We Are All the Same in the Dark Page 33
I slide through the door and shut it quickly. Musty with a hint of lemon. Death with a touch of perfume. That’s what Odette’s kitchen smells like.
My eye adjusts to the shadows. Tidy. A table. Chairs. Cuisinart coffeepot. A pistachio-colored KitchenAid mixer. Cups, saucers, and plates in glass-fronted cabinets. An old pink gas stove and a new stainless steel refrigerator.
This house watched Odette grow up. Saw her limp through its door with one leg. Still holds her crying in its walls.
I tell myself she wouldn’t mind me touching things. That she spit into the lock and guided my bobby pins. I shake a little salt into my hand. Run a finger over the smooth Formica counter, which reminds me of the one I sat on in the mobile home, swinging my legs.
I pull a glass out of the cabinet and turn on the faucet. The water runs. It tastes slightly off, familiar, just like every glass of small-town water I’ve ever swallowed. I flick on the light without thinking. I just as quickly flick it off, nervous, even though the yellow curtains with a hundred tiny pineapples are pulled shut and bright sun is on the other side.
The refrigerator is a nice blast of chilly air, clean and stocked with an open box of baking powder and a six-pack of beer called “Bridesmaids’ Tears.” One is missing. The label has a cartoon of a weeping woman holding a diamond ring and a bouquet of flowers. Tattoos of men’s names are crossed out on her shoulder. It’s a lot of detail for a beer can. I roll one across my forehead for a second, cooling off, before I put it back.
I drop into a chair and let my eyes wander—to an empty nail on the wall, to a message chalkboard with half a stick figure, to the old cookbooks crammed in the shelf under the sink.
A familiar red book catches my eye.
Betty Crocker.
My mother used that same old edition, inherited from my grandmother. She was a low-budget comfort food kind of cook—a comfort food kind of person.
Tuna Casserole with Potato Chip Topping. Hamburger Noodles. Brownies with Milk Chocolate Icing.
Get Betty, she’d say, when I was sick or sad or happy.
It almost felt like somebody died when I learned Betty Crocker didn’t exist—that she was just a pleasant dream pulled together by a marketer. The death of Santa Claus was easier to take.
I’d sit with that red book on the gold Formica counter, thumbing through all the penciled notes, sometimes in my mom’s crazy scrawl, sometimes in my grandmother’s elegant cursive: Use half as much sugar! Cook twelve minutes longer! Good for company! Montana’s favorite cake!
The memory is sweet, so very sweet, if I don’t remember the blood.
41
One step at a time. One boot at a time. Odette told me that while I sat scared in the back of her patrol car when I was thirteen.
After she let me touch her metal leg, I’m pretty sure I remember every word she said. I certainly remember the six words on that piece of paper. I slept with them under my pillow at the group home and read them every single day to remind myself what kind of person I should grow up to be. Right now I’m choosing resourceful.
I tell myself that Betty is a big welcome sign.
If Odette was with me at the door, she’s gone now. I feel like I’m an after-hours visitor in her museum. The emptiness of these rooms makes it both harder and easier to slip off my shoes and begin to pad through every one of them, assessing, pulling open drawers and closets.
I pause at the closet in the hall, overwhelmed. It’s stuffed. It looks like someone dumped five wastebaskets in there.
Still, nothing immediately says Look at me except the man from another century staring me down from a frame in the front hall. He is so intense. If he could speak, he’d be yelling at me to get the hell out of his house.
He’s the only alarm system. Electricity and water, on. Thermostat set at 85, which is why I’m warm but not sweating too much.
The living room reminds me of Bunny’s mother’s—wood floors, faded prints, little glass objects with no purpose. The only sort-of updated thing in here is a cream-colored leather couch. Are those soft indents on one side where Odette and her husband sat close to each other? There is no TV, just an empty space and a bunch of cable cords tangled up with a wad of dust.
French doors lead off the living room into the biggest bedroom. This is where I enter present day again. A big fuzzy white rug is thrown on dark hardwoods. A plump comforter is all snow against a beat-up headboard. The light on a side table with a sleek blue globe and bendy neck says I read.
Over the bed, Odette put up a huge photograph—aquas and reds, sea and dirt—taken someplace far away. A more personal picture of Odette and her husband sits on the dresser. The frame is warm in my hand.
They look sweaty and happy and in love, like an advertisement for Tinder. Odette is wearing a fancy metal climbing leg. She is exactly how I remember, a beautiful, exotic superhero. Her husband looks like Emily Blunt’s. A valley with hundreds of trees is turning red and gold below them, a carpet that rolls and rolls like life goes on forever.
When I run my finger around, there is dust, a thin layer like I opened a bag of flour too fast. That kind of dust takes zero time to accumulate in Texas, even with the doors and windows shut.
It feels like nobody is living in this house, but somebody is cleaning it, keeping its heart ticking. I’m guessing a housekeeper was here, and not that long ago.
I stand still for a second, listening for a door to open.
That’s because I don’t think Odette’s husband stays away. I think he lies in this bed sometimes, drinks those beers, and cries his own tears. Does he say I’m sorry I left you?
I’m sorry I killed you?
Wyatt Branson was the first person of interest. Finn Kennedy, estranged spouse, was the second.
Hurry. I pull open a dresser drawer at random. Pretty underwear. Lace and color, hearts and animal prints, cotton and silk. I feel instantly sick. I hide my pot under my panties and bras. I can’t bear to touch Odette’s and see if she hid something else even though that’s why I’m here, to find something.
This drawer confirms that Odette’s husband can’t let her go, no matter what the old lady in the cemetery said about him being in love with someone else.
I force myself to slow down and finish. I tug another drawer. Empty. So is another. And another.
The bedroom closet is last.
I slide it open. One of Odette’s police uniforms is hung front and center on a hook, clinging to a plastic dry-cleaning bag.
Suffocating.
No mouth to breathe.
I’m back at the statue monster, staring up at the blank face.
Back in the dream lake, gasping for air.
I fall to my knees in the closet.
My hand brushes against a foot.
42
It’s not that I am disturbed by Odette’s legs, four of them in a row, metal and plastic, high tech and Barbie doll. I mean, I put my eye on the sink on a regular basis and let it stare at me while I brush my teeth.
I’m disturbed because these deeply personal pieces of Odette are still in her house, waiting for her to come back.
OK, I was a little freaked out in the beginning—but only because the first thing I saw was toes with purple nail polish. I thought it could be someone hiding in the closet, alive. I thought it could be Odette, dead, propped up against the wall with her dresses.
I ran out of the house so fast, I can’t remember if I put my water glass back in the cabinet and locked the door on my way out. That’s what I’m worried about as I pull into the Dairy Queen drive-through. That, and all my fingerprints.
Bunny taught me to throw grease and sugar at emotional-related nausea and I am at this moment fully qualified. I order a steak finger basket boiled in clear lava and a Dr Pepper so big that a small rat could drown in it. I park and eat and drink until I no longer want to throw up.
I pull out my list of names and the printed version of Trudette’s map from my backpack. The map is exact in one way—it has online links and step-by-step directions to each of the tour highlights, numbered one through ten, the Blue House being No. 4.
But the drawing itself is like something a hobbit drew of a kingdom, with trees and buildings and tiny little icons of shovels and crowns and bats and exclamation points that mean No Trespassing. The Branson place, drawn five times the size of everything else, looms over the town like a Scottish castle even though it is 7.2 miles outside the city limits. It has ten exclamation points around it like little rays of sun. Do not enter!!
Every inch is crammed with a drawing or an extra piece of trivia. The middle name of President Truman—Trumanell’s namesake—was actually just the letter S because his parents couldn’t make up their minds!
I can’t make up my mind, either. It feels like it is midnight, but the sun is shining. My watch says 2:07 P.M. even though it feels like this day started yesterday.
I promised Odette. One week of trying. One week to say goodbye, so maybe she will leave my dreams and we can all stop diving to the bottom of the lake for green M&M’s.