Weeping openly now, Tamara climbed the stairs again. The door to the pink bedroom, her bedroom, was closed. She set the lantern down on the floor by the door. She jiggled the handle and found it locked. Levi had locked himself in her bedroom. No. She was locked out.
“Levi—”
“Go to bed, Tamara.”
“I have to talk to you.”
“Go to bed. We’re done talking.”
“But—”
“There is nothing you can say to make this all right. So we’re done.”
Tamara pressed her hands to the door as if she could magically make it open by sheer wanting.
She knew she should go. She knew she should leave him alone to cool off. But she had his come inside her and they were in the house where her daddy shot himself and she was scared. She hadn’t been this scared or miserable since the night of the flood.
“Momma was going to kill Kermit,” Tamara said. She didn’t say it loudly, but Levi must have heard her because after a minute the door opened a crack, and she nearly fell into the room.
“What did you say?”
Tamara stepped back, afraid she’d made it worse.
“Momma. On my birthday. I had to pick—either she’d kill Kermit or she’d fire you. I had to pick. That’s what she did to punish me for kissing you. Your job or my horse.”
“Your mother did that to you?”
Tamara nodded.
“What did you pick?”
“I should have picked your job, but I couldn’t do it. And I couldn’t pick Kermit, either. I told her I was going to get you and Kermit and we’d ride away and she could shoot herself instead. She slapped me and left. I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For not being able to save your job.”
“You think I would have picked my job over your horse? There are other jobs.”
“There are other horses.”
“Your daddy gave you Kermit.”
“Yes, he did.”
“Your mother is an evil woman.”
Before the night of the flood, Tamara would never have thought such a thing. Was her mother a little crazy? Well, yeah, but Granddaddy made everybody crazy. And who could blame her with her husband dead, too? And they’d fought a lot, her and her mother. She couldn’t have said she’d liked her mother all that much most days. But evil? No, Tamara would never have said that about her mother before that awful night. She’d felt sorry for her. Even in that big house with her big Cadillac and the credit cards Granddaddy paid for, there was something about her mother that had always reminded Tamara of a dog who had been kicked by its owner one too many times. But the pity was long gone. Her mother had killed the pity.
“Yes, I think she might be,” Tamara said.
Levi exhaled and rested his forehead against the door frame. With the lantern between them at their feet, Levi looked like a ghost of some sort, and she imagined she did, too. Their shadows stretched upward to the ceiling. She’d never been this tall, tall as a man, tall as a monster.
“After your mother fired me, I had this fantasy,” Levi said. “I’d come back to Arden at night and knock on your window.”
“You knew my window?”
“Last window on the side of the house nearest the road. Yeah, I knew your window.”
Tamara started to open her mouth, to say something to that, but decided better of it.
“I’d knock on your window in the middle of the night and get you to let me in. And then, in your own bed, I’d fuck your brains out. I’d do it the next night, too. And the night after. And every night until I knocked you up. And then you know what I dreamed of doing?”
“No,” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper.
“I’d leave you. I’d leave you pregnant and alone to face your mother and you’d have to tell her you were pregnant and it was mine, all mine.”
“That was your dream?” She’d had dreams like that, too. Not the part at the end. The part at the end was every girl’s nightmare.
He nodded. “My fantasy. My ugly awful fantasy to get back at your mother for what she said to me and what she did. I’m not telling you this because I’m proud of it. I’m not. Uncle Andre would kill me with his own hands if I did that to you or any other girl. And here you are, making me into that person I don’t want to be. Don’t do that to me. Do anything but that to me, Tamara.”