Blood Orange (16 page)

Lexy said, “One of these days I believe she’s just going to open
her mouth and start talking.”

“The surf jarred her memory some way. It’s like she’s got this
combination lock inside and today something clicked.”

Lexy nodded. “If he taught her to swim, don’t you think she
must have trusted him?”

It hadn’t occurred to Dana that Bailey might have had a relationship with her kidnapper.

“How could she trust a man who’d steal her?”

“Three months is a long time in a little kid’s life, Dana. And
maybe it was a woman. Someone who wanted a daughter.”

“Lieutenant Gary doesn’t think so.”

“Well, you know what I think, and you don’t want to hear me say
it again. But. She’s got to see someone who knows how to question
kids. She’s ready to talk.”

“I won’t push her. She’s been through enough.”

“But if she’s been sex-“

“I told you, that didn’t happen.”

“A professional-“

“She doesn’t need a professional.” Dana waved at Bailey and
blew her a kiss. “You and Detective Gary are on the same side.”

“It’s not about taking sides.” Lexy looked tired. “But don’t you
wonder who did it? Doesn’t it alarm you that he’s still out there?”

“Why do you think my pulse jumps every time I see a white van?
Look, there’s one at the end of the street. And it happened at the
beach today. I got up and left Bailey alone-alone on the beach, for
God’s sake!-and it was just some locksmith.”

“Oh, Dana.”

Time to change the subject. Time to pretend we’re normal people
leading normal lives.

Normal was all Dana had ever wanted, to be like everyone else,
like the cliques of blond girls at Bishop’s School. She had believed
when she was fifteen that such girls knew a secret she did not. It was
a class thing, she finally decided. If your father had the right kind
of job, if your mother only worked because she wanted to, if you
took vacations in Hawaii and your grandmother took you to
Europe the summer before high school, and if you got a convert ible for graduation, then you knew the secret of feeling normal in
your skin.

“What’s up with you, Lexy? Let’s talk about your life for a
change.”

“Well, mostly the same old stuff, but I did have dinner with
Micah last night.”

Dana had been telling herself that he had gone back to Italy.

“Mind you, I had to go over there and drag him out of his apartment. He was in one of his moods.”

After Italy she had let Lexy think she and Micah did not like
each other. She buried the truth in silence not because Lexy was a
priest but because her friend’s feelings about her brother were so
possessive and protective.

“I told him he had to keep me company or I was going to go
wacko.” Lexy groaned, “I think I’m in burnout. I used to have enough
energy for two women, but now I fall into bed and sleep like the dead
and wake up just as tired as I was when I lay down. I tell my therapist
I haven’t got time for coffee breaks. She says I have to make time.”

“Since when are you in therapy?”

“She’s a clergy member up in Orange County. Lutheran, actually. Eleanor.”

“How could I not know that?” Dana asked, feeling as if she had
let Lexy down. “Why are you in therapy?”

Bailey appeared at Dana’s elbow and rested her head against her
shoulder for a moment. “Are you having a good time?” Dana asked
her. “Do you want to sit on my lap now?”

She darted off, back to her friends behind the coffee bar.

“She’s so beautiful,” Lexy said, watching her. “But I worry …”

“We’re talking about you. I know your problem. You don’t have
a life except St. Tom’s. You’ve got to stop hiding behind that collar;
it’s not big enough.”

Lexy sighed, tilting her head to the sun, letting her hair drop
back like falling fire. “It’s work, and it’s Micah. And it’s me. Mostly,
lately, it’s Micah.”

Dana stared over Lexy’s shoulder at the street where a white van
with darkened windows was stopped at the light.

Lexy said, “When we were kids he’d have these spells…. He’d
set his tent up out in the yard and sleep there, eat out there for days
and days. No one ever told him to come inside. I think our folks forgot about him. Sometimes I’d go out and try to make him come inside and he wouldn’t even talk to me. He loved me better than
anyone, but he wouldn’t say a word.”

“You can’t be responsible for everyone, Lexy. He’s a grown man.”

Lexy smiled. “Sometimes I forget you met him.”

“Yes.”

“I wish you two had gotten along.”

Bailey scrambled onto Dana’s lap, and she was grateful for something to hold on to.

“Maybe when he’s feeling better I’ll have you all to dinner. Try
again, huh? You and David and Micah.” She sighed and stood up.
“Sometime when we have a whole afternoon I’d like to talk more
about this. It’d do me good, but now’s a bad time. I’ve got an appointment at ECS in fifteen minutes.” She straightened the lines of
her forest green moleskin jumper. “And after Evening Prayer I’ve
got to go by and see Dorothy Wilkerson. Do you know her?”

Dana remembered an upright little woman with a formidable
jaw sitting rigid as a bookend in a back pew.

“She’s a hundred and two years old, but she walked to church
twice a week until five years ago. Last Easter she gave me her power
of attorney, went to bed, and said she was finished, ready to die.”
Lexy swung her leather bag over her shoulder. “I expect every night
to be her last, but come the dawn she wakes up and drinks a cup of black coffee, calls me on the phone, and says she’s still alive. I’m
never sure if she’s glad or disappointed.”

Dana would not live to be one hundred. Sometimes it was a
stretch making it to the end of a conversation.

Dana sat with Bailey for another half hour, watching the traffic
through the red flowers of the cape honeysuckle. At least six white
vans went by. She tried not to think about Micah.

When David learned that Bailey could bodysurf he would say it
was time she saw a psychiatrist. They would argue and go to bed
angry again. He did not need to know. She would tell Lieutenant
Gary instead.

She thought of the ways she continually failed people, those she
loved the most, like David and Bailey and Lexy. There had never
been a time when she had not been trying to be good. She had believed if she pleased people her reward would be a normal life. But
the older she became the less sure she was that she would recognize
normal if she ever got a chance to live it.

Micah had been strange from their first meeting, the furthest
thing from the normal she admired. He was waiting in the little
Florence air terminal when she staggered off the plane, jet-lagged
and stiff as a cheap shoe. He waved and called out, and the sign he
held with her name written in huge Old English letters was like a
dozen fingers pointing at her. If it weren’t for Lexy she would have
walked right by him. No one else had such an ostentatious greeter.
She did not like the way other travelers smiled at his enthusiasm. He
drove a car the size of a telephone booth, a Mercedes of a variety
never dreamed of in Mission Hills. With her two bags jammed behind the front seat, they flew through the outskirts of Florence, creating three lanes of traffic on streets only wide enough for two. In gridlocked intersections Micah laid on his horn and stuck his head
out the window, yelling in flamboyant Italian.

When the sun inched around to their little table on the terrace at
Bella Luna, she and Bailey got up and walked to the 4Runner
parked around the corner. They held hands; Dana thought she detected the hint of a skip in Bailey’s step.

She was getting better.

Dana had left the car windows down a few inches, and the interior was cool when she opened the rear door and fastened Bailey
into her car seat. When she opened her own door she saw a rock on
the driver’s seat with a piece of paper around it, held in place with a
rubber band.

She jerked back as if she’d seen a snake. For a moment she
stared at it, not quite able to believe what she was looking at. She
had thought with Bailey’s return the trouble was over. David and
Gary had said she couldn’t count on that, but she had.

A scream came up from her stomach and twisted in her throat.
She ground her teeth together, held on to the door frame, and told
herself not to frighten Bailey. The street seemed suddenly, strangely
empty.

She picked up the rock and pulled off the rubber band. The
paper fluttered to the asphalt, and she stared down at it with raw
eyes. Then she got in the car and slammed the door, jerked her seat
belt across her chest, and turned the key in the ignition.

Roaring out of the parking place and down the street, she left on
the pavement both the rock and the note with its cutout letters
glued onto ordinary white paper. But she had seen the message and
read it.

DON’T BE AFRAID. I LOVE YOU BOTH.

orothy Wilkerson was one hundred and two years old and
-dying of exhaustion.

“Any changes?” Lexy asked Alana, the home nurse on duty.

“She told me this morning she’d had visitors in the night and I
shouldn’t be letting people into her room without her permission.”

Lexy knew many old people near death had night visitors, some
friendly and comforting, others threatening and dreaded. Two gentlemen had talked to Lexy’s grandfather every night for several
months before he died. When she asked him what they talked
about, he said they explained things he needed to know. She had
been small at the time and a little afraid of the old man with hairs
sprouting from his nose. Now she wished she’d asked him what
those things were.

“She called me a heathen.” Alana, a graduate of San Diego’s
large Roman Catholic university, had married a Jordanian and converted to Islam. Her distinctive head scarf had given her away to
cranky old Dorothy Wilkerson, who, despite her fractional eyesight,
could see enough to make an insult stick.

“Other than having visions and being abusive, how’s she
doing?”

“She has incredible stamina, Lexy. And such will.” Alana raised
her eyes to heaven. “I know her joints give her pain, but she won’t
take anything. I think she’s afraid of not thinking clearly. And I
know she wants to tell you something.”

“In that case,” Lexy said, “in I go.”

Alana touched her arm. “Allah is good.”

“Amen to that, sister.”

Though she was almost blind, Dorothy claimed to hear better
than she ever had. Her muscles had atrophied to the point of being
virtually useless, arthritis had cemented most of her joints, and osteoporosis had made her bones so brittle that if she turned over in
bed she could break her hip, so she slept in a contraption that made
it impossible to move without assistance. To a woman who in her
youth had been a talented horsewoman and ocean swimmer, this
confinement might as well have been a barbed-wire wrap.

She had the right to be curmudgeonly.

Dorothy’s husband had left her sufficient money to be cared for
at home in the same bedroom in which she had slept for seventy
years. If one had to die alone and slowly, this room on the second
story of a gracious old Craftsman at the edge of a pretty canyon,
tree-shaded and, now, at twilight, full of the songs of birds, was not
a bad place to do it. Someone had brought in a large, untidy bouquet of homegrown roses and put them on the table under the window. From across the room Lexy smelled their spicy-sweet fragrance.

She had sat at so many bedsides where the dying shared unpleasant quarters with strangers. Once, in such a place, the loud voices of
two orderlies in the hall discussing the intimate details of their dates had interrupted her prayers. The noise continued until Lexy, at the
end of her patience, charged out into the hall and with all her
priestly authority reminded them that people were dying and if they
didn’t have respect for that, would they at least go outside so she
wouldn’t have to hear about their escapades.

A six-foot-tall redheaded female priest could kick a lot of butt
when she wanted to.