Blood Orange

by Drusilla Campbell

  “Are you listening to me?” Dana touched his wrist. “I asked you if it would be safe having her here.”

  “Well of course it is. Do you honestly think I’d put you and Bailey in danger?”

  “No. Not on purpose.”

  “Shit, Dana, give me some credit. She’s harmless. Pitiful.”

  He sensed Dana’s mind circling, stirring up the atmosphere in the bedroom. In such a mixing bowl he would never get to sleep. There were tablets in the bathroom cabinet, but he did not like to take them. When he thought of the vials of pills in his mother’s bathroom and bedside table, he couldn’t even take an aspirin without feeling weak.

  “You’ve been mad at me since I came in the door,” he said, taking the book from her hands. She folded her arms across her chest. “What happened today?”

  “Nice of you to ask.”

  This was the way she fought, with the big chill and sarcasm and snotty back talk. She never yelled or threw things. It would be better if she did. It might help break through the wall between them.

  She shoved her extra pillows onto the floor. “My grandmother called. She needs more money this month.”

  Imogene.

  “That’s what you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “No.”

  “Did something happen today?” He sounded angry, but he wasn’t. Not very. He was just sick of the tension between them and everything being so complicated. He had a sudden flying memory of himself at ten or eleven, riding his bike, no hands, down the hill behind his uncle’s house. He wanted to feel that way again. He wanted to be happy and fearless to his toes.

  He said, “Tell me what’s up.”

  “Can you come home early tomorrow and watch Bailey? I hate to take her over there. She bangs on the piano and Grandma says it’s okay but I can tell she doesn’t mean it…. I know I’m being a bitch, David, but I get so tired. If it isn’t Bailey, it’s Grandma, and now it’s Marsha Filmore moving in.”

  It was the closest he would ever get to an apology from Dana.

  “Yeah,” he said, “it’s a bitch.” He got into bed. “Did you call Lieutenant Gary?”

  “I’ve told you, I don’t want-“

  “This isn’t about you, Dana.”

  She sat up, hugging her bent knees and glaring at him. “If you were really concerned about Bailey, you’d agree that the best thing for her is to be left alone. Why can’t you just trust that I know what I’m doing with her?”

  Sometimes she made him so angry his throat closed up.

  “I’m convinced, David, completely and totally convinced, that she wasn’t mistreated. I can’t prove it, but I sense it; really deep down I know she’s okay. But she was traumatized, and it’ll take a long time for her to come around.”

  “And talk?”

  “Of course she’ll talk. David, she gets closer every day. She plays more, she has more enthusiasm. She had a great time at Bella Luna, and tonight she sprinkled powder all over the bathroom.”

  “Being a mute is not okay, Dana.”

  “Don’t call her that.” She threw back the bedcovers and stormed into the bathroom, not turning on lights. He heard the pop of a pill vial opening. Water ran, and a moment later she came back to bed.

  “So. What about coming home to babysit? Can you do it, or shall I call Guadalupe?”

  He used to enjoy being with Bailey, just the two of them. Though she was slow and her behavior unpredictable, happiness and affection for people and animals and life in general had bubbled up in her irrepressibly. He compared the new and old Bailey; and what he felt-the mash of anger, frustration, impatience, the compulsion to find and punish her abductor-made it hard to be alone with her.

  “We could work something with Marsha where she could babysit once in a while. Could be a real plus for both of you.” As soon as he spoke he regretted his words.

  Her lips made a seam and almost disappeared inside her mouth. For the first time that he could ever remember he thought she wasn’t pretty, that he could do better. The disloyalty made him sick to his stomach. There was no one better for him than Dana, and he loved her with every neuron. He could not stand to think that their love for each other had gotten lost somewhere and that they would never be able to reassemble the scattered pieces of it. What kind of glue was there for a broken marriage?

  Lately he had been thinking about marriage. How, despite the odds against success, no couple ever thinks its marriage won’t work out. It’s never in the playbook that giddy newlyweds will end up hurting each other just by breathing. And they can’t imagine ahead how the loss of love will surprise them. It was like in a game, being taken down from behind, slammed into the turf and piled on. You feel your brain slosh around in your skull like an egg shaken in its shell, you lose sense of where and who you are, and your Osterized brain is asking, Huh? How? What did I do wrong?

  “You’re not paying attention.”

  “I am.”

  “I said I feel sorry for her, but no way do I want her babysitting. “

  She was really saying, Abandon your clients and cases and forget about the payroll at the end of the month, and come home and watch Lion King for the tenth time with a seven-year-old who won’t even talk to you.

  Allison would do it for him. He was her hero. He made the suggestion to Dana.

  “Allison’s a paralegal, David. A professional. You ask her to babysit and she’ll quit on you. And I wouldn’t blame her.”

  He laid his forearm over his eyes. They were talking about Allison and babysitting when Dana hadn’t yet given an okay to the Marsha deal, and her sleeping pill would kick in soon.

  He was drawn and quartered by the demands made of him: as a lawyer, a husband, a father, a man who cared about doing the right thing by his client, his wife, his child. He wanted to say, I love you, we love each other. He wanted to ask, Don’t we? Don’t we?

  “I’ll come home,” he said. “Four?”

  Her eyes softened.

  He said, “Promise me you’ll think about Marsha.”

  It was how the game was played. You gave up a little yardage, but if you kept your eye on the goal, you got to the end zone anyway. It took a while and wore you out, and sometimes you wondered why you bothered, but you got there eventually.

  ana knew she would eventually give in. And she knew that )David also knew it. At breakfast she said Marsha Filmore could live over the garage until the case was over. She could have said it the night before and made it easy for both of them; but they did not dance that way at their house. Dana thought all marriages must have such patterns of feint and parry, dominance and submission, the unique choreography of the relationship.

  She had not told David about the note left on her front seat. When he came home late and in a bad mood, thinking only of himself and his work, she had perversely kept silent, not wanting to share any more than the time of day with him. She wondered if she was being irrational, then decided not. There was nothing David could do about the note, and his mind was already crammed full. With a pinch of guilt she realized that knowing something he did not gave her an energizing sense of power.

  In the afternoon she spent an hour trying to make a few notes about the Nerli Altarpiece but she did not get far. She liked thinking about her thesis more than writing it. Actually, lately, she wasn’t much interested in thinking about it, either. Bailey pestered her, wanting to be held; and Moby barked at anything that moved on the street. Now, as she drove to her grandmother’s house, she thought about families and wondered if, in the Middle Ages, husbands and wives had danced around each other as they did in the twenty-first century. Maybe Tanai Nerli had gone in his carriage to San Frediano to visit his daughter because his wife was driving him around the bend and halfway to the bughouse with complaints about the servants and demands for a larger, grander palazzo. Maybe he always escaped to his daughter’s instead of staying home and fighting it out. And maybe the wife resented the daughter because of it. Or perhaps the art historians were all wrong and th
e woman in the background was Nerli’s lover, not his daughter. In the painting Lippi had captured husband and wife kneeling in the foreground, gazing at one another devotedly. But if Dana knew how to paint smiles over her anger, it was likely the Nerlis also covered their grudges and resentments. Dana did not call this lying. Without masking, marriage would be impossible.

  Or maybe it was her thinking that was cockeyed. Maybe most husbands and wives waltzed through marriage like Ginger and Fred. As usual, she could only guess at what normal was.

  The North Park business district had been shabby for as long as she could remember. The big red and blue neon hand advertising VOICE OF THE SOUL PSYCHIC READINGS had occupied the same space since Dana scooped ice cream at the Baskin-Robbins down the street. There were a few restaurants with signs in their windows advertising DISCOUNTS FOR SENIORS, bars where Happy Hour stretched from two in the afternoon until nine or ten at night, some thrift shops, and a couple of storefronts where for a fee a person could borrow against the next month’s government check. In her grandmother’s neighborhood the houses were small frame Craftsmen built in the twenties or pseudo-Spanish bungalows, barely more than cottages. Some had been gentrified, a few had expensive additions, but most were old and worn out. The owners were probably senior citizens like Imogene, surviving on fixed incomes and paying in Prop Thirteen-protected taxes a fraction of what their golden property was worth.

  A white Dodge van was parked in Imogene’s driveway. It wasn’t anything like the one that had run over Moby Doby, but, still, it was a van and it was white, and those two things were enough to encourage the voices of panic. For a few minutes Dana’s imagination ran wild with “maybes” and “what if”s.

  She drove around the block to find a parking place.

  The bungalow where Dana had lived from the age of five until she went to college was not as rundown as those on either side of it. She and David had it painted every other year and paid for a oncea-month gardener to trim the grass and groom the pink hydrangea bushes under the windows. At the edge of the porch stairs Dana paused to check the bushes for whitefly.

  Her grandmother’s voice, still strong despite her eighty-four years, came from behind the screen door. “It’s you. I didn’t know for sure you were coming.”

  Dana drew her hands back covered with a sticky white powder. She brushed them together and a cloud of bugs, like tiny white dash marks, floated upward.

  “You’ve got whiteflies.”

  “That man you send over, he’s no good. Don’t do anything but hack up my lawn with that noisy power mower.”

  “Hi, Grandma.”

  “Hi, yourself.” She held open the screen. “Come in if you’re coming” .

  Imogene’s hair was the flat black color of India ink, and she wore it in a tightly turned and sprayed pageboy. She was tall, long waisted, and not so much fat as large. “A big-boned gal,” David said. As a girl Dana had been mortified by everything about her grandmother but especially by her baggy breasts swinging side to side under the outsized man’s T-shirt she usually wore. Beneath Levi’s rolled to midcalf, her legs were pale and blue-veined. Dana still hated the way her grandmother looked, still cringed with mortification at the sight of her ridiculous clothes, her painted mouth.

  Imogene turned her cheek for Dana’s dutiful kiss.

  The kissing was new, and Dana did not like it. Up close, under a heavy dusting of rose-scented powder, her grandmother smelled stale and greasy, and although she claimed to have given up cigarettes, she smelled like smoke.

  “I don’t have long,” Dana said.

  “You never do.”

  “I brought you a check.”

  “It won’t bounce, will it? That time last February, the bank wouldn’t take it.”

  “I told you, Grandma, David had to borrow from our personal account to pay some of the office expenses.”

  “Maybe he shouldn’t be in business if he can’t pay his bills.”

  And maybe I should walk out of here and never come back. Dana slung her shoulder bag over the back of a chair and perched, glancing around at the familiar front-room furnishings. Her imagination cramped at the effort it took to see the child Imogene playing the baby grand piano that took up half the front room. She still played well, though her musical choices were peculiar: hymns and jazzy Broadway tunes. Dana dimly remembered being told that Imogene had once been a band singer, traveling across country in a bus, the only woman. Despite doubts about the truth of that story, Dana momentarily felt sorry for her grandmother’s lost dreams, whatever they were. Then she remembered waxing the piano every week, and the sound of Imogene’s voice sawing the air on Wednesday afternoons: “Elbow grease, Danita. Show some muscle.”

  “Why didn’t you bring Bailey? I like that child. I’d like half a chance to know her.”

  “She irritates you.”

  “That’s what you tell me, but I haven’t noticed it myself.”

  “She’s got a cold.” It had always been easy to lie to Imogene. “Another time.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re not eighty-four years old.” Imogene spoke of her aching hip, her stiff hands, her bad eyesight and constant indigestion. Dana tuned her out.

  In the kitchen a drawer squeaked.

  “Do you have company? I heard a drawer.”

  “Must be a ghost.”

  No more irritating woman walked the planet.

  “We have to talk about money, Grandma.”

  “Two hundred’s not so much.” Imogene eased herself into her Lazy Boy recliner with its flattened cushions and threadbare arms. A blue towel lay across the headrest. “What happened to all the cash David got when he was a quarterback?”

  “That was years ago.” And David had never been a high-advance, big-paycheck athlete. Despite high school and college stardom, he had been chosen late in the draft; his only really big bonus came as the result of a Monday-night game against the Raiders when he went in after the half and threw two touchdown passes for an upset win. Commentators still talked about that game. For a while he’d been the team and the town’s glory boy, but it had been a fluke performance, a lucky afternoon for David and the Chargers, nothing more.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t of bought that expensive Mission Hills house.”

  “This isn’t about how we spend our money.”

  “I know Mission Hills, and I wouldn’t want to live there if I couldn’t afford to.”

  Heat rose up Dana’s neck and spread out along her jawline. “Grandma, you’ve got to do better living on what you’ve got. You buy too many lottery tickets.” She made no house payments. She did not drive a car. “We can’t keep giving you extra.”

  Imogene had never given Dana anything extra. At fourteen Dana struck a deal with the owner of the ice cream shop. He paid her cash to scoop his thirty-six flavors through the dinner hour until ten, when business was always slow. She had time to study, and when she got home she stayed up half the night with her books and made the grades that got her a scholarship, first to Bishop’s School and then to Miami of Ohio.

  Dana said, “Since the start of the year-“

  “You could work for the IRS, the way you count pennies.”

  “Seems like I learned from the Queen of Cheap.”

  “Don’t start complaining.”

  Don’t complain, because it does no good; don’t complain, because, as Lexy had told her so often, it was all in the past now, and the past was just a story. It was Dana’s choice to hold on to the story or let it go.

  Let it go, let it go.

  In the kitchen the radio blared and the voice of a talk-show host sawed through the door between the rooms. As abruptly as it came on, it went off.

  “Clock radio,” Imogene said.

  Dana would not give her grandmother the satisfaction of her curiosity. She put the check on the piano. “I can’t stay, Grandma. David came home from work to watch Bailey.”

  “How is she?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “You
bend the truth, bad as your mom.”

  Dana told Imogene about the bodysurfing and Bailey’s gregarious behavior at Bella Luna.

  “That’s good news; you should be grinning ear to ear. How come you look like you’re carrying a grand piano on your back? You’ve got something on your mind, Danita. Spit it out.”

  Conversations with Imogene were always this way. She knew more and better than Dana, no matter what the subject, what the issue.

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, there was a note.”

  “Another one.”

  “Different. Not threatening this time. Just someone wanting attention. “

  “What did it say?”

  Dana told her. Don’t be afraid. I love you both.

  “Gives me gooseflesh.” Imogene rubbed the tops of her arms. “What’s the cop think?”

  “I haven’t told him yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “There hasn’t been time.”

  “Bullshit. For something like this, there’s always time.” Splaying her hands on the arms of the recliner, Imogene levered herself onto her feet. She winced and rubbed the small of her back. “Danita, what do you know that you’re not telling?”

  “If I knew something, don’t you think I’d tell Lieutenant Gary?”

  “That’s what I’m wondering.”

  Dana jerked the door open and stepped onto the porch. “I don’t have time to stand here and discuss this. David has to go back to the office.” She could not wait to get away.

  “If you were to ask me, he’s wasting his time defending that slimy s.o.b. Everyone knows he did it. He’s gonna get the gas for sure.” She tugged her denim pants down at the crotch. “Probably done plenty else, from the smarmy looks of him.”