Friendswood (33 page)

W
ILLA SPENT SO MUCH
TIME
in her room, she almost didn't see it anymore—the furniture, the arrangement of three windows, her figurines on the shelf—all blacked out by familiarity. Dog had started losing his fur, at first just in mangy patches, and then nearly all of it, so the pink skin was bare and wrinkled, and he looked like a large piglet. One of Dog's faces was Junior's face again, watching her, the eyes red and turned down, full of pity and pain. All the other eyes on Dog's body overflowed with water, leaking into the few spots of black fur, which stood up in pointed tufts. Dog had made it clear, not unkindly, that she should die. The question was how? She saw herself crossing the street, hit in the shoulder by a speeding delivery truck, spun up and around, hitting her head on the concrete. She imagined falling into the creek with an injured arm, drowning while the rain poured down overhead. She might contract a flu that wouldn't leave her, a high fever and sepsis, so that her organs shut down one by one, every last one of the doctor's attempts to save her, failing.

She'd heard her parents talking that night about how Lee Knowles's daughter had died, just six months after her diagnosis. They'd thought at first it was just a bad sore throat. She'd died when she was only sixteen, the age Willa would be in June. When you got cancer, she'd heard, your complexion got very clear and white, no more acne, no more scars, just pure, luminous skin, and then it started to look transparent, as if its
purpose was to let people see through it to your soul. What scared Willa was the way people lost their hair—it made their faces look so bare and vulnerable, no matter their age, like babies. Jess had lost all of her long dark curls, and she'd had to go around like those other people Willa had seen, wearing their helmets of baldness. Any worry about being pretty would have seemed a long way off to her then, across an ocean, across a continent. What must it have been like for her to know she only had so much time, to have to pretend that she was getting better when everyone knew she was not, and to feel, as close as the pillow beneath her head and the just-washed sheets against her bare legs, that she was going to die? She imagined Jess, alone in her room, eating ice cream and listening to music, reading notes from her friends who missed her at school. She would chew the bits of chocolate in the ice cream, try to focus on some gift her mother had given her a long time ago—a stuffed animal with button eyes. The toy could take her far back into the past, and maybe that distance she covered in memory could comfort her, because if she couldn't move forward in time, she could always move backward.

Willa tried to interpret the Dickinson poem.

On every shoulder that she met—

Then both her Hands of Haze

Put up—to hide her parting Grace

From our unfitted eyes.

My loss, by sickness—Was it Loss?

She was trying to write her analysis of the poem when she first heard her dad come home and the TV downstairs switched on.

Or that Ethereal Gain

One earns by measuring the Grave—

Then—measuring the Sun—

Jana ran into her room, wearing a rainbow-striped T-shirt and a purple satin tutu. “Where's my brush? I know you took it!”

“I did not take your brush.”

“Yes, you did.” Jana lifted the pillow off Willa's bed and looked under it. She had a wild horn cowlick on her forehead. Jana went to the dresser, scanned her hand over the surface. “You always take my things.”

“I do not.”

Outside, there was the crunching sound of a car's tires over stones in the driveway. “Who's that?” Jana said, running to the window. “Wow! It's the police. Are we in trouble?”

Willa went to the window behind her, and saw a man and a woman in uniform get out of the squad car. “Their lights aren't on.” Willa felt a violent sadness fall from her chest to her stomach, a heavier gravity. The doorbell rang.

Jana ran downstairs. She would want to watch the action, whatever it was. Willa decided to stay upstairs until they made her come down.

“What does she want?” said Lamb, in that creepy voice he didn't always use.

“The stars will rain like hail,” said Dog.

A minute later, her mother knocked softly at her door. “Willa, honey, you need to come down. We're all in the living room. I've sent Jana to her bedroom.” She paused. “You come on down when you're ready.”

Willa looked at herself in the mirror, at the yellow smudges beneath her eyes, the blank roundness of her cheeks, the faint red marks around her nostrils. She smoothed her hair, pressed the pads of her fingers against her cheekbones until she felt their familiar shape. She did not look like herself.

When she came downstairs, she saw her parents in the bright green living room, her father gripping the arms of his easy chair, sitting very straight, her mother holding her hands in a little cage in front of her. The police, in their dark uniforms, sat awkwardly across from them.

“Come on in,” said the woman officer, rubbing at her black pants. “We just need to talk a little bit. Would that be okay?”

Her father's knuckles looked huge against the armrests, his face smaller somehow, drawn up. “The question is whether we make a report.”

“It's awkward,” said the policeman. “My name is Robert Gracia, by the way.” His smile was gapped, with very white square teeth against his brown skin. “But someone filed a report. They said they were at a party where someone put a pill into your drink, and that's a crime.”

“If you decide to tell us what you remember,” said the woman gently, “we can go forward.”

Willa sat down on the couch next to her mother, but kept her eyes on the policeman's large face. “We don't want this out,” said her father. “It's not fair to her and it's not fair to us.”

Her poor dad. He didn't know how many people already knew. Willa heard her voice like she was listening to someone speak on the radio. “I don't remember it, but it wasn't my fault, I can tell you that. I was just supposed to go out to lunch with a friend.”

The man took out a pad of paper. “Who was that?”

Willa glanced at her mother, and her mother nodded. “Cully.”

The man wrote something down. “Cully who?”

“Stop talking to them,” said her father. “They can't help us. That's all you have to say. Any more than that's not going to do us any good.”

“Actually, we can try—” said the woman.

“Really? That's interesting,” he said. “Because you know what will happen to this family if you try? Our daughter will be dragged through it again, and in the end, it will just be her word against theirs. What's the try in that?”

“Mr. Lambert, if your daughter was the victim of a crime—” said the man.

“She told you already she doesn't remember—tell me what good that will do her?” He was moving his chin in a strange way, as if it wasn't quite connected to his face.

Her mother's face was very red, her teeth clenched. “We just want to protect our girl. That's what we want.”

Willa felt a strange pain in her knees, as if they'd been twisted in order to pull them up from her bones. She should never have been so vain as to believe Cully Holbrook liked her. It seemed inconceivable now that it had ever mattered. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm really sorry.”

The female officer looked at her with wide, frightened eyes. “You didn't do anything wrong, Willa.”

The policeman looked panicked, and half stood from his seat. “Well, without a report there's not much more we can do. I just want y'all to understand that.”

“I'll go back upstairs,” said Willa, in the same disjointed voice she'd used before.

“Has she seen a counselor?” she heard the woman officer say.

“Yes, she's seen the pastor of our church,” said Willa's mother. “It's really helped.”

“Is there anything else you want to report?” said the man. “Just understand. We have to follow up. It's our obligation. We have to make you . . .”

And Willa closed the door to her room, so that all she could hear were muffled noises. When the police finally left, it was just beginning to get dark. When her dad came up to call her to dinner, she told him she wasn't hungry, and he left her alone to the star-patterned quilt, the book splayed open on the pillow.

Lamb said, “What does she want? We know.” His head had grown huge and tubular, much too large for his tiny, frail body, and the legs kept collapsing beneath it.

Dog said, “Your name will be written in the scroll of Time.”

“Your name will be written in the scroll of Time,” said the other, cruel head, grunting, and then the five others repeated the words, out of sync and loud against her ears, until it finally stopped.

She sat by her window, looking outside most of the evening, watching the occasional car pull up to the stop sign at the corner, watching the
late-night speed walkers and the lone motorcyclist. Around ten, she saw the man who lived across the street come out to his yard and turn off the sprinklers, gather up the balls left in the grass, and hook the lawn chair under his arm as he made his way back to the porch. After she heard her parents go to bed, she saw smoke rise in the distance over the rooftops of houses. It seemed like a signal from everyone she knew who was already dead, her dad's parents; her great-uncle; Lee Knowles's daughter, Jess. The smoke billowed and thinned to a gray screen as it rose up toward the moon. What the dead were telling her she didn't know.

S
HE FOUND THE WEBSITE
without any trouble, and the recipes were surprisingly easy to locate. “This thread is purely for informational use. Do not do anything illegal with this information.” The instructions were mixed in with videos of teenage boys making smoke bombs and advertisements for
The Anarchist Cookbook
. She settled on the recipe posted by Jolly Jim because it seemed precise and the ingredients were easy to get. “An explosion is a sudden, violent change of potential energy to work”—it was a gunpowder that had sat latent inside her all these years—“which transfers to its surroundings in the form of a rapidly moving rise in pressure called a shock wave. The shock wave can cause substantial danger.” The chemicals pushed against one another of necessity. She imagined the war on a microscopic level, and it seemed fitting that one could use these orderly, measured substances to protest a chaos of them.

It was hard to believe she would do it, hard to see that when she poured the plastic bottles of nail polish remover into the glass jar, it would actually amount to anything with any power at all beyond removing chipped red lacquer from someone's fingertips, and she watched herself pour a brown jug of hydrogen peroxide with fascination, the pungent liquid filling the bowl. She cleared out the freezer, threw out the package of meat, ice cube trays, plastic bags of frozen fruit and broccoli, and she put the glass jar in the center, alone. She waited the prescribed one hour.

She had to relieve the pressure. There was no other way. It occurred to her that this may have been exactly as those men felt, boarding the airplanes with their box cutters, a buildup of stymied energy within them that could only be relieved by action. She felt reasonable and reassured, though, in her measurements, in following directions for something she didn't know how to do. When her mother had been too drunk to cook dinner, Lee had taught herself to cook this way, blindly obeying the words on the page. Sometimes it worked out, and sometimes the dish ended up bland or burned, her mother passed out on the couch, snoring, so Lee had to eat it alone. But the litany was there, written down: do this, do that.

She took the concoction out of the freezer, added it to the swimming pool chemical, followed the instructions to stir, wait. After the glass jar spent two more hours in the freezer, she was told she'd find a kind of white powder on the bottom. She'd imagined it would look like ground seashells or teeth. But when, holding her breath, she opened the freezer door and looked, there was only maybe a quarter of a teaspoon of something like salt at the bottom of the glass. She realized she didn't know what she was supposed to do with it.

That afternoon she went back to the fireworks stand in Alvin, wore her sunglasses and a scarf over her hair. She went straight past the skinny salesman by the stacked display, and back to the shed.

She knocked, heard laughter beyond the door, and then Allen swung it open.

“Hey, there,” she said. “I could use some more help.”

“Come in then, I guess,” he said.

On the table behind him sat a woman with very tight, short orange curls, grinning and eating scrambled eggs from a plate with her fingers. There were marks all up and down her bare legs and arms, small scabs. Lee had obviously interrupted something, and the woman scowled, pulled her plate closer to her hip.

Lee told Allen what had happened with her failed attempt, and it was a moment before she noticed the iguana, nosing around his ankles, its
scales uneven in places as if they'd been scraped off and had grown back in a crooked pattern.

Allen started laughing, and then the woman did too. “What shit are you really trying to get rid of, lady? Did he screw someone else? Is that what happened? What are you
really
after?”

“They all do at some point.” The woman chewed on the eggs. “You just have to get over it. Or not.”

He stepped closer, flicked at her sunglasses. “What you got going on back there?”

There was no other way. She'd have to just take the humiliation and answer this guy. “I just want to scare him, I guess.”

“Huh,” Allen said, folding his arms. “Is that it?”

She held out two one-hundred-dollar bills, and he took them from her, pushed them into the front pocket of his jeans. “Alright, then. Go back to the website. That recipe you tried is nearly impossible to get right. Do the one with wax. Make sure you get a meat thermometer. And be patient.”

He kicked at the iguana, and it scurried into an open cabinet at the back of the room. “Make a long fuse. I'll get you one. You sure you just want to scare him?”

Lee nodded.

“Well, make sure he's not in the vicinity then, or you might scare him to death.”

The woman held her stomach and cackled.

Lee wanted to tell Allen she would never hurt anyone, but as he picked up a beer bottle from the table and started drinking from it, she realized he didn't care. He just didn't want to be arrested himself.

She gave him two hundred more dollars.

“Tell me how to do it, walk me through it.”

The woman's eyes went wide. “Hell, I'll tell her if you won't.”

He took the money and called back to the woman, “You don't know fuck.” He turned to Lee. “Come on, let's get you some special fuse.”

She followed him out to the fireworks stand, and he pointed to a box that said
FUSE
—
EX—
BOLDER
. He went through the instructions with her, his demeanor suddenly serious and teacherly, as he nodded, drew a diagram of what the bomb should look like. He touched her arm. “Hey, you don't look like a woman a man would cheat on, you know.” The ends of his fingers were stained with something black.

She picked up the box. “Thanks.” She walked again past the clerk selling fireworks beneath the shelter, and got into her car.