I Love You More: A Novel (29 page)

It was the seventh month of our year apart when we first allowed ourselves to summon positive memories of Oliver. Prior to that point, we’d concentrated on the pain he’d caused us, perhaps because that was how we’d always been able to justify our crime, but that night as we lay inside our pink-petaled baths, each of us welcomed joyous thoughts.

Diana recalled the day she taught Oliver to paint. It was before they’d married, before he’d built her the studio above the garage, when she still kept one in town. She’d invited him over. She remembered him walking by each painting, slowly, stopping to admire a figure, a still life, a brushstroke; telling her his bones didn’t contain an inch of creativity. She pulled out a large, newly primed canvas, several jars of paint, cans of brushes, palette knives, turpentine, and wipe cloths.

“The first rule is not to think,” she said. “The second is to use your entire body, not just your hand or your wrist. The third is to paint for you, no one else. Finally, paint a world you’d like to live in, not one you’d like to see.”

“Will you pose for me?” he asked.

Nude modeling was something Diana had done in college for extra money before her parents died, before she’d received the
proceeds of her father’s estate and insurance policies. It wasn’t necessarily that she was an exhibitionist, but she’d never been shy. Shyness was for the modest, and modesty was for those who aspired to perfection not for those who’d been born with its gift. Diana, though raised a gracious Southern lady and far from vain, had always known that her physical form was lovely, her curves elegant, and with the same understated confidence as a cat, she knew what light, what color, what fabric would add regality to her odalisque poses.

That day Diana chose to lie on an antique settee covered in deep blue velvet. Under the diffused lighting, her olive-toned skin appeared milky white. Strands of blond hair wound around her neck, obscured one nipple. A long floral silk scarf wrapped around her hips, wandered between her thighs, loosely bound her ankles. Her eyes, nearly the color of the sofa, challenged her captor. Oliver was a quick study. He mixed and swirled and brushed and scraped. He used broad gestures, thick lines, bright colors. Periodically, he’d make mud of what he’d done, dip the cloth in the turpentine and wash it all away. Hours passed. Diana fell asleep. It was dark out when she woke. Oliver still painted. She rose, rubbed her stiff joints, and walked to him.

“May I see?” she asked.

He turned the canvas toward her. She saw a never-ending field of lilies. In places, the flowers were so dense the colors bled together. Where this happened, the paint was rich, thick, lush. She laughed. “It’s beautiful, but it looks nothing like me.”

“You said to paint a world I’d like to live in,” he said. “This is the inside of you.”

Jewels recalled the time she and Oliver drove to the Hamptons to meet her parents. It was the weekend after they’d confessed their love to each other. She remembered him being nervous. While this hadn’t surprised her, after all she was very close to her parents, especially her father, she had paused. Oliver had always
been so in control, more so than even Cruel Jewels, and watching him fidget, get lost twice on the way, fumble and drop his keys in the driveway when they finally arrived, endeared him to her.

“My father will love you,” she said. “Really. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Oliver had smiled, and said, “Worried? Who’s worried?”

Just as she thought, her father had liked Oliver immediately. They discussed the law, stocks, and current events. Her father told the story of how he met her mother.

“I was a student at NYU and had taken another girl to the ballet, but when I saw Genevieve dance, I was mesmerized. I sent my date home in a cab and waited outside the theater door. I was amazed she agreed to have coffee with a lowly finance major.”

“An extremely handsome finance major,” Jewels’s mother interrupted.

Jewels’s father touched his wife’s cheek, kissed her. “We were inseparable after that night. Our precious Jewels was born fifteen years later. Like me, she grew up in this very house. It’s been in the family for three generations.”

Jewels’s mother brought out the album of clippings from her dancing career. Oliver watched patiently as she paged through them, commented on a costume, a plié, a review.

“I see where Jewels gets her athleticism and grace,” he said.

Her mother blushed. “Our Julie is quite the runner,” she said. “She placed in the Junior Olympics, you know.”

Oliver looked at Jewels with such admiration. It was as if before that moment, he hadn’t really
seen
her. “I had no idea. Do you have pictures?”

“No, Mother, please,” Jewels said, but her mother wasn’t to be deterred.

While a fire popped and cracked in the stone fireplace of the small cottage, her mother shared album after album of her daughter’s life and childhood. Later they played bridge, watched
the news, had nightcaps. After her parents retired, Jewels took Oliver into the attic and showed him her Barbie collection. He helped her set up the Dream House, gave movement and voice to Ken. That night, two unusual things occurred: Ken didn’t die, and Oliver and Jewels didn’t have sex. Instead, they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

Bert recalled hiking the Appalachian Trail with Oliver. They walked eight to ten hours every day. At night, they met up with other brave souls, shared campfires, and slept under the shade of trees or in the pup tent Oliver carried in his backpack. Oliver had surprised her with his knowledge of wildflower species and his seemingly innate survival skills. He could make a fire by rubbing sticks together, walk miles without tiring, and his temperament never changed. He seemed happier, more at peace than she’d ever seen him.

One night they came upon a river. Just as she had that first time the three of us met at Rainy Cove Park, Bert suggested they take off their clothes and go for a swim. The moon reflected on the water. A dog howled in the distance. When they left the water, Oliver built a fire. That night, Bert was certain she saw their futures in the flames. Ever since she was a child, she’d had visions, and sometimes she knew what people were thinking. It wasn’t like she heard voices, nothing as frightening as that, it was more like she saw thoughts in a person’s eyes or felt their auras. Over the years, she’d read about others who shared her gift, and she’d attended classes and seminars to sharpen it. Oliver would have many children, and not only ones spawned by his sperm in her womb. She saw the shadows of two other women, and while perhaps that should have bothered her, it didn’t. The women were her sisters; in the not too distant future, they would comfort her. She saw herself birthing a daughter, and many years later with grandchildren by her side, and though Oliver wasn’t there, she saw love, happiness, and fulfillment. She lied to Oliver about what
she saw. She told him the two of them would grow old together, surrounded by many children and grandchildren, and because she created that story for him, she decided to believe it too.

What she didn’t see was Oliver’s murder. She didn’t see herself firing a gun. She didn’t see the bullets piercing his chest and stomach. She didn’t see him dying.

Deception
: the act or practice of deceiving someone by concealing or misrepresenting the truth; to trick or fool.

Kill
: to cause the death of a person, animal, or other living thing.

There was this boy at school who accidentally shot his twin brother. I was seven years old then. They weren’t in my grade—they were older than me by a year—but I still knew them. Their names were Jason and Jeremy Green. Unlike Daddy, Jeremy’s dying did make the front page of the
Hollyville Herald
, so even though people talked about it for a while, they couldn’t spread rumors. The facts were all there. After cleaning his gun, Jason and Jeremy’s dad put it away, but he forgot to lock the cabinet in the garage where he kept it. The boys found it while searching for their basketball. The Green family moved soon after the incident occurred.

For a long time I thought what happened to Jeremy Green was the only form of killing that wasn’t murder, but a couple of months before Daddy died, I walked in on him staring at the barrel of a gun. He was sitting on his bed.

“Is everything okay, Daddy?” It wasn’t that I was surprised he had a gun; I’d heard Mama and Jewels talking about it on the
phone that time. It was the way he was holding it. I mean, everyone knew it wasn’t very smart to point a gun at someone, especially yourself.

When he saw me, he quickly pulled the gun away from his face. “Hey, Pimpernel (any of various plants of the genus
Anagallis
, especially the scarlet pimpernel, with creeping stems and flat, five-petaled flowers).” He spun the chamber; bullets dropped on the off-white comforter making little dents in its puffiness. “Do you want to hold it?”

“Won’t Mama get upset?”

“I don’t think there’s any reason to tell her, do you?”

“I guess not.” I took the gun from him, held it. It was small but heavy. “Why do you have it?”

“So I can protect you and Mama if a bad guy comes into our house.”

“Why would a bad guy come in our house?”

“He won’t,” Daddy said. “It’s just in case.”

Daddy was big into just-in-cases. Like he’d say “Let’s pick up some milk just in case we’re out” or “Let’s record
CSI
just in case we don’t get home on time.” The thing is, when we’d get home there wouldn’t be any milk and
CSI
would be over, so when he said that about bad guys coming into our house, I didn’t sleep for a week.

“But won’t you go to jail if you shoot someone?” I asked.

“Not if it’s self-defense, Paramount (more important than anything else; supreme).”

Later, I looked up self-defense. It meant defending your interests, especially through the use of physical force, which was permitted in certain cases as an answer to a charge of violent crime. “Defending your interests” was pretty broad, and what exactly was considered a “charge” of violent crime? Could it refer to your insides as well as your outsides? I mean if someone deceived you, like Daddy deceived Mama and Ryan Anderson deceived me, it
felt like a million arrows were piercing your heart. Defending yourself against them was practically a reflex, but while the Ryan-Lucy thing had helped me understand how Mama felt when she found out about Daddy’s other families, there were two big differences between Mama and me: One, even though I was really mad at Ryan, not once did I consider murdering him, and two, I had no intention of befriending Lucy Baxter; in fact, I had put together a long list of mean get-backs.

It started with unflattering nicknames. Because I’d been the brunt of them from the same girls who were now my friends, I figured they’d be happy to help me come up with some for Lucy. Loose Lucy. Lippy Lucy. Lame Lucy. Loco Lucy. Just to name a few. Lucy didn’t take it too well, definitely not as well as I had. She cried right in front of us. At least I’d had the good sense to wait until I got home. Also unlike me, she kept trying to kiss up to us, which made picking on her even more satisfying. Since we weren’t little kids anymore, this form of revenge got tiring pretty fast. It was Kelly who finally came up with something really devious. What I didn’t know about Lucy Baxter right away was that she actually had naturally curly hair (like me). Apparently she spent hours blowing it straight every morning (unlike me) with a hair dryer and that’s why it always looked so perfect. Kelly decided that we should fill a balloon with water, wait for Lucy to come into the girls’ bathroom like she did every morning before class started, and throw the balloon at her. As planned, it popped, completely soaking her hair in the process. She cried of course, but not like the other times. This time she looked completely demoralized. I actually felt sorry for her, but not for long because when her hair dried, it looked really good, curly and full, not frizzy and disheveled. As planned, Lucy did get a nickname, but not the kind I’d had in mind. The boys started calling her Sexy Lucy, which I thought was really ignorant. I mean sexy doesn’t even start with L. After a couple more weeks of Get Back at Lucy Baxter pranks, such as
hiding her bra while she was in gym class and putting hot sauce on her spaghetti at lunch when she wasn’t looking, she showed up at my house, which in retrospect was very courageous but at the time annoyed me.

“What do
you
want?” I asked, when I answered the door.

She handed me a wrapped box with a card taped to it. “Happy birthday,” she said, and walked off, leaving me gawking. Now, it’s not that I’m overly paranoid, but I was a bit concerned about the box’s contents. I held it up to my ear. No ticking. I shook it. Something heavy moved back and forth. I stared at it for a while, and thought things like
How did she know it was my birthday
and
Is she kissing up, trying to trick me?
I figured I’d start with the card, which I considered burning in the fireplace but then decided I could just as easily burn it after I read it. This is what it said: