course I knew who Bridget was. Instantly. “Please. You’re not even half a Bridget, you fetus. You’re not even Bridget Lite. How dare you try to step into her shoes.”
“It’s not like she’s using them,” I snapped without thinking, and instantly felt my flush turn into beet-red shame.
“Wow,” Paula said. “At least we know where we stand now.”
“I guess we do,” I said. I was ashamed of what I’d said in anger, yes, but I would not back down.
I’d figured Paula out now. How ironic that I’d thought of Bridget as my rival, when I saw her photograph on the news. A part of me had been relieved to find his house was not a shrine to her, as if she were the first Mrs. DeWinter. It was the opposite. No clothes, no leftover lipstick or perfume. Not even any photographs, just a bunch of square shadows on the wall where framed things had once hung.
I’d only found a hint of her yesterday when I was looking for a hand towel. I’d seen a broken rosary in the back of an otherwise empty bathroom drawer. I’d thought, Is William Catholic? He didn’t seem Catholic. He didn’t seem anything. I’d wondered idly, like a girl testing out last names in her notebook, if I’d have to convert. It would upset my parents, but at least it would upset both of them equally. Dad would feel I’d chosen a form of Christianity, and Mimmy would be equally certain that I hadn’t.
When I’d pulled the rosary out and saw its pale coral beads, the delicate silver crucifix, I realized it was too feminine for William. I’d shoved it way back in the drawer again, quickly, like it had gone red-hot.
Now I wondered who exactly had cleared all Bridget’s things away so thoroughly. Had Paula done it, to make room for herself? I was willing to bet she had. She knew where William kept the garden key, and she let herself in every night like she already belonged here. I’d thought she was William’s Walcott, but she wasn’t worth even one of Walcott’s toes.
The front door reopened, and she turned her attention away from me. It felt like a hook being peeled out of my skin. As they came in, Natty was talking in his outdoor voice, loud and excited.
“. . . that kind of beetle. Don’t scare him! You’ll make him smell like fart!” and William laughed.
Paula had started forward, but she froze at the sound. William had a big laugh, weirdly overloud, like his volume knob was busted. I hadn’t heard it since the Circle K. He’d laughed like this when he got shot.
That was strange; since I’d practically been living here, I hadn’t heard him laugh. For a second I didn’t know if that was because he was some flavor of autistic. Maybe he didn’t laugh because he didn’t feel things. I had some vague idea that that was what Asperger’s meant. But that picture, with Bridget, holding his little girl in his lap . . . Maybe I only hadn’t heard him laughing because he was so damn sad, like anyone would be.
The sound of it changed Paula’s face. She swallowed and her eyes pinked up. I stopped wondering. I didn’t know much about Asperger’s, but I damn well knew William. I’d seen all the way down into him, back in the Circle K. I knew him even better now. I’d watched him be so sweet and patient with my kid, and I’d poked my nose into the crannies of this scraped-out shell of a house, even the smallest bedroom, the empty one, with walls the color of orange sherbet. Happy fat bluebirds flew in a hand-painted line up near the ceiling. A child’s room, now with no toys, no window treatments, just a sad dust bunny drifting across the bare floor with no bed or dresser to hide under.
He wasn’t incapable of feeling. He was heartbroken. Even Paula the hard case was halfway to crying because his big laugh was a good sound, a familiar sound. One that had been missing.
Natty paused in the doorway, pointing up at the porch light, so excited. “William! That’s a Cope’s Gray! It’s not typical for him to go down out of trees.”
William leaned down and swung Natty up, favoring his shot side. He held Natty high to see the frog who’d come to eat the porch light bugs. He was saying something about its thigh coloration, feeding facts to Natty’s information-hungry brain, both of them squinting into the light.
Watching him hold Natty, their heads bent together, the whites of Paula’s eyes had gone even redder.
William set Natty down, and Paula turned her back and started rinsing the same two plates she’d already rinsed. Natty invaded the kitchen, begging for a Tupperware to catch the slimy friend they’d found out there. William followed at a slower pace.
“No, honey, we have to leave him out. It’s mating season. He’s come down to find a girlfriend.” I still sounded shaky. Paula’s spine got even more rigid as she stood, rewashing the only clean dishes.
William came over, too, walking into air so thick with cat-fight tension that to me it tasted just like estrogen. He didn’t seem to notice, saying, “He says he misses the ‘yell-y frogs’ at night.”
Up on Mimmy’s mountain, the treetops were full of about a million of those bloaty-looking fellows. They hollered all summer long, clamoring for love.
“Maybe we can get a CD,” I said, trying to sound normal.
Natty scrubbed at his eyes with his fists, saying, “Real frogs is better.” It was full dark now, and these days, the closer he came to the badlands of sleep, the more baby-talk invaded his sentences.
William said to him, “We could make a terrarium. You could have frogs chirping in your room.”
“No, you cannot,” I said.
“You don’t like frogs?” William said, surprised, as if frogs were universally beloved, like chocolate or songs.
“I like frogs fine. Outside. Not in the house where Natty could leave the lid open, and they could come and touch my sleeping face with their sticky little creep feet.”
It was the longest conversation we’d ever had in Paula’s presence. Usually, she took over, shutting me out. Now she finally had herself together. She turned around and reached for her abandoned beer.
William saw her reddened eyes. “What did I miss?”
Paula waved one hand dismissively, “Shandi and I were discussing history. She thinks Columbus is a superhero, landing on an ‘undiscovered’ continent. It upset me. There was a whole nation of people who belonged here already, with a far more valid claim.”
He looked to me, his eyebrows raised.
I said, “It’s sad, but it’s history. We were all born in the country that came next. I’m a big fan of the fresh start.”
The silence after that was strained. William looked back and forth between us like he’d heard a few bars of a song he knew but could not place.
Natty said, “We could have catched him for a minute, though,” claiming William’s attention.
“Another night. I see Green Tree Frogs here quite frequently.”
Paula pitched her voice low, talking under them, so only I could hear. “Oh, kitten heels, it’s on. I’m gonna sink your battleship.” Then she walked past me, took William’s arm, and walked him away from me manually. “So, Kai still won’t call me back. I heard from Tank that she joined some sort of a farm co-op. I’m guessing cult?”
William snorted. “Your mother sel
ling airport flowers. Yeah. I can see that.”
Natty was yawning. He came over to lean on my leg, saying, “But I do want that frog termarmium, Mommy.”
Natty could say anaphylactic and ludicrous and the Latin names of fifty kinds of bugs without a hitch, so I knew he was done for the day.
I ceded William to Paula, but only for the moment. Tomorrow was another day.
I took my kid back to the condo. I tucked him into bed with his light saber and his big Darth Vader mask and helmet. In my son’s post-Stevie world, a decapitated Dark Lord was better comfort than poor old Yellow Friend. His room at the condo also had a star-shaped night-light from Dad, plus Praying Hands Jesus and Mimmy in her red bikini watching over him from the wall. A growing flock of William’s origami birds stood sentinel on the bedside table, but none of these things could stop big black bombs and guns with feet from hunting my kid. By midnight he’d crawled into bed with me.
I didn’t need the shrink Dad was paying for to tell me these bad things were all substitute Stevies. She specialized in PTSD in children, but so far it looked to me like Dad was shelling out two hundred bucks a pop for a kindly old lady to watch Natty make little plastic good guys beat the crap out of little plastic bad guys. I did that with him every day for free.
It surely wasn’t helping him sleep. He spent the rest of the night fisting his hands in my hair, throwing out his arms and punching me in the throat, and flipping around like a slinky and then shoving his little toes up into my nostrils.
I lay there, drifting in and out. I loved him way past crazy, but he was not the man I wanted in my bed. That man was in Morningside, sleeping the hard sleep of the recently shot. Alone. I hoped.
I might not know squat about seduction, but Paula, I was willing to bet, knew it sixteen ways from Sunday. She was slinky and so exotic-looking with those pale eyes, up-tilted like a cat’s. All her suit skirts were two inches higher than what I would consider to be strictly professional.
They’d said on the news that the accident had happened exactly a year before the robbery; I’d appeared on the horizon exactly one day before it became socially acceptable for her to make a move on him. No wonder she hated me.
And me, stupidly casting her as a bitchy lady Walcott, hadn’t realized I had competition. I’d been too busy Mimmy-ing out, and Mimmy, post-divorce, had lived what the Baptists called a blameless life. She kept her lamp trimmed and waited for nothing, immaculate. She sold all her candy and gave her fried chicken to families that had been invaded by new babies. No man was invited in to eat off her table and admire the way her house sparkled. Mimmy looked hot, but inside, the only thing less sexual than Mimmy was a puffy baby kitten eating pudding. Vanilla pudding.
I’d been broken for so long that the first time my body woke up to a man, I’d pulled on my circa 1957 clothes and started dusting, wearing pearls. It made sense, I guess. I’d fallen hard for William on the same day I decided I could no longer pretend my son’s conception was a miracle, immaculate and tidy. It helped that the bullet hole made William a supersafe man to be alone with. While I was playing nursemaid, I didn’t have to move ahead with any of it. Not finding my red-clay golem man, and not sex.
Paula, who walked in heels like she was sex itself, shaking out her oil-black hair, thick and coarse as a pony’s mane, was marking him like territory. I couldn’t stall any longer. Not on either front.
The next day, I got up early and dressed myself so carefully. A full circle skirt with a white midi blouse. I even went for the Peter Pan collar. Hair in a high pony. Perfect red lipstick, like a stop sign aimed at kissing. I wanted to take the sex out of today, all of it, to keep it safe for later.
Natty and I ran a bunch of errands, first thing. That afternoon, when I headed toward William’s house, I had two bags in the car. One was full of everything I needed to make Mimmy’s best corn chowder. The other was my old gym bag, unearthed from my closet at Dad and Bethany’s while Bethany was at Pilates.
I set them down on William’s kitchen counter, pushed all the way against the tile backsplash. William was in his room. I loaded the dishwasher, then went to put Natty down for his nap on the loveseat in the office. He made me pin his sheriff’s badge on before he could sleep.
“I need it for being brave in,” he said, which broke my heart. I stayed, petting his feet until he drifted off.
When I finally left him, I found William drinking coffee at the breakfast bar, still in sweat pants and an old white tee.
“You look like you could use a nap, too,” he told me.
“Thanks! I love it when men tell me that,” I said, smiling, but if I looked half as sick as I felt, I couldn’t blame him.
I’d never actually told anyone. Walcott had handled all those parts for me. I was scared to even try, but my spine was set. I knew inside the Circle K that I should have told this story a long time ago. I had to tell it, now. I wanted William Ashe to be the first.
I went into the kitchen, letting the breakfast bar create some space between us. I got the first bag and began laying out the soup ingredients on the granite countertop, very tidy, like the fate of nations hinged on whether or not the onions lined up straight. Making this soup would be my last act of Mimmy-hood. I wanted it to count.
“In the hospital, I asked you for a favor, but you were kind of glassy. Do you remember?” I asked him.
In my peripheral vision I could see his head cock to the side in that odd, un-human way he had. It reminded me of the velociraptors from Jurassic Park.
“You said you killed a miracle. You said things about science and destiny. I told you I’d help you, and I meant it. I’ve thought about it since, quite a bit. But you never brought it up again, and I was coming out of anesthesia and taking opiates. I was beginning to wonder if it happened as I remembered it.”
“It happened pretty much like that,” I said, low. It made it easier, to have him say he really meant to help. So I began talking, taking him with me to just before I started my senior year of high school.
It was my dad’s weekend, and I was supposed to be at the late movie with a bunch of kids from synagogue. I barely remembered calling Walcott a little after midnight, but I did. He heard Pink caterwauling over a heavy dance beat, heard me yelling that he should please come to the party and get me now. I laughed in a high-pitched cackle, and when he asked me where the hell I was, I said, “I think the Kappa house? Kappa Lappa Something?”
He heard a boy’s voice talking, close to the phone, which meant close to my face. Then I’d disconnected.
He called me back, again and again, but he only got my voice mail. I’d sounded so weird. After the ninth call, he was alarmed enough to go downstairs and steal his one mom’s Visa and his other mom’s Prius. He came galloping over the hills in a white hybrid, getting forty-six miles to the gallon, to save me.
He picked Emory, because it was the closest campus to my dad’s with housing for the Greeks. By the time he found Kappu Nu, it was after three A.M., but inside their big white house, a party was still raging. He loped through, doing a lap of the ground floor before taking the stairs two at a time. He opened every door he found, busting in on kids having all kinds of probably consensual sex, on a naked couple so busy yelling at each other they never knew he was there, on three frat boys passing a water pipe, and finally a bathroom full of buzzed girls smearing on fresh lipstick. He pushed his way in, but none of the girls was me. He went back downstairs and waded around the impromptu dance floor until he’d peered into the face of every shortish girl with dark hair he could find.
He left the house. He walked down the road calling my name. He was about to go back to his car, thinking he had chosen the wrong campus, when he saw a yellow VW parked on the next block. He knew that Mimmy-enraging DA DS GRL vanity plate; Dad had had the car delivered in the middle of my Lumpkin County Sweet Sixteen. So Walcott went back. He stood in the
front yard, pacing back and forth, hollering my name over the muffled sound of dance-music backbeats trapped inside.
I heard him.
I said his name back, though my tongue was so thick and dry it was like a wad of cotton in my mouth.
My eyes opened, and I was staring up at the stars through the branches of some oak trees. I could hear the party, and over that, Walcott’s voice sounded again, now hollering, “Marco?”
I called back, “Polo,” through my cotton wool mouth.
I was lying on a half-deflated beanbag chair, weather damaged and sad. I lifted my head and saw him coming, a long, thin line of vertical Walcott, appearing through the trees in the backyard. I let my head tip back, and above me, through the leaves, the stars were spinning on strings, like a baby’s mobile some crazy god had strung up just for me.
I could feel thin grass sprouting from the red clay soil under my feet. I flexed my naked toes. My silver sandals were gone, baby, gone. I lay there trying to remember what had made me skip meeting up with my Atlanta friends, heading off instead to a party with two older girls I’d just that second met at Starbucks. Oh, right. I’d been pissed about some stupid fight with Bethany.
“Marco?” Walcott called again.
I put my head up to say “Polo” and the world spun, but I saw him see me. My head tipped back. I blinked such a long blink that when I opened my eyes Walcott was there, as if he had teleported to me.
I heard him saying, “Shandi, Shandi. Oh shit, Shandi.”
I felt his hands, first scrabbling at my waist, then brushing my bare thighs. He was pulling my bunched-up skirt down. It registered then, distantly, that I felt too breezy down there to be wearing any panties.
“Hi, Walcott,” I said.
“Shandi, are you drunk?” Walcott asked.
We weren’t that get-wasted-every-weekend kind. Sure, we’d snuck a bottle or two of his momses’ organic Pinot, but always together. Never out in the unsafe world where I could end up on a beanbag chair with my skirt hiked up, showing Walcott and the crazy swinging stars all of my private business.