Just in case.
In case what?
Nothing.
Better Billy should have it; let’s face it, she’d never use it, didn’t deserve to use it, the worst mother in the whole world.
Maybe not the worst-that crazy girl who drove those two babies into a lake, that was worse. And she’d seen on TV about some girl jumping off a building holding her baby. That was worse.
Some people burned their kids or beat ’em-she sure knew about that-but it didn’t say much for her that the only worse thing she could compare herself to was stuff like that, did it?
The truth was, she was bad enough.
No wonder Billy’d had to escape.
No escape for her, she wasn’t smart enough, good enough, just like Daddy had said: Something missing, tapping his head with one hand.
Trying to say she was stupid or crazy.
She wasn’t, but…
She could think fine when she wasn’t stoned.
Okay, reading was hard for her, so were numbers, but she could think, she knew she could think. She herself didn’t understand the things she did sometimes, but she wasn’t crazy. No way.
Better not to think… but where would Billy escape to?
So small and skinny.
No surprise there. Look where he’d come from.
Weird the way it had happened. Because she usually liked the big ones. Big like Daddy. Hogs, like Motor and others. Names and faces she’d forgotten-all those high school football players and wrestlers doing to her just what Daddy suspected they were doing, Daddy beating her ass even though he could never prove it.
She’d wanted to explain it to Daddy: It ain’t hotpants; it’s the only chance to get close to people with goals.
You didn’t explain to Daddy.
Goals… it had been a long time since she’d thought about the future.
Too many years of sour notes.
Mixed in with one solitary sweet night, the prettiest little baby; those nuns had been grumpy but pretty good to her. She appreciated that, even though she knew they wanted her to give Billy up.
No way; what was hers, was hers.
She fed herself a little gumdrop memory of Billy’s fat baby face-she deserved a little sugar, didn’t she?
That night, the night of She’d been so much younger, prettier, skinnier, lying alone in the grove after midnight. Her choice to be alone-maybe that’s where Billy got it from!
So maybe they were the same in at least one way!
She found herself smiling, remembering that night, how she’d actually felt something.
The warmth between her legs, all over her, the hard dirt didn’t even hurt her back.
The orange trees green as bottle glass in the moonlight, snowy with flowers, because this was the blossom season, the whole grove smelling so creamy and sweet, a beautiful sky, dark with a halo of nice light overhead because the moon was big and fat and gold and dripping with light, like a butter-soaked pancake.
Lying there after he kissed her and said sorry, have to go, her skirt still up, floating.
Then a vibration-loud, close, as fast-moving clouds blocked out the moon.
Cicadas, millions of them, swarming through the grove.
She’d heard stories about them but had never seen them.
Never seen them since, either.
A onetime thing.
Maybe it had been a dream, that whole night a dream…
Huge bugs like that, should have been scary.
Twice as huge as the shiny black wood bees that freaked the hell out of her when they zoomed out of nowhere.
The cicadas were even noisier, so many of them, she should have been all froze up with fear.
But she wasn’t. Just lay flat on her back, feeling sweet and female, one big package of pollen and honey, watching as the cicadas settled on row after row of orange tree, covering the entire grove, like bunches of gray- brown blanket.
What were they doing? Eating the flowers? Chewing away at the tiny green oranges, bitter and hard as wood?
But no, all at once they were all gone, zipping up into the sky and disappearing like some cartoon tornado, and the trees looked exactly the same.
Night of the cicadas.
Magic, almost like it had never happened.
But it had. She sure had the proof.
Where was Billy?
CHAPTER
14
Lisa, you coke-snorting bitch.
Dance with me and this is what happens.
Dance around me and this is what happens.
Oh, the joy.
Ode to joy-wasn’t that Bach?
He hated Bach. In the hospital where they’d taken his mother when she had to wear a football helmet, they played Bach and other classical crap.
Trying to soothe the patients.
Patients. Inmates is what they really were.
Lisa had tried to drive him crazy.
Tried to lead.
Oh, the look on her face… dance with me, darling.
CHAPTER
15
The domestic-violence tape played on all the eleven o’clock news broadcasts: Lisa and Cart Ramsey, both smooth and tan, immersed in Jacuzzi bubbles, lining up putts on the home green, doing a Roy Rogers-Dale Evans number on sleek horses, smooching for the paparazzi. Lisa as a beauty queen and a gorgeous bride, cut frantically with close-ups of her post-beating face.
Then somber reporters intoning about the brutality of the dead woman’s wounds, followed by the department spokesman, a photogenic Parker Center captain named Salmagundi, fielding questions without really answering them.
Petra watched it at her dinette table, hunched over another sandwich, feeling violated.
After getting off the phone with Dr. Boehlinger, she’d tried to paint: a desert landscape she’d been working on for months, swirls of sienna and umber highlighted with acra red, the faintest hints of lavender, nostalgic flashes
