An Unexpected Grace

by Kristin von Kreisler

  “You dating anybody?” Adam asked.

  “No.” As Lila rested her arms on the table, she decided to go ahead and lay her relationship with Reed facedown in the street to writhe around in all its blood and gore: “I lived with a man for a long time. We split up six months ago.”

  “What happened?”

  Squirm. “I found out he had another girlfriend.”

  “Sounds like a winner.”

  “I’d been thinking about breaking up for a long time. She just forced the issue,” Lila said. “But I hate to tell you—most men are jerks. If they don’t cheat on you, they shoot you.”

  “Whoa! Does ‘sweeping generalization’ mean anything to you?” Adam asked.

  “I’m right, though.”

  “I’ll bet on some distant island in the middle of nowhere you could find one decent man.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Women aren’t always perfect, either. I lived with a compulsive shopper for five years. I broke up with her because I didn’t want to be in debt for the rest of my life.”

  “Very wise of you.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Something must have drawn you to her, though.”

  “She was pretty, fun, smart. She was always interviewing interesting people. If she hadn’t been so irresponsible, she’d have been great.”

  Lila wondered how Adam would compare the girlfriend to her. At least they’d gotten their dismal pasts out of the way.

  The waiter set their lunches on the table in a paper bag, which was a clean and honest white.

  Adam picked it up. “Let’s go.”

  At the Pet Stop, Albert Wu was washing his front window with a squeegee like you find at gas stations, a sponge on one side and a rubber blade on the other. He dunked the squeegee into a bucket of soapy gray water and smeared it around on the glass. Outside in the sunlight, his beaver toupee looked exhausted, like it had built one dam too many. Albert wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his shirtsleeve.

  “We’re looking for a treat for Grace,” Adam said.

  Albert smiled so his face crinkled. “Check out the bin by the counter. We’ve got rawhides, all kinds of biscuits, anything a dog could want.” Albert wiped his squeegee’s sponge across the glass again.

  Inside, Adam held a desiccated pig’s ear out toward Grace. She sniffed it with ebullience.

  Lila screwed up her face. “You can’t give her that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I feel sorry for the pig.”

  “You can see Grace loves it. You need to give dogs what they like.”

  Normally, Lila would have argued with Adam, but he’d been so right about the dog park that she gave in with a wince.

  Magnolia, Albert’s cockatiel, let out a piercing screech.

  Adam went to her perch and stroked her chest. She cocked her head and peered at him sideways. “Bad day, bird?”

  Lila smiled.

  “You’re prettier when you do that,” Adam told her.

  “Do what?”

  “When you smile. You seem more approachable.”

  “Thanks.” Lila wasn’t sure how approachable she wanted to be. If her heart had been a piece of paper, it would have had something fluttery, like “eeeeek,” written on it.

  The Unitarian Universalist Church looked like a giant rowboat turned upside down. Around its stern was a brick wall; Adam said he’d looked over it by chance and discovered the garden, whose entrance was a gate of iron swoops and curlicues that would have made an interesting painting.

  He led Lila and Grace down a gravel path to a wooden bench under an apple tree. The garden was like Eden minus the snake. Fig and pear trees were starting to bear fruit next to the walls, and lavender and roses grew in beds. In one corner was a sundial on a stone pedestal; in another, an Ionic-column fountain, dripping water from its capital into a mossy pool. Inside the church, someone was practicing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “the land of the free” traveled, forte, through the air.

  Lila unhooked Grace’s leash, and she plopped down on the gravel. Adam handed her the pig’s ear, which she took with an ecstatic chomp. He sat on the bench, and they unwrapped their sandwiches in the same companionable quiet as when they’d bathed Grace.

  “Why don’t you have a dog?” Lila asked.

  “Used to. A blond Lab kind of like the dog at the park. Named Hubble. He died a few years ago.”

  “Why haven’t you gotten another dog?”

  “I wanted Grace, remember?”

  “Are you ever going to forgive me?”

  “The jury’s still out.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “I want to see you grovel.” Adam smiled.

  Lila smiled too, even if it did make her look approachable.

  When they finished their sandwiches, they wadded up the paper wrappers and put them and the empty water bottles into the bag.

  Adam threw it into a garbage can behind a camellia bush. “Know how this sundial works?”

  “Not really.”

  “Okay, when the earth turns on its axis, the sun seems like it’s moving across the sky.”

  “Right.”

  “So the sun casts a shadow from this iron stick. The shadow points at the time.” Adam rested his finger between Roman numerals I and II, etched in the stone around the dial’s base. “For the time to be accurate, you have to set the sundial right for your latitude and aim it directly north. But that’s not hard to do. I made one of these in Boy Scouts.”

  “You were a Boy Scout?”

  “On my honor.” Adam sat back down and rested his elbows on his knees. “When I lecture about sundials, I hand out a page of maxims.”

  “Like what?”

  “Time and tide wait for no man.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Okay, try ‘Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.’ ”

  Lila leaned down and patted Grace’s golden haunch. “Time can change things; that’s for sure.”

  Lila and Adam walked home slowly because Grace was worn out. Panting and looking wilted, she plodded along, dragged her paws, and occasionally scraped her toenails on the asphalt. Though she no longer wore her cow costume, Adam gently encouraged her, “Git along, little dogie,” and he told her that she and Taurus, the bull in the sky, could get together and produce golden stars. He told Lila about the Hyades, which form Taurus’s face, and the Pleiades, which shine from his shoulder.

  At the front door, patches of sunlight on the porch looked like Holstein markings. As Lila turned the key in the lock, she said, “I can wash Grace’s cow costume before I give it back.”

  “Don’t bother. It’s just a little rumpled. Keep it in case we need to disguise her again.”

  He had a future in mind, Lila thought with a tingle. A car drove by with its radio’s bass too loud, so the music had a heartbeat thump.

  “I enjoyed our lunch,” she said.

  “I did too,” Adam said. “I asked you out today, so now it’s your turn. Call me if you want to get together.”

  Errrch. Call you?! Stick out my neck that far? Calling him would be so different from accepting his invitation.

  For the rest of the afternoon Grace sat at the front door, staring through the glass like she wanted Adam to come back. Lila didn’t know what she wanted anymore.

  26

  At the kitchen table after breakfast, Lila turned the pages of Columbine: The Story of a Rampage. Grace, on her early morning patrol, was rustling through ferns and lecturing blue jays behind the house. Ever since Adam had taken her to the dog park, she wanted to roam the yard and explore the blackberry patches, the creek bed, and anything that cast a shadow or snapped a twig. Adam would have been pleased at her new confidence and spirit of adventure.

  In the past month, he’d often come to Lila’s mind. She’d remembered the Peruvian nuns, Grace’s cow costume, and his gentleness helping her from the shower. But those pluses had not been enough to can
cel the threatening minus of calling him and suggesting they get together. Whenever she considered it, self-preservation won over risk, and she snapped her clamshell shut.

  There were better things to do than brood about making the next move toward Adam when she wasn’t sure she was up to a relationship with any man. Lately, she’d painted a dentist’s office door with a fleur-de-lis-shaped peephole, a Victorian house’s door with a lace curtain over the oval window, and a Safeway door with posters for lost dogs taped to the glass. Each week she and Grace had gone to see Betsy, and nearly every day Lila had taken Grace to the dog park, where she retrieved her tennis ball and strengthened her leg.

  In the past few weeks, Lila had also finished calling the Bay Area Makovs, and then she contacted all the California ones listed on whitepages.com. Finding no one who knew Yuri, she Googled “Makov” and pored through thousands of citations. Makov was a common name, and the Makovs were a varied lot. Louis Makov had written books on the police, of all things. Jonni Makov was a punk drummer in a Czech rock band, and Pavel Makov was president of a Peoria bank. Lubov Makov, an engineer, had published The Microwave Anisotropy Probe Control System. Arthur Makov was a quarterback for the Texas Aggies. Sergei Makov was a Russian bishop, and on Facebook, Helge Makov’s spaghetti straps slid off her teenage shoulders, exposing tops of breasts that looked like ski jumps.

  None of those Makovs got Lila closer to Yuri, however, and her frustration drove her to the library, where she checked out the Columbine book. She wondered if the same malicious urge that drove Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to shoot up a school might have driven Yuri Makov to go postal. But now as she finished the book’s first chapter, she had more questions than answers.

  In a year Harris and Klebold had built a hundred bombs, which they intended to detonate at Columbine High School; then they would shoot surviving students as they ran for their lives. Lila wondered if Yuri had carefully planned what he was going to do, or if one morning he’d tossed off his covers, climbed out of bed, and in a flash of evil decided to kill people. Or maybe in all those months as he’d quietly vacuumed and dusted Weatherby offices, he’d been suppressing a volcano and waiting for the right morning to let the lava flow. Lila wished she could climb into his brain and discern: spontaneity or premeditation ?

  Harris and Klebold had shot themselves, just as Yuri had. Lila tried to put herself in his place as he lifted the gun to his temple and curled his finger around the trigger. Was he sweating? Icy? Hesitant? Remorseful? Afraid? Relieved that he was free to move on? Did he just shoot himself in a crazed reflex without thought or feeling?

  Lila wanted Yuri to have begged God for forgiveness at the end, but, more likely, suicide had been a way to shield himself from facing consequences, a cowardly act to avoid his victims’ and their families’ hate. He may have thought dying by his own hand was better than an executioner strapping him to a table and injecting him with a lethal drug, and he might have wanted his death over with sooner rather than later, and on his own terms. Or he could have seen it like stepping off a cliff into an abyss. How could Lila know?

  She wasn’t much closer to knowing Yuri’s motive, either. The chapter made clear that Harris and Klebold had sought revenge against other students’ slights and snubs. “I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things,” Harris, described as a cold-blooded psychopath, had written in his journal. Depression and anxiety were said to have driven Klebold, who had once referred to himself as a “god of sadness.”

  A study in the book concluded that most school shooters had feelings like Harris’s and Klebold’s. The students were depressed or coping with losses and failures, and seventy-one percent felt bullied, persecuted, or shunned. To fight back, the students killed out of rage, just as Dr. Leibowitz had claimed on TV that people going postal did. So Lila was back full circle to anger—and its relative, depression, which was said to be anger turned inward.

  She stared out the window at Grace, thrashing through a patch of vinca, and at an English laurel, which deer had eaten back to naked stems. But Lila hardly saw Grace or the bush because she was mentally standing up to Yuri and trying to get back her power. What were you doing? she demanded of him. Without averting her eyes, she stared him down.

  Imagining his face, she couldn’t see anger. Not in his dark eyes or set jaw. Not in his look of concentration as he brushed a feather duster over bookshelves and computers. Not even in his aloofness, which may have been a defense against being looked down on as an immigrant and janitor. Maybe he’d dressed better than other Weatherby employees to tell them he was better than they were.

  Had he used indifference to hide feeling hurt or alone? Who in the office might have snubbed him as students had snubbed Harris and Klebold?

  Suddenly, Lila pictured who. Yuri might have thought she had. Her stomach felt like it had been thrown from a skyscraper window.

  One evening Yuri had been grooming a schefflera in the lobby near the desk of Emily, whom he later killed. She’d left for the day, as had nearly everyone in the office. Lila had stayed because Cristina was going to drive her home after working late.

  Lila walked by Yuri, who, as usual, might have just stepped out of a Macy’s catalogue on his way to a casual dinner, in corduroy slacks, a V-necked sweater, and a shirt with a button-down collar. Though he seemed absorbed in his snipping, he looked up as Lila passed, and he beamed. He seemed like he’d purposely waited for her—a benign spider hoping for a friendly fly.

  “Hello!” he said.

  “Hi.” Lila pressed the elevator button.

  In the longest second in recorded history, silence crawled between them with an arm and leg tied behind its back.

  Wanting no one to feel awkward, Lila’s Pleaser jumped in. “You’re doing a good job with that plant.”

  Yuri held out a schefflera branch as if he were about to lead it to a dance floor. “Grow . . . good.”

  “Yes. You’re helping it.” Anyone could tell he was sensitive to greenery. “Uh, you enjoy working with plants?”

  “Enjoy?” He cocked his head the way Grace did when she was trying to understand.

  “You know, you like.”

  “You.”

  Surely he couldn’t have been saying he liked Lila. Oh, God. She chose to think he meant “you” to be a question—as in “Do you like working with plants?”

  “Well, I do like plants a lot. I grew tomatoes every summer when I was a little girl,” she said.

  Where’s the elevator?

  Yuri’s lips turned up in a smile that was too eager and needy, and it felt oppressive. He seemed to want more from Lila than even her Pleaser might be willing to give.

  Still, her Pleaser wanted all exchanges to go smoothly, so she smiled back, though the smile was wan.

  “I . . . happy. You here.” He pointed at the floor.

  He probably wanted Lila to say, Well, golly, I’m really glad you’re here too. What a nice way to finish the afternoon. She managed only, “Uh, well . . .”

  Just then the elevator arrived with an off-pitch bong, and, thank goodness, she could leave.

  “Good-bye,” she said.

  “Good-bye,” he said, but now his smile looked rained on.

  Lila practically hurled her body into the elevator to escape the awkwardness. Before the doors closed, she wouldn’t let her Pleaser turn around and wave an insincere good-bye. Perhaps in Yuri’s mind Lila had snubbed him—and maybe she unintentionally had. But, oh, how she wished she’d handled that uncomfortable situation better. What are you supposed to do when someone is being nice but you get a creepy feeling about it?

  Last week Lila had told Betsy that the only way she’d get over being shot was to know why it had happened. The only way out of trouble was through it, she’d said, and you got through it by understanding it and going on from there.

  “Do you have to understand? Does it really matter?” Betsy asked.

  “It does to me. I’ve been doing everything I can think of to find out.”


  “That keeps you tied to the man who shot you,” Betsy said.

  Lila hadn’t liked the sound of that. She pushed its camel’s nose out from under her mental tent back into the sandstorm. But the camel pushed his nose back.

  Grace shuffled up the steps outside the kitchen and yipped to let Lila know she wanted in. Grace’s usual energetic climb had seemed slow, and through the French door’s glass, her face looked troubled.

  Lila set Columbine aside, got up, and opened the door. “Whatsamatter, Grace?”

  When Grace looked up, the whites below her pupils formed the beseeching crescent moons she’d presented in her early, ul-traneedy days. The fur on her right front paw was dark and wet.

  “Been jumping up to drink out of the birdbath again?” Lila asked as Grace limped inside.

  Lila turned to close the door behind her. Fuzzy-edged red smears marked the stairs from the yard. As Grace walked across the kitchen floor, she left bloody paw prints like the muddy ones she’d left when Lila had first known her. Lila’s knees started knocking together.

  27

  Lila grabbed her purse and Grace’s leash and hurried to the door. For Grace’s sake, Lila tried to act like all was well and blood was no worry. But her stomach was tied in a hitch knot. She was trembling when she told Grace to come. As she hobbled a couple of steps, pain showed in her eyes. To spare her, Lila would have gladly taken the pain, quadrupled.

  Even if Lila’s arm had not been injured, she could not have carried Grace. So Lila slowly coaxed her through the kitchen to the garage. Each time Grace put weight on her right paw, she flinched. Still, she kept going because Lila asked her to. “You’re such a good, brave dog,” Lila said.

  When they got to the Volvo, Lila covered the front passenger seat with blankets. She urged Grace to put her front paws on the seat so Lila could push her from behind. But lifting her hurt paw must have asked too much. Grace stood there, staring ahead with glazed eyes. Lila gently nudged her to make sure she understood what she should do, but she whimpered and did not move.