The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (36 page)

“I never would’ve guessed it,” her mother said. “You seemed so nice.”

“Nice!” her father spat out. “Not hardly. And I’m not promising anything about not getting even.”

“Well,” Nance said to her father. “Maybe there’s some soul-searching you need to do.” She fixed him with a stern look, and he flushed. Her father, the man with a restraining order against him, the one who wanted to strangle two men with his bare hands.

Suzi lifted her head from Ava’s shoulder. “What about Otis?” Suzi asked, realizing that Otis had been left out of the equation. “What were you going to do to him?”

“He’s doing enough on his own,” Nance said, but stunned as they all were, nobody asked her to elaborate.

“Mom,” Ava said. “Travis’s birthday party is on Friday. At Alligator Point. He wants me to ride down early with him, on Thursday night. So we’ll beat the storm.”

“Go to the beach when a hurricane’s coming,” Mom said. “What kind of sense does that make?”

Ava went on a tirade about how important the party was to Travis and how his grandmother had lived at the beach for years and that this would also be a hurricane party and that she would be
just fine
.

* * *

People from Genesis Church started calling their house, talking to Suzi’s mother, asking her to please come to church on Sunday night with Suzi for a “ceremony of healing.” Her father said there was no way in hell he was setting foot in that church, and her mother agreed that she felt the same way. Suzi felt that way, too. After all, she was no religious freak.

“Ten or twelve people from the church have sent notes, saying they’re sorry,” her mother told her. “Which is nice, I guess. But what they need to do is put that disgusting pig behind bars.”

“What’s a ceremony of healing?” Suzi asked.

Her mother shook her head. “I imagine a lot of praying is involved. I think they need to do less praying and more castrating.”

“Praying never hurt no one,” Suzi told her mother. Suzi’s grandmother Verna Tommy used to say that.

“Oh,” Suzi’s mother said, and swooped over and snatched up Suzi in a fierce hug that made her eyes water.

Marylou tried to carry on her daily activities as if nothing had changed. But everything had changed. She was no longer working at FTA. After attending church on Wednesday night and finding Buff Coffey up at the pulpit, she decided that she’d no longer have anything to do with Genesis Church. She was no longer bent on destroying Wilson and his family. All the oomph had gone out of her. Her days lacked focus. She’d slipped into idle mode.

She took Buster for his five a.m. walk in the coolish air. The birds were unusually quiet. On the news it was all Hurricane Grayson, which had made landfall yet again—the fourth time for one storm, a record—sweeping back from the Atlantic into New Smyrna Beach; and now it was working its sodden, massive way west across the Panhandle. It was a slow-moving storm, they said, causing widespread flooding, spawning tornadoes. If her house got flooded, what would she do?

She wished she were back in Memphis. She missed her high-ceilinged house with its tall windows, her hollyhocks by the front door, the moldy-smelling metal glider on her front porch, the urban sounds of her neighborhood, and even her old friends—Virginia from church, Gladys from her high school teaching days—friends she’d lost touch with because she’d withdrawn into her protective shell after her second husband of only two years, Martin, died. Why had she done that? She
kept hearing her own words echoing in her ears.
Revenge just hurts more people. It’s not worth it. I’ve hurt people trying to get revenge. I’ve hurt you and your family
.

But had
she
really done the hurting? Had it really been her fault that the photographer who took those photos uploaded them on the Internet and Buff saw them? Well, yes, okay, because, as Caroline had said, she should’ve stood up to Mr. Boyle, told him he couldn’t take those photos. If they hadn’t been taken, none of this would’ve happened. She shouldn’t have taken Ava there in the first place. If only she hadn’t moved to Tallahassee. If only she hadn’t read the article about Wilson on the Internet. If only Martin hadn’t been killed in the accident. A semi ran into the back of Martin’s Jeep on the interstate, claiming he didn’t see the line of cars stopped ahead of him. Turned out later he’d been smoking pot. The truck driver, not Martin. If Teddy hadn’t left her. If Helen hadn’t died. If she hadn’t gone to the clinic at Memphis University. If Wilson had only realized what the hell he was doing by conducting his so-called experiment. If there hadn’t been a cold war on to instill wrongheaded thinking throughout the land. If radiation hadn’t been discovered by that sick and twisted couple, the Curies. Okay, maybe that was going too far. But even if these things hadn’t happened, let’s face it, other awful things would have.

Marylou stood with Buster beside a wooded lot and let him sniff around in the dirt. She was so tired. She felt like a limp noodle. This kind of thinking wasn’t helping. It just led back into the land of Freeze, where nothing she could do would ever matter. She missed having a sense of purpose, even if it was a malevolent one. Had she really decided that revenge was pointless, the way she’d preached to Wilson and his family? It was true: she had no desire to exact revenge on them anymore. They had suffered, but not the way she’d intended; and Wilson, the great scientist, was no closer to acknowledging the
wrongness of his deeds than he had been when she’d first moved here. Suzi’s suffering, and her family’s suffering, had been pointless.

But maybe, argued her inner Radioactive Lady, the problem was that
certain
people hadn’t suffered enough! A certain
person
, that is. She gave Buster’s leash a sharp tug and he glanced up at her, puzzled, but then seemed to shrug—goofy old lady—and started ambling along again. Buster was so forgiving. Unlike her. That horrible Ceremony of Healing she’d accidentally attended at Genesis Church. She’d gone for regular Wednesday night church, but once there she’d gotten a nasty surprise.

That night there were no ministers, no singers, no band, and the cameras weren’t even going. The giant screens were blank. There was nothing to look at except a woman playing an organ. “Sweet hour of prayer! Sweet hour of prayer! That calls me from a world of care and bids me at my Father’s throne make all my wants and wishes known.”

During the last verse of the hymn, Buff, wearing a dark suit, emerged from a door next to the stage, followed by Paula and Rusty and Angel. “This robe of flesh I’ll drop and rise to seize the everlasting prize …” There was an intake of breath. The organ kept warbling, but most people had stopped singing.

“Damn,” Marylou said aloud. She’d been missing Suzi’s company in the seat beside her, even though she knew that Suzi would never be coming back to this church. Why had Marylou thought that
she
could come back like nothing had happened? She’d assumed that Buff would surely have resigned in disgrace, but she’d underestimated him once again.

Buff strode up onto the stage, and his family scuttled over toward the seats, Paula’s and Rusty’s eyes downcast, and Angel, in her mother’s arms, looking around curiously. They sat down three rows ahead of Marylou.

Marylou scooted around on her seat cushion, the buttons in the fabric biting into her haunches. She wanted to bolt, but she had to see what happened next. She couldn’t imagine what Buff was going to say. How could he stand up there, facing them, after what he’d done? But he did face them, and his face didn’t look so hot. There were dark circles underneath his eyes. He looked gray and haggard, like he’d lost weight. His trousers hung on him. Where’s your big dick now, buddy?

Buff opened his mouth and said that he’d decided not to lie anymore. He talked about how sorry he was, how he’d hurt so many people, how he’d let his family and his congregation down, and then he began to sniffle. “I’ve had a demon inside me for many years,” he said. “I’ve tried to fight it, but it keeps coming back. Lord, I’ve tried to fight it. Sexual addiction. Addiction to pornography. Please help me, friends. Please help me fight this thing.”

“We will, we will,” said members of the audience.

“Friends, please forgive me. With your help I can beat this thing. With your help and the Lord’s help, I can become a whole man again.”

“Bullshit,” Marylou said in a loud voice.

“Oh, Lord,” said the elegantly dressed black man sitting next to Marylou, his eyes trained on Buff. “Oh, lordy, lordy, please, lord.”

Three rows in front of her Paula was sobbing, too, and so was Angel, but Rusty sat there stiff-backed, and Marylou squirmed for all three of them.

But what happened next was even worse. Buff looked around and started picking out people to plead forgiveness of. “Forgive me, Danielle.”

“I forgive you!” Danielle, whoever she was, burst out.

There was a big upswelling of approval from the congregation.

After that, when he spoke to one of his victims, she answered back
that she forgave him. So there were more than four victims. Seven, at least.

Finally, when he’d run through the list, plucky Paula dashed up on the stage with him, hugged him, and said she forgave him. At least he didn’t ask poor little Angel to forgive him. Rusty walked up to the stage, too, but she didn’t cry and she didn’t hug him and Marylou could tell she wasn’t anywhere close to forgiving him. Her mouth was all clenched like she was holding lots in.

Then people in the congregation went up and began hugging Buff and his family and praying with them and laying hands on them, and that’s when Marylou got up and walked out, wishing to God she’d done so earlier.

Buff. The Reverend Buffington Coffey.

Now, walking Buster, she kept replaying that ceremony in her mind, that maudlin, self-pitying display, making it all about him, not his victims, forcing people to “forgive” him just so he’d feel even less regret about what he’d done. He had stopped lying and confessed, and that, she guessed, was a good thing; but no doubt he’d hire some shyster lawyer who would get him off and he wouldn’t even lose his job and his family would come back to him and pretty soon he’d start doing it again, probably to Angel and Rusty along with other people’s daughters, because that kind of person never stopped, that was a proven fact, much as people wanted to believe otherwise. You can forgive them until the cows come home.

She and Buster were back on her street, and she found herself staring at Buff’s two-story house that, in the early morning light, looked like something from a magazine cover:
Show Off Your Stunning Split-Level!
His wife’s car wasn’t there, but his SUV was. He was in there, right this minute. What was he doing? Probably having a good dream about all the people he’d fooled at that so-called ceremony.

Marylou, with a surge of energy, began walking more briskly toward
home, Buster trotting to keep up. She’d been trying to get revenge on the wrong person, that was the problem. Wilson had done something awful, monstrous even, had caused deaths and disfigurements, but in a way, he himself had been brainwashed by the cold war mentality. And he hadn’t kept on doing it. He hadn’t tried to seek forgiveness in a showy, public way. As she walked along, Marylou realized she was full of energy again, a scary, humming kind of energy. Gas. Go. Return of the Radioactive Lady. And this time she would not be deterred.

* * *

She rang Buff’s doorbell close to seven a.m.—a Friday morning, so if he wasn’t up he should be up. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he didn’t answer right away—she wouldn’t have wanted to talk to anyone if she were him. And she expected that, when he did, he’d be either under the influence of sleeping pills or unshaven and miserable looking, liquor on his breath, weak and pathetic, the way he’d looked at the ceremony of hoodoo.

She intended to lean on the doorbell until he answered, then give him the cake and leave. She had no desire to sit and watch him eat it. Didn’t think she could.

But she should’ve known! He answered the door right away, smiling, freshly shaven, with swim trunks, a T-shirt, and flip-flops on. “Well, good morning to you!” he said. “To what do I owe this honor?”

She thrust out her cake. “It’s two nice big slices of my fresh pineapple upside-down cake,” she said, trying to do a passable imitation of a kind smile. “Excellent for breakfast!”

He thanked her and asked her to come in and share the cake. She demurred.

“Aw, please come in for just a minute,” he said, standing back from the door. He took the cake from her—plastic-wrapped on a paper plate. She hadn’t wanted to give him the whole cake in case he decided
to give some to someone else. He took her arm and pulled her inside. Was he suspicious of her?

She stood there, in his spotless kitchen, her mouth dry and her heart thudding in her chest. “It’s cold in here,” she said.

“I keep the air-conditioning up too high,” he said, setting the cake down on the counter. “Paula’s always turning it down. She’s not here now.”

Marylou nodded.

“Come. Come sit down.” He gestured at the living room.

“I can’t. I really need to go.” She tried to swallow. “Are you going swimming?”