The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [137]
She already knew he’d been sick. As she and Wilson had driven away from her house back in Tallahassee, raindrops just beginning to fall, she’d glanced over and seen Buff staggering around in his side yard, wearing his bathing trunks, throwing up in some bushes.
Wilson promised to tell no one, ever, what she’d done.
In a way, his knowing about her evil deed created the tit-for-tat situation she’d been hoping to achieve when she moved to Tallahassee in April. It wasn’t the same kind of tit-for-tat—his life for Helen’s—but, in this new version, she knew all about his reprehensible experiment, tit, and he knew that she’d tried to kill someone, tat. She hadn’t known how much antifreeze would kill Buff, but killing him had been her aim. If Buff was dead right now, she’d be a murderer. And only Wilson knew.
Before they fell asleep, wearing their clothes, Wilson said, from his double bed beside hers, “I went for months, years, without talking about that study. I’d think about it sometimes, feel sick about it. It made me even sicker when I realized how much I didn’t think about it. Just tucked it away somewhere in my mind and went about my business. But I needed to talk about it. I feel better talking about it.”
“Just call me Oprah,” Marylou said. But then she told him that he was the only person left in the world she could talk to about Helen, the only other person she knew personally who’d been involved with the experiment, even if they’d been on opposite sides.
He admitted that his was the wrong side, but he said there had been a cold war going on and he was scrambling to get grant money. He was an ambitious young scientist trying to get data, a doctor trying to help determine how much radiation was safe. Back then, these sorts of studies were being conducted all across the country. They knew virtually nothing about radiation, but they’d all thought that small amounts had to be safe.
She listened, forcing herself to remain silent. Part of her understood. Part of her never would. But it made her feel calmer to hear his side.
Unlike Teddy, who’d had to detach from the past to go on living, she realized that she didn’t feel alive, unfrozen, unless she held the past as close to her as possible, so she could take it out and examine it whenever she wanted to, with someone who’d been there, too. That was why she felt comforted by the presence of Wilson Spriggs. That, and she’d always, from the first time she saw him, found him to be attractive, that foppish dandy in his bow tie.
From the next bed Wilson began to sing, in a warbling, cracking tenor: “ ‘I will tell all the world / Of my young Southern girl, … /I love you, Mary Lou Brown.’ ”
“Very interesting,” Marylou said. “But stupid.”
“Ain’t it?”
“You can’t remember my last name. But I like the young Southern girl part.”
Then she paused and stretched, her old bones cracking and creaking, the elastic waist on her linen pants sliding up. Even though they’d spent nine hours in the car today and then toured the hospital, walked around downtown Memphis, her ankle and hip ached only a little. A four, on a pain scale of one to ten. “Have you ever seen the movie Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman?” Marylou asked Wilson.
“Don’t think I have. But I am losing my memory.”
“Well, shoot,” she said. “Come over here and I’ll tell you all about it.”
* * *
When she and Wilson dropped by her house on Evergreen Street around noon, she saw Caroline’s minivan in the driveway. And Vic’s Volvo. The jig was up, whatever the hell that meant.
When she and Wilson went inside, she was expecting to be yelled at, castigated, attacked even. It was a stupid thing she’d done. No doubt about that. One of many stupid