The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (33 page)

“Did you just come here to yell at me for not coming to group?” Travis said. “I didn’t think you’d care.”

“I’m not yelling. I care.”

“That’s good,” Travis said, and they both leaned in awkward silence. Ava kicked the toe of her flip-flop in the red clay floor. Outside there was the sound of birds, a rooster crowing, and the boys somewhere yelling and whooping.

“I wish I could just stay in the seventeenth century,” Travis said.

“Why?”

“My mom. She’s always in a bad mood. Either drunk or trying not to drink or has a hangover. Do you drink?”

Ava shook her head. “I mean, I have a couple of times.” That was a lie. She’d tasted wine once and hated it. In high school she’d never been invited to the parties where kids drank. Her few friends in high school had been the uncool supersmart girls, now gone off to good colleges across the country, who’d had slumber parties where they watched
Gilmore Girls
.

Travis straightened up, turned around, reached up and removed one of the rifles from the wall.

What was he going to do with a gun? “Is that real?” Ava asked him.

“Of course,” he said. “We’re not supposed to let visitors hold them, but do you want to?”

Ava shook her head.

He took aim at something outside the front door. “We keep our gunpowder kegs in a room back there, if you want to see.”

“No, thank you,” Ava said, and then asked him if he knew about Buff and Suzi, and when he said no, she told him what had happened, and she told him how her mother had confronted Buff at church and that he’d denied doing anything, and how her father had beaten Buff to a pulp and how Buff had threatened to press charges, and how that didn’t sound good, even if she wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, and how her parents had reported Buff’s abuse of Suzi to the police and he’d denied everything to them, too, and how Suzi had just been crying in her room and going to counseling appointments, and her mother had been crying, too, and her dad had either been angry and yelling or not speaking to anyone.

Travis had lowered the rifle and was frowning at her. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“Since he’s your uncle, I thought you’d want to know. Bob’s your uncle!” she couldn’t help adding.

“
Buff’s
my uncle. He’d never do anything like that. He’s a minister!”

Ava couldn’t believe that he was standing up for Buff. She’d thought he’d be on her side, on Suzi’s side. “You don’t believe Suzi? You think she’s lying? She’s not a liar.”

Travis lifted the long gun to his shoulder again, sighting an imaginary target across the room, and Ava felt like slugging him. It seemed very important, suddenly, to prove Suzi right and Buff wrong. But how to do it when she wasn’t there with them? Actually, she knew how to do it. She could reveal her secret to Travis, about Mr. Boy taking the naked pictures of her and Buff showing her that he’d seen them. But if she told Travis, she’d have no control over the information anymore. If Travis told anyone, more people would get in trouble, including her. But she really, really wanted Travis on her side, and Suzi’s side, and telling on herself was the one way she could think of to get him there.

“Hey,” Travis said, hanging the musket back up on the wall. “Would you like a tour of the mission? We close in forty-five minutes so they won’t care if I leave my post. I’m in training to give tours. What I want to do eventually is work on the archaeological dig. They’ve found some cool stuff—pottery, bowls, tools. I’m going to FSU next year and majoring in archaeology. I’m going to get my own apartment. Have you been watching the news about Hurricane Grayson? There’s a storm warning for the entire coastline of Florida. Atlantic and Gulf coasts. First time that’s ever happened.” He started walking out of the fort, and Ava had to catch up.

Okay, so he didn’t want to talk about the Buff thing, and Ava realized she was sick of hearing about it and talking about it and thinking about it, and glad not to have to tell Travis what she didn’t want to tell anyone.

He and Ava went into the friary and then into the gorgeous church with the high thatched roof, which let in tiny beams of light, wisps of straw floating down, and the dirt floors and glowing religious paintings, then they walked over to the Indian council house. She could see why Travis liked it here so much. Up on this hill there was a touch of a breeze every now and then. And the traffic on Pensacola Street was just a faint murmur.

As she was walking around with Travis, she had three realizations, none of them directly related to what she was looking at. The first realization was that looking at the pictures and the places and imagining what went on in Mission San Luis felt like a key into a new kingdom. Re-creations of the past.
She
wanted to re-create the past. She wanted to immerse herself in history. The history of something. She would major in history. History, she realized, was what she cared about most. She’d been skirting around this knowledge for some time. She’d been most interested in the
story
of Elvis, in his history, even more than his music. She’d loved reading books about how horse breeds came to be,
about the origins of foxhunting and what sort of people had gone in for it. The subjects weren’t as important to her as the stories. What sort of history she might want to study, the time period, at what college, she didn’t know yet. But she knew. History! That’s where she wanted to be. She felt something in her settle and lift at the same time.

The second realization was that she really liked Travis. She felt happy around him. Relaxed. Even today, with all the stress at home. He was cute and smart and interesting, and she wanted to go out with him. Not out-out, like going steady, but she wanted to go on a date with him and see what happened. She hadn’t had any fun dates ever. But she felt ready to try again.

The third realization wasn’t so good. It struck her that she’d been remiss in keeping her secret from her family, especially now that Suzi was in such a bad way. It wasn’t Travis she needed to tell. She needed to tell her parents. Suzi, surprisingly, hadn’t ratted on her about the naked photos, but she needed to rat on herself.

If she told her parents about her experiences with Mr. Boy and Buff, her story would add more weight to Suzi’s case. It would also get Ava into trouble, but was that such a big deal now? No, Suzi was her little sister, and she needed her help. Ava rarely got to feel like the big sister with Super Suzi as a sibling, but this would give her the chance. It would upset her parents even more, though. She hated to be the cause of more pain and conflict, but she had to do it.

She and Travis were standing at a display of knee-high pottery jars in the Indian council house, a large circular structure that could accommodate three thousand people, and Travis had gone quiet and was watching her. “What are you thinking about?” he asked her. “Are you bored? I’m sorry, I talk too much.”

“I was wondering how I was going to get home,” Ava said. She wasn’t, but she should have been, since Otis had roared off before she could make arrangements with him to pick her up.

“I can take you,” Travis said. “We could get ice cream first, if you want.”

“I want,” Ava said, knowing she’d remember this afternoon for the rest of her life, walking around Mission San Luis with Travis, realizing that she liked him, realizing what she wanted to study in school, realizing that she had to help her sister, come what may. Two great things and one awful thing in one afternoon. And there was Hurricane Grayson, which might or might not cause a lot of trouble.

Why did the good and the bad have to come together? It seemed, often, that they did.

Finally, the day had come. He got up early, dressed, ate a hearty breakfast of twelve toaster waffles before anyone else got up, enjoying the solemn ceremonial feel of this occasion, this day, August 12, 2006. A day that would appear in future science books, in news stories, in TV specials, maybe even movies. All this wonderful fallout would take a while, but right away, at least, he’d be in the local news. His story would wipe Hurricane Grayson off the front page of the
Tallahassee Democrat
and would do the same to the stories about Reverend Buffington Coffey, and give Rusty some peace and quiet.

He missed Rusty. She hadn’t been around since all the fuss started with Suzi and Rusty’s father. He’d texted Rusty and asked her to call him, but she didn’t, so he called her and left voice messages, saying that he missed her and that his reactor was nearly finished and he wanted her to be there when he put it together. When she didn’t call him back, he called again and added that he was sorry for everything that had happened with her father, and that he didn’t blame her and that he really, really liked her—he didn’t mention the word love again—but she wouldn’t text or call him back. There was so much he needed to tell her, so many things he’d had to do without her.

She’d missed out on the blowtorch. He loved his blowtorch. He loved the roaring noise, the metal mask he wore, the bright flame, and
she would’ve loved these things, too. She could’ve helped him take apart the replacement mantles that the two of them had stolen from Target, extracting the thorium strips. She could’ve helped him dump the strips into his cast-iron frying pan, and he would’ve let her fire up his blowtorch and reduce those suckers to ash. Watching Rusty do it would’ve made it even more fun.

Next he’d had to isolate and purify the thorium from the ash, and he’d had a little chat with Granddad about how to do that. Granddad had suggested using lithium fragments to absorb the unwanted ash. Lithium batteries, his grandfather said, would be the best source.

He wanted to tell her how Granddad had become a virtual prisoner in his den, with himself as his own jailor. He was so scared of being accosted by Mrs. Archer that he never went outside anymore. He gazed longingly at the front yard, commenting on the yard work that needed to be done, but he wouldn’t venture out. He wouldn’t even go on walks with Otis and Parson, which had been one of his favorite things to do.

And his mother, who usually fussed over Granddad almost as much as she fussed over Ava, had stopped reading to Granddad and asking after him and bringing him snacks. It was all about Suzi now, taking Suzi to counseling, talking to Dad, in loud enough voices that even somebody who wasn’t trying to eavesdrop could overhear, about the four other girls from the youth group who were also pressing charges against Buff.

When he heard all this talk about Buff, Otis thought of Rusty, whom he realized now must’ve known something was screwy with her father. She’d called him a phony and a perv, and he felt really bad for her. She must feel so embarrassed and ashamed to have everyone know. And the worst thought he had was that maybe her father had tried to do some of the same things to her. Maybe he
had
done them. Otis had read about men doing those things to their daughters, but he’d never tried to imagine how a daughter with that kind of father might
feel. In fact, until he started wondering about Rusty and missing her and feeling bad for her, he’d never thought much about anybody other than himself—maybe because he’d never really spent a lot of time with another person, outside his own family, that is. Gotten to know her. Shared experiences with her, like stealing and vandalism and creating dangerous nuclear devices. So this is what it feels like, he realized, to let another person into your world. It felt much more dangerous than any nuclear device he could create, because he had no idea what the possible chain reaction would be. But when he thought about all the bad things he and Rusty had done, it made him happy, and he was glad of all of it. He thought about her at night, in bed, until he ached, and there was only one thing to do for that, but a different sort of ache came back right after. He missed her.

So, in order to keep the memory of Rusty alive, he went out and shoplifted lithium batteries from CVS and Walgreens and Target and Walmart, even though he could’ve paid for them. Once he got them home, he cut them in half with wire cutters and removed the shiny lithium strips and dropped them in a beaker of Crisco oil to prevent oxidation. Then, donning his gas mask, lead suit, and latex gloves, he put the thorium and lithium into a sealed aluminum foil ball and dropped it into a pan of oil, cooking it on his propane stove for half an hour. When he tested the ball, after it cooled, with the Geiger counter, all indications were go.

Then he had the thorium all ready to shoot the gun at. He had the beryllium strips for part of the fuel, but his final step was to transmute the radium—obtained from the clocks and the hidden tube of paint and the chunk ordered online—into a workable form. He ordered some barium sulfate online and mixed it with radium and strained the brew into a beaker. In the beaker it emitted a glow that told Otis it was ready.

A few days earlier he’d loaded up his gun with his uranium and beryllium and tried shooting it at the thorium. Nothing happened,
nothing that could be measured with his Geiger counter. He tried this for three successive days with no results, and he began to get agitated.

That night he drove by Rusty’s house, looking for her, but it was shut up tight. No cars there, no lights on. Another night he walked over to her house, dressed in black, wanting to propose some Mrs. Archer harassing if she was up for it. The black SUV was in the driveway, but no lights were on. He knocked on Rusty’s window, but there was no response, so he snuck across the street and did some halfhearted Mrs. Archer tormenting by himself—tossed some gravel at her windows, picked up a flowerpot with fake daisies in it and placed it on the roof of her car—not very original tricks, but it was something to honor Rusty, and he slunk back home, missing her.