I get up, new energy and a new mission on my mind. “It’s okay. I’m going to go pee, though. Find me back here when the car comes, ’kay?” And I bolt, back into the house.

There is no way the pictures are still there, I tell myself. It’s been a decade. But it’s like an invisible hand, the ghost of Odilie, is guiding me up the stairs, toward the master bedroom, which I’d heard from a partygoer was the first room on the left of the second floor, a bright pink monstrosity with animal print rugs, flowers that look like genitalia, but not in a tasteful Georgia O’Keeffe way.

There’s a hum at the back of my head, an itch I’m trying to scratch at. Jackson said, his pearly whites. I think back to Thelma Kay’s comment on the group photo of Tom, Odilie, that other couple, Odilie’s stretched out grin. Teeth=secrets.

There are two enormous night tables next to the California king-size bed, neon pickled lime green with one deep drawer apiece. Nothing sits on their surfaces except a pair of gold-flecked Murano glass lamps, so I pull out the first drawer. It’s empty except for some ZzzQuil, a pair of tweezers, a couple of old magazines.

I move to the other side, to the other giant ugly nightstand and its enormous drawer. This one is much fuller, a hoarder’s paradise: everything from Q-tips, to rash cream, to dried plants to a bunch of loose silverware, a tape measure, some fabric swatches. And a stack of books.

I remove each one, shaking them for loose contents. To Kill a Mockingbird, a cookbook, The Rules, a book on the geography of Wyneck, an old local Yellow Pages. And a hefty tome on teeth, slick color photos of the fangs of wildcats, of carnivorous plants and human babies. Of sharks. And my brain trembles, lights sparking.

I open it, feel for something, turning the pages rapidly, check inside the spine’s end band until finally, finally, I feel something come loose and I carefully slip it out, nestled in a page about the red fangs of the triggerfish.

When I turn it over, I want to yell, the sound catching in my throat, behind my tonsils, the contents as deadly and carnal and hideous as the mouth of the cannibalistic tiger salamander gaping at me from the cover of the book, its fangs dripping with the blood of its own kind.

17

ODILIE

Ten years ago

Peri returned from the city. Odilie came home from work and could smell her before she saw her, the tobacco and hyacinth, and another scent, the pungency of acetone, wafting through the walls of the apartment. When Odilie opened her bedroom door, Peri was on the bed painting her toes, wiping at the polish bleeding into the corners of her cuticles with a damp cotton swab.