The lights dimmed for the slide show. Helen sat down right where she was on the floor. Probably that would be considered disrespectful. But her side ached the way a person aches when they are homesick, or heartbroken.
HELEN KEPT WAKING up all night with the feeling that someone was holding her. Not holding her down or even tightly. She was just aware of arms around her waist, the sense of warm flesh, the weight of someone else. But of course when she woke up, she was alone. Joanne slept across the room. The salsa music played. People laughed. No one wrapped their arms around her. Helen settled back down in her small cot. But as she drifted back to sleep, the arms, the embrace, returned.
ON HER WAY to Ashley’s—which was a short walk down a dirt road, past cows grazing, a broken fence, a pile of rocks, those were the directions she got—Helen practiced what she would say. I don’t know why I’m doing this, she’d say. I like my hair. Nothing drastic, please. Nothing ballistic.
But then she saw the gently curving path that led to Ashley’s log cabin and Helen, out of nowhere, imagined herself as a platinum blonde. Then with blue-black hair. She could even picture herself with I Love Lucy red. By the time she reached the front door, her heart was pounding. Inside this log cabin, she thought, was the power to change her.
The door opened before she knocked.
Ashley stood there, frowning, already studying the top of Helen’s head. She was tall and thin, the kind of woman that Helen’s mother called willowy. She had a powder puff of white-blond hair and round blue eyes. Her accent, when she finally spoke, was thick and southern.
“Lulabelle,” she said to Helen, “your hair is earth and you are water. It is sapping you of nourishment, darling.”
“Uh-huh,” Helen said, and followed her inside.
Ashley turned to her. “I use no electricity, no chemicals, no toxins.”
Helen swallowed hard. The cabin smelled like her old Lincoln Log set from when she was a child.
Ashley began massaging Helen’s scalp. “Your hair is earth,” she said again. “It gives life.”
Helen gasped and moved away. “I killed Scott,” she blurted.
As if she hadn’t heard, Ashley’s hands resumed their massaging. “It should be terra-cotta,” she said finally. “And you need to drink more water. You are dehydrating from your soul outward.”
She stopped massaging as abruptly as she began and left the room.
Helen’s eyes had to adjust to the darkness—no electricity!—but when they did, she realized there was nothing much to see. The room, with its log walls and floors, was bare except for several chairs and an old-fashioned white porcelain basin. Helen supposed this was what it was like where Loretta Lynn grew up. She’d seen that movie about her life, the one with Sissy Spacek. That was a long time ago. Before she even knew Scott. Helen realized that Scott had not been in her life for most of her life. He had been with her for only three and a half years. When she had been thinking about breaking up with him, she’d come up with a theory that television shows outlive relationships. She’d had a boyfriend during the Dynasty years who was gone long before the show was canceled. Another that L.A. Law had outlived. She supposed had Scott not died, then he would have been her Seinfeld boyfriend. But he had died. Out of the blue. Without warning. So that now it would seem wrong, irreverent, to think of him in terms of Seinfeld. He was her dead boyfriend. He was the man she had accidentally killed. And it was wrong, irreverent, to think about how she’d been unhappy with him recently. His own grieving mother had told her they were so much in love. Helen could not tell her that wasn’t true anymore. She thought again of those two dots of blood on his neck. Marking him. After she’d left the hospital and before she’d come to New York, Helen had gone to see Scott’s parents. His father had talked about his neck. “It broke,” he’d said, wringing his hands as if he were demonstrating how to kill a chicken. “It snapped.”
Ashley stood there like a flamingo, long legs and arms bent at weird angles, balancing jars and pots of powders and creams on a tray.
“I don’t want to go ballistic,” Helen told her.
Ashley seemed to float toward her. Incense burned an unfamiliar, foreign smell.
“It’s important, you think,” Ashley said, easing Helen into a chair, “to maintain control.”
Helen closed her eyes. “Yes,” she said.
Ashley was mixing, rubbing, stroking, pouring water, applying hot, applying cold, wrapping, tugging.
Time slowed down, the way it had when Helen and Scott were in her car and it was airborne, flying off Thurbers Avenue. Was Scott already dead at that point? Helen wondered for the first time.
“Your hair tells me you should drive a Volvo,” Ashley said.
“I recently totaled my Toyota,” Helen told her.
“When your hair is terra-cotta and you drink more water, you will understand better.” Ashley tapped her on the shoulders. “You can go now.”
At a hair salon, a mirror hung in front of you, but here there were just logs.