Blood Orange (28 page)

She parked in front of Micah’s building and looked up to the
windows on the second story left, where all the lights were on.
Either no one was home in the other apartments or the tenants were
sleeping. She did not know what she would do if Micah wasn’t at
home. Beside the front door there were mailboxes, and his name
was on number four. She tried the knob, and the door swung open.

Luck, she told herself. A sign that she was meant to follow through
with this.

The apartment house had the sour detergent-and-cabbage smell
of too many tenants cooking meals and washing clothes over a span
of too many years. The maroon carpet on the stairs had worn to the
wood in the middle of each tread, and the handrail had a metallic
shine where the paint was gone. Two apartments opened onto the second-floor landing. Beside one door stood a plastic potted plant
and a life-sized ceramic cat with a mouse in its mouth.

Micah definitely did not live there.

Dana knocked on the other door and stepped back, surprised,
when it, too, opened to her touch.

Another sign.

She stood on the threshold and called his name. She stepped inside. “Micah?”

Next door a dog yapped.

“Micah, it’s Dana. You left your door open.”

It was an old-fashioned, railroad-style apartment. The front door
opened into a tiny anteroom, which opened into an old kitchen
floored with swirls of yellow, orange, and blue linoleum. A sash window over the sink was open, and from the sill a yellow cat with a
bell around its neck observed her.

“Micah?”

She looked into the living room.

Was it too late to turn around and go home? Perhaps pack a bag
for herself and move to some far desert town, change her name, and
find hard work, brain-numbing work? Eventually the desert sun
would burn the memories out of her.

In Micah’s palazzo in Florence there had been paintings and pictures everywhere. Between the back of the couch and the wall, canvases had been filed on their sides, tacked to temporary wooden
frames. There were paintings in the bathroom and on the back of
the front door. The main room had been a montage of color and images. Nothing matched, but everything in the space seemed to belong there. She remembered waking in Micah’s bed, the smell of
turpentine and oil paint, and across the room Micah in the doorway
with cups of syrupy Italian chocolate in his hands and a bag of pastries between his teeth like a dog. She remembered the feel of the sheets and the river-smelling air coming in the window over her
head.

She remembered everything.

In the bare-walled and shabbily furnished living room on Spruce
Street he lay lengthwise on the floor, and his feet were bare, the
soles pink, as if he had just bathed. His head was turned to one side
so that what Dana saw was his ruddy cheek and the way his hair
curled around his ears and the golden glow of his earring. From
where she stood, paralyzed, he looked almost perfect.

His other cheek lay in the blood that had pooled around the bullet hole in his head and soaked into the worn wooden floor.

She did not scream; her throat had sealed shut.

She looked at his feet again, at the vulnerability of their tender
pinkness. Waves of despair and shame and grief hit so hard they
seemed to have velocity. She dropped to her knees, took hold of his
ankles, and rested her cheek against his instep. She remembered
that she had loved Micah. Not forever, not even for a long time, but
for a few days, and as intensely as she had ever loved anyone.

The dog was yapping again. She heard footsteps.

Dana turned around and looked into Lexy’s eyes.

n ambulance had taken Micah’s body. The police arrived and
masked questions impossible to answer honestly.

“Why would he want to kill himself?”

Lexy replied, “He’s always talked about it. Since he was a teenager.” Not an answer, barely an explanation lost in tears and confusion. The policeman led her to the couch and told her to sit. Dana
saw how he stood over her, his body language a mix of protection
and frustration.

Lexy had come through the door into the apartment, and there
was no time for Dana to explain anything. Lexy’s grief rushed out of
her, filled the moment, and left no space for questions or explanations to form. It was Dana who called 911.

“Why were you here, Mrs. Cabot?” Though the officer, Robert
Oliphant, was younger than Gary by a decade, he had the same tone
of voice that implied he had seen everything and could not be
fooled or surprised or shocked. “How’d you get in? D’you have a
key? “

“The door was open.”

“How do you know the victim?”

Dana looked at Lexy. “His sister’s my best friend.”

Dana could not tell if Lexy was paying attention to the questions. She sat on the edge of Micah’s saggy oatmeal-colored couch,
staring down at the ancient parquet. Dana did not try to comfort
her. There was no way to break through the wall suddenly between
them. She did not want to try, because an army of questions lay in
wait on the other side.

She had to get home quickly, send Marsha Filmore back to her
apartment, and get into bed before David came home.

Now, in panic mode, her priorities were clear. Answer Oliphant’s
questions quickly and decisively. Look him straight in the eye and
give him no reason to suspect she was being anything but true-blue
honest.

“He’s my friend’s brother.” She added in a softer voice, “He
asked me to come over because he had a picture he wanted to give
me.

Lexy looked up, her face flushed and tearstained. “Which picture?”

“I don’t know. One of the Florence sketches, I think. He always
said he was going to give me one.”

Oliphant rubbed his chin. “Seems peculiar, him calling you and
then killing himself. And it’s pretty late at night. He didn’t say anything that might have let you know …”

“Nothing.”

“When did he call you?”

Dana was not sure, but she thought the police might be able to
check the phone records. So she said, “He didn’t call. I ran into him
on the street. I was buying bread.” As she held her breath, she
thought of what Imogene had told her, that she was a liar like her
mother. She knew this to be true, because while she strung the lies together she was perfectly calm. It wasn’t even a challenge to meet
Oliphant’s gaze. She read in his expression that he believed her. She
was free to go.

“We’ll call you if there’s anything comes up. You’ll have to make
a formal statement.”

“Of course,” she said. “You know I’ll help in any way I can.”

She picked up her purse and walked over to the couch where
Lexy huddled, watching her. She sat beside her friend and wrapped
her arms around her. In her arms, Lexy felt bony and cold.

“I’ve got to get home to Bay. I’ll come by your place tomorrow.”

“I’ll be at work.”

“No one expects you-“

“You didn’t see him on the street.” Lexy’s neon green eyes stared
at Dana. She added, softly, “Why did you lie?”

It had been a snap to mislead Oliphant, but Lexy was her friend
and priest and knew her better than anyone except David.

“Why did you come here? How did you even know where he
lives?”

“A picture-“

“You’re lying.”

“Is there a problem?” Oliphant asked from across the room,
where he was talking to a man taking photographs of the apartment
and blood splatters.

“We’re both upset,” Dana said, as if anyone in the room needed
to be told.

Oliphant turned back to the photographer.

“Dana, for the love of God, my brother’s dead. If you know why,
you have to tell me.”

Dana stood up.

“You know,” Lexy whispered, wide-eyed. “You know.”

I know. I know.

Dana heard David’s car in the driveway and pretended to be
asleep. Sometimes she pretended so convincingly-her eyes closed,
each breath deep and even-that she woke in the morning having
slept the night through. But method acting would not work tonight.
She would not sleep, had no right to sleep.

She had known Micah was unstable, but he was so full of life
when they were together that if someone had suggested he would
one day put a bullet in his brain she would have said it was impossible. Now, too late, she remembered what Lexy had told her years
before. Micah’s depressive disease had been severe. Twice he had
been hospitalized, once for violent behavior. In high school he had
often talked about suicide. He never stayed long on his medication,
claiming it dulled the edge of his creativity. He’d never had a sustained relationship with a woman.

She remembered all this now. When she met Micah and fell tumbling into his dream of love and let it seal around them and make a
closed world impervious to reality and subject only to the laws of
passion and impulse, the Micah she knew every day had been so
vital that he drove out everything Lexy had told her.

And when his dreamworld no longer suited her, she had hacked
her way out of it and come home to safe San Diego.

On the dreary flight from Italy she had sworn to expunge Micah
from her thoughts. If she could do that, she would be safe. David
would never know she had been unfaithful, and for her, too, it would
eventually seem that the affair never happened. The details would
fade, as details always did.

She cringed as she recalled how confident she had been that she
could erase what was inconvenient to remember.

Imogene had called her willful, as if it were a flaw in her person ality. Until now Dana had seen it as strength. In her efforts to forget
Micah and pretend their affair never happened, she had been more
successful than even she would have believed possible. When she
didn’t talk about Micah, Lexy had assumed they didn’t get along
and left it at that, though she was perplexed. She told David that
Micah was a nice guy, but kind of peculiar. David said what did she
expect:’ He was an artist.

Micah had sent passionate letters, and at first she thought it
would not hurt to read them; but his threats and pleas and fervid
declarations only made her miserable and more aware of how narrowly she had avoided a ruinous mistake and more determined to
obliterate him and Florence from her memory.

No wonder she didn’t want to work on her thesis.

She had burned his last two letters in the barbeque, unopened.
She had willed herself to forget everything about Micah.

Now, lying in bed, she kept hearing Lexy’s words. You know.
You know.

She had been careless and cruel, and, yes, she did know why
Micah shot himself, but she would never tell Lexy, because then
David would have to know.

The man asleep beside her was capable of the most intense and
complicated legal thinking, and his compassion ran broad and
deep. But his thoughts about loyalty and honor were as black-andwhite as those of a knight in medieval times.

She slipped out of bed and into her running clothes. Outside,
she sat on the edge of the deck and laced up her Nikes. After midnight in the middle of the week the streets were silent except for the
occasional yip of a coyote and the yowls of a pair of cats facing off
under a parked car. She felt safe in Mission Hills at any hour of the
day, but she avoided the unlighted park and ran along the sidewalk
to the end of Miranda Street, where she turned up toward the lights of Fort Stockton Boulevard. All along the way, like spectators at a
race, blue and black trash cans were lined up at the curb for emptying the next morning.