An Unexpected Grace (10 page)

L
ila's new physical therapist, Betsy McKibbon, had an encouraging, gentle manner, and her smile exposed a tiny gap between her front teeth. Her eyes were the blue of an autumn sky on a cloudless day. Silver dolphins cavorted at her earlobes just below salt-and-pepper curls, which rested, flat and soft, against her plump cheeks.

In her consulting room, Betsy settled on a metal stool opposite Lila, who was sitting on a padded table, and Betsy's knees protruded under her long purple skirt. A pair of lavender-framed bifocals hung from a silver chain around her neck. Her wide hips and large breasts made her look like she'd birthed and nursed eight children.

“I've got to tell you. You're the first person I've treated who's been shot,” Betsy said. “It must have been traumatic. You can't snap your fingers and get over something like that.”

Her empathy contained a kindly hug that put Lila at ease. “It's been hard,” she admitted.

“I can imagine.”

Betsy put on her bifocals and flipped through the records from Dr. Lovell, who had removed Lila's cast the day before. When he'd sent her to Betsy, he said she was slightly unconventional, but good with distressed patients—Lila's category, he inferred.

As Betsy glanced through Dr. Lovell's notes, Lila looked around the room. The carpet, walls, and curtains were violet; in a tabletop fountain, water splashed from a copper fish's mouth onto an amethyst geode. Feathers and peace pipes hung on the walls beside papier-mâché angels with heavy Frida Kahlo eyebrows. On a rolltop desk in the corner was a framed photograph of towheaded boys jumping on a trampoline—probably Betsy's grandchildren.

From the desk, she pulled out a printed form with the outline of a body, the arms and legs extended like Leonardo's Vitruvian Man. She unscrewed the cap of her purple fountain pen. “Okay, so tell me . . . what happened? How did the bullet hit you?”

When Lila explained its path from her breast into her arm, Betsy marked an
X
on the body for each wound. “What about pain?”

“I still hurt.”

“Where exactly?”

Lila pointed to places on her shoulder and arm, and Betsy noted them on the drawing of the body too.

“What kind of pain? Burning? Aching? Throbbing?” she asked.

“Aching. It comes and goes.”

“Any particular movements that bring it on?”

“Mostly reaching up and forward.”

“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate the pain today if ten's the worst?”

Lila thought for a moment. “Maybe seven. Mostly when I move my arm.”

As Betsy wrote “seven” under the body's left foot, she said, “We're going to get that number down to zero.”

Lila wanted to believe her, but faith eluded her, especially when Betsy examined Lila's arm, which was pasty and shriveled. As Betsy moved it back and forth at the elbow, though, she acted like she'd seen plenty of injured arms and Lila's wasn't unusual. Betsy bent down and looked closely at the wound; healed like the one on Lila's breast, it resembled an angry crimson centipede.

Betsy ran her fingertip over its legs, where stitches had been. “You've got ‘proud flesh.' The name comes from the swelling.”

“Maybe my flesh is swollen and red because it's still mad at the bullet.”

Betsy chuckled. “And you're still mad at the man who shot you?”

“I hate him. I can't help it.”

“That's not helpful for your spirit. The only person your anger hurts is you.” When Betsy smiled, she exposed the gap between her teeth again. “You can calm down the scars with vitamin E oil. Skin is very forgiving.”

Like Lila should also be, she figured Betsy was implying. But that would be impossible. You couldn't walk away and forget someone who'd tried to kill you.

As Lila fidgeted, the papier-mâché angels on the wall looked like they were frowning at her.

 

Betsy left the room while Lila took off her shirt and bra and climbed between the padded table's sheets, which were striped lavender and white. When Betsy returned, she draped a pillow of warm flax seeds around Lila's neck—a delicious comfort. Next, Betsy put gel on Lila's injured arm and ran the flat metal surface of an ultrasound head over her sore, tight muscles to reduce pain, though Lila guessed that Betsy was talking long term, because Lila couldn't tell a difference. Finally, Betsy rubbed cream on her hands. As the smell of lavender filled the room, she gently kneaded Lila's flesh from shoulder to elbow, to reduce swelling.

The massage made her as limp as gauze. More relaxed than she had felt in months, she closed her eyes and listened to the water from the fish's mouth splash on the geode. Outside, a motorcycle roared down Mill Valley's main street. But Lila ignored it because she was soaking up the peace in Betsy's office.

When she stretched out Lila's arm as straight as she could coax it, it stayed stiff and partly bent. But it tingled, as if Betsy had opened a dam in Lila's veins and persuaded new blood to flow through. Betsy put more cream on her hands, reached under Lila's shoulders, and massaged with heavy sweeps. Over the years Betsy's powerful hands had surely removed pain from legions of needy people.

Lila pictured her slapping reins on oxen and rumbling across the prairie in a Conestoga wagon. Strong and sturdy, she would not flinch at snakes or blink at dust; she would bake huckleberry pies on campfires. Stability also seemed lodged in her touch, and it made Lila feel as close to safe as she'd felt since getting shot. Betsy was like Mother Hubbard, peering at the heavens through a shoelace eye and reassuring Lila, one of her many children.

Betsy gently pressed her fingers against Lila's shoulder blades. “You've got a lot of tension here. Your shoulders are still cringing from terror.”

“I can't help it.”

“It's involuntary.” Betsy pushed them down as if she were encouraging them into a straight, more trusting line. “Our bodies show what we're feeling in the present, but they also hold emotions from the past. I'd say you're carrying a lot of stress.”

“I can't get rid of it.”

“Sometimes it's difficult.” Betsy kneaded Lila's shoulders again. “When my husband died, I went around hunched down with grief. It took me a couple of years to push my shoulders back and stand up straight again.”

“How did you get yourself to do that?”

“Thinking things through. Seeing my life was still good. Even though I was alone, I had lots to be thankful for.”

“I have things to be thankful for, but I've got reason to be mad, too,” Lila said.

As the muffled voices of passersby filtered through the window, she told Betsy about her flashbacks and nightmares. For good measure, she threw in Reed and Adam and Grace.

“Sometimes challenges come in groups,” Betsy said.

Lila didn't see challenges. She saw Yuri's violence, Reed's disloyalty, and Adam's inconsideration. “All I want is to get my life back in control.”

Betsy's laugh came from her belly. “You think we can control our lives?”

“We can clean up messes. We can straighten out things.”

“Oh, honey. Seems to me it's more important to accept them. Then they usually straighten out themselves.” Betsy pushed Lila's shoulders down again and gently put them in their place. “The best way to fix your life is to go after what makes you happy. Forget the rest. I tell everyone who comes in here that joy is the greatest healer.”

“Uh-huh,” Lila said. But where were you supposed to find joy after a maniac shot you?

Betsy moved to the side of the table and massaged Lila's arm again, then pulled it up and forward. “Look! Your range of motion is already better.”

Lila had to admit she was right.

“Your life is going to be better too. This injury is going to be the best thing that ever happened to you.”

Before Lila could say, “That's crazy!” her Pleaser leapt in and gagged her.

 

Betsy covered Lila with a Navajo blanket that had brightly colored stripes of triangular trees, stylized eagles, and zigzags of lightning. Betsy said they symbolized Native Americans' values: The trees meant growth; the eagles, independence; and the lightning, power. The heavy wool weighed down on Lila and smelled of mysterious sheep.

“I want you to lie here for a few minutes and think about your injuries. When your body got hurt, so did your mind and spirit,” Betsy said. “Those three parts of you are related, and one influences the others. I can help put your body back together, but only you can heal the rest of you.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“You could start by not seeing yourself as a victim.”

“I am a victim. It's a fact. I got shot.”

“There's more than one way to look at things. Your job now is to get your power back.”

Power, as in the blanket's lightning, Lila guessed.

Betsy adjusted the venetian blinds so the room got as shadowy as a church, and she left and shut the door behind her. As Lila closed her eyes, the American flag in Mill Valley's town square snapped in the wind so wire clinked against the pole. She asked herself:
How do you stop seeing yourself as a victim when you
are
one?

A movie started playing on the screen behind Lila's eyelids. It starred Mrs. Podolsky, her favorite high school English teacher, who was all angles and no curves; chopsticks through her bun kept even it from looking rounded. She'd just had the class read
The Diary of Anne Frank
, and she asked what they thought of it.

Billy Axelrod, who always acted like he thought he was so smart, spouted off, “Anne seems like a goody-goody.”

Mrs. Podolsky narrowed her eyes at Billy, like he was Santa Fe High School's biggest twit. She rested her palms on her desk as if she were about to leap over it and squash Billy as flat as plywood. “Anne was heroic. She could have simpered and hated up there in that Amsterdam attic, but she chose to be brave and kind,” she said.

Betsy would have wanted Lila to raise her hand in that class and side with Mrs. Podolsky. Betsy would have urged Lila to add that Anne Frank's stomach must have growled from hunger, and fear crept into her thoughts. But though the Nazis harmed her body and mind, she refused to let them victimize her spirit or diminish the quiet power of her courage.

Lila guessed everyone could make that choice to keep their power for themselves. Ultimately, not even Yuri Makov could take away her inner strength. Still, the only way she could feel like she had it back was to stand up to him—but she couldn't shake a fist and demand an apology from a dead man.

Somehow Lila would have to confront him in her mind. But to do that, she needed answers. Since her Internet search had not yielded much fruit, Lila decided to go straight to the horse's mouth.

T
he horse whose mouth Lila went to was Agnes Spitzmeier, Mr. Weatherby's stern and stocky office manager, a long-toothed Clydesdale of a woman and a former Marine recruiter. Lila offered to take the bus to San Francisco to talk with her, but she insisted on coming to Cristina's house that very afternoon. “The least I can do,” Agnes said on the phone several times. She seemed to want to make up to Lila for getting shot when she herself had not been hurt.

Lila was relieved not to go to the office. Before, it had been a cheerful place, but now it would represent tragedy. The bullet marks would be patched in the walls, the broken windows replaced, the bloodstains washed out of the carpets. But the smell of disaster would linger, and the karma would be black. Lila wanted never to face that office again. By coming to Cristina's, Agnes was doing Lila a favor.

Agnes arrived in a tailored navy suit, a white shirt with a button-down collar, and sensible flats with rubber soles and a spit-and-polish shine. Too much hairspray made her hair look like a motorcycle helmet. She carried a boxy briefcase with snaps that twanged when opened. It was probably her purse.

When Grace set eyes on Agnes through the front door's glass, she barked the first barks Lila had heard from her—ferocious and determined protests to run off Agnes. Lila got Grace to calm down. But as Agnes stepped into the entry, Grace refused to resume her role as a Walmart greeter. The fur on her back bristled like an agitated skunk's stripe, and she stiffened her legs and glared.

“Be polite, Grace.” Lila gave Agnes an apologetic look. “I'm dog-sitting. She's not mine. She's never been protective before.”

“Looks like a nice dog.” Agnes's voice tended more toward booming than conversing. Fearless, she extended a beefy hand for Grace to sniff.

Grace was more inclined to sniff Agnes's ample thighs and bottom, as if she were a fire hydrant. Grace could have been patting down Agnes to decide if she could board a plane into the house.

When Lila tried to push Grace back, she wouldn't budge. “I'm sorry.”

“No problem. I grew up on a farm with four dogs a lot more aggressive than she'll ever be.” Agnes stooped down and gave Grace an affectionate chuck on the chin.

Grace wanted none of Agnes's chucking. Clearly repulsed, Grace stepped back so Agnes couldn't chuck her again, then glowered as Agnes followed Lila into the kitchen, where she poured boiling water over teabags in white mugs.

While Lila and Agnes waited for the tea to steep, they mentioned the freeway traffic and spring weather. Agnes filled her in on how people at the office were faring. Grace sat under the kitchen table and beamed huffiness with her eyes, which said in no uncertain terms,
I'm not going to let you be Lila's entire focus this afternoon, you unwelcome slug. Don't forget for a minute that she's mine.

Ignoring Grace, Lila put cream and sugar in Agnes's tea and handed it to her. They carried their mugs to the living room and set them on the coffee table, under which Grace immediately crawled. Through the table's glass top, she frowned at Agnes with resentment and watched her settle her heft onto the sofa adjacent to Lila's chair.

“She's sweet,” Agnes said.

As if on cue, Grace groaned her loudest, most disdainful groan and shut her eyes.

Agnes lifted her briefcase to her lap, twanged the snaps, and got out a mechanical pencil and yellow pad. She looked like she was about to take notes. “Okay, you wanted to talk about Makov.”

“I wanted to know if you had any idea why he shot everybody.”

“Why do you care?”

“I want to make sense of what happened. I need to get over it.”

“Why come to me?”

“You hired him. I thought you might have known him better than anybody in the office did.”

“That's not true. Nobody knew him very well, at least not that I know of.”

Agnes didn't seem to want to discuss Yuri, though she'd come to Cristina's house to do exactly that. Something was wrong. Lila asked, “Is there any reason we shouldn't talk about the shooting?”

“No. Not unless you're planning to sue.”

“I'm
not
.” Lila's cheeks burned. She felt as insulted as Grace had when Agnes had chucked her chin. “I'm not after money, if that's what you mean. That was the last thing on my mind.”

Agnes gave Lila a long, hard look and apparently decided she was telling the truth. Agnes's conciliatory smile revealed horse teeth. She took a swallow of tea and clunked her mug on the table. The noise rousted Grace, and her eyelids sprang open.

She clambered out from under the coffee table, plopped in front of Lila, and smacked her paw on her knee; clearly, she wanted Agnes to know that Lila was hers and not to be shared. When Lila brushed her paw away, she returned it and, whining, dug her nails into Lila's skin. Grace's eyes had lost their anti-Agnes cast and now seemed to plead,
Love me! Please, please! Pay attention to me!

When will Adam Spencer come and get her?
Lila's resentment toward him filled her mind. No matter how understandably needy, Grace was annoying and out of control. “I'll put her away, or we'll never get a chance to talk,” Lila said.

When she grabbed Grace's bandana, the dog whimpered, but Lila led her to the kitchen anyway. Lila closed the door, behind which Grace groaned, like she was auditioning for the melodrama
The Perils of an Abject Dog
.

Ignoring Grace took concentrated effort, but Lila eased back into her chair. “Sorry.”

Agnes gulped her tea as if Grace had never interrupted them. “Mr. Weatherby feels horrible about what Makov did,” she said. “What happened wasn't Mr. Weatherby's fault. Mine, either. We treated Makov better than he deserved. It's all documented. We can't be responsible for somebody going crazy.”

“Why did he go crazy? That's all I want to know. Did anybody come to an official answer?”

“The police report was inconclusive. Maybe a shrink might have an idea, but I don't know what it would be.”

“What about you? What do you think?”

“He was screwed up. Simple as that.”

“How?” Lila asked as Grace whined behind the kitchen door—and Lila wanted to bind her muzzle shut with baling wire.

As Agnes crossed one knee over the other, her stockings strained against her flesh. She shook her head with obvious dismay at Yuri Makov, and her jowl quivered. “Lemme tell you, his references were great. When I interviewed him, he was polite. He seemed, well . . . prissy or something. I thought he'd fuss over the office.”

On her stout fingers, Agnes counted examples of the subtle, civilizing changes Yuri had made at the firm in his first weeks on the job: He'd straightened photographs on walls, set wastebaskets out of sight behind desks, left a bowl of peach potpourri in the women's restroom, fertilized the hall's schefflera plant so it quit shedding leaves.

“I thought he was going to work out great, but a month or two after you started working for us, he slacked off,” she said. “He left toothpaste on the bathroom mirrors and ham scraps in the staff lounge sink's drain. His idea of a vacuumed hall was a clean path down the middle and filth around the baseboards. The morning I found Mr. Weatherby's trash can overflowing, I decided Makov was being a slob on purpose. Angry about something. Passive-aggressive. Know what I mean?”

Lila nodded that she understood. “Do you think he wanted a promotion? Or a raise?”

“No, his problem was bigger than that. After the trash can, Mr. Weatherby told me to give him another chance, so I did.” Agnes's frown made clear she'd gone along to get along with Mr. Weatherby, but she'd thought that
semper fi
was not in Yuri's character.

“He showed up one day and announced ‘I not wet clean.' He was too good for toilets and sinks. Can you believe that?” she boomed. “I offered to get him rubber gloves and a plastic apron, but that wasn't good enough. I told him we weren't the Soviet Union, and he wasn't going to get a free ride here.”

“Did that make him mad?”

“He was already mad. Something was bugging him.”

“What was it?”

“Who knows?” Agnes shrugged. “You probably noticed how bad things got toward the end. The bathrooms were like nasty porta-potties at construction sites. Never saw such a mess in an office.”

Agnes explained that on the afternoon she hired a janitor to replace Yuri, she waited for him to arrive for work so she could fire him. Instead of showing up at three, as contracted, he stepped off the elevator at nearly six, wearing a dark suit, a tie patterned with fallen red leaves, and a rose boutonniere—“of all the damned things.” Agnes rolled her eyes and mocked him. “He was holding a symphony program. He'd gone to some matinee.

“Thank God he didn't make a scene when I fired him. He got back on the elevator and left,” she said. “The next day I told Mr. Weatherby I'd send Makov's last paycheck in the mail, and he'd never come to the office again. The impudent jackass. He thought he was better than the rest of us and the world owed him a living.”

“If he didn't want the job, getting fired couldn't have made him shoot a bunch of people, could it?” Lila asked.

“He had a damned chip on his shoulder. If you'd known him, you'd have seen it.”

“I knew him. Sort of.” Lila's stomach fluttered slightly as if goldfish were swimming around and brushing her insides with their fins.

“How'd you know him?” Agnes asked.

“Oh, the same as everybody. I saw him around.”

“What did you think of him?”

“He seemed needy and shy.”

Agnes narrowed her eyes in what looked like suspicion. “How'd you ever come to that?”

Lila squirmed and searched for an answer.

One afternoon Yuri had come to her office in a tweed jacket with black suede patches on the elbows. He had smiled at her as if he liked what he saw, and that gave a small boost to her confidence, which Reed and his girlfriend had sullied.

Yuri dug lined yellow paper out of Lila's wastebasket. “Beautiful . . . uh . . . shirt,” he said, nodding at her old Lands' End pea-green turtleneck.

“Thanks,” she said.

He pointed at Lila's abstract painting, leaning against the wall. “You do?”

“Yes, a few years ago.”

“Beautiful.” He gathered the last yellow paper from the wastebasket as if he were picking a daffodil. “I.” He pointed proudly to his chest. “Moscow University . . . architecture . . . study.”

“Good! Good for you!” Lila felt sorry for his talk in clumps and halts. He was obviously embarrassed about his English. Wanting to take control of the awkward situation, her Pleaser stepped in and beamed at him. “Maybe you can go to school and be an architect here.”

He nodded like he needed time to process her words. “Yes,” he finally said.

“I'm sure there are good architecture programs in San Francisco.” Lila spoke extra-slowly so he could understand.

“I . . . uh, hope.” He pronounced it “hop.” He was backing toward the open doorway. Her wastebasket's papers were folded in his long, sensitive fingers.

“Thanks for taking my trash,” Lila said, like he'd just done her a great favor.
Would my Pleaser just shut up
?

“I . . . here . . . clean?”

“It's okay. It's clean enough.”

“Tonight . . . I good floor . . . for you.”

“Oh, just your average vacuuming would be fine.” Lila's Pleaser smiled too broadly.

“Lady nice . . . you.” He nodded formally and backed into his dustbin, which clanged against the wall. His face clouded with shame.

Lila flinched for him. “You're doing a good job. Thank you so much!” She said it extra-loud and with a little too much gratitude.

How could Lila describe to Agnes her initial sympathy for Yuri? What could she say about his insecurity and eagerness to connect? Their encounter had meant nothing to him, or so she told herself.
It couldn't have mattered, could it?
All she'd meant was to be polite.

Lila tugged her shirt's cuff, as if at least she could control her sleeve. “I don't know why I got the impression Yuri was shy. I guess it's just that he was quiet. I never picked up he'd kill anybody.”

“None of us did. Nobody saw it coming. The police said experts find the warning signs almost impossible to read.” Agnes took another gulp of tea. “You don't know how many nights I've been in bed asking myself what if I'd never hired him. Or fired him.”

As Lila shrank back into her chair, she played her own secret round of the What-If Game. What if her Pleaser had been cruising the Caribbean when Yuri showed up in her office that day? What if she'd not felt sorry for him? What if she'd been a hunchbacked, knock-kneed gnome whom he never would have noticed?

“If Yuri was mad about getting fired, he'd have gone after just you and maybe Mr. Weatherby, not the rest of us,” Lila said.

“He could have been mad at me and Mr. Weatherby and gone after the rest of you to pay us back.” Agnes pressed her knuckles on her eyebrows as if she were trying to push all the tragedy out the back of her head. “I keep going over every time I talked to him and looking for something I should have seen. Getting fired must have frosted him, but we don't know if that set him off. Nobody knows what it was.”

When Lila swallowed, the muscles in her throat were tight. The neatly wrapped package of answers she'd hoped for from Agnes receded into the distance, out of reach.