An Unexpected Grace (20 page)

They seemed free and happy, as if they'd given up being on guard at the gate all the time and had taken up lolling around and enjoying the sun. With the ribbon, they weren't identical twins anymore, either. Now they looked like a duck and a drake. If you looked at them just right, you could almost call them a couple.

A
dam lived half a mile from Lila in a white Victorian farmhouse whose peeling paint and missing shingles made you think of a senior citizen in need of a hug. Once you walked along the stone path that curved around his vegetable garden, though, all you thought about was green thumbs. Hanging off vines were emerald green snow peas, lettuce grew like a carpet, and the zucchini looked like they were going to need birth control. On the front porch a wisteria climbed the railing, and two wicker rocking chairs invited Lila and Adam to sit. They didn't because he wanted to print photos he'd just taken for her.

He left Lila in the living room and went into his study. Grace was home watching Animal Planet after Dr. Hightower had just proclaimed her cut “improving” and covered her stitches with a hot-pink elastic sock. She'd lain on his exam table as if she were the Queen of Sheba and acted like she'd have been shocked if Lila and Adam hadn't fallen all over themselves to light the myrrh in her incense burner. At home, they'd fed her chicken. After Adam had settled her on the bed in front of the TV, they'd left so he could show Lila gates she might want to paint.

While his computer printer hummed, she snooped around the living room. A wingback chair and brass floor lamp sat on an oriental rug in front of the fireplace. Above the mantel was a watercolor of an orchard, perhaps where he'd picked apples growing up, and a Betsy Ross flag hung above the stairs. Floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books covered one wall. Next to a Morris chair by a window in the corner, a brass telescope was aimed at the sky.

Lila bent down and studied a photo of a little girl who must have been Adam's niece, a little older than Rosie—blonde braids, a missing front tooth, and eyes that slanted at the outside edges like his did when he concentrated. An Irish setter, for whom Adam must have bought the cow costume, was sleeping at her feet. She was holding a calico cat on a porch swing, painted the same violet as a picket gate that Adam and Lila had just seen.

“Some ancient languages supposedly didn't have a word for ‘violet,' ” he'd said. “The theory is that people hadn't physically evolved enough yet to see violet's end of the color spectrum.”

“Imagine the colors we can't see,” Lila said.

Adam focused his camera on the gate and clicked. “There must be lots of pleasures waiting for us to evolve to them.”

He seemed like he was addressing Lila's color-loving artist, but her Horny Guttersnipe shimmied.

Lila ordered her,
Sit down and fold your hands in your lap!

She sulked.
Phooey!

 

Adam handed Lila three photos printed on computer paper. Thrilled, she shuffled through them.

The first was the violet picket gate under a trellis and flowering passion vine. The second was Chinese red, as tall as three people, with a green-ceramic roof and hinges as black as ravens' wings. The last, made of iron bars, was flanked by brick columns that served as pedestals for two stone Buddhas. High above them seven strings of prayer flags extended from a redwood's trunk like ribbons from a maypole.

“Look at the interesting things behind those gates,” Adam said.

Here we go again. The art critic.
“Uh-huh,” Lila said.

He noted two mossy griffins holding up a stone bench in the English garden behind the violet pickets, and miniature stone pagodas tucked among ferns behind the Chinese gate. “See the monk raking leaves under the prayer flags? He'd make a great painting. Especially his yellow robe.”

“The color's saffron,” Lila said.

“You paint people, don't you?”

“Sometimes.”

“So why not him?”

“Okay, okay.”

“There's a whole world behind those gates. That's what I want you to see.” To help her examine the photos, Adam turned on a lamp with a brass bugle for a base. “I know what I'm talking about. I'm right.”

“And not the least bit pushy or judgmental.” Lila smiled.

“Exactly.” Adam's grin had triumph in it. “I'm just looking out for your best interests.”

 

Just as companionably as they'd bathed Grace, Lila and Adam made a salad with lettuce and carrots from his garden, a stir-fry with chicken and his snow peas, and brown rice, which Lila spooned into his favorite thrift-store bowl. Glazed in the bottom was the face of a lion like Rosie's Gerald, but Adam's lion looked perplexed, as if he couldn't figure out where the mound of mint jelly beside his wildebeest carcass had come from. Lila and Adam served themselves on attractive but mismatched china thrift-store plates.

As steam from their food glowed in a blue candle's light at the kitchen table, they discussed the Second Time Around Shop, where Adam had bought the plates.

“I've found a better place to get great things,” he said. “Goodwill has an ongoing auction on the Internet.”

“Never heard about it,” Lila said.

“You'd be amazed what you can find there. That bugle lamp in the living room cost five dollars, and all it needed was a little polish. I got a dollhouse for my niece. It was practically new.”

“Sounds better than eBay.”

“A lot less expensive. You have to check every few days because auction items change, but that's no big deal. You can find the site if you Google ‘Goodwill.' ”

Lila took a bite of chicken; its delicious smell would have driven Grace wild. “Lately Google hasn't helped me much. I've been disappointed.”

“Google's practically a miracle,” Adam argued. “What were you looking for?”

“Oh, just a woman I was trying to find around Monterey.”

“You can find anybody on the Web.”

“Not her.”

“Who is she?”

Lila stopped the fork on its way to her mouth and considered how to explain. Adam, like Cristina, could judge her as crazy for trying to track down Yuri's family, and yet maybe Adam could help. Lila dove in and risked, “I'm trying to find the mother of the man who shot me. I know she lives near Monterey. I've tried everything I can think of on Google, but nothing's worked.”

“Why would you want to talk with her?”

“I want to know why her son shot everybody.”

“Forget him. You should be glad he didn't kill you.”

That word “should.”
Judgment, as Lila had feared. She almost backed off, but then Adam looked at her with his eyes slanted at the edges, like his niece's, intent and sincere. Lila said, “It's easy for you to say ‘forget him.' He didn't shoot you.”

Adam took a hurried bite of rice and washed it down with a gulp of wine. “Okay, what's so important about finding answers? What's the point?”

“If I don't understand him, I'll never get over what he did. I won't be able to put him behind me. At least psychologically, I won't ever heal.”

“I don't mean to be blunt, but that doesn't make sense.”

“Not to you, maybe, but it does to me. And, please, will you not be so critical?”

“I didn't mean it that way,” Adam said. “But I don't think you need to understand the motive of some maniac. All you have to know is he was crazy.”

“That's what Cristina says, but I'm sure there's more to it.”

“Such as?”

Why did I start this conversation?
Lila wished they could go back to Goodwill. “I've tried hard to find out what happened. The dead ends have made me wonder if
I
might be responsible for what Yuri did. Yuri Makov was his name. From Russia.”

“There's no way you could be responsible.” Adam's face didn't look judgmental now. He seemed genuinely concerned.

“He liked me. He sent me a valentine. Sometimes he tried to talk with me at work.”

“That's no big deal.”

“It may have been a big deal when he asked me out one night,” Lila said.

Remembering the “aahs” and “uuhs” that had peppered Yuri's sentences on the phone nearly canceled her pleasure in Adam's supper. Soon after she'd seen Yuri in the lobby, he'd called her at home and said, “You want go me . . . uuh . . . ballet . . . aah . . . night Saturday? Beautiful fun . . .”

She pictured him, beads of self-conscious sweat on his forehead as he forced himself on. He sounded like he was reading something he'd written to impress her, but, still, his English slogged along. And the ballet, of all things? Was that meant to impress her too? Her Pleaser wanted to spring forth and sprinkle daisy petals on Yuri to make him feel better, but Lila's mind was racing to answer a more important question:
How did he get my unlisted number?

Finally, she managed, “I'm sorry. I'd really like to go with you, but I have a boyfriend. I don't go out with other men.”
A lie, but what are you going to do?

“Yes . . . aah . . .” Clearly, Yuri was trying to translate what she'd said, but from her tone of voice, he must have known she'd turned him down. Maybe he'd not planned how to handle rejection, but only how to say he'd pick her up at seven and he knew where she lived.

The very thought of that was cringe inducing. After breaking up with Reed, Lila had not listed her new phone number and address specifically to prevent men she didn't want to know from finding her.

Adam wiped his napkin across his mouth. “So what if Yuri asked you out? You didn't go, did you?”

“Of course I didn't. But it was creepy. The only way he could have found my unlisted number was by sneaking through my personnel file.”

“You think he did that?”

“I'm sure he did.”

“You reported him to HR,” Adam said, like any sensible person would have done it.

“No. I didn't want to make a fuss.”

“He was practically stalking you, for God's sake. A fuss would have been appropriate. He was wrong.”

Maybe I was too.
Lila studied her salad as if she hoped for redemption in lettuce and tomatoes. “I didn't want to go to HR because I was worried I might have led him on. He seemed so shy. I felt sorry for him, so I was nice to him. Maybe nicer than I should have been.”

“How do you mean? You baked him brownies or something?”

“I talked with him once in a while. I encouraged him to go back to school. I complimented him on his work so he'd feel like a worthy person.”

“So what?”

“So he could have thought I cared more about him than I did. When I wouldn't go out with him, I might have made him mad.”

“Men get turned down for dates all the time without getting angry. Even if you did make him mad, it couldn't have led to such a disaster.”

“Yes, it could.”
The butterfly effect.
“He was sensitive.”

“Anyone who could shoot so many people was not sensitive,” Adam insisted.

“No, I could have hurt him so he took his anger at me out on everybody.”

“Surely he wasn't mad at
you
.”

“When I've looked back the last couple of months, I'm afraid he could have been.”

Adam set down his fork. Neither he nor Lila was eating, though worry was chomping her stomach.

“You're blaming yourself so you can feel like what some lunatic did was rational, but it wasn't. Life isn't predictable. Sometimes bad things happen to good people no matter what they've said or done. You can't explain it. There's no point trying.”

“I still think it might be my fault.”

“You weren't in control of what happened.” Adam puffed out his cheeks and slowly blew out air, like releasing steam. “Whatever upset him, it's got to be some problem you know nothing about.”

“I've done everything I can think of to find out what it was.” As Lila explained her months of looking for an answer, Adam listened so attentively that his whole body could have been covered with ears. “I try to tell myself I'm not to blame, but that doesn't help. I have to find out the truth to know for sure I'm not responsible,” Lila said. “Mrs. Makov knows more about Yuri than anybody. If she can't explain why he shot us, nobody can. I have to talk with her, or I'll spend the rest of my life wondering. Mrs. Makov is my last hope.”

“Did you ask the police how to reach her? They must know.”

“They accused me of having a relationship with Yuri. I don't want to talk with them about any of this.”

“Okay, let me try to find her.” Seeming to forget that he and Lila were in the middle of dinner, Adam wadded up his napkin and set it by his plate. “You spell it
M-a-k-o-v
? She's around Monterey?”

“Right.”

Adam took long, hurried strides into his study.

 

The computer screen saver's photo of a meteor shower flickered silver light on Adam's face. Lila rested her hands on the back of his chair and watched him type “people search” on Google. It felt good that he was trying to help; truly, sharing a burden reduced its weight. For the first time in months, Lila didn't feel alone. There was hope.

Then the first of nearly fifty million citations for “people search” appeared on Adam's screen. He exhaled a long breath and said, “We might be here all night.”

He went to Yahoo, even though Lila said she'd tried it. He typed in “Makov” with no first name, then “Monterey,” and he scrolled down and clicked on “California.” In a blink, a message popped up on the screen that let him know no Makovs were listed.

“See, that's what kept happening. I tried several sites,” Lila said.