Blood Orange Read online

  She wondered if Micah still stood in the park watching the house and how many times had he done it before tonight. She could look out the living room window, but she really did not want to know. Feeling the way she did right now, she could not trust herself.

  “Shit,” she said, aiming the word at life in general.

  Bailey tugged on the sash of Dana’s dressing gown.

  “What?”

  Bailey patted her lips with her index finger and shook her tangled head. Beautiful silent angel.

  “I’m sorry,” Dana said. “That was a bad word.” She lifted Bailey into her arms and kissed her bandaged fingers one by one.

  Bad wife. Bad mommy.

  Eventually Dana carried the coffee to the deck. “Sorry I took so long.” She laid the tray on the table. Marsha had stubbed out her cigarettes in a pot of geraniums. Dana handed her an ashtray.

  Bad mommy. Bad wife. Great hostess.

  “I never sleep anymore,” Marsha said. “And there wasn’t any coffee in the apartment.”

  Dana wondered if she imagined criticism. Had Marsha been expecting a full larder? Ten-dollar-a-pound coffee and deli packs from Real Food?

  “I hate to go out,” Marsha said. “People look at me.”

  Common ground at last.

  “It was the same for me when Bailey was gone. After the first article in People. “

  “Ghouls,” Marsha said. “Where is your little girl?”

  “Eating breakfast. She’s nervous around strangers.”

  “Ha! Me too.”

  Dana flinched as a hummingbird whirred by her ear. It hovered, piercing the blossoms of the leggy pink buddleia that grew in a pot at the edge of the deck. Down the street someone was using a leaf blower, and there were children in the park playing soccer. It was a normal Sunday for everyone but the Cabot family. It would take the fingers of both hands to enumerate how off-kilter their individual and communal lives had become.

  “I saw you,” Marsha said, looking at Dana over the rim of her coffee cup, “in the park.”

  Dana swallowed sand.

  “It doesn’t matter, you know.” Marsha regarded her steadily. “Who you meet, who you talk to, it’s none of my business. I won’t tell your husband.”

  Dana’s cheeks reddened as much with anger as embarrassment. “You can tell him what you like. A lot of people around here run.” Dana’s voice did not want to cooperate. “Early runners. We know each other.”

  Marsha smiled and took another sip of coffee. “You want to be careful, out on the streets so early.”

  Dana stared. Who was this woman to tell her anything? She blurted, “You shouldn’t be smoking.”

  Marsha looked surprised and then dismissive and amused. “Considering everything, cigarettes are the least this little girl’s got to worry about.”

  “It’s a girl?”

  “Yeah. Poor little cunt.”

  Fingers and toes tingling, Dana stood up. She took Marsha’s cup from her even though she hadn’t finished it. “I’m going shopping. I’ll buy you groceries. Leave the list on the tray.”

  She walked into the kitchen and locked the door behind her.

  n Sunday Lexy taught an adult Bible class following the ten ‘thirty service and afterward enjoyed a three-mile run on the beach. She stopped by El Cholo for carryout and now lay on the couch in her gray sweats, the remains of a beef burrito on a plate on the floor beside her. There was no question she had earned this day of rest, but it was the same on Sunday as on the other six days of the week-when she stopped moving, doing, acting, and working, she felt the disapproving eyes of God upon her. Or were they her mother’s eyes? She couldn’t always tell the difference.

  She should have worked through the God and mother thing in seminary, where she had been given countless opportunities to lay bare her neuroses. But it was such an embarrassing cliche to admit she suffered from the neurotic equivalent of the common cold, a sense of never being good or worthy enough. She did not want anyone to know about the anger that lay at the heart of her childhood.

  The white walls of Lexy’s apartment were bare except for a Swanson print of the Tower of Babel that she had told Dana was a portrait of her mind when “the committee” took over her thinking. Her furniture, a cherry red couch and easy chairs and a footstool the size of a Volkswagen, was classic Ikea. No fancy pillows, not a knickknack in sight. Her one indulgence was the flowers she bought weekly from a wholesaler and arranged in a blue Mexican bowl on the plank coffee table.

  She clicked up the television volume, hoping to drown out the committee carping in her head, though she knew there was really only one effective way to silence the racket. It was the alcoholic’s aspirin, the all-purpose remedy for every ill: a meeting, a meeting, a meeting. Take thirty meetings in thirty days, ninety in ninety days; no committee could survive that. The nagging never went away completely, however. It waited just below her consciousness, ready to erupt when provoked. The current rant had begun with Micah’s call the previous week. Her intuition that something was wrong had segued into guilt for not having spoken to her mother in more than ten days.

  Several of the committee members in her head had her mother’s weather-worn face and spoke with her flat western drawl, the accent of wide skies over empty, and land. What makes you think you can be a priest? You-a cocaine addict, an alcoholic who slept with half the eligible men in New York before settling down for less than a year with William Whats-his-name. Plus you neglect your brother and you’re lazy and self-centered and vain as a mare in heat.

  She did not think her mother had ever been consciously cruel, but as Billy once said, she was a ropy old pioneer broad. She had her own way of thinking and never considered there might be another, equally valid point of view. She was neither stupid nor uninformed; nevertheless, she believed alcoholism and depression were defects of character and will, conditions that stank of carelessness and, worst of all, an absence of self-discipline.

  Lexy was grateful to alcoholism. It had brought her to her knees, to surrender. It had bent her toward God in a way that nothing else could have. In meetings she heard variations of her own story told by teenaged crackheads, suburban matrons, bums and businessmen. The wonder of it knocked her over, lifted her up, and then dropped her to her knees. And on her knees she had found her faith.

  God accepts us all, Lexy thought. Why can’t you, Ma? Why couldn’t Dad? He had died not speaking to either Lexy or Micah. Lexy blamed her mother for this. As far as she knew, she had never spoken up for either of them, never defended their right to be themselves.

  This is what Dana and I have in common, she thought. Neither of us had a mother worth a pot of peas.

  n arrangement had been made with Miss Judy at Phillips Academy for Bailey to visit school during playtime. Reluctantly Lieutenant Gary had said it would be safe if the visits were unscheduled. The important thing, he had repeated half a dozen times, was not to establish any activity patterns a kidnapper could rely upon. Bailey loved her school outings. Her silent eagerness to be part of the wider world both gratified and encouraged Dana.

  On the Monday morning after her meeting with Micah, Dana delivered Bailey to school and then looked in on Rochelle at Arts and Letters. She was helping a customer choose a birthday book, so Dana went into the stockroom and began unpacking boxes of books from a distributor. These were popular novels whose titles Dana recognized.

  Rochelle stood at the stockroom door. “I intend to deep-discount those. Perhaps the vision of a woman committing economic hari kari will bring a few more customers in off the street.”

  “Business bad?”

  “Of course, darling. When is it otherwise? But I sold that beau tiful Giotto book yesterday, and this month’s rent is paid. Who am I to fret?”

  Dana always felt a pang when one of the magnificent coffee-table books of stunning reproductions left the shop. She thought of the upstairs loft as her own private library.

  “Do you have time to help me shelve this week?”
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  “If I can bring Bailey.”

  “But of course. A child who doesn’t speak is a blessing to the world.” She flipped her hand. “Just teasing. Not to worry.” She sailed back to the front of the shop trailing chiffon scarves in shades of blue and green.

  Dana was folding down a box for recycling when Rochelle came into the back room again. “I’ve been meaning to ask how your thesis is coming. You know you can take home any book you need. You’ve only to jot a note.”

  “Thanks.” Dana dropped the flattened box into the recycling bin. “I’ve got a ways to go.”

  “Well, darling, what’s holding you up now that Bailey’s back? I adore having you here, but really.”

  “Bailey keeps me busy.”

  “Garbage, garbage, garbage. I raised four children. I know whereof I speak.”

  “I’m not as organized as you, Rochelle.”

  “Sit down and listen to me, Dana.” She patted the box beside her. “I want you to take advantage of the books while you can. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to keep this place afloat. I adore Arts and Letters, you know that, but it’s terribly difficult to sell books these days, and I’m not sure I want to be bothered anymore.

  “You’d sell?”

  “In an instant. Though I’ve no idea who’d buy the place.”

  “I’d buy it. I’d love to own a bookstore.”

  “Indeed? What about `The Significance of Visual Subtext in Italian Renaissance Art’?”

  Once Dana had enjoyed thinking and talking about her thesis, but the life had gone out of it. She told herself she did not know why. “It’s hard, Rochelle.”

  “My God, darling, what isn’t?”

  While Dana and Bailey were out, the mail had been dropped through the old-fashioned slot in the middle of the Cabots’ front door and lay scattered on the entry tiles. As Dana stooped to gather the envelopes, flyers, and catalogs, she noticed one long white envelope in particular. The address on the outside was printed in individual letters cut from magazines.

  No stamp.

  Someone had watched and waited until she and Bailey were away from home, then stepped onto their porch and slipped the envelope through the mail slot. Her intestines knotted, and automatically she looked around for Bailey and saw her headed upstairs, stretching her small legs to take the stairs two at a time.

  Safe.

  Dana slumped onto the bottom stair. She did not have to open the envelope to know what kind of message lay inside. She smelled the hostility coming off it as if the writer had poison on his fingers. She also knew she had reached the limit of her patience. If she had to, she would take Bailey away from San Diego, hide with her in some gray and anonymous eastern city until the Filmore trial was over and the police had caught her daughter’s kidnapper. Maybe it was a crazy man working on his own, maybe a whole gang-women as well as men-waging a hammer-of-God vendetta against defense attorneys. The threat to Bailey and David, to the family, was as real as the air in Dana’s lungs and the sweat on her skin.

  She would have to begin working more closely with the police and dragging Bailey-willing or not, happy or not-to shrinks and therapists and anyone who had a chance of getting her to talk about what happened during the three and a half months she was gone. Until then the notes, the threats, the constant abrasion of anxiety would continue. It was so simple, really. Cooperate with Lieutenant Gary, love David and Bailey. Why did she insist on complicating it?

  She called Gary, and he came over immediately.

  he showed the detective the envelope, still lying on the tiles. (Putting on gloves, he carefully slit the seal. A photo of David and Bailey taken at the time she was returned had been glued to a sheet of white paper and a noose drawn around David’s neck in black marker.

  Dana ran to the kitchen sink and vomited acid. She splashed water on her face, dried it with a paper towel, then gagged again. As she turned, Gary was at the counter in the kitchen putting the envelope and paper into a plastic evidence bag. He slipped it into the inside pocket of his sport coat.

  “Well, it doesn’t look like Bailey’s their target anymore,” he said. “I’ll get someone over here to check for prints around the mail slot.” He rubbed his eyes and dragged his hand down his face and across his mouth. “It’s a long shot. There’s not much I-“

  “You can talk to Bailey, ask her questions. You can talk to her now, here.”

  He looked surprised.

  Bailey grumped and dragged her feet when Dana told her to turn off Sesame Street and come into the kitchen. She refused to sit in her own chair. She straddled Dana’s lap with her back to the officer.

  “What happened to her hand?” he asked.

  “Cut herself.”

  “Serious?”

  “No.”

  He looked at the back of Bailey’s head. “Just a couple of questions.”

  Dana watched his body language relax. She wondered if he had children of his own and thought it strange that she had never asked.

  His voice held a smile as he asked, “Bailey, when you went away-

  Bailey pressed her forehead into Dana’s collarbone and clapped her hands over her ears.

  Dana tried to pry those little hands away, but her daughter was surprisingly strong. Over Bailey’s head she looked at Gary, feeling helpless and vindicated at the same time.

  “It’s okay,” he said, and mouthed the words, She’s listening.

  He said, “When you went away, Bailey, did you go in a car with a lady?”

  Bailey shook her head.

  “Were you in the car a long time?”

  No response.

  “Did you sleep in the car?”

  Nothing.

  “Did you have good things to eat while you were away?”

  “What’s the point of a question like that?” Dana asked.

  The detective’s head dropped forward, and he stared at the counter for so long the silence became uncomfortable. Dana wondered if she should apologize for interrupting him, or if there was something he expected her to do.

  He shifted forward on the chair. “Look, Bailey, your mother told me that when you were going to school you learned all about policemen and firemen and the kind of work they do.”

  For the first time Bailey turned her head to look at him.

  “I’m a policeman. It’s my job to find people that do bad things.”

  “You were stolen away from me,” Dana said, holding Bailey’s heart-shaped face between her hands. “Stealing a little girl away from her mommy and daddy is just about the most bad thing anyone can do.”

  “That’s right,” Gary said. “But policemen can’t work alone. They need helpers. That’s why I’m asking you these questions, Bailey. I need you to be my helper.”

  ~” Bay.

  She had fallen asleep.

  As Dana walked the detective to the door she told him about taking Bailey to the beach and her new courage in the water. In the foyer, she sat on the bottom stair, pushing aside the pile of unopened mail, as she told him what she had realized about herself a few hours earlier. “Normally I’m a cooperative person. You might not believe that because you’ve never seen me actually be helpful, but it’s true.”

  “What happened to you isn’t something you get over fast. Maybe it stays with you the rest of your life. I don’t know. Tell you the truth, I never worked a kidnapping where the child was returned.”

  She felt a surge of pity for him. “I’ve been hard on you. I’m „ sorry.

  He nodded, looking at her with narrowed, assessing eyes.

  “And you know, it’s still crazy around here. Marsha Filmore’s living with us now.”

  “In your house?”

  “God, no. There’s an apartment over the garage.”

  He shook his head, obviously perplexed.

  “Marsha didn’t do anything.” Dana folded her arms across her chest. “She’s a victim. Why should she suffer because she has lousy taste in husbands?”

  “Y
ou’re a strange woman, Mrs. Cabot.” He stepped around the mail and opened the front door. “Every time you see a white van you panic, but you destroy a piece of potentially important evidence and `forget’ to tell me things, and then you let the wife of a child killer come and live with you.”

  “There’s a presumption of innocence, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Actually, I haven’t forgotten,” he said. “I’ve been presuming you’re innocent for months now.”

  “Me? Of course-“

  “My chief keeps saying I’m naive. Am I?”

  Dana swallowed what felt like a marble.

  “I mean, is it true, you’re acting weird because you’re still kind of in shock? Or are you covering for someone?”

  He leaned toward her.

  “Do you know who kidnapped Bailey?”

  David called to say he would be working late. Dana and Bailey drove to Big Bad Cat for hamburgers and milkshakes. On the tenminute drive home Bailey fell asleep, and when Dana carried her upstairs to bed she did not waken. Dana unlaced her shoes and eased off her pink-and-white striped overalls. For one night she could sleep in her underwear.

  As she knelt beside Bailey’s bed watching her settle into deep sleep, Dana replayed the conversation with Gary. She would call his superior tomorrow and complain. She wanted him demoted, fired for the crime of insulting her. At the least he deserved a reprimand. But she knew it would never happen. Gary and his superior thought she was lying to protect someone. In a little while she would call Lexy and say, “Can you believe what jerks they are?”

  More than offended, Dana was hurt by the policeman’s suspicions. She thought of the person who had kidnapped Bailey and of the picture with the noose carefully drawn around David’s neck. Gary must think she was a monster to protect such a person. Her stomach turned in disgust. She closed her eyes and rested her forehead on Bailey’s mattress, letting the room spin around her.

  She wouldn’t call Gary’s boss. He had hurt and offended her, but when she made herself replay the last few weeks she could not blame him for misinterpreting her behavior.

  Later she poured a glass of wine, intending to take it upstairs; but she felt too edgy to sleep or settle down to watch television-simultaneously wrung out and wired. She walked around the house, turning on all the lights, checking the locks on the windows and doors downstairs, pulling the blinds and drapes. The house felt airless as a sealed box.