Freaky Green Eyes (16 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
“âbecause I, I reallyâ”
I really love you. I can't believe this has happened
.
I wanted to tell my father I was sorry, not that I'd told the truth to the police, but that I'd had that truth to tell, and not another; but the distinction was too subtle, I couldn't begin to articulate it, and Dad wasn't interested, in any case, in hearing it. He interrupted to say, with a smile that might have been sincere, or sarcastic, “Francesca, I don't hate you. I don't even dislike you. I forgive you.” He leaned forward, smiling harder, pressing his forehead against the wire mesh, and saying in a lowered, angry voice that drew the guards' attention, “What I know is my wife and that bitch sister of hers conspired to poison you against me. Poisoned a girl against her own fucking father. A girl supposed to be smart, like her father, but it turns out she's not so bright, she's putty in the hands of the cunning, so she'll have to live with that on her head, see? So I wash my hands of youâyou're no daughter of mine. You can tell your precious aunt Vicky her turn is coming: my son isn't putty like my daughters.”
The visit was over. Someone led me out dazed and
blinking. I was too confused to cry. I would assure Aunt Vicky, who was waiting just outside, that the visit hadn't been upsetting. But I felt as if my father had grabbed me by the shoulders and shaken me until something cracked in my neck.
âSUBSCRIBE NOW! REID PIERSON DISCUSSION GROUP!
LEARN HOW YOU CAN JOIN FORCES WITH THE REID PIERSON DEFENSE FUND!
I clicked on the site just once. I have to admit it's impressive, the colorful website Todd has established, with Dad's financial support.
You can scroll through Reid Pierson's “blockbuster” career as an athlete and a TV sportscaster, which covers more than twenty years of photographs, newspaper clippings, and testimonials from fellow athletes and celebrities; you can subscribe to the Reid Pierson Discussion Group that is mostly Pierson fans, both women and men. These loyal fans believe that Reid Pierson was “framed” by authorities, or that if
he'd actually committed the crimes he confessed to, there were “mitigating circumstances” like temporary insanity or self-defense. There are women who “adore” him and men who “admire” him no matter what. To these people, Reid Pierson will always be a hero. They send him donations for an appeal fund, love letters, and marriage proposals.
So far, Reid Pierson has not accepted any marriage proposal.
âA new development: the Seattle district attorney has reopened the investigation into the “accidental” death of Bonnie Lynn Byers in 1985.
âI have recorded in the Lavender Journal Dad's final words to me.
You can tell your precious aunt Vicky her turn is coming: my son isn't putty like my daughters
.
But I haven't told Aunt Vicky yet. I wonder, should I?
âIn the Spanish-style ranch house in the Moreno Valley of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where Krista Connor never was, her paintings, her silk screens, her weavings, her pottery are in all the rooms. In the living room with its big windows facing the mountains to the north, framed photographs of Krista Connor are arranged on a table beneath a lamp with a fringed shade. And there are the Polaroid shots Mero Okawa took of Mom, Samantha, and me: the three of us smiling so happily, Mom with her arms around Samantha's and my waists, leaning her chin against my shoulder.
Some things, you think they will go on forever
.
Sometimes I come into the room and see Samantha staring at these photographs as if hypnotized and I'm afraid almost to wake her. Sometimes I lapse into this state myself and lose track of time. And I wake startled to realize that minutes have passed in my life, but no time has passed in Mom's life.
âBefore we left Seattle, Aunt Vicky gave me Mom's silver ring in the shape of a dove, which I wear on the third finger of my right hand. This was one of the rings discovered in my father's safety deposit box. Aunt Vicky thought we'd have to take the ring to a jeweler to have it made smaller, to fit my finger, but it actually fits just right.
âThis afternoon I went running alone. My usual route from our house is along a dry gulch that winds toward a country highway. The air was clear, cool, dry. As I ran, I tried to think of nothing except what surrounded me, what my eyes saw. In the Southwest everything is so vivid: no drifting fog, no drizzle, no overcast skies and long-lingering rain that turns people inward, brooding and melancholy. Here shafts of sunshine move across the striated outcroppings of rock and the smooth duned sand. Near the highway I heard a whimpering sound and a noise like desperate scrambling in underbrush, and there was a young dog, hardly more than a puppy, small and scrawny
and covered with burrs. I stopped to pet it, and it licked my hands eagerly and thrashed its stumpy tail. It had the fox-thin face of a collie and the more solid body of a Labrador retriever, and there was no collar around its neck, no tags. “Poor dog! Poor puppy.” I squatted beside it, uncertain what to do. The puppy was frantic with affection; obviously it was frightened and very hungry. If I kept running, it would try to follow me, and it wasn't in a condition to run fast. And I couldn't leave it.
I mean, how could I leave it?
I decided to check the few houses in the area, though I seemed to know, judging by the puppy's condition, that it must have been dumped by the roadside.
In the end, I brought the puppy home with me.
We haven't decided yet what to call him.
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BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
JOYCE CAROL OATES
has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time. Her first novel for teens,
BIG MOUTH & UGLY GIRL
, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, followed by the acclaimed novels
FREAKY GREEN EYES; SEXY
; and
AFTER THE WRECK, I PICKED MYSELF UP, SPREAD MY WINGS, AND FLEW AWAY
. A recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story, Ms. Oates is also the author of many bestselling novels, including
WE WERE THE MULVANEYS; BLONDE
, which was nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize;
THE FALLS
; and
THE GRAVEDIGGER'S DAUGHTER
. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. You can visit her online at
www.readjoycecaroloates.com
.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at
hc.com
.
OOKS BY
J
OYCE
C
AROL
O
ATES
With Shuddering Fall
A Garden of Earthly Delights
Expensive People
them
Wonderland
Do with Me What You Will
The Assassins
Childwold
Son of the Morning
Unholy Loves
Angel of Light
Mysteries of Winterthurn
Solstice
You Must Remember This
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart
Black Water
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
What I Lived For
We Were the Mulvaneys
Man Crazy
Broke Heart Blues
Blonde
After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates
REDITS
Cover art © 2004 by HarperCollins UK / Cover art © 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
OPYRIGHT
In this novel, place names are attached to fictitious locations in the State of Washington, and any similarity between fictitious characters and actual persons living or dead is coincidental and unintentional.
Emily Dickinson's “They shut me up in prose” (
here
) is reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from
The Poems of Emily Dickinson
, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright ©1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
FREAKY GREEN EYES
. Copyright © 2003 by The Ontario Review, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oates, Joyce Carol.
Freaky green eyes / by Joyce Carol Oates.
p. Â Â cm.
Summary: Fifteen-year-old Franky relates the events of the year leading up to her mother's mysterious disappearance and her own struggle to discover and accept the truth about her parents' relationship.
ISBN 0-06-623759-9 â ISBN 0-06-623757-2 (lib. bdg.) â ISBN 0-06-447348-1 (pbk.)
EPub Edition © January 2016 ISBN 9780062472328
[1. Family violenceâFiction. 2. Fathers and daughtersâFiction. 3. Mothers and daughtersâFiction. 4. Psychological abuseâFiction. 5. MurderâFiction.] I. Title.
| PZ7.O1056 Fr   2003 |                                                                                    2002032868 |
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First paperback edition, 2005