The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott (25 page)

“Don't worry, the tree will survive,” he said. “Look.”

He pointed, then. She gazed up into the branches with their high fluttering leaves catching the sun. But now the bird was gone, so what was he pointing at?
 
When she looked back down, David had already begun walking away.
 

She rushed to join him, glancing at her watch before asking, “Do you like music?”
 

He nodded. “Some.”

“Who, specifically?”

“I like Miles Davis.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Jazz. Well, that makes sense. Living in the moment? Improvising?”

“Miles was good at that. There's freedom, even within a structure, if you can open your mind to it.”

“Three or four minutes of a typical song isn't usually enough time for much of an expression, you mean.”

“It's happened, but most songs are similar because the mind prefers repetition over change. Obsession over discovery.”

“Is that why the secret to happiness is so hard to find, too?”

He looked at her almost, it seemed, in disappointment. As though everything he'd said had fallen on deaf ears. “There is no secret,” he said.

“No? Why not?”

“Because it's not something that's out there, somewhere. So it's not a journey. You're already there, and just don't know it.”

“Wow, that's a relief,” Val confessed. “I'm happy, and I don't even know it?
 
Or is this what you meant before, about my finding myself?”

“Yes.” He stopped walking and suddenly turned to take her arm, halting her in her tracks. “What's your name?”

“What?" She pivoted to free her arm, and move it behind her back.
 
Teasingly at first, but then, seeing his seriousness, allowing her feigned reaction to harden into what it had merely mimicked. "You know my name," she said.
 
"I just don't know yours.”

“And do you think of yourself as Valerie, too?”

She laughed, but in a way that felt like a deterrent. From her hidden vocabulary of defenses. “You're playing games with me, now,” she said, and started to walk on. But then he held her back with only his voice.

“How long will it be before you give it up, do you think?” he asked.

She stopped and turned, tensing. “Give what up?”

“The story telling.”

For a moment she felt frozen to the spot on which she stood. How to answer such a thing? She suddenly felt trapped by his words, and couldn't look at him directly. “Hey, everyone has a story to tell,” she heard herself say.
Except you.

“Would you know me any better if I told you my history? I told you I'm not the same person anymore."

She felt an inexplicable flush of anger, knowing her attempt at rattling him had backfired, and now she made no attempt to suppress it. Hands on her hips, she felt almost like a woman scorned, once more.
Almost
, yet somehow with a curious quality to it. Because she was aware of her reaction now, too. The scripted, theatrical aspect of it. As though part of her were watching from the sidelines as her controlling frustration and passion surfaced. Off to one side, as in a movie, horns honked on cue, and the traffic became like an endless sweep of blank faces moving toward unknown destinations. But even while these reminded her of passing hours and missed opportunities, there was also embedded within it a sense of projection beyond herself. A sense of being that driver, or that one. Off to another house, another job, another. . . s
tory.

When David finally spoke again, his unflappable serenity challenged her emotions once more. “People rarely change unless something big happens to them that unmasks their ego, and allows them to open their eyes to the world. To see the big picture. Maybe this is what needs to happen to you, so you can be free of the past as well. Have you considered this?”

She studied the path ahead, which on the one hand seemed to be leading nowhere, and yet also everywhere. She glanced at her watch again, wanting time out. But for what?
 
To
think?
 
“Listen,” she managed to say, still not looking at him. “I really do have a job to do, and it's getting late. Maybe I'll see you here again sometime, and we can continue this conversation, okay?”
 

When he didn't answer, she felt for certain that it was a lie. It was also why she avoided his eyes. Then again, maybe it had all been a lie, what he believed, too. Maybe he was deluding himself as much as her.

If only she could believe
that
.

She gave him a little wave at this thought, as she was wont to do with friends who'd outstayed their welcome. “Okay, then, goodbye for now, David,” she heard herself say.
 

Or whatever your name is.

She forced herself forward, toward the distant parking lot, quickening her pace at his silence. She felt an odd relief as each step she took widened the distance between them. When she finally glanced over her shoulder, he was nowhere to be seen. As if he had never been.
 

“That was a close call,” she whispered, before it occurred to her that talking to herself was probably even less healthy than talking to strangers.

At the realization that she wasn't merely late, she paused a moment later to compose herself at the nearest bench. She tried to imagine how she might explain her strange encounter to those at the office, and why it seemed even stranger now that he was gone. Why had she willingly missed a chance to interview a star ball player? Was it career suicide she was secretly seeking? Perhaps she could claim that it had been an enigma, like chancing upon a black hole in deep space--a singularity whose gravity had attracted her just before she'd managed to escape being pulled into the unknown. Or if she waited long enough, maybe David would make the complete circle around the golf course, and return to complete the mystery. Then she wouldn't have to explain it to anyone at all,
including
herself.

She waited, but when he did not return, a sense of loss engulfed her. It was a familiar feeling, like déjà vu, and not unlike being lost as well.

Val took an impulsive detour downtown on the way home. At first she cruised past the old Fox theater, where ornamental neon glowed beside an Italian sidewalk cafe whose tables bustled with exuberant concert goers. Next came the skeletons of those future monoliths of glass and steel that figured into the district's revitalization plans, so long stuck in the planning stage and now out of funds for completion. Feeling increasingly restless after each turn, she finally passed a gaggle of teens on the street corner, and when she spied a lone girl sitting atop a battered picnic table at the rear of a closed bar off Congress street, she abruptly braked, parked, and got out. She walked purposefully toward the girl, yet felt the effort. The resistance.

She's lost,
came her first thought.
just like me.

The girl appeared to be wearing a long black coat, like a duster seen in old western films. The closer Val got, though, the lighter in weight the material appeared to be. Dark, yet without the stiffness of leather. Her shoes too were black, with thick soles and high lace ups. Mock boots in military style, the girl's footwear matched a severe buzz cut that resembled an attempted Mohawk, but with the sides grown partly back and tinted orange. The impression was of a persona constructed on whim, subject to the vagaries of mood. Only her deep-set cobalt blue eyes, luminous and accentuated by purple eye shadow, seemed insistently candid, their whites as pure as chalk. Attentive and receptive, the soul soon revealed in those eyes possessed a fleeting curiosity as startling as the luminous eyes of an owl whenever clouds parted for the moon.

Before Val could even speak, the enigmatic young woman stabbed out her cigarette and announced, "I don't have any tattoos, unless ya count the gargoyle on my left hip, and the flaming Harley on my right."

"I'm sorry, what?" Val responded in disconcertion.

The girl grinned with exaggerated stagecraft, tilting her head to one side, a gesture that emphasized the angular profile of her nose and chin. Then she thrust out her hand as her expression morphed in defiant constriction at her violated space. "I'm
Rikki
," she divulged. "Something I can do for you, officer?"

Val moved closer, with the intention of taking her hand. At that, the hand dropped limply away. So Val let her own arm drift back down too, and asked, "What makes you think I'm a police woman?"

"'Cause I don't have a personal banker,"
Rikki
, the Goth girl, replied.

Val smiled, tentatively.
 
"Actually, I'm a KTAT producer. Valerie Lott. The weekend show and sometimes the news."

The girl looked past her, bored at this revelation.
 
"Oh God."

"Something. . . wrong with that too?"

"Oh, no. Nothing. I mean everything. I mean, like, what's right about it?
 
Anything, honey?"
 
Rikki
looked back at her deliberately, and winked.

Honey,
Val thought.
 
A cloyingly sweet substance that could slowly smother a person. Like love. She took in a slow breath, and then sighed.
 
"No, you're right, it is just a job, really. Like selling used cars. Or paint." She pursed her lips in correction.
 
"I mean varnish."

Rikki
squinted to focus on her. Intrigued, now. "I like you," she announced, suddenly.

"What?"

"I just decided."
 
She snapped her fingers. "Sometimes it happens that way, ya know? Don't take much. Just a peek."

Val decided to mimic the gesture by snapping her own fingers in front of her own face several times, as a test. "Just like that?"

"Sure."

"Nice to be able to make a decision that quickly," Val said. "With just a peek."

"Anybody can do it. Go ahead, give it a try."

"What if it's the wrong decision?"

"Then ya learn from yer mistake."

"What have you learned so far,
Rikki
?"

Rikki
laughed at the question. "Hey, all I know is that life is what ya make it. Or haven't ya tried that? Life, I mean."

Momentarily taken aback, Val wondered aloud, "You're a Buddhist too?"

Rikki
touched a broken fingernail to the top button of her shirt. "Me? Hell, no. I'm a roller coaster girl. Why'd ya think that?"

"Met a guy at the park was a Buddhist, is why. Sounded like something he would say."

"Yeah? Well, what did
you
say?"

"'Goodbye.'"

Rikki's
eyes narrowed. A pouting look shaped her lips.

"Okay, I guess maybe I wanted something he had," Val confessed, "impossible as it was to admit at the time." She paused to reflect on her odd admission. "We connected in a way I never had before with a man. We even shared the same interests, trite as it is to say. Things I told him, I'd never told anybody else. But he just seemed so. . .I don't know. He did tell me we always think it'll be better one day.
 
Salvation, redemption. Whatever. Only nothing much really changes unless something big happens to us."

"What, ya mean like. . .
death?"

Val chuckled at the irony. "Maybe so,
Rikki
." She stopped herself, finally.
 
"By the way, did you know a girl named Sarah Collins?"

Rikki
rubbed at her temples briefly with the palms of both hands.
 
She followed this with a pause long enough to soft boil an egg. "You knew Sarah?"

Val sat opposite her, at the end of the table. Clenched one hand into a fist.
 
Looked down at it. "Not really," she admitted. "But I saw her the night she died in that tunnel.
 
She was waiting for something, or someone. And I'm wondering who."

"Why do ya care?"

"Maybe because no one else does."

"Good answer!"
Rikki
lifted one arm, suddenly expecting to be high-fived.
 
Val obliged belatedly, in surprise, but felt no sense of exhilaration at the act.
 
"Not the answer I got from the other lady, for sure,"
Rikki
added.

"Other lady?"

"Police lady."

"Oh."

"Did you talk to her too?"

"No, I talked to a male detective named Trent. Pretty routine, though."

"Ya mean like paperwork, just for the record?"

Val snapped her fingers, and smiled.

Rikki
nodded in memory. "About Sarah?
 
Like I told that cop, can't really say I knew her, either. Not much of a peek there. I mean, we shared a booth now and then over at the Grill at one or two in the morning, like after some show at the Rialto. Truth be told, though, no one really knew Sarah. Not even Sarah. She didn't talk much."