Blood Orange (11 page)

“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.

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.