Wildwood
Page 32
“That sounds like an excuse for not having any answer at all.”
The skin over Lexy’s high cheekbones turned a bright pink.
“Shit.” Dana laid her head against the back of the couch and closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. I know I’m being a jerk. I’m not . . . myself.”
“Sure you are.” Lexy’s eyes were neon green. “You’re probably more yourself right now than you’ve ever been. Grieving, bitching, and angry: this is Dana Cabot without the high-gloss enamel.” Lexy held up her nails. “Under this plastic or whatever it is, you should see my nails. Pitiful. But they’re me. This other stuff is just cover-up. I accept that.”
Dana’s brain was too battered to come up with a response. Remember me when I was funny and resilient and determined—not taking razor swipes at the people who love me, she thought.
In the office the only sound was the low whir of the air-conditioning. Dana pressed her fingertips against her eyelids. How hard would she have to push to blind herself? On the other side of the door a phone rang. She looked at Lexy and saw stars.
“What did you want to speak to me about?”
Lexy put her earrings back on. “A hitch in the facilities. Nothing serious, but we have to move the Bailey office. We’re in a constant space crunch around here, you know that. Too many people need that big room in the undercroft. So I’m going to put you guys in the room at the back of the offices.” She pointed behind Dana. “It’s not huge, but you can leave everything out. Lock the door and come back, no one’ll disturb your stuff.”
Dana thought of taking down the smiling Bailey posters, the maps and blowups of flyers, of rolling them up, of carrying the computers across the parking lot, of running yards and yards of new extension cords. Though no one would say so out loud, the move looked like a demotion. What had been an active cause would seem less so in a small back room. She wanted to kick Lexy’s desk. She wanted to kick Lexy.
“I have a selfish reason for doing this, Dana.” Lexy waited, and finally Dana looked at her. “I miss seeing you. I don’t have many friends, not real friends, and I thought . . .”
“I can’t be anyone’s friend.”
Not even her husband’s. David and Dana slept in a bed that felt at once cramped and too vastly wide. They ate silent meals at the dining room table and occasionally, when David was not working late, watched television together with the room completely dark so they could not see each other’s faces.
“I know you mean well, but there’s no way you or anyone else can understand.” Even the people in the support group: their love and loss had seemed inferior to Dana’s. “I think about her all day, and at night I dream about her. I can’t get away from her. In my mind I see her in the most horrible situations and I can’t turn off the pictures. It’s like I’m being tortured, my eyelids are pinned back and I have to watch the awful . . .”
Sometimes she hoped Bailey was dead. Better dead than suffering as in those imagined scenes.
“Oh, Dana. Poor Dana.”
She did not want Lexy’s sympathy, nor her empathy, and definitely not her Christian charity. Nor did she want others to share her feelings. Not even David. She was just as happy he had found distraction in the Filmore case and left her in sole possession of the black and bottomless grief and guilt. If she could not have her daughter back, she would have these.
“I have to go.” Dana stepped toward the door quickly to avoid Lexy’s hug. Her hand on the knob, she said, “Beth knew about the move out of the undercroft?”
Lexy nodded.
“And she didn’t want to tell me, right?” Dana stared at the toes of her tennis shoes. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate . . . I don’t mean to be so hard to get along with. I just . . . am.”
Lexy stood beside her. Dana smelled the green-grass and citrus fragrance she wore.
“Listen to me, Dana.”
“No.”
“The only way through this—”
Dana shook her head. The last thing she wanted to hear now was a religious cliché.
“I’m your best friend,” Lexy said. “You’re mine.”
“If that’s true, then you’ll leave me alone.” Dana’s eyes burned. She clenched her jaw and turned for the door. With her hand on the knob she added, “I can’t be anyone’s friend.”
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