Blood Orange Read online

  “You seemed so out of touch. How was I supposed to keep Bailey content with an Advent calendar and a wreath? The day after Thanksgiving she started nagging for a tree.” Dana strangled on the words.

  “You took me on right after the service. You can be tough, Dana.” Lexy removed her plain gold earrings, hoops the size of quarters, and laid them on the blotter in front of her. She massaged her earlobes. “Like right now, what you want to do is punch me out.”

  Dana smiled.

  “Am I right?”

  “Do you blame me?”

  “You’re mad at God and that makes you mad at me. Yeah, I blame you. It’s not fair to me.” She played with the earrings. “I’m more than a priest, Dana. I’m your friend.”

  Dana focused on the earrings-circles-and refused to be drawn in.

  “I don’t think it matters to God that you don’t believe right now. I mean He’d probably rather you did, but under the circumstances … ” Lexy tipped back. Over the years the back of her office chair had rubbed a raw swipe on the woodwork behind her desk. “Dana, humans are the ones who want our faith to hold steady under all conditions. And I don’t think it’s about God most of the time. I think we want a steady faith because it makes our lives more pleasant. It’s a control thing. Doubt equals discomfort in most people’s lives. Belief means security and every question has an answer, the more simplistic and concrete the better.”

  “You’re saying God doesn’t care one way or the other?” Dana fiddled with the frayed cording around the leather cushion. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “I’m saying if you lose faith for a while when your daughter’s abducted, God understands.”

  “That’s big of Him.”

  “None of this means we aren’t still friends, Dana.”

  But don’t count on me for a Christmas present this year. Dana was becoming as bad-tempered as her grandmother, Imogene.

  Imogene had rained on every parade Dana ever took part in, squatted on every float she ever built, and slept through every song she ever marched to. To get out of Imogene’s house Dana had learned to shape reality by focusing on her goals and depending on only herself. Emotions like anger and disappointment undermined her determination, so she taught herself not to feel them, to bury them deep. Since Bailey’s disappearance this had become harder to do.

  Lexy said, “What if He’s a She? Do you hate her, too?”

  “A female god wouldn’t let children be hurt.”

  “It’s the big question, isn’t it?” Lexy examined her red acrylic nails. “If God is good, how can He, She, or It let such awful things happen in the world?” She grinned, looking beautiful. “Maybe you’d be happier as a fundamentalist, Dana. They always have answers for situations like this.”

  “And all you have is questions. Don’t you even have an opinion, Lexy, a theory?”

  “Sure I do, but you’re not going to like it.”

  Dana smiled. “When has that ever stopped you?”

  “Maybe some lessons are so hard, the only teacher is pain.”

  Dana rolled her eyes. “I was hoping for something more original.”

  “The truth is just the truth, Dana. It doesn’t have to be original or startling. It just is.”

  “That sounds like an excuse for not having any answer at all.”

  The skin over Lexy’s high cheekbones turned a bright pink.

  “Shit.” Dana laid her head against the back of the couch and closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. I know I’m being a jerk. I’m not … myself.”

  “Sure you are.” Lexy’s eyes were neon green. “You’re probably more yourself right now than you’ve ever been. Grieving, bitching, and angry: this is Dana Cabot without the high-gloss enamel.” Lexy held up her nails. “Under this plastic or whatever it is, you should see my nails. Pitiful. But they’re me. This other stuff is just cover-up. I accept that.”

  Dana’s brain was too battered to come up with a response. Remember me when I was funny and resilient and determined-not taking razor swipes at the people who love me, she thought.

  In the office the only sound was the low whir of the airconditioning. Dana pressed her fingertips against her eyelids. How hard would she have to push to blind herself? On the other side of the door a phone rang. She looked at Lexy and saw stars.

  “What did you want to speak to me about?”

  Lexy put her earrings back on. “A hitch in the facilities. Nothing serious, but we have to move the Bailey office. We’re in a constant space crunch around here, you know that. Too many people need that big room in the undercroft. So I’m going to put you guys in the room at the back of the offices.” She pointed behind Dana. “It’s not huge, but you can leave everything out. Lock the door and come back, no one’ll disturb your stuff.”

  Dana thought of taking down the smiling Bailey posters, the maps and blowups of flyers, of rolling them up, of carrying the computers across the parking lot, of running yards and yards of new extension cords. Though no one would say so out loud, the move looked like a demotion. What had been an active cause would seem less so in a small back room. She wanted to kick Lexy’s desk. She wanted to kick Lexy.

  “I have a selfish reason for doing this, Dana.” Lexy waited, and finally Dana looked at her. “I miss seeing you. I don’t have many friends, not real friends, and I thought …”

  “I can’t be anyone’s friend.”

  Not even her husband’s. David and Dana slept in a bed that felt at once cramped and too vastly wide. They ate silent meals at the dining room table and occasionally, when David was not working late, watched television together with the room completely dark so they could not see each other’s faces.

  “I know you mean well, but there’s no way you or anyone else can understand.” Even the people in the support group: their love and loss had seemed inferior to Dana’s. “I think about her all day, and at night I dream about her. I can’t get away from her. In my mind I see her in the most horrible situations and I can’t turn off the pictures. It’s like I’m being tortured, my eyelids are pinned back and I have to watch the awful … “

  Sometimes she hoped Bailey was dead. Better dead than suffering as in those imagined scenes.

  “Oh, Dana. Poor Dana.”

  She did not want Lexy’s sympathy, nor her empathy, and definitely not her Christian charity. Nor did she want others to share her feelings. Not even David. She was just as happy he had found distraction in the Filmore case and left her in sole possession of the black and bottomless grief and guilt. If she could not have her daughter back, she would have these.

  “I have to go.” Dana stepped toward the door quickly to avoid Lexy’s hug. Her hand on the knob, she said, “Beth knew about the move out of the undercroft?”

  Lexy nodded.

  “And she didn’t want to tell me, right?” Dana stared at the toes of her tennis shoes. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate … I don’t mean to be so hard to get along with. I just … am.”

  Lexy stood beside her. Dana smelled the green-grass and citrus fragrance she wore.

  “Listen to me, Dana.”

  “No.”

  “The only way through this-“

  Dana shook her head. The last thing she wanted to hear now was a religious cliche.

  “I’m your best friend,” Lexy said. “You’re mine.”

  “If that’s true, then you’ll leave me alone.” Dana’s eyes burned. She clenched her jaw and turned for the door. With her hand on the knob she added, “I can’t be anyone’s friend.”

  Four months earlier

  very afternoon at two-thirty Dana Cabot’s cell phone rang. Five idays a week the driver of the Phillips Academy minibus said more or less the same thing: “I’m at the corner of Goldfinch and Washington. Two minutes, Mrs. Cabot.”

  The staff at Phillips Academy said Bailey needed structure if she was to learn to manage life. And after three years, the routines, the very basic classes, and the constant positive reinforcement had paid
off. Bailey was learning her letters, knew the names and values of coins, and recognized the numbers on an old-fashioned clock facealthough eleven was likely to be called one-one and twelve, one-two. Since December she had become amusingly pedantic on the subject of community services. Police, firefighters: she knew what all of them did and shared her knowledge with everyone, including the housekeeper-and-babysitter, Guadalupe, who spoke no English at all. At Christmas she had insisted on baking cookies for the drivers of the recycling and garbage trucks who called out hello to her when they made their Thursday pickups.

  Dana sat on the bottom stair and put on her shoes and socks. Moby Doby walked up to her, his nails clicking on the hardwood, licked her hand, and sat, eyeing her expectantly.

  “Are you learning to read time, too?”

  Keeping Bailey’s schedule today meant Dana had rushed home from her job at Arts and Letters, leaving Rochelle with three customers-one an art historian with an interest in Early Renaissance Italian art, which happened to be Dana’s field. Or would be, once she finished her thesis. Were it not for Bailey, she would be sitting in Bella Luna drinking a double capp, discussing the influence of Giotto.

  She believed she was not cut out for a life of self-sacrifice. Almost any woman would be a better mother than she for a child like Bailey.

  She did not socialize with mothers from Phillips Academy. She told herself she did not want to hear them complain. Secretly she feared conversations with those women would reveal that they never complained at all, that only she resented her child’s demands.

  Dana blamed Bailey’s disability on her side of the chromosome equation. In the North Park neighborhood where she grew up, kids had called her grandmother “loony” because she’d dressed like a bag lady and yelled at them and shook her fist if they walked or rode their bikes across her pitiful square of front lawn. As for her mother, on any test for mental health she would definitely score on the peculiar side of the bell curve. She had abandoned Dana, her only child, before Dana was five years old.

  When Bailey’s medical and psychological reports came in, David Cabot had sprung into defense mode before anyone could accuse him of contributing to her problems. Not only did he personally possess all the requisite DNA for scholarship, ordered thinking, and rationality, but every single person in his family was smart and ac complished. David’s brother and sister held advanced degrees, and he had been an honor student and a star athlete, accepted by Law Review, and Order of the Coif. His father had been a judge, albeit a certifiable sexist, racist, and workaholic. His mother wrote poetry and chaired committees and sang in the community choir. She spoke four languages, and Dana had never seen her when she wasn’t stoned on Valium.

  The phone rang.

  “Hi, Mrs. Cabot. We’re at the stoplight, Washington and Goldfinch. See you in two.”

  San Diego’s chilly spring fog had burned off, leaving behind a misty blue sky; a cool breeze disturbed the pipe chimes in the olive tree in the front yard. Dana wished she had worn a sweater.

  She slapped Moby’s bony hindquarters. “Let’s run, kiddo.” He took off at a lope, Dana following.

  Before Bailey was born Dana had run several half-marathons, but since then she rarely had the time for more than a mile or two. Often she ran at night or at dawn through the Mission Hills neighborhood. As if she were visiting an aquarium, she looked in the windows of the houses she passed. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Validation perhaps. Some indication that her childhood had not been wacko as David claimed. In the kitchens and living rooms of strangers’ homes she wanted to see another little girl eating a macaroni-and-ketchup sandwich, another grandmother asleep in front of the television with a yellow cat around her shoulders like a fur collar.

  On the far side of the park the cherry red Phillips Academy minibus idled at curbside. Dana waved to the driver, and the pneumatic doors wheezed open. Bailey bounded out and hurled herself at her mother, grabbing her around the hips and almost toppling her.

  “I played football, Mommy.”

  At the end of the day, Bailey was always a beautiful mess. One butterfly barrette gone, hair wild and tangled, the buckle on one of her beloved shocking pink, strappy plastic sandals hanging by a stitch.

  Resentment and ambivalence and dreams of Giotto vanished, incinerated by a love so fiercely protective it rocked Dana. “What happened to your shoe?”

  “I was like Daddy.” Moby trotted beside Bailey closely enough so her hand skimmed the back of his neck.

  “I didn’t know they let you play football at Phillips.”

  “I ran, and then I fell down.” Bailey stopped and pulled up the leg of her size-six cargo pants, revealing a knee covered with pink and yellow bandages and layers of gauze. Looking up at her mother, dark eyes alight with gold flecks in the park’s dappled sunlight, she said, “I’m brave, Mommy. Like Daddy.”

  Dana whisked her up into her arms and spun around, then made a controlled tumble onto the grass with herself on top, buzz-blowing into Bailey’s neck while the little girl squealed joyfully and Moby barked and pranced on his toes. Before the squeals turned to tearsthe change could occur in a millisecond-Dana let Bailey go.

  At the same moment a white van turned onto Miranda Street and paused in front of their house.

  Bailey began shouting, “S’cream man, s’cream man.”

  Several things happened at the same time.

  Dana saw that the rear bumper of the van had a sticker on it.

  There was a crash of glass and a squeal of brakes.

  Moby barked furiously and dashed in front of the van.

  Dana heard Moby’s sharp kye-eye cry; the van swerved and sped off; and Bailey began to scream.

  t about the same time, in an interview room in San Diego’s Ldowntown jail, David Cabot studied his client across a Formicatopped table and through the bars separating them.

  It was a crappy place to be on a beautiful May afternoon.

  The prosecutor had argued that a man with Frank Filmore’s financial resources and international connections constituted a bail risk, so this Ph.D. chemist was spending the months before his trial downtown in the county lockup, wearing a two-piece cotton uniform that made him look more like an emergency-room nurse in scrubs than a man accused of a capital crime. David’s associate, Gracie Perez, sat beside him in the small room, asking the questions-essentially the same questions they’d been asking since taking on the case. No fact or gap or contradiction in Filmore’s story could be overlooked. It was the same way in football. All it took was a hole in the line and the other guy was in for the TD.

  To David most of life could be compared to football. Gracie, the whole office, and half the San Diego bar laughed at his metaphors, but for him football comparisons were a useful way of sorting life out; and if some people thought he was a half-smart jock, he didn’t care. In the courtroom they discovered how wrong they were.

  To the right of Gracie and David, near the door of the cramped and windowless room, Allison, a paralegal, was taking down questions and answers on a steno pad. An audio recorder would be easier, but David had yet to meet a defendant willing to be taped.

  David listened to Filmore talk and assumed that three quarters of what he heard was either a bald lie or a cheap wig. Guilty or innocent, rich or destitute, you put a guy in jail and he forgot how to tell the truth. And the longer you gave him to think about his answers, the more he’d make it up and bullshit. The unjustly accused lied because they were afraid; the guilty lied because they thought they were smarter than the system. They were also afraid, but they’d never admit it. David didn’t want to get too jaundiced in his view of the men and women he defended, but he doubted Filmore was the one in a million actually telling the truth. Although he had sworn he wouldn’t let the law make him a cynic, there were days-like today and yesterday and probably tomorrow-when he could feel the negativity creeping up on him like mold.

  It had been a long day, and his neck and shoulders were tight. He glanced at his
watch. God willing, in an hour he’d be at the club playing racquetball with his law partner, Marcus Klinger. Then a sauna and a massage. He had a regular weekly appointment with a therapist whose thumbs knew how to find the knot at the nape of his neck. She didn’t talk. She wouldn’t ask him how he could stand to be in the same room with a man like Frank Filmore.

  He imagined his father laughing and shaking his fat index finger in his face. Scum of the earth, boy. Watch it don’t rub off. Claybourne Cabot had been a hanging West Virginia judge whose best friends were the coal-mine owners in the southern part of the state. When he got drunk, which was once a week on Sunday starting right after church and going on until he passed out, he would tell anyone in earshot that the government could save a heap of cash if it would dispense with courts and lawyers for ninety percent of the people arrested. “Put ‘em down the mines and forget the sons of bitches,” he’d say. One of his coal-mine cronies would drawl in response, “Whatdya wanna do, C.C.? Ruin us?” Claybourne Cabot laughed so gustily, people thought he had a sense of humor. “Serve you right, you brass-balled pirates.”

  It galled David to recognize that when it came down to the bones of it, he practiced law much as his father had adjudicated. Judge Cabot had assumed if you were in court you’d done something bad now or in a previous life, so he might as well punish you hard. Guilt and innocence had been irrelevancies to the judge. They weren’t important to David, either, although in the early days of a defense the question of guilt or innocence popped up in his mind like an irritating ad on a computer screen. Especially in a capital case like this one, with Frank Filmore’s life on the block. At the preliminary hearing the prosecutor, Les Peluso, was going to argue for murder with special circumstances, leaving open the possibility of the death penalty. Peluso wanted to be mayor of San Diego, and as far as he, the press, and public were concerned, Filmore’s trial was only a formality on his way to that position.