“Oh my God,” Paula says in a strangled voice, peering out the window.
William is busy typing in the name “Clayton Lilli.” It’s unusual, but is it unusual enough? Perhaps he needs more search terms.
“William! William!” Paula calls. Her tone is urgent.
“What?” he says, looking up from the screen.
She doesn’t turn around. She has shoved the curtains to one side and her palms are pressed flat against the glass. The room is dark, and outside, in his yard, he can see a faint orange light.
Paula says, “Your car is on fire.”
He gets up immediately and comes to the window, pushing in beside her.
So it is.
For a moment, he is once again caught in the free fall of vertigo. His heart pounds when he sees the orange glow inside his car. The breath leaves his body, and the exhale shapes itself into her name. For the span of that half breath, the fire reads like a reverse love letter, a violent no, an angry bomb set in answer to his long-ago fireworks.
By the inhale, he knows this is ridiculous. And yet the feeling lingers as he sprints for the extinguisher.
Chapter 9
I knew nothing about seduction when I started. Now, at least, I knew that I was bad at it. I also knew it required more than a wardrobe change, no matter what music videos and a thousand romantic comedies had taught me. Most of all, I’d learned it was impossible to give it a serious go without a babysitter.
I didn’t have one. Walcott hadn’t returned my last three calls. Another couple days of this crap and I’d get in my car and drive to Lumpkin County to see if he had died and forgotten to tell me.
I couldn’t invite Mimmy to Dad’s condo, even though Dad had cleared out. (He’d stopped by twice, bearing gifts, but he’d used the doorbell like a guest. He said he wanted it to be our place, for real.) That left mixing Natty in with my half brothers for Bethany’s nanny to keep. The boys all got along, and Bethany hated it as a bonus, but Oscar was recovering from a stomach flu. That closed that option off until at least the weekend.
William didn’t seem to mind me and Natty showing up and hanging out, but he didn’t try to jump me just because I put on my red Marilyn dress or the micro-est of all my seventies minis. I tried speaking in a husky voice, and he asked me, “Do you need a lozenge?” like I was his wheezy grampa. I even tried to channel Reese Witherspoon, dropping a pen when he was behind me and starting a slow bend to pick it up. He stepped around and got it for me, leaving me jacked at the waist and feeling like fifty different kinds of fool. It didn’t help that I suspected Paula would know exactly how to do this. Assuming she wasn’t doing it—and more—already.
My time was running out. He slept less and went on long walks now. He spent hours at his lab, analyzing the cheek swabs and the bag I’d given him. He spoke as if any day now he would have a tidy file of facts for me to take to a P.I. and our business would be done.
I still didn’t believe that. I thought, instead, that the great god Thor would find the actual guy—a name and a mailing address and a face. His identity would be the world’s worst present, wrapped in a bloodred bow, because then I’d have to choose. Once the Golem had a face, I’d have to decide what to do with him, or to him. What if I was the first link in a long chain of drugged girls? Could I stop him and still keep Natty safe from ever knowing? Part of me hoped he would be so distant that I would have no choice but to let it go. Like if he was in Alaska, or dead. Maybe even dead in Alaska.
God, I wanted to know who he was, though. More than that. I knew that I would know. My heart believed in it, in William, in spite of every rational thing my mind said.
Wednesday, I got to his house while he was still at the lab. I let myself in with the hidden outside key, and then I taught Natty to play blackjack, using jelly beans for chips. He cleaned me out of all my reds and oranges and was swinging his feet and sneak-eating his winnings when I heard the door opening.
I leapt to my feet, smoothing my pencil skirt. I’d paired it with a low-cut top and a push-up bra that understood exactly how to work that neckline.
It was Paula, though, hours early, carrying her inevitable six-pack. She lounged in the doorway, eyeballing my cleavage, and said, “Yowsa! Put those away before someone loses an eye.”
Natty swung around on his bar seat to watch her cross the room, while I tugged uncomfortably at my blouse. She moved Natty’s art supplies down a foot and then banged the six-pack onto the coffee table, like she had such immediate plans for it that there was no reason to take it to the fridge. She plopped onto the sofa, slipping her black heels off and putting her bare feet up beside the beer, claiming the space. “Hiyas, Natty.”
“Hiyas, Paula,” said Natty, and his wide, red smile told me two things: he’d eaten enough jelly beans to thoroughly spoil his dinner, and he liked Paula just fine. I bet men of all ages liked her fine. Her bare legs were cinnamon colored and eighty miles long.
“Pack up your stuff,” Paula told him. “Tonight is grown-ups night. You and your mom are going home now.”
Natty started pushing the remaining jelly beans into a heap, obedient.
“No, we’re not. Go work on your poster,” I said, lifting him down.
Natty paused, looking back and forth between us. The Word of Mom won; he went to the coffee table and began coloring his purely godawful diagram of all the pieces of a beetle.
Paula put her hands behind her head, elbows bent, and stretched herself upward, spine bowing like a cat’s. I heard her back crack from across the room. For a minute the only sound in the room was the back-and-forth sawing of Natty’s crayon on the poster board. Then Paula started talking, apparently to the ceiling. She sure wasn’t looking at me.
“Did you know that Bridget once signed on to be a nun?” Paula told the ceiling. She had my whole attention the second she said that name, and she knew it. “The first vows are temporary. They last three years, in case you aren’t down with how the sisters go. But they are real vows. Poverty. Obedience. Chastity. That’s the one that gets me. If you take the next set of vows, it’s chastity, your whole life long. Can you imagine?”
I could, actually. I had imagined it, vividly, every time I broke up with a boyfriend, feeling permanently borked. But all I said was, “What’s your point, here?”
Paula chuckled and lay her head back, like she was done talking, but she had brought up Bridget for a reason. A nun. Who marries nuns? William, apparently. Perhaps her point was that he wouldn’t pick a follow-up who was as far from pure as I was. Maybe the sexpot wardrobe was actually working against me, and I’d do better in a burka. But if so, Paula and her skirts and her constant ooze of pheromones was as out of luck as I was.
Paula started talking again, still addressing the ceiling, “She worked at a mission down in the projects. William was doing this intense MD/PhD program at Emory, but he never let Bridget go alone. Can’t you see him, with those sledgehammer arms and very few discernible facial expressions, dragging a laptop and fifty pounds of textbooks, studying, while Bridget bent over a Dick-and-Jane book, teaching some detoxing, underage, illegal Mexican hooker to say ‘The pencil is yellow’ in English.”
“Little pitchers,” I said.
Paula glanced at Natty, wielding a blue Crayola with his head bent. He’d copied the bug parts diagram freehand from one of William’s books, making it huge. To decorate his room, he’d said. I could have cheerfully lived out my whole life without ever knowing what-all chunks made a bug, but Natty was entranced.
“Him? He’s not listening,” Paula said.
“He’s always listening,” I said, and then added without changing my tone, “Are you listening?”
“Yep,” Natty said.
Paula chuckled and said, “Fine. I’ll do the Disney version. After that, she went to the convent for twelve months of prayer and meditation before her fi
nal vows. No contact with the outside world at all. William was still at Emory, but his research was so hot Geneti-Tech had already signed him on. He was working eighty-, ninety-hour weeks, sleeping four hours a night. Guess where William went, every Saturday? That damn convent. It was almost two hundred miles away. Bridget wouldn’t come out, but there he was, up on the hillside every weekend, working on his laptop while the battery lasted, then doing push-ups, doing whatever crazy math William does for fun inside his head. He went all through fall, through the dead of winter. It rained every day in February, but William was there, running laps around the campus in the downpours.” She looked down at Natty. “That’s really cool, there, Natty. What is that?”
“A thorax,” Natty said.
“Does this story have a moral?” I asked her, impatient.
I figured I already knew it. She was showing me Bridget’s perfect dead-nun shoes, the ones I’d hatefully said that Bridget wasn’t using. She was telling me I could never grow big enough goodness feet to fill them.
But she surprised me, meeting my eyes and speaking with slow deliberation. “That’s what it looks like: William in love. Does it sound at all familiar?”
It was a low blow, and it landed. I’d never seen the William she described, but oh, I could imagine him. What that would feel like, to have him lay siege to the condo, pacing outside it like a massive wolf, howling for me to come down? I wanted, instantly, desperately, to see it for myself. Up close and super personal.
“Have you?” I challenged her back.
“Yes. Of course I have,” she said, smiling a wide smile that showed me all her teeth. Her dog teeth were exceptionally pointy. “But, hey, stay here. Make him a cozy dinner. He is desperately lonely. If I get out of the way, you could very well become the thing he’ll settle for.”
She said it all fake encouraging, like she was bucking me up. She was so at ease on the sofa, like this was her home, too, already. On some level she was enjoying this, and I was not. William could be at the lab for hours, and I didn’t want to stay here, sparring with her. Especially since I was losing. I stood up.
“Come on, Natty, let’s pack up your . . . thorax.”
Natty said, indignant, “It’s a beetle. Only this one part is a thorax.”
I picked up Natty’s poster for him. He took his bag of crayons.
Paula walked us out, playing hostess in a fake-gracious way that made my hands feel itchy with a faint desire to slap her. When we got to the door, Natty went kangaroo-hopping away across the grass, heading toward the car.
I paused and said to Paula, quietly, but sharp, “Can you please at least tell William to call me if he gets done with the tests today?”
“I’m sure he’ll call, if he has something for you.” Paula’s lemon-twist smile gave the words a second meaning.
“Oh, go to hell,” I said. I turned to go.
I heard her blow out an exasperated sigh, and then she called after me, “I will make sure you get the labs.”
“Sure you will,” I said. I kept walking.
“Hey. Hey!” she said, and something in her tone made me pause and look back at her. “Do you know what I do for a living?”
I was surprised enough by the question to answer it. “You’re a divorce lawyer.”
“Yeah, a great one. I only work for women,” Paula said. “I don’t let men screw women over. Ever, when I can help it. Even if I think that the women are heartless, pushy, baby whores. Don’t take that personally. It describes a large portion of my clientele. When your labs are done, I’ll get the info to you. Period.”
She shut the door, but I believed her. I hated that I believed her, but I did, enough to worry that she would take over and bring the reports to me, too. I wanted William to come to me, to follow me the way he’d once followed Bridget to a convent. I wanted him to bring me more than lab reports. I couldn’t see any of it happening with her camped out here, so I went home.
By nine o’clock, Natty was asleep, and William hadn’t called. Maybe he hadn’t finished yet. He could be at the lab, finding the Golem right now. Or he could be putting a dent in that six-pack with Paula, while she dripped all kinds of anti-Shandi poison in his ear and ran her bare toe up and down his leg.
I’d decided I might as well go to sleep, too, if I could stop the anxious twine of waiting from unspooling in my belly long enough to drop off. I needed to get at least an hour or two before Natty’s parade of bad dreams started.
I was heading up the stairs when the doorbell rang. I ran for the door with every organ in my middle trying to jam itself up into my throat. I half believed I’d see William there, in those low-slung faded jeans, coming after me like he’d once gone after Bridget, and bringing me my answers, too.
When I looked through the peephole, it was Walcott, standing on the stoop. I was too relieved to see him to be very disappointed. I threw the door open.
“Thank God, come in! Are we okay? You keep shunting me to voice mail, and I’m having desperate sorrows. When did you get in town?”
“Just now,” he said, going past me into the condo’s leather-and-chrome infested den. It was an awful room, made of angles and sharp glass edges, as if Bethany had told her decorator to make it a place where American Psycho would be totally at home. Right now, her cold-ass aesthetic was softened by the place being so filthy. With Dad using the on-call rooms at the hospital and me mostly at William’s, it had degenerated into a flophouse. Dishes and Natty’s cowboy things and all my laundry lay scattered across its sleek surfaces.
I followed Walcott, feeling strangely shy. We were almost never at odds. I didn’t know how to manage it. To fill the silence—I never had awkward silences with Walcott!—I said, “My dad got Natty that Lego Death Star.” It was a four-hundred-dollar toy, one of the unstoppable penance-gifts Dad was showering down on us, courtesy of Bethany being such a butthole right after the robbery.
“Oh, cool! Can I see it?”
Misfire. I flushed as I said, “It’s at William’s.” I could feel Walcott bristling. “Are you thirsty? I have beer and Cokes and I don’t know what all.”
“Sure.”
We passed through into the kitchen, which had a lot of stainless steel and slate gray granite countertops, but still was not as oppressive as the living room. If I were decorating for my dad, I’d do rich creams and deep, warm browns with a fat, welcoming sofa and a leather wingback.
“How’s Natty doing?” Walcott asked. “He already in bed?”
“Yeah. He’s not great,” I said. I got a beer out of the fridge and pushed it into his hand. “Mimmy offered to come spend the weekend, which might do Natty a world of good, but Lord. I can’t even imagine opening that negotiation with Bethany. I don’t own anything worth her allowing The Mimmy to come pee in her territory. Unless maybe Bethany needs a kidney? I have a spare.”
“Bethany’s more Tin Man,” Walcott said. He didn’t open his beer, just held it, and added, strangely rueful, “Too bad you only have the one heart.”
It was the kind of wryly mawkish joke he made when he’d been out overdrinking with the other poets, but he hadn’t even touched his beer. I got one, too, and then boosted myself up onto the countertop. I took a swig and it was so good, cold and really bitey. It was one of Dad’s small-batch local brews that cost the earth.
“I’m glad you’re finally here, Walcott. I hate being out of sorts with you. It makes everything taste like crap. Can you stay over? Maybe take a shift with Natty? I would pay you four cherry Pop-Tarts. It would seriously change my quality of life if I could get three hours of uninterrupted sleep.”
“Oh. Well. Hmm. I don’t think I can do that.” He said it slow, almost regretful.
“Poop. Are you still mad at me?” He shook his head. “Why then? Because of CeeCee?” I asked, rolling my eyes.
I’d introduced CeeCee t
o Walcott, and she knew we’d been slipping out our windows and sleeping at each other’s houses on the sly since we were nine. Ever since they got serious, though, she’d been making pushy little dabs at me, trying to step me out of territories she wanted only for herself, acting as if I were some kind of rival.
“Forget CeeCee. I broke up with CeeCee that night after the robbery.”
I looked at him then, really looked at him, studying his face in the kitchen’s bright lights. His mop of unruly brown hair was tufted up crazy like it got when he was stressed or his writing wasn’t going well. He had thick eyebrows arched over large, deep-set eyes. His nose was unapologetically big, but it was a noble damn nose, no matter what he said about it, balanced by his wide, full mouth. His face was so familiar that I hadn’t really looked at him, hadn’t noticed how his skin was drawn tight over his angular skull. He had purple circles under his eyes that rivaled mine.
“You didn’t tell me. Are you okay? I’m such an ass! Are you having PTSD, too?”
“I’m not sleeping great,” Walcott said, setting his untasted beer aside. “Listen, I can’t drink this. I can’t sleep over, none of that, because you are about to be furious and want me out of here.”
I blinked, taken aback, and then laughed. “I never want you out of anywhere.”
“You will this time. I came to ask you to put the brakes on all this crap with William Ashe.”
I sparked into an instant anger, just as Walcott had predicted, and that made me even madder. “That ship has sailed.”
Walcott shook his head. “I don’t mean the lab stuff.” He looked away, desperately unhappy. “I mean stop going over to his house all the time. Don’t let him build the Death Star with Natty. I should do the Death Star.”
I puffed air out in a psh noise. “William is not going to replace you with Natty, or with me. You have a Walcott-shaped perma-spot with us.”