‘Lulu wasn’t the first to disappear,’ Dee said. ‘I’ve looked into it. You’ve got a real problem around that lake.’ Maybe that was when it really went sour between them. Sour or not, Dee should call her right away.
She won’t. This is a particular gift, just for her. And she feels the silky-deep stirring of anger. If the police hadn’t kept her out of everything maybe she would have remembered the street name and made the connection years ago. Wasted, wasted time.
The photograph has one more secret to yield. Dee peers hard at the suspect’s shirt. Close to, it gets grainy and her eyes protest. But she can see writing there, embroidered across the breast pocket. They must have blurred it out for the newspaper. Dee can make out a name. Ed or maybe Ted, Banner something.
It feels like striking the last blow in a long, long fight. She has a name or part of one, and a street. Dee finds that she is crying, which doesn’t make sense, because she is filled with fierce certainty. Just for a moment, for one beat of her heart, Dee feels Lulu beside her. The car fills with the scent of warm skin, suntan lotion. A soft, plump cheek brushes against hers. Dee catches the clean smell of her sister’s hair, and the sugar on her breath.
‘I’m coming,’ Dee tells her.
Ted
It’s the right day, so I go to see the bug man in the morning. I found him in the want ads online. He doesn’t cost as much as the regular ones, so I can afford one session every two weeks. My appointment is always very early, before anyone else is awake – when no one else wants to go, I guess. I enjoy my visits to him. I tell him about Olivia, and how much I love her, and about TV I’ve watched and candy I’ve eaten and the birds in the dawn. I even talk about Mommy and Daddy sometimes. Not too much. I don’t talk about the situation with Lauren or the gods, of course. Each time, I slip in real questions among the dumb stuff. I am slowly working my way up to the big one. I’ll ask it soon. Things with Lauren are getting worse.
Sometimes talking to him even seems to help. Anyway he prescribes the pills, which definitely help.
It is a forty-five-minute walk, which I manage OK. It is not quite raining but a warm rotten mist hangs in the air. Headlights throw a musty sheen on the wet road and earthworms writhe pink and gleaming on the sidewalk.
The bug man’s office is in a building that looks like a pile of children’s blocks, carelessly stacked. The waiting room is empty and I settle happily on a chair. I like this kind of place, where you’re inbetween one thing and another. Hallways, waiting rooms, lobbies and so on; rooms where nothing is actually supposed to happen. It relieves a lot of pressure and lets me think.
The air smells strongly of cleaning products, a chemical impression of a flowering meadow. At some point in the future, I guess, almost no one will know what real meadow smells like. Maybe by then there won’t be any real meadows left and they’ll have to make flowers in labs. Then of course they’ll engineer them to smell like cleaning products, because they’ll think that’s right, and it will all go in a circle. These are the kinds of interesting thoughts I have while in waiting rooms and at crosswalks or standing in line at the grocery store.
The bug man appears and shows me in, adjusting his tie. I think I make him nervous. It’s my size. He hides it well most of the time. He has a belly like a little round scatter cushion, the kind Mommy liked so much. His hair is sparse and blonde. Behind the glasses his eyes are blue and almost perfectly round.
Obviously I can’t recall his name. He looks like a friendly little shield bug, or a stag beetle. So the bug man is how I think of him.
The office is pale, pastel, containing far more chairs than could ever be needed in here. They’re all different sizes, shapes and colours. They put me in an agony of indecision. I wonder, is this the bug man’s way of judging my mood? Sometimes I try to think like Lauren, and guess which chair she would pick. She’d probably just throw them around the place.
I choose a dented, metal fold-out. I hope this severe choice will show him that I am serious about my progress.
‘You’ve lost some more hair,’ the bug man says mildly.
‘I think my cat pulls it out at night.’
‘And your left arm looks badly bruised. What’s up with that?’
I should have worn long sleeves, I wasn’t thinking.
‘I was out on a date,’ I say. ‘She shut the car door on my arm byaccident.’ I haven’t actually been on a date yet, but I feel like it’s more likely to happen if I say the words, like a spell that will force me to do it.
‘That’s unfortunate,’ he says. ‘Apart from that, did you feel the date went well?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I say. ‘I had a great time. You know, I’ve been watching this new TV show. It’s about a man who kills people, but only if they deserve it. Bad people, in other words.’
‘What do you think appeals to you about this show?’
‘It doesn’t appeal to me,’ I say. ‘I think it’s nonsense. You can’t tell what people are like from what they do. You can do a bad thing even though you’re not a bad person. Bad people could do good things accidentally. You can’t really know, is my point.’ I can see him drawing breath to ask me a question so I hurry on. ‘And there was this other TV show where a man killed lots of people, but then he hurt his head in an accident, and when he woke up he thought it was ten years earlier. He didn’t remember killing the people, or the new kinds of cellphone or his wife. He was a different person to the one who killed the women. So was it still his fault, even when it was out of his control?’
‘Do you feel that your actions are sometimes out of your control?’
Careful, I think.
‘And there’s this other show,’ I say, ‘about a talking dog. That seems much more realistic to me, in a way, than being able to tell good people from bad. My cat can’t actually speak – I admit that. But I always know what she wants. It’s just as good as talking.’
‘Your cat means a lot to you,’ the bug man says.
‘She’s my best friend,’ I say, which might be the first true thing I’ve said to him in the six months that I’ve been coming here. A silence falls, not uncomfortable. He writes on his yellow legal pad but it must be about groceries or something, because, really, I’m not giving him anything.
‘But I am worried about her.’ He glances up. ‘I think she’s …’ I hesitate. ‘I think my cat is, what would you say? Homosexual. Gay. I think my cat is attracted to female cats.’
