Evelyn held out her hand. “Give me that needle.”
“I’m not done yet.”
“Oh, yes you are. Hand it over.”
“It’s too late, I’m already tattooed.” Ingrid hunched over her arm.
Evelyn sighed again. She thought she had never felt so exhausted. “Come on, Ingrid, stop. I mean it.”
“You don’t want me going through life with half a tattoo, do you?”
Evelyn felt something inside her give up. Here she was in her Dream Life kitchen, her Dream Life husband having become, overnight, a cheating, unemployed drunk. And now she was watching a sixteen-year-old stick a sewing needle into her arm.
The ghost of Joe Cullen was standing beside her now, and she felt him smile, a good face for a change. He saw the humor in it, she knew. He had been someone who’d gone to the lowest point life could bring you and still been able to laugh. She had admired that.
Go ahead,
he nodded to her, and a flash of the man Joe had once been flared in the kitchen like lightning and was gone.
Evelyn nodded slowly back at Ingrid, at her half-finished arm.
“If you’re already tattooed,” she said, “we’re going to do it right. For once in our stinking lives, we are going to do one lousy thing the right way.” She put her hand over Ingrid’s to stop her from doing any more. “Forget the sewing needle. We’ll do it pro.”
Ingrid felt Evelyn’s hand seeping warmth into hers. But she wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly.
“Pro?” she repeated.
“Go up to the junk room—the fainting room,” Evelyn said.
“In the closet there’s a black leather case that looks like a little suitcase. Bring it down.”
Ingrid went. She’d seen the black case before and tried to open it, but it had a combination lock. From the way the contents had moved when she shook the case—rattling, but well-padded—she’d imagined it contained a set of silverware.
She’d been wrong. Evelyn spun the numbers and snapped the catch open and Ingrid looked down at the small jars of ink in their holders, the long shining needles, the ink cups and the tattoo machine itself, which was shaped like a revolver whose barrel was a pen. Anything could happen after all. If Evelyn was going let her give herself a real tattoo, anything at all was possible.
Anything, Mister.
Evelyn lifted out a small metal box with a gauge on the front of it.
“What’s that?” Ingrid asked.
“The power supply.” Evelyn plugged the box into the wall outlet and the tattoo machine into the box.
“It looks like a Geiger counter,” Ingrid said.
“A what?”
“For measuring radiation.” She looked at the tattoo machine. “So how do I hold it?”
“You don’t. I’m doing it. If you do it yourself, it’ll look like crap. Now what is this thing you’re putting on yourself?”
“It’s an atom. A lithium atom.”
“An atom?” Evelyn started to object, but the ghost of Joe Cullen was practically yelling at her:
Never try to talk a customer out of a design.
“All right, then.” Evelyn reached into the case and handed Ingrid a purple magic marker. “You better draw it on your arm first, since I have no idea what an atom looks like.”
“Sure you do.” Ingrid drew another electron ring and then a third one, added a dot to each ring, and Evelyn realized that Ingrid was right—she did recognize the symbol.
“These dots are electrons,” Ingrid said. “A lithium atom has three electrons, and they orbit the nucleus, which is this cluster here.”
“Isn’t lithium what they give to mental patients?”
“Lithium is what the first nuclear reaction was done with,” Ingrid said.
Evelyn unscrewed ajar of ink and poured a little into a tiny plastic cup that was part of the tattoo machine. “I’m going to do it in black, since that’s what you started in,” she said.
“Black will be fine,” said Ingrid.
She watched Evelyn fit the needle into the machine. When the needle touched her arm she gasped. This was what it must have felt like when the tiger’s claw tore through Evelyn’s arm. The sudden hot searing, the slow dragging rip. Her body buzzed vibrating with the machine in Evelyn’s hand and then the pain endorphins kicked in, and alongside the agony, something lovely began to course through her, something slow and delicious and sweet.
Mister, she was marking me forever.
Ingrid closed her eyes.
Evelyn bent over Ingrid’s arm. She’d only used the kit once before, and that was years ago, to touch up one of Joe’s tattoos after a knife fight had scarred it. But she had watched Joe ink her so many times that holding the tattoo machine felt natural, as if she’d absorbed its movements through its long relationship with her own skin. She went slowly, first re-inking what Ingrid had done, because that part was the easiest. Then she moved to the long oblongs of the electrons’ orbits. She was nervous about these; if her hand shook, it would show.
Her hand didn’t shake. Perhaps it was her training as a manicurist. She was steady and perfect.
As she inked, she found herself trying to picture this Joanne, imagined her looking twenty-five, not forty, and blonde, with clear, freckle-less skin like a new ream of paper no one had ever scribbled on. But the image was banal and she knew it; it would not hold even in her imagination, it came apart like wet Kleenex. She was done with crying. Things happened in a marriage, any marriage, and this wasn’t like when she was with Joe.
But wasn’t it? Ray drunk and screwing other women, Evelyn smashing windows. Violence and infidelity, her old friends.
Ingrid let out a little sigh of pain and Evelyn realized how quiet she’d been up to now. She lifted the needle off Ingrid’s arm. “You okay?”
Ingrid opened her eyes and looked down at her arm. “Oh,” she said softly. The nucleus at the center, the orbital rings around it. “Wow.” Her eyes went to Evelyn, to her arm, to Evelyn again.
“You like it so far?” Evelyn asked.
Ingrid looked at her forearm again. Her atom. Both the Big Bang and the Earth’s oceans contained lithium. And batteries and nuclear fuel. And drugs to make your mind stop turning against you. Only three electrons, but with so much power contained in them. And now it was hers. Proof of what was inside her.
I had the secret formula, Mister. Me.
“Evelyn.” Ingrid looked up, euphoric. “It looks awesome. I never knew you knew how to do this.”
“I guess I do.” It must be contagious, what Ingrid was feeling; Evelyn felt a burst of energy course through her that had nothing to do with the agony of the last two days. Ingrid’s eyes were spotlights and crowds cheering. Evie Lynne Shepard can give tattoos! The ghost of Joe Cullen was enjoying this. He was rocking back and forth on his heels, he was bouncing up and down, he was practically crowing.
Evelyn studied Ingrid’s arm and picked up the tattoo machine again. “Do you want a little color in it?” she asked. “Like those three little electron bits, I could ink them in a different color if you want.”
“Red,” Ingrid said without hesitation. “Make them red.”
Afterward, they toasted Evelyn’s work with Fresca and ate hot dogs straight from the package. Evelyn held the soda can to her forehead, trying to cool off. And then, because everything was different now, she rolled up her shirt sleeves and opened the top two buttons of her blouse.
Ingrid, stoned from the combination of pain endorphins and her wine cooler, felt as if she were having a vision: on Evelyn’s forearms she saw orange koi and hearts pierced with arrows, below her collar bones were the familiar orange tips of the sun’s rays.
“Come to California with me,” Ingrid said. Not knowing she was going to say it. Then saying it again. “Come with me. I could manage to get through the wedding if you were there.”
“You know what?” Evelyn put down her soda. “I just realized this. I never thought California was a place I could actually go. But I suppose I could.”
“You totally could. You could come with me, and then you could talk my dad into letting me come back to Newell Academy in the fall. And then after that we could rent a car and drive up to L.A. and I could show you all those places you wanted to see. You know, Hollywood and stuff.”
Evelyn nodded. “Maybe I could. Besides, I need some perspective after what’s happened with Ray. And speaking of Ray, where is he? He’s been out walking around for what, three hours? I hope he didn’t fall in a ditch or something. Not that it wouldn’t serve him right.”
“He wasn’t walking,” Ingrid said. “He took the car.”
“No, he didn’t. He was too sloshed. He’s not that stupid.”
“I saw him. He drove off in the Saab.”
No need to tell her I went after him. No need to tell her what I did next. It was for her, Mister. It was always for her.
“Oh, Jesus.” Evelyn’s face went a sickly white, and Ingrid realized that turning pale was not something that people did only in books.
“I doubt he drove very far,” Ingrid said. “Maybe he’s just, I don’t know, sitting in the parking lot at the train station.”
“Ingrid, how could I be so stupid? Again?” Evelyn jumped up and paced the few steps to the deck railing and back again. “I should have known it. He’ll be dead in some ditch somewhere. It’s happening all over again and it’s still my fault.”
“What’s happening all over again?’
Evelyn brushed at her face. “I can’t cry about this. We have to find him. Oh, how could I be so stupid? How could he be so stupid? Oh, my God.”
Ingrid stood up too. “It’ll be all right,” she said. That sounded stupid; Detective Slade would never say that.
I took her in my arms and kissed away all those watery diamonds her eyes were squeezing out and by the time I got around to her mouth I was a rich man, Mister—
Yeah, right. Ingrid dared the palm of her hand onto Evelyn’s upper arm, laid it over a bluebird with streamers in its beak.
“We’ll just go find him,” she said. “We’ll get in the Olds and go see.”
Evelyn felt her ears ringing. Too much was the same as the night Joe died: a drunken husband, an infidelity, a confrontation.
“Come on,” Ingrid said. “We’ll just drive down the road to the commuter rail and I bet we’ll see him.”
Evelyn allowed Ingrid to lead her to the car. She was back in the circus, the day Joe died, it was happening again. Next it would start to rain, there would be a thunderstorm. Her hands were shaking.
“You drive,” she said. “I can’t do it.” She sank down onto the passenger side of the front seat and closed her eyes.
Ingrid got behind the wheel. “They fixed the transmission nice this time,” she said. They coasted down the hill to the train station. “Open your eyes,” Ingrid said. “See? There’s the Saab.”
Evelyn looked. There was the Saab, all right, parked in the lot just as Ingrid had said. She felt a blur of relief. “How did you know he’d be there?” she asked, and then a new hand was tightening around her throat because Ray was not there, not in the car, not anywhere. She climbed out into the heat of the afternoon sun and checked the back seat, just to be sure. Stood on the blazing macadam and screamed, “RAY! RAY!” No one was in sight.
Just past the station there was a ditch on the far side of the tracks. Could he have fallen in there? Could he have fallen on the tracks, oh, of course that was it, he’d been hit by a train. “RAY,” she screamed, and then Ingrid was beside her, gripping her shoulders, saying something.
“Evelyn, stop.”
“He’s going to be dead.” She was sobbing. “I know it.”
Ingrid was pulling her back toward the car. “We have to go back to the house and do this right. Why do you think something happened to him?”
“It’s just like what happened with Joe. How he died. We had a fight and then he went off drunk.”
“You said he fell down the stairs.”
“I’m so stupid,” Evelyn whispered.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
Evelyn didn’t answer, but in the silence that followed Ingrid realized with perfect clarity that she knew exactly what had to be done. It was the power the lithium atom had given her. She opened the passenger door of the Olds and pushed Evelyn gently in. Started the car and drove back up the hill to the house.
“I’ll find your husband,” I told my client. “I know where to look for him. Leave everything to me.”
Evelyn washed her face and put on a clean blouse and allowed Ingrid to give her a cup of coffee. She took one sip and spit it out. “What did you put in it?”
“A splash of bourbon.”
“No more booze, Ingrid. Please.”
Ingrid had put in the bourbon because it made it more like her story that way, but she knew she couldn’t explain that to Evelyn. So she poured the laced coffee down the sink and make another cup, with cream and sugar this time. Then she got the Yellow Pages and looked up the Hotel Bristol, the place Ray had gone when he skipped out of college.