“Mrs. Andora,” I said in a thick slab of a voice. “It’s Pamela.” I swallowed. “I have an update.”
“We’ll be there to speak to the doctor soon enough,” Mrs. Andora said brusquely. She heard it in my voice, I could tell. She would not permit me to say it. “Are you there? At the hospital?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know anything, Pamela.”
“I do,” I said. “I’m so sorry, but I do.”
Mrs. Andora threw the phone against the wall. I know this because I saw the hole it left when I came for the funeral the following week. The sound that came out of her was manly, a guttural, bloodthirsty battle cry. It sent me staggering back, T-boning the edge of the kitchen counter. I whimpered because the corner was sharp and it had pierced my liver or a kidney, one of those important, tender organs. I listened to ladylike Mrs. Andora suffer in that grotesque, masculine way until Mr. Andora came on the line and choked out, like some kind of grief-programmed answering machine, “We can’t come to the phone right now.”
The line went dead, and then I was going through the louvered doors and into the bright foyer, asking for Sheriff Cruso in a twee little voice, as nonthreatening as could be, because he had already looked at me like I was the know-it-all beast of his nightmares. It was his job to know these things first, and yet I had found out two of the girls hadn’t made it before he did. I was thinking, I’ll pull him aside. I’ll tell him in private that Robbie and Denise are dead. I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his subordinates. This was how my brain was wired back then. This is how I almost went on to live.
Eight a.m.
The decision to visit Florida State University had nothing to do with an interest in Florida State University and everything to do with getting a rise out of my mother.
In 1968, there were anti-war and anti-segregation protests staged along the campus’s legacy walk. In the fall, students wore blue jeans in solidarity with the Tallahassee gay community. Newsweek called FSU “the Berkeley of the South.” This was all according to the brochure that arrived in the mail my sophomore year of high school, addressed to my father, along with an invitation for him and his family to come for an all-expenses-paid campus visit. They were wooing him, hoping to lure him away from his cushy office on Park Avenue to join the department of the burgeoning law school.
Before my mother threw the invitation in the trash, she tore it up with a look on her face that I had seen only once before, when a neighbor brought over a carrot cake as a thank-you for some letter of recommendation she had written. As soon as the front door closed, my mother doused it in dish detergent, squeezing the bottle in both hands, like it was on fire. From that point on, Florida State University took on a flammable quality in my mind, something that set off my mother’s alarm bells, made her sharp and attentive.
Two years later, when it came time to consider college, I mentioned FSU. “That’s pretty far,” she said, her voice jumping an octave. Interesting, I thought, and decided to press harder on this rickety key of parental concern, long out of tune.
“They offer something called an externship!” I exclaimed with legitimate enthusiasm, paging through the new brochure I’d requested. Even as a prelaw undergrad, you could earn credit by working in the courts at the Capitol Building, just a few blocks from campus.
“Why would you go to ‘the Berkeley of the South’ when you have the grades to go to Berkeley?” my mother pushed back. My mother never pushed back on me. Anything I wanted to do was fine by her.
It was a salient point, but I flicked my hair off my shoulder as if it weren’t.
“You’re too smart for a state school,” my mother added a little desperately.
That got me to lower the brochure, examine my mother, wonder if she had been body snatched sometime in the night. I’d always considered myself an intuitive person, but you could be dull as a doornail and still see there was something about Florida that was deeply agitating to Marion Young. I might never have learned what, if Denise’s death hadn’t broken the proverbial seal on our vesicle of family secrets.
I arranged a visit to campus, using money I’d earned bookkeeping at my father’s law firm, not because I needed to—my father made a lot of money, and my mother came from even more—but because my mother was so dead set against FSU that she refused to pay for the trip. I relished every second of fighting about my first choice for college with my beautiful, busy mother, who often seemed too wrapped up in her functions and hobbies and various women’s clubs to pay attention to what was going on in my life. My sister was eight years older and moved out of the house for good when I was in the fourth grade. I was often alone and terminally bored, and I do not say that facetiously. Idle, my mind goes to places that scare me.