I Love You More: A Novel (25 page)

Mr. Dork was staring out the window when I walked into the classroom. Mr. Dork is okay-looking I guess. He shaves his head, which is kind of cool, and he isn’t fat or anything, but he wears the same cowboy boots every single day. He says they’re made from an alligator that he killed himself. He also says he has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, run the Boston Marathon, played college football, was a narc, which I mentioned earlier, and dated Nicole Kidman (he keeps a framed picture of her on his desk) when he was in high school. No way Mr. Dork went to an all-girl high school in Sydney, Australia. Mr. Dork is one of the stupidest liars I know, the kind that thinks people believe stuff just because he says it. I mean it’s the information age. Ryan Anderson smiled at me as I walked to my seat. I smiled back. I hoped the entire class saw.
Especially Ashley Adams, who I had decided wasn’t that nice after all. Since Ryan and I had showed up together at Dairy Queen, she’d started doing things to get his attention, like bringing him candy, flipping her ponytail, or
accidentally
brushing his shoulder as she walked by him. She gave me the stink eye whenever she thought Ryan wasn’t looking. She’d also glued herself to the All That Girls.

When the bell rang, the kids who weren’t there already, which was a bunch of them, scrambled to their desks.

“Quiet down,” Mr. Dork said. He wrote the word
phlegmatic
on the chalkboard. “Who knows what this means?”

Nearly half the class raised their hands. I mean, seriously? He wrote that same word on the board every day. If it weren’t for Ryan Anderson, who, thankfully, hadn’t raised his hand, I probably would’ve gone to the principal’s office three grades ago and begged to switch into the regular (read “dumb”) kids class, which probably would’ve been an even bigger waste of my time, but at least I would’ve had Mrs. Fun (her real name was Bunn) all these years. At my school, you’re stuck with the same teacher, same classroom, and same kids from kindergarten through eighth grade.

“Ashley,” Mr. Dork said.

“Having a calm and unemotional disposition.” I rolled my eyes. Ashley was also a kiss up, not to mention ever since she’d taken Ryan’s place in the regional spelling bee, she’d been trying to worm her way into Ryan’s and my afternoon spelling practices.

“That’s right,” Mr. Dork said. “So let’s all put on our calm and unemotional dispositions, shall we?”

The day proceeded like any other. Math first, followed by English, recess, science, lunch, spelling, history, and, finally, social studies. After the last bell, I waited for the other kids to shuffle out of the room and went up to Mr. Dork’s desk.

“Mr. York, do you mind if I ask you where you get your doughnuts?”
He looked at me questioningly, so I added, “Mama asked me to stop and get fresh doughnuts on my way home. And since I’ve noticed that you eat doughnuts sometimes, I figured you might know of a grocery that carried them. Or a bakery.”

“How is your mama?” he asked.

“Fine, sir,” I said.

“That’s good.” He started stacking papers on his desk. “My wife generally gets them directly from Krispy Kreme”—
Mr. Dork has a wife?
I couldn’t imagine any woman, especially a smart woman, marrying Mr. Dork—“but there is this one place. What street do you live on, Picasso?”

“Magnolia,” I said.

“Ah yes, the flower streets.” He’d said
flower streets
as if there were a bunch of them when in fact there were only four, that I knew of anyway: Magnolia, Honeysuckle, Sunflower, and Daffodil. And they were
Lanes
not
Streets
. Before I figured out that being an only child was a good thing, and before I knew I actually had two half brothers and a half sister, which wasn’t a good thing, I used to ask Daddy if I could have a little sister, and he always said why did I need another sister when I had four of them already—Magnolia Lane, Honeysuckle Lane, Sunflower Lane, and Daffodil Lane. “We’re practically neighbors,” Mr. Dork continued. “My wife and I live on Bonnie Blue.” Bonnie Blue is a street; it’s one over from Cupid’s Court where Ryan and Ashley live, and six streets over from Magnolia. In my opinion that isn’t “practically neighbors.”

“Really?” I said, even though I, and everyone else in my class, especially Jimmy Wilkes and Hayden Matthews, knew exactly where Mr. Dork lived. Who did he think toilet-papered his house last Halloween?

“There is a small mom-and-pop grocery store just a few blocks past your street called Ken’s Market. I’ll draw you a map.” He went to the art cabinet and grabbed a sheet of red construction
paper and a black marker—how old did he think I was?—and proceeded to draw.

“Thank you,” I said, when he handed it to me.

“You bet,” he said. “Just be careful, okay. You’ll have to cross Sixth Avenue, but there are pedestrian signals.”

I started walking away.

“Oh, and Picasso.”

“Yes, sir?” I said.

“Keep up the good work. The school is grateful to you and Ryan. The two of you have put us in the regional spelling bee the second year in a row now. Principal Harper is even considering sending you two to the state competition if you finish well, which I’m confident you will.” He winked.

Ryan was waiting in the hallway. He walked with me to Ken’s Market, which, as it turned out, was in the little strip mall where Mama had taken Daddy’s shirts to be cleaned, and where Pizza Palace and Ming Lounge were located, my two favorite takeout and delivery places.

“You want to go upstairs and play a video game?” I asked him, when we finished unpacking the groceries. “I just got
Civilization
.”

“Cool,” he said. “Where’s your mom?”

“Sleeping. She’s not feeling well.” That was kind of true. I grabbed the doughnuts and some Cokes and we went to my room.

Ryan stayed until dinnertime. Mama still wasn’t out of bed when he left, so I made one of the Marie Callender’s chicken pies that I’d gotten from the grocery. I figured Mama wouldn’t be too happy, if she knew that is (I planned to stuff the empty box deep into the outside garbage can), since she prides herself on her chicken pies and says the frozen ones taste awful, but I must admit I really liked it. In fact, I think I might’ve liked it even better than Mama’s pies because, in all honesty, I’m not too big on broccoli.

Murder, like lies, comes in many colors. Early on we’d decided that ours was pink.

Every time we met at Rainy Cove Park, we’d perform the same ritual. After our trek through the dense woods, we’d lay out our blanket and sit in silence for a while, then we’d take off our clothes, fold them neatly, stand side by side, hold hands, walk into the lake, and as if we were engaging in a baptismal ceremony, submerge ourselves in the water’s warmth, invite its spirits to cleanse us of our impending act. For we each believed in our own almighties and thus knew on the most cellular of levels that what we planned was indeed one of the gravest of sins. When we returned to our sacred circle, we’d close our eyes, raise our faces to the sun, and imagine we sat inside a field of pink flowers, their velvety corollas tickling the skin of our necks, chins, cheeks, brushing across our naked breasts, bellies, thighs, toes, capturing us, folding us inside their stigmas, styles, ovaries, and only then, when we were fully buried within their ovules, fully soaked in their sweet redolence, only then were we at peace.

It was Bert who taught us the power of the pink petals. She recommended we continue this ritual: that we perform it in our hearts and minds while we killed Oliver and during the year we were apart.

We designated twelve “pink days.” At exactly one minute past midnight on the third day of each month, the monthly anniversaries of Oliver’s murder, we’d light candles, steep ourselves in baths of floating petals, and imagine ourselves communicating with one another. We’d share our pain, the difficulty we were having maneuvering our way through the empty hours, our moments of newfound joy. The only territory completely off-limits was the events of that fateful day. That information would only cross our minds and lips once, the day of our reunion. Not because we lamented or feared our crime; because we honored it. We held the act itself in the highest regard. We were part of an exclusive club. And we
knew
, because the winds and the water and the bark of the trees had whispered our destiny:

We would kill only once.

We would not get caught.

Yes, in the beginning, there would be chaos. Our lives would be shapeless and empty. Darkness would hover above us. But one day, long after Oliver’s flesh had drooled from his bones and dried to ash, long after we’d suffered pinnacle upon pinnacle of the greatest anguish we’d ever known, long after the gods had called light back into our lives, we would reach our fullest potential.

The first several times we took our pink-petaled baths, we tried to sort through our emotions about Oliver. How had we been so wrong about him? How had we missed the signs? Prior to making the pact to kill him, we’d read as much as we could find on the topic of sociopaths, and we learned more than we ever wanted to know about such a man. We learned the truth, and because each of us was a mirror for the others, we could no longer live in denial. We could no longer go back to the way it had been, to the life we’d known. We could no longer be the women we once were.

We remembered the day we finally faced ourselves. For Diana it was that moment when she realized Oliver had seen her in the
martini bar before. But there had been other clues, clues she now understood she’d chosen to miss. There was the time right after Picasso was born. She remembered being so tired, her body spent from natural childbirth, her breasts swollen with milk. She’d been half asleep when the phone rang, thought it was a wrong number because the woman on the end of the line had asked for someone named Peter.

“There’s no one here by that name,” she’d said. Oliver yanked the phone from her hand and rushed out of the room.

“I told you not to call here,” Diana heard him say; she hardly recognized her husband’s voice. It was cold, angry.

“I don’t care if he’s sick,” he continued. “Fuck, I don’t care if he’s dead. Got it? Do not call here again.”

It startled her when he threw the phone across the room.

Moments later he came back into the bedroom, sat down next to her, rubbed her shoulder. “Can I get you anything?” he’d asked. Kind. Soothing. The Oliver she knew.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“On the phone.”

“It was a wrong number, sweetie,” he said. His eyes were clear, honest. “Lie back and get some rest.”

For Jewels there was no specific clarifying event, but there was a moment of acknowledgment. For her, knowing had seeped into her in the way that dog urine soaks through an area rug. Things Oliver said didn’t ring true. At times his actions didn’t feel genuine. More and more there were his lies, his need to control, his skillful ability to manipulate even her, his lack of conscience. Most of all, there were those chilling eyes and that smile, the eyes and smile that weren’t those of the man she’d married, the eyes and smile that brought to her mind one word: evil. She’d never considered herself the jealous type, and yet following him had seemed as natural as making love to him. She wasn’t surprised
by what she found, but she was afraid. Deep down she knew she couldn’t confront him. There was nothing to gain by doing so, and a lot to lose. Approaching Diana and Bert was the only possible course of action. She
had
to know them. She
had
to understand how and why. She
had
to make sense of her role in this story. A story she could never have written. For Jewels, love departed as quickly as it had arrived. Diana and Bert had spoken of
feelings
, like pain, humiliation, betrayal, but she never felt any of those emotions. Fear was her only nemesis, and she’d realized quite soon after she discovered Oliver’s ways that she could control the fear. She just had to keep one step ahead of it.

For Bert, realization came before she married Oliver. It came on a warm, sunny day when they were driving back from having dinner in town and their car hit a dog, a yellow Lab. The dog was still breathing when she’d gone to him, and she’d begged Oliver to put him in the car and take him to the vet, but he’d refused.

“He’ll get blood all over the car,” he said. “And look at him. He’s almost dead anyway.”

Bert had stayed behind after Oliver drove off. She knocked on nearby doors, found the dog’s owner, accompanied her to the vet, paid the bill, consoled the woman when the dog died. Oliver was gone when she finally got home; not gone forever. Her days were merely up for that week. When she saw him again, she brought up the dog, but he insisted there’d been no such accident. His insistence was so pure, so steadfast, that she doubted herself rather than him. That day she realized it had always been that way. Oliver changed his story; she doubted her memories. And yet she’d married him.

The books we read painted a picture with which we were all familiar, but we’d ignored what we saw. We’d chosen only to see the Oliver we met. The handsome, charming, perfect man. The man who was so like us it was uncanny. Who knew our thoughts
before we said them. Who walked in step with us. Whose eyes met ours with such keen, abiding interest. Whose touch could send shivers throughout our bodies. Whose declarations of love had changed our worlds.