pretty girls on TV opened briefcases with prize money no one would win.
When I finally got home, I wanted to retreat to the coldest place on the planet or at least my husband’s arms. It turned out, those were the same things.
“I never knew you to be surprised at the vile nature of human beings,” Finn had said from the bed, while he watched me strip off my uniform. “We kill indiscriminately, always have, always will. People we love, people we don’t know, sisters, brothers, wives, children, best friends, neighbors, rats, snakes. We kill for fun out of car windows and deer blinds, for fifteen minutes of fame, because a bumper sticker says Zero Percent Republican, because the TV is too fucking loud. I’d say tomorrow will be different, but it will be the same.” He turned over and closed his eyes.
Finn’s a good guy. I married him, first and foremost, because he couldn’t lie without the vein in his forehead popping. So he never lied.
It’s not that he was wrong. But at that moment, I didn’t want to hear life was hopeless. I didn’t want a lecture from a clear-eyed lawyer who also had a rotten day.
So I went to the bar.
Wyatt brushed by.
I grabbed his arm right as he opened his pickup door.
The second Wyatt entered me in that parking lot was a welcome shot of pain, long overdue.
Now Wyatt is massaging that same arm I grabbed, the one his father broke when he was ten by pushing him off a tractor. He says that arm has told him things ever since.
The rubbing means he’s bothered. There’s so much I know about Wyatt that I wish I didn’t. So many reasons I think he’s innocent even with a strange girl trembling on his couch and acid rolling in my gut.
“I found her lying off the highway,” he’s saying. “She was wishing on dandelions, probably for someone to pick her up. It’s as simple as that. I have no idea how she got there. I think maybe she’s running.”
The girl whips her head up at his last sentence. That’s when I see the drooped lid, the squint, the flash of bloodshot red. I work hard to control the muscles of my mouth, keeping my own eyes blank and unsurprised, because that’s what I’d want.
My heart is suddenly so quiet I wonder if it’s beating. I tighten my grip on the gun, keeping it focused on Wyatt. I turn to the girl. “It’s going to be OK, honey. What’s your name?”
“Good luck on that,” Wyatt says. “She hasn’t said a word. I’m calling her Angel.”
“Wyatt. Over by Lila.”
“Come on, Odette.” He takes a step, tightening up on me. “You aren’t going to shoot me. There’s nothing here that can’t be settled without a gun. And you know what they’ll do if you call this in. I’ll be staring at metal bars. It will kick stuff up that’s just now settled down after that piece of shit TV documentary about True.”
The girl’s hair straggles to her thin shoulders. No shoes. Why didn’t he call this in right away? Did he touch her? I need to think all the things I’d think if this was someone I didn’t know.
“I’m taking her.” I strain to keep my cop voice.
“You can’t dump her in the system.”
“I’ll find out where she belongs. That’s my job.”
“Does she look like she belongs to somebody good? Are you going to be the girl I know today? Or a cop like all the rest? She needs that eye fixed. You think social services will jump on that? You throw her in the system and kids will tear her apart. Popeye. Evil Eye. Blackbeard. My daddy got called everything in the book.”
Stop. Talking. I blink back the imagery of Frank Branson’s eyes, one empty and brown, the other a treacherous piece of blue ice. He deserved every name he was called.
He could have afforded a prosthesis that matched the color of the other eye, that fit better, that didn’t roll around, that didn’t come out of some quack’s drawer of eyeballs, only a grade above a cheap marble collection. Wyatt’s father, though, was a twisted piece of work.
He once convinced Wyatt, at age four, while sitting across from him in a Dairy Queen booth, that he was a figment of Wyatt’s imagination—all because a waitress brought Wyatt his strawberry milkshake but forgot to bring his father’s.
Frank Branson used and reveled in the raw material presented to him.
Angel is raw material.
Wyatt