Blood Orange (7 page)

“Dana, I know this is rough on you, and I’m not much help. But
I’ve had hard cases before. This is nothing new.”

Except that the stakes were higher now because their lifestressful, trying, imperfect as it was but still theirs and precioushad been threatened.

“This isn’t the time for us to fall apart, Number One. We have to
make some plans.” She recognized his take-charge voice. “I want
you to check Bailey out of Phillips tomorrow. Tell the principal we’ll
be back when the case is over. She’ll understand.”

“Phillips Academy has a waiting list. Bailey’ll lose her place.”

“You explain it to the principal.” A muscle moved in his jaw.
“You can do that. Say you’re going to homeschool her for a while.”

“David, she’s a special child. She needs to be at a special school.
I can’t teach a kid like Bailey.” And Dana had a job and a thesis to
write. There was a limit to the number of extensions her advisor
could give her on it. And small as her salary was at Arts and Letters,
it helped pay interest to the credit-card usurers so the Cabots could continue to live thousands of dollars beyond their means while they
waited for the big cases to roll in.

“Bailey has friends at Phillips, and she loves riding the bus every
day.

“You used to like teaching before you decided to study art his„
tory.

“You make it sound like art’s not important. I should have
stayed with teaching, that’s what you’re saying. What I want, what I
care about, it doesn’t matter?”

“Dana, who’re you fooling? You haven’t worked on your thesis
since you got back from Italy. We spent all that money so you could
do research-“

“I don’t have enough time.”

His jaw tightened. “This isn’t about you, Dana. It’s about
Bailey’s safety. Can we just stick to the issue?”

This was the way the defense attorney/husband argued. He got
her off the subject, and she lost track of the point she had been trying to make and then said all the wrong things so that when they finally got back to the topic her confidence was gone.

“Dana, you’re the one who’s been going on-“

“I haven’t been going on about anything.”

“-about danger and risks.”

“You want me to quit work, like what I do, my life, doesn’t matter!”

“That’s crazy. I’m the one made you go to Florence to do the research. But I don’t believe you even care about getting your degree
anymore.

A passing car cast light and shadow across the bedroom ceiling.
“You don’t know anything.”

He sighed. She hated when he sighed at her.

He reached behind him and switched off the reading lamp on his side of the headboard. “If you can come up with a better plan,
great. But I’ll tell you, Dana, I’m through being the bad guy around
here.”

He fell asleep immediately while Dana tossed for another half
hour. Fighting did not seem to trouble David. It was, after all, what
he did for a living. She hated it, felt torn apart, her insides twisted.
One day she imagined her loyal and steady husband would say he
could not take it anymore, drive away and leave her alone on a
porch in the dark. Dana thought this way even though she knew no
one was less like her mother than David.

The night Dana had been abandoned, her mother had probably
been high on something. Dana remembered her taking speedboat
turns in the old Chrysler, sometimes jerking the wheel so hard Dana
flopped from side to side. No seat belt. She was five years old at the
time and already the grown-up in the family. She remembered asking her mother to slow down. Swift as a snake, the back of her
mother’s hand had swung off the steering wheel and slammed
against Dana’s mouth. Her lip burst and bled down the front of the
Dead Head T-shirt she wore. She had been quiet then, squeezed her
eyes tight, hung on to the edge of the seat, and waited for whatever
came next.

Five years old, wearing a T-shirt to her knees, standing on the
porch of an old frame bungalow on a dark city street, a bulging duffel bag beside her. Dana still remembered her mother’s last words to
her. “Ring the doorbell. Keep on until she lets you in. Tell her I can’t
take it anymore.”

ust before dawn Dana rose from bed, put on shorts and a hoodie,
and ran the twelve blocks from Miranda Street to Goldfinch,
passing unnoticed through safe and silent, sleeping Mission Hills,
with its stately Spanish colonial residences, angular, Forties-style
Hollywood mansions with carefully tended yards and pristine paths
from sidewalk to door, and classic Craftsman homes built half of
wood and half from river stones the size of footballs. A fourbedroom pale pink stucco Spanish colonial in Mission Hills proved
how far Dana had come since that night on Imogene’s front porch.
In these days of hugely inflated prices the home they could really afford would probably be three cramped bedrooms baking under a
flat roof on a treeless street in El Cajon. Dana wondered if Frank
Filmore and more of his kind were worth the neighborhood’s high
price tag.

The spring night was clear and cool, and her nose tingled with
the smell of jasmine and damp gardens. Overhead the sky glowed a
yellow-gray from the reflected city lights. On Arboles she surprised
three raccoons scrambling into a garbage can set on the street for
morning pickup. They stared at her brazenly from behind their masks. A homeless person slept on the porch of the Avignon Shop.
Embarrassed, Dana looked away too quickly to note if the figure
was male or female. She thought of her mother and wondered what
had happened to her. Margaret Bowen had been twenty-two the
night she drove off.

Dana let herself into Arts and Letters and locked the door behind her. As she did she felt a jab of alarm between her ribs and
turned around quickly, half expecting to see someone standing in
the shadowy store; but of course there was no one there. There had
never been a break-in on Goldfinch as far as Dana knew. Her knees
were doughy with adrenaline as she felt her way upstairs and into
the loft, where she turned on a small corner light and sat down.

She had just begun work on her doctorate in art history when a
professor told her that Arts and Letters had the best collection of
art books in San Diego County. Dana had seen the store dozens of
times-it was in her neighborhood, across the street from Bella
Luna, where she bought her coffee-but she had never done more
than browse the best-sellers and deeply discounted remainders on
the first floor. Once she saw the second-floor loft full of art books,
she became an habitue; and two years ago Rochelle, the shop’s eccentric English owner, had given her a key and hired her to work a
few hours every week.

She dug a dust cloth from its place lodged behind an ancient edition of Tansey’s book on the Sistine Chapel. Using a wooden step
stool to reach the top of the six-foot shelves, she dusted the heavy
books one by one as she reran her conversation last night with
David. He was right. Bailey was not safe in school when there was
someone out there making threats; keeping her home was the logical course. Thinking this, Dana felt trapped. And then ashamed.
She did not want to be the kind of woman who felt trapped at the
thought of spending more time with her child.

Margaret Bowen’s daughter.

Imogene Bowen’s granddaughter.

She lifted down and dusted a huge book of reproductions of
works by Early Renaissance Italian painters. This was Dana’s period; and someday she would buy the eight-hundred-dollar book,
but for now she was content just to look at it. She laid the heavy volume on the refectory table in the center of the loft. Turning on one
of the brass table lamps, she bent its swivel neck so a band of yellow
light fell on the pages. Then she turned to page four hundred and
thirty-six, the Nerli Altarpiece.

Just six weeks earlier Dana had been in Florence doing research
for her thesis. While she was there, Lexy’s brother, Micah Neuhaus,
who had lived in Florence for more than ten years, had taken her to
Spirito Santo to see the great painting.

In the immediate foreground pious-faced Nerli and his wife kneel
in profile facing each other. The Virgin Mary sits between them with
the baby Jesus, who is mischievously eyeing his cousin, John the
Baptist. The gilded frame holds other figures, but what interested
Dana in Early Renaissance paintings were the background scenesin this case, a village street scene and a nobleman pictured embracing a younger woman in a doorway. Scholars had determined those
figures were Nerli and his daughter. For Dana the detailed painting
opened doors into a story of ordinary lives that had nothing to do
with the sacred figures. It was the mysteries of the secular narrative
present in many early Italian masterworks that captured her imagination as nothing else in art had.

She closed the book and rested her head on her hands. She had
to find a way to do it all. Somehow. Rekindle the excitement about
her thesis; be a better, more loving wife; homeschool Bailey. It will
all work out, she told herself. There had to be a way to make it all
happen. She tried to pray, but her thoughts had frozen solid. She wondered if it made any sense to ask the God of Year One for help
in modern times. Faith and prayer must have been simpler for Tanai
Nerli and his wife.

When she was young prayer had come as easily as speech, as automatically as a language she was programmed to speak. Her grandmother had made fun of her devotion, and once she even hid Dana’s
good shoes on Sunday, but Dana went to church wearing rubber
flip-flops. No one cared what she wore at Holy Family Episcopala royal name for a storefront church that housed, as well as
Episcopalians, a congregation of Korean Methodists. In that shabby
church she belonged not simply to the congregation-that was
easy-but to something she felt in her bones but lacked the words
to describe. Years later Lexy had helped her understand that what
she’d felt was a hunger for transcendence. This soul-longing was a
gift, Lexy said.

Dana lifted her head and listened. Someone was knocking on the
door of Arts and Letters. She glanced at her watch and saw that it
was not yet six A.M., much too early for Rochelle to appear, and anyway, she was the owner and had a key. Dana turned out the lights
and sat still as the knocking continued. She heard a voice say her
name.

“David?”

“It’s me, Micah.”

Her thoughts shut down.

“Let me in, Dana.”

If she ignored him, Micah Neuhaus would bang with his fists
until the neighbors called the police. He would like nothing better
than to make a public demonstration. But if she let him in … He
was a python curled in the darkest corner of her life.

This was ridiculous. He was an adult human being, nothing like
a snake. She did not know what he was doing outside Arts and Letters, but she could guess, and it would not do. He had to leave
her alone. She stood up, rubbing her damp palms on her running
shorts, beginning to feel angry. What was he doing in San Diego?
He had no business intruding on her life this way, and she would tell
him so, and he would hear the steel in her voice and know that she
meant every word.

But her knees were jelly as she went downstairs and fumbled
with the doorknob.

He pushed past her into the dark bookstore.

In the weeks since they’d parted she had forgotten how young he
looked, though he was almost forty, not much younger than she. He
wore sandals, a pair of snug Levi’s, and a baggy black sweater. His
dark hair curled near the nape of his neck and was more untidy than
she remembered it. But the piratical gold earring was still in his left
ear, and the bruised, sensuous mouth had not changed. She remembered how his lips felt against the inside of her elbow, the pinpricks
of pleasure, the half-drunk sense of simultaneously dropping into
the center of her body and lifting out of it.

“Why are you here?”

“I saw your husband on TV.”

“How did you know I’d be here?”

“I watched you leave your house.”

“How dare you spy on me?”