The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (40 page)

“Maybe he knew things would never get better for him,” Caroline said. “Maybe he just gave up. But that’s not going to happen to you. Or me.”

“I know that!”

At last Ava allowed Caroline to hug her, and Caroline buried her face in Ava’s sweet, sweaty hair.
Oh, when are you going to grow a shell like the rest of us?
is what she was thinking. And was also thinking,
Ava still needs me!
And,
I can’t do this anymore!

The next day she dropped Ava off at Graceland and decided to explore the city on her own. She’d visited there many times when she was growing up, but it was simply her birthplace, the place where her father had grown up, a backdrop for family reunions. As she drove through Midtown she felt like she’d been wearing smudgy glasses that had been removed. The past was visible everywhere: 1920s bungalows, Art Deco buildings from the thirties and forties, neon signs from the fifties and sixties. She drove past a sign in the shape of a smoking cigarette and one that had a white shirt with no body in it, waving an empty sleeve, advertising Happy Day Laundry. Every particular she saw was interesting and worthy of scrutiny, because it was in Memphis.

Memphis was where she’d lost her mother. The whole city seemed poised to reveal something important to her, something about her parents. Their past lives, their youth, their spirits even, seemed to be living on here in an alternate universe. In this part of town she could be back in the fifties, for all the buildings had changed. Was it possible to fall in love with a city?

Downtown she’d parked her car beside the Peabody Hotel and took a walk down Main Street. Trolleys, mostly empty, clacked past her. There was the Chisca Hotel, once the broadcasting home of WHBQ
radio and the
Red Hot and Blue
show hosted by Dewey Phillips, who’d played Elvis Presley’s first single, “That’s All Right,” for the first time on his show in 1954.

One street over, on Mulberry, was the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot, now the National Civil Rights Museum. She passed a building which was once the Alonzo Lott School for Waiters. Sunlight slanted on the brick storefronts and coffee shops, the fire station. She could open up a clothing store in one of these buildings. Caroline’s.

In the distance was the Arcade Restaurant, and across from the Arcade was Earnestine and Hazel’s, which had once been a church and then a pharmacy and a brothel. Now it housed a juke joint called Soul Burger.

The Arcade was a touristy spot because it had been used as a setting in several Hollywood movies. Locals sniffed at the food because the rolls weren’t homemade, but Caroline loved the old brick building, the neon signs in the huge plate glass windows, the Memphis memorabilia on the walls, the soda fountain and the boomerang pattern in the Formica on the tabletops. It was the oldest restaurant in the city, and it was down at the end of South Main.

In the Arcade she’d sat in one of the turquoise and tan booths and ordered coffee and sweet potato pancakes and indulged her fantasy of living there, in one of those buildings on Main Street, working in a quiet and orderly store surrounded by beautiful clothing that she’d chosen herself, talking to people who actually wanted her advice and suggestions, feeling competent in her own life again.

* * *

And now, driving through Memphis, on her way back to Marylou’s house with the tangy smelling white bags of barbecue and sides in the backseat, it felt unnatural being in Memphis without Ava, but it also
felt fine. She was starting to understand that she and Ava would probably keep needing each other, coming apart and then back together, for the rest of their lives. It was up to her to make the first real move, to take a short step away. Neither Mom nor Elvis could make everything all right for Ava.

Caroline hadn’t been able to step away, at all, ever, because part of her, deep down, was sure that she was somehow responsible for Ava’s autism—that it was caused by something Caroline ate or drank or did while she was pregnant, or that her genes were bad, or the fact that her labor had gone on for a week and Ava had been yanked out by forceps with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. And those fucking mercury-laced shots.

Like Nance, she’d blamed herself all these years, but unlike Nance, she hadn’t had a single evil doctor to share the blame. It was just her and the guilt and Ava, and somehow, she was going to have to practice, putting them aside, little by little.

Back at Marylou’s house Caroline and her kids and the couple sat down in the kitchen, which smelled like old bread and old sponges. The round table took up too much space in the kitchen. The wooden chairs were tall and spindly, their seats hard and too short, the chair cushions thin and hard and lumpy from years of butts pressing into them. Despite the discomfort, it felt like they were having a party. Trevor decided to cast off his vegetarian scruples just for that evening and accepted a sandwich with a sigh. They all dived into the greasy barbecue sandwiches—pulled pork on white bread with a pickle, fries, beans, and slaw—that Caroline had dumped onto Marylou’s thin china plates. Katya asked Suzi what she liked to do, and Suzi told her about soccer and how she couldn’t wait to get started again in the fall, and Caroline felt relieved.

Then Otis started talking about how they should start selling Elvis relics on eBay, and Suzi chimed in with some suggestions about what
they could pocket and sell—leaves from the trees on the grounds of Graceland, threads from the carpets inside the mansion. Katya and Trev got into the discussion, proposing that they all go into the Elvis relic business together.

“There are other Elvis sites to harvest from,” Katya said. “Like Lauderdale Courts, where he grew up. Humes High School.”

“We’d have to wear disguises, so they wouldn’t be suspicious of us, coming back to Graceland, over and over again,” Suzi said. She grinned at her mother while slurping up sweet tea through a straw, happier than Caroline had seen her in months.

“They’re used to people hanging out at Graceland every day,” Caroline said, and told them about the people she’d seen in the Meditation Garden.

“I’ll sit by Elvis’s grave and weep and fall out while you guys steal things,” Katya said. “This could be way more lucrative than being a TA.”

“I’ll impersonate a German tourist,” Trev said. “Wear a toupee. Pretend I can’t read any signs.”

“Otis could be an Elvis impersonator,” Suzi suggested. “He’s already got the pigging-out thing down.”

Otis kept stuffing french fries into his mouth. “You could be a Donald Duck impersonator,” he said.

“Or Michael Jackson,” said Suzi.

“Michael Scott!” said Otis.

“I’ll be Kelly Osbourne,” said Caroline.

It was almost like a dinner at home but without the edge.

They had just finished dinner and were helping Trev and Katya pack up endless cartons of books, when Caroline decided to check her messages. There were six from Ava and four from Vic.

She tricked him. She’d told him—and Caroline—that she was taking him out to the Cracker Barrel for breakfast, and he’d had no reason to doubt her and he was dying to get out of that house, but then, before he knew it, the three of them—she and Buster and Wilson—were on the interstate driving toward Panama City, and she told him where they were really going. It stunned him at first, that she could be so audacious, so bold, as to think she could get away with such a stunt.

“Why are we going there?” he asked her. Pine trees went whizzing past in the rain—he was way too old to jump out of her car, even if it were barely moving.

“I’m taking you back,” she said. “Where we met. Where I got the radioactive cocktail. To jog your memory.”

“I remember all I need to remember.”

“Not in my opinion.”

“And yours is the only one that counts, I guess.”

“You got that right.”

Why hadn’t he allowed himself to be talked into getting a cell phone? Caroline and Vic and the kids wouldn’t have any idea where he was. They’d be worried sick. He voiced this worry to Marylou.

“I’ll call and let them know you’re safe in an hour or two. Or three. After we’ve gotten a good head start.”

“So you changed your mind again? You
are
going to kill me?”

“This is just a little outing. I need to know for sure that you remember who I am and what you did with that experiment, that you understand how terrible it was, and that you’re truly sorry. Then I’ll take you home.”

“I know who you are and I understand what I did. It was terrible and I’m truly sorry. There’s an exit. Turn around.”

“You’re just saying that.”

He wasn’t just saying that. It was true. He’d just waited too long to tell her, hoping he might not have to. “I have to use the bathroom. Right now. Pull over.”

“There’s a rest area three miles up the road. Don’t try anything funny.”

At the rest area he considered accosting a stranger and telling him what was happening, but knew that people would think he was a senile wacko. He thought about sneaking off into the woods, but then he’d be a senile wacko lost in the rainy woods. Buster would follow his scent and give him away. Maybe he could run across the interstate and hitchhike back. No, she’d be the only one who’d stop to pick him up.

He did manage to find a quarter in his pocket and the number for Vic’s cell phone on the emergency card Caroline had put in his wallet, but as he tried to make the call Marylou and Buster came up behind him and Marylou hung up the phone. He gave up and got back into the car with her.

* * *

It stopped raining and the sun came out. They got off the interstate and onto a two-lane highway that plowed straight up through north Florida and Alabama, through tiny towns with gorgeous old houses, their yards dotted with scraggly palm trees, past pecan groves and fireworks shops and fruit stands, past the Bama Nut Shop, past one Mexican restaurant after another, and periodically Wilson forgot why he was riding along
through the Deep South, and what year it was, and where exactly he was going, and he started enjoying the ride, because he hadn’t taken a ride like this, through the country, in a long time, then he wondered why
he
wasn’t driving, and then he turned and saw Marylou and thought, again,
Oh Christ
.

Marylou talked and talked, telling him about how she and Teddy had met at Little Rock Community College, where they were working toward associate’s degrees, Teddy on the GI Bill. They’d both had small parts in a production of
Our Town
, Teddy as Simon Stimson, her as Rebecca Gibbs. She’d been terrible in the play, but Teddy’d lavished her with compliments at the cast party, and she did the same to him, even though he hadn’t been so hot himself.

After they got married Teddy couldn’t find work as an industrial designer in Little Rock—didn’t really look that hard, truth be told—so they moved to Memphis where he eventually got a job at a tool and die shop designing custom parts for mechanical cotton pickers. Before that, though, when they were in public housing, she’d finally gotten pregnant with Helen.

She told Wilson how for years after she’d been slipped the radium she hadn’t felt right, had felt tired and anemic, put on iron pills by her doctor, but that Helen had seemed fine until that Christmas morning when the little girl had come to her parents—she and Teddy lounging in bed, Helen up early checking her stocking—and showed them the lump in her right thigh, a hard lump like a peach pit lodged under her skin. “But it doesn’t hurt,” Helen kept insisting. It took a little over a year for her to die, Marylou told him. Imagine, watching for more than a year as your child died.

“I can’t imagine it,” Wilson said. “It sounds like the worst thing in the world. I am so sorry.” How could he possibly convey how sorry he was? He could throw himself off a building or under a train, but what good would that do? He was going to die soon anyway, either by natural causes or by Marylou’s hand. He’d once read that a writer called John
Jay Chapman, a nutcase who’d lived around the turn of the century, had stuck his hand in an open flame in order to do penance for having beat up another man who was flirting with his fiancée. Mr. Chapman had burned his hand into a stump, but the fiancée had married him anyway. Wilson could do something like that, he supposed.

“So what’s your story?” Marylou asked him, accelerating past a van so fast her dashboard rattled. Sitting beside him, she looked like a little white-haired pixie. She wore a white T-shirt that hung down like a dress over her white slacks. The interior of her car, a Ford Taurus, was neat as could be. When he commented on this, she informed him that it was a rental car. A pinecone air freshener swung from the rearview mirror. “Let’s hear why you thought that radiation study was a good idea,” she said. “I wait with bated breath.”

Rather than demonstrating that there wasn’t much problem with his memory, as far as the study went, which would put him in the position of admitting he’d only been pretending not to remember, he told her instead about the time in his life he remembered best, which was being in the Army Air Corps during the war, stationed in England and then Italy and occupied France. He’d flown the P-47 Thunderbolt, a single-engine plane that looked like a milk bottle. Jugs, people called them. He and his fellow fighter pilots went on bombing missions, blowing up aircraft, railroad tracks, bridges, truck depots. He’d once taken out a Messerschmitt 262, a Swallow, one of the world’s first jet-powered fighter/bombers. Those things were bad, bad news for the Allies, he told Marylou. How come? she asked. Because, he said, the Swallow could’ve won air supremacy back for the Germans if they’d come on the scene earlier or if the war went on much longer. So you’re saying that if it weren’t for you, we’d be speaking German today, she said, and actually gave him a little smile.