Devil's Oven (24 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

As Ivy tried to help Lila stand, she told herself that what Anthony had done to Lila couldn’t be her fault. She had done nothing to encourage him. Like a spoiled child, he reached out for whatever might please him, and struck down whatever—whoever—displeased him. Despite Lila’s connection to Claude Dixon, Anthony’s finding her had to have been chance and nothing else. But feeling the weight of Lila’s misery in her arms, Ivy was suddenly certain that she was indeed guilty.

When Lila was steady, Ivy draped the towel around her shoulders, and lifted her hair so it wouldn’t be caught underneath. She averted her eyes from Lila’s bruised and bitten torso and instead concentrated on Lila’s grubby feet, with their once-shiny, manicured toenails.

Ivy would never let some stranger touch the ticklish parts of her feet, or hold her hand in theirs. A sloe-eyed woman with thick white streaks in her black hair had set up a fancy table to do fake nails and manicures at Sassy Scissors, where she and Thora got their hair cut. Ivy didn’t like the way the woman looked at her when she came in; her smile was too automatic, too forced. But someone like Lila would find that appealing, wouldn’t she? She liked to be flattered. Catered to.

Ivy was nothing like Lila. Who would care what her toes looked like? No one had ever cared what her face looked like.

An excuse
, Thora was always saying.
You use that lip as an excuse.

Lila dabbed at her skin with the towel in a slow, absent motion. Ivy wondered if she was even aware of what she was doing. Ivy had made the bathwater plenty warm, but not hot enough to bother the sores on Lila’s body.

She had seen the purple and black striations between Lila’s legs and the way the flesh around her groin was swollen and red. Anthony had done this, and he had brought Lila back to the trailer because he wasn’t finished with her. What would he do now? What should
Ivy
do now?

“I have some things you can put on,” she said, reaching for the clothes she had set on the back of the toilet. Unfolding them, she realized she didn’t have any underwear in the pile, only socks and pants and a sweater. Lila wasn’t nearly as large as Thora, but Ivy had found an old pair of sweatpants in the trailer’s rag bag that she thought might fit, as well as a soft cotton fisherman’s pullover she had bought for Thora a decade earlier. The sweater had shrunk several sizes in the dryer, but Thora had still kept it. The idea that Thora might have kept it for sentimental reasons bothered her. That wasn’t the Thora she had known her whole life. Or thought she’d known. She pushed the thought away.

She held Lila’s shoulder as she bent to put the sweatpants on and noticed Lila looking away, not focusing on her own body. Lila winced as she pulled the sweatpants over her hips, but didn’t cry out.

When Lila was dressed, Ivy positioned her on the edge of the tub so she could towel dry her hair. She tried to be gentle as she worked the bathwater out of the curls. Lila’s hair was matted in places, and really needed to be shampooed, but she knew Lila was too fragile right then. Anything might set her off screaming, panicked liked an animal, and Ivy needed time to think.

•  •  •

Lila sat propped up in the bed, her head tilted back against the warped headboard. She breathed evenly, but stared forward, still and silent.

“Let’s try to eat this soup.”

Ivy cradled the back of Lila’s head with one hand to keep her upright, and held the spoon to Lila’s lips with the other. It was only chicken broth, her mother’s prescription for hurting tummies and bad colds.

Lila responded by pursing her lips at the edge of the spoon. She sipped, still staring forward at the drawn curtains.

“Are you warmer?”

Lila didn’t answer, but accepted another spoonful of broth.

It was strange to have Lila back in the trailer. She had been there as a client several times, always in the front room, where Ivy had set up a screen for clients to change behind. They hadn’t been close enough friends when they were younger for Ivy to bring her home. By junior high, Lila had made it clear that she was beyond people like Ivy, people who were obviously never going to leave the mountains. But she had been kind sometimes. Particularly when she wanted something from Ivy. And she had come back to Alta, hadn’t she?

Can I let you walk away from here to tell everyone, Lila?

When the broth was down to a scant spoonful, Lila slumped against the headboard and closed her eyes. Ivy put aside the bowl and adjusted the pillows so that they were beneath Lila’s head. She reached over and turned off the lamp. Almost immediately, Lila’s breath deepened and Ivy knew she would sleep for hours.

Distorted shadows covered the bed and walls, making the room seem empty and lonesome. It had once been her parents’ bedroom. Thora had taken down the bright, inexpensive pictures and cheerful curtains that Ivy’s mother had put up, and replaced them with dull things: brown curtains like burlap, and generic, black-framed photos of buildings from the thrift store. “Better for renters,” she had said. It was not a happy room.

Ivy stood over Lila, wondering what all those boys had seen in her. As a teenager, Lila’d had corkscrew curls and a mouth that was too wide for her face. Freckles, too. She had never been hesitant or shy, and had tormented the teachers with her willingness to do things like climb out of second-story windows for a joke, or make cookies in the shape of a penis and testicles in Home Ec class. Then she would pull off a tear-jerking performance in a school play. It wasn’t just boys who wanted to be near her. Girls did, too.

“Sleep is good,” Ivy said, tucking a curl away off Lila’s forehead.
How much do I owe you? Is this enough?
“Sleep. Then we’ll know what to do.”

•  •  •

Down the hill, the only light coming from the house was the television’s chalky glow from behind the living room curtains. Ivy let herself in and turned on the overhead light. The television was blaring, but Anthony wasn’t in the room. The floor was littered with cupcake wrappers, an empty potato chip bag, and peanut shells that had first been crushed in his careless hands and then ground into the carpet. She had discovered he liked to shell peanuts when she pulled a bag of them out of the cabinet to put some on an ice cream sundae. He had shelled fifty or sixty in one sitting, not even bothering to eat half of them, but sprinkling them on the floor as though that was what the floor was made for. Seeing the mess, she recalled that she had thought they were out of peanuts. Where had he even found them? She was too tired to think about it. At least he had fed himself, and not forced her to come down to the house to make him a meal.

Ivy took a quick shower, and changed into dry corduroys and a violet cotton sweater whose wide portrait collar made her feel more civilized, as though she hadn’t been half-covered in vomit and mud and Lila’s blood only an hour earlier.

Back in the living room, she swept the wrappers into one hand and dropped the remotes into the pockets of the denim caddy hanging over the arm of the recliner. Each of the caddy’s three pockets had an initial embroidered on it—Thora’s initials. Ivy had made it for Thora the previous Christmas after seeing one in a magazine, and laid it on Thora’s chair for her to find Christmas morning. Thora was everywhere in the house, as much of a presence as when she had been alive. She felt Thora’s vexation as she used a whisk broom and dustpan to clean up the peanut shells so she wouldn’t wake Anthony with a noisy vacuum. Eventually the room was clean, but Thora wasn’t exorcised. She had just become invisible.

Ivy dumped the debris in the kitchen trashcan and went to wipe down the sink. Movement in the window caught her eye, and she looked up to see her own reflection. The light shining behind her made her features look blurred and flat in the glass. Her face had been transformed into a narrow oval with shadowed indentations for eyes, a faint triangle of a nose, and a thin line where her lips should be. No lashes. No scars. No hollows beneath her cheekbones. But the light had also transformed her hair into an aura of yellow gold.

She reached out, and the fingers of the woman in the glass met hers in cold union.

•  •  •

Ivy woke to the sound of the front door slamming.

She scrambled to kneel in the recliner so she could push back the curtain and look out the window. Outside, the sky was clear, the moonlight stronger.

Anthony’s long shadow led him up the driveway, toward the darkened trailer.

She opened her mouth to call him back, and her breath made a small wreath of fog on the glass. All she had to do was open the front door and shout after him. But nauseating fear kept her where she was until he disappeared behind the trailer. She sank back down into the chair, and turned off the lamp.

She couldn’t move. Closing her eyes, she tried to will herself to get up out of the chair. To go up to the trailer. To do anything but sit there.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Jolene pulled Charity’s beat-up car into a parking space around the corner from the courthouse. It stalled out before she could put it into park. The last time she had driven a car had been over thirty years ago. Working a clutch properly seemed to her like one of those things she shouldn’t forget, but it hadn’t happened that way.

The concrete and marble courthouse was a tomb whose thick walls couldn’t keep the silent pain of the men and women inside from reaching her. Hospitals, nursing homes, prisons—they were all islands of misery, and she stayed away from them if she could. Up on the mountain, she could hardly feel anything at all. She had strength, there. But being around all this humanity was draining her body of its usefulness. Her time was coming, and she hadn’t even gotten close to what she was supposed to do.

Lila was out there, holding the hand of hell itself. Ivy—her dear, sweet Ivy of the serious questions and snowy hair—was lost. And Thora. At least someone had closed her eyes. Ivy? It had to have been Ivy.

She had to do something right this time. She couldn’t bear to be born again. To suffer life again.

•  •  •

“You mean I can’t see my own father?” There was a particular little-girl tone of voice that some of the other dancers at the club used when they wanted something from the men. It made Jolene laugh when she heard it—baby talk from cotton-candy pink or red-painted, pillowy lips. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t imitate it. The advantage she had over those girls was her ability to maintain innocence in her eyes. She had changed from the sweatshirt into one of Charity’s fluffy, V-neck sweaters, and had left her jacket open so the man at the jail’s front desk could get a good look at what was inside.

“I understand your concern, miss, but the visiting schedule is posted right on the front door.”

The gleaming gold tag over his left breast pocket read
FOWLER
, and his aura was a putrid, muddy orange. He seemed lonely in his defenses, like he had been loved once but had forgotten what it was like. His brusqueness was part of an act that wouldn’t be difficult for her to break.

“But I came all the way here from school, Officer Fowler,” she said. “I came as soon as I heard from the police, and now you tell me I can’t see him?”

“Really wish I could help you.” He shook his head with exaggerated regret.

Jolene nodded, playing along. “Please.”

“Sorry,” he said. “You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to talk to
Da-dee.
”

Ah, there was the sarcasm. He must have recognized her from the club. It still surprised her to realize the low esteem in which the dancers were held. Most of them were young mothers, or girls who had wanted to dance all their lives but didn’t have much training. A very few were addicts and even fewer had sex for money, but they were all the same to the public. It had been foolish of her to imagine that she could sail into the courthouse, ask to see Bud, and be taken to him immediately.

The prospect of the next hour—of having to persuade this man the way he wanted to be persuaded—filled her with visceral dread. It had been different with Tripp. Even though he was touching evil in the worst way, she had found a kind of solace in his arms. She had forgotten what it was like to be touched with tenderness. And Tripp
had
been tender—for a while, anyway. She had let herself feel human, almost vulnerable, in the same way she allowed herself to feel when she danced at the club.

“I know he’s upset.” This was not a lie. She could feel Bud’s rage around them. He was afraid for Lila. Desperate. “Where’s his lawyer?” She looked around the lobby as though a lawyer might suddenly appear.

 “Said I can’t help you.”

Fowler moved some papers around on his desk and put a bright green apple on top of them. The apple was obviously a nod to a doctor-ordered
healthy lifestyle
, because sickness—physical as well as moral—was consuming his body.

“But how come you don’t have a line on what’s up with the lawyer, seeing as you’re his daughter and all?” He gave her an insincere little smile. “You don’t seem too worried about Mrs. Tucker—your mama.”

“She’s my stepmother,” Jolene said. “We don’t get along, you know?”

“No. I can see that you wouldn’t,” he said. The gray around him intensified.

“What if I just sat over there in a chair and waited until the morning visiting hours?”

“I think that would be a waste of your time, but go ahead and do that if you want,” he said. “Free country, public place.”

“Okay,” she said, returning his smile. “Works for me.” She knew he would watch her walk away.

The “L” of chairs in the waiting area sat beneath a bank of bright but indirect lights. A wall-mounted television tuned to a twenty-four-hour news channel yammered at her from above. She was weary enough to close her eyes and sleep for hours, but knew she had to stay alert if she was going to see Bud. She sat paging idly through a fishing magazine, four years old but its content still brand new to her. Every so often Fowler would look up from his desk, staring at her without apology or acknowledgment.