Free Lorelei's Secret by Carolyn Parkhurst Page B

do I have any tattoos?’
    I stared at her. I knew the whole of her skin by heart.
    Did she think there was anything I had missed? ‘No,’ I said.
    ‘You don’t.’
    She lowered her head and parted her hair for me. I could see black ink on her scalp. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
    I bent over her head, examining. I couldn’t make it out.
    ‘What is it?’ I asked.
    ‘It’s snake hair,’ she said. ‘Like Medusa.’
    ‘Wow,’ I said. I tried to follow the lines on her head, to make out the scales and the angry snake faces, but her hair was too thick. ‘When did you get it?’
    ‘When I was seventeen.’ She pulled away from my hands, still resting in her hair, and raised her head to look at me. ‘I used to pull my hair out. It’s kind of a nervous disorder.’
    I nodded. ‘I’ve heard of that,’ I said. ‘Let me think, what’s it called?’ I puzzled out the possible Latin and Greek roots.
    ‘Trichotillomania ?’
    Lexy stared at me and shook her head. ‘You know the
    damnedest things,’ she said. ‘Anyway, my parents took me to a couple of different doctors, and they put me on medication for it, but nothing worked. So one day, I just decided to shave my head and be done with it.’
    I thought about my Lexy as a young girl, standing bald and brazen before the world. It was a strangely moving thought. ‘And did it work?’ I asked.
    ‘Well, yeah. There was nothing left to pull on.’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘So I kept it shaved for a year or so, until I felt like things were better in my life and it’d be safe to grow it back. I got the tattoo as kind of a talisman. It’s my secret strength. It protects me from falling back into that place where I used to be.’
    I reached out tentatively. She took my hand. ‘I’m sorry,’
    she said.
    ‘For what?’
    ‘For ruining your nice proposal.’ She held her hands out before her and looked at the words again. ‘It was very sweet.’
     
    ‘That’s okay.’
    ‘I just need some time,’ she said. ‘To trust that this is all real.’
    ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
    So I waited. I waited for five more months. And one
    morning, I awoke to find a single word printed across my palm. Yes, it said.

13
    Here’s the thing: I wasn’t entirely honest with Detective Anthony Stack when he asked me if Lexy had ever mentioned suicide. In fact, I wasn’t honest at all. Which is not to say that I had any reason to believe Lexy was suicidal in the months and weeks leading up to her death; at least, I had no such reasons at the time. But it would be dishonest of me not to reveal at this point that she did, during the sweet, breath-holding time of our engagement, tell me that there had been moments in her life when she had thought about killing herself.
    The only time she came close, she told me, occurred
    during that hair-tearing year of her adolescence, the year the snakes took up residence on her scalp. Her parents were going through a divorce, and she was having a hard time in school - but I say that as if those are reasons. As if the fabric of human misery can be spooled apart into threads just like that. How many young girls that year had trouble in school, had trouble with their parents, and still never thought to pick up a knife and press its cold point against their wrist? No. There’s more to it than that, and more scientific minds than mine have yet to piece it all together.
    But whatever that fatal elixir is, that mixture of
    circumstance and temperament that leads a person to
    the edge of death and sometimes back again, it flowed through Lexy’s body like blood. She fell into a deep depression, and the effort of wading through each day, the weight she carried like a stone in her gut, left her exhausted. She would come home from school and crawl into her bed and stay there until it was almost time for her mother to come home from work, and she knew
    she had to rouse herself and create some semblance of normalcy. During those afternoons,