Blood Orange

by Drusilla Campbell

  “How long do you think it’ll take for the press to find her here?” Allison asked.

  “The press?” She had been tricked. “You didn’t tell me there’d be reporters.”

  “Uh oh,” Geoff said, standing up. “Time to do the dishes.”

  “Stay where you are.” Dana stood up. “You guys have done enough.” It was a relief to escape into the house. If she had to talk to David right then, or even look at him, she would get mean; and mad as she was, she did not want to embarrass him in front of the team.

  None of them would have any peace after the cameras arrived.

  As Dana collected the dishes, Gracie said, “I hate to ruin the party, but I think we’d better get her before she calls from some street corner.”

  “She’s coming today?” Blindsided again. “But the paint won’t even be dry.”

  “She says she doesn’t care about the paint smell,” Larry said. “She just wants out of that housekeeping motel in El Cajon.”

  Dana hipped the door into the kitchen, put the dishes on the counter, and sat down at the breakfast bar. Geoff and Gracie followed her, letting the door slam behind them.

  “I can’t believe David didn’t tell you she’s coming tonight.” Geoff laid his hand on her shoulder.

  “We all assumed you knew.” Gracie sat beside Dana. “Here’s what we’ll do. For tonight we’ll get her a hotel.”

  “No.” Dana would not be the one to make David break his word. “You told her she could come, so go get her.” She looked up in time to see Gracie and Geoff exchange a glance. “What?”

  “You listen to me,” Geoff said. “If you don’t want that woman here, you just say so. This has not been a good year for you, and, personally, if you’re asking my opinion, which I know you’re not, but I’m going to give it to you anyway-“

  “The boss can be a bully,” Gracie said.

  Dana instantly and automatically rushed to his defense.

  “Who are you, anyway? Laura Bush?” Geoff said as he pulled out the stool beside her. “Gracie’s right.”

  They meant to be supportive, but their concern cut into her like a trap.

  “We all know when David wants something, he gets it.”

  “God, all the times he’s got me to work overtime when I didn’t want to.” Geoff rolled his eyes.

  Gracie said, “None of us thought it was fair to ask you to have Marsha in the apartment in the first place. We all argued against it.”

  Annoyed as Dana was, it still hurt to hear David criticized by his friends.

  At the sink she began scraping fat from the steaks into a plastic dish to sweeten Moby’s dinner. Through the kitchen windows she watched David in conversation with Larry McFarland. He tilted his head back and drank the last of his Corona, and the movement was so familiar, her eyes stung in memory of the college boy she fell in love with. He would be deeply wounded if he knew Geoff and Gracie had called him a bully. He took charge, called the plays; he was the quarterback.

  “You don’t really know him,” she said and snapped a top on the plastic dish. “He didn’t bully me. He and I, we’re a team. This is something I want to do to help the case. I honestly don’t care if she moves in today or next week. I was just caught off guard.”

  Gracie looked at Geoff. “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Okay,” Gracie said. “In that case, I’ll go get her.”

  “Me too,” Geoff said.

  They wanted to end the conversation in the kitchen and continue it in the car between themselves. For a while, as she imagined what they might be saying, Dana indulged in a fit of peevishness that stirred the sparks of her resentment and annoyance until she was angry again, not just with David now, with all of them. She was wiping the granite counters when Bailey pranced into the kitchen with each of the fingers of her right hand stuck into beer bottles.

  “That’s dirty,” Dana snapped. “Put them in the recycling and go wash your hands.”

  Bailey shook her head and grinned at Dana from between huge fingers.

  Dana felt her face redden and her pulse quicken. “Do as you’re told, Bay.” She tried to swallow back the anger. It wasn’t Bailey’s fault. It was David who was driving her crazy.

  Bailey grinned and waggled her fingers in Dana’s face.

  “Dammit to hell-“

  Bailey jerked back her hand and slammed it down against the granite counter. Three bottles shattered, and shards of glass flew onto the counter and floor. Bailey saw blood dripping from her hand and began to scream. David raced through the back door and scooped her into his arms at the same time he grabbed for a dish towel and wrapped it around her hand.

  Dana stood frozen, staring at them, then fled upstairs.

  ana opened her eyes when the gray light of morning began to Mill the bedroom. She stared at the open-beamed ceiling, feeling nothing, her mind a blank. Suddenly she remembered the night before, and as the guilt rushed in, it flattened her, squeezing air from her lungs as if she had awakened in a two-dimensional world. Beside her David turned fitfully, taking half the bedcovers with him. She would never get back to sleep. She might as well go for a run. When she came back she would apologize to David and agree with whatever he said or suggested.

  Who was she, anyway? Lately she hardly recognized herself. Organized, sensible, goal-oriented, and successful: that’s who she was. But it certainly had not been sensible to throw away the note and say nothing about it. Whoever was sending notes had taken Bailey from them. It could happen again, and maybe this time he wouldn’t bring her back.

  Dana’s strange behavior had come from the shock of the kidnapping and return; it must be a kind of post-traumatic stress. This made excellent sense. She had other symptoms: she couldn’t concentrate anymore, her mind was a sieve, she slept poorly, and her re lationship with David wasn’t good. She had suffered a massive emotional trauma. When she thought about it that way, it was a miracle she wasn’t in a rubber room.

  She walked softly down the hall, stopping at Bailey’s open door to look in. She lay on her back with her arms flung out. Dana saw the bulky white bandage on her hand and her throat closed. She had reacted to the scene with the beer bottles as thoughtlessly as Imogene once might have. Swearing to make it up to her husband and child, she went downstairs, her bare feet sticking to the hardwood floors. Moby came in from the living room and put his wet nose under her hand to get her attention. After giving him a biscuit, she walked to the sink and splashed water on her face.

  On the front steps she sat down to lace her running shoes. The air was cool and damp as she stretched out her hamstrings and quads on the brick front steps. From the next street she heard the regular thump of the Sunday paper being tossed from a car onto driveways and porches. A dog barked a halfhearted protest. In the park across the street the details of the trees and shrubs had begun to emerge gradually, like visitors from another world. A figure stood at the foot of a white-barked eucalyptus fifty meters into the park. She thought she recognized Micah’s insouciant slouch, and a thrill ran through her, followed by dread like a heavy coat on a hot day. She glanced up at the bedroom window to make sure the light was off, then jogged across the street and into the park.

  Micah straightened as she approached. He wore Levi’s and a leather jacket over a T-shirt.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Once she had thought him attractively boyish, but the half-light revealed his face to be more gaunt than she recalled and etched with fatigue. She did not remember the deep lines bracketing his mouth or the pleat of skin between his eyes.

  “I have nothing to give you. How many times do I have to say it? Why do you keep pestering me?”

  “Pestering?”

  He had last contacted her months ago, but seeing him concealed in the shadows of the park, spying on her house, she felt as if he had been tormenting her constantly and for a long time. It occurred to her that in a sense he had been, though not intentionally. Since Italy thoughts of him
had never been far beneath the surface of her mind. She had been reminded of him by Lexy, by a winning flash in the eyes of a stranger, by the sight of someone with a boyish grin or tall, slender body like his.

  “Just tell me why you’re here. What do you want from me?”

  “You know.”

  “You’re wrong. I don’t know. I thought we’d talked this through. I thought you understood me.”

  “I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t stop thinking about you….’

  “You’re off your meds, aren’t you?”

  He laughed. “You and my sister, you act like everything’s a pharmaceutical problem. I don’t need medicine.”

  “Don’t you want to be happy?”

  “I want to be alive. You make me feel alive. Not pills.”

  “It’s not fair to lay that on me. I don’t want that responsibility.”

  “You said you loved me.”

  “But I didn’t mean it the way you thought I did.”

  “Why do you lie to me? You loved me, I know it.”

  “Micah, the police patrol this park at night. You’re not supposed to be here after sundown.”

  “That’s not what bothers you.”

  She despised his satisfied air of knowing her better than she knew herself.

  He said, “You always follow the rules.”

  “That’s not the point. This isn’t about me. It’s about you leaving me alone. I know I hurt you, and if I could undo what happened, I would. But since I can’t-“

  “You wouldn’t change a thing. You say you would, but I know you better than you know yourself.”

  “This is an insane conversation.”

  “Don’t say that.” He grabbed her hand and held it pressed between his palms.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “Not as much as you’ve hurt me.”

  “Oh, God, Micah, I’m sorry. Why can’t you just believe me when I say there can’t be anything between us? Let it go, let me go for God’s sake.”

  He dropped her hand. “If you were mine I wouldn’t let you run at night.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “He doesn’t deserve you. He leaves you alone. He stays away most nights.”

  “He works.”

  “If you were mine I’d never let you out of my sight.”

  “That’s it,” she said, backing away. “I’m done. I’m going for my run now, and if you’re not gone when I get back, I’m calling the police. I will do it, Micah, I promise you. I’m going to say you’re stalking me.

  He touched her shoulder and she flinched. As he ran his fingertips down her upper arm, she thought of a sculptor stroking the clay beneath his hands, warming it into life.

  “You’re so strong, Dana. You look delicate, but you’re not. You’re tough. I always forget that about you.”

  Move, she thought. Run. She didn’t know why she was still standing there, mesmerized by his hands caressing her shoulders and up her neck into her hair.

  “If you came to Mexico sometimes no one would have to know except us. And I’d be satisfied with that, Dana. It’s not much, but I’d be okay, I wouldn’t ask for more than four or five times a month. I’d be able to work then. See, that’s the deal, I can’t work now. It’s like I’m flat all the time, but just knowing I’d see you would give me something to hope for.”

  It was pointless to argue. She had nothing to say to him that she hadn’t said before. Micah was a creature of whim and emotion, a man inured to logical arguments, one who reveled in the life of his senses.

  Hopelessly, she covered her face with her hands.

  He pulled them away, and his large dark blue eyes peered into her face. In the heat of his gaze what was hardened against him melted and spilled. Sensing this, he put his arms around her, and she did not resist but took a deep breath and, letting it out, came to rest against the familiar lines of his angular body.

  He was hard against her, and without thought her hips moved toward him. His arms tightened around her. She saw the future. Saw herself lying on the damp grass within view of the house and yet as lost as if she were both blind and deaf, abandoned in a dark land beyond rescue.

  She jerked away and stumbled backward, regaining her balance against the trunk of the eucalyptus. “I can’t be your hope, don’t make me your hope. You have to let me go.”

  “Never. As long as I live-“

  The crisp lemon scent of the tree sharpened her senses.

  “You need help. Not hope. You need to go back on your meds and see a doctor, talk to someone. Not me,” she whispered. “Not me.

  s Dana retreated from the park and crossed the street she sensed him watching her, hoping she would weaken, turn back and return to him. She tried not to run or reveal in any way how frightened she was. He might call out, and she was not sure what the sound of his voice might do to her.

  As she came around the corner of the garage she saw Marsha Filmore sitting on the top of the steps to the apartment, smoking a cigarette. She wore a huge sweatshirt and black leggings. Even pregnant, she looked thin, with skinny legs and arms and shoulders rounded like a dowager’s. In contrast, her stomach bulged as enormously as if an exercise ball had been stuck to the front of her.

  Dana stood in the shadows, watching and waiting for her body to stop shaking. Marsha lit a fresh cigarette off the burning stub of the first. Dana felt a flash of outrage on behalf of the fetus but then saw the script of despair on Marsha Filmore’s face and her disapproval became pity. It was not Marsha’s fault Frank Filmore was a monster. And in the old days plenty of women smoked during pregnancy, and their children mostly turned out fine. Dana’s own mother had used tobacco and only God knew what else.

  She opened the gate to the yard and said good morning. Then, “I’m just making coffee. Would you like a cup?” Any distraction would help break the spell of Micah.

  As she measured grounds into a filter Dana realized she was beginning something David had known she would not be able to resist. He never said he wanted her to pump this woman for information. He wouldn’t dare. But to Dana his motive was clear.

  Since when was Dana supposed to do David’s work for him? Didn’t he pay an investigator to dig up the dirt? Resentment distracted her further and burned like chronic indigestion. It seemed like she was always resentful of something these days.

  Through one of the large kitchen windows Dana watched as Marsha settled onto the redwood chaise, tilted her head back, and closed her eyes. Dana imagined Marsha had once loved Frank Filmore and perhaps had held on to that love as long as she could, but now it was gone, yet she was stuck with him. That seemed like a pretty good reason for smoking. Or maybe she loved him in spite of what he was. Maybe she couldn’t help loving him.

  Having filled the kettle, Dana had begun slicing strawberries for Bailey’s breakfast when David came downstairs. Although it was Sunday, he was dressed for work in chinos and a cotton sweater. His eyes were bruised with fatigue.

  “Did you run?” he asked.

  “It was chilly. Very fallish.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “You’re going to work?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Dana ticked her head toward the deck. “And leaving me alone with her?”

  “I’ll be back around three-thirty. The game’s at four.”

  “You’re going because you’re mad at me?”

  His expression said she had just asked a question too profoundly stupid to be acknowledged.

  A sharp retort was on her lips, but she remembered her vow to be agreeable and forced a smile instead. “I don’t know what happened to me last night.” She hated making apologies. “I just lost it.” She wondered how long he had stayed up drinking with Larry and the others. Once the sleeping pill took effect, Dana had slept through the night without waking. “First there was the stuff about the press and her moving right in, and then …” She shrugged and hoped he understood.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Translation: he was pissed.r />
  “David, please. Don’t be mean.” She whispered so that Marsha would not hear her through the open back door.

  Bailey wandered into the kitchen wearing only her underpants and a pair of bunny slippers.

  “Look at her hand,” David said. Gloved in bandage and gauze it was twice its normal size.

  “It wasn’t my fault. She hit the bottles against the sink.”

  “Why’d you make a big-“

  “Lower your voice, David. We can talk later.”

  “-deal of it? When you were a kid didn’t you ever put beer bottles on your fingers?”

  Imogene drank beer from cans.

  “Why can’t you try just a little harder, Dana? I know it’s not easy, but what the hell else do you do?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

  But of course he had. Her job description was simple: wife, mother, and team player. And right now she was failing in all three.

  He looked as if he wanted to say something else, but instead he lifted his shoulders and smiled a little-sheepishly, she thought. A smile she had once found irresistible. A man who smiled that way, she could forgive him almost anything and for a long time. Not forever, but for a long time.

  “The game’s at four,” he said.

  At four o’clock the house would be full of David’s buddies and some of their wives, women Dana knew only from Sundays in the fall. Beer, California sushi, chips and salsa; someone would bring lasagna or pizza or nachos. Football food.

  “Did you forget it’s our Sunday to host? I wrote you a note.” He gestured toward the refrigerator, where Dana saw the pink Post-it note. It had been there ten days at least, and she had stopped seeing it.

  On the deck he paused to lay his hand on Marsha’s shoulder and say something. Words of consolation and encouragement, Dana supposed. He was good at that when he wanted to be.