“We spoke last night. I think there’s still a chance for you there. But like my dad says in his overwrought sermons, the door to heaven is open an inch and the wind is blowing.”

“I thought it was hell that was open an inch. I never understood whether the door was blowing open or shut.” I can tell by her face that my attempt at lightness doesn’t land. “Look, Maggie, I just need a little more time. The answer is right in front of me. I know it.”

The pity in her eyes unnerves me. She reaches over and lays her hand on mine.

“With Trumanell,” she says, “there’s always hope, right before there’s a new curve on a road that never, ever stops curving. Have you ever thought that the knowing could be far worse than the not knowing? Either way, there is no resolution, no absolution. I mean, what are you going to do? Throw a celebration picnic in the cemetery, give her grave a pat on the head, and say everything is finally OK? It will never be OK.”

The baby is growing restless, disturbed by her mother’s intensity.

“You of all people can’t be saying that justice for a dead girl is not resolution,” I say quietly.

“You’re not going to stop?”

“I’m not going to stop.”

“If that’s the case, I think you’re more dangerous to us than Angel is.”

My stump is starting to throb. “I thought we were partners … Maggie … in everything,” I stutter out. “In defending Wyatt. In finding Trumanell. In helping girls. In standing up to this town’s bullshit ideas about God and the devil. In fighting fucking bats.”

I regret the last words immediately. Maggie owes me nothing. I would save her a hundred times. A thousand.

“I’m saying I can’t watch, Odette. I can’t be your mountain anymore. My father says that I need to do whatever I can to stop your obsession with Trumanell. He says he can’t bear to watch me go down, too. Rod thinks Angel needs to go into the system. By waiting, you’re putting her at risk.”

The baby has launched into full wail. Maggie’s focus has shifted to the doorway behind me. She leans over and slaps down the lid of the laptop.

I turn. It’s too late. Angel has already seen.

34

The baby’s shriek hits a high note that doesn’t exist. A few houses away, something thuds to earth.

Men are shouting. A beam, a hunk of concrete, a person. It doesn’t matter what it was. All that matters is in this house. Lola is now stacked behind Angel in the doorway, pink and sleepy-faced, fingers plugged in her ears.

“I’m going to change the baby’s diaper. See what’s happening outside.” Maggie throws Beatrice over her shoulder and holds out a hand to Lola. “Come on, sweet Lo. Let’s give Angel and Aunt Odie a minute.”

Maggie’s face says, Don’t let me down.

“Pull up a chair, Angel,” I offer gently, patting my side of the table.

Angel shakes her head. She plants herself across from me, in Maggie’s place.

“Please,” I beg quietly. “Help me. I want you to be safe. For everyone in this house to be safe.”

I slowly lift the lid of the computer and turn the screen toward her.

“Are you running from this man?”

For a second, Angel stares, mesmerized, at the headline. “She Was a Sweet Woman Who Loved to Cook,” Say Neighbors. A life, boiled down to a single phrase. Angel’s gaze drops down the screen, to the murky headshot of a man with dark stubble and a docile smile.

She twists the screen back toward me. Her eyes are perfect, unknowable twins.

“Would you like something to drink?” I ask.

Without waiting for a nod, I walk to the refrigerator and pour her a glass of orange juice. I set it in front of her.

I can see her holes as if they are my own. The hole in her face, plugged by a jewel. The hole in her throat, sucking down all the words. The hole in her heart.

I sit back down, shove the screen down, and set the computer on the floor. She lifts the glass of juice to her lips.

“When did you lose your eye? Were you a kid?”

I think, This is a stupid question. She is still a kid.

“I was sixteen when they amputated my leg,” I rush out. “It was … a car wreck. I was alone for a long time before they found me. Were you alone when you lost your eye? Was the man in this photograph there?”

Nothing.

I’m pushing, doing everything wrong, everything I was told not to. Except there is no time.

“If I’m honest, I spend a lot of nights wondering who I am,” I say finally. “If I’ll ever be whole. I lost my mother to cancer before I lost my leg. I had a rough relationship with my father, who killed people, but using a badge. He called it ‘God’s authority.’ The last time I saw him before he died, I screamed at him. I said I had no idea who he was. I said he had no idea who I was. I went to my room and slammed the door. He was gone to work in the morning when I got up. I packed, called Maggie to take me to the airport, and took a plane back to college early. He died three weeks later. We talked only once again before that, about some red tape with my tuition. I hung up on him.”

I pull my backpack up from under the chair and unzip the front pocket. “I didn’t find this until after he died. Right after our fight, my father had tucked it in the book I was reading, on the same page with the bookmark. He must have thought I would find it quickly. But the book was dull. For three weeks, he thought I’d read what he wrote to me and never said a word. All because a book was dull. I’ve never forgiven that author. I go into bookstores and turn his spines around. I steal his books from libraries and dump them in the trash. You smile, but it’s the truth.”

I hold out a small square of folded paper, worn at the edges. “I want you to have what my father wrote about me. Because every time I look at you, I see myself. I see myself as I wish I were.”

I lay the paper on the table between us.

“Did you know Maggie’s father is my uncle and my pastor? When I was a kid, he always preached about predestination. I’d think, what is the point of being good, of trying, if God has already decided if I am going to heaven or hell? I’d spend an hour playing a game with a banana, going back and forth about whether to take a bite, and when I finally did, I’d wonder if God could see the endgame with that banana. That was an hour wasted, Angel. I should have been eating a bag of chips or dancing in the rain. I don’t believe in predestination. I believe we choose whether to press the trigger. But so help me, for some reason, I believe the universe pulled us together for a reason. You with one eye, me with one leg. It’s only the second time in my life I’ve ever felt completely sure about God.”

Maggie is now the one standing in the doorway. I’m not sure how long she’s been there, listening. I think that somewhere deep in her head is a tiny seed that holds the memory of the bat, and not just the legend as it was told to her when she was older. She remembers its wing grazing her pink baby cheek. She remembers watching me raise the window, lift a Tupperware lid, and set it free.

I sling the backpack over my shoulder, rising from the table.

I blink back tears, hoping Angel can’t see them, even though I know this one-eyed girl sees everything.

“I’m going to get some sleep,” I tell Maggie. “Real sleep. If it’s OK, I’m leaving Angel here for one more night. I’ll ask a patrol car to run by off and on. Call if you need me. We can all make some decisions tomorrow.”

Maggie nods, relieved. She is forever the good preacher’s daughter—the love in my life when all other love fails. The four of them trail after me to the door.

I glance back just once. They are framed in a picture I will keep in my head as long as I live. Sharp, certain lines. Yellow and pink, green and purple.

Maggie’s words are repeating in my ears as I climb in the truck.

Go in peace.

35

My leg is off. The curtains in my bedroom are pulled against the sun, the covers up to my neck. My brain, jumping all over the place.

Finn on our third date, accosting a guy at a gas pump who yelled “Eileen!” at the back of my head, which Finn thought was a cruel play on I lean, but was really the name of the man’s daughter who had gone to the restroom.

My sorority Big Sister, presenting me with a sexy pink sparkle T-shirt that said Leg Story, $50, because so many men felt a right to come up to me and ask.

Wyatt, last year, picking up one of Trumanell’s old bobby pins from a groove in the dining room floor, eyes glistening.

My father, at our kitchen sink with one of the sheets from my bed, scrubbing out blood that had seeped through a bandage wrapped around my thigh.

Lola, wearing an eye patch, a plastic knife in her mouth, yelling I’m armed to the teef.

Maggie, all in white, up on the Baptist Church altar, her eleven-year-old soul getting the official OK from her father.

Me, in a grainy old news video on The Tru Story, a stick figure on crutches wobbling out of Parkland Hospital for the first time.