The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (35 page)

What had she expected? She’d expected hugging and kissing and professions of love, and maybe undressing and fondling, if they hadn’t been in an office. But what had happened—she hadn’t even known that men acted like that. She had to wonder: Did other men do such things? She found herself staring at the men walking past her house, in the car beside hers, her friends’ fathers, her own father! Grown-up, painfully ordinary men. Surely not!

For years she’d been warned repeatedly, boringly, about perverts, and had never thought much about what a pervert might do once he got hold of you, but now she supposed she knew at least some of it. She was ashamed, and disappointed in herself for not following Officer Friendly’s advice. She hadn’t run away or yelled or kicked him in the balls. Which she’d just assumed she’d do. She’d assumed she was brave and bold. She was Suzi! But, no, she’d stood there like a wimp and did as he asked, even though it made her sick. And the worst thing was—she’d asked for it! But why? Why had she?

When she got brave enough to ask her mother these questions, her mother’s response, after hugging Suzi, was to get on the phone. She called around, polling people about counselors; and many of them recommended Doris as the best person in town for “this sort of thing.”

Doris was the calmest woman Suzi’d ever met—soft-spoken and kind but no-nonsense and unflappable. On the old side. On the nondescript
side. But Suzi kept watching Doris and marveling—Doris was a real counselor! Like the kind Ava went to!

Doris had told Suzi in no uncertain terms that it was a very
good
thing that her mother had overheard, because this kind of thing needed to come out in the open and not be a secret. That was the worst thing about it. The secret part. And Nance should’ve told her mother right away, Doris said. She said that Suzi really needed her parents’ protection against men like Buff.

When Suzi explained that she’d started it, that she’d told Buff she was available, Doris explained that Suzi was too young to understand the ramifications of what she was doing. She’d gone along with Buff because she didn’t know what would happen, and once she got into his office she was too intimidated, too frightened to act. Buff obviously had a lot of problems and was so immature he felt it was okay to act out the way he did.

When Suzi thought of Buff’s behavior, his heavy breathing and dirty talking—had he really compared her mouth to a pussy?—and his violent pumping away as “acting out,” Suzi wanted to giggle, but she stifled it because Doris was so serious. The thing was, Doris said, Buff was the adult, and he’d abused his position of authority that the church had given him, not just with Suzi and Ava but with all those other girls. It was a good thing, for everybody’s sake, that his behavior was discovered and stopped. Suzi was
not
responsible for any of the pain this was causing anyone. No, the blame lay squarely on Buff’s shoulders.

Tears sprang to Suzi’s eyes—again—and she felt so many conflicting things, it made her dizzy. She felt so grateful to be sitting there, talking to Doris, able to unburden herself to somebody who knew how to respond. And she knew that Doris was right. It was Buff’s fault. But was she entirely innocent?

Doris kept talking, asking her things, and Suzi answered as best she could, but one thing she could never tell was that she was relieved
to be there with Doris not just because she could unburden herself but because, at last,
she
was the one who needed help and support,
she
was the one in need of attention,
she
was the one with the problem, and most important, now
she
had her mother’s undivided attention. She felt guilty about this, and a little angry. Did you have to get yourself sexually abused (as Doris called it) to get some attention in her house?

* * *

The shit hit the fan again with Ava’s revelation. After Ava told their mother about Mr. Boy and the nude photographs their mother blew another gasket. She went down in the basement and told their father, who was monitoring Hurricane Grayson on his computer. He came up and called the police and reported Mr. Boy, whose real name was Mr. Boyle. Both her parents were furious at Nance and blamed the nude photo thing on her. They invited the poor woman over without telling her why.

It was early evening when her parents, Suzi and Ava, Nance, and her grandfather sat down in the living room. Nance, for some reason, had insisted that Granddad be there. The two of them sat next to each other on the couch, Suzi next to Nance, with her bum leg propped up on the coffee table, and her parents sat in armchairs. Ava sat on the ottoman in her baggy pajama shorts and huge sleep T-shirt, even though it was only seven o’clock. Her face was dotted with three big blobs of white acne medicine, even though she had no acne now and had never had any. You could point this out to Ava until you were blue in the face and it never sunk in.

Otis was wandering around the neighborhood with his Geiger counter, thank God. This whole thing would embarrass him; and he wouldn’t understand it, having never had a girlfriend, or even had a crush on a girl, in his entire life.

Nance, looking sporty in a navy-and-white-striped dress, admitted
that she’d taken Ava to the photographer’s, and said she’d only done it to help Ava, because Ava really wanted to go on
America’s Next Top Model
.

“As if!” Suzi barked out.

“I never really cared about the
Next Top Model.
” Ava, ignoring Suzi, addressed Nance. “It was mostly your idea. You paid for it.”

Nance looked down at her white veiny hands, and they all waited to hear what she was going to say. She didn’t say anything.

“Regardless,” said her father. He had stubble on his cheeks and the hair on his crown stuck up in wisps. How long had it been since he’d taken a shower? He was obsessed with the hurricane—staying up all night to check on it like it was some bad kid he was keeping tabs on. He had to know exactly where it was, where it was going, how big a troublemaker it was. All day yesterday Grayson had churned across the Florida peninsula, he told his family, moving very slowly,
gaining strength over land
—very unusual—causing massive flooding. The flooding was so bad that President Bush had declared the entire state of Florida a Federal Disaster Area.

This morning he’d informed them that Grayson had swept through Melbourne, breaking a record for the amount of rainfall accumulated, and back out into the Atlantic again. Where would it go now? Who cared, as long as it didn’t come here. But it might come here. It might! It was a screwy storm, zigging and zagging all over the place as if it were toying with the entire state.

Right now it was sunny and clear here in oblivious Tallahassee. The air-conditioning in the house had shut off for a while, and the birds in the hedge by the living room windows could be heard twittering idiotically through the closed windows; and there were morons out walking their dogs and jogging as though there weren’t a huge storm nearby. Hide! Hide! It might be coming! Suzi wanted to yell. Parson was sleeping under the covers on Suzi’s bed. She was no fool. Okay,
Suzi was officially losing her mind. She wished she could hold Parson now, smelling her comforting doggy smell, kissing her pointed snout.

“You should never have done that without our permission.” Her father was lecturing Nance in an angry voice about the photo session.

“I realize that,” Nance said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m over eighteen!” Ava said. “I don’t need your permission. God!”

Her mother wouldn’t let Ava take any blame. She addressed Nance. “You shouldn’t have let that creep take nude photos of her,” said her mother, who was sitting in her favorite red chair by the window. “Now they’re all over the Internet. What were you thinking?” Her mother looked spooky because of her short hair.

Nance kept worrying her hands in her lap. When was she going to start defending herself? What could she say? There really was no excuse for what Nance had done, Suzi thought. None. And she’d thought Nance was so sensible.

Vic sat back, folding his arms on his chest. “I’d like to strangle both of those fuckers with my bare hands.” He pinched his mouth together. She’d never heard her father talk this way, use this kind of language. “Should have killed that asshole while I had the chance,” he muttered. Buff had gotten a restraining order against her father.

“Just let the police handle it,” Suzi suggested. “Those creeps aren’t worth it.” This was a line she’d heard on a
CSI
, she realized as soon as she’d said it.

“Please don’t kill them, Daddy,” Ava said, her face screwing up like she was ready to cry. She thought he was really going to do it! Ava was so naive.

“When I think of what those men did, it’s all I can do to sit here.” The short haircut made her mother’s eyes look larger and angrier. She was rocking slowly back and forth. “I’d like to cut their balls off. They both deserve it.”

Suzi couldn’t believe that her parents were talking about wanting to kill people and mutilate their privates. Her parents!

Granddad appeared to be listening to all this and understanding it. “Come on now, you two,” he said. “You’re scaring the kids here. It’s not right, this ugly talk.”

Nance finally looked up and started talking, and what she said was so astounding that Suzi could barely believe it. She told them all that she’d been one of the women in Granddad’s radiation experiments in Memphis in the 1950s, and that she’d suffered health problems ever since and lost her eight-year-old daughter, Helen, to cancer, because she’d been tricked into drinking radiation for Granddad’s study.

What?

“I knew it,” Caroline crowed. “I told you, Vic!”

Nance went on talking, saying she’d testified in a government investigation during the Clinton era and had been financially compensated, but years later she’d found out that Granddad was living here in Tallahassee and had decided to come here and kill him. The way he’d killed Helen.

He’d killed Helen. Granddad killed Helen? And Nance was going to kill Granddad?

Suzi looked at Ava. Ava was staring at her with a frozen face, but Suzi could tell she was just as shocked as she was.

“My God,” Suzi’s mother said to Nance. “Are you kidding? You were planning to kill him?”

“She’s not kidding,” Suzi’s father said.

“I was never more serious about anything in my life,” Nance said.

Kill Granddad? He was the sweetest thing in the world, or at least he’d been five minutes ago, before she found out he’d killed Helen in his experiment. That was beyond what even Suzi could imagine. What was wrong with all the adults in this room, all former or wannabe murderers?

“Did you kill her daughter?” Ava asked Granddad.

“Of course not!”

“You did, Dad, indirectly,” her mother said. “You know you did.”

“He won’t admit it,” Nance said.

Granddad just shook his head.

“I guess you blame the U.S. go’ment,” her father said sarcastically.

So her mother and father already knew all about Granddad’s experiment. What else had they been hiding around here?

Nance spoke up again and added that when she realized that Granddad’s memory wasn’t right and that he was just a harmless old man, she decided that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to kill him, so she’d decided to get even with the whole family. She’d targeted Ava and tried to get her involved in modeling because her parents wouldn’t like it and tried to turn Suzi into a religious freak because her parents wouldn’t like that either, but none of it was satisfying because she really liked both girls and didn’t want to hurt them.

Nance said all this really fast, and it was too much for Suzi to take in at once. But Suzi kept thinking,
She wanted me to be a religious freak? That’s
why she invited me to church? She scooted as far away from Nance as she could get, scooted until she was smashed up against the arm of the couch.

“But see what I ended up doing,” Nance said. “By trying to get revenge, I hurt lots of people. People I care about.” She turned and smiled a suck-up smile at Suzi, but Suzi just made a disgusted face, an expression Mykaila had perfected.

“What did I tell you?” her mother said to her father. “I told you she was one of Dad’s subjects. Maybe you’ll believe me next time.” Her mother, once again, was focusing on the wrong thing.

Her father smoothed his hand down over his face as if he were trying to iron the frown off it, but it didn’t work. “Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Suzi stood up and limped over to the ottoman and lowered herself down next to Ava, the only person in the room, in the world, who
had no pretense, who wasn’t hiding anything, who was always exactly like she appeared to be. She laid her head on Ava’s shoulder, smelling the medicinal acne stuff, the most wonderful smell in the world.
Please, please don’t move away from me, Ava
. And instead of scooching away, Ava draped an arm awkwardly around Suzi’s shoulder. There was an uneasy silence. Suzi tore her gaze away from Nance’s profile and turned it, once again, on her granddad, the accused murderer, who sat there, with a slightly puzzled expression, on the other side of the woman who’d planned to murder him.

“Did you hear that, Granddad?” Suzi burst out. “Nance wants to kill you! Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Wanted,” Nance said. “I
wanted
to kill him.”

Granddad said, “Why would you want to do that?”

“You know why,” Nance snapped at him.

He shook his head. “Can’t say as I do.”

“I’ve told him, many times,” Nance said, “but he always forgets.”

“How were you going to kill him?” Ava asked. Leave it to her to focus on the method! How Aspergery. But now that she’d asked, Suzi really wanted to know, too.

Nance sighed. “Never could decide.”

“So you’re
not
going to kill him,” said her mother, to the aspiring murderer. “We don’t have to worry about that, do we? My God.” She sounded ready to cry. “We’ve got enough to worry about.”

“Oh, no, no,” Nance said. “I gave that idea up long ago. I love all of you. I truly do. I just wanted to come clean ’cause I’m hoping to keep you from doing the same sort of stupid things I did. By hurting your kids I’d hoped to hurt you and Dr. Spriggs, but it all backfired. Please promise me you won’t try to get revenge on Buff. Enough people have been hurt.”