“How am I wrong?” Tina asked in the dark. “What happened? Why did your nephew say that thing about you hurting your dad’s feelings right before he died? Why did he say everyone hates you?”
I rolled onto my side, giving Tina my back. “Didn’t you tell me in Aspen that it’s okay to stop when it starts to feel like too much?” I turned my face so that I was speaking to the ceiling, so that the word carried. “Stop.” It didn’t escape me that she was perhaps the only person in my life I’d told to stop anything, and that not only did she listen to me, she didn’t make me feel bad about it either.
* * *
In the morning, fog shrouded the panoramic views from Tina’s bedroom windows, razing the Seattle skyline to the same elevation as Lake Washington. Tina was asleep, and I lay there watching the pink scar on her tan chest rise and fall—Nixon had marked her as his—wondering if I had the courage to wake her up the way she had been waking me up for the last few weeks.
“Sorry,” Tina said, her eyes still closed. “About last night. I shouldn’t have pushed you on it.”
“I have an idea,” I said, and she opened her eyes to hear it.
Tina had been hard at work, studying for her jurisprudence exam in August. I had relished having her big, gorgeous kitchen to myself for most of the day, with expensive gadgets and her Ruffoni copper cookware, in making her French press coffee and plating beautiful meals for her on her old wedding china.
When I was CJ’s wife, I didn’t think anything about making dinner and cleaning up after him. I bought cheap cuts of meat because even though CJ earned a decent living, he was frugal, and he had no palate. I made the things my father made for us at my mother and brother’s behest: casseroles and meat loaf with gravy, thick sloppy stuff that clung to CJ’s beard and neutered my appetite in more ways than one. But at Tina’s, I served fish and vegetables that were not previously frozen. I poured red wine into crystal glasses and lit candles that burned high between us.
I suggested we throw a dinner party.
“We can invite all the girls from the grief group,” I said. “And Frances, of course.”
Tina reached out and tucked my hair behind my ear with a closed-lip, conciliatory smile. “I’m not sure all the girls in the grief group would understand.” She gestured: me in her bed.
“But Janelle was here,” I protested. “You introduced me to Janelle.” I thought about Janelle more than I cared to admit. I wondered if Tina thought that people might have an easier time understanding her and Janelle because Janelle was composed and confident, because she wore nice jewelry and didn’t have acne pits in her cheeks.
“I wasn’t planning to. You arrived early.”
“So it’s a secret society we’re in.”
Tina frowned. “Secret society?”
“Of people like you,” I said, and realized that wasn’t cruel enough to hurt her. “Women like you.”
Quietly, Tina said, “There’s no secret society, Ruth. Just women who care about each other.” She sat up and reached for her robe. I reached for her hand.
“I’m sorry.” With my thumb, I brushed the thin blue vein that ran the length of her forearm. “I would really like to throw a dinner party, though.” Tina shivered, but she didn’t lie back down. “We could invite Janelle too.”
Tina looked down at me with a gorgeous smirk. And then she was crawling on top of me, straddling me on all fours. “Let’s just add CJ and Martha to the list while we’re at it,” she said. It took all my strength to push her face away when I felt her cool breath on my neck.
“I was just trying to be nice.”
“So am I,” Tina said. She grabbed my wrists and pinned them to the pillow above my head, nuzzling the stretch of skin between my jaw and my ear. I wondered if Janelle had taught her that, or if Tina had always known what to do. I couldn’t decide which version of her made me crazier, the girl who had to be taught or the girl who just knew.
PAMELA
Tallahassee, 1978
Day 35
The Defendant’s capture unleashed something into the world. At first, from the epicenter in Tallahassee, I was unaware of the impact. Here, it was completely normal that The Defendant was all we could talk about, that his picture was on the front page of every newspaper and the top news story of the day. He had proclaimed his innocence with a waggish grin. He’d fled Colorado because although he hadn’t murdered Caryn Campbell, the media had already convicted him and tarnished his shot at a fair trial. He’d lied about his identity to the police in Pensacola for two days because he’d known they would tie him to the carnage at The House as well as to the disappearance of Kimberly Leach, and he had nothing to do with either one. Women were attacked all the time, by all sorts of men, weren’t they?