Blood Orange (37 page)

She sat on the edge of the bed, her arms folded across her midsection. She thought of what she was about to do and of the consequences. She thought of her guilt and prepared herself to take
responsibility.

First she called David and asked him to come home.

“I’m due in court at one.”

“There’s time. It’s not even ten yet.”

“What’s this about, Dana?” He was still angry with her.

“Just come home.”

His voice was muffled as he spoke to someone in the office. He
told her, “Sorry, it’ll have to wait.”

“It can’t. Not this time.”

“Is this about Bailey?”

“It’s about all of us.”

A windy sigh echoed down the telephone line.

“Give me thirty minutes. And Dana?”

“Yes.”

“This better be good.”

“It’s not. It’s not good at all.”

After hanging up she stared at the phone for a long moment,
then pressed a speed-dial button and eventually was connected to
Gary. As she told her story he interrupted only to ask clarifying
questions. Where was the sash now?

“I have it. And the note.”

“Well, that’s a surprise.”

His voice sounded dry and pinched when he said he would have
to come and take a statement from her.

“I need to tell my husband first, but he has a court date. He’ll be
gone by one. You can come here after that.” She hung up, not waiting for him to agree.

From the bottom of her jewelry box she dug out her emergency
money, two twenty-dollar bills and a five, and went down to the den
where Guadalupe and Bailey were sorting a pile of plastic pieces by
shape and color. Dana handed Guadalupe the money.

“Walk up to Big Bad Cat and have lunch, will you? I need the
house to myself until about three.” In a mix of Spanish and English
it took a few moments to get the point across.

Guadalupe’s dark eyes were full of sympathy.

For years Dana had not cried, but lately she could not stop. She
tried to smile as tears rolled down her cheeks. “Bad times.”

“Ah, pobrecita. “

from the bedroom window Dana watched David cross the deck.
She imagined the house shimmied with the force of his heels
hitting the wood. Drawing a long breath, she looked around her at
the bedroom where they had slept together for the last eight years.
These might be the last moments of her marriage, and she wanted
to pay attention to everything, because the room would never look
the same after she and David talked.

He came through the bedroom door like a storm system, his
brows drawn down and his jaw squared.

“This better be important,” he said as he threw his keys on the
bed.

“Can we sit down?” She realized how frightened she was and
grabbed her hands together to steady them.

“Just talk, Dana. I’ll sit if I want to.,,

Please don’t be so angry. Not before you know anything. There
won’t be anywhere for you to go except over the top.

She perched on the windowsill and started with the easy words.
“Jason Gordon is the person who’s been sending hate mail to the
house.”

“You mean the kid on the Bailey Committee? Why would he do
that? “

“I don’t know, no one knows yet. But …” She told David how
Beth had said Jason had a crush on her, and how she had heard
Bender and Jason expressing their disapproval of David defending
Frank Filmore.

“It was the picture of you with the noose drawn around your
neck that gave it away.”

“Dana-

“I was going through the mail and looking at the latest bulletin,
and I realized that the noose picture came from St. Tom’s bulletin.”
His face bore a look of intense concentration, as it did when he was
in court. “I called Gary, and I mentioned that Jason had been very
helpful and that he worked at a copy shop.”

“So is he the one who hit Moby?”

She nodded.

“What about the note in your car?”

“It was Jason.”

“He’s confessed?”

She nodded again.

“He’s confessed to everything? The kidnapping too?”

“No, not the kidnapping.”

He sat in the small easy chair near the window, visibly more relaxed than he had been a few minutes earlier. He tapped his index
finger against his lips. “One thing’s for sure. He couldn’t pull off the
kidnapping alone. Whoever else was in on it-“

“He didn’t take her.” She looked around their bedroom a final
time.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I know who did.”

He stared at her.

She rushed on. “It was my fault, David. I made it happen.”

“That’s ridiculous, Dana. How-“

“The kidnapping had nothing to do with Frank Filmore.”

“How can you be so sure? Is this what Gary says?”

She was dry-eyed now, surprisingly calm.

There was a limit to the amount of deception a person could live
with before her whole life was infected by dishonesty and there was
nothing left that was good and pure and strong. If God was in the
business of teaching lessons, then this must be what she was meant
to learn. Perhaps she had learned too late, and nothing would be
left of the life she had loved. Not a single coal burning anywhere.

“David, if I knew some way to spare you this, I would.”

She watched something change in his face, a subtle shift and
firming of the contours. He looked at his watch. “I don’t have much
time.” He sat with his hands on his thighs.

“You know I love you…”

“That’s established, Dana.” In a court of law, love did not count
for much. “Just say what you have to.”

“I had-in Florence I had … an affair … “

His face was impassive.

“With Lexy’s brother.”

“You had sex with someone?”

“Lexy’s brother,” she repeated, unable to say his name. “It was a
stupid thing to do, I don’t know-“

“Wait a minute.” He held up his hand. “You mean you fucked
this Michael? Micah?”

“You make it sound-“

“What? Cheap? If it wasn’t, what was it? Are you going to tell
me he was the great love of your life?”

“Of course not. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“Why not? I bet everything else has been in there.”

She sucked in her breath and held it.

“You know, I should’ve figured it out when I never could get you
on the phone. Jesus, what a klutz I was. It never occurred to me not
to believe. I guess I never would have known.” He shook his head,
talking to himself. “I would have gone on assuming I could trust
you, you loved me….”

“I do. Love you.”

“Did you tell him that, too?”

She no longer remembered what she had felt for Micah or said
to him. This moment and the revelations that preceded it had
burned out her memories of Florence.

“Do you know how many times I could’ve cheated on you?” He
stood up. “Going way back, Dana, I could’ve fucked half the cheerleaders and paralegals-“

She covered her ears with her hands, and he pulled them away,
holding her wrists so hard she thought the bones would snap.

“But I never did. I never even gave it serious thought. I guess I
was a jerk, huh?”

She started to say that if he gave her another chance she would
make it up to him. He told her to shut up.

“Dana, I always believed in you. I believed in us. We were a team.”

“Yes,” she cried. “Yes, and we still are.”

He dropped her wrists, threw them down as if he couldn’t stand
to touch her. If he had looked angry or hurt, she could have taken
that. Instead she saw something she had never seen in his expression, a terrible neutrality that told her that in his mind he had already begun to separate from her.

“David, don’t shut me out. Please. It was a stupid, stupid mistake, but I learned something about myself … “

“I don’t care what you learned.”

“Yes, you do. You always cared about me. You can’t just suddenly
stop.” She did not want to cry. Crying made her weak. She hated
him for making her do it and herself for not being able to stop.

He shoved her away. She stumbled back, hitting her hip on the
windowsill. In the fraction of a moment it took her to regain her
balance and rub her hip she realized that she had still not told him
the complete truth.

“I’ll tell you why I did it. Do you want to know?” She saw that
he was torn. “I wanted to be someone else for a while.”

“Well, me too, Dana,” he said, his voice metallic. “Who doesn’t?”

“I got away from you and Bay and everything I knew, and a part
of me came out that I didn’t know was there. And I couldn’t stop
myself.” I didn’t even try. Her words hurtled on, and he seemed to
be listening. If she said enough, perhaps, eventually, he would understand. “It wasn’t about cheating on you or not loving you. It was
about stepping out of my skin and being someone else for a week.”

“You want me to forgive you because-“

“Because you know me, because you know in your deepest heart
that I love you.” Loving David marked and identified her as surely
as the curve of her ears, her thumb- and voiceprints. “I’ve lived my
whole life fighting not to be my mother and grandmother, compensating for their influence, beating off anything that looked like it
might drag me down to their levels. I paid so much attention to
what I wasn’t that I never had a chance-“

“Stop blaming those two for everything. It doesn’t work anymore. You’re an adult, and what you do, you do because you want
to. You wanted to fuck a stranger, so you did. That’s it.”

“David, listen to me. Micah wanted me to stay, he begged me to
stay with him, but I wanted to come home. I chose you and Bay.”

He sneered. “For some reason that doesn’t make me feel any
better. “

“I realized that if I left you I’d be leaving myself, the best part of
myself. In a way, what happened was a good thing, David. I’m not
excusing it, but sometimes it takes a terrible experience to make you
understand-“

“Congratulations,” he said. “Insight is a wonderful thing.”

“Stop being a lawyer. Listen to me with your heart.”

“Shi.t, Dana, I’m tired of listening.” The mauve circles around
his eyes seemed to have darkened in the last half hour. “Just tell me
the rest of it. He took Bailey. Where?”

“Mexico, I think.”

“And his reason?”

“To hurt me.”

“Nice guy.”

“He didn’t hurt her. That’s something I know.”

“Maybe.”

“It didn’t mean anything. It meant nothing.”

“That is such a stupid thing to say.” He looked at her with
incredulous disgust. “Fucking is one thing, but stealing our
child-“

“He was unbalanced, but the man I knew in Florence would
never-

“Stop trying to blame him. You started it. You couldn’t keep
your pants on. Just say it, Dana. It’s your fault,” David roared.
“Bailey would not have been stolen, her future, her world-our
world—would be a different place if you hadn’t decided to experiment with the limits of your personality.”

Panic spiked through her, and she fell against him, wrapping her
arms about his neck, pressing her face into his chest.

“Forgive me, just forgive me. I admit everything, David. Say
you’ll forgive me.” She searched his eyes for a star of hope.

Something to work toward.

The cosmos could have been created in the length of time it took
him to answer.