The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (29 page)

She was happy for Teddy that he’d been able to escape the weight of what had happened and create another life for himself, even if she hadn’t been able to. She’d married Martin, of course, a few years after Teddy left, but, although he was a perfectly nice man, he was no Teddy, and she never could talk to him the way she’d been able to talk to Teddy.

For years she’d kept a notebook full of things she wanted to tell Teddy, things only she and Teddy would appreciate. Small things,
mostly.
The oak tree in the side yard got struck by lightning and it split the trunk right in half, but I wouldn’t let them cut it down. I took swimming lessons at the Y, and it turns out I’m a natural! Remember Marcia Jenkins, that sweet but homely girl from down the street who was in my junior honors English class? She married a Canadian Inuit! In their newspaper picture the two of them are rubbing noses. Remember how I used to hate prunes? Well, I’ve gotten right fond of them in my old age
. And so on.

After she got caught up with planning to murder Wilson, she shut that notebook, Notes to Teddy, for good. Teddy would never understand, or condone, her desire to get even. Living well is the best revenge, he always reminded her. That’s what he’d said when she expressed to him her anger at her own parents, telling him how they’d abandoned her at her grandmother’s house in Little Rock so they could go off gallivanting in Hollywood. Teddy, while not making light of her anger, had encouraged her to forgive them, and after a time she had. But forgive Helen’s death? Never.

Suzi Witherspoon was the first young person she’d met, in all her years of teaching Sunday school and high school, whom she thought she could love the way she’d loved Helen. She had to go carefully with Suzi. Not make any mistakes. It was even possible that if she was able to have a grandparent-grandchild relationship with Suzi, her anger about Helen would dissipate and she could get on with enjoying the rest of her life. Live and let live, as Teddy would’ve said. It could happen, couldn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t too late.

The timer dinged and she removed her pineapple upside-down cake from the oven. She was supposed to take it to a potluck supper her Sunday school class was having that evening. Perhaps she could talk Suzi into coming with her.

* * *

The Leon County Public Library, where Marylou hadn’t been before, was a two-story affair with large plate glass windows, built in the
seventies. It was full, on this summer afternoon, of mothers with small children and office workers and scantily clad teenagers and people who appeared to be homeless napping in the air-conditioning.

Marylou had loved going to the Georgian-style, three-story library in downtown Little Rock when she was a child. Her grandmother would drop her off there a couple of afternoons a week, and in her memories of that library it was always summer. She relished the time by herself, the drowsy heat and whirring fans and smell of old book covers, sitting in the same plaid chair in the children’s room and deciding which five books, in the stack of mysteries she’d selected, she really wanted to check out, the same lady librarians working behind the counter, probably they were only in their forties but they looked, to Marylou, to be 140.

In the Leon County Library it was all DVDs and CDs and banks of computers. Suzi rode the elevator upstairs to get her books, and Marylou wandered to the back of the room downstairs where there was a children’s section. She leaned against a long bookshelf and glanced through children’s books—some of the same ones she’d read to Helen—
Three Little Horses
by Piet Worm, that strange book with the gorgeous illustrations of Blackie, Brownie, and Whitey dressed up like princesses—but she was also secretly watching the children sitting around her, industriously coloring the free coloring sheets handed out by the librarian and fighting with their siblings while their mothers searched the library catalog on the computer.

After a bit Suzi reappeared, limping—she’d left her crutches at home—with three books she was clutching to her chest. “Ready to go?” That excited look again.

“What you got there?” Marylou asked her casually.

Suzi blushed a deep scarlet under her SeaWorld cap. “Just some random books.”

“Oh. Okay.”

But Suzi really wanted to show her. She crowded closer to Marylou, who was already jammed up against the shelf. Suzi displayed her books one by one:
A Teenagers Guide to Sex, What Your Parents Won’t Tell You About Boys
, and
What Boys Are Really Thinking (and Should You Care?
).

“Huh,” Marylou said, nodding, and sighed. Typical teenage stuff, she supposed. But did they have to get interested so young?

“Can I spend the night at your house tonight?” Suzi asked her. “So I can read them? All my friends are busy or out of town.”

Marylou decided to ignore that last part and said sure, but would Suzi like to attend the Sunday school potluck with her?

“No way,” Suzi said vehemently.

So maybe Marylou was wrong about the folding in of the religion. Maybe Suzi’d already gone off it.

“That’s where the guy is. At church.”

“What guy?”

“Him.” Suzi held up the books again, glancing around as if she was afraid of someone listening in, although nobody was close enough to hear them.

“The young man you’re interested in?”

Suzi snorted. “He’s not that young.”

Remain calm, Marylou told herself. “How old is he?”

“Old. Really old.”

Marylou felt faint and gripped the bookcase behind her. “It’s just a crush, honey. Those come and go.”

To her horror, Suzi’s eyes filled with tears. “We did something we shouldn’t have done.”

Marylou led Suzi over to a miniature table and chairs and they perched, squatted really, on tiny kid chairs. Help, Marylou thought. What should she say? She’d never been a parent to a teenager. And the ones today were nothing like the ones she’d taught years ago. Or maybe
they were, but the ones she’d taught in the 1950s knew to hide things better.

“So you let him …” Marylou trailed off, wanting, and not wanting, to know the details.

“We had sex!” Suzi said, not even bothering to whisper.

Marylou glanced around the kids’ section, wild-eyed. Every person she looked at, mother and child, was staring back at her.

Suzi went on, talking too loudly. “I thought I wanted to, because I love him, I really do, but I wish I’d waited. I wanted to wait till I got married. Or at least engaged.”

Marylou whispered, “Honey. You’re not …”

“No!”

This time Marylou didn’t even bother to look around. She felt that righteous anger welling up in her again. She’d missed it. “Did he force you?”

“I’m such a slut.”

“You are not a slut.”

Suzi went on like Marylou hadn’t spoken. “
I
asked
him
. I thought I wanted to. I love him. And he wants to meet me again. Tonight! I told Sierra and she thought I should go tonight, but she probably thinks I’m a slut and is telling everyone.”

Marylou scooted her little chair toward Suzi and hugged her, comforting her as best she could. Why would sensible, sweet little Suzi do such a self-destructive thing? The poor kid!

Finally Suzi lifted her head from Marylou’s shoulder and whispered, “Don’t you want to know who it is?”

No, she thought. But she said, “If you want to tell me.”

The lip quivering again. The repressed smile. This next revelation, Marylou realized, was really the shocking part about what Suzi wanted Marylou to know. The other stuff was just warm-up.

“It’s against the law, having sex with a young girl,” Marylou heard herself say. “Whoever did this to you could be arrested. Should be.”

“I know, I know. I don’t want him to get into trouble. His wife can’t find out. Ever.”

Marylou gripped the seat of her chair. “He has a wife?” She’d been picturing some nasty, sly-faced older teenager, not someone with a wife.

“I can’t tell you.”

“You’ve got to tell me. This can’t go on.”

“That’s why I’m telling you. I guess I don’t want it to go on. I do and I don’t. It all started because of Ava. It’s her fault. I just offered myself as a replacement for her. Since she wouldn’t. His daughter told me that’s what he wanted, since he likes to look at pictures of young girls on the Internet. I felt sorry for him ’cause Ava was being such a jerk to him. She could’ve said no nicely.”

“Who is it, Suzi?”

Suzi was sobbing now, and it look a long time before she could speak his name.

* * *

That night Suzi went to sleep in Marylou’s bed, with Buster. Marylou skipped the potluck and sat on her screen porch in the dark. She had to figure out what to do, who to talk to, which of the emotions swirling inside her to express, and to whom.

Mostly she felt terrible for Suzi, because she knew, from her own experience with a nasty uncle, that this event would affect her the rest of her life. This sort of thing happened to a lot of girls, but that fact didn’t lessen the pain of it, not one iota. She also felt terrible for Paula and Rusty and Angel, but not as bad as she felt for Suzi. It was awful, not being able to take away what had happened to Suzi.

Suzi had begged Marylou not to tell, not yet, and Marylou had promised; but of course she had no intention of keeping this promise. If Suzi wouldn’t tell, she would. But who should she tell first, and how should she tell them? For some reason she found herself wanting to tell Wilson, the only person around who would listen and remain calm(ish)
and help her come up with a plan. But, no, that was ridiculous. She couldn’t tell Adolf. Should she tell Caroline? The police? Buff’s wife? Buff himself? She’d always thought there was something slick and shifty about Buff—a proper nickname for a grown man? So why was she so surprised? But a thirteen-year-old girl? That was different from fornicating with lusty choir women. Reverend Coffey was depraved. She wanted to run over and pound on Buff’s door, and she just might do it.

All those people must be told. She hated to be the one to tell, the one to start a chain reaction of events that would hurt lots of people and would draw attention to her in a way she wanted to avoid, seeing as most people she knew here didn’t know her real name or why she’d come to Tallahassee in the first place. But she could deal with all that. What was worse was the paralyzing guilt, worse than she’d ever experienced before; and she couldn’t argue herself out of it, the way she’d learned to do when she started berating herself about the radioactive cocktails.

Because this whole thing was her fault. It was
her
fault. She had taken Suzi to that church for her own devious purposes and delivered her into the clutches of that creep. Could she ever stop ruining the lives of innocent people? First her own daughter and now Suzi. The Radioactive Lady, it seemed, was just as destructive as the nasty shit she’d swallowed.

She could be sitting anywhere, on any screened porch in August, the heat cradling her, the cicadas in the live oak trees doing their metallic buzzing that sounded like
hot, hot, hot
, she could be in Memphis or Tallahassee or Little Rock and it didn’t matter because only her internal landscape counted at the moment, and it was a familiar landscape, a place she’d found herself many times, a safe, cool numbing place she might call Freeze. Freeze wasn’t like the Stop in Go-Stop, Go-Stop, behavior that Teddy had always teased her about. Freeze was more like:
I’m checking into the Econo Lodge and I’ll see you later. She’d spent time in Freeze after her parents had hopped into their Studebaker and driven away from her grandmother’s house, and for a time after Uncle Pat molested her. She’d lived in Freeze for years after Helen died.

She sat there in her teak patio chair for she didn’t know how long, deep in the land of Freeze, not able to move, or think, or feel. Then she heard a rustle outside. Sometimes when she was sitting out here at night she imagined a giant cockroach creeping through her backyard or an armadillo as big as a collie. There was something prehistoric about this landscape. But the rustling she was hearing now sounded like a person. A person creeping through the tangle of shrubbery and vines along the back of her house. It was nearly midnight, so her tormenter had just assumed that, as usual, she’d be in bed. She remained motionless on the dark porch, barely breathing. When the shadowy figure came into view at the sliding screen door,
it
froze in surprise.

“Graahhhh,” Marylou bellowed, hauling herself out of Freeze with her own angry voice, not even sounding like a human being, lurching to her feet and snatching up an empty candlestick—the old lady did it on the screened porch with the candlestick!—yanking open the screen door, letting the candlestick fly at the fleeing figure. It missed by a mile.

But she’d seen who it was. Now, at least she knew.

There’d been five tropical storms and only one named hurricane so far this summer—Ernesto—and Ernesto hadn’t amounted to squat. With a name like that, what would you expect? All predictions had been for Ernesto to swing into the Gulf, but by the time he rumbled over eastern Florida, he was only a mild tropical storm. Now Vic had a new friend: Grayson. Another wimpy name, but who knew? Grayson was passing over the Dominican Republic this very day, and all forecasts had him headed toward the Gulf.