because you had to be a mean girl to make it through high school, you just did. So were our mothers; it’s something you don’t outgrow. They said Lily Archambault started Northshore Elementary with them but Lorna yanked her out, like Fort Jude was some kind of social disease that she could catch, and packed her off to Ashley Hall. She married a man in Charleston without telling her mother, things between them were that bad. Lorna brought Lily back to Fort Jude in her coffin – toxemia in the last month of pregnancy with Lucy, our mothers said, so you cut down on the salt.
She also brought home the baby like a prize.
Poor Lucy! If Hal Archambault hadn’t dumped her and moved out to the beach with Eden Rowse it might have been different, but Lucy was all she had left. She was always overprotective and cranky, but it got worse after the divorce. She locked Lucy up like Rapunzel in that tower, so it’s not our fault she didn’t fit in.
I said what everybody else was thinking, ‘I guess the old bitch got what she deserved.’
‘You mean the fire.’
‘Whatever it was.’ My God, last week I was in her front yard!
Out of the blue, Jessie said, ‘She lost her man. No wonder she was a bitch.’
I choked on my B.L.T. and ran to the john before anybody could say, ‘Are you all right?’
11
Dan
Burt Mixon, that unwitting genius of negative reinforcement, taught Dan the absolute integrity of personal space when he was old enough to know he had one, but not big enough to defend it.
The gawky, anxious girl’s strung so tight that the kindest thing he can do is let her go. When you get like that, you don’t want people to see you. Not the way you are. Dan knows. At the corner she turns around to check. He waves and goes back into the kind of heat that stops hearts. It’s exponential; even the cockroaches have died. Stalled in the sweltering shotgun hallway, Dan considers. He’s looking for so many things in his life that he can’t be sure what brought him here. It’s those fucking news photos, he thinks. The ones Lucy tried so hard to hide. As if your mother can protect you from certain things.
The gabled frame house where the old lady died may have been nice back in the day but it morphed under the hands of multiple tenants, who made it hideous. Heading upstairs, he picks his way through a jumble of makeshift partitions, amateur wiring and crap fixtures, searching with no clear idea of what he is looking for: diaries, perhaps. Notebooks. Some trace. A hook to hang his story on. He’d settle for a note crumpled in a kitchen cabinet or a cry for help scrawled on the plaster under torn wallpaper, but all he finds are insect carcasses and desiccated mice, empty roach eggs. Dust.
‘Come on,’ he says to no one. ‘Give me something.’
The attic, he thinks, even though it’s clear there are no secrets there. It’s hours until dark and he’s running out of next things to do. The girl left her pack, he notes, disproportionately cheered. The teddy bear tag has Steffy McCall scrawled on its belly, with the address. He can always drop it off at her house. Dan shoulders the pack and with a false sense of purpose, doubles back on the room where the woman died, looking for something – emotional detritus or some forgotten object or her outline scorched in the floor – anything to mark the fact that something stupendous happened here.
He studies the splintered floor and peels away wallpaper. He peers into her empty closet, but Lorna Archambault might as well have blasted off, shooting up through the ozone layer to flame out on the surface of the moon. He needs to go, but heat drops on him like a dentist’s protective lead blanket. Like a collapsing lawn chair, he folds into lotus position in the spot where her recliner stood.
Absorbing the space.
His breathing slows. His hands lie palms up on his knees, relaxed, open to whatever comes. It is the posture of meditation but there is the outside possibility that sleep throws a switch somewhere inside him; he won’t know. When he next looks up, his perception has jolted into a new place. Flies drop in mid-flight in this heat; reason is stillborn. In this place, in his exaggerated state, even pragmatic reporters like Dan Carteret can inhabit the