Got two odd eyes and two big feet
The height she couldn’t hide, but the odd eyes, she tried to. She started wearing sunglasses whenever she could, in the grocery store, in her bedroom, even in the classroom, handing her teacher a fake note from her doctor describing her sensitivity to light. Later in life, she would consider her odd eyes a blessing. Not ghost eyes, but she had been gifted with a second sight nonetheless: she could look at a girl and tell if she’d been hit before. Forget bruises and scars—hit women learned to hide or explain those away. No need for stories about running into doorknobs or tripping down stairs—all she needed to do was lock her odd eyes onto theirs and she knew a woman surprised or outraged by pain from a woman who’d learned to expect it. She saw past flawless skin to diamond-shaped iron burns, gashes from golden belt buckles, necks nicked by steak knives, lips split by class rings, faces blooming purple and deep blue. She’d told Aubrey this the third time she’d invited her for tea, and after, Aubrey had stared into the mirror, wondering what else the first lady saw. Was her entire past written on her skin? Could Mrs. Sheppard see everything that Paul had done to her? At least now she knew why Mrs. Sheppard had been so kind to her. Why, after the altar call, Mrs. Sheppard had found her in the church lobby and offered her a hug; why, the following Sunday, Mrs. Sheppard had given her a small Bible with a floral cover; and why, the Sunday after that, Mrs. Sheppard had invited her into her office for tea. Aubrey didn’t even drink tea, but for months she’d sat on the other side of the gray striped settee, dropping sugar cubes into her cup. She took her tea sweet—sugar, honey, and cream.
“That’s fine in here,” Mrs. Sheppard had told her once, “but out in public, folks might think it’s juvenile, a young lady doctoring up her tea with all those sweets.” She’d corrected Aubrey gently, but Aubrey had felt so embarrassed that weeks later, she’d only added a single sugar cube to her tea.
One afternoon, she sipped the bitter tea and asked Mrs. Sheppard what had happened to Elise Turner. She lofted the question casually, as if she hadn’t been wondering it for weeks—no, months, ever since Pastor Sheppard had somberly announced the news to the congregation. At the time, he hadn’t offered a cause of death, which had raised suspicions the way only a sudden, unexplained death could. A woman Elise Turner’s age didn’t just die naturally; she hadn’t seemed ill and if she hadn’t suffered some terrible accident, then what could’ve happened to her?
“I just don’t know,” Sister Willis had said in the ladies’ room after service. “Somethin’ just don’t sound right to me.” And even though the other women around the sink had nodded, no one had expected the news that trickled in, days later, that Elise Turner had shot herself in the head. The congregation had already imagined possible shameful tragedies—an accidental drug overdose, a drunk-driving accident, even a murder caused by circumstances the pastor had thought it best to obscure. Maybe Elise had taken a lover (she could do better than Robert, couldn’t she?) and in the seedy motel room where they’d conducted their affair, the lover had killed her.
Despite the lurid speculation, no one had been prepared for the reality of Elise Turner’s death, especially not Aubrey. She had never known Mrs. Turner but she’d felt as if she did, at least a little, the way you could know someone you’d only seen from a distance. On Sundays, she’d seen the Turners enter Upper Room—the husband stiff-backed in his suit, the wife smiling at the greeters in the lobby, the daughter a spitting image of the mother. They’d reminded her of a family out of television. The strong, manly father, the beautiful mother, and the daughter, who had somehow been blessed with beauty and smarts. In AP Government, Aubrey sat near the back, watching Nadia breeze into class with her friends, and whenever she slipped through the door after the bell rang, she appeased Mr. Thomas with a smile before he could write her up for detention. How could he punish her? Week after week, when he listed the top ten test-scorers, her name was on the whiteboard, as if it had been written in permanent marker. She was going to a big university someday, everyone knew it, while Aubrey would shuffle off to the community college with the rest of their class. On Sunday mornings, she watched this girl—this Nadia Turner—slide into the church pew beside her mother and her father, and she wondered what it would be like, to go to church with your family. Mo didn’t believe in God. Kasey did, only abstractly, the way she believed in the universe’s ability to right itself. Neither was happy that Aubrey had started going to church, although they hadn’t said so directly.
“Are you sure you want to spend so much time there?” Mo would say. “I mean . . . don’t you think it’s maybe a little too soon?”
Too soon for what, she’d never said, but she didn’t have to. She worried that Aubrey had turned into some religious nut. That she would start seeing images of Jesus in burnt toast, or speaking in tongues mid-conversation, or picketing outside gay weddings. When Aubrey had seen the Turners on Sundays, she wondered what it would be like to be their child, to be smart and beautiful, to have a father and a mother who held your hands during prayer. She thought about the mother especially, who seemed nothing like her own. Elise Turner, young and energetic and beautiful, who laughed in the lobby before service, always greeted as soon as she stepped inside, who had spoken to Aubrey once before, when they’d passed each other before the Christmas play.
“You dropped something, honey,” Elise Turner had said, pointing at Aubrey’s program, which had fluttered to the carpet. Her voice was cool and silky, like milk.
How could a woman like that kill herself? Aubrey knew it was a stupid question—anyone could kill herself, if she wanted to badly enough. Mo said that it was physiological. Misfired synapses, unbalanced chemicals in the brain, the whole body a machine with a few tripped wires that had caused it to self-destruct. But people weren’t just their bodies, right? The decision to kill yourself had to be more complicated than that. Across the couch, the first lady raised an eyebrow as she leaned forward to refill Aubrey’s teacup.
“What do you mean?” Mrs. Sheppard said. “You know what happened to her.”
“I just know she shot herself.”
“Well, that’s all there is to it, honey.”
“But why?” Aubrey said.
“The devil attacks all of us,” Mrs. Sheppard said. “Some folks just aren’t strong enough to fend him off.”
She sounded matter-of-fact as she slowly stirred her tea, the spoon clanging against the cup. She was also nothing like Aubrey’s mother—too assertive and steady and sure of herself. Her mother was one of the weak women Mrs. Sheppard would pity or scorn, depending on how much she knew. Right now, she didn’t know much. Only that Aubrey had moved in with her sister because she and her mom hadn’t gotten along. She hadn’t told Mrs. Sheppard about Paul, who drank bottles of whiskey on weekends and sometimes hit them but always cried about it after because he didn’t mean to, his job was so stressful, they just didn’t know what it was like, being out on the streets all the time, not knowing if you’d make it home. He’d moved in a year before she’d left, and for a year, he had made nightly trips to her room, pushing her door open, then her legs, and for a year, she had told almost no one. Almost, because she’d told her mother after the first time it happened and her mother had shook her head tightly and said “No,” as if she could will it to be untrue.
Across the couch, Mrs. Sheppard reached for a cookie.
“Now, why do you want to know about all this?” she asked.