“Maybe my hearing aids. I hate these old things. Too bad you’re not a Doucet. I thought you was kin. Everyone’s all but dead and in the ground.”
“No relation. It’s part of a… history project,” I said.
“A history project, you say. Well, I’m my daddy’s only daughter. Now my father was just as charismatic and loving as can be. Real gentle. Nothing like my husband—ex-husband. Though now he’s dead, too.”
“Oh, gosh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Which part, honey?” I heard an unmistakable flick of a lighter, then a deep inhale.
“All of it,” I said.
“Well, you know how it can be. In the beginning someone can seem one way, and then…” Her voice pitched higher. “Maybe if we all remained strangers we’d be better off. Nice and polite to one another.”
“So no Opal Do-sit?” I tried to pronounce the name as she had, but as my tongue tapped the roof of my mouth, it sounded too harsh.
“There’s that click again,” she said. I’d heard it, too, this time. Like the quick clack of a keyboard.
“Maybe a bad connection?” I offered. “Someone else pick up the line?”
“I live alone, honey. Ain’t you been listening?”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Quit saying sorry, honey.Sorry’s a bad habit. Only say it when you mean it. Anyhow, let’s see: Besides my daddy I had an uncle named Jagr Doucet. Didn’t know him too well. Tall and gangly fellow. Big bushy eyebrows. Doctor of some sort.” Another inhale. Another click click, but she made no mention of it, so perhaps she was just playing with her lighter. I heard rustling, like she was pulling apart a bag of chips, then the crunching to confirm it. “He was from Gallipolis. Up the river. That’s where my daddy’s from. You ever been there?”
“No,” I said. My attention drifted to the white pages again. I ran my index finger down the column for a name I may have missed.
“Not much there—except that insane asylum. Guess they don’t call them that now. I never know how to say things right no more. My niece tells me that. Tells me I’m offending somebody, but I’m just saying it like I know.”
“So you do have relatives,” I said.
“Just my niece. My brother’s kid. He’s dead, too. Anyhow, my father said it was haunted, that hospital. He should know because his brother sometimes worked there. When I was a girl, though, I saw people sitting out on the lawn, and they didn’t look sick to me. Just bored. Just sitting there outside while those attendants watched them.”
“Is he alive still?”
“My father?”
“Your uncle.”
“Uncle Jagr? Goodness no, honey. Died close to…” I could imagine her counting on her fingers. “Close to twenty years ago, I’d say, ’67 or ’68. That was the last time I was back in Gallipolis, for his funeral. They buried him next to his first wife. Opal Doucet. So there’s that name for your history project.” I found my pen and started taking notes. “Uncle Jagr had some giant monument, and she had this tiny little marker right beside it. I remember thinking that was kind of funny but also sad. Didn’t have much occasion to return again. Life does that, you know, has a way of creeping up on you till one day you wake up and you’re an old woman who barely recognizes her own self. I’ve got whiskers, honey. They pop out of nowhere, and I begged my friend Dorrie that when I die, please come over and pluck them out before the funeral. Say, what do you look like?” she asked.
I described myself: brown eyes. Little gap between my teeth. Freckled nose. Hair in two braids.
“You sound like a little girl,” she said. Click click. The line was bugged, or I’d seen too many movies. I was Nona Dixon, not Columbo. “Anyway, don’t know much about Opal. It’s Do-Sit—that’s all I can tell you. Like putting your fanny in the seat of a chair.”
I ended the call and set the phone back on the cradle. I opened that gray notebook again and ran my fingers over the ink’s indentations. I turned the pages, carefully. The paper was stiff and crumbly at the edges. I paused when I came to Formula no. 37, for sterility. Chasteberry. Maca. Indian ginseng.Cyperus rotundus.Primrose oil. I wondered why my own doctors couldn’t have helped me more, why modern medicine couldn’t fix a woman when men can walk on the moon. Then, I noticed it there, at the bottom corner of the page, the initials so small I took them for an inkblot. JD. I turned the pages and saw them again and again. JD. JD. JD.
Not J.D. Fox, anchor, Action 13 News.
No, Jagr Doucet. Opal’s husband.
It was like trying to piece together a puzzle without knowing what the puzzle looked like. When my mother did puzzles, her strategy was to begin with the border pieces to give it shape. I began with what I knew: Opal Doucet had written in her husband’s notebook a recipe for mood-altering drugs—Happy Pills, my pharmacist Gary had called them. Edith claimed Opal had killed people with her cures, but they were her husband’s cures, mostly. She’d died in the fire, her body taken back to Gallipolis to be buried. Anecdotal evidence, Wyatt might call it, because he lived by the numbers on his spreadsheets. He believed in facts. But feelings are facts lodged in the body before the brain can resolve their meaning.
In that moment, here’s what I felt, without any proof: Bertie kept the notebook with these formulas locked up in her safe with the Earthshine recipe, and Halley stole it because she believed it was all connected, the lawsuit, the Jane Does, me.You don’t know Bertie Tuttle.
If that was true, I didn’t know myself. Where would I be without her?Whowould I be? She discovered me all those years ago, handpicked me from thousands of other girls. She saw it in me, something special. That’s what I always believed. That’s what Iconvincedmyself to believe. “It’s her,” she’d said, and with those words I began to travel forward on the path she’d paved. I began to orbit her world.
Her world.
