“I’m concerned about all my patients. But I stay out of their worlds once they get out of my chair.” She drains the glass of whiskey. “Let’s get this over with. I’ll answer two questions without a warrant. That’s it.”

“All right,” Rusty says smoothly. “Did Odette think her father killed Trumanell and Frank Branson?”

My head snaps up. That was loaded and ready to go. Not the question I was expecting first.

“I don’t have any idea. What’s your second question?”

“Did Odette think Wyatt Branson had a role in killing his sister and father? Was she protecting him?”

“Odette and I never got that far, either. I did get myself on the list to visit Wyatt as a pro bono therapist during one of his court-required bouts in a mental factory. Odette’s face that last day of her therapy haunted me. She was a vulnerable child. One leg. Sixteen years old. No mother. A father out of No Country for Old Men. I needed to reassure myself that Wyatt Branson wasn’t going to get out and kill her because he thought she knew something. It wasn’t ethical for me to see him, so I never went back. But I’ll tell you this: I left his room knowing he was fully capable of murder.”

It’s like the real Dr. Greco stepped out of a cracked egg. This is the woman who flipped juries.

Rusty studies her with an intentness that makes me uncomfortable. “And you didn’t warn Odette?”

“I left messages. Her father wouldn’t take my calls. I had no proof Wyatt did anything. I won’t say Wyatt’s guilty. People act in inexplicable ways while grieving, and it can look very much like guilt. I’ve spent thirty years trying to tell the difference between the two. Read my book. In fact, take my book.”

She whips open the cover. Her hand pulls out a pen that was lost in a tangle of gray-black hair falling over her ear. Bunny would call her signature style grandiose.

Dr. Greco closes the cover and shoves the book toward me.

No one budges.

“Did Wyatt Branson share something with you?” Rusty asks slowly. “About that night?”

She stands up, a little wobbly. “He told me that gold glitter from Trumanell’s hair clip was stuck to his skin for days but the cops were too stupid to see it. He couldn’t bear to wash it off. Take that for what it’s worth. And get out.”

In less than a minute, I’m opening the passenger door, Rusty cursing under his breath. And then she’s shouting from the porch—waving her book in the air.

“Go get it,” Rusty orders. “But hurry up.”

I’m smiling, full-on pageant, as I hurry toward her. I have no desire to be remembered as anything more than a nice, clueless girl liaising for justice.

“This will definitely be better bedtime reading than what I’ve got going right now,” I gush. “I would have been bummed if I forgot it. Thank you.”

Dr. Greco is not listening. She’s staring at my eye intently, and not my real one.

I extend my hand for the book. Before I have a good grasp, she purposely lets it fall into the dirt.

We kneel at the same time to pick it up. When my hand gets there first, she slaps hers over it and holds firm. The sweet, spicy scent of whiskey is spilling out of her pores. My aunt’s perfume.

I time-travel to my aunt’s trailer. Breathe in the kind of dust that is a million years old and catches in your throat. Feel the burn of aluminum that scorched red marks on my bare skin if I brushed up against the trailer on a hot day. The insane itch of mosquitoes that crawled through the screens even with my Scotch tape repairs. The eye inserted in my face that felt like a piece of rock, that didn’t match the other, that my aunt did not want me to take out except at bedtime because she couldn’t stand to see it empty.

I’m a little slow in the present because I’m so swept up in the past. It takes a few seconds to realize that whatever we are still doing down here, Dr. Greco doesn’t want Rusty to know about.

“Odette told me about a girl who wouldn’t speak,” she whispers. “I have a strange feeling that girl is you. Call it psychologist’s intuition. I want to reassure you that I’ve never broken her confidence.” She throws a small nod of disapproval toward the patrol car. “I don’t know what you’re doing with him. I do know this. Odette would have died for her friend Trumanell. She would have died for you. But she wouldn’t have wanted you to die for her.”

58

Whenever my father showed up, about twice a year, he brought me a Big Gulp Cherry Coke from 7-Eleven and a pack of plastic Ribbontail worms for catching bass. He always took me fishing down the slope at the river that ran by the mobile home park.

The last time, he thought that bought him some private time with my mother in the back of my aunt’s trailer.

She was out sunning on the deck in a red-striped bikini when we got back, if you could call anything 6x6 with a broken pine railing a deck. I was holding a bass the size of my thigh.

He strolled over and snapped the back of her bikini top like it was a bra. She slapped him.

We thought he was leaving when his truck door slammed.

When he pulled the trigger, I was throwing myself at him. A hug, I thought. That will stop him.

Two shotgun pellets punctured my eye like they were on some kind of missile guidance system. The rest of my face, untouched.

My father left us on the ground. I crawled underneath the trailer with a black widow that didn’t move and two rats that were so nice, it was like out of a cartoon. That’s where my aunt found me when she came home a half hour later from the bar.

By then, yellow crime scene tape was hanging like streamers at a bloody birthday party.

I never told my aunt that while I was under the porch, one of the uniformed cops commented about white trailer trash and the size of my mother’s breasts. But the man and woman who wrapped her in black plastic were gentle. I saw them both close their eyes briefly right before I never saw her face again. I’m pretty sure they said a prayer.

Nobody knew I was watching.

But in the long minute after he shot me, while he considered shooting me again, I knew my father always would be.

59

Rusty ordered me to hand over the book as soon as I jumped in the car. He thumbed through it, fluffed it out, turned it upside down, clearly suspicious of our little tea party in the dirt.

I don’t know what you’re doing with him. I’m replaying Dr. Greco’s tone. Was she warning me? Just drunk? How much does she know about me?

I finally break the silence with Rusty about a half hour into the ride back, when ninety miles an hour is beginning to feel more like sixty.

“So?” I ask nervously.

“So … what?” he replies.

“Do you believe Dr. Greco’s story? It was like she was saying … Wyatt killed Trumanell.”

“Not news to me.”

“The doctor is … messed up, don’t you think? She seems so alone.”

“If you sell your soul to the devil enough times, that’s what happens. You end up in prison. Her prison just has big windows. Dr. Andrea Greco made snap decisions on testimony for criminals. Karma is paying her back. I have some cop buddies in Dallas who celebrated her retirement like it was theirs.”

He rolls down the window and spits. It doesn’t fly back in, pretty much a redneck Olympic skill at this speed.

Rusty has his eyes focused on my profile, not the road that’s whizzing by. Like he’s reading my mind. Like he’s a completely reckless human being. Like this is one of the interview techniques that got him the name Wonder. Maybe all of the above. Inside, I’m screaming for him to slow down.

“It was probably another dead end,” he says. “Don’t feel bad. I hit the brakes on Odette all the time.”

“Can you hit the brakes right now, just a little?” I beg.

“The twins have a soccer match at six. I want to make it.” But I watch the odometer pull back five miles an hour.

“I saw them at the memorial ceremony,” I venture. Anything, to cut the tension. “So cute. What are their names?”

“Olive and Pimiento. Unless, you’re asking for the names on their birth certificates. That would be Olivia and Penelope, after their grandmothers. But Olive and Pimiento is what I call them, Angelica, Angel, Angie.” I hold my breath as he swerves around an eighteen-wheeler. “The name on my birth certificate is Russell Arnold Colton, for my grandfathers. How about yours? I’m guessing not Angelica Odette Dunn.”

“I think you already know what it says.”

“Yes, I do. It’s pretty. Montana. The lovely Spanish word for mountain. That’s the name your mother gave you, isn’t it? The one you had to erase like it never existed. I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry your mom died. And I’m sorry that your dad is the fucking son of a bitch who erased her.”

One of my tears splashes on the seat. Did Rusty see? Does he know not just my name, but about my eye, too? Is he one of the stupid people who think I can only cry out of one? I still cry out of both, you asshole.