It seemed too good to be true, the morning that Suzi came knocking at her door. Marylou was wary about answering, because nobody ever rang the bell except Jehovah’s Witnesses and the person who was harassing her, the coward who’d always run away by the time Marylou could step outside to look around.

Suzi had an eerie look on her face. She’d hobbled all the way over to Marylou’s house on her bad knee, but the look on her face didn’t seem to Marylou to indicate that she was in pain. On the contrary, it seemed like suppressed pleasure, the way Helen used to look when she came home from school, bursting with a story to tell her mother about some kid’s bad behavior.

Marylou flung open the door, gave Suzi a hug, and invited her in, noticing that Suzi looked sloppy for Suzi, in an old T-shirt and sweatpants cut off into shorts and old flip-flops, her hair jammed down under a SeaWorld baseball cap.

“You should’ve just phoned me, honey,” Marylou told her. “I would’ve come and got you.”

“Could you take me to the library?” Suzi asked Marylou. “The big one downtown? It has some books I need.”

Marylou told her sure, wondering why she hadn’t asked her mother to take her, but pleased that she hadn’t. She explained to Suzi that they’d need to wait until her pineapple upside-down cake finished baking. While Suzi flopped down on the sofa in the living room with Buster to wait, Marylou busied herself in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher and wiping counters.

She wanted to run over her options in her head once again, but she’d recently had trouble thinking clearly. Maybe it was the torpid subtropical heat here. It was hard to focus.

Okay. She’d tabled her initial plan to murder Wilson, because there wouldn’t be any satisfaction in murdering him if he didn’t know, or understand, why he was being murdered, but it wasn’t that she felt any sympathy for the wretched old coot. Even after that nighttime walk on Nun’s Drive when he asked her to go ahead and kill him. Oh no. She did not feel a bit sorry for him. In fact, after meeting with him and talking with him and observing him, she hated him even more than she had when he’d simply been an abstract bogeyman. It was easier to despise him now that she had particulars to focus on—his spotty, shaking hand waving in her direction like an underwater plant when he was trying to tell her something but couldn’t form the words; his habit of farting like a pack mule when he walked; the way he sat three inches away from the TV screen and stared at the idiotic commercials for Depends diapers as if they were words of wisdom from on high. And him—some smart research doctor who thought he was better than everyone else! A Nazi doctor who treated pregnant women like his own personal guinea pigs! She’d stopped dropping in to see him because his decrepit condition depressed her. She’d decided to leave him be and take care of the rest of his family.

Marylou’d decided that Suzi, the first family member she’d met, was the person she wanted to focus on the most. She would continue to disrupt the lives of the others, but she’d devote most of her trouble-making time to Suzi. But trying to decide how to best use Suzi was just as difficult as pinpointing the best method of ridding the earth of the scum named Wilson Spriggs, the American Nazi. The problem was that she felt no desire at all to harm a hair on Suzi’s head. She liked Suzi. Plain and simple. In fact, she liked her so much that she wished she could adopt her. Who knew why you liked one person more than others? She and Suzi were nothing alike, so it wasn’t that. Marylou was reserved and calculating and expected people to intuit her stellar qualities without her having to do a thing—meanwhile ignoring all her weaknesses—while Suzi was earnest, open and self-confident, and enthusiastic about life. Marylou felt good just being around Suzi. And Suzi needed her, too, since her own mother had checked out long ago. The two of them, she and Suzi, needed each other.

And now, in her cake-smelling kitchen, stacking hot clean melamine plates in her cupboard, Marylou had another hand-slap-to-the-forehead moment. Instead of trying to create trouble for Suzi, maybe she should pour her energy into creating a positive relationship with Suzi. Make Suzi want to come live with her! Suzi needed to spend time with Marylou, lots of time; and gradually she’d become more and more estranged from her own parents; and soon she would turn, by her own choice, into the granddaughter Marylou had never had. The daughter she’d never had. The daughter Helen would’ve been if she’d been allowed by the American Nazi to grow up like her friends had. Healthy. Smart. Kind. Loving. Responsible. Sweet. Funny. The truth was, Marylou loved Suzi. How could this be? But there it was. The feelings she had for Suzi both delighted and terrified her, but she couldn’t ignore them.

It had already been harder than she’d expected to drive any real wedge between Suzi and those hapless goats she called parents. The church thing, she’d thought, would do it, but she’d underestimated the mother’s ability to avoid looking a gift horse in the mouth. What a strange expression that was. Was she, Marylou, the gift horse? She imagined herself with a horse head and Caroline peering into her mouth. One chomp would do it.

And she’d also underestimated the father’s determination to focus on anything but his job and that nasty, slatternly coworker of his. Gee-gee.

She’d hoped that Suzi would embrace fundamentalist Christianity and become a zealot, but she was wrong there, too. She’d underestimated Suzi’s ability to fold religion smoothly into her already well-rounded life like eggs into a batter.

It had also been hard to derail Suzi because she, Marylou, had so much to do! She was living in a new city; and living, period, took work. When she’d first moved to Tallahassee—ah, those halcyon days!—she had only her hatred of Wilson Spriggs to focus on. She knew nobody, had no place to go except the grocery store; and, on her first few visits to Publix, she’d looked around and decided that every old man she saw pushing a cart must be Wilson Spriggs. She was in the town where he lived, and it seemed like everyone she saw must be connected to him in some way, like they were all in some unfolding drama starring the Radioactive Lady and the American Nazi.

But now the people and places she saw in Tallahassee had taken up their proper roles again. They were simply themselves, and she was forced to acknowledge them. She had to chat with the checkout girls at Publix and the woman at the hair salon (recommended by Paula Coffey) who cut her hair, and her coworkers at Florida Testing and Assessment who liked to discuss American Idol and CSI while eating their bag lunches. She had to find new doctors. Keep up with her prescriptions. Locate a reliable lawn service and discuss the state of her yard with the workers. (She actually hated yard work, and she’d put all the fake flowers around as a joke—she’d found them on sale one day at Walmart—but it was like the emperor’s new clothes. Everybody acted like they were real, so Marylou didn’t bother to explain.)

But mostly what took up her time was church. Even though it wasn’t a Baptist Church, and it was the kind of church she’d always turned her nose up at, she found she actually enjoyed going. It was her own fault, allowing Buff and Paula to pull her into their lair, but not having many other obligations she could use as excuses, it was hard to say no. So she was now going not just Sundays and Wednesday nights, but she’d joined a women’s Bible study group, which met for breakfast on Thursday mornings, and a prayer group, which met for lunch on Fridays. And her Sunday school class, the Wouldbegoods, was always doing community projects. They’d talked her into helping with the food pantry and the clothing drive, and it all took time! Marylou was busier now than she’d been in Memphis. “Busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest,” Teddy used to say.

Six months after Helen died, Teddy’d left Memphis and gone away, up to Wisconsin, where his sister lived, just for a visit, he’d said, but then he kept extending his stay. Finally he told her he’d gotten a job with the City of Madison Parks and Recreation Department and eventually asked her for a divorce. A few years later he remarried and had three boys who were now grown. She knew this because for years they’d exchanged cards at Christmas and the occasional letter, until one letter from Teddy, coming right after what would’ve been Helen’s twenty-first birthday, informed her that he just couldn’t write to her anymore, and asked her not to write to him. It was too depressing, he said, to be reminded of her and Helen, because the two of them went together in his mind, and always would, and Marylou understood. She and Helen did go together, but in her mind, Teddy went with them, and she was incapable of putting it all behind her, even if she’d wanted to, which she didn’t.

She was happy for Teddy that he’d been able to escape the weight of what had happened and create another life for himself, even if she hadn’t been able to. She’d married Martin, of course, a few years after Teddy left, but, although he was a perfectly nice man, he was no Teddy, and she never could talk to him the way she’d been able to talk to Teddy.

For years she’d kept a notebook full of things she wanted to tell Teddy, things only she and Teddy would appreciate. Small things, mostly. The oak tree in the side yard got struck by lightning and it split the trunk right in half, but I wouldn’t let them cut it down. I took swimming lessons at the Y, and it turns out I’m a natural! Remember Marcia Jenkins, that sweet but homely girl from down the street who was in my junior honors English class? She married a Canadian Inuit! In their newspaper picture the two of them are rubbing noses. Remember how I used to hate prunes? Well, I’ve gotten right fond of them in my old age. And so on.

After she got caught up with planning to murder Wilson, she shut that notebook, Notes to Teddy, for good. Teddy would never understand, or condone, her desire to get even. Living well is the best revenge, he always reminded her. That’s what he’d said when she expressed to him her anger at her own parents, telling him how they’d abandoned her at her grandmother’s house in Little Rock so they could go off gallivanting in Hollywood. Teddy, while not making light of her anger, had encouraged her to forgive them, and after a time she had. But forgive Helen’s death? Never.

Suzi Witherspoon was the first young person she’d met, in all her years of teaching Sunday school and high school, whom she thought she could love the way she’d loved Helen. She had to go carefully with Suzi. Not make any mistakes. It was even possible that if she was able to have a grandparent-grandchild relationship with Suzi, her anger about Helen would dissipate and she could get on with enjoying the rest of her life. Live and let live, as Teddy would’ve said. It could happen, couldn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t too late.

The timer dinged and she removed her pineapple upside-down cake from the oven. She was supposed to take it to a potluck supper her Sunday school class was having that evening. Perhaps she could talk Suzi into coming with her.

* * *

The Leon County Public Library, where Marylou hadn’t been before, was a two-story affair with large plate glass windows, built in the seventies. It was full, on this summer afternoon, of mothers with small children and office workers and scantily clad teenagers and people who appeared to be homeless napping in the air-conditioning.

Marylou had loved going to the Georgian-style, three-story library in downtown Little Rock when she was a child. Her grandmother would drop her off there a couple of afternoons a week, and in her memories of that library it was always summer. She relished the time by herself, the drowsy heat and whirring fans and smell of old book covers, sitting in the same plaid chair in the children’s room and deciding which five books, in the stack of mysteries she’d selected, she really wanted to check out, the same lady librarians working behind the counter, probably they were only in their forties but they looked, to Marylou, to be 140.

In the Leon County Library it was all DVDs and CDs and banks of computers. Suzi rode the elevator upstairs to get her books, and Marylou wandered to the back of the room downstairs where there was a children’s section. She leaned against a long bookshelf and glanced through children’s books—some of the same ones she’d read to Helen—Three Little Horses by Piet Worm, that strange book with the gorgeous illustrations of Blackie, Brownie, and Whitey dressed up like princesses—but she was also secretly watching the children sitting around her, industriously coloring the free coloring sheets handed out by the librarian and fighting with their siblings while their mothers searched the library catalog on the computer.

After a bit Suzi reappeared, limping—she’d left her crutches at home—with three books she was clutching to her chest. “Ready to go?” That excited look again.

“What you got there?” Marylou asked her casually.

Suzi blushed a deep scarlet under her SeaWorld cap. “Just some random books.”

“Oh. Okay.”

But Suzi really wanted to show her. She crowded closer to Marylou, who was already jammed up against the shelf. Suzi displayed her books one by one: A Teenagers Guide to Sex, What Your Parents Won’t Tell You About Boys, and What Boys Are Really Thinking (and Should You Care?).

“Huh,” Marylou said, nodding, and sighed. Typical teenage stuff, she supposed. But did they have to get interested so young?

“Can I spend the night at your house tonight?” Suzi asked her. “So I can read them? All my friends are busy or out of town.”

Marylou decided to ignore that last part and said sure, but would Suzi like to attend the Sunday school potluck with her?

“No way,” Suzi said vehemently.

So maybe Marylou was wrong about the folding in of the religion. Maybe Suzi’d already gone off it.

“That’s where the guy is. At church.”

“What guy?”

“Him.” Suzi held up the books again, glancing around as if she was afraid of someone listening in, although nobody was close enough to hear them.

“The young man you’re interested in?”

Suzi snorted. “He’s not that young.”

Remain calm, Marylou told herself. “How old is he?”

“Old. Really old.”

Marylou felt faint and gripped the bookcase behind her. “It’s just a crush, honey. Those come and go.”

To her horror, Suzi’s eyes filled with tears. “We did something we shouldn’t have done.”

Marylou led Suzi over to a miniature table and chairs and they perched, squatted really, on tiny kid chairs. Help, Marylou thought. What should she say? She’d never been a parent to a teenager. And the ones today were nothing like the ones she’d taught years ago. Or maybe they were, but the ones she’d taught in the 1950s knew to hide things better.

“So you let him …” Marylou trailed off, wanting, and not wanting, to know the details.

“We had sex!” Suzi said, not even bothering to whisper.

Marylou glanced around the kids’ section, wild-eyed. Every person she looked at, mother and child, was staring back at her.

Suzi went on, talking too loudly. “I thought I wanted to, because I love him, I really do, but I wish I’d waited. I wanted to wait till I got married. Or at least engaged.”

Marylou whispered, “Honey. You’re not …”

“No!”

This time Marylou didn’t even bother to look around. She felt that righteous anger welling up in her again. She’d missed it. “Did he force you?”

“I’m such a slut.”

“You are not a slut.”

Suzi went on like Marylou hadn’t spoken. “I asked him. I thought I wanted to. I love him. And he wants to meet me again. Tonight! I told Sierra and she thought I should go tonight, but she probably thinks I’m a slut and is telling everyone.”

Marylou scooted her little chair toward Suzi and hugged her, comforting her as best she could. Why would sensible, sweet little Suzi do such a self-destructive thing? The poor kid!

Finally Suzi lifted her head from Marylou’s shoulder and whispered, “Don’t you want to know who it is?”

No, she thought. But she said, “If you want to tell me.”

The lip quivering again. The repressed smile. This next revelation, Marylou realized, was really the shocking part about what Suzi wanted Marylou to know. The other stuff was just warm-up.

“It’s against the law, having sex with a young girl,” Marylou heard herself say. “Whoever did this to you could be arrested. Should be.”

“I know, I know. I don’t want him to get into trouble. His wife can’t find out. Ever.”

Marylou gripped the seat of her chair. “He has a wife?” She’d been picturing some nasty, sly-faced older teenager, not someone with a wife.

“I can’t tell you.”

“You’ve got to tell me. This can’t go on.”

“That’s why I’m telling you. I guess I don’t want it to go on. I do and I don’t. It all started because of Ava. It’s her fault. I just offered myself as a replacement for her. Since she wouldn’t. His daughter told me that’s what he wanted, since he likes to look at pictures of young girls on the Internet. I felt sorry for him ’cause Ava was being such a jerk to him. She could’ve said no nicely.”

“Who is it, Suzi?”

Suzi was sobbing now, and it look a long time before she could speak his name.

* * *

That night Suzi went to sleep in Marylou’s bed, with Buster. Marylou skipped the potluck and sat on her screen porch in the dark. She had to figure out what to do, who to talk to, which of the emotions swirling inside her to express, and to whom.

Mostly she felt terrible for Suzi, because she knew, from her own experience with a nasty uncle, that this event would affect her the rest of her life. This sort of thing happened to a lot of girls, but that fact didn’t lessen the pain of it, not one iota. She also felt terrible for Paula and Rusty and Angel, but not as bad as she felt for Suzi. It was awful, not being able to take away what had happened to Suzi.

Suzi had begged Marylou not to tell, not yet, and Marylou had promised; but of course she had no intention of keeping this promise. If Suzi wouldn’t tell, she would. But who should she tell first, and how should she tell them? For some reason she found herself wanting to tell Wilson, the only person around who would listen and remain calm(ish) and help her come up with a plan. But, no, that was ridiculous. She couldn’t tell Adolf. Should she tell Caroline? The police? Buff’s wife? Buff himself? She’d always thought there was something slick and shifty about Buff—a proper nickname for a grown man? So why was she so surprised? But a thirteen-year-old girl? That was different from fornicating with lusty choir women. Reverend Coffey was depraved. She wanted to run over and pound on Buff’s door, and she just might do it.

All those people must be told. She hated to be the one to tell, the one to start a chain reaction of events that would hurt lots of people and would draw attention to her in a way she wanted to avoid, seeing as most people she knew here didn’t know her real name or why she’d come to Tallahassee in the first place. But she could deal with all that. What was worse was the paralyzing guilt, worse than she’d ever experienced before; and she couldn’t argue herself out of it, the way she’d learned to do when she started berating herself about the radioactive cocktails.

Because this whole thing was her fault. It was her fault. She had taken Suzi to that church for her own devious purposes and delivered her into the clutches of that creep. Could she ever stop ruining the lives of innocent people? First her own daughter and now Suzi. The Radioactive Lady, it seemed, was just as destructive as the nasty shit she’d swallowed.

She could be sitting anywhere, on any screened porch in August, the heat cradling her, the cicadas in the live oak trees doing their metallic buzzing that sounded like hot, hot, hot, she could be in Memphis or Tallahassee or Little Rock and it didn’t matter because only her internal landscape counted at the moment, and it was a familiar landscape, a place she’d found herself many times, a safe, cool numbing place she might call Freeze. Freeze wasn’t like the Stop in Go-Stop, Go-Stop, behavior that Teddy had always teased her about. Freeze was more like: I’m checking into the Econo Lodge and I’ll see you later. She’d spent time in Freeze after her parents had hopped into their Studebaker and driven away from her grandmother’s house, and for a time after Uncle Pat molested her. She’d lived in Freeze for years after Helen died.

She sat there in her teak patio chair for she didn’t know how long, deep in the land of Freeze, not able to move, or think, or feel. Then she heard a rustle outside. Sometimes when she was sitting out here at night she imagined a giant cockroach creeping through her backyard or an armadillo as big as a collie. There was something prehistoric about this landscape. But the rustling she was hearing now sounded like a person. A person creeping through the tangle of shrubbery and vines along the back of her house. It was nearly midnight, so her tormenter had just assumed that, as usual, she’d be in bed. She remained motionless on the dark porch, barely breathing. When the shadowy figure came into view at the sliding screen door, it froze in surprise.

“Graahhhh,” Marylou bellowed, hauling herself out of Freeze with her own angry voice, not even sounding like a human being, lurching to her feet and snatching up an empty candlestick—the old lady did it on the screened porch with the candlestick!—yanking open the screen door, letting the candlestick fly at the fleeing figure. It missed by a mile.

But she’d seen who it was. Now, at least she knew.