Orchids and Stone

by Lisa Preston

  “Look, she wants to go. Don’t be a killjoy.” Daphne clapped her hands against her thighs, beseeching the dog. “Come on, girl. Come on!”

  Grazie roused herself. After the leash snapped onto her collar, she was first out the door, crossing the street, making for the greenbelt.

  CHAPTER 4

  In the heart of the Peace Park, Vic brought up the elephant: What should they do for the old dog with failing hips? “Surgery or not?”

  The Grazie Decision, as they called it, wasn’t coming to them with grace, but they’d agreed it was not a choice to be abdicated through procrastination. They’d spent enough time considering and needed to decide whether or not to put the dog, the kids, and themselves through the hip replacement procedure. If they decided against it, they had to admit to drawing a line in the sand, making a proclamation against extending Grazie’s life a year or two, saying she wasn’t worth the expense and inconvenience. In his more reluctant moods on the subject, Vic talked about not being a bleeding heart.

  “She’s looking great tonight.” Daphne said it hoping Vic would become enthusiastic and carry them forward with a burst of determination she didn’t feel but ached for.

  “It’s over five thousand dollars.”

  “I know,” she said. “And weeks of recovery.”

  “The stairs would be out of the question for six weeks. She’d hate not being upstairs with us at bedtime.”

  “But we could always sleep in the living room for a month and a half,” Daphne finished for him. She knew the next line in the debate, too. “But the whole thing may not help all that much.”

  This was the finish they both understood.

  Vic nodded. “Plus, she’s old.”

  “Right.” Daphne scuffed a toe along the path. “But the decision’s yours.”

  This was the kind of decision-making abdication Daphne could warm to. Grazie predated her, had been Vic’s Divorce Dog, the middle-aged sweetheart he’d pulled from the pound when his wife told him to move out and he’d moved in with his father.

  Grazie had given him an enticement for the kids when their mother had them embittered, got him through putting his dad into assisted living, gave him a way to date Daphne, who’d been so wary in the beginning she wouldn’t see him at his place or hers nor anywhere that demanded they get in a car together.

  Her parents had forced such caution onto Daphne from the age of eleven.

  Never get picked up by a guy. Never get in a car with one. Never meet one somewhere he’s arranged. At the rare school-related party, never drink anything other than tap water she’d poured herself or a soda she’d opened herself, and never leave that benign drink unattended.

  You’re never safe, her dad had warned when he and her mom had taken her up to Bellingham for college. She’d winced for him, knowing he felt a father’s job was to keep his daughters safe, knowing he felt he’d failed Suzanne.

  Daphne inhaled, realized it sounded like a gasp, and cleared her throat. “Seriously, you should decide,” she told Vic, using both hands to massage Grazie’s hips, wishing they could know if the dog would choose to have surgery were she given the choice.

  Big into choices, Daphne recoiled at imposing her selection—whichever it might be—on a being as sweet and soulful as Grazie, good old Grazie, who wagged her tail in pleasure as she snuffled in the border grass and made quick, watery eye contact before inspecting a fir cone on the path. Grazie. Their Grazie.

  The grass was already dewy with nightfall. It would soak their shoes if they strayed from the park’s curving asphalt path, but Daphne meant to stray, to retrace her path from earlier in the day. With the leash in one hand and Vic holding her other hand, she led them across the grass, up the slope toward the bench near the fountain. She stiffened in the cool night, her memory and muscles sharpening as she thought of the old woman’s odd behavior.

  Had she been hiding? The memory offered more clarity than the moment had. Now Daphne could believe the old lady was hiding from the woman in black. Daphne understood her own isolation, lost in her thoughts at the time, not tuning in right away and being naturally standoffish with strangers. But the woman had been trying to hide when she had ducked into the bushes.

  “It’s our decision,” Vic said. “We are an us, a couple.”

  Such words should have melted Daphne, but nothing would thaw her tonight, not this weekend, and she shook her head. “She’s your dog.”

  “Come on. Grazie thinks she’s yours now.”

  It was true. Four years ago, Grazie had chosen Daphne to be the person she loved best. Maybe a dog rescued from the pound could form fiercer attachments than other animals. Maybe she recognized a kindred searcher. Maybe she and Grazie just found each other at the right time in their lives, at Vic’s father’s house. It had been a home of changes. Long before Daphne moved in, Vic’s dad moved out to the assisted living facility. Every other weekend the kids stayed over. In between those visits was the Wednesday night visitation—or vigil, as Daphne thought of the experience.

  The kids were jealous, she decided, of Grazie’s affection for her. The dog’s easy love chafed them just as they bristled over Vic loving Daphne.

  Looking at Vic’s profile in the low light under cloud-cloaked stars, she saw the essence of the man beside her. A good man, a guy who hadn’t gotten the cards he’d hoped for, a guy who’d been nothing but good to her. A guy with complications he made the best of, including Daphne and her quirks, including Daphne’s small, sad family, and her spiky best friend, Thea.

  Thea, who never gave Vic the slightest break or benefit of the doubt. Daphne had given him both, moved out of Thea’s apartment several years ago and into Vic’s house.

  “Don’t you want to follow the path?” he asked when Daphne led them toward the heart of the greenbelt. “How far are you going?”

  “I should go as far as it takes,” she muttered.

  “What?” He was falling behind her now. Grazie wasn’t keeping up either. Daphne yearned for glimpses of Eastpark Avenue. She pictured the waiting car, the man. The other woman saying something about embarrassment. The teenagers. The old lady looking back at her from the rear window.

  Daphne shook her head and kept cutting through the park, toward the center. She was first to the fountain. Turning her back on the cascade made her look at the bench where she’d bent over and stretched her back that afternoon. Seeing Vic walk up with Grazie was like a superimposed movie as she tried to imagine herself there in brighter light. She turned, imagining the old lady who had scurried for the ferns and shrubs before the woman in black arrived.

  “That’s where I was sitting when I first saw her. She was ducking behind those bushes.” Daphne gestured to the bench and brush before moving out.

  She cut across the park toward Eastpark, walking fast.

  Picturing the black-haired woman in the dark wool coat with her hand on the older lady’s arm, Daphne made fists, pumped her arms, and started to jog. She burst from the park where the car had idled.

  Behind her, Vic was calling encouragement to Grazie. Soon they were by Daphne’s side. He took her arm with his free hand and murmured to his dog, told her she was a good girl. Daphne stared at the street and summoned a vision of the old lady being hustled into the running vehicle.

  “Why did they take her in a car if she lived on Eastpark?”

  Vic shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s what, twenty or thirty blocks long? This is about in the middle, maybe they live at either of the far ends. It could have been a couple of miles home.”

  Daphne pointed at the pavement. “Do you think the police should have come here with me?”

  “What for?”

  “To, you know, see it.”

  “I bet they’ve seen Eastpark Avenue before.”

  After a long pause, Daphne said, “I’ll never see her again.”

  “The old lady, you’re talking about,” Vic said, his voice the careful tone of a man who’d been on this shaky ground with her a year ago, a
nd every year before.

  When Daphne didn’t answer, he called her name again. She’d been running her hands through her hair and she let her palms cover her ears, huddling forward. She gasped when a man’s hands closed over hers.

  “Isn’t this really all about Suzanne?” Vic asked as he pried her hands off her ears.

  She yanked her wrists from his grasp.

  “I know what day Sunday is,” he said.

  Her gaze searched the border of the park, the pavement, and the houses down Eastpark.

  “And I know what other anniversary comes this week,” he said, his voice full of soft sympathy. “Saturday.”

  Holding a hand up for silence, she flinched when he took her fingers in his, cupped her palm, traced her heart line, her life line.

  “Daph, I think I even know why he did it.”

  She kept her face turned away. “This isn’t about my dad.”

  “Your dad was about your sister. I know that. You know it, too.”

  “Vic …” Daphne’s voice broke. “Leave it. Leave me alone.”

  “Aw, Daph.” He rubbed the back of her neck, oozing sympathy if not empathy.

  Vic’s mother died thirty years back but from a long battle with cancer, not a sudden, criminal loss. When Daphne first told him how she lost her sister and her father, he’d explained his keen awareness of the inadequacy of sympathy, especially from one who has not experienced a similar theft of life.

  Daphne had enjoyed his quiet interest as she told him, in pieces, about her family, their losses. He’d listened, truly listened, with a distressed expression, kind murmurs, and soft questions. She’d told him how her father was sure someone had seen something, how he held onto the hope that was never fulfilled with a new lead reported to the investigators.

  She swallowed, as suspended in progress as was her sister’s cold case. “I should have done something.”

  “Back then? For your dad? For Suzanne?” When she sniffed and shook her head, he tried again. “For the old lady? I think most people would have done exactly what you did or even less.”

  “I think most people should do something,” she snapped.

  “You didn’t fail her, Daphne.” He pointed to the street, to the park behind them. “You didn’t fail here.”

  “I didn’t do anything. When someone sees something, if they act, if they speak up …” Her voice broke. She knew where the thought would take her and where it came from. Her father’s legacy—the belief that people must intervene for others—began a decade before he killed himself. Eleven-year-old Daphne heard it daily in those weeks before the worst Christmas holiday on record, those weeks when they still held desperate hope. Someone saw something. Someone should have done something.

  Vic took both her hands in his. “People can’t live their lives—no one can—dropping everything anytime there’s a stray dog, a kitten in an alley, a late-night TV commercial with a starving child.”

  “Or an old lady asking for help?”

  “And getting help, from her own daughter,” he said, his voice insistent as a lawyer in closing argument.

  “You don’t know that,” Daphne said.

  “You said the woman called her ‘mother’ and—”

  “And the old lady, the first lady, told me she wasn’t the other woman’s mother. She said ‘I’m not her mother’ in so many words.”

  “We both know what’s likely and probable.”

  “What might you have done, Vic?”

  “Daph …” He stroked her palm.

  Choking off a strangled sob, she shook his hand away. “Come up with something, some kind of answer. What in the world would you have done? What do I do next time to know I did everything?”

  He grimaced. “Maybe tell them to hang on a minute. Say you want to ensure the lady’s okay. Explain your heart’s in the right place, you understand if they feel you’re butting in, but isn’t that better than letting a stranger pass by into …”

  “Terrible danger?”

  He sighed. “Possible danger.”

  She nodded and jutted her chin forward. “M’kay. Great. Next time, that’s exactly what I’ll say.” When her face crumpled, she sank into his embrace.

  He kissed her bowed neck. “I wish I’d been here, been with you.”

  “You think it’s different for you because you’re a guy?” Her tone was more incredulous than challenging. Vic was not given to misogyny and theirs was not a relationship characterized by gender stereotypes.

  “Hell, no,” he said, massaging her large, hard bicep through her sweater. “But everything’s easier when you’re with someone.”

  “Minerva Watts!”

  “What? Who?” Vic looked around in the dark, but no one else was there. Grazie flopped down on the wet grass, her legs stiff.

  “The old lady’s name. I just remembered.” It rang clear as a dew drop now. “Minerva Watts. She told me her husband’s name, too. John, I think.”

  “But her husband wasn’t the guy in the car,” Vic said, double-checking.

  “No, no, of course not. He’s dead.”

  “Dead? Who?” Lost again, Vic reached for Daphne’s hand. “Slow down, will you?”

  “Her husband. Minerva Watts’s husband.”

  “What about him?” He tried to keep his hands on her shoulders, but she shrugged out of his embrace.

  “He’s dead,” Daphne shouted. Then, seeing Vic fold his arms across his chest, she said in a calmer tone, “What?” And she searched the ground for clues.

  “You’re getting a little wound up. Did you notice?”

  Smoothing her hair, Daphne sighed. “I just wish I’d see something here, like maybe she dropped something or, I don’t know.”

  He checked his watch and clapped his hands, rousing the dog to her feet. “Come on, Graz. Can we go home now, Daph? Okay?”

  As they recrossed the park, Daphne paused at the bench. “I’m going to call that police officer back and give him her name.”

  “Good idea.” Under her stare, he hastened to add, “Really. It’s great.”

  “But?”

  He shrugged and stayed silent.

  “But you don’t think it will change anything, do you?” She cringed at her tone, argumentative even though she too thought calling in Minerva Watts’s name would make no difference.

  “Daphne, what is it you would like changed? That people shouldn’t grow old, shouldn’t have troubles? Families shouldn’t have difficulties that spill out onto other people’s lives? Would you like no one’s life to touch a stranger’s, even for a minute?”

  She reached for his hand and they finished the walk home in silence. At their front door, Vic hugged her and told her everything would be all right.

  Daphne twisted away. “I need to give Graz her nighttime aspirin.”

  “Cool beans.” He grinned back when his phrase made Daphne smile, but she kept to herself how Thea had gone off on a tirade about his use of the expression just a week ago. “Love you. Can I go to work now?”

  “Yes.”

  He grabbed his briefcase. Instead of watching him drive away, she checked Google but found no good match for Minerva Watts in Seattle. Drumming her fingertips against her phone as she thought about the old woman, she pulled the phone book from the back of the kitchen junk drawer, but it had no listing for Minerva Watts or M. Watts.

  What had Mrs. Watts said? In her mind, Daphne stood in the park and Minerva Watts’s feeble words came back. I’m Mrs. John Watts …

  Daphne nodded with the whispery memory. She checked for J. Watts and John Watts in the phone book but got nothing. Sighing, she thumbed through the phone book’s front pages and dialed again.

  It was a one-minute conversation. The woman who answered with a quick, “Seattle Police Department,” said she’d look up the officer who’d come to Daphne’s house earlier and relay the message: the old woman said her name was Minerva Watts.

  The lack of satisfaction clouded Daphne with uncertainty.

  An
old lady asked me for help, said she was being robbed. And I … did nothing.

  How many people did nothing? How many times would it have mattered? How often might a life be saved if people made an effort and took action? If they got involved whenever there was a question, a hint of trouble.

  Wouldn’t Suzanne be alive? Someone saw something.

  And then, wouldn’t her father?

  The dreadful impossibilities made her want to get the box from under the bed upstairs so she could read words that meant the world. Lingering over those papers was an act she rarely permitted herself. The moping left her in a funk for days while her mind ran in endless spirals, but tonight she trod closer to the indulgence. Suzanne’s old poems and essays—especially the BETRAYAL paper from her unfinished school year—left Daphne fraught with confusion and wistful love.

  “You will have an even worse weekend than you’re already going to have if you get that box out,” Daphne warned herself out loud.

  She picked up her phone and texted Thea, asking her to call or come over. Now? tomrrw AM? next PM? Only wrkng half day, Daphne added, with another round of thumb-flicking before she pocketed her phone and cajoled Grazie up the stairs.

  Maybe Thea could find Minerva Watts and they could make sure the old lady was all right.

  Thea could find anyone. Daphne wanted the courage to find someone, something.

  Maybe Thea could find a particular retired homicide detective. Daphne didn’t remember him, but remembered how her father kept checking with the man for months, for years. It was after the uniformed policemen had come to the door that Christmas break when she was eleven. Remembrance left her suspended in confusion and helplessness. The funeral memories could still make her shake, wrap her arms around herself like she hugged her cold body now.

  Brushing her teeth while stripping with her free hand, she spat, rinsed, then pulled her phone from her pants. In bed, she willed Thea to call, to text, to save her. “Please?”

  Grazie wagged in response to Daphne’s plea. Sliding naked from the bed, Daphne pulled the comforter with her to cuddle the dog on the floor. Her fingers traced the edge of the cardboard box of her sister’s things behind the bed’s dust ruffle.