Chapter Four
Someone is touching my arm as I sleep. My skin registers it, but my brain is still tangled in dreams and memories. For a moment I think Mabry is next to me in the twin bed, tickling my arm.
My eyes fly open. I leap from the bed, swatting at my arm and scanning for my handgun, only to find the intruder is a daddy longlegs, now scampering across the wood floor. Shit.
My breath is shallow as I rub my arms and settle my heart rate. It’s a strange feeling waking up in this house again. In one way, it’s too familiar. In another, too foreign. A purgatory of sorts.
In the bathroom, I find fresh towels and a bar of soap to wash my face.
I catch my reflection in the mirror. I look tired but not as bad as I expected, considering I tossed and turned all night.
I smooth my hair back into a neat bun. One strand breaks loose, but I tuck it behind my ear.
I’m wearing the XXXL black T-shirt that reads Fort Worth Live across the front.
Seems appropriate. It’s what my handlers at the show gave me to leave the studio in.
I have no idea what happened to the silk blouse.
Maybe some intern has fished it out of the trash by now and sold it on eBay.
Hashtag honestly stupid. I shouldn’t have brought this T-shirt.
A reminder of what I’ve put at risk. But that’s what I do, keep things I shouldn’t.
I dig through my hanging cosmetic bag for my moisturizer. Something shiny glints through one of the clear plastic pockets, but I ignore it. I shouldn’t have brought it either.
I rub moisturizer on my face, then dig a short silk robe from my duffel. The robe’s inappropriateness is on trend with everything else in my bag. Too formal. Completely unnecessary here. I tie it tight around my waist, glance at the bedroom door. Time to wake up sleeping dogs.
I climb the attic steps again and fold my hand around the knob and pull.
Come on, I silently encourage. It still only rattles in place.
I study the landing in the dusty light coming from the window at the bottom of the stairs.
I didn’t miss anything last night. No key.
I try the knob again, pulling harder. The door gives slightly.
And with that small give, my sense of urgency to get inside grows.
I pull and pull and pull, then yank the door as hard as I can.
Something cracks on the doorframe, but instead of the door opening, my hand slips off the knob.
I sway backward, balancing on the top step and somehow catching myself before I fall and become a heap of broken bones at the base of the stairs.
I exhale, slow my breathing, regroup. I need a different plan.
The kitchen is warm and humid and filled with the sounds of birds, almost as if they’re in the room with me.
I search the drawers but don’t find any options to accommodate a breaking and entering.
Only a few paper plates and plasticware.
I do, however, spy the coffee maker and a bag of chicory coffee.
I pour water into the coffee maker, as well as a generous amount of grounds. I find a coffee cup and set it on the butcher-block countertop my decorator would approve of. Unlike the marble ones I chose for my kitchen at home. “Scars too easily,” she said. “That’s okay,” I told her. “I like scars.”
A throbbing starts in a vein on the inside of my arm, high up next to the crease in my elbow.
Next to the small tattoo I thought was a great idea five years ago.
Amy got one too. A spur-of-the-moment decision as we walked past a tattoo parlor in Deep Ellum after a concert.
We chose hearts. A symbol of the love we felt for our family members who are sometimes hard to love.
I rub the spot. Amy didn’t know what was under that tattoo.
The scars from when I didn’t love myself.
I don’t wait for the coffee to finish dripping before I pour some into a cup, then sit at the table with my phone.
I’d silenced my notifications before bed, and I see a text from Amy sent an hour ago.
I check the time. What the hell was so important that she sent a text at six in the morning? I open it.
Stay off Twitter until I can call you.
Seriously? I thought she knew me better than that.
I open Twitter. I scan for any mention of me and find it immediately.
Christopher’s first wife retweeted my old classmate’s tweet from yesterday as well as the clip from Fort Worth Live.
Under it she wrote, This is what a homewrecker looks like. There are hundreds of comments.
HOT!
I’d let her heal me anytime!
What a fucking idiot
She needs a boob job
NUTCASE!
Sad emoji, laughing emoji, flame emoji. The things people have the courage to say when they’re hiding behind a screen.
I developed a thick skin growing up with Krystal Lynn as my mother and after grinding my way through nine years of higher education without any support at home, but these comments find a way to pierce my armor.
And in a way it feels good. Pain, I understand.
The word homewrecker, however, I do not understand.
I keep scrolling, and that’s when I see her second tweet, stating Christopher and I engaged in an illicit affair while he was still married to her.
“Bullshit!” I yell to the empty kitchen. And that’s when I see her final tweet. It gets my hands shaking so much I almost drop my phone. This is not the role model we want for our children. She’s only an expert in cheating. How did you do so well on those clinicals? Time to be honest Dr. Willa!
Acid churns in my stomach. My breathing shallows. I scroll to Amy’s number and press it. It goes straight to voicemail. I send her a text instead: Call me!
I finish my coffee, talk myself out of responding to that insane tweet, tell myself that platform will only bring attention to something I want to disappear. Still, though, I’ll need to address it at some point. I can’t preach to people about how to handle bullies and not handle my own.
And there’s something else I have to handle.
Of all the things I don’t have control over, finding that tape is something I still do.
I need it in my possession. After that, I’ll hang tight for a couple of days, make sure the social media fallout dies down.
Make sure the vultures don’t get anything else to feed on.
Then I can go home, confront the allegations from Christopher’s ex, coddle whomever necessary at GMA to get my spot back, and reboot my career.
The shrill cry of a crow startles me and I jump.
It sounds as if the bird has gotten inside, but the kitchen is empty.
I’m too keyed up. Maybe I don’t need coffee after all.
Then I notice something’s off. Something creaks near the door that leads outside, and I raise my coffee cup, ready to hurl it if anything tries to come through the door.
Nothing comes in but a breeze. I lower the mug and study the door.
It’s cracked open. I ease up to it and try to push it closed, but a hot wind pops it back open.
I push it again. And again. Each time it opens on its own; the wind enough to jostle it free.
The wood near the latch is warped and rotten.
And it takes several more tries before I finally get it to stick.
Even shut, the wind whistles through it.
If only the attic door was this rotten. Then my gaze stops on something on the other side of the door’s window. My pulse kicks back up.
Clusters of rusted wire-fence pens fill the backyard.
Once they were filled with goats and a henhouse and even peacocks.
I loved yelling “Pretty, pretty” at them and watching them fan open their bright feathers.
There are no bright colors back there now.
Just browns and dull greens. And a rusted, leaning shed sitting off to one side.
The Aunts kept their gardening tools in there.
Like the attic, Mabry and I were forbidden from playing in it.
Too many sharp objects. I wonder if those sharp objects still exist, especially one that might open a locked door.
I stand in front of the attic door with a hammer in one hand and a screwdriver in the other.
My trip to the old shed proved quite fruitful.
I tap gently at first. I don’t want to damage the lock too much.
But the longer I stand there, tapping and getting nowhere, the antsier I get.
Maybe I could hit it a little harder. I wedge the screwdriver into a crack by the knob and bring the hammer down hard on top of it.
A ripping sound erupts from the wood frame.
A piece splinters away, and the doorknob jostles.
The damage sounded worse than it looks, but I’ll still need to leave some cash behind to fix it.
The smells of mothballs and mildew smack my face when I open the door.
Sunshine floods in through two dormer windows facing the front of the house.
The room isn’t an attic anymore. It’s a bedroom.
An odd, sloped-roof bedroom, but a bedroom nonetheless.
The Aunts once had a plan to make this place a bed-and-breakfast. Maybe they succeeded.
My heart aches with the knowledge strangers could have enjoyed this space, made memories here while I was forbidden from doing the same.
Another thing to add to the long list of things to forgive.
But forgiveness is like a house of mirrors in the Watters family.
Just when I think I’ve found a way to it, a memory will surface or, in this case, a room, and I’ll discover I’m even more lost than when I started.