Betsy would have wanted Lila to raise her hand in that class and side with Mrs. Podolsky. Betsy would have urged Lila to add that Anne Frank’s stomach must have growled from hunger, and fear crept into her thoughts. But though the Nazis harmed her body and mind, she refused to let them victimize her spirit or diminish the quiet power of her courage.
Lila guessed everyone could make that choice to keep their power for themselves. Ultimately, not even Yuri Makov could take away her inner strength. Still, the only way she could feel like she had it back was to stand up to him—but she couldn’t shake a fist and demand an apology from a dead man.
Somehow Lila would have to confront him in her mind. But to do that, she needed answers. Since her Internet search had not yielded much fruit, Lila decided to go straight to the horse’s mouth.
15
The horse whose mouth Lila went to was Agnes Spitzmeier, Mr. Weatherby’s stern and stocky office manager, a long-toothed Clydesdale of a woman and a former Marine recruiter. Lila offered to take the bus to San Francisco to talk with her, but she insisted on coming to Cristina’s house that very afternoon. “The least I can do,” Agnes said on the phone several times. She seemed to want to make up to Lila for getting shot when she herself had not been hurt.
Lila was relieved not to go to the office. Before, it had been a cheerful place, but now it would represent tragedy. The bullet marks would be patched in the walls, the broken windows replaced, the bloodstains washed out of the carpets. But the smell of disaster would linger, and the karma would be black. Lila wanted never to face that office again. By coming to Cristina’s, Agnes was doing Lila a favor.
Agnes arrived in a tailored navy suit, a white shirt with a button-down collar, and sensible flats with rubber soles and a spit-and-polish shine. Too much hairspray made her hair look like a motorcycle helmet. She carried a boxy briefcase with snaps that twanged when opened. It was probably her purse.
When Grace set eyes on Agnes through the front door’s glass, she barked the first barks Lila had heard from her—ferocious and determined protests to run off Agnes. Lila got Grace to calm down. But as Agnes stepped into the entry, Grace refused to resume her role as a Walmart greeter. The fur on her back bristled like an agitated skunk’s stripe, and she stiffened her legs and glared.
“Be polite, Grace.” Lila gave Agnes an apologetic look. “I’m dog-sitting. She’s not mine. She’s never been protective before.”
“Looks like a nice dog.” Agnes’s voice tended more toward booming than conversing. Fearless, she extended a beefy hand for Grace to sniff.
Grace was more inclined to sniff Agnes’s ample thighs and bottom, as if she were a fire hydrant. Grace could have been patting down Agnes to decide if she could board a plane into the house.
When Lila tried to push Grace back, she wouldn’t budge. “I’m sorry.”
“No problem. I grew up on a farm with four dogs a lot more aggressive than she’ll ever be.” Agnes stooped down and gave Grace an affectionate chuck on the chin.
Grace wanted none of Agnes’s chucking. Clearly repulsed, Grace stepped back so Agnes couldn’t chuck her again, then glowered as Agnes followed Lila into the kitchen, where she poured boiling water over teabags in white mugs.
While Lila and Agnes waited for the tea to steep, they mentioned the freeway traffic and spring weather. Agnes filled her in on how people at the office were faring. Grace sat under the kitchen table and beamed huffiness with her eyes, which said in no uncertain terms, I’m not going to let you be Lila’s entire focus this afternoon, you unwelcome slug. Don’t forget for a minute that she’s mine.
Ignoring Grace, Lila put cream and sugar in Agnes’s tea and handed it to her. They carried their mugs to the living room and set them on the coffee table, under which Grace immediately crawled. Through the table’s glass top, she frowned at Agnes with resentment and watched her settle her heft onto the sofa adjacent to Lila’s chair.
“She’s sweet,” Agnes said.
As if on cue, Grace groaned her loudest, most disdainful groan and shut her eyes.
Agnes lifted her briefcase to her lap, twanged the snaps, and got out a mechanical pencil and yellow pad. She looked like she was about to take notes. “Okay, you wanted to talk about Makov.”
“I wanted to know if you had any idea why he shot everybody.”
“Why do you care?”
“I want to make sense of what happened. I need to get over it.”
“Why come to me?”
“You hired him. I thought you might have known him better than anybody in the office did.”
“That’s not true. Nobody knew him very well, at least not that I know of.”
Agnes didn’t seem to want to discuss Yuri, though she’d come to Cristina’s house to do exactly that. Something was wrong. Lila asked, “Is there any reason we shouldn’t talk about the shooting?”
“No. Not unless you’re planning to sue.”
“I’m not.” Lila’s cheeks burned. She felt as insulted as Grace had when Agnes had chucked her chin. “I’m not after money, if that’s what you mean. That was the last thing on my mind.”
Agnes gave Lila a long, hard look and apparently decided she was telling the truth. Agnes’s conciliatory smile revealed horse teeth. She took a swallow of tea and clunked her mug on the table. The noise rousted Grace, and her eyelids sprang open.
She clambered out from under the coffee table, plopped in front of Lila, and smacked her paw on her knee; clearly, she wanted Agnes to know that Lila was hers and not to be shared. When Lila brushed her paw away, she returned it and, whining, dug her nails into Lila’s skin. Grace’s eyes had lost their anti-Agnes cast and now seemed to plead, Love me! Please, please! Pay attention to me!
When will Adam Spencer come and get her? Lila’s resentment toward him filled her mind. No matter how understandably needy, Grace was annoying and out of control. “I’ll put her away, or we’ll never get a chance to talk,” Lila said.
When she grabbed Grace’s bandana, the dog whimpered, but Lila led her to the kitchen anyway. Lila closed the door, behind which Grace groaned, like she was auditioning for the melodrama The Perils of an Abject Dog.
Ignoring Grace took concentrated effort, but Lila eased back into her chair. “Sorry.”
Agnes gulped her tea as if Grace had never interrupted them. “Mr. Weatherby feels horrible about what Makov did,” she said. “What happened wasn’t Mr. Weatherby’s fault. Mine, either. We treated Makov better than he deserved. It’s all documented. We can’t be responsible for somebody going crazy.”
“Why did he go crazy? That’s all I want to know. Did anybody come to an official answer?”
“The police report was inconclusive. Maybe a shrink might have an idea, but I don’t know what it would be.”
“What about you? What do you think?”
“He was screwed up. Simple as that.”
“How?” Lila asked as Grace whined behind the kitchen door—and Lila wanted to bind her muzzle shut with baling wire.
As Agnes crossed one knee over the other, her stockings strained against her flesh. She shook her head with obvious dismay at Yuri Makov, and her jowl quivered. “Lemme tell you, his references were great. When I interviewed him, he was polite. He seemed, well . . . prissy or something. I thought he’d fuss over the office.”
On her stout fingers, Agnes counted examples of the subtle, civilizing changes Yuri had made at the firm in his first weeks on the job: He’d straightened photographs on walls, set wastebaskets out of sight behind desks, left a bowl of peach potpourri in the women’s restroom, fertilized the hall’s schefflera plant so it quit shedding leaves.
“I thought he was going to work out great, but a month or two after you started working for us, he slacked off,” she said. “He left toothpaste on the bathroom mirrors and ham scraps in the staff lounge sink’s drain. His idea of a vacuumed hall was a clean path down the middle and filth around the baseboards. The morning I found Mr. Weatherby’s trash can
overflowing, I decided Makov was being a slob on purpose. Angry about something. Passive-aggressive. Know what I mean?”
Lila nodded that she understood. “Do you think he wanted a promotion? Or a raise?”
“No, his problem was bigger than that. After the trash can, Mr. Weatherby told me to give him another chance, so I did.” Agnes’s frown made clear she’d gone along to get along with Mr. Weatherby, but she’d thought that semper fi was not in Yuri’s character.
“He showed up one day and announced ‘I not wet clean.’ He was too good for toilets and sinks. Can you believe that?” she boomed. “I offered to get him rubber gloves and a plastic apron, but that wasn’t good enough. I told him we weren’t the Soviet Union, and he wasn’t going to get a free ride here.”
“Did that make him mad?”
“He was already mad. Something was bugging him.”
“What was it?”
“Who knows?” Agnes shrugged. “You probably noticed how bad things got toward the end. The bathrooms were like nasty porta-potties at construction sites. Never saw such a mess in an office.”
Agnes explained that on the afternoon she hired a janitor to replace Yuri, she waited for him to arrive for work so she could fire him. Instead of showing up at three, as contracted, he stepped off the elevator at nearly six, wearing a dark suit, a tie patterned with fallen red leaves, and a rose boutonniere—“of all the damned things.” Agnes rolled her eyes and mocked him. “He was holding a symphony program. He’d gone to some matinee.
“Thank God he didn’t make a scene when I fired him. He got back on the elevator and left,” she said. “The next day I told Mr. Weatherby I’d send Makov’s last paycheck in the mail, and he’d never come to the office again. The impudent jackass. He thought he was better than the rest of us and the world owed him a living.”
“If he didn’t want the job, getting fired couldn’t have made him shoot a bunch of people, could it?” Lila asked.
“He had a damned chip on his shoulder. If you’d known him, you’d have seen it.”
“I knew him. Sort of.” Lila’s stomach fluttered slightly as if goldfish were swimming around and brushing her insides with their fins.
“How’d you know him?” Agnes asked.
“Oh, the same as everybody. I saw him around.”
“What did you think of him?”
“He seemed needy and shy.”
Agnes narrowed her eyes in what looked like suspicion. “How’d you ever come to that?”
Lila squirmed and searched for an answer.
One afternoon Yuri had come to her office in a tweed jacket with black suede patches on the elbows. He had smiled at her as if he liked what he saw, and that gave a small boost to her confidence, which Reed and his girlfriend had sullied.
Yuri dug lined yellow paper out of Lila’s wastebasket. “Beautiful . . . uh . . . shirt,” he said, nodding at her old Lands’ End pea-green turtleneck.
“Thanks,” she said.
He pointed at Lila’s abstract painting, leaning against the wall. “You do?”
“Yes, a few years ago.”
“Beautiful.” He gathered the last yellow paper from the wastebasket as if he were picking a daffodil. “I.” He pointed proudly to his chest. “Moscow University . . . architecture . . . study.”
“Good! Good for you!” Lila felt sorry for his talk in clumps and halts. He was obviously embarrassed about his English. Wanting to take control of the awkward situation, her Pleaser stepped in and beamed at him. “Maybe you can go to school and be an architect here.”
He nodded like he needed time to process her words. “Yes,” he finally said.
“I’m sure there are good architecture programs in San Francisco.” Lila spoke extra-slowly so he could understand.
“I . . . uh, hope.” He pronounced it “hop.” He was backing toward the open doorway. Her wastebasket’s papers were folded in his long, sensitive fingers.
“Thanks for taking my trash,” Lila said, like he’d just done her a great favor. Would my Pleaser just shut up?
“I . . . here . . . clean?”
“It’s okay. It’s clean enough.”
“Tonight . . . I good floor . . . for you.”
“Oh, just your average vacuuming would be fine.” Lila’s Pleaser smiled too broadly.
“Lady nice . . . you.” He nodded formally and backed into his dustbin, which clanged against the wall. His face clouded with shame.
Lila flinched for him. “You’re doing a good job. Thank you so much!” She said it extra-loud and with a little too much gratitude.
How could Lila describe to Agnes her initial sympathy for Yuri? What could she say about his insecurity and eagerness to connect? Their encounter had meant nothing to him, or so she told herself. It couldn’t have mattered, could it? All she’d meant was to be polite.
Lila tugged her shirt’s cuff, as if at least she could control her sleeve. “I don’t know why I got the impression Yuri was shy. I guess it’s just that he was quiet. I never picked up he’d kill anybody.”
“None of us did. Nobody saw it coming. The police said experts find the warning signs almost impossible to read.” Agnes took another gulp of tea. “You don’t know how many nights I’ve been in bed asking myself what if I’d never hired him. Or fired him.”
As Lila shrank back into her chair, she played her own secret round of the What-If Game. What if her Pleaser had been cruising the Caribbean when Yuri showed up in her office that day? What if she’d not felt sorry for him? What if she’d been a hunchbacked, knock-kneed gnome whom he never would have noticed?
“If Yuri was mad about getting fired, he’d have gone after just you and maybe Mr. Weatherby, not the rest of us,” Lila said.
“He could have been mad at me and Mr. Weatherby and gone after the rest of you to pay us back.” Agnes pressed her knuckles on her eyebrows as if she were trying to push all the tragedy out the back of her head. “I keep going over every time I talked to him and looking for something I should have seen. Getting fired must have frosted him, but we don’t know if that set him off. Nobody knows what it was.”
When Lila swallowed, the muscles in her throat were tight. The neatly wrapped package of answers she’d hoped for from Agnes receded into the distance, out of reach.
16
Lila heated leftover split pea soup for supper and set Grace’s kibble and chicken on the floor. When she didn’t cross the kitchen to eat, Lila thought perhaps she wasn’t hungry. Lila pushed her paints aside on the kitchen table and sat down for her soup. But she wasn’t hungry, either, because her mind was on Yuri Makov.
Agnes had raised two important questions without providing answers: Why had Yuri shot people after being fired from a job he didn’t want? And what had been troubling him before Agnes fired him? When Lila so badly wanted answers, not getting them was hard. A fog of unknowing darkened her thoughts as she twirled her soup spoon between her thumb and index finger.
She swallowed some soup and noticed that Grace was staring at the kitchen floor’s heater vent like she expected stray cats to leap out. That was odd. Lila got up from the table and looked through the metal grille to see what was so absorbing, but all she saw was darkness. Grace glanced at her, then returned her focus to the depths below the floor.
Lila had almost forgiven her for being a pest with Agnes. Grace probably couldn’t help being possessive after never having a decent home. If someone visited again before Adam came and got her, Lila would lock her in the bedroom. But he’d better come soon, because every day Grace seemed to feel less like a foster dog and more like a permanent resident.
She kept staring into the heater vent while Lila finished her soup and carried her bowl to the sink. She was relieved that Grace was taking a break from her new clinging-vine impersonation and seemed to have found something besides Lila to be interested in. She sloshed soap and water into the soup pot and scraped a spoon against the bottom’s crust. While Lila was cleaning the sink with a sponge, Gr
ace got up and left the room.
The paintbrush she’d set to dry on a paper towel near the dish rack was gone. All that remained was a pale gray tinge on a pucker in the paper, where the wet bristles had been resting. Needing the brush to paint that night, Lila searched the counter. Nothing. Perhaps she’d knocked the brush to the floor when making dinner, she thought. She got on her knees and looked around the sink, but there was no brush—and she began to worry.
At Lila’s high school graduation, her mother had given her the brush in an antique Chinese box. The brush was from France, made of Russian sable bristles attached to a smooth oak handle that felt like a beloved friend’s hand. When Lila shook water from the bristles, they returned to a perfect point, which encouraged the precision that had won an award for Wind Song, one of her first paintings in college. To Lila, the brush was a tool for a lifetime, a symbol of her mother’s belief in her—and it had meant all the more after her mother’s death.
That was why Lila cringed when she crawled under the kitchen table and found oak splinters scattered like matchsticks beside the gold ring that had once held the bristles in place. Now the ring was a curved metal scrap, pocked and stippled by dog teeth. The missing bristles had undoubtedly made their way down Grace’s gullet.
A lump of sadness rose in Lila’s throat. Not getting answers she’d hoped for from Agnes had been disappointing, but Grace’s destroying Lila’s prized possession was worse. Maybe it was only a material object, but losing it felt like her mother had died a second time. Lila scooped up the metal and splinters and got to her feet. “Grace! Damn you! Grace!” Lila hurried down the hall.
When she didn’t find Grace in the den, Lila went to the bedroom and lifted the bed skirt. Plastered next to the wall, Grace was resting her chin on her front paws. She blinked at Lila and knitted her eyebrows. Even Lila, who’d never been close to a dog, could read the emotion behind Grace’s expression and recognize guilt in her frown.
An Unexpected Grace Page 10