Blood Orange Read online

“I’ll load up the car and meet you back at the flat.”

  He brought fresh rolls and mozzarella, tomatoes, and blood oranges from Sicily. They ate a picnic on the bed. Dana was suddenly ravenous. Micah sliced a blood orange and nudged her onto her back, opened her mouth with his fingertips, and squeezed the fruit onto her tongue as his other hand lifted her sweater and cupped her breast. The juice was the color of raspberries and filled her mouth with sugar. Her nipples tingled as they hardened.

  He shoved aside bread and mozzarella, clearing a space for them to lie. A knife clattered to the floor. He licked her sweet, sticky mouth.

  I will always remember this. The smell of the fruit, the smell of him.

  It was dark when she awoke, and cold. The wind was up, spitting rain against the window. In candlelight Micah sat across the room facing the bed, his sketch pad propped against his crossed knee. She pushed herself up on her elbows.

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost seven.”

  “You shouldn’t have let me sleep. Why didn’t you wake me up?” The remains of their meal still covered the bed and floor. An orange had bled onto the duvet, staining it brown.

  “I wanted to watch you. Sleeping. You’re so uninhibited,” he said. “Awake you’re always in control, or trying to be. But when you sleep your body lets go. You lie on your stomach with your legs apart. I can see all of you and you don’t care.” He held out his pad. “Here, look at yourself.”

  He had drawn her thighs and buttocks and her sex with the same precise detail as he rendered the rooftops of Florence. She handed it back.

  “You don’t like it?” His question sounded like a dare. “Why don’t you take it home and show it to your husband?”

  She went into the bathroom and sat on the bidet. He came to the door

  “Go away. I want to be alone.”

  “You didn’t care how much I watched you yesterday. You let me see anything, and now all of a sudden you’re a nun. What did he say that’s turned you against me?”

  She splashed warm water between her thighs, then stood and dried. She still felt sticky and ran hot water in the old-fashioned tub so hard the room quickly filled with steam. She added cold and, when the temperature was right, stepped in and sank until the water covered her to the chin.

  He crouched beside the tub and watched her. She slid under, her hair floating in the water as in Ophelia’s suicide, and stayed there until her breath ran out.

  His eyes shone with tears. “Tell me you’re coming back to me.”

  His hand cupped the round of her shoulder. His thumb bore down into the soft tissue above her breast.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “I could push you under. I could hold you under until you stopped breathing. You wouldn’t have a chance.” The steam had reddened his cheeks and brought up the wild curl in his hair. “You’re not strong enough to stop me, Dana.”

  She was afraid.

  “I’ve been waiting all my life for you,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like to be me. You’re middle class to your core, Dana. You’re a taker, a user. That yellow coat says it all.”

  “I’ve got to get dressed.” And get out of the palazzo and back into the hotel. She would tell the man at the desk not to let him come up. The lock on her door would keep him out.

  She grabbed for the towel draped over a nearby chair and wrapped it around her. In the palazzo’s central room a triple-bar electric heater glowed near the couch. She stood in front of it and tried to dry herself without letting the towel slip. The heating element burned the back of her legs. She realized that she was barely breathing.

  “Drop the towel.”

  “I have to pack.”

  “No. I want you to stay here, forever. I want to lock you in these rooms, feed you cheese and blood oranges and never let you out.”

  “Micah, you frighten me.” His eyes drilled into her. “I can’t leave my daughter. I know what that’s like. My own mother …” There was no need to explain. They had talked about their lives until they knew each other’s stories as well as their own. “If I stay with you I’ll ruin her life. I can’t do that.”

  Bailey needed her, and she needed Bailey. When Dana loved her, she also loved the little girl abandoned on her grandmother’s front porch. How was it possible she hadn’t understood that before?

  Micah’s expression brightened. “I thought you didn’t love me.”

  “I don’t know-“

  “I’ve got a great idea. She can come here.”

  “It wouldn’t-“

  “How do you know? You haven’t even heard what I’ve got to say.” He followed her to the wardrobe where she kept her clothes. “We can make this work, Dana. I can earn plenty of money. We can move somewhere better if you want. Bailey’ll love Florence.” Dana thought of a top winding tighter and tighter. “God, wouldn’t it be great to be a kid in Florence? She’d be bilingual in no time, and we’ll send her to one of those convents-“

  “David would never let it happen.” Arguing only encouraged him. She must stop talking and dress, just dress and get out.

  “She can stay with us in the summer, him in the winter. Whatever.”

  “You don’t know about Bailey. She has special needs.” Her voice was marbled with fear.

  He stepped in close. It took all her will to keep from moving away.

  “She needs you. You just said that.”

  “Yes, but more. A special school …”

  “Florence has schools,” he said angrily. “Italy isn’t Borneo.”

  He had lost interest in everything but his plan. Good. He would not notice that as she dressed her hands shook. He paced around the bedroom, scheming about schools and special diets and tutors. He stopped finally and stared at her, as if surprised to see her fully dressed. She had cleared away the mess on the bed and laid out her suitcase.

  “We could work this out if you wanted to. Why don’t you want to? What’s happened? You were hanging on me when I went down to the piazza this morning and now you don’t want me near you. What did he say to you? Did he threaten you?”

  “He’d never do that.”

  “Why not? I would.” He grabbed her wrists and drew her to him. She felt his fingers bruise her skin and heard David asking who had grabbed her and why. “I’d do whatever it took to keep you.”

  “You’re hurting me.” Her pulse roared in her ears.

  He looked at her and stumbled back a step, throwing off his grip. He held his hands out before him and stared at them. “I want to hurt you,” he said and began to cry. “I want to make you hurt like I do.”

  ana had expected Bailey to fret about being homeschooled; ‘but she adapted well, and if she missed her friends at Phillips Academy and the cherry red minibus that took her there, she kept it to herself. This surprised Dana, but what had come as an even greater surprise was her own pleasure at teaching her daughter. When David was with the Chargers she had been a kindergarten teacher, and now the skills came back to her. Counting and alphabet games, story time, and field trips to the zoo and the bank and the supermarket: Dana had forgotten the way a young mind sponged up information, even one as challenged as her daughter’s.

  To be a successful mother, wife, gardener, cook, and teacher all at the same time, Dana had to be organized, and some days she just wasn’t. Some days moved from confusion through chaos and into crisis with no rest in between. Not that Bailey cared; homeschooling and her mother’s full attention suited her fine. She took charge of snack time, sometimes managing to pour more orange juice into their glasses than onto the table. They went for walks while she chattered about what she saw. She could not read, and numbers confused her; but her imagination was vast. She made up wonder fully intricate, amusing, and often violent stories about the evil disposition of the ugly gnome statue in the garden of the house at the end of the street.

  Bailey was excited about the day’s visit to the Birch Aquarium. In preparation she and Dana had spent the previous day at
the library looking at books about fish and their habitats. For the last fifteen minutes Bailey had been sitting up straight in an easy chair in the living room with a picture book of ocean creatures open on her lap.

  “I want to see a ee-ee-eel,” she said, stretching the vowel out to show Dana she knew the long sound it made.

  Standing in the entry, Dana sorted through the mail, not opening the bills, checking for letters without return addresses. The police had told her to set such envelopes aside. She was to leave them for the police to open.

  “Time, Mommy, time.”

  “Soon, honey.”

  Finish sorting the mail.

  Water and biscuits for Moby Doby.

  Set the timer on the stove so the roast’ll be ready at five-thirty.

  Set another timer on the backyard sprinklers.

  Turn off the answering machine so no one can leave threatening messages.

  Two weeks had passed since the incident with the rock and note. Moby Doby was almost as good as new, the window had been repaired, the media had lost interest in the tribulations of the Cabot family, and there had been no further threats. Though the police had cautioned her against becoming complacent, Dana did not jump at the blast of a car horn anymore, or the telephone’s sudden jangle. Micah Neuhaus had not attempted to contact her since the morning in the bookstore, and about him, too, she had begun to relax.

  After their trip to the aquarium she and Bailey were going to La Valencia Hotel for afternoon tea-a dress-up occasion. And risky. In a public setting Bailey might sit at the table and sip her chocolate milk and eat her cookies like a model child. On the other hand, if she became excited or frustrated for some reason, she could go off like a fireworks display and sling cookies at the waiter. But it wasn’t fair to keep her cooped up in the house all day when she had done nothing wrong; she did not deserve to be punished. There had to be walks to the library and trips to the mall, and chancy outings like this one. She had to learn how to be in public places.

  For the festive occasion Bailey had chosen to wear her favorite dress of lime green and pink dotted Swiss with a wide shiny sash striped in the same colors. And her shocking pink strappy sandals just back from the cobbler, who warned Dana his repairs would not last and the shoes were not worth fixing again. Obviously, he didn’t know about seven-year-old girls and their favorite shoes.

  Bailey dropped the fish book and jumped off the chair. She stood at the front door, kicking at the metal base of the screen. “Gogo-go.

  “Quiet down, kiddo.”

  “Go-go-go.”

  Dana tossed the mail-all perfectly legitimate-into a basket. “I have to get Moby some water and put him outside. You stay where you are, okay? Wait for me and we’ll go out together.”

  “I wanna see a ee-eee-eel.”

  “You will, Bay, you will.”

  If it were not for David and the stress in their relationship, Dana would have been happy. But they were so out of sync that nothing she did could make it better. He got home from work late, his complexion putty-colored with exhaustion. She fed him, he planted himself in front of the television, and fell asleep. He didn’t even have time for racquetball or a pickup basketball game on Saturday afternoons. Their conversations had become more like interviews, with Dana asking the questions and David grunting the answers.

  The last time they’d made love it hadn’t worked. David had apologized. “It’s the case,” he said. Afterward Dana couldn’t shake the image of Frank Filmore sprawled in the bed between them.

  When they were kids and new to each other, she and David had talked and made love every chance they got. Best had been the humid Ohio afternoons before the start of football season when lightning cracked the sky behind mountains of blue-black and violet thunderheads and the moisture-laden air seemed too thick to breathe. Sex on those days had been like inviting the elements into their foreplay. Back then Dana had believed God had brought them together and that a special charm blessed their love and kept it fresh. These days she felt sad and foolish for having been such an innocent.

  In the entryway, Bailey continued to kick the door.

  “Don’t kick,” Dana yelled back over her shoulder. “Stop it ” now.

  Moby made a soft, excited woofle in the back of his throat as Dana dug into the biscuit box for a handful of treats. In the backyard she checked the lock on the wall gate. As she did, she heard a car door slam and the screech of tires. The neighbor’s kid had just gotten his driver’s license.

  She returned to the kitchen, set the timer on the stove so the roast would be ready at dinnertime, closed and bolted the back door, then remembered she had forgotten to turn on the sprinklers and went outside again. Ready at last, she walked down the short hall to the front of the house. Bailey was not waiting for her there.

  “Time to go, Kidney-Bean.”

  Hiding was one of Bailey’s favorite tricks.

  Dana checked the powder room under the stairs. Then she stood at the foot of the stairs and called up, trying not to sound irritated. “Come down now, Bailey, no more games.”

  Still nothing. Sighing, Dana looped her shoulder-strap purse over the newel post and went upstairs. Bailey’s bedroom door was closed. She opened it.

  “What are you doing in here-“

  The pink-and-lime checkerboard comforter was pulled up over the pillows. A dozen stuffed animals-bears and pigs and a funnylooking gray and black warthog-sat in a circle the way Bailey currently liked to arrange them. The room was as clean and empty as it had been when Dana tidied it an hour earlier.

  Dana flew clown the stairs and opened the screen door, ran down the path and looked up and down the street and across the park. No one was about; the neighborhood was peaceful. She opened her mouth to call Bailey’s name, and then she saw the shoe. The strappy sandal had broken again and fallen off. It lay in the muddy gutter beside a set of tire tracks.

  September

  ailey had been gone more than three months.

  To Dana that was ninety-plus bed and bath times and onehundred-and-twenty mealtimes, not counting snacks. It was fifteen Sundays at St. Tom’s, one hundred tantrums give or take, thousands of small jokes, a million hugs and kisses.

  In the parking lot between St. Tom’s and its offices, Dana sat in the 4Runner, staring down at the keys in the palm of her hand. She saw her ragged nails and her dry skin. So many things she had done for years without thinking, like filing her nails and moisturizing her skin, had fallen aside since Bailey vanished. Days passed and she wore the same Levi’s and shirt or sweater. Meals were a mouthful of cottage cheese, an apple or an ice cream cone. Nothing tasted good anymore.

  She did not remember brushing her teeth that morning.

  She stared across the street at the Mission Hills Nursery where a female employee arranged tubs of spidery yellow and white lilies along the edge of the sidewalk. Behind them, grappling up the chain-link fence, blood red bougainvillea was in full bloom. Blue sky, vivid colors: Dana felt invisible amidst the brilliant life. And she did not care, not even when she saw her face reflected in the rearview mirror. There were vertical lines bracketing her mouth that had not been there three months ago, a pinch at the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were so tired they seemed to have faded from brown to beige. But she had not, would not, cry.

  Early in life she had learned tears made her mother angry, which meant a face slap. And because she knew her grandmother wanted to see her whining and pitiful, Dana had refused to give her the satisfaction of showing any weakness. Now, when she wanted to cry, she could not. She understood that the Bailey Committee had to move. And she knew Lexy loved her and felt frustrated by her inability to comfort her. There was nothing anyone could do. The loss of a child to death might become, with time, bearable. But a disappearance was a mystery and fed the imagination with grisly pictures and suppositions. And guilt: the conviction that if she had kept Bailey glued to her hip this would never have happened.

  She reached into the backseat for her purse, op
ened the outside flap and took out her cell phone. Three months ago she had programmed in the number of Lieutenant Walt Gary, the officer in charge of the Bailey investigation. Though an improvement over kid-phobic Patrolman Ellis, neither was Gary a rock of empathy.

  An electronic female voice told Dana to listen to everything because the police department had made changes in its menu. She stabbed the zero key; after a moment the voice of a live human being came on the line.

  “This is Dana Cabot,” she said, trying to sound like the kind of woman who got what she wanted. “Connect me to Lieutenant Gary, please.”

  “I’ll check if he’s in.”

  As Dana waited, three different customers came out of the nursery pulling American Flyer wagons loaded with seedlings that would bloom at Christmas. Dana had already decided she would not celebrate Christmas without Bailey. Lexy told her not to look ahead. She should live one day at a time.

  She felt a quick impulse to go back into the office and tell Lexy she was sorry for being mean. It made no sense to be angry with her best friend, but when Dana looked at Lexy she thought about God, and she was mad at God. She had been tricked by religion, beguiled into believing God loved his creation. Which he didn’t. If he did there would be no murdered Lolly Calhouns, no kidnapped Bailey Cabots.

  The woman on the phone was apologetic. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Cabot. The roster says Lieutenant Gary’s on a call.”

  Dana had seen the room where Gary worked. She knew that his phone sat on the right side of his gunmetal gray desk beside a picture of his mother and father and a pit bull named Louie. She knew he sat at his desk right now avoiding her call because he had run out of positive things to say to her. He was too honest to pretend hope when he felt none.

  In the beginning, however, he had encouraged her to be optimistic and talked about how efficiently a search could be mobilized since the passing of the Amber Act. He spoke of something called NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Dana did not ask what exploited meant.

  The media and police had moved into action so quickly it was impossible not to feel hopeful at the beginning. Twenty minutes after Dana reported Bailey missing a description of her had been broadcast on multiple radio stations throughout San Diego County. On all the news shows that night and every night for a month afterward Bailey’s picture was on the screen, and throughout the newscast a scroll ran along the bottom of the screen with a number viewers could call with information. Almost immediately the phones had begun to ring. A brown-haired child had been sighted crying in a restaurant in Yuma; a little girl was seen struggling with a man in a truck in Barstow. Strong leads, weak and crazy leads, plenty of dead ends, and even a couple of calls saying David Cabot was just getting what he deserved. Walt Gary was convinced that David’s defense of Frank Filmore, the rock through the window, and Bailey’s abduction were all related.