Blood Orange Read online

  “How’s Moby?” he asked.

  “He’ll be okay. He’s in Emergency.”

  “Shit, that’ll cost-“

  She pressed her palms against his chest. “Please, David, don’t start with the money.” He would never see the bill; she would pay off the vet in installments.

  Bailey tugged on David’s earlobe hard enough to make him wince. “The window got broke and the policemens came ‘cause the s’cream man wrote a bad note. I saw all the letters.” She made a down-mouth, shook her head, and sighed. “No B. “

  For once Dana was glad that her seven-year-old daughter could not yet read. She asked her husband, “Did you see it?”

  He nodded. “We’ll talk about this later. You two go upstairs-“

  “I want s’cream.”

  Dana scooped chocolate ice cream into a Babar bowl knowing that in thirty minutes she would regret giving her daughter sugar, but she could not face the inevitable screams if she played tough mommy right now. Choose your fights, or at least postpone, she thought as she settled Bailey at the counter with a dish towel tied around her neck.

  “Eat up, Sweet Pea.” She put the ice cream carton back in the freezer. “What happens next?”

  “I guess I have to talk to the cameras.”

  Oh, you’ll hate that, she thought sarcastically and then felt meantempered and small. The limelight was his natural environment.

  “I wish you wouldn’t encourage them,” she said. “Some ambitious kid reporter’ll be over tomorrow wanting to write a feature story about the family of the poor beleaguered defense attorney.”

  “I’m going to turn this around, Dana.” He gripped her shoulders. “Whoever threw that rock doesn’t scare me.”

  “But he scared the hell out of me. And what about Bailey?”

  “It’ll take more than a rock and a note to get me off the Filmore case.

  She wondered if he had even heard her say his daughter’s name.

  “What’s more, we’re going to make this work to our advantage. Filmore can’t get a fair trial in a city where-“

  “He killed that child,” Dana said, whispering. “You know he did.”

  “The evidence is lousy, Dana.”

  Bailey banged her heels into the chair leg and clanged her spoon against the side of her empty dish. David said, “Hey, Bailey, you want to come outside with me and talk to the cameras?”

  She cheered and lifted her arms, swinging her spoon wildly.

  Dana took it from her. “No, David.”

  “You come too.”

  She shook her head and turned her back on him, staring down into the stainless-steel sink, where she saw a blurred reflection of herself and was thankful the image was unclear. “You’re using her.”

  He waited a beat. “If you’re not coming out, make me some eggs, will you?”

  “At least wipe the ice cream off her face.”

  “And bacon if you’ve got any.”

  ater she regretted everything: the saturated fat in the eggs and bacon and butter; the floral sheet; going to the emergency veterinary clinic when Dr. Talbot would have served as well and charged a quarter as much. Worst of all, she had forgotten what every defense attorney’s spouse must always remember: the client is never guilty until the verdict is in. And sometimes not even then. She should have walked onto the front porch with David and Bailey; they should have stood together like a team.

  As they prepared for bed that night, she thought how mean she was to David, how she withheld herself as if she wanted to punish him when he had done nothing but give his best. She thought of saying she was sorry, but she was no good at apologies.

  Sometimes she let herself think what their life would have been like if Bailey had been normal. There would have been another child by now, maybe two. They had bought the Miranda Street house because Mission Hills was a safe neighborhood and they wanted a big family. As Dr. Wren told her every time she saw him, there was no reason not to have another child. Bailey’s disability was no one’s fault. Though she understood his words with her logical mind, another part of her felt responsible. She had soured on her body. Occasionally David brought up the idea of another child, though rarely in the last few months. She knew he hoped for a son, someone to play ball with and dream for. So why not just say yes, let’s have another baby?

  She did not want to think about what might be holding her back.

  “You want to watch the news?” she asked.

  “God, no. I don’t even want to think how that sheet’s going to televise.”

  She felt the blush of heat in her cheeks. “I used the only thing big enough-“

  As soon as the police and press left, David had called his partner, Marcus Klinger, who appeared an hour later with a bag of nails and several large sheets of plywood that they hammered into place over the window.

  “I’ll call the glass man tomorrow.”

  “You won’t have to.” David got into bed wearing short-legged sweat pants and a T-shirt with the Miami of Ohio Athletic Department logo fading on the front. “They’ll be lined up after seeing the mess on TV.”

  Dana’s diaphragm tightened. “Did you tell the reporters what the note said?”

  “Just that it was a threat.”

  PERVERT LOVER, YOU’LL GET YOURS.

  “Maybe Marcus should take the case. If you were second chair-“

  “I won’t be intimidated, Dana. You know me better than that. Whoever did this, he’s a coward. Only cowards and kids throw rocks and run away.”

  She grabbed a hairbrush off her dresser and dragged it through her thick dark hair.

  “Frank Filmore deserves a fair trial just as much as anyone.”

  She nodded.

  “I know you hate the work I do.”

  Her temper flared. “I don’t hate your work. I believe in it. But couldn’t you for once defend someone who’s not a scumbag? What’s wrong with a clean-cut bank robber?” She thought of George Clooney or Cary Grant. “Maybe a nice jewel thief?” She sat beside him and laid her hand on his chest, feeling the heat of his body beneath her palm. “Why does it always have to be the dregs of the earth? Can’t you see how these people pollute our life?”

  He couldn’t leave them behind at the end of the day. He brought them home from the office and court and jail-the rapists and drug addicts, the thugs and derelicts. And not just their crimes and cases, but their agonized histories, too, all their rage and pain and deprivation. He couldn’t help it.

  “You weren’t so miserable when I showed you that hundredthousand-dollar retainer.”

  Giddy described them both when they’d counted the zeros on the check. And astonished when it didn’t bounce, when it settled comfortably into the business account beside the two-hundred-andfifty-dollar payments on time, the five-thousand-dollar checks for twenty-thousand dollars’ worth of labor. Overhead at Cabot and Klinger was high, and the money was gone in less than a week; but for a day or two they’d both felt rich.

  “If this trial goes the way I think it will, there’ll be plenty more big retainers. You can pay off all the charge cards and Bailey’s school and finish fixing the garage apartment and get yourself a new car. Think about it, Dana, no more pinching pennies, no more debt.”

  “This isn’t about money.”

  It was about injured dogs, broken windows, and the danger Dana smelled in the air like a grass fire circling them.

  “This is the Super Bowl, Dana. You don’t walk away from-“

  She stood. “It’s not a god damn game.”

  “Don’t I know that? I have a man’s life in my hands.”

  And he could not forget that any more than he could overlook his loyalty to his family. He was made that way, and Dana knew she should trust him. He would die before he let his family down. But there had never been threats before. And their home had not been violated.

  He put his arm around her shoulders. As he pulled her to him she had to tell herself to relax. This man who meant everything to her: when
had she begun having to work at loving him?

  “Dana, I know this is rough on you, and I’m not much help. But I’ve had hard cases before. This is nothing new.”

  Except that the stakes were higher now because their lifestressful, trying, imperfect as it was but still theirs and precioushad been threatened.

  “This isn’t the time for us to fall apart, Number One. We have to make some plans.” She recognized his take-charge voice. “I want you to check Bailey out of Phillips tomorrow. Tell the principal we’ll be back when the case is over. She’ll understand.”

  “Phillips Academy has a waiting list. Bailey’ll lose her place.”

  “You explain it to the principal.” A muscle moved in his jaw. “You can do that. Say you’re going to homeschool her for a while.”

  “David, she’s a special child. She needs to be at a special school. I can’t teach a kid like Bailey.” And Dana had a job and a thesis to write. There was a limit to the number of extensions her advisor could give her on it. And small as her salary was at Arts and Letters, it helped pay interest to the credit-card usurers so the Cabots could continue to live thousands of dollars beyond their means while they waited for the big cases to roll in.

  “Bailey has friends at Phillips, and she loves riding the bus every day.

  “You used to like teaching before you decided to study art his„ tory.

  “You make it sound like art’s not important. I should have stayed with teaching, that’s what you’re saying. What I want, what I care about, it doesn’t matter?”

  “Dana, who’re you fooling? You haven’t worked on your thesis since you got back from Italy. We spent all that money so you could do research-“

  “I don’t have enough time.”

  His jaw tightened. “This isn’t about you, Dana. It’s about Bailey’s safety. Can we just stick to the issue?”

  This was the way the defense attorney/husband argued. He got her off the subject, and she lost track of the point she had been trying to make and then said all the wrong things so that when they finally got back to the topic her confidence was gone.

  “Dana, you’re the one who’s been going on-“

  “I haven’t been going on about anything.”

  “-about danger and risks.”

  “You want me to quit work, like what I do, my life, doesn’t matter!”

  “That’s crazy. I’m the one made you go to Florence to do the research. But I don’t believe you even care about getting your degree anymore.

  A passing car cast light and shadow across the bedroom ceiling. “You don’t know anything.”

  He sighed. She hated when he sighed at her.

  He reached behind him and switched off the reading lamp on his side of the headboard. “If you can come up with a better plan, great. But I’ll tell you, Dana, I’m through being the bad guy around here.”

  He fell asleep immediately while Dana tossed for another half hour. Fighting did not seem to trouble David. It was, after all, what he did for a living. She hated it, felt torn apart, her insides twisted. One day she imagined her loyal and steady husband would say he could not take it anymore, drive away and leave her alone on a porch in the dark. Dana thought this way even though she knew no one was less like her mother than David.

  The night Dana had been abandoned, her mother had probably been high on something. Dana remembered her taking speedboat turns in the old Chrysler, sometimes jerking the wheel so hard Dana flopped from side to side. No seat belt. She was five years old at the time and already the grown-up in the family. She remembered asking her mother to slow down. Swift as a snake, the back of her mother’s hand had swung off the steering wheel and slammed against Dana’s mouth. Her lip burst and bled down the front of the Dead Head T-shirt she wore. She had been quiet then, squeezed her eyes tight, hung on to the edge of the seat, and waited for whatever came next.

  Five years old, wearing a T-shirt to her knees, standing on the porch of an old frame bungalow on a dark city street, a bulging duffel bag beside her. Dana still remembered her mother’s last words to her. “Ring the doorbell. Keep on until she lets you in. Tell her I can’t take it anymore.”

  ust before dawn Dana rose from bed, put on shorts and a hoodie, and ran the twelve blocks from Miranda Street to Goldfinch, passing unnoticed through safe and silent, sleeping Mission Hills, with its stately Spanish colonial residences, angular, Forties-style Hollywood mansions with carefully tended yards and pristine paths from sidewalk to door, and classic Craftsman homes built half of wood and half from river stones the size of footballs. A fourbedroom pale pink stucco Spanish colonial in Mission Hills proved how far Dana had come since that night on Imogene’s front porch. In these days of hugely inflated prices the home they could really afford would probably be three cramped bedrooms baking under a flat roof on a treeless street in El Cajon. Dana wondered if Frank Filmore and more of his kind were worth the neighborhood’s high price tag.

  The spring night was clear and cool, and her nose tingled with the smell of jasmine and damp gardens. Overhead the sky glowed a yellow-gray from the reflected city lights. On Arboles she surprised three raccoons scrambling into a garbage can set on the street for morning pickup. They stared at her brazenly from behind their masks. A homeless person slept on the porch of the Avignon Shop. Embarrassed, Dana looked away too quickly to note if the figure was male or female. She thought of her mother and wondered what had happened to her. Margaret Bowen had been twenty-two the night she drove off.

  Dana let herself into Arts and Letters and locked the door behind her. As she did she felt a jab of alarm between her ribs and turned around quickly, half expecting to see someone standing in the shadowy store; but of course there was no one there. There had never been a break-in on Goldfinch as far as Dana knew. Her knees were doughy with adrenaline as she felt her way upstairs and into the loft, where she turned on a small corner light and sat down.

  She had just begun work on her doctorate in art history when a professor told her that Arts and Letters had the best collection of art books in San Diego County. Dana had seen the store dozens of times-it was in her neighborhood, across the street from Bella Luna, where she bought her coffee-but she had never done more than browse the best-sellers and deeply discounted remainders on the first floor. Once she saw the second-floor loft full of art books, she became an habitue; and two years ago Rochelle, the shop’s eccentric English owner, had given her a key and hired her to work a few hours every week.

  She dug a dust cloth from its place lodged behind an ancient edition of Tansey’s book on the Sistine Chapel. Using a wooden step stool to reach the top of the six-foot shelves, she dusted the heavy books one by one as she reran her conversation last night with David. He was right. Bailey was not safe in school when there was someone out there making threats; keeping her home was the logical course. Thinking this, Dana felt trapped. And then ashamed. She did not want to be the kind of woman who felt trapped at the thought of spending more time with her child.

  Margaret Bowen’s daughter.

  Imogene Bowen’s granddaughter.

  She lifted down and dusted a huge book of reproductions of works by Early Renaissance Italian painters. This was Dana’s period; and someday she would buy the eight-hundred-dollar book, but for now she was content just to look at it. She laid the heavy volume on the refectory table in the center of the loft. Turning on one of the brass table lamps, she bent its swivel neck so a band of yellow light fell on the pages. Then she turned to page four hundred and thirty-six, the Nerli Altarpiece.

  Just six weeks earlier Dana had been in Florence doing research for her thesis. While she was there, Lexy’s brother, Micah Neuhaus, who had lived in Florence for more than ten years, had taken her to Spirito Santo to see the great painting.

  In the immediate foreground pious-faced Nerli and his wife kneel in profile facing each other. The Virgin Mary sits between them with the baby Jesus, who is mischievously eyeing his cousin, John the Baptist. The gilded frame holds other
figures, but what interested Dana in Early Renaissance paintings were the background scenesin this case, a village street scene and a nobleman pictured embracing a younger woman in a doorway. Scholars had determined those figures were Nerli and his daughter. For Dana the detailed painting opened doors into a story of ordinary lives that had nothing to do with the sacred figures. It was the mysteries of the secular narrative present in many early Italian masterworks that captured her imagination as nothing else in art had.

  She closed the book and rested her head on her hands. She had to find a way to do it all. Somehow. Rekindle the excitement about her thesis; be a better, more loving wife; homeschool Bailey. It will all work out, she told herself. There had to be a way to make it all happen. She tried to pray, but her thoughts had frozen solid. She wondered if it made any sense to ask the God of Year One for help in modern times. Faith and prayer must have been simpler for Tanai Nerli and his wife.

  When she was young prayer had come as easily as speech, as automatically as a language she was programmed to speak. Her grandmother had made fun of her devotion, and once she even hid Dana’s good shoes on Sunday, but Dana went to church wearing rubber flip-flops. No one cared what she wore at Holy Family Episcopala royal name for a storefront church that housed, as well as Episcopalians, a congregation of Korean Methodists. In that shabby church she belonged not simply to the congregation-that was easy-but to something she felt in her bones but lacked the words to describe. Years later Lexy had helped her understand that what she’d felt was a hunger for transcendence. This soul-longing was a gift, Lexy said.

  Dana lifted her head and listened. Someone was knocking on the door of Arts and Letters. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was not yet six A.M., much too early for Rochelle to appear, and anyway, she was the owner and had a key. Dana turned out the lights and sat still as the knocking continued. She heard a voice say her name.