Blood Orange Read online

  A scream came up from her stomach and twisted in her throat. She ground her teeth together, held on to the door frame, and told herself not to frighten Bailey. The street seemed suddenly, strangely empty.

  She picked up the rock and pulled off the rubber band. The paper fluttered to the asphalt, and she stared down at it with raw eyes. Then she got in the car and slammed the door, jerked her seat belt across her chest, and turned the key in the ignition.

  Roaring out of the parking place and down the street, she left on the pavement both the rock and the note with its cutout letters glued onto ordinary white paper. But she had seen the message and read it.

  DON’T BE AFRAID. I LOVE YOU BOTH.

  orothy Wilkerson was one hundred and two years old and -dying of exhaustion.

  “Any changes?” Lexy asked Alana, the home nurse on duty.

  “She told me this morning she’d had visitors in the night and I shouldn’t be letting people into her room without her permission.”

  Lexy knew many old people near death had night visitors, some friendly and comforting, others threatening and dreaded. Two gentlemen had talked to Lexy’s grandfather every night for several months before he died. When she asked him what they talked about, he said they explained things he needed to know. She had been small at the time and a little afraid of the old man with hairs sprouting from his nose. Now she wished she’d asked him what those things were.

  “She called me a heathen.” Alana, a graduate of San Diego’s large Roman Catholic university, had married a Jordanian and converted to Islam. Her distinctive head scarf had given her away to cranky old Dorothy Wilkerson, who, despite her fractional eyesight, could see enough to make an insult stick.

  “Other than having visions and being abusive, how’s she doing?”

  “She has incredible stamina, Lexy. And such will.” Alana raised her eyes to heaven. “I know her joints give her pain, but she won’t take anything. I think she’s afraid of not thinking clearly. And I know she wants to tell you something.”

  “In that case,” Lexy said, “in I go.”

  Alana touched her arm. “Allah is good.”

  “Amen to that, sister.”

  Though she was almost blind, Dorothy claimed to hear better than she ever had. Her muscles had atrophied to the point of being virtually useless, arthritis had cemented most of her joints, and osteoporosis had made her bones so brittle that if she turned over in bed she could break her hip, so she slept in a contraption that made it impossible to move without assistance. To a woman who in her youth had been a talented horsewoman and ocean swimmer, this confinement might as well have been a barbed-wire wrap.

  She had the right to be curmudgeonly.

  Dorothy’s husband had left her sufficient money to be cared for at home in the same bedroom in which she had slept for seventy years. If one had to die alone and slowly, this room on the second story of a gracious old Craftsman at the edge of a pretty canyon, tree-shaded and, now, at twilight, full of the songs of birds, was not a bad place to do it. Someone had brought in a large, untidy bouquet of homegrown roses and put them on the table under the window. From across the room Lexy smelled their spicy-sweet fragrance.

  She had sat at so many bedsides where the dying shared unpleasant quarters with strangers. Once, in such a place, the loud voices of two orderlies in the hall discussing the intimate details of their dates had interrupted her prayers. The noise continued until Lexy, at the end of her patience, charged out into the hall and with all her priestly authority reminded them that people were dying and if they didn’t have respect for that, would they at least go outside so she wouldn’t have to hear about their escapades.

  A six-foot-tall redheaded female priest could kick a lot of butt when she wanted to.

  “It’s me, Dorothy.” She pulled up a straight-backed chair and sat. “Lexy Neuhaus.”

  “I know who you are. I recognize your voice. Where’ve you been?”

  “Evening Prayer.”

  She had been the only person at the short service. At the end of the day people wanted to be home with their families or off with friends. Solitude did not bother Lexy. She loved St. Tom’s. From within its shadows and musty twilight she imagined she heard the murmur of old prayers and petitions. As she read aloud the names of the sick and dying, the travelers, the troubled and the weary, she tried to envision each person. That evening her favorite prayer of intercession had been chosen with Micah, Dana, David, and Bailey in mind.

  Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give Thine angels charge of those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for Thy love’s sake.

  She improvised a prayer for herself, asking God to help her overcome her anger, deal with loneliness, and take greater joy in her work. The priesthood was an isolating job. She had known that from the start.

  “What are you thinking about?” Dorothy snapped.

  “A family at St. Tom’s, the Cabots. Their daughter was kidnapped.”

  “I don’t pay you … to think about whoever they are.”

  “My dear, you don’t pay me at all.”

  “You’re … only here so I’ll give money to the church.”

  “Wrong again, Dorothy. There are a few things money can’t buy, and I’m one of them.”

  Women from the church came by every day and sat with Dorothy, but volunteers for the job were few because Dorothy was not a likable woman and probably never had been. At coffee hour a few Sundays back, Lexy had overheard someone say that it was well beyond time Dorothy Wilkerson died. The endowment needed her money, and one hundred and two was more years than anyone deserved. Lexy had flinched at the words. Sometimes the truth was too ugly to speak.

  A tear made its slow way from Dorothy’s eye down her crevassed face. Lexy pulled a tissue from the box on the bedside table and touched it to her cheek.

  Dorothy winced and jerked her head aside. “Don’t … put paper on my face.” She lifted her hand a few inches off the blanket and wiggled her fingers. “In the dresser. Handkerchief.”

  In a cream-colored, quilted satin box lay four piles of ironed handkerchiefs of fine cotton and linen, lace-edged and embroidered.

  “Oh my,” Lexy said, “these are beautiful. I’ve never seen hankies like this. It seems a shame-“

  Her phone vibrated against her hip.

  “Nonsense,” Dorothy croaked. “Bring me the … red poppies.”

  When Lexy laid the handkerchief on Dorothy’s upturned palm, the old woman’s fingertips skimmed the raised red embroidery as if reading Braille.

  Lexy said, “I couldn’t blow my nose on that. It’s much too beautiful.”

  The vibrations stopped.

  “When I was a girl we always had … like this. Now everything’s paper … plastic.” She lifted the handkerchief to her face, holding it a few inches from her eyes.

  Lexy used the moment to glance at the printout on her phone. The call had been from Micah. Much as she wanted to talk to him, she could not leave Dorothy now.

  “I sat … on Mother’s bed and played with these. She had more … more beautiful.” She lifted the red-poppy-embroidered handkerchief an inch.

  “Do you want your medication, Dorothy?” When there was no response, Lexy asked, “Do you want to tell me why you’re crying?”

  A single light on the table beside the bed cast an ashy golden glow across Dorothy’s face. Lexy rested her hand on the pillow. She rarely urged medication on a dying person, believing that at the end of life pain was sometimes less important than the need to communicate with a clear mind.

  Why had Micah called?

  “Doctor Neuhaus …

  “I’m not a doctor, Dorothy. Call me Lexy.”

  “Reverend Neuhaus … “

  Even when she was healthy Dorothy had not known what to call her female priest.

  “I’m listening, Dorothy.”
>
  “Something …” Lexy saw her fingers twitch in agitation. Lexy held them gently. “I … Before I was married there was … a man…”

  There was so often a man.

  Lexy shut her eyes and focused Dorothy’s image in her mind as she imagined that a narrow band of light connected the two of them. She felt the light pour into her palms and heat them.

  “I’m here, Dorothy. I’m listening.”

  “I had … abortion. Mama took me … Kansas City, and then I married Forrest … never told him.”

  Most of the sins men and women carried with them all their lives were in the end so mundane; and yet, as the liturgy said, the burden of them was intolerable. Lexy felt a heavy sorrow pressing against her heart and lungs like a shadow-being filling her up inside. Dorothy probably thought she was the only person at St. Tom’s with a dark story to tell, but Lexy knew everyone’s secrets, and there were far worse tales. George Willits killed a child in Vietnam, and no amount of absolution could banish her face from his dreams. Another man made love to his sister until they went away to separate colleges, and he still yearned for her though he was married and a father several times over. A woman put a pillow over her suffering husband’s face and held it there until he died. She felt guilty for not feeling guilty, for being glad she’d done it. Lexy had heard these stories whispered in her office, in the church; a confession of murder had come in a letter. Each case had deepened her understanding of what it meant to be a child of God. Dorothy’s body was, ultimately, as disposable as one of the paper tissues she so despised. Despite age and illness, and no matter what tawdry things occurred in the course of a lifetime, the child of God remained unsullied.

  In each of the unattractive, the grumpy, irrational, and difficult men and women she dealt with every day, Lexy tried to see that child of God within. This was central to all she believed; it was what enabled her to love and forgive the imperfect individuals around her. But love and forgiveness required a particular kind of emotional energy, supplies of which often ran low in her. She had learned to playact at such times and disliked herself for doing so.

  Lexy settled Dorothy’s hands on the coverlet. “None of it matters now.”

  “A boy … I believe … was … a boy.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid or ashamed or worried. Your husband isn’t angry with you, and God loves you just the same as the day you were born, just as much.”

  Lexy opened her prayer book to the Office of Reconciliation and read the reassuring old words. “Now there is rejoicing in Heaven, Dorothy; for you were lost, and are found; you were dead, and are now alive in Christ Jesus our Lord. Abide in peace. The Lord has put away all your sins.”

  After that Dorothy seemed to sleep awhile. In the dark room smelling of roses and medicine and old age, Lexy closed her eyes. She doubted she had said and done enough to ease Dorothy’s guilt and agitation. At this most mysterious and important time in her one hundred and two years, Dorothy deserved a priest who was wiser than Lexy, more loving, more deeply and profoundly faithful. The needs of people were so many and so great, and by comparison, her gifts were so puny and unreliable. What the world needed was saints, men and women with unshakeable convictions and a genius for giving of themselves. And what did the poor world get? Lexy Neuhaus and her coat of many flaws.

  She wondered if she should leave now and call her brother.

  Dorothy jerked awake suddenly, her faded blue eyes wide with alarm. “They were … here again.”

  Lexy remembered the nighttime visitors.

  “Three of them.” Dorothy looked at her right hand and raised three shaky fingers. “They have hats … big. With feathers.”

  Great. The Three Musketeers.

  “They say … call … Ellen.”

  “Who is Ellen?”

  Dorothy turned her head aside and muttered something.

  “I didn’t hear you, Dorothy.”

  “Daughter.”

  “Dorothy, you’ve told me so many times, you and your husband were-

  “I … lied.”

  Of course, Lexy thought and almost laughed. Everyone lies. About everything. Still, it was a surprise to hear Dorothy say it. She belonged to what Lexy thought of as a more honest generation. But that idea must be a myth, another lie. Perhaps everyone had always lied, when and as it pleased them.

  “Where is she?”

  “Del Mar.” A beach suburb a few miles north.

  “How long is it since you saw her?”

  “I have … phone number.”

  On the pillow Dorothy’s old head was small and fragile as a newborn’s, but gray-skinned, the eye sockets deep and shadowy as those of a Halloween mask. It was as if her body, unable to die, had decided to implode. One day Lexy would come into this room and find Dorothy had vanished into herself.

  “In … drawer there.” Her cracked voice still managed to sound imperious. “Yellow sticky thing.”

  Among the pencils and bookmarks and bottles of aspirin and tubes of dried-up ointment, Lexy found a square of yellow paper with a name-Ellen Brownlee-and an 858 number written in a shaky hand.

  “Tell her I’m … dying….” A profound sigh rattled up from Dorothy’s throat, and she began to weep.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Lexy said. “I’ll do it tonight.”

  As Lexy got up to leave, Dorothy became agitated. She shook her head rapidly from side to side, her mouth twisting into a grimace, and said something too softly for Lexy to hear, so Lexy moved closer to the bed and leaned in.

  “I won’t know what to do,” Dorothy said, gasping. “Who will … help me? I want to do … right thing.”

  She was talking about death. And having performance anxiety. Suddenly Lexy felt swollen with love for Dorothy Wilkerson.

  “You won’t be alone,” she said. “Christ will be there. He’ll show you the way, Dorothy. You can hold out your hand and He’ll take it.

  “You … stay.”

  Lexy would have to miss the ten P.M. Pacific Beach AA meeting. She had been looking forward to it, needing it, but Dorothy was more important.

  “Reverend?”

  “Yes, Dorothy.”

  ,,will it … hurt?”

  Lexy blinked the tears from her eyes and put her lips near Dorothy’s ear. Before speaking she took a moment to inhale the scent of old skin under the sweet fragrance of rose-scented powder, the smells of age and death and dying. It was important not to flinch from them.

  “It will be a sweet thing, Dorothy.” Lexy thought of Bailey Cabot sitting on the steps and Dana seeing her as she turned the corner. “It will be like returning home. At last.”

  When Lexy returned to her office she sat in her desk chair with her long legs on the windowsill. She had a bad feeling about calling Dorothy’s daughter. Instead she called Micah, letting the phone ring twenty times before she disconnected. She sensed that he was in his apartment. Listening to the ring, knowing it was she, not answering.

  She had too much on her mind to have to nursemaid her brother. He made her cross.

  She had promised Dorothy she would call her daughter Ellen that night. This also made her cross; she wished she were in Bermuda at a five-star hotel.

  On a particularly dark day the previous winter, Lexy had an attack of martyrdom and misspent the better part of a drizzly Sunday afternoon tallying up how many hours she worked each week, multiplied by fifty-two and divided into her salary. The result was an hourly wage pitifully low enough to gratify her sense that day of being overworked and underappreciated. The mood didn’t last long. No one became a priest to make money, and she was hardly suffering.

  She lived rent-free a block from the ocean in a condominium owned by the church. Her insurance premiums and retirement were paid; and she drove an almost new Japanese import, compliments of a parishioner who owned a car dealership.

  And then there were all the immaterial things she could never reckon in terms of dollars and cents. Hers was often exciting work, rich in surprises and challenges
, with very little that was routine. She spoke to people at their most needy and vulnerable-like the stranger who wandered in one day needing to talk about his son who had died in Iraq. Afterward she saw that she had helped him by listening without judgment. It was the promise of such unexpected encounters with the Holy Spirit that got her out of bed and onto her knees every morning; it was the lift of her heart when she held a baby over the baptismal font and claimed it as Christ’s own forever.

  And then there were the things she never wanted to do. Like call Ellen Brownlee.

  She fished in her purse for the yellow paper and stared at the number written there. She put her hand on the telephone, then withdrew it, looked at her scarlet nails, at the dark, empty street. In a few weeks it would be Halloween, which meant a return to Standard Time. The world would seem colder as it turned toward the Advent season.

  She heard her mother’s voice in her head, the atonal western voice parched of emotion, the voice of empty spaces and immense skies, telling her to get on with her work and stop dilly-dallying. She wondered if her mother ever talked to anyone about her two youngest children, the odd ones who had left Wyoming and carved out lives so different from those she had chosen for them. Lexy imagined her telling people about her three strong Montana sons with handsome families and steady jobs. She probably never mentioned her other son, an artist, a peculiar, moody boy, and her daughter, who was-of all things-a priest.

  Lexy called the number on the yellow paper.

  Ellen Brownlee’s voice was clipped, without lilt or laughter.

  “I’m Lexy Neuhaus, the priest at your mother’s church, Ellen.”

  A pause.

  “She asked me to call you.”

  “Okay.”

  “She’s dying.”

  Another pause, and this time Lexy waited, listening to the buzz on the line.

  “I thought maybe she’d gone already. She’ll be a hundred and two next April.”

  “Actually she’s a hundred and two now.”

  “No kidding.” There was a moment of silence. “I thought I’d probably know if she was gone. I mean, isn’t that what happens in movies? Someone dies and another person senses it?”