Cutting Teeth(98)
“Want me to come with you?” Darby offers outside Mary Beth’s hospital room. She’s been overly deferent and cautious around Rhea since their reunion and, frankly, it’s freaking Rhea out.
“No, no, you go ahead. You have to get Jack.”
The two women hug. It’s been three days since Darby texted the terrible news to Rhea from the back of an ambulance, asking her to pick up Mary Beth’s personal effects. Hours after that, Rhea was finally escorted into the classroom and allowed to collect Mary Beth’s things. The shreds of a white T-shirt lay like a chalk outline on the scratchy carpeting of their children’s former classroom; the paramedics cut it off. It seemed like an entire trip around the sun since she had crawled across to pull Bodhi from Zeke’s teeth. All the things she didn’t know then, she couldn’t even count them.
The world was different. The space rang with an impermeable silence, the kind of silence that felt blasphemous to break. Rhea breathed deep, in and out, in and out. She tilted her palms away from her body and she made a slow, deliberate rotation. She didn’t know what the hell she was doing, but whatever it was, she needed to do it. This room, this school, this chapter of her life during which she didn’t recognize her own main character—her.
A plastic bag slouched across the tile, beside the classroom sink. She picked it up. And slowly, stiffly, as if nursing a forgotten injury, began collecting the items jettisoned in the chaos of stabilizing Mary Beth. A turquoise necklace. Her phone—screen cracked. A sandal. Three bobby pins. A bracelet.
Rhea picked up the familiar charm bracelet and tested the weight in her hand. The entire chain was stuffed with little souvenirs, gifts from family members. A miniature Eiffel Tower to commemorate a trip to Paris. A moose for when they went to Jackson Hole. A cross. A longhorn. A Texas flag. A wiener dog. A birthstone. Rhea could write the short version of Mary Beth’s biography with the help of James Avery alone. The rhythmic clink of them was a Mary Beth signature; Rhea shuddered to imagine a world where they sat still forever, locked tight in a box for her daughters to split amongst themselves when they’re old enough. How Mary Beth loved those girls.
She came across a silver N dangling from the bracelet for Noelle.
Rhea’s fingers traveled the rest of the bracelet quickly. Around the entire loop she went, three times. Again. Again. Again.
Back to the N. She brought the charm to eye level, examined the link. There. The link beside it. A broken metal hook.
Rhea glanced over her shoulder and reached into her pocket.
* * *
“I brought your stuff.” Rhea moves slowly into the room. Doug still hasn’t returned. Before she left, Darby pushed back the curtains on the window at Mary Beth’s insistence.
Darby said, “Better?” But, of course, it wasn’t for Mary Beth. The question only made it worse. The view is nothing but a flat, graveled rooftop where pigeons hop around with pieces of french fries in their beaks.
Mary Beth stares quietly up at the ceiling, unmoved. A toiletry bag has tipped over on the couch where Doug must be sleeping. Rhea isn’t used to seeing Mary Beth without makeup. Her mouth turns down. The blue veins running from both corners of it are prominent because of either the lighting or the lack of tinted foundation.
Rhea won’t act like she knows a thing about what it feels like to lose your eyesight, but her mind goes to Bodhi, to his face, to his hair, to his little-boy body; does she have a clear enough picture in her head that it could last her the rest of her life if it had to?
“Are you okay?” Rhea asks.
Mary Beth turns her face to her. Her mouth works too hard, searching for words. “Jesus … said.” Mary Beth takes a deep, laborious breath. Her words are mushy. It’s Jee-shush and shed. “I came … so those … who do not see…” Rhea watches her give up on the rest and a pang of sorrow hits her where she lives.
“May see,” she finishes because, believe it or not, Rhea used to watch church on TV on Sunday mornings with her bowl of milky Cocoa Puffs in her lap just to feel like she had a grown-up taking care of her. “Mary Beth?” Rhea says, taking a seat at the chair beside her bed. “I’m afraid I need to talk to you and I’m coming to you because we’re—” Rhea feels like she has to search for the word, too, a word that’s, embarrassingly, not all that familiar in her world. “—friends.”
Mary Beth’s nose wrinkles. A smile? Something else?
“I found something.” Rhea pulls out the small silver A. Gently, she turns Mary Beth’s hand over where it rests at her side and presses the A into her palm.
She swallows. With her right fingertip, she prods the charm, feeling the angles, pinching it, bottom to top. “Ange … line,” she says as if learning the name for the first time.
“Yeah,” agrees Rhea. “Angeline.” Together with the N on Mary Beth’s charm bracelet, it creates a perfect matching pair. The Brandts’ two daughters: Noelle and Angeline.
“I found it outside of Miss Ollie’s class.” Rhea keeps her voice low. “Because I was there the day she was killed. Too.” She lets the final word land. Mary Beth’s eyes search aimlessly. “Look,” Rhea says. “I know you were there. I know you were involved somehow because there was blood on the charm.”
There’s a man who’s confessed to murder because his back is against the wall, but Rhea knows all too well about police jumping to the first, the easiest conclusion, happy to let the chips fall.