The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [133]
“I know who you are and I understand what I did. It was terrible and I’m truly sorry. There’s an exit. Turn around.”
“You’re just saying that.”
He wasn’t just saying that. It was true. He’d just waited too long to tell her, hoping he might not have to. “I have to use the bathroom. Right now. Pull over.”
“There’s a rest area three miles up the road. Don’t try anything funny.”
At the rest area he considered accosting a stranger and telling him what was happening, but knew that people would think he was a senile wacko. He thought about sneaking off into the woods, but then he’d be a senile wacko lost in the rainy woods. Buster would follow his scent and give him away. Maybe he could run across the interstate and hitchhike back. No, she’d be the only one who’d stop to pick him up.
He did manage to find a quarter in his pocket and the number for Vic’s cell phone on the emergency card Caroline had put in his wallet, but as he tried to make the call Marylou and Buster came up behind him and Marylou hung up the phone. He gave up and got back into the car with her.
* * *
It stopped raining and the sun came out. They got off the interstate and onto a two-lane highway that plowed straight up through north Florida and Alabama, through tiny towns with gorgeous old houses, their yards dotted with scraggly palm trees, past pecan groves and fireworks shops and fruit stands, past the Bama Nut Shop, past one Mexican restaurant after another, and periodically Wilson forgot why he was riding along through the Deep South, and what year it was, and where exactly he was going, and he started enjoying the ride, because he hadn’t taken a ride like this, through the country, in a long time, then he wondered why he wasn’t driving, and then he turned and saw Marylou and thought, again, Oh Christ.
Marylou talked and talked, telling him about how she and Teddy had met at Little Rock Community College, where they were working toward associate’s degrees, Teddy on the GI Bill. They’d both had small parts in a production of Our Town, Teddy as Simon Stimson, her as Rebecca Gibbs. She’d been terrible in the play, but Teddy’d lavished her with compliments at the cast party, and she did the same to him, even though he hadn’t been so hot himself.
After they got married Teddy couldn’t find work as an industrial designer in Little Rock—didn’t really look that hard, truth be told—so they moved to Memphis where he eventually got a job at a tool and die shop designing custom parts for mechanical cotton pickers. Before that, though, when they were in public housing, she’d finally gotten pregnant with Helen.
She told Wilson how for years after she’d been slipped the radium she hadn’t felt right, had felt tired and anemic, put on iron pills by her doctor, but that Helen had seemed fine until that Christmas morning when the little girl had come to her parents—she and Teddy lounging in bed, Helen up early checking her stocking—and showed them the lump in her right thigh, a hard lump like a peach pit lodged under her skin. “But it doesn’t hurt,” Helen kept insisting. It took a little over a year for her to die, Marylou told him. Imagine, watching for more than a year as your child died.
“I can’t imagine it,” Wilson said. “It sounds like the worst thing in the world. I am so sorry.” How could he possibly convey how sorry he was? He could throw himself off a building or under a train, but what good would that do? He was going to die soon anyway, either by natural causes or by Marylou’s hand. He’d once read that a writer called John Jay Chapman, a nutcase who’d lived around the turn of the century, had stuck his hand in an open flame in order to do penance for having beat up another man who was flirting with his fiancée. Mr. Chapman had burned his hand into a stump, but the fiancée had married him anyway. Wilson could do something like that, he supposed.
“So what’s your story?” Marylou asked him, accelerating past a van so fast her dashboard