by Dale, Lisa
And yet, she was living in a constant state of jumpiness—half fear, since she knew Arlen was furious with her and that he had every right to be—and half excitement, at the thought that she might see him again. At night, she dreamed he was in her bed, his arms around her as they both drifted off to sleep within sleep. And when she woke in the morning and he was gone, the pain of loss was nearly physical, as if he’d been convicted all over again.
The life they’d wanted had been snatched away from both of them by a court system gone wrong. Everybody felt bad for Arlen, wanted to help Arlen. But Eula? She was nothing more than the wife who hadn’t believed in him enough. Who hadn’t believed in her heart he was fundamentally good. The guilty verdict had ruined both their lives—but Arlen had been cleared of blame.
Some days, she made plans to go see him. Scenario after scenario flitted through her mind. She could hire a private detective, track him down. She would show up wherever he was—she always envisioned the confrontation would happen at a movie theater or a public park or some other place she could easily imagine—and she would hold her head up high and say to him, If you want me, here I am.
Sometimes in her mind he didn’t answer. He stood looking at her with his gorgeous brown eyes, soulful and forlorn. Until she stepped backward foot over foot out of her fantasy and returned to wherever she happened to be—her desk at the bank office, the grocery store, watching TV.
Other times, when she offered herself, he kept her waiting a moment, as if the decision of whether or not to forgive her hadn’t occurred to him until now. He needed a moment to watch her with hope and suspicion. And then he kissed her until they were both crying—because they were not too old, because they could still have it all, because the courts had taken everything from them, but not this.
The first scenario she could bear—the sight of Arlen walking away from her, the lonely feeling of disillusion as she came out of her dream and into the real world again. But the second fantasy—it caught her off guard. And when it did, it wrecked her. To think that he could still love her—and to know that he could not—was a torture no woman could stand.
“Let’s not talk about Arlen,” Eula said. “Let’s talk about where you want to go out to eat dinner next week.”
“Wherever it is, there won’t be any peas,” her mother said.
The Richmond coliseum on Saturday evening was so full of sights, sounds, and smells that it was almost too much for Arlen to bear all at once. Some concert was going on—thrash metal, and a band Arlen had never heard of but whose music sounded like terrible fighting cats—and now excited stragglers were milling around the sidewalks, scavenging for action or drama.
In his regulation green shirt and cotton slacks that were too heavy for the warm evening, Arlen used a metal and plastic grabber to pick up paper cups and napkins. Someone had decided it was a good idea to hand out yellow “Richmond’s hottest girls” fliers before the concert, and now they dotted the sidewalks like crumpled flowers. Some were wedged into sewer grates. He did his best to pry them out.
The church had come through for him, giving him money without asking questions and finding him a job. He liked the work. He liked the satisfaction of seeing a piece of garbage on the ground—and then seeing that it was gone. This was his third night of working at the coliseum, and he never quite knew what he was going to be doing until he got to work. His first day, his job was to amble around the concourses and clean up stuff as he saw it (he realized it was busywork, hardly work at all, but it felt good). His second day he was given a job that was more meaningful; he was loading equipment onto a truck—boxy black speakers and wires that seemed entirely mysterious and powerful. And now, his third day, he was outside in air that couldn’t quite be called fresh, watching the kids in their early-and mid-twenties stand around looking for trouble. He felt a thousand years older than they were. And he looked older too, by how he was dressed and how he stood. Yet he was only five or so years away from the oldest of them.
He worked the street, cleaning. A handful of kids at the end of the road were laughing and monkeying around on a lamppost, playing at climbing. Arlen watched them. He felt a certain territoriality over the street now that he’d cleaned it. And he didn’t like to see a bunch of hoodlums screwing around.
He made his way toward them. Though they were half in shadow, there seemed to him to be something electric and pressurized about the group. They were laughing loud, calling out to strangers across the street, punching fists in the air. Arlen lingered a few feet from them, hoping that his presence as a person who looked semiofficial might be enough to make them settle down or at the very least move on.
But it didn’t work. One kid, who wore an imbecilic winter cap despite the heat, mounted the base of the streetlamp and began to shimmy up with his two hands and feet wrapped around the pole for dear life. His friends called to him, laughing and cheering him on. Arlen walked over to the group and looked up at the kid who was by now halfway up the pole and wheezing.
“Get on down from there,” he said. “You hear me? I said get down.”
The kid slid fireman-style back to the pavement. His two feet landed at the same time, and he sprang up and sauntered toward Arlen. He was about the same size as Arlen, puffed up like a chicken and fuming. His jeans were two sizes too big. Behind the anger and testosterone in the kid’s eyes there was something wickedly, dangerously pleased.
“You don’t tell me what I can and can’t do,” he said.
Arlen laughed. “You ought to thank me. I saved you from having everybody find out that you’re not strong enough to get to the top of that pole.”
The kid tipped his head, his teeth pulled back in a sneer. “I know who you are. You’re that guy who got thrown in jail.”
“You ain’t right in the head.”
“You so totally are!” The kid turned to his friends. They were quiet now, sensing a threat. “This is that guy who just got let out of jail.”
Arlen didn’t say a word, hoping his glare was warning enough. His skin flushed with heat and his armpits itched.
“So—what—now you’re all tough?” the kid said, his arms open wide in an exaggerated shrug. “Ten years of being somebody’s bitch and you think that gives you the right to tell people what to do?”
Arlen threw down the plastic grabber and, in a blink, he had the kid up against a wall. In the back of his mind, Arlen considered that the group might try to come to the kid’s rescue—then Arlen would be outnumbered. But none of them moved.
“Listen to me”—he pulled the kid toward him, then pushed him hard against the wall—“you little piece of shit. I say get down off that pole, you get off it. And I swear to God if you want to know about being somebody’s bitch, I’ll mess you up so bad you’ll have to dig your balls out of your tonsils.”
Arlen’s teeth clenched. He didn’t care that he spit all over the kid’s face. He didn’t care that people were behind him, telling him to stop. The kid was gripping Arlen’s hands, his fingernails digging. His toes bumped Arlen’s knees.
“Let me go, man. Come on. I didn’t mean anything. Let me go.”
Arlen blinked. He saw himself looking down on the scene, saw himself holding the kid by the throat, saw people gathered in a half circle behind them. As fast as the anger came on, it vanished. And when the blood in his eyes cleared and he could look at the kid against the wall, he saw that the boy was sniveling, that he was actually much younger than Arlen had first thought, sixteen or seventeen at the most, and that tears were gathering in his eyes.
Arlen gave him a little shove. “Son of a damn bitch,” he said. He left his grabber and garbage bag on the ground, and he walked away.
Lesson Ten: The human face was designed for expression, and the human smile is especially expressive. We show smiles socially, as a kind of visual handshake. We smile to reassure. To convey understanding. To encourage. To laugh. We smile when we can’t help it, sometimes through tears.
Take two pictures of a per
son smiling: one that is a nice, normal smile and another that is the same exact smile—except for being captured just moments after a joke. You’ll know without a doubt which smile is the “real” smile (the Duchenne smile) even though the two are identical and even though you can’t put your finger on why you know what you do. A truly happy smile comes from way down within the emotions: it lights the eyes.
Smiles have a practical function too. Smiles can be seen from great distances; they’re big and recognizable. They were signals of peace from approaching tribesmen; they are still signals of peace across boardrooms and conference halls. Our smiles are banners we carry and hold high.
CHAPTER 10
Lauren’s heart pumped blood deep within her chest. Her heart was a miner that trudged down into the pits every day, rain or shine. It was the pistons and valves of an engine that operated by magic instead of gasoline. It was the heart that beat when she landed her first pirouette, when she learned to drive a car, when she daydreamed about having a child, when she closed her eyes and slept. And Lauren believed in her heart like she believed in the earth under her feet—a thing taken for granted, a thing that would not change until the end.
But in the night, in the shadows caught between Saturday and Sunday, she woke in the film of a cold sweat, the sheet twisted tight beneath her. Her heart was a berserker, warring wildly against the confines of her chest. She put her hand on her ribs, wondering if this was it—if her heart would give up now. She panicked. She hadn’t really thought her heart was in danger of stopping. Not like this. Not before she … before she …
What?
She lay awake in the faint red glow of a decades-old alarm clock, too afraid to reach for her phone. She waited, waited, hardly daring to breathe until her heart’s wrinkled beat went smooth under her fingers and she knew that when the sun rose, she would too. She comforted herself: just a minor aberration. She’d overreacted. She wasn’t going to die. But still, if she was …
She rubbed her eyes to clear her head, decided to get a glass of water from the bathroom in the hall. She splashed her face in the sink. In the mirror, the woman who looked back at her was pale with faint crow’s-feet despite an expensive skin regimen and a dedicated avoidance of the sun. She could see the past week on her skin—the days spent with Will in the hot sunshine. Last night, she’d passed out cold with her laptop open at her side.
She leaned against the sink. The frantic palpitations of her heart stopped as quickly as they came on. It beat normally now, but she minimized her movements. Just in case. All her life she’d handled stress, fatigue, pressure, and tension. She thrived on it. So what was different now?
Sometime over the last few days—when she’d been laughing with Maisie, or perhaps when she’d been digging up old farm equipment with Will, or rinsing the fine film of dust from the folds of her eyelids—a question had gripped her and not let go. There was, quite unexpectedly, the idea that she could be doing something different with her life. If she wanted to. But what? She’d dedicated her entire adult life to one singular and focused outcome: the reward at the end of the travails, her own private promised land. And, since she’d so carefully laid down the tracks that would channel her toward a very specific kind of future, was it even possible to go in another direction now?
In the bathroom she stared herself down, patting drops of water off her face with a soft towel. And she wondered: If her heart was going to stop tomorrow, and she had to choose how to spend her last day on earth, would she get back in her Beemer and hightail it to Albany to work on the Dautel case?
She held her own gaze and forced the question: What would she do if she wasn’t locked into the life she’d already made for herself? The voice that answered came from someplace quiet and dangerous: You could do anything.
The morning dawned muggy and hot, an early thunderstorm having swept through and made the earth steam, and already the bugs were flying frantically around Will’s face as if tossed about in a small hurricane. At his side, Lauren occasionally waved her hands around to fight them off, sending the smell of sunscreen in all directions. Will had told her: You get used to the gnats.
They were walking down a long country lane—or, at least, a narrow clearing that had at one point been a lane but which no driver would dare run a car down anymore. The old road was thick with ridges of green-brown mud from ATV wheels. On either side of the lane, Will caught glimpses of promising old treasures in the overgrown woods—bits of rusty things he couldn’t entirely see: an old refrigerator with the door cockeyed, a ladder that hadn’t been climbed in twenty years.
Will stole a glance at Lauren beside him, and for once, he didn’t think she noticed. She seemed distracted. She wore a black baseball cap; her hair was a tuft of ponytail that stuck straight out the back. She wore no makeup, and the sporty white sneakers she’d brought for her trip were now a healthy shade of eggshell. Each day, he found more to admire about her. She was tough in a courtroom and even tougher when she ducked beneath a porch or climbed a questionable ladder into an old loft. Of any partner he’d ever picked with, only she never seemed to complain. Not even when she was acting funny for a reason Will couldn’t begin to guess.
“Why do you keep glancing behind you?” he asked.
She grimaced; apparently, she hadn’t wanted him to notice. “We’re so far back in the woods.”
He laughed. “Right. If there’s not a Starbucks within five miles, we’ve reached the outer limits of civilization.”
She flicked his arm with the backs of her fingers, but she was smiling. “I’ll have you know I don’t drink Starbucks coffee.”
“What do you drink?”
“Starbucks lattes.”
He smiled. The woods were full of sounds, none of them mechanical. The air smelled green and loamy. He never felt safer than when he was walking down an old trail, with nothing but the sky, and the trees, and the occasional animal that lifted its head before running away. But a hint of nervousness shone in Lauren’s eyes.
She glanced behind them again.
“Most of these picks are safe,” he assured her. “We just don’t want to sneak up on anybody.”
“You ever get in any trouble on a pick?”
“Not really,” he said. She glanced at him—the slightest narrowing of her eyes. And he laughed. He forgot he couldn’t lie—or even fudge the truth. He confessed. “Okay, maybe a little trouble.”
“Like what?”
He thought back on his past picks. Once, an octogenarian had run him off his property with a gun full of buckshot. The van still had a hundred little nicks in the paint. Another time, a man had come at him with a broken bottle—but that was before he realized Will had shown up with $1,000 cash, hoping to buy an old motor he’d heard was on the property.
But it wasn’t always the men who were dangerous. Women, too, posed their threats. Some were reluctant to let him poke around on their properties—one had even called the police and then sicced her rottweiler on him. And occasionally he ran into women who wanted to barter with a commodity far older than the dollar bill. He knew what they wanted: he was a little built—enough to make it worth their while—and he knew they imagined he was the one who was dangerous. Only once had he taken anyone up on the offer, years ago, and that had been a mistake that left him hurrying out the back door with his fly down and his shoes in his hands. In some ways, he would have preferred the danger of a shotgun—at least with firearms, he knew where he stood.
Lauren was looking at him with that scrutinizing gaze of hers—he was getting used to it—and he patted her lightly between her shoulder blades. “Don’t worry. It wasn’t real danger. Just enough to keep things interesting.”
“Define interesting.”
“Biggest danger on a pick like this is raccoons. Little buggers are nasty.”
She glanced at the woods around them. “So we’re fine now. You know this guy.”
“I know him,” Will said. “Well, I know him some. We’re okay.”
&nbs
p; He saw her visibly relax. “Sorry. I guess I’m just paranoid.”
“Any particular reason, apart from the obvious lack of sidewalks and pigeons?”
She fixed her gaze steadily in front of her as they walked, their reflections passing through the clouds that reflected in murky puddles. “Did you give Arlen my note?”
“I did.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing, really. He disappeared for a while. Don’t know where he went. And he hasn’t said a word about it since.”
A muscle in Lauren’s jaw tightened. “I thought he was following me.”
“Really?” A bad feeling settled in Will’s gut. In the treetops, a crow called, hidden by the dripping green leaves. “When? Where?”
“Shockoe Bottom. Yesterday around ten. I was going to yoga. And I don’t know why—I just had this feeling that someone was following me.”
Will took a deep breath. “Arlen was with me yesterday at ten. We were staining an old bookshelf.”
“All right. Must have been my imagination.”
He took her arm, stopped her. They stood in the middle of the forgotten road, tangles of Virginia creeper carpeting the ground around them. Will didn’t hide his concern. Or his frustration. “If you thought someone was following you, why didn’t you call me?”
“Because it was just a feeling. I’m sure I imagined it.”
His grip tightened. “I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure the first rule of self-defense is to trust your instincts. You should have done something.”
“I did. I went inside.”
He realized he was holding her; he let her go.
“You’re angry,” she said.
He took a deep breath. “What was your first clue?”
“Glabella wrinkles.”
“Sounds sexy. What’s that?”
She reached up and touched the spot between his eyebrows. “Here.”
His eyes closed for a moment, and when he opened them again she was looking up at him, the rust-brown of her irises glinting like tiger’s-eye. “Glabella,” he said. “It sounds better on you.”