Blood Orange (21 page)

“His wife’s going to live over our garage.” Dana knew this would
outrage Imogene. “We’re going to fix the place up this weekend.”

Gracie had called that morning to say that if Dana agreed, they
should make a party of it. All Dana had to do was provide the beer.
She had been looking forward to a whole day with David to herself
and a task to keep them busy. Long firelit conversations and dawdly
dinners had never been their style. But with a project and occupation for their hands and bodies, they never ran out of conversation.
She had almost declined Gracie’s offer, but they rarely had company
anymore, so she said it was a great idea, and now she was looking
forward to it.

Imogene said, “You don’t want to let that little angel girl around
her.”

“It’s the husband who’s on trial.”

“Even so.”

“She’s pregnant and the press is hounding her and she can’t even
go to the supermarket without being accosted. Her doctor says if
she gets more upset it’s bad for-“

“That little Bailey, she’s a special one; you don’t want to take any
chances.”

It was an insult that Imogene felt she had to say that. As if Dana
did not adore her daughter.

“You watch out for her. Bad things happen fast.”

Easy to give advice and lecture now. What about the haunted
house? And Imogene had been a block away playing mah-jongg
when Dana was eight and three junior high school boys chased her
down the alley behind the house, shoved her to the ground, and tried to pull down her underpants. Mr. Valdez, the electrician who
lived three doors from Imogene, came out his back door waving a
.38 revolver. The boys ran off laughing and stumbling over themselves. The chivalrous old man had helped her to her feet, averted
his eyes from her torn clothes, and walked her home.

From the kitchen, a cupboard door slammed, and a tap ran and
then shut off.

“You do have company! Whose van is that?” As Dana opened
the screen door and stepped onto the porch, a slightly disgusting
possibility occurred to her. “Grandma, have you got a boyfriend?”

Something sly crawled into her grandmother’s expression. “More
like family.”

“We don’t have any family.”

“Oh no? What about your mother?”

/ou’re a sick woman, Dana thought as she hurried up the sidewalk toward her car. She gripped the steering wheel until her
hands hurt. The old bitch had only mentioned her mother to get a
rise out of her. That was Imogene’s way, to goad and tease until she
got some reaction. And Dana never learned. For a crazy moment
she had actually believed her mother was in the kitchen. She had
felt excited.

On impulse, she made a screeching U-turn and drove back
around the corner, passing the bungalow. There was a parking space
across the street now. She pulled into it and turned off the ignition.

Drumming her fingernails on the steering wheel, she stared at
the van in the driveway and tried to see her drug-addled mother behind its wheel. How could Dana have been so stupid when she
knew perfectly well the meaning of I don’t want you, gone forever,
and never coming back. Nevertheless, she got out of the 4Runner
and walked back across the street and peered in the van’s front passenger window. A yellow plastic rose rode in a plastic bud vase on
the dash.

So much for the boyfriend theory.

And the interior was pristine.

So much for the mother theory, too.

Dana opened the side gate and closed it softly behind her. Dry
leaves from the avocado tree in the next yard crumbled and
crunched underfoot like bags of corn chips as she tiptoed along the
cracked and buckled cement path that ran beside the house to the
screened-in laundry room at the back. Something heavy like tennis
shoes bounced around in the drum of the dryer. Her heart felt the
same way.

A movement in the kitchen caught her eye-a man had walked
into her field of vision and opened the refrigerator. He wore his gray
hair in a long, ragged ponytail and was so thin and tall he had to
bend like a paperclip to look in the refrigerator. He pulled out two
bottles of beer, holding them by the necks in one hand. As he
turned to leave the kitchen, he stopped and peered at the window.
Dana froze. He touched the top of his head and then patted the
breast pocket of his denim shirt while he continued to stare long
enough for her to see that he had a narrow, sharp-boned face like a
martyred saint’s. At the sound of Imogene’s voice he turned from
the window and walked out of Dana’s sight.

She dropped to a crouch, breathing hard and shaking. What
luck he appeared to be half-blind. As she hurried back down the
path and out onto the driveway she heard Imogene laugh and then
the notes of “Blue Room.” After several measures, a jazzy violin
joined in with the piano. Dana dashed across the street and into her
car. She locked the door and sat, hearing the music in her head.

A man, duets: suddenly her grandmother’s life held worlds of
mystery she could not guess at. She felt the pinch of guilt and dismissed it. Imogene had been at the heart of all her youthful misery,
and Dana was not going to start feeling sentimental about her now.

The feast Dana brought home from the Real Food deli did nothing to mollify David’s bad temper.

“How long has she been sucking her thumb?” he asked, jerking
his head toward Bailey while he twisted a corkscrew into a bottle of
Chardonnay. “I told her to stop, but it’s like she’s deaf now. On top
of everything else.”

“Later, David.”

Since Bailey’s return David had begun to talk about her in her
presence, as if she were either deaf or invisible.

Dana emptied clear plastic containers of crab cakes, marinated
green beans, and grilled vegetables onto a large serving plate and set
the kitchen counter for the three of them. Bailey tracked her steps
with one finger hooked through a belt loop on Dana’s Levi’s, her
thumb jammed in her mouth. She seemed to have lost ground since
her outgoing day at Bella Luna.

Dana handed David two chilled wineglasses, settled Bailey on a
stool at the counter, and sat down herself. A large swallow of wine,
followed quickly by another, and she began to relax. They ate in silence until Dana said, “My grandmother had a guest today. Very
sneaky. She said it was my mother.”

David looked up, appalled. “The bitch.”

“Who? Grandma or my mother?”

“Both.”

Dana smiled. It was good to have someone on her side. She put
ketchup on Bailey’s crab cake to make it more appealing. Sheepishly
she confessed how she had sneaked around the house and narrowly
missed being seen. David thought it was funny and said he’d hire
her as an investigator. Bailey stopped eating and watched them.

“So who was it?” He poured more wine.

“A man. A violinist like that Hungarian-“

“Menhuin?”

“No. The jazz guy. We have a CD.”

“Django Reinhart.”

“Yeah, him. When I left they were playing “Blue Room.” She
hummed a few bars of the old song. “Can you believe it?”

“She’s a weird old coot.”

A moment later Dana said, “There was a white van in her driveway. I guess it was Django’s.”

“There are a million white vans.” He swallowed the rest of his
wine. “They’re all over town. You don’t mean you suspect Imogene?”

It was almost like he was trying to misinterpret.

She wanted him to understand the pressure she was under; but
she did not want to tell him. Better for him to realize it himself and
speak the reassuring words of comfort. They were just platitudes if
she had to prompt him.

After the meal they were alone for a few minutes.

“Look,” Dana said, “about the thumb-sucking, let her do it. It
must be comforting.”

“It’s going to ruin her teeth. We’ll pay thousands of dollars for
braces.”

“I sucked my thumb until I was seventeen and went away to college and met you.”

“You did? You never told me that before.”

“It never came up.”

“What about germs?”

“Just let her be, David. She needs time, is all.”

She told him Bailey had been enthusiastic and responsive during
their visit to the Humane Society shelter that morning. “I almost let
her choose a kitten. Sometimes kids with voluntary mutism get
started talking again if they have an animal.”

“She can talk to Moby. Cats make me sneeze.” He swallowed his
wine as if drinking were an act of aggression.

“You might at least think about it.”

“Why?”

“You act like you don’t want her to get better.”

“I want her to see a shrink.”

“Now you’re on Gary’s side? I thought we agreed to let her get
well on her own.”

“That was almost a month ago.”

Dana thought about how good it would feel to throw her glass
across the room.

David said, “There’s a sick bastard out there; he had our daughter… If I didn’t know better, I’d think you didn’t want him
brought to justice.”

Maybe she would sweep her arm across the counter-send
dishes, glasses, and all flying.

David stared into his glass as he swirled the last of his wine. “I
want to kill him. I don’t get how you can not care.”

“I do care; you know I do.”

“Then explain to me-“

“I’ve done everything a specialist would do. I’ve had her draw
pictures, I gave her special dolls to play with. I examined her,
David. I touched her and she didn’t cringe.”

“Maybe she got used to it.”

She hated him.

“I’m sorry, Dana. That was an awful thing to say.”

She had been planning to tell him that Bailey could bodysurf,
that she had enjoyed herself at Bella Luna, and that this definitively proved she was getting better. Now she couldn’t even
make herself speak to him. She was like a closed oyster at the
bottom of the sea, the pearl growing inside her black and deformed.

“We fight all the time, Dana. It didn’t used to be like this. You’re always mad at me for something. Mostly I don’t know what the hell
I’ve done.”

It wasn’t fair that he accuse her of anger when she felt his anger
as if it had hands to pin her shoulders back and pull her hair.

“Just let Gary’s people …” The skin around his mouth was
white. “I know you had a bad experience when you were a kid, but
it won’t happen to Bailey.”

“You guarantee that, do you?”

“Gary says you can watch the whole interview through a mirror.
If you don’t like what you see, you can run in screaming.” He ran
his hands through his thick hair. “Just do it, Dana. Just fucking call
the cops and set it up.”

Dana stared at him. “You know what I’d like?” She stood and
started banging the china and cutlery into the dishwasher. “Just
once in a while I’d like to have a conversation that doesn’t involve
me doing something I don’t want to.”

As she spoke, he was walking out the back door.

Predictably, as soon as he was gone she regretted her anger and
would have liked to run behind the car, catch hold of the fender,
and drag it to a stop so she could tell him that she loved him and
hated what was happening between them.