Blood Orange

by Drusilla Campbell

  “She can wait-“

  “Dana, why can’t you for once just say okay?” His smile never reached his eyes. “Just try it: `Sure, David, happy to help out.”’

  “I don’t even want Bailey in the car with Marsha Filmore.”

  “Yeah, but you let her babysit last night.” He sighed and patted his mouth with his tightened fist. She almost heard him counting down his temper. “Whatever happened to the Number One I could go to, no matter what?”

  She wasn’t a wide receiver; she was his wife, his lying and adulterous wife. She looked away, sensing that if he looked into her eyes he would see the truth there.

  “I don’t get what’s happening to us, Dana. I feel like I barely know you anymore. I mean … are you in the game or not?”

  She closed her eyes and whispered, “In.”

  “Then start acting like it, okay?”

  A moment later she heard the garage door groan as it went up and the car backing down the driveway to the street. All at once it seemed that if he went away angry it would be like the moment when the razored edge of a steel trap slammed down on an animal. There would be no going back. The wound would never heal. The death would be a slow agony. She ran out to the driveway and grabbed hold of the half-open window on his side.

  He shifted into Neutral.

  “David, I’ll take her, of course I’ll take her. I’ll do it this afternoon. But after this case is done, promise me you won’t take any more like it. You could stick to personal injury and torts and stuff. It’s this case that’s got me acting so weird.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t blame the case, Dana, though it’s a pisser, IT grant you. What’s going wrong with us is more than that.” He twisted the plain gold band he wore on his left ring finger. “The thing about you and me, Dana, was the way we used to work together. Only now we don’t. Now we can barely have a conversation without one of us going off.” He stared at her.

  “It’s my fault.”

  “Did I say that? Didn’t I precisely say `us’?”

  “But you meant me.”

  David shifted into Reverse. “I got a big day ahead of me. If you won’t take Marsha-“

  “You weren’t listening to me. You never listen to me. I said I’d do it.”

  He closed his eyes and then opened them. “Why couldn’t you just say that in the first place? Why did we have to go through all this crap first?”

  San Diego Central jail is a multistory sandstone-colored monolith that occupies most of a block near the courts. Dana dropped Marsha at the visitors’ entrance and drove to Seaport Village, where she and Bailey browsed the tourist shops, ate ice cream, and watched the boats in San Diego Harbor. Though the sun was bright, the weather had begun to change. The wind had shifted and carried a bite of the north in its current now. Dana and Bailey, dressed in cotton slacks and long-sleeved T-shirts, were cold by the time they returned to the jail two hours later and found Marsha pacing the sidewalk, smoking. Driving home, Marsha leaned her forehead against the passenger-side window, leaving an oily smudge on the glass.

  Dana parked the car in the driveway. “You’re shivering,” she said to Marsha. “You need a heavier coat.”

  “It’s in storage.”

  The woman looked so beaten down Dana felt sympathy for her. “I’ll get it out of storage for you.”

  “It’s a mink. Full-length.”

  “In San Diego?”

  “Frank gave it to me.” She looked at Dana as if to size up her reaction to this. “I have a fox jacket, too. He gave it to me for my birthday last year.”

  “Generous.”

  “He always gives expensive gifts.” She showed Dana her Rolex in case she needed convincing.

  “Unless you’d rather get it yourself….” Dana wished she hadn’t volunteered.

  Marsha’s eyes narrowed. “Why’re you being so nice all of a sudden?”

  “You’re having a hard time.”

  “I don’t want your pity.”

  “I don’t pity you.” It was hard to say exactly what she did feel. She disliked Marsha Filmore, yet at the same time she felt an inexplicit kinship with her. She was strangely reluctant to break the connection and send her back into isolation. She asked, “Why did you go to see him?”

  “You husband said I should.”

  “He can be persuasive.”

  “He’s okay, your husband. Better’n most.”

  “If I were you, if … Frank were my husband, I’d never go near him.” She carried so many lies around with her these days that she had a powerful longing to speak her true mind. “You should file for divorce.”

  “He’s my husband.”

  “But you don’t want to see him.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You said David told you-“

  “I didn’t want to call a taxi, have the TV people follow after me.

  Dana’s face turned hot with embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I misunderstood.”

  “And, by the way, I never told your husband about babysitting. I could of said something last night, but I figured …”

  In the backseat Bailey fussed and kicked.

  “Is that the only sound she makes? Does she ever talk?”

  “Not since she was taken.”

  “Bet you’d like to see that guy hanging by the balls.”

  “No.” Dana rested her head on the steering wheel, exhausted. “Not really.”

  She got out of the car and went around to open the door behind Marsha. Bailey fiddled with the lock on her seat belt. Dana’s hands shook as she pressed the button and opened it for her. Bailey grizzled and beat on the arms of the seat with her fists.

  Marsha said, “How do you stand the noise? It’d freak me out. That Lolly, she was a fusser, too, believe me.” She followed Dana into the backyard. “We could hear her all the way inside our house, yelling and crying and whining. It was hard for Frank especially. One thing about that high IQ he’s got, he needs quiet to think. Did you know his IQ is over one hundred and fifty? The mind of a genius, it’s sensitive. He couldn’t think with Lolly making a racket.”

  Dana looked pointedly at Marsha’s belly.

  “Yeah, I know. But like I told your husband, I’m going to train this baby. She won’t make a peep unless I want her to.”

  the morning after Micah’s suicide Lexy did not get up in time to see the sun rise. She lay in bed with her eyes shut, playing a game from her childhood. So long as she kept her eyes closed, nothing that had happened the day before was real. The game hadn’t worked well when she was eight, and it was useless now. Scenes from the night before pressed down on her eyelids until they burned.

  Since seminary her morning ritual had been a comforting discipline. The words of Morning Prayer and the day’s Collect and lessons calmed the waters of her mind in all weather. But on the first day of a world without her brother, Lexy could not pray. The gears of faith did not engage. She sat in her easy chair by the window and thought about life without faith, spinning out of control into a place where nothing mattered. Not God. Not sobriety.

  Call someone. Go to a meeting.

  She got to work late. With laypeople reading the Morning Office, she told herself there was no reason to be prompt. The members of the stewardship committee filled up the chairs in the waiting room, eyes on the clock as she came in fifteen minutes late for their appointment. That was the kind of day it was.

  She had only glanced in the mirror when she left home and must have looked a wreck. The head of the committee asked her if she felt okay.

  “I had a bad night.” She wasn’t ready yet to talk about Micah. “You have to be nice to me today. No surprises.”

  The committee smiled and chuckled, reassured.

  After the meeting she sat in her chair with her feet on the windowsill and waited for the phone to ring. Maybe it was true that Micah had told Dana to come by for one of his Florence pictures, but she didn’t believe they had met on the street. It was too unlikely. Lexy knew Dana had t
rouble with the truth. This had never been an impediment to their friendship, but Lexy had known her to lie to protect herself and those she cared for, to simplify, to dismiss the truth when it was inconvenient.

  Lexy called Alana, Dorothy Wilkerson’s nurse. At the sound of her calm, kind voice, she told her about Micah.

  “I grieve for you, Lexy. A brother is a precious thing.”

  “He was on antidepressants. Stopped taking them.”

  “Oh dear,” Alana said. “You blame yourself?”

  “Of course I do. I should have tried harder-“

  Alana cleared her throat. “May I speak honestly, Lexy?”

  Why not? Be my guest. Lexy gave silent assent.

  “It was your brother’s choice, made between him and God. Beyond that, we can know nothing.”

  Lexy was crying, and Alana kindly changed the subject.

  “Her Ladyship has been asking for you. Half the time she thinks she’s done something wrong, the rest she says you don’t deserve what she pays you.”

  It was possible to laugh and cry at the same time.

  “What about pain?”

  “You know she’s not a complainer. Stoic or stubborn, I don’t know which. There’s pain in those old joints, of course. And her legs are swollen big. But mostly she just lies there, hasn’t opened her eyes in two days. She said to me this morning, `Ellen left me. Lexy left me too.’ I told her you’re coming back….”

  Lexy dreaded sitting at Dorothy Wilkerson’s bedside in the company of her present thoughts. On fashion shoots there was always confusion and contradictory directions, and she could go from morning until day’s end without concentrating on anything more pressing than a visit to the bathroom. And then Billy would arrive and whisk her away in his black Mercedes. First home for a bath and a few drinks, then to dinner with a noisy crowd, most of whom would not know a serious thought if it handed them a calling card. In her old life it was possible to go for a week without thinking about much of anything.

  On her desk she kept a photo of Micah with a mostly empty beach in the background. He had sent it from Mexico back in July. He stood beside a fruit stand piled high with mangoes and papayas blushing like schoolgirls. His dark hair curled untidily around his shirt collar; his eyes, the windows to his soul, were hidden behind wraparound sunglasses.

  For the rest of Lexy’s day, nothing went right.

  The evening meeting with the church school committee stretched a tedious thirty-seven minutes beyond its allotted hour. Lloyd Beecham, chair of the adult learning subcommittee, was saying that what St. Tom’s needed was a book group. “For lovers of fine books …”

  Lovers of fine books. Lexy doodled the words in the margin of her notebook.

  Lovers of fine books.

  Lovers.

  In a blink she understood.

  She stood and excused herself to the committee, claiming an emergency. She ignored the curious faces as she walked to her closet, got her purse and jacket, and left without further explanation. Overhead the sky was a deep navy blue against which the scudding clouds were startlingly white. A sliver of moon hid in the branches of an oak. Lexy closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath of air. Across the street the palm trees in the sidewalk strip in front of the nursery bent and rustled. She held her hand before her, astonished by how calm she suddenly felt.

  From the street Dana’s house was dark, but when Lexy walked around the back, the lighted kitchen looked welcoming. She saw Dana at the counter with a magazine open in front of her. As Lexy stepped onto the deck, Moby rushed out of the shadows and barked ferociously until he recognized her; then he wagged his stubby tail and butted his nose against her thigh.

  Dana said through the screen, “I’ve been expecting you.” She opened the door, and Lexy stepped inside. She had been in Dana’s kitchen dozens of times, but this night she felt like a stranger.

  She walked past Dana into the living room and sat in one of the padded chairs set off to the side of the fireplace. She knew how she looked: prim and unnatural with her knees pressed together and her hands folded around the strap of her handbag. Dana sat across the room on the couch. She had never regained the weight lost during Bailey’s absence. Her cheekbones and small chin had an unfamiliar sharpness, and she was pale as the wind. Dana was a careful and tidy woman. Lexy had never seen her when her hair wasn’t smooth and shiny. Except for during Bailey’s absence, she could number the times before this when she had seen her without lipstick and blush.

  “Where’s Bay?”

  “Bed.”

  “David?”

  “At work.”

  “Tell me,” Lexy said. “I need to know. Everything.”

  “It’s too … complicated. You deserve an explanation, I know that. But when I tell you …”

  “I knew there was something strange when you came back and didn’t talk about him. Before you went, I would have bet anything you’d really like each other.”

  Dana nodded. “We did.”

  “You could have told me,” Lexy said. “I wouldn’t have condemned you. You’re married, but these things happen. I know that.”

  A deep blue-green cashmere throw lay across the arm of the couch. Dana pulled it across her legs. “It didn’t end well between us. He wanted me to stay, and when I wouldn’t-I couldn’t, Lexy, you see that, I know you do. But not him. He became very angry and … hostile. I was afraid of him.”

  “You knew what he was like. I told you about the mood swings-“

  “Yes, yes, but once I met him, I forgot about everything except him.”

  “But it must have been obvious he wasn’t-“

  “Like other people?” Dana’s expression held a strange bright glow. “Lexy, I loved that he was so different. Not like any man I’d ever met. It was like I’d been climbing a ladder all my life, one foot in front of the other, never looking down, terrified that if I so much as paused, I’d fall off. And then I met Micah and he showed me there was a trapeze, and he said to grab it. He told me all I had to do was step off the ladder and I’d fly. And I did.”

  Lexy saw that Dana wanted to be understood and forgiven.

  “I flew so high I barely breathed.”

  But Lexy did not want to understand. The white collar tightened around her throat.

  “And he was always happy when we were together, Lexy. He told me he didn’t get depressed anymore. I believed him.”

  “Because you wanted to. Because it suited your purposes.”

  “It was like I wasn’t myself anymore. I know that’s not a good reason, but it’s the only way I can explain it. Not just to you, Lexy. To me, too.”

  Lexy didn’t care if Dana believed her own words. They were just an excuse. “You broke my brother. You broke his spirit, the stuff that held him together.”

  “But I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to. Yes, it was a dangerous affair, but I was the person with something to lose. I thought if anyone got hurt it would be me.”

  Lexy ran her finger between her collar and throat. “I trusted you with him. If I thought you might seduce-“

  Dana jerked back. “I didn’t seduce him.”

  “You took one look at that beautiful face and thought you’d have a fling, one week, and you’d toss off all the traces, do anything you pleased and then go home and back to being the quarterback’s wife, `the team player.’” Dana recoiled from her sarcasm, and Lexy felt a jolt of satisfaction. Land a good punch and it’s like whiskey straight from the bottle.

  “And you know what, Dana? I believe you when you say you couldn’t help yourself.” Out of her anger she felt an old cruelty rising, a cruelty she’d believed vanquished by prayer and sobriety.

  “Does David know?”

  Dana looked surprised. “Of course not. I won’t tell him for the same reason I wouldn’t stay with Micah. I love him, and I love Bailey-“

  “That’s why you fucked my brother? Because you love Bailey and David? How stupid of me. Now it all makes perfect sense.”

 
Lexy took off her collar and folded her hands around it as she held her purse.

  “So who’ve you got in your sights now? Why not Beth Gordon’s grandson? Or you could pick up a boy at the beach-“

  “Micah wasn’t a boy. He was a man, and he made choices, and I was one of his choices, and now that you know, I’m glad.”

  She did not look glad; she looked trapped and battered.

  “We both loved him, Lexy. But neither of us could have helped him.”

  “My brother is dead and it’s your fault. You can’t make that go away with words. You’re going to have to live with it the rest of your life.”

  “There are things you don’t know, Lexy.”

  “What I’m going to do is walk out of your house, and we’re not going to be friends anymore.” Lexy’s voice broke. “You know, in the church hardly anyone tells me the whole truth about things unless they’re making a confession. Mostly people want me to like them; they want the priest to be their friend, like it gives them some cachet. So they say what they think I want to hear, or they try to impress me with how saintly they are. I thought you were different. I thought you were a real friend.”

  Lexy walked to the front door and stood there. “You can’t wrap yourself up in a lie like it’s that little green blanket and expect to stay warm and cozy for the rest of your life. This is all going to catch up to you, Dana. You better make sure you tell David the truth, because if you don’t, someone else will.”

  Lexy opened the door, and Dana batted it shut with the palm of her hand. “Don’t threaten me,” she said.

  Lexy’s laugh scoured her throat. If she didn’t get out of Dana’s house she would be sick.

  “If I have to face the truth, Lexy, then so do you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Micah killed himself because he couldn’t live with what he’d done. He killed himself because he couldn’t live with his guilt. He kidnapped Bailey. I have a note to prove it.”

  ana stumbled upstairs and swallowed two sleeping pills. She did not have to pretend sleep when David got home after another late night. But just after four the next morning the sound of sprinklers going on in the park awoke her. She heard Lexy’s terrible words in her head, and she knew she would not sleep again. She slipped out of bed and into her running clothes. In the cold, gray dawn a heavy fog lay over everything. As she crossed the deck and lawn she looked up and saw the flickering white light of the television in the apartment window. She felt, reluctantly, a bond with Marsha as she imagined her sleepless as well, lighting cigarette after cigarette and thinking only God knew what terrible thoughts.