49

My butt is resting on a high branch of a tree that hangs over spot No. 7 on the murder map, labeled “Rape Site.” My mouth is aiming a stream of pot smoke at a small triangle of blue sky I can see through a patch between the leaves.

Here Is Where Trumanell Branson Stopped a Rape and Became a Folk Hero. It doesn’t say that on a plaque anywhere, and the map vaguely guided me to “the first big tree past the east head of Indian Trail off the parking lot; no marker per City Council ruling.”

I’m guessing that the crime occurred sixteen years ago in the flat spot of dirt under the giant oak that’s hosting me, or else I’m staring down at the park’s most popular hookup spot. Probably both.

From up here, I’ve got a good view of some dead grocery store flowers still in their plastic, a few empty wine bottles, two blue Trojan wrappers, and something white and lacy that didn’t get put back on. I take another puff and turn up Alan Jackson so my earbuds are practically vibrating with his twang. I want to get a sense, not only of this park, but the psychological landscape.

I want to roll around in the myth of Trumanell, of Odette, of this town whose whole purpose for existing is to wait. I want to stare into this lake, which is so much darker and uglier than in my dreams that I’m not sure it’s the same one.

A couple of weeks ago, I started a chart of people related to this case. I wouldn’t make a good cop. I gave up after I hit seventy-two. It seemed like if I kept going there would be as many names to think about as Stephen King put in The Stand.

Like the rapist who Trumanell beat up under this tree. Fred Lee Tippen might have decided to send someone after Trumanell while he rotted in prison. She’s the one who opened up his whole can of victims, all those girls in town who started to talk about what he did to them. But I can’t talk to Fred because he was sent back to Huntsville two weeks ago, charged with raping a woman in the back row of an empty theater during a Star Wars movie.

On the way out here, I drove by his house anyway. A toddler was playing outside in a kiddie pool, naked, totally unsupervised. I picked him up and knocked on the door. His mom acted shocked he was out there alone. I know better. I’ve delivered a lot of wandering toddlers to trailer park doors.

Like the girl who Trumanell rescued in this park. Eleisa Manchester, now thirty-one and a mother of two. She met her husband in law school. She named her daughter Nell and her boy Truman. A picture that ran with Trudette’s crime blog showed her in a pink pussy hat that she knit herself. So, here’s to you, Trumanell. You’re still saving the world. I take another puff.

Like the girl named Lizzie, Trumanell’s look-alike. She’s in hiding somewhere after writing some limp bestseller called My Sister Trumanell. Right after the book was published this spring, a leaked DNA test proved that Elizabeth “Lizzie” Raymond is definitely not Frank Branson’s biological daughter. But her mother told her she was. People are messed up. This whole town is messed up.

I suck in a last hit. Blow it to the sky.

It’s just me and a couple of muscled-up guys with fishing lines down there in the water, who followed me with their eyes a little too curiously as I muddied my way to this tree.

I blew them off with a better-not-touch-me vibe. I left the gun behind the Ritz crackers at the Blue House, but I did bring along a sharp knife. I practiced with it a few times on an old punching dummy that I hung from a tree on the land in back of Bunny’s house.

Slash don’t stab. That’s how Mary and I said good night and goodbye and I love you at the group home. The truth is, we only had a white plastic knife, and we used it to make peanut butter crackers. But girls didn’t mess with us because they weren’t sure.

The higher I get, the more the lake feels like a giant magnet, pulling at me.

I also have a terrible craving for chicken and dumplings.

The boys have stripped off their shirts to bare just how macho they are, which is pretty Matthew McConaughey macho. They’ve graduated to a little canoe just offshore and are standing up, rocking it. A fish is flopping in the air on one of their lines, glinting, swinging like a wild silver pendulum.

Why do men have to kill beautiful things?

I look around for my father before I crawl out of the tree.

Nothing says you belong more than acting like you do, so I wheel my white Hyundai Accent rental car right into the middle of the Blue House driveway.

I wave to the woman next door, who is on her knees planting red petunias, roll my burnt-orange Texas Longhorn suitcase that Bunny got me for graduation through the gravel, and stick a key into the side door lock.

I open the pineapple curtains to the sunshine and unload groceries. Coke, cheese sticks, protein bars, two kinds of chips, sour gummies, frozen eggrolls, queso dip, Mrs. Renfro’s salsa, chicken-mushroom soup, Bisquick, a bag of carrots, peas, chicken breasts, milk, garlic salt. I found the chicken and dumpling ingredients while I rolled my cart around eating a Whataburger.

Next, I arrange the bathroom, one of my favorite hobbies, which tops yelling at Wheel of Fortune with Bunny and cranking Amy Winehouse. I line up my makeup on the sink counter, lay my toothbrush and toothpaste on a white washcloth, tuck my shampoo and conditioner in the shower, and hang up a towel.

Organizing my things in a bathroom soothes me. I’m pretty sure it’s because I spent a year of my life living with a gang of girls who shared a single-minded goal to steal every Maybelline lipstick and tampon I owned.

The day I arrived at Bunny’s, I was in my new bathroom for so long, sparking joy like Marie Kondo, that Bunny thought I had escaped out the window.

The eyes, though, they go with me 24/7. I have two, the one in my eye, which is green with gold flecks, and a spare that is a dull brown, which I pair with a matching dull brown, nonprescription contact lens in my good eye. Bunny asked what I wanted for my sixteenth birthday, and this was it: to be able to change the color of my eyes to something ordinary. She didn’t ask why because she knew.

She has reassured me I should never worry my father will find me by looking for green-eyed, one-eyed girls because I look so perfectly two-eyed. I didn’t want her to be worried, either, so I never said that I could pluck a green eye out of his face and put it in mine and you could not tell the difference. The point being, my father sees my eyes every day when he looks in the mirror. It’s a problem.

That was the fourth time I’d been back to my ocularist. It turned out the office where I first met him with Odette is only forty minutes from Bunny’s house in Oak Cliff. It was like God saw the need in advance.

My ocularist never asks why, either. Just what. What does the new eye feel like? What do I want painted in the corner this time? What do I think about what happened to Odette? What a terrible shame.

And please.

Please remember there is zero room for error with the eye you have left.

I place my suitcase on an old trunk at the foot of the bed. Odette’s plushy white cloud is calling to me again.

But I have work to do. I don’t want to disappoint Finn if he shows up again in the morning. I don’t want to be kicked out for not keeping our deal.

And something is in this house. I know I’m still high, but I feel it.

I grab a Coke and a protein bar from the kitchen and two U-Haul boxes and a handful of garbage bags from the garage.

The old man in the hall looks extra nasty today. I flip him off and start with the hall closet.

After twenty minutes, I decide that a night in jail might have been better than tackling this closet. At one point, I imagine there is a little man at the back pushing things through the wall as soon as I make more room.

“Come on,” I shout at him when I pull out a half-full bottle of Deerbuster Coyote Urine.

I fold old police uniforms and wool coats into boxes and garbage bags, and dutifully tug out every pocket and examine old receipts and mints. I sort change. I make a list, so if Finn ever cares to look at it before he trucks it off to Goodwill, he can.

Four umbrellas, a pellet gun, a Crock-Pot, and an old framed print of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. I check out the painting for a few minutes before wrapping it in newspaper. This painting always seemed a bit too high drama. I like Salvador Dalí’s version, with the Apostles’ faces hidden and the weird floating Jesus torso. It’s what I remember most about my senior class trip to Washington, D.C., the first place I ever traveled where people didn’t say y’all.