She looked at me with eyes that were afraid to hope and hoped anyway. “Why would you?”
“Because you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
The good side of her mouth began to tremble. The tear spilled onto her cheek and was followed by others. “If I didn’t have to go back to Savannah… if I didn’t have to live with them… with
I took her into my arms. “You’re going to be a lot better than that.”
“Jake?” Her voice was muffled with tears. “Would you do something for me before you go?”
“What, honey?”
“Take away that goddamned chop suey. The smell is making me sick.”
The nurse with the fullback shoulders and the watch pinned to her bosom was Rhonda McGinley, and on the eighteenth of April she insisted on pushing Sadie’s wheelchair not only to the elevator but all the way out to the curb, where Deke waited with the passenger door of his station wagon open.
“Don’t let me see you back here, sugar-pie,” Nurse McGinley said after we’d helped Sadie into the car.
Sadie smiled distractedly and said nothing. She was — not to put too fine a point on it — stoned to the high blue sky. Dr. Ellerton had been in that morning to examine her face, an excruciating process that had necessitated extra pain medication.
McGinley turned to me. “She’s going to need a lot of TLC in the next few months.”
“I’ll do my best.”
We got rolling. Ten miles south of Dallas, Deke said, “Take that away from her and throw it out the window. I’m minding this damn traffic.”
Sadie had fallen asleep with a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. I leaned over the seat and plucked it away. She moaned when I did it and said, “Oh don’t, Johnny, please don’t.”
I met Deke’s eyes. Only for a second, but enough for me to see we were thinking the same thing:
I moved into Deke’s Spanish-style home on Sam Houston Road. At least for public consumption. In truth, I moved in with Sadie at 135 Bee Tree Lane. I was afraid of what we might find when we first helped her inside, and I think that Sadie was, too, stoned or not. But Miz Ellie and Jo Peet from the Home Ec Department had recruited a few trustworthy girls who had spent an entire day before Sadie’s return cleaning, polishing, and scrubbing every trace of Clayton’s filth off the walls. The living room rug had been taken up and replaced. The new one was industrial gray, hardly an exciting color, but probably a wise choice; gray things hold so few memories. Her mutilated clothing had been whisked away and replaced with new stuff.
Sadie never said a word about the new rug and the different clothes. I’m not sure she even noticed them.
I spent my days there, cooking her meals, working in her little garden (which would sicken but not quite die in another hot central Texas summer), and reading
She changed the parting in her hair from the center to the right, cultivating a Veronica Lake style that would cover the worst of the scarring when the bandages eventually came off. Not that they would for a long time; the first of her reconstructive surgeries — a team effort involving four doctors — was scheduled for August fifth. Ellerton said there would be at least four more.
I would drive back to Deke’s after Sadie and I had our supper (which she rarely did more than pick at), because small towns are full of big eyes attached to gabby mouths. It was best that those big eyes should see my car in Deke’s driveway after the sun went down. Once it was dark, I walked the two miles back to Sadie’s, where I slept on the new hide-a-bed sofa until five in the morning. It was almost always broken rest, because nights when Sadie didn’t awaken me, screaming and thrashing her way out of bad dreams, were rare. In the daytime, Johnny Clayton was dead. After dark he still stalked her with his gun and knife.
I would go to her and soothe her as best I could. Sometimes she would trudge out to the living room with me and smoke a cigarette before shuffling back to bed, always pressing her hair down protectively over the bad side of her face. She would not let me change the bandages. That she did herself, in the bathroom, with the door closed.
After one especially terrible nightmare, I came in to find her standing naked by her bed and sobbing. She had become shockingly thin. Her nightgown was puddled at her feet. She heard me and turned around, one arm across her breasts and the other hand over her crotch. Her hair swung back to her right shoulder, where it actually belonged, and I saw the swollen scars, the heavy stitching, the fallen, rumpled flesh over her cheekbone.
