I had wondered if this empty road would feel familiar. It doesn’t, not until the Branson place pops up in the distance like a carton of milk filled with concrete. It looks like nothing will ever knock it down. By comparison, my aunt’s trailer in Oklahoma used to rock on a tornado night like an empty can of beer.

I’m thinking about the trailer because of the black clouds knotted up in the west. Unexpected. Just like cancer, my aunt would say. My mother tried to convince me a troubling sky was as beautiful as a clear one. She’d tell me, “We don’t have mountains down here—we have storm clouds.” She said they were a sign of spring, part of life, something to get used to.

If a thing creates solid terror every time, you don’t get used to it.

A little spit of rain lands on the windshield as I take the last turnoff.

It seems as if no other breathing thing in the world exists—just me, and the crows flying over my head, out of formation, already panicking.

And then it’s right in front of me. The infamous Branson cattle gate, wide open.

Your a Murderer. That’s what the crazies wrote on the sign they hung here five years ago.

I guess we’ll see.

Wyatt Branson answers the door with a shotgun pointed at my good eye. The idea of being totally blind fills me with terror. I’m thinking about that, not dying.

My instinct is to push down the barrel, but I don’t know how far away the barrel is. Depth perception isn’t so great with one eye. The car in front of you might be one foot away instead of three. You might miss the hand you’re about to shake, or the shotgun you want to shove out of your face.

He’s not saying anything.

I can hear my breathing over the wind.

One of my therapists told me that controlling a panic attack was “mind over matter.”

Bunny thought that particular therapist was “shit over toast.” Bunny would be so upset if she knew I was on this porch about to die.

Wyatt Branson cocks the gun.

I reach up and take out my eye.

I was scared in exactly the same place on this couch five years ago. Wyatt is somewhere down the hall. Maybe getting a towel for my wet hair. Or hot tea. Or duct tape. Or rope.

He hasn’t said Hello, Angel, but he obviously knows who I am. My eye is a pretty obvious calling card.

My eye. It’s still clutched in my hand. I fumble it back in.

The details of his place are flashing back in spurts. The flowered couch. The field out the window, still mowed like a Civil War battlefield. The blinding white paint. The wall where a bunch of quotes used to be. I remember reading them to calm me down after he started talking to Trumanell. The only really interesting thing is what happens between two people in a room. I’d never heard of Francis Bacon before I read that.

Why is he taking so long? I remind myself that Wyatt Branson was on video camera placing a bet on red in the Choctaw Casino when Odette disappeared—the only reason he wasn’t torn limb from limb by those people who had just flocked to the cemetery. That, and there was nothing to speak of in the stuff the police hauled out of his house the second time around.

Wyatt emerges from the dining room. No towel. No shotgun. Just a glass of water, no ice. He hands it to me silently.

I knew before I ever showed up that Wyatt Branson would not open up about Odette unless I made myself vulnerable. So my plan was to play a part. If I can get my breathing under control, that’s what I’m going to do.

Wyatt drops into a chair. White shirt, jeans, cowboy boots, muscle like my father’s that I bet snaps as fast as a rubber band.

“Talk,” he orders.

43

Wyatt Branson found me in that field because my father stole my eye.

I woke up three days after my thirteenth birthday to find my eye missing from the little blue dish in the bathroom of my aunt’s trailer. It was a cheap eye that didn’t fit right. It hurt most of the time and was ten shades off the color of my real one, sort of a dark-green poo. But it was the only eye I had.

I knew instantly what this meant. I had to run.

My father was out of prison. He snuck in during the night and took my eye because he liked to steal the things that meant the most to me.

That ugly eye didn’t keep me from being teased, but it kept me from being a complete freak in a small Oklahoma town.

At school, it kept me on par socially with Emmaline, pronounced in a pretty drawl as line not lean. She was a girl who talked with her hand over her mouth to hide her six missing teeth. I threw my first punch because of something said to Emmaline. I thought my one-eyed situation was better. At least I could breathe freely.

I knew my aunt didn’t steal my eye, because even when she was drunk, which she mostly was, she wouldn’t touch it. She said my eye, in or out, gave her the shivers. She asked me to wear a scarf over it when I was at home.

She wrapped up cheap scarves for me every Christmas and birthday, using a fraction of the monthly check she got from the government for keeping me after my mother died. The last thing she said the night I ran was that the police had called to advise her of my father’s release but she forgot to mention it.

Wyatt Branson sits there like a stone, listening to me stumble around. I tell him how many eighteen-wheelers I jumped in before I got to his and that I am petrified of storms like the one whipping up outside. I say I came to town to pay my respects to Odette. I thank him for saving my life.

I don’t say how I lost my eye. I’m saving that for later, just in case.

“Jesus,” he says. “Stop already. I’ll take you to the spot.”

I’m pretty sure “the spot” refers to where Odette disappeared off the face of the earth. It’s No. 10 on the map, marked with a chalice, a large cross, and the word approximate. Trudette wrote in her blog that she’d never stood there. Once, she tried unsuccessfully to spot it from the air. She called it “the Holy Grail.”

I say yes even though there’s a big loud no in my head.

I survive in a flatter, one-eyed world by imagining myself walking around in the layers of a painting. Rembrandt called it “vanishing perspective.”

I call it trying not to kill myself.

Every layer holds a clue. Colors are bolder close up. They drop away in distance and get a bluish tint. Closer objects overlap farther ones.

But right now, while I’m bumping over anonymous dirt roads in Wyatt’s truck, none of that matters. I’m a passenger in Wyatt’s painting, and he is driving way too fast for me to jump out of it. The thick black mass overhead is like the sky is unfinished with an artist still swirling his brush around.

I had offered to drive my rental car. I assured Wyatt that I can still see wide. Losing one eye only cuts off twenty percent of horizontal vision, which means if I swivel my head a lot, I drive a hundred percent better than your average texting teenager. While Wyatt ordered me to get in, I tried not to think about the person-sized aluminum toolbox in the truck bed.

“You nervous?” he asks. “You’re scrunching up your back against the seat. You did that the last time you were in my truck. I thought you wanted to pay your respects.”

We’re deep into the property at this point. No markers. The fields are a monotonous blur except when we reach a long stretch of fence, obviously replaced, all steel and wire.

Wyatt yanks the truck to a stop. “We’re here.”

There is no fence post turned into a holy cross, like in the archival crime scene picture on trudette.com. No pile of wilting flowers. No memorial of any kind. The field is green, back to work, like Odette was just a blip.

“I found her pickup pulled over,” he says. “They tore up the fence so bad, my lawyers got the city to pay for it.”

“I thought … the cops found her truck.”

“They twist the story the way they like it best.”

Wyatt has slipped over to my left as we trudge along the fence line. I wonder if he’s doing that on purpose, knowing it will keep me off balance if he walks on my blind side. Wyatt would surely know how his father protected himself with one eye.

He stops abruptly. He doesn’t have to say anything. I know.

Here is where Odette jammed her shovel in the ground. Here is where the police said pennies glistened in the headlights, and no one knew why.

I reach in my pocket for my change from Dairy Queen and pick out a penny. I close my eyes and throw it as far as I can over the fence.

“It’s a little late to be wishing,” Wyatt says.

“A wish … is just hope,” I say, but I’m not sure he can hear me over the thunder.

Wyatt glances up. “You done? Better go.”

“Was something buried here?” I spit out. “Something important?”

“Yes,” he says. “There was. Never ask that question again. There’s a price for being curious.”