Blood Orange Read online

  “It can wait.”

  And it was only a suspicion she had. Nothing had been confirmed.

  “Just go to work, will you? We’ll talk tonight.”

  If you can manage to get home before midnight.

  Later she went down to the kitchen, where Bailey and Guadalupe were washing dishes. Bailey stood on a stool at the sink with her hands in the water almost up to her shoulders. A Spanishlanguage station was playing on the radio while Guadalupe talked a streak, though Bailey had no clue what she was saying.

  I’m not sending her home. I pay the bills.

  Another hundred dollars or so wouldn’t break them.

  In the middle of the radio broadcaster’s blast of jackhammer Spanish she heard Bailey’s name and then David’s and Jason’s. She ran upstairs and turned on the television in the bedroom. While she clicked through the channels with her right hand, she turned the radio dial with her left.

  Nothing.

  She called Information for the local public radio station and eventually was connected to the news director, who told her there had been an arrest in the Bailey Cabot kidnapping. The police were holding an unidentified juvenile who apparently knew the family and was active on the committee to find Bailey.

  “No,” Dana said.

  The juvenile was also in trouble for threatening the family, David Cabot in particular.

  “I never said he took her. I absolutely did not say that.”

  “Ma’am?”

  She hung up and was about to call Gary when the phone rang.

  Lexy said, “The police have arrested Jason Gordon.”

  “I just heard.”

  “You knew?”

  “Actually, Lexy, I was the one who called Gary yesterday. I wasn’t sure, but I told him about the picture, the one of David with the noose around his neck, and I remembered Jason took it for the newsletter the week Bailey came back. Plus, his friend has a white van.

  “He’s confessed to the letter-writing, and now Gary’s accused him of kidnapping Bailey. Beth just called me, half-crazy. They rousted him out of bed at seven A.M., slapped handcuffs-“

  “I must tell Gary who really did it. At first I wasn’t going to, Lexy, but then I realized I have to.” The receiver was cold in Dana’s hands. “I’m sure the charges’ll be dropped. There’s no evidence against Jason. I don’t think he’ll even be arraigned, but they might keep him overnight. He’s only a boy, and he must be terrified.”

  What amazed Dana was that all around her, life thrived. Downstairs Bailey and Guadalupe amused and entertained each other. In the park the city workers were mowing the grass and yelling back and forth in Spanish. She could hear the cars speeding down the Washington Street grade. Busy people, busy lives. And in the midst of all the normal hubbub, Dana’s life, her family, and friendships, were all afire; her life was a wildfire no one could extinguish except her. She could tell Gary everything, the whole truth, and the fire would be out. But what would remain of her life in the ashes?

  She said, “And Beth … she was so good to me, Lexy. I can’t let her suffer needlessly.”

  “I know. Jason’s a jerk, but he’s no kidnapper. But of course that’s what I would have said about Micah, too.” In the long pause Dana heard Lexy breathing. “Do what you have to. He’s dead. I guess it doesn’t matter what people say about him now.”

  “Lexy, I am so sorry it came to this.” The phone was dead by the time she’d said it.

  Dana walked down the hall to Bailey’s bedroom, where everything she saw-the cubbies and the oval rag rug, the bunk beds she and David had put together-glowed with a patina of emotional significance. It had taken them hours to sand the beds to a satin finish. For several days afterward Dana had awoken in the night with aching shoulders and the whir of the electric sander still ringing in her ears. She remembered the laughter and the grousing. When it came to the fifth layer of varnish and yet another sanding, she had complained loudly, and David had said he’d do it himself, and she said she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Later they’d ordered Chinese and eaten it on the back deck with Moby between them, just a puppy, begging bites of orange chicken. How strong and pure and good they had been together in those days.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, her arms folded across her midsection. She thought of what she was about to do and of the consequences. She thought of her guilt and prepared herself to take responsibility.

  First she called David and asked him to come home.

  “I’m due in court at one.”

  “There’s time. It’s not even ten yet.”

  “What’s this about, Dana?” He was still angry with her.

  “Just come home.”

  His voice was muffled as he spoke to someone in the office. He told her, “Sorry, it’ll have to wait.”

  “It can’t. Not this time.”

  “Is this about Bailey?”

  “It’s about all of us.”

  A windy sigh echoed down the telephone line.

  “Give me thirty minutes. And Dana?”

  “Yes.”

  “This better be good.”

  “It’s not. It’s not good at all.”

  After hanging up she stared at the phone for a long moment, then pressed a speed-dial button and eventually was connected to Gary. As she told her story he interrupted only to ask clarifying questions. Where was the sash now?

  “I have it. And the note.”

  “Well, that’s a surprise.”

  His voice sounded dry and pinched when he said he would have to come and take a statement from her.

  “I need to tell my husband first, but he has a court date. He’ll be gone by one. You can come here after that.” She hung up, not waiting for him to agree.

  From the bottom of her jewelry box she dug out her emergency money, two twenty-dollar bills and a five, and went down to the den where Guadalupe and Bailey were sorting a pile of plastic pieces by shape and color. Dana handed Guadalupe the money.

  “Walk up to Big Bad Cat and have lunch, will you? I need the house to myself until about three.” In a mix of Spanish and English it took a few moments to get the point across.

  Guadalupe’s dark eyes were full of sympathy.

  For years Dana had not cried, but lately she could not stop. She tried to smile as tears rolled down her cheeks. “Bad times.”

  “Ah, pobrecita. “

  from the bedroom window Dana watched David cross the deck. She imagined the house shimmied with the force of his heels hitting the wood. Drawing a long breath, she looked around her at the bedroom where they had slept together for the last eight years. These might be the last moments of her marriage, and she wanted to pay attention to everything, because the room would never look the same after she and David talked.

  He came through the bedroom door like a storm system, his brows drawn down and his jaw squared.

  “This better be important,” he said as he threw his keys on the bed.

  “Can we sit down?” She realized how frightened she was and grabbed her hands together to steady them.

  “Just talk, Dana. I’ll sit if I want to.,,

  Please don’t be so angry. Not before you know anything. There won’t be anywhere for you to go except over the top.

  She perched on the windowsill and started with the easy words. “Jason Gordon is the person who’s been sending hate mail to the house.”

  “You mean the kid on the Bailey Committee? Why would he do that? “

  “I don’t know, no one knows yet. But …” She told David how Beth had said Jason had a crush on her, and how she had heard Bender and Jason expressing their disapproval of David defending Frank Filmore.

  “It was the picture of you with the noose drawn around your neck that gave it away.”

  “Dana-

  “I was going through the mail and looking at the latest bulletin, and I realized that the noose picture came from St. Tom’s bulletin.” His face bore a look of intense concentration, as it did when he was in court.
“I called Gary, and I mentioned that Jason had been very helpful and that he worked at a copy shop.”

  “So is he the one who hit Moby?”

  She nodded.

  “What about the note in your car?”

  “It was Jason.”

  “He’s confessed?”

  She nodded again.

  “He’s confessed to everything? The kidnapping too?”

  “No, not the kidnapping.”

  He sat in the small easy chair near the window, visibly more relaxed than he had been a few minutes earlier. He tapped his index finger against his lips. “One thing’s for sure. He couldn’t pull off the kidnapping alone. Whoever else was in on it-“

  “He didn’t take her.” She looked around their bedroom a final time.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I know who did.”

  He stared at her.

  She rushed on. “It was my fault, David. I made it happen.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Dana. How-“

  “The kidnapping had nothing to do with Frank Filmore.”

  “How can you be so sure? Is this what Gary says?”

  She was dry-eyed now, surprisingly calm.

  There was a limit to the amount of deception a person could live with before her whole life was infected by dishonesty and there was nothing left that was good and pure and strong. If God was in the business of teaching lessons, then this must be what she was meant to learn. Perhaps she had learned too late, and nothing would be left of the life she had loved. Not a single coal burning anywhere.

  “David, if I knew some way to spare you this, I would.”

  She watched something change in his face, a subtle shift and firming of the contours. He looked at his watch. “I don’t have much time.” He sat with his hands on his thighs.

  “You know I love you…”

  “That’s established, Dana.” In a court of law, love did not count for much. “Just say what you have to.”

  “I had-in Florence I had … an affair … “

  His face was impassive.

  “With Lexy’s brother.”

  “You had sex with someone?”

  “Lexy’s brother,” she repeated, unable to say his name. “It was a stupid thing to do, I don’t know-“

  “Wait a minute.” He held up his hand. “You mean you fucked this Michael? Micah?”

  “You make it sound-“

  “What? Cheap? If it wasn’t, what was it? Are you going to tell me he was the great love of your life?”

  “Of course not. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  “Why not? I bet everything else has been in there.”

  She sucked in her breath and held it.

  “You know, I should’ve figured it out when I never could get you on the phone. Jesus, what a klutz I was. It never occurred to me not to believe. I guess I never would have known.” He shook his head, talking to himself. “I would have gone on assuming I could trust you, you loved me….”

  “I do. Love you.”

  “Did you tell him that, too?”

  She no longer remembered what she had felt for Micah or said to him. This moment and the revelations that preceded it had burned out her memories of Florence.

  “Do you know how many times I could’ve cheated on you?” He stood up. “Going way back, Dana, I could’ve fucked half the cheerleaders and paralegals-“

  She covered her ears with her hands, and he pulled them away, holding her wrists so hard she thought the bones would snap.

  “But I never did. I never even gave it serious thought. I guess I was a jerk, huh?”

  She started to say that if he gave her another chance she would make it up to him. He told her to shut up.

  “Dana, I always believed in you. I believed in us. We were a team.”

  “Yes,” she cried. “Yes, and we still are.”

  He dropped her wrists, threw them down as if he couldn’t stand to touch her. If he had looked angry or hurt, she could have taken that. Instead she saw something she had never seen in his expression, a terrible neutrality that told her that in his mind he had already begun to separate from her.

  “David, don’t shut me out. Please. It was a stupid, stupid mistake, but I learned something about myself … “

  “I don’t care what you learned.”

  “Yes, you do. You always cared about me. You can’t just suddenly stop.” She did not want to cry. Crying made her weak. She hated him for making her do it and herself for not being able to stop.

  He shoved her away. She stumbled back, hitting her hip on the windowsill. In the fraction of a moment it took her to regain her balance and rub her hip she realized that she had still not told him the complete truth.

  “I’ll tell you why I did it. Do you want to know?” She saw that he was torn. “I wanted to be someone else for a while.”

  “Well, me too, Dana,” he said, his voice metallic. “Who doesn’t?”

  “I got away from you and Bay and everything I knew, and a part of me came out that I didn’t know was there. And I couldn’t stop myself.” I didn’t even try. Her words hurtled on, and he seemed to be listening. If she said enough, perhaps, eventually, he would understand. “It wasn’t about cheating on you or not loving you. It was about stepping out of my skin and being someone else for a week.”

  “You want me to forgive you because-“

  “Because you know me, because you know in your deepest heart that I love you.” Loving David marked and identified her as surely as the curve of her ears, her thumb- and voiceprints. “I’ve lived my whole life fighting not to be my mother and grandmother, compensating for their influence, beating off anything that looked like it might drag me down to their levels. I paid so much attention to what I wasn’t that I never had a chance-“

  “Stop blaming those two for everything. It doesn’t work anymore. You’re an adult, and what you do, you do because you want to. You wanted to fuck a stranger, so you did. That’s it.”

  “David, listen to me. Micah wanted me to stay, he begged me to stay with him, but I wanted to come home. I chose you and Bay.”

  He sneered. “For some reason that doesn’t make me feel any better. “

  “I realized that if I left you I’d be leaving myself, the best part of myself. In a way, what happened was a good thing, David. I’m not excusing it, but sometimes it takes a terrible experience to make you understand-“

  “Congratulations,” he said. “Insight is a wonderful thing.”

  “Stop being a lawyer. Listen to me with your heart.”

  “Shi.t, Dana, I’m tired of listening.” The mauve circles around his eyes seemed to have darkened in the last half hour. “Just tell me the rest of it. He took Bailey. Where?”

  “Mexico, I think.”

  “And his reason?”

  “To hurt me.”

  “Nice guy.”

  “He didn’t hurt her. That’s something I know.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It didn’t mean anything. It meant nothing.”

  “That is such a stupid thing to say.” He looked at her with incredulous disgust. “Fucking is one thing, but stealing our child-“

  “He was unbalanced, but the man I knew in Florence would never-

  “Stop trying to blame him. You started it. You couldn’t keep your pants on. Just say it, Dana. It’s your fault,” David roared. “Bailey would not have been stolen, her future, her world-our world—would be a different place if you hadn’t decided to experiment with the limits of your personality.”

  Panic spiked through her, and she fell against him, wrapping her arms about his neck, pressing her face into his chest.

  “Forgive me, just forgive me. I admit everything, David. Say you’ll forgive me.” She searched his eyes for a star of hope.

  Something to work toward.

  The cosmos could have been created in the length of time it took him to answer.

  Pork was the only cure for what sickened David. After the
scene with Dana, he went back to the office, gathered his papers together, and went to court, where Gracie said he argued brilliantly on behalf of a seventeen-year-old boy being tried as an adult accused of assault and battery by an old man with faulty eyesight and a distrust of any non-white below the age of seventy-five. David barely remembered his words to the jury.

  It was the kind of case he could put his heart into. The boy was not too smart, not too cunning, and not mean enough to be guilty. If the criminal justice system got him, he would be lost forever. This was why David had become a defense attorney, to make sure boys like this did not get railroaded into jail and have their lives ruined.

  The jury was out just over an hour before returning a not-guilty verdict. On the walk back to the office, for about fifteen minutes, he felt right with the world. Then he thought of calling Dana to report his success, and the world caved in on him. He closed himself behind his office door and sorted through his messages. Three from Dana, which he threw away. Nothing from Peluso.

  That night he bought an expensive dinner at Morton’s Steak House and indulged in a one-hundred-and-twenty-dollar bottle of Merlot. If Dana could have Guadalupe eight days a week, he deserved a good meal when he wanted one. He sat in a booth alone, the day’s copy of the San Diego Transcript propped in front of him as camouflage. While he ate and pretended to read the front page, he watched the women at the bar in their short skirts and fuck-me stiletto heels, the muscles of their calves outlined like diagrams in an anatomy textbook. He could have almost any one of them. The blonde in the red silk suit and diamond ear studs-he had only to stand at the bar, engage her in conversation, and let slip that he was David Cabot. It would be so easy, it wasn’t worth doing. He did not want to wake up in a strange bed looking at someone whose name he could not remember. He wanted to be with Dana the way it was before and never would be again.

  He couldn’t digest his steak and left half of it on the plate. He left the restaurant and went into a sports bar. Watching the end of the Monday-night matchup, for the first time in many years he wished he were still a quarterback. Five seconds on the field and Dana would be out of his mind and the game would be everything. David walked through the Gaslamp, down Fourth as far as Island, then right, and left again to Seaport Village, where he sat on a bench with his back to the dark shops and watched the lights on the harbor and Coronado. Over and over he told himself he had to figure out what to do about Dana. And over and over again he asked himself what was the point of pretending there was anything to figure out. They were finished. Their marriage was over. He shifted his thoughts to Frank Filmore’s defense. How could he do it if Peluso said no to the plea? And then he thought of Bailey, and he loved her and missed her and wanted to kill Micah Neuhaus. But he was already dead. His suicide denied David the only course of action that made sense to him. He thought of Dana again.