“Hey, Bex!”
She had gotten through her morning classes without seeing Chelsea, Laney, or Trevor, doing her best to blend into the swarm of kids moving from class to class. Anytime anyone looked at her with the somber look of grief, Bex flinched, guilt welling up inside her.
She remembered Dr. Gold, the court-appointed shrink they made her see after her father disappeared and her gran took custody of her. Dr. Gold had watched Beth Anne for a long time, the two sitting in companionable silence while the woman fingered the tiny, silver bird that hung from a chain around her wrist. It had jeweled pink eyes, and Beth Anne couldn’t help herself. She reached out to touch the tiny head of the bird, and the doctor smiled.
“It’s a finch,” the doctor said.
Beth Anne said nothing, playing the smooth body of the bird against her fingertips. “The eyes are tourmalines.”
Beth Anne still wouldn’t speak, not at first, but every session started the same: Dr. Gold unclasping the bracelet and re-clasping it on Beth Anne’s arm without a word. Beth Anne would color, letting the silver bird glide over her paper.
Bex remembered the soothing sound of the doctor’s voice as Beth Anne colored one day in her office—long strokes of purple bleeding into blue, bleeding into yellow, into pink—a rainbow. Dr. Gold prattled on about all sorts of things: her daughter was only two, but she was already a handful; her husband was forever thinking he could fix things that he couldn’t. Week after week, Dr. Gold spoke and Beth Anne colored silently, learning to relax into the rise and fall of the doctor’s kind voice. And then, one day, Dr. Gold laid her hand on Beth Anne’s arm.
“It’s not your fault, Beth Anne. None of it.”
Beth Anne had a crayon in her fist—red, glaring, and angry, the heat from her hand making the wax weaken in her grip.
“They don’t blame you.”
She eyed the crayon and smelled the scent of the wax. It didn’t smell red; it smelled like a crayon. All crayons smelled the same.
“He didn’t do this because of you.”
When Beth Anne held the point of the crayon against the paper, the point flattened.
“He gave you things because he loved you—not because you were a part of this.”
A red tail arced from the plane of the crayon. Bright, bloodred.
“This wasn’t about you.”
Beth Anne put the crayon down carefully and turned, her eyes fixed on Dr. Gold’s.
“Yes it was,” she said.
Dr. Gold gave Beth Anne a humorless smile. “Why don’t you tell me why you think this was your fault?”
Beth Anne’s hand went over the crayons all lined up at the edge of her paper and selected a blue one, pressing it hard so the color was dark, dark.
“Beth Anne?”
Her name was Isabel Doctoro, and she had been sleeping in Beth Anne’s father’s room for three nights. She had a big, soft leather purse that she threw on the couch before she’d disappear with Beth Anne’s dad, and once the bedroom door shut, Beth Anne would rifle through the bag, through Isabel’s world. Inside, there was lipstick the color of cherries. A frosted-glass, finger-sized vial with a roller ball on the end that Beth Anne pressed against her skin, breathing in the oily, lavender-laced scent it left behind. A compact with a broken mirror. And a scrollwork bracelet with a hunk of real turquoise.
Beth Anne slipped on the bracelet and promptly forgot about it until that night at dinner. The three of them were eating pizza straight from the box when Isabel grabbed Beth Anne’s arm with her clawlike fingernails.
“Where’d you get that bracelet?”
Beth Anne glanced at her wrist, feeling the heat burning on her cheeks.
“That’s mine, isn’t it? You took it from my purse!”
“Now, now,” Beth Anne’s father said, trying to calm Isabel.
“No, Jackson, that was in my purse. It’s mine. She stole it from my purse!”
Through lowered lashes, Beth Anne watched her father’s gaze rake over her. “Did you take that bracelet, Bethy?”
Beth Anne wagged her head from side to side, still studying her pizza slice.
“She’s lying! She’s lying! She’s out-and-out lying, Jackson. You’ve got to punish her!”
Isabel snatched the bracelet from Beth Anne’s wrist and pinched her cheeks with one hand, making Beth Anne’s lips pucker. “Your daddy’s gonna teach you that it’s not right to steal.” She slapped the bracelet on her own bony wrist, and Beth Anne thought the richness of the stone made Isabel’s yellow-hued skin look that much more sallow.
“Go to your room, Bethy.” Her daddy’s voice was even, relaxed.
Isabel didn’t spend the night that time. When Beth Anne woke up the following morning, Isabel was still gone, but the bracelet was sitting in the center of the kitchen table.
It took fourteen days for the police to find Isabel Doctoro’s body.
“Bex!” Trevor was moving toward her at a dizzying speed. “I’ve been looking all over for you.” He squeezed her arm, then pulled her into a hug.
Bex stiffened. The feeling of Trevor’s warm, muscled body pressed up against hers was both intimate and weird.
“Hey”—he didn’t let her go, his mouth a hairbreadth from her ear—“it’s okay. I’m here.” He squeezed her a little tighter and Bex felt herself melt into him, exhaustion crashing over her in white waves. She wasn’t sure how long they stayed like that, if it was a minute or hours, but however long it was, it felt too short.
“I’m so sorry. Jeez…” He looked away and raked a hand through his hair. “I feel like I’m kind of responsible.”
Heat ricocheted through Bex, exploding like gunfire in her ears. “W-what?”
“I don’t know. I feel like…” Trevor looked down at his feet, the tops of his ears flushing a fierce red. “I feel like I should protect you. Like, I don’t want you to have to experience anything bad.”
Bex was frozen, rooted to her spot in the hall.
“I know that’s stupid, but”—Trevor looked up at her, his eyes finding hers and pinning her there—“I really like you, Bex.”
She blinked at the small smile that played on his lips, every synapse in her brain firing simultaneously, random triggers flailing: He likes me! Run! It’s a trick. It’s a joke. I like him. Someone actually likes me! A boy, a boy likes me! He’s lying. Everyone’s lying.
Something overrode the wild clatter in her brain and Bex’s lips were moving, sound coming out. “I like you too, Trevor.” Heat grazed the back of her neck, and her palms started to sweat in that millisecond between her answer and his response. Her stomach started to lurch, then flutter.
“So, we like each other then,” Trevor said, a wide smile pushing up his red-apple cheeks.
The bell cut through Bex’s response while Trevor’s hand found hers, his fingers intertwining with hers.
There were grief counselors in all the afternoon classes. Bex saw Renee slip into the class across the hall from hers and shrunk back in her seat, hoping that the doctor wouldn’t turn around and see her, wouldn’t announce that she had talked to Bex about the heredity of mental illness.
At half past the hour, all the classes filed into the cafeteria ten minutes early for lunch. A long line of adults stood behind a podium, all with somber faces and wearing every shade of navy-blue pantsuit imaginable. Bex figured that black must have given off too dark a vibe so the official color of teen grief must be navy blue. She wasn’t certain why skirts were off-limits and let her mind wander while the principal tapped a microphone and waited for the clattering of dishes and lunch bags and Starbucks cups to die down.
“If we can all just take a moment of silence,” Principal Morse started.
Chelsea and Laney looked at each other and then at Bex, pulling her into a crushing embrace while they bowed their heads. Bex chanced a glance up and met Trevor’s eyes. He was sitting across from her, staring. They both bowed their heads for one enveloping moment of pulsing silence, Bex staring at her kneecaps under the table and listening to the thud-thud-thud of her heart. She remembered a story that her only Raleigh friend, Mel, had told her about, something that Mel was reading in class. It was about a man who killed another man and was driven to admit it because he could still hear the dead man’s heart beating—“The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Bex hoped the heart she heard was her own.
When she looked up, she was met with Darla’s pale-blue eyes staring down at her from a huge photograph projected on the cafeteria wall. The girl was smiling, head cocked, blond hair in corn-silk waves over one shoulder, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes.
They were dull but accusing.
“Darla’s dad took that picture. We were there. It was Corolla Beach last summer.” Laney was whispering in Bex’s ear, her chin jutting toward the picture of Darla. Bex was immediately pulled back to that North Carolina courtroom, to that twanged voice dripping with anger and hate: “She should have to sit here and see what her daddy done. What he done to my little girl.”
“I have to go.” Bex stood up and tried to extract herself from the table and the cafeteria as quickly and quietly as possible, keeping her eyes trained on the floor. But she knew they were all looking at her, wondering how she could so callously get up and walk out while the principal memorialized a dead girl.
A noose was tightening around her neck as Bex escaped the cafeteria and burst into the hall. It was hard to breathe, each thread of rope tightening against her throat. She pushed out into the commons, dropping to her knees and sucking in air, coughing, sputtering.
It wasn’t him, she told herself. There was absolutely no indication that Darla was killed by the Wife Collector.
The jaunty image of the postcard emblazoned with the Research Triangle flashed in her mind.
Daddy’s home.
Bex tried to shake out the image, the memories, the voices, but they crawled and picked at her like fire ants on her skin. She fished out her cell phone and with shaky fingers dialed a number she’d hoped never to have to dial again. It rang twice before a jaunty voice greeted her.
“Dr. Gold’s office. This is Maria. How may I help you?”
Bex was silent for a minute, letting Maria’s voice soak in.
“Hello?” Maria said again. “Dr. Gold’s office?” Her voice rose at the end of the greeting.
“I’m sorry,” Bex pushed out. “I’m sorry. I need to talk to Dr. Gold.”
Maria paused on the other end of the line, and Bex could hear another line ringing in the office. “May I ask who’s calling, please?”
Bex froze. Beth Anne Reimer. Bex. Bex Andrews. That’s who she was. That’s who she was now.
“Bex Andrews.”
“Ms. Andrews, Dr. Gold isn’t in at the moment. Were or are you a patient of hers? I can schedule you an appointment or take a message—”
Maria’s pleasant, all-business voice was cut off when Bex hung up the phone.
• • •
Bex sat in the coffeehouse until the sky went from crystal blue to a low, muted gray, the sun beginning to set. She nursed a single cup of coffee, sipping slowly, refreshing it constantly so that each time the liquid burned her lips. The pain somehow satisfied her.
“Oh, oh thank God, there you are!” Denise rushed toward her and nearly toppled the chair, throwing her arms around Bex. She let Bex go, then looked her up and down, the relief in her face quickly dissolving to anger. “Bex, you scared the hell out of me and Michael.”
Bex looked up at Denise and noticed Michael over her left shoulder. He put a hand on his wife’s arm and muttered something in her ear. She shook him away. “No, Michael, she needs to know that she can’t just run off.” Denise looked down at Bex again. “Bex, the school called and said you missed your afternoon classes, and when I got to the school, no one knew where you were. You can’t run off like that. You just can’t.”
Her voice wavered between anger and sadness, and Bex shrank back in her chair, unsure of what to do. “We must have called you thirty times. And your boyfriend said you ran out of the cafeteria at lunchtime. You didn’t even tell him where you were going. Why, Bex?” Denise leaned on the table, palms pressed down, eyes blazing.
“Honey!” Michael pulled her back, and she crumpled in his arms. “We were incredibly worried about you, Bex.”
“I’m sorry,” Bex said. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Michael stroked his wife’s hair as her shoulders rocked. “Come here.” He stretched out an arm for Bex. When she dutifully went to him, he engulfed his wife and his daughter in one tremendous hug. “It’s going to take some time for us all to get on the same page. Come on.”
They filed out of the coffeehouse in a straight line, silently getting into Michael’s car. Bex kept her eyes on her sneakers as he pulled out into traffic. Denise turned around in her seat. “I’m not mad. Well, actually I am. You can’t walk out of school like that.” She glanced at Michael’s profile. “We understand that today was probably really hard for you, but you have to talk to us. You can’t just act out, okay?”
Bex heard the words but couldn’t process them. Didn’t they know who she was, why this had happened?
No, because you’re Bex Andrews now. Beth Anne stayed in Raleigh. The Wife Collector stayed in Raleigh. You’re normal now. You have to be normal.
She cleared her throat and made the effort to look into Denise’s eyes. “I’m really sorry, you guys. I just—I kind of freaked out, I guess.”
“We can dig that.”
Both Bex and Denise shot Michael looks.
“What? I’m just trying to say that we understand. Man!”
Denise turned back to Bex. “We’re not going to punish you this time, but skipping school is not okay and not letting us know where you are is definitely not okay. If you want to talk about this—about anything—we’re here for you. Okay, Bex?”
Bex nodded.
“And if you don’t think you can talk to us, there are always the grief counselors, or Michael or I can find you someone else for you to talk to.”
Bex nodded again, the lump in her throat too big to allow her to speak.
Denise squeezed Bex’s knee. “We love you, honey.”
“I love you too.” It was barely a whisper, but one of the truest things Bex had ever said.