“Okay,” she said. Her voice was very quiet and even. “I’ll marry you if you can answer this question for me: Do I have any tattoos?”
I stared at her. I knew the whole of her skin by heart. Did she think there was anything I had missed? “No,” I said. “You don’t.”
She lowered her head and parted her hair for me. I could see black ink on her scalp. “Sorry,” she said.
I bent over her head, examining. I couldn’t make it out. “What is it?” I asked.
“It’s snake hair,” she said. “Like Medusa.”
“Wow,” I said. I tried to follow the lines on her head, to make out the scales and the angry snake faces, but her hair was too thick. “When did you get it?”
“When I was seventeen.” She pulled away from my hands, still resting in her hair, and raised her head to look at me. “I used to pull my hair out. It’s kind of a nervous disorder.”
I nodded. “I’ve heard of that,” I said. “Let me think, what’s it called?” I puzzled out the possible Latin and Greek roots. “Trichotillomania?”
Lexy stared at me and shook her head. “You know the damnedest things,” she said. “Anyway, my parents took me to a couple of different doctors, and they put me on medication for it, but nothing worked. So one day, I just decided to shave my head and be done with it.”
I thought about my Lexy as a young girl, standing bald and brazen before the world. It was a strangely moving thought. “And did it work?” I asked.
“Well, yeah. There was nothing left to pull on.”
“Right.”
“So I kept it shaved for a year or so, until I felt like things were better in my life and it’d be safe to grow it back. I got the tattoo as kind of a talisman. It’s my secret strength. It protects me from falling back into that place where I used to be.”
I reached out tentatively. She took my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“For ruining your nice proposal.” She held her hands out before her and looked at the words again. “It was very sweet.”
“That’s okay.”
“I just need some time,” she said. “To trust that this is all real.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
So I waited. I waited for five more months. And one morning, I awoke to find a single word printed across my palm. Yes, it said.
THIRTEEN
Here’s the thing: I wasn’t entirely honest with Detective Anthony Stack when he asked me if Lexy had ever mentioned suicide. In fact, I wasn’t honest at all. Which is not to say that I had any reason to believe Lexy was suicidal in the months and weeks leading up to her death; at least, I had no such reasons at the time. But it would be dishonest of me not to reveal at this point that she did, during the sweet, breath-holding time of our engagement, tell me that there had been moments in her life when she had thought about killing herself.
The only time she came close, she told me, occurred during that hair-tearing year of her adolescence, the year the snakes took up residence on her scalp. Her parents were going through a divorce, and she was having a hard time in school—but I say that as if those are reasons. As if the fabric of human misery can be spooled apart into threads just like that. How many young girls that year had trouble in school, had trouble with their parents, and still never thought to pick up a knife and press its cold point against their wrist? No. There’s more to it than that, and more scientific minds than mine have yet to piece it all together.
But whatever that fatal elixir is, that mixture of circumstance and temperament that leads a person to the edge of death and sometimes back again, it flowed through Lexy’s body like blood. She fell into a deep depression, and the effort of wading through each day, the weight she carried like a stone in her gut, left her exhausted. She would come home from school and crawl into her bed and stay there until it was almost time for her mother to come home from work, and she knew she had to rouse herself and create some semblance of normalcy. During those afternoons, lying in bed until the light faded, she wrote things on her arms and legs, places that she knew could be hidden with clothing, digging deep into her flesh with the pen. Sometimes, she wrote, I feel like I could start crying and not stop for a day and a night, and maybe that would be enough. And maybe it wouldn’t. She wrote, Sometimes I feel like I have a ragged hole inside me, and it gets bigger every day. She wrote, Once upon a time, there was a girl who just disappeared. She laughed when she told me these things, making fun of the drama of her teen angst, but I could see that it hurt her to remember. It was during those afternoons in bed that she began to pull out her hair. She wanted, she said, to make her pain tangible, to feel something on the outside. As she lined up the strands of hair on the sheet next to her, she told me, she felt a sense of accomplishment.
It was on the night of her senior prom that all those months of unhappiness crystallized into a single moment of action, and she actually thought she would kill herself.
Lexy had two close friends at the time, Brian and Sara. Brian was gay, and Sara had a boyfriend named Jon who was a year older and in college. Since Sara was going to the prom with Jon, it just made sense for Lexy and Brian to go together. Neither of them wanted to miss out. So Sara and Lexy went dress shopping. Sara wanted something black and sexy, as unpromlike as possible. Lexy wanted to be pretty, in spite of herself. She wanted a prom dress. She found something perfect at a vintage clothing store, a pale blue 1950s strapless gown with a spray of pink roses embroidered diagonally across the dress from bodice to hem. She loved the dress, but she was embarrassed about her hair, about the bald spots that showed in between the few wispy tendrils that were left, so the day of the prom, she took a razor and shaved her head. She was pleased with the way it looked; she liked the way her smooth scalp felt when she ran her hands over it. The effect of the bald girl in the satin evening gown was unusual, to say the least, but it made her feel glamorous.
The prom was not what she thought it would be. People stared at her newly shaven head with open disdain, and she felt lonely dancing with Brian, good friend though he was. She wanted to be one of the girls with boyfriends, handsome in their tuxes, boyfriends who stroked their bare shoulders and whispered in their ears what they would do to them later on. She didn’t even like these boys, there wasn’t a single one she could point to and honestly say she could imagine being with, but she wanted someone who wanted her back. She thought about dancing with a boy who’d become aroused at the press of her body, who’d close his eyes and touch his lips to the top of her head. She wanted the fantasy of romance and feeling grown-up, not her awkward friend Brian whose hands were light and unsure on her arms and whose eyes kept drifting to look at Michael Patterson, the boy he’d had a crush on all spring. She envied Sara, sophisticated in her sheer black dress and heavy eye makeup, who knew she’d be kissing someone and more when the night came to an end. Afterward, they went to a Holiday Inn where they’d arranged a couple of rooms for the night—Lexy’s mom had even agreed to pay her share, knowing nothing was going to happen between her and Brian—and got drunk, the four of them, until Sara and Jon started making out and decided to slip off to their own room, leaving Lexy and Brian alone together.
“So that was the prom,” Lexy said to Brian, reaching over for the bottle of vodka they’d gotten hold of. She poured some into her glass of orange juice.
“Yeah,” said Brian. “Kind of a letdown.”
“Michael looked good,” Lexy said. Brian ducked his head and looked down into his drink. He was still shy about talking about it, even though Lexy had done everything she could to be supportive.