The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (16 page)

During the offering, “Late Breaking Genesis News” played on the screens—announcements about upcoming church events. Neither Nance nor Suzi put any money into the white offering bucket passed down their row.

Nance leaned over and said to Suzi, “This is an unusual church.”

“I’ll say.”

A chuckling African American man took the stage, made a few jokes about his short stature, and then introduced the youth minister Buffington Coffey, who was delivering the sermon, the regular pastor being out doing the Lord’s work somewhere else. Reverend Coffey wore jeans and a plaid button-down shirt untucked. He had a handsome face and long sideburns, like somebody from an Abercrombie ad. Then he started talking about taking his little girl swimming in the Gulf, and Suzi quit listening.

Nance, who’d slipped a beige cardigan sweater over her pink church dress, kept glancing over at Suzi and smiling, patting her hand.

Suzi was slumped so she could stick her leg out in the aisle, and she felt self-conscious. Her bare feet, in the ugly sport sandals her mother made her wear, were freezing, and, not being an old lady, she hadn’t thought to bring a cardigan. Maybe the cold was what made people here so lively. A middle-aged white woman with a long flowing skirt and bare feet was swooping and genuflecting in the aisle near Suzi, like she was hearing music on an invisible iPod.

Okay, this church was bizarre, but more bizarre than any other church? Just not as civilized as Faith Presbyterian, where people wore better clothes and sat quietly like they were half asleep.

Nothing was mentioned at all in the service about it being Grandparents’ Day. Maybe Nance had got that wrong.

Now the Reverend Coffey was talking about a vision he’d had that
morning, and Suzi perked up. Who didn’t like a vision? He paced back and forth on the stage so they could get the full benefit of him, but Suzi watched his screen image rather than the actual him, because that way she could see his face more clearly.

“I saw a field,” he said, “a huge field, that stretched as far as I could see. I was standing in this field and I was a child, and God was there, too. He was my father, and he was standing a little ways away with open arms, asking me to come to him. ‘I will catch you,’ he said. ‘I will hold you up. I am always here for you! I’ll be here for you when your job evaporates, when your earthly relationships fail. I am all knowing, and all loving, and all protecting. That’s what a father’s love is.’ Now I know.” Here the Reverend Coffey stopped and stared out into the congregation. He had long eyelashes and dark eyes. “Now I know that many of you have never experienced that kind of love from a parent. And you want it. You need it.”

True, Suzi thought. She did need it. It was like he was talking directly to her. Cool!

“But you
can
experience that love with God,” the reverend went on. “With him, you can feel that safety, that protection, that unconditional love you’ve always yearned for. Just step forward. Move toward him. He’s waiting for you.”

Okay, Suzi didn’t mind God waiting for her, but she really wanted her mother. Why couldn’t it be her mother, waiting there for her in that huge field? She pictured her mother standing in a field, a soccer field, and then she started thinking about soccer and pretty soon the sermon was over.

After the service came to a close, Nance introduced Suzi to people around them. “This is my granddaughter.” The first time she did it, Suzi wondered if she’d just slipped up. But then she did it three, four, five times. Some people shook Suzi’s hand—clasped it—and others hugged her. They asked after her knee and said that Suzi should pray on it and ask God to heal it. “We just love your grandmama,” said a
cute old African American woman wearing blue jeans. “She’s a precious jewel.”

After most people had cleared out of the auditorium, Suzi and Nance made their way through the lobby.

“Hope you don’t mind that I told people you’re my granddaughter. I’m sure that Helen would’ve been just like you.” Nance’s eyes had gotten watery.

Don’t cry, lady; that’s all I ask. “It’s fine,” Suzi said, pausing to rest.

They approached the reverend, who was shaking hands with people leaving the church. “This is my
adopted
granddaughter,” Nance told him, after he’d greeted her profusely, clasping both her hands in his. “Suzi, this is Reverend Coffey, our neighbor in Canterbury Hills.”

Reverend Coffey was even taller than he’d looked onstage and built like a football player. “Just call me Buff,” he said. He had longish, wavy brown hair and looked like Orlando Bloom, with the same jutting chin and thinnish lips. And those eyes! He turned to Nance. “This girl is a true gift from God,” he said, about Suzi. Then he said to Suzi, “Hope you’ll be back next week. And come to youth group. I’m the leader.” He looked intently into her eyes, as if there was more going on at youth group than just your standard Bible-related activities.

Nance offered to take Suzi to Dunkin’ Donuts after church, somewhere Suzi hadn’t been since she was eight.

“Let’s bring your grandfather with us next week!” Nance said in the car.

Suzi, sprawled out in the backseat, was surprised that Nance was just assuming she’d be going back to Genesis Church, and she was even more surprised to discover that she was actually considering it.

“Your granddad doesn’t get out much,” Nance said. “I think he’d enjoy it. Don’t you?”

“Maybe.” Suzi had never thought about her granddad being lonely, but she supposed he must be. “I thought you said today was Grandparents’ Day.”

“I just made that up,” Nance said. Her eyes met Suzi’s in the rearview mirror and then slid quickly away. “I wanted you to come with me. I shouldn’t have lied, though. I’m sorry.”

That was strange. A church lady telling a lie like it was no big deal.

“I would’ve gone anyway,” Suzi said, but that might have been a lie also.

As soon as Nance got Suzi settled at a table in Dunkin’ Donuts with a few cream-filled delicacies, surrounded by glum-looking people getting their sugar fixes, Nance announced that while Suzi was eating her first donut, she’d drive down the road and fill the car up with gas and be back in two shakes of a jiffy jack’s tail. “Save me the biggest one,” she told Suzi, pointing at the donuts.

Suzi watched her drive off, pulling into the traffic on Monroe in her oddly aggressive manner. Why couldn’t she have waited to get gas? Why the urgency? She drove right on by the Shell station on the corner. But maybe she had a particular brand of gas in mind. The thing was, after Suzi had eaten all the donuts but one, she sat there and sat there. She looked at her watch. Nance had been gone for half an hour. Suzi’s braced knee, propped up on a red vinyl chair, was throbbing. It was time for more pain meds. They were a few miles from Canterbury Hills or she might’ve set off walking—if she hadn’t been injured.

Should she call someone? Nance herself didn’t have a cell phone. She’d have to call home and ask one of her parents or Otis to come and get her. Otis would be mean about it. And she didn’t want to get Nance in trouble, make her look like a flake. But where the hell was she? Suzi called Mykaila and chatted awhile, told her about the church service, about the fetching Reverend Coffey, told her she was stranded at Dunkin’ Donuts. Not a bad place, Mykaila observed. If you have to be stranded. Maybe Nance was in an accident! Mykaila suggested hopefully.

Suzi ate the last donut, then waited another half an hour, then another fifteen minutes, then, finally, called her mother. She’d thought
her mother might be angry at having to come get her, but she wasn’t. No, instead of being angry or feeling bad about Suzi getting stranded, her mother was worried about what had happened to Nance.

In the van, Suzi told her mother that it really hadn’t been Grandparents’ Day at church after all, but that Nance had pretended to some people at church that she was Suzi’s grandmother. “I think she’s confused,” Suzi said. “Maybe she’s getting Alzheimer’s.”

“Oh God,” her mother muttered, like it was the end of the world or something.

When they drove by Nance’s house, her bottle green car was in the carport.

“Should we stop?” her mother asked Suzi. “Should we go in and make sure she’s all right?”

“Let’s go home,” Suzi suggested. “My knee’s really hurting.” Crazy old bat. It was a shame, really, because she’d gotten rather fond of the old thing. But what if she’d pulled this sort of stunt in Italy somewhere?

When they got home, her mother spent twenty minutes talking to Nance on the phone, or, rather listening to Nance talk, and murmuring consoling phrases, like “I’m sure it was” and “She’ll understand.”

The hell I will, thought Suzi. What would possess somebody to behave like that, after she’d introduced Suzi around as her granddaughter? Was this the way Nance would treat her actual granddaughter? Good thing she didn’t have one.

When her mother finally got off the phone, her face looked thoughtful. She told Suzi that Nance was very apologetic and said that it would never happen again.

“Why’d she do it?”

“She got upset, thinking about her daughter,” her mother said. “Her daughter died. Did she tell you?”

Suzi was pleased to report that she knew all about Helen, who’d died of cancer.

“I guess her Helen loved donuts, and Nance got overcome with
memories being in Dunkin’ Donuts,” her mother said. “That’s no excuse. But she said she’ll make it up to you and hopes you’ll forgive her. I’m just telling you what she said.”

“She just left me there.”

“I know, I know. But people do crazy things when they’re sad.”

“I’m sad, and I don’t do crap like that.”

Her mother sat down in a kitchen chair like the wind got knocked out of her. “
You’re
sad?” she said. “What’s wrong, honey?” Like, you’re not allowed to be sad.

Duh, she wanted to tell her mother. Why do you think? You only care about Ava. It was too awful to say aloud, and her mother would just deny it anyway. “My knee, duh,” Suzi said, glad she had a go-to pain source that her mother had to acknowledge.

“Oh, yes, that,” her mother said, sounding relieved. She glanced out the window into the sunlit branches of Granddad’s beautiful live oak tree as if she wished she were outside instead of in here. “Nance has been so nice to all of us, so helpful. She’s adopted our family. I hate to just cut her off.”

“I’m not going to just cut her off,” Suzi snapped. Her mother would look for an excuse to cut anyone off. “She wants to take Granddad to church with us next week.”

“Oh, really?” her mother said. “I’m sure he’d enjoy that.”

Anything to take the old man off her hands. Suzi had said the right thing once again.

“I guess we could give her another chance,” her mother said.

Before Nance/Marylou actually met Wilson, she hadn’t realized how complicated, and potentially unsatisfying it could be, trying to enact her revenge. She hadn’t even considered the possibility that Wilson might be losing his marbles, might not remember what she
required
him to remember.

On the third morning she read the
New York Times
to him, or pretended to read it, the two of them were sitting alone in his little den, drinking cups of coffee that Caroline had brought in; and he asked her if she was the one who’d sent him the package, which gave her hope that he did, finally, grasp the situation.

She said that, yes, it had been she who sent him the package full of photocopies of documents and letters from the government study, linking her and Wilson and Helen.

He asked her why she’d sent it to him.

She said to remind him of what he’d done.

He gave her that blank face. At least he was wearing his hearing aid today and had put on trousers with a short-sleeved button-up shirt tucked into them, instead of his usual bathrobe and pj’s.

“You’re as bad as a Nazi,” Marylou explained to him. “You’re a monster. Experimenting on human beings without their knowledge or consent. I should call you Heinrich. Or Adolf.”

He actually smiled. “Or Godzilla,” he said.

The smile was insufferable. “Do you know who I am?” she asked him.

“I believe I do.”

“Who? Who am I?”

The annoying little white poodle was out in the front yard, barking fiercely at Paula Coffey, in her white visor, jogging by. Wilson said, “You’re Mrs. Archer. Mrs. Archer with the lovely blue eyes.”

“I told you. My real name is Marylou Ahearn.”

His eyes behind their trifocals swept her up and down. “You look nice today.”

“Go straight to hell.”

He nodded. “Not yet,” he said, and crossed his legs so that his white calf showed. He glanced out the window, and she did, too. The dog was silent, but the city recycling truck was nearby, slamming glass bottles around. Moss hung in ghostly swaths from the huge live oak tree in the front yard. The sunlight coming into the room made her feel drowsy. The smell of warming dust made her feel drowsy. She didn’t want to feel drowsy. It was happening again. His bobbing and weaving was wearing her down. The previous two times she’d “read the newspaper” to him she’d given up badgering him after a while and just sat there, making small talk about Memphis and gardening and the weather, hoping that her mere presence was making him miserable, occasionally imagining flying across the room and strangling him. Breaking the table lamp over his head.