The Dogs of Babel (22 page)

“I know my wife’s voice,” I say. I’m surprised at the coldness of my tone. I take a breath and compose myself. “Anyway,” I say, “I found it on my phone bill. October twenty-third. Eleven twenty-three P.M. Eastern time. You spoke to her for forty-six minutes. Surely you can remember
something.
You can at least try.” She doesn’t say anything, so I continue. “Look, you’ve got me on the phone for five dollars a minute, and I’m not planning on hanging up until I get an answer out of you. How often does an opportunity like that come along?”

She doesn’t laugh, but when she speaks, I can hear she’s softened. “Why don’t you tell me about your wife?” she says.

And so I do. I tell her everything I can think of. I tell her about how I met Lexy; I tell her about how Lexy died. I tell her about the lonely months I’ve spent since then, unraveling clues that may not be clues at all. My work with Lorelei, the open gate, the empty yard. I have no idea how long I’ve talked, but when I finally stop, my throat is dry.

There’s a long silence after I finish talking. “Lady Arabelle,” I say. “Are you there?”

“I’m here, baby,” she says.

“So… did that help?” I say. “Did it help you remember anything about Lexy’s call?” My voice cracks. I don’t think I’ll be able to bear it if she says no.

“I think I can help you,” she says. I let out a breath that sounds like a sob. “I don’t remember the call, I have to be honest with you. I get a couple hundred calls a month, and most of them sound pretty much the same after a while. But I do keep notes.”

Notes! Oh, God, she has notes from Lexy’s phone call! I don’t trust my voice to answer her.

“I’m writing a book,” she says. “About my experiences as Lady Arabelle. Starting last fall, I’ve kept notes on every call I’ve taken. If you give me the date and time again, I can look and see what I have, and I’ll call you back.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you. I can’t tell you…”

“I know, baby,” she says.

I give her the information and my phone number, and we hang up. I’m shaking all over. I feel jubilant, and I feel afraid.

It’s full morning now, and the sun is coming through the windows. I’ve got to calm down. I’ve got to find something to occupy my mind while I wait for Lady Arabelle to call me back. I sit down to compose a “Lost Dog” ad, but as soon as I write the words “Missing: Eight-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback,” tears come to my eyes and I have to put down the pen. Instead, I go into my office and turn on my laptop. I still haven’t finished listing the books on the shelf. I stretch out on the floor in front of the bookcase and begin to list the books on the bottom two shelves.

To Have and to Hold
(Ours. It’s a book about writing your own wedding vows. We bought it before we got married.)

The Toad Not Taken: The Linguistic Value of Puns
(Mine.)

Out of the Rat Race and into the Chips
(Mine. It was written by the grandfather of a girl I dated in college. It describes how the author started his own mail-order business and was able to make lots of money and still play golf every afternoon.)

Your Fortune in Mail-Order Selling
(Mine. Same girlfriend, same grandfather.)

Exercises for a Healthy Heart
(Mine. It’s a novel that I found misshelved in the fitness section of a bookstore.)

A Handbook of Dreams
(Hers. A book on dream interpretation.)

Flesh Wounds
(Hers. A wryly funny collection of short stories.)

Papier-Mâché Arts and Crafts
(Hers.)

Put a Lid on It: Managing Your Anger
(Hers.)

Learn to Play Piano in Fourteen Days
(Mine.)

The City of One
(Mine. A futuristic sci-fi thriller.)

A History of the English Language
(Mine.)

Stone Shoes and Other Fables
(Hers.)

That’s all of them, and I still know nothing. I’m beginning to feel sleepy. I was up all night, after all. I put my head down on the carpet. It feels blessedly soft against my cheek. I close my eyes and sleep.

I dream that I come upon Lexy sitting in the kitchen, chopping an onion. In the dream, I can feel my eyes stinging from the sharp smell.

She looks up at me and smiles. “I was going to peel it,” she says. “But you can only peel so many layers before you have to cut it.”

“Lexy,” I say, “you’re alive.” But what I feel isn’t surprise or joy or wonder. I’m furious at her. I’ve never been so angry.

“I meant to call,” she says.

“You meant to call?” I say sharply. “Well, that does me a lot of good.”

Lexy laughs. “Sorry,” she says.

“You can’t just come back here,” I say. “Do you have any idea what I’ve been through? What the fuck were you thinking?” I’m shouting at her now.

“Do you want me to go?” she says, standing up from the table.

“No,” I say. “Just go back to cutting your fucking onion.”

The dream gets strange after that—there’s something else, something about how Lexy needs her body back, the body I buried. I don’t know how we’re going to get it back for her. “This is your fault,” I yell at Lexy. I’m screaming, I’m out of control. “If you hadn’t let it go in the first place, we wouldn’t have to get it back.”

I wake up with the anger still hot in my stomach. The phone is ringing. I look at it for a moment, disoriented, before picking it up.

It’s Lady Arabelle. “I found my notes,” she says. “There’s something you’re not going to want to hear.”

I take a deep breath. “I’ve got to know,” I say.

“All right, honey. Listen to me, now.” She waits a moment. I can hear her rustling through pages of notes, although I know she already knows what she’s going to say. Break down
Lady Arabelle
and what do you find?
Read
and
bleed.Lay bare.

“Your wife,” Lady Arabelle says. “She was pregnant.”

I’m silent for a long time. When I finally speak, my voice sounds very far away.

“Yes,” I say. “I know.”

I
didn’t know before she died. She never told me herself. It showed up in the autopsy, of course; Detective Stack called to give me the news. She was two months along. But I knew even before that. I had found a scrap of paper, a corner of cardboard from a box that had contained a home pregnancy test. I didn’t find the test itself; she was careful to get rid of that. But in the bathroom trash—I’ll admit now that in those first days, I tore apart the house looking for hints as to what had happened, I went through every piece of lint on the carpet and every soggy, coffee-stained envelope in the garbage—and in the bathroom trash, underneath the tissues and cotton swabs and tangles of minted floss, I found a scrap of pink cardboard that she must have missed. It was one of the… anomalies I found during those terrible days. One of the clues that started me down this path. The piece of cardboard had three letters on it: CLE. I didn’t recognize the lettering or the color of the cardboard as anything we had had in the house recently, so I went to the drugstore with my little pink scrap in my hand, and I walked the aisles until I found the box it matched up with. The letters were from the word “clear,” and the box contained a home pregnancy test. And I knew.

It didn’t happen in New Orleans, certainly; that’s much too early. But when? We were using birth control all along, and I don’t remember any specific incident when we thought it might have failed. I suppose I’d always had some romantic notion that when you conceived a child, there would be some cataclysm, some indication that something momentous had occurred. But there was nothing like that. I’ve looked at the calendar, using the autopsy report as my guide, and I’ve pinpointed the week when it must have happened. I can recall certain things about that week, some of them quite happy, but there was nothing special, nothing earthshaking. It was just another week in my life.

What does it change, though, to know that she was pregnant? What good does it do me? It hasn’t made things any clearer. It has only widened the circle of images at play in my mind. I’ve thought, for example, well, if she was pregnant, then she might have been dizzy. She climbed a tree for reasons I cannot fathom, but that may have made perfect sense in the moment, and she got dizzy and fell. Or hormones. Pregnant women have mood swings. A wave of despair just as she attained the highest branch. A wave of despair caused by a hormonal shift, having nothing to do with how she felt about me or her life or our child. There are so many ways it could have happened. She had not yet begun to show. Or had she? Had there been a new roundness to her that I was slow to notice? I’ve racked my brain but I can’t remember how she looked the last time I saw her naked. I can’t even remember when it was.

How we come to take these things for granted when we see them every day! There was a time when the sight of her bare body would make me lose my breath. When I couldn’t even look upon her without a wave of arousal passing through me like fire. How long had it been since I came up behind her and cupped her breasts in my palms? How long since the sight of her stepping out of the shower had begun to seem commonplace? My body singing at the sight of her. It’s not that we were making love less frequently than before—well, of course, it was a little less frequent than it had been in those early, heady days. Who can maintain such constant passion for more than the first year or so? But sex was no longer the underlying current of everything we did. Did she notice that? Did she feel I no longer loved her as well as I could? Did she feel rejected? Had my lust for her fallen too far into the background, become too much the wallpaper of our lives and not enough the centerpiece? Oh, God, oh, God, did she think I no longer found her beautiful? Did she worry about the changes a baby would write on her body? No. She wasn’t that petty, that insecure. What, then? What did I do and what did I neglect to do? How did I fail her? How many different ways? In what way am I to blame—I know I must be, the problem is figuring out the details of my failure. The problem is explaining it in a way I can understand. Perhaps even Lexy couldn’t have done that.

Lady Arabelle’s notes aren’t able to tell me much more. The rest of our conversation focuses on the tarot card reading she did for Lexy.

“I do a ten-card tarot reading,” she says, “in a Celtic cross spread. Do you know anything about tarot cards?”

“No,” I say.

“Well, in a reading, I lay out ten cards, and each one has a specific role in the reading. Taken all together, the cards give me a picture of a particular moment in a person’s life, you see? And I can look at the spread and get an idea of what paths this person might take from here. I’m not telling the future, you understand. The future isn’t fixed in place. It all depends on what actions you choose to take from this moment we’re looking at right now. And the cards can help determine the best course of action. You got that, honey?”

“Okay,” I say. “Yes.”

“All right. Now with your wife, the first card I laid out was the Magician.”

“The magician?” I say. I’m looking around for a piece of paper to write this down.

“That’s right. The Magician card was in the Significator position, which is the position that represents the overall place your wife was in her life the night she called.”

“That sounds important,” I say.

“Well, sure,” she says. “They’re all important. They all work together. For the Magician to appear in this space, it means that your wife was in a position to control what was going to happen to her. The Magician represents unexplored potential, you see, he represents opportunities and possibilities. And your wife had the power to follow those opportunities. She was in control of her world.”

“Okay,” I say. “That sounds good.”

“Now the second card, that’s the Crossing card. This is the card that indicates the basic problem the seeker—that would be your wife—is facing. In this reading, that card was the Lovers.”

“All right,” I say, writing it down.

“The Lovers card indicates a choice, a very important choice that has to be made. The decision you make is going to affect the course of your life. There are conflicting forces at work, and you have to look carefully at the implications of your decision. Okay, now, the third card is the Crowning card. That represents the overall situation hanging over the person’s head at this particular moment. For your wife, this card was the Page of Cups, which indicates that she had received some news. Usually it’s news of a birth, or a new start. I took that to be the baby.”

“Yes,” I say. “I’m sure that’s right.”

“The fourth card is the Base of the Matter. That shows you what’s really at the root of the current situation. For her, it was the Ace of Wands, but it was reversed.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the card came up upside down, so it has a slightly different meaning than it would otherwise. Usually, the Ace of Wands means a new beginning—again, sometimes a birth or sometimes just a new business undertaking or something like that—but when it’s reversed, it means that this new beginning wasn’t well thought out. The circumstances aren’t right, and the seeker might not succeed in the undertaking. Or it could mean that she could succeed, but she doesn’t have the confidence to find out.”

“How did she take it when you told her that?”

“I’m afraid that’s not in my notes, sweetheart. But I don’t think she took it badly. I’m sure I would have played up the positive aspect, that if she believed in herself, she’d do okay. I’m sure I would have told her that.”

“Okay,” I say. This is all starting to run together in my mind. It all sounds so weighty, but I don’t know what to make of any of it. I write it down dutifully. The fifth card, she tells me, represents past influences, and in Lexy’s reading it was the Six of Cups; apparently, it has something to do with looking back on happy memories, but beyond that, the significance is lost on me. I shake my head to clear it and resolve to listen more carefully.