It was oddly intimate, the way Caroline said Misty’s name. Maybe Caroline had already chosen. Maybe Misty was in on all of this. Maybe Caroline was acting. I couldn’t tell. It was convenient timing. The box was empty, still sitting in Lucinda’s lap.
Mike once joked that body language should be a high school requisite, like French or Spanish. He believed that everything you really needed to know about a person could be observed. And Misty was up and draping Caroline’s arm over her narrow shoulders as if she’d done it a hundred times before.
Holly was the first of us to stand, finding her voice as soon as Misty and Caroline disappeared. “Well, girls, I had a better time spreading my legs at my last Pap. Caroline can stick her club right up her ass. I won’t be applying.” That was a lot of imagery my stomach couldn’t handle right now.
Because I could taste the inside of that box.
Holly was halfway to the door when Lucinda spit. The wad of paper flew out of her mouth and landed right on the pristine red toenail poking out of one of Holly’s Via Spiga sandals.
“Jesus, Lucinda, get some help, will you?” Lucinda flinched like a dog used to being kicked. Holly bent over to scrape the soggy ball off her toe with a practiced red fingernail. She stalked over to the fireplace and flicked it into the flames along with her own slip of paper. “I recommend y’all do the same and that we all forget the last twenty minutes ever happened.” She paused at the door, flashing a sly smile. “Not that it’s any of y’all’s business, but I keep a few naughty toys under the mattress.”
I wouldn’t want to share a lifeboat with Holly, but in the last ten seconds, I had developed new respect for her. I bet she’d carve a damn good potato. Lucinda hobbled after her, mumbling an apology to her back. On any normal day, I’d be jumping up, not admiring Holly in the least, trying to soften Lucinda’s humiliation, assuring her everything was OK.
Their exit left me alone with Tiffany and the flirtatious girl in the portrait. Tiffany slid over to Misty’s chair and pulled it in so close to me I could feel her body heat, ramped up from the fireplace. She smelled like chocolate-covered pinecones, probably some designer perfume I couldn’t afford. The two scars of her eyelid lift were barely perceptible. I thought that we weren’t so different from the girl in the hall, whose tiny foot had been broken and bound for beauty. Whose hands were bound by black string.
“If that’s all she’s got on me, I’m in good shape.” Tiffany snatched the piece of paper out of my hand. “Alex needed to go.”
Am I dreaming? Still in New York, asleep on my couch?
“Stop looking at me like that. It was just a little antifreeze in his water. Stop looking at me like that!”
I wasn’t sure what expression I was wearing. I couldn’t feel my lips or my cheeks. I was perspiring from the top of my head, which I hadn’t known was possible. The room was baking now, unbearable.
Tiffany began to pace like a feral cat in five-inch heels, desperate to be let out of her cage. Four steps forward. Four steps back. Again. Again. And again.
When did someone shut the door?
Tiffany halted abruptly in front of me, as if she’d made a decision. “Unfortunately, Hannah Beth was the one to find him. He was trembling and frothing a little bit at the mouth. But I told her he just spit up a little milk. She’s only four, so she probably won’t remember anyway. I bought her that Louis Vuitton purse shaped like a Chihuahua the next day. Adorable, and it doesn’t shit.”
It took a second.
She’s talking about a dog.
I tried to shut off my mind. To not imagine the face of the presumably adorable Hannah Beth when she found the small furry pile.
“See ya around, Emily. Or not. I really don’t think you have the stomach for it.” Tiffany’s eyes raked lazily over my belly. It felt like a threat. I wanted to strike out, but my hand lay dead in my lap, and then she was gone.
I gazed up at the girl on the wall, frozen in blues and browns and greens, and wondered what she knew. She had to hold clues to Caroline Warwick, to the reasons I was here contemplating all the things I had tried to forget.
The weeping willow in the portrait suggested that Caroline had been raised somewhere else in the South, maybe by a river. Georgia? Kentucky? That fit with the honeyed accent. Riding pants and high black boots hugged long, graceful legs. Her hands gripped the reins loosely, but there was no question about whether the horse or the girl was in control.
My eyes roved over the woodwork. The ceiling. I stood and stared into the shiny black pupil of young Caroline. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to quiet my mind. Instead, I saw the teddy bear on the bed in the little pink room somewhere above my head. Abused by love. No eyes. One ear, missing. The seam, sewn flat.
“What is wrong?”
My heart slammed like a rock against my chest, and I jumped sideways, knocking the Tiffany lamp. Too many Tiffanys, I thought crazily.
“I did not mean to scare you. Did you lose something?” Maria steadied the lamp.
“No. I’m sorry. I should go.”
I didn’t tell Maria that before I closed my eyes I had been looking for tiny cameras, because it would sound absurd. Or that I felt like I had stumbled onto a stage three days ago, in the smack-dab-middle of a play, and everyone knew their part but me.
And I didn’t tell her that the relief coursing through my body was like when Daddy pulled back my swing, high and taut, and let me fly into the wind.
That lovely wooden box that stunk like the morning breath of the devil?
None of its secrets was about me.
The praying mantis is a stick figure that has five eyes and can turn its head 180 degrees to stalk his prey. All the way home, this is how I thought of Caroline, as page 44 in my mother’s insect book.
Odd what pictures the brain chooses to keep. Me, age ten. Cross-legged on the kitchen floor. Opening up to the right page, as directed. My mother flipping pancakes and describing the beauty of the praying mantis despite the fact that it is a brutal and clever killer. The mantis pretends to be praying before thrusting out its spiky forearms and sinking its teeth into the neck of its prey. Not to kill it, but to paralyze it. Because the mantis likes to eat its victims alive.
I unzipped my dress and let it fall to the middle of my kitchen floor. My belly was a white balloon.
I wrapped a throw from the living room around my body, naked underneath except for a bra and a scrap of panties, opened the kitchen door, and walked purposefully across the backyard to the alley.
Mike had purchased two large plastic trashcans, preparing for the avalanche of diapers. I studied them, glancing both ways down the alley. No sign of life. I passed by our plastic bins and ventured another hundred yards to one of three old metal garbage cans in the tall grass between the houses. The alley was narrow, its road rutted like small-town alleys are, barely big enough for the garbage truck to pass.
I lifted the lid of the can and smelled the perfume left by thirty years of dung and rot. The can was empty, black on the bottom like a hole into the earth. I stuffed the dress all the way to the bottom. At the last minute, I slipped off my new sandals and threw them in, too. I slammed down the lid. It echoed in the afternoon silence, a dissonant cymbal clash.
I carefully retraced my path back on the dirt road, barefoot, trying to avoid the bits of glass and metal that had been spit back out by garbage trucks.
Three houses ahead of me, a man slipped from a yard into the alley. He wore the yellow and black nylon palette of Livestrong. He didn’t wave, but his eyes never left me. He moved into the middle of the alley, stretching his body as if warming up for a run.