An Unexpected Grace (21 page)

“Several's not enough.”

Adam moved on to Lycos and got the same response. As he tried AnyWho and USA People, his mouse clicks seemed to pick up determination; but Mrs. Makov was elusive, and Lila began to feel like she was watching failure unfold before her eyes. She went to the kitchen and washed Adam's wok and rice pot so he wouldn't sense her disappointment. When she returned to his study, he was looking at GenieSearch.

“Victory! Got her,” he said.

Lila broke out in chill bumps.

Adam moved the cursor down a list of names and stopped. “Here she is. Meet Olga Makov.”

 

Lila and Adam reheated their dinners in the microwave without taking the salad off their plates. Who cared about soggy, wilted lettuce when Olga Makov lived at 176 Ashton Avenue, Monterey, California, and they had her phone number?

Finding her felt like someone had chased away the dark. Everything in Adam's house looked brighter, the brass candlestick between them gleamed, and the candle flame sparkled. Though Adam disagreed that Lila was to blame for what Yuri had done, he'd cared enough to find Mrs. Makov for her—and that made all the difference. Instead of leaving her to search on her own, he was walking beside her. Cristina had been right that Adam and Lila could be good friends.

After dinner, on their way up Tamalpais Avenue to Cristina's, where Adam had left his car, he enveloped Lila's hand in a delicious clutch, and warmth traveled through her. You might think holding hands is a ho-hum act; but when Adam held Lila's, her Horny Guttersnipe swooned.
Forget the “good friend” business,
she sighed.
We're talking ecstasy here.

A taxi came around a curve, and the driver dimmed his headlights. Adam and Lila stepped off the narrow road to get out of his way as he passed by too fast. When they were alone again, Adam wrapped his arms around Lila and gave her a long, slow kiss that made her tinglers whoop and her toes involuntarily curl. Then without a word, he took her hand again. As something four-footed rustled in the brush, they continued up the road.

The night was dark, and stars were twinkling their hearts out. To Lila, just extravagantly kissed, the Big Dipper seemed like it was scooping up Truffle-in-Paradise ice cream.

Though she told herself she shouldn't get swept away, she'd become like Grace, who was so good at letting loose in life and going with the flow. Now going with the flow with Adam felt exactly right.

A
s Lila crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, fog darkened the horizon and threatened to roll in with a chill. Though she'd forgotten her sweater, she didn't care because she was thinking so hard with her heart about Grace. Lila had left her lying in her sphinx position as the morning sun streamed through Adam's kitchen window and brightened her golden fur. “You have to stay here. You're not well enough for a long drive to Monterey,” Lila had told her. “You'd have to sit in the car for hours, and you'd get stiff and bored.”

Grace's sad eyes insisted,
Oh, please! Please! Don't leave me! I want to be with you!

“Adam'll take good care of you. He loves you,” Lila said.

But Grace did not touch the pig's ear he gave her, and the only thing that could have stopped her from demolishing it was worry.

When Lila walked to the car, her own worry followed her. She and Grace had never been separated for more than a couple of hours. As if to reassure Lila before she drove away, Adam reminded her of their plan: When he set out at four o'clock to teach his class, he'd leave Grace on his porch, and Lila would pick her up by five. Grace would be alone for no more than an hour.

Still, Lila was concerned because Grace had seemed distressed. Weaving through San Francisco traffic, Lila imagined Grace's sweet face looking mournfully down from billboards, along buses' sides, and out of cars' rear windows—and the sumo wrestlers who'd rolled on Lila's heart at the Humane Society started a rematch. If she hadn't been so hungry for answers about Yuri Makov, she would have turned back.

She also worried about meeting Yuri's mother, who'd seemed confused on the phone. “Hallooo? Hallooo?” she'd barked into the receiver. As Lila had introduced herself and explained that she wanted to see her, Mrs. Makov kept repeating “Sorry?” Finally, though sounding reluctant, she agreed to talk with Lila. Mrs. Makov might have resented the intrusion, or she might not have wanted to reveal her thoughts to a stranger.

As Lila approached the outskirts of Monterey, sprinklers tossed water in giant circles on artichoke fields. Seagulls soared above sand dunes between the ocean and farms. Near the freeway exit to Mrs. Makov's house, mobile-home parks replaced the artichokes, and strings of faded plastic triangles flapped in the wind above truck stops named Alice's and Eat.

Lila drove down Ashton Avenue, a lonely gravel road through empty fields. She checked her watch to make sure it was after one o'clock, when Mrs. Makov had said she'd be home from her school cafeteria job. Lila prepared herself not to like Mrs. Makov because she'd reared a murderer; she would have a sullen face, as purple as borscht, and her bad teeth would be a complementary yellow. If Lila let her imagination loose, she saw Mrs. Makov as a mother version of Goya's
Saturn Devouring His Son
. A monster with bulging, crazed eyes, she would gnaw Yuri's arm.

Though that picture was extreme, Lila didn't know what Mrs. Makov might turn out to be. With misgiving, Lila asked herself,
What are you getting into?
Yet if she ever hoped to heal and have a normal life, she had to keep going.

 

Olga Makov lived in a grievously depressing house with gray aluminum walls. It looked like a mobile home that had lost its way to a trailer court and ended up alone on the edge of a spinach field. Above the front picture window was a frayed, oxblood-red awning, not for shade, because little sunshine burned through fog here. Hummingbirds must have long ago stopped visiting the empty feeder in a leggy rhododendron. Red sugar-water had splashed on the sidewalk and dried to a crust.

At the door Mrs. Makov looked up at Lila with sad, dark eyes. Her body was as short and squat as Gertrude Stein's, and in her black carpet slippers, her flat feet looked like small rafts. Brown support hose restrained her thick legs; a dirty apron was tied around her plump stomach. She wore a blue uniform, and a black hairnet flattened her cheaply dyed, carrot-blonde curls.

“I'm Lila. I called on Monday.”

Mrs. Makov shrank back with obvious discomfort, but she moved aside and allowed Lila into the living room, as dark and damp as a cave. Mrs. Makov led her past a doily-covered table in the kitchen that smelled of sour cream, then through a doorway next to the refrigerator.

“I live cousin here. My room,” Mrs. Makov said. As she sat on her narrow bed, she gestured for Lila to take the only chair, the metal folding kind used for bingo games in nursing homes. “Yuri good boy.” From a TV table beside the bed, Mrs. Makov picked up a photo of him and handed it to Lila.

Like in the one she'd seen on the TV news, Yuri grinned at the camera as if he were your favorite kid brother, about to tell a silly joke.

“Knock-knock,” he'd start.

“Who's there?” you'd ask.

“Boo.”

“Boo who?”

“I didn't mean to make you cry!” He'd rear back his head with a peal of laughter that would make you laugh too.

Lila handed the photograph back to Mrs. Makov. “Yuri changed so much from the boy in this picture. Why was he unhappy in this country?”

She gave Lila a blank look.

Lila nodded toward the picture. “Yuri was happy in the photo.” She smiled and pointed at her mouth to convey “happy.” She said, “He was not happy here.” Frowning to look miserable, she pointed at the floor, as if it represented the United States.

“Here hard. No easy. He work, work.”

“Did he hate his job?”

“No like. No good.”

“Why didn't he learn English better and go back to architecture school? He could have been an architect here.” Lila was speaking too loudly, but turning up the volume didn't seem to help Mrs. Makov's comprehension, because she shrugged and said nothing. So Lila moved on. “Did Yuri have brothers and sisters?”

“Brother. Kiev.”

“Is his father here in the U.S.?”

“Father dead.”

Mrs. Makov looked uncomfortable about that, too, so Lila dropped the topic of Yuri's family and got down to her overarching question. “Mrs. Makov, was Yuri angry about anything? Do you know?”

“Hard work. No easy. Want important.”

“To do important work? To be important?”

“America people important.”

“Is that what he was angry about? That he wasn't an American?”

“No angry. Good boy. He here come. He help. He give.” As she rubbed her thumb over her fingertips to convey that he'd given her money, tears slid through the wrinkles on her downy cheeks. She dabbed at them with a wadded paper towel from her apron pocket.

Lila didn't want to press Mrs. Makov when she was upset, but today might be the only chance for answers. “Do you know why Yuri shot everybody?” Lila asked. To make sure Mrs. Makov understood “shot,” Lila raised her thumb and pointed her index finger like a pistol barrel.

Mrs. Makov's face looked even sadder, and she seemed to cringe. “I cry, cry. Go away never. Everybody cry.” She blew her nose.

“But what made him do it?” Lila tried again.

“Yuri good boy.”

Up against rock-hard denial, Lila wrapped one hand around the other and searched her brain for what to say. Even if Mrs. Makov was the mother of a man who'd tried to kill her, Lila felt sorry for her, caught between her love for Yuri and her knowledge of his horrible crime.

Though Lila didn't want to hurt her, she needed an explanation badly enough to press again: “You don't know why? There has to be a reason.” Her voice sounded harsh, threatened.

Looking miserable, Mrs. Makov stared at the floor. “I sorry. Sorry. Go away never.” She spoke as if she were talking to herself as much as to Lila.

Mrs. Makov got up and shuffled over to her chest of drawers, the veneer of which was peeling to expose raw, unfinished wood. She pulled the top drawer open and lifted out a small package wrapped in crumpled, yellowing tissue paper. With tenderness, she unwrapped a scarf knitted from maroon and orange acrylic that had started to pill.

She handed it to Lila. “Yuri. Moscow.”

“This was his?”

She nodded. “I make for him. As boy.”

Lila felt like she was holding a leper's shroud. She quickly gave it back to Mrs. Makov.

She set it in her lap and gazed at it with loving eyes. Without a word, she let Lila know that no one could chip through her defense, and Lila would find no insight in this house.

She had come to a final dead end, and it tore into her heart. As she sat there, frozen, the metal chair's slat dug into her spine. Finally, Lila got to her feet, said good-bye, and walked out of the room. Mrs. Makov was weeping on her bed.

Outside, fog cooled Lila's face. Her temples throbbed. Her body ached from having been so tense. More than simply crushed with disappointment, she felt stunned. How do you respond when you reach the end of the line and there's no hope? And when acceptance seems too much to ask of yourself? Grief pressed down on Lila's chest and made it hard for her to breathe. The possibility of guilt made it harder.

It's over. Give up. You've failed.
The thoughts felt like hammer blows.

She was rummaging through her purse for the car keys when a battered green Volkswagen stopped in front of the house. A galumphing Great Dane of a woman, wearing the same black hairnet and blue uniform as Mrs. Makov, climbed out of the car and walked toward Lila.

“Are you Lila?”

“Yes.”

“I'm Olga's cousin Marina. She said you were coming. I wanted to see you, but I couldn't get off work till now.” Her smile was friendly, but the stress lines in her face suggested that meeting Lila was not easy for her. Marina's accent only vaguely hinted of Russian and suggested she'd lived a long time in the U.S.

She shifted a heavy canvas bag from one shoulder to the other. “If it helps you any, we're really sorry. That's all we can say. It's been awful for everyone.”

“I know,” Lila said. And after meeting Mrs. Makov, she knew more than ever how awful. “I came here to find out why Yuri shot us. Mrs. Makov wouldn't tell me.”

“She couldn't. She has no idea. Nobody really knows,” Marina said. “Yuri was having a hard time. Harder than he expected when he came here. I think he was overwhelmed.”

“From being in a new culture? Learning English?”

“That and a million other things,” Marina said. “You may not believe me, but he was sensitive. Once I saw him cry over a Shostakovich CD because the music was beautiful. He wanted a son to name Ilya after the painter Repin. Yuri was gentle.”

“But violent.”

“Well, yes, that, too . . .” Marina looked off into the distance like she was still trying to reconcile the opposites, yet knew she never would. “Olga's never going to get over it. Tanya comes over here every day and cries.”

“Tanya?”

“She and Yuri knew each other since they were kids. A year ago she got a visa to join him here. They were saving money to get married.”

A
s Lila started back along the artichoke fields and traveled up the coast, wind blasted the car and whipped the ocean into whitecaps. She was seething. She kept repeating: Number one, Yuri Makov had been a fraud. Number two, she'd been a fool. Number three, if he hadn't shot himself, she'd want to kill him for her months of questioning whether she'd made him mad enough to shoot people.

Narrowing her eyes in anger, she pictured him and Reed out in the whitecapped ocean, in the same disloyal boat. Testosterone dripped from their sails' halyards, and their bow was pointed—the better to penetrate the waves. Written on the stern was the boat's name:
Cheater
. In the cabin, beds were ready for trysts. After admiring their reflections in the water, the men adjusted the mainsheet and sailed on to satisfy themselves.

Joe Arruzzi had been right that shit happened. All the time. With maniacs like David Carpenter or Eric Harris, you could almost understand how the shit evolved from cruel parents or insensitive students. You could even see how someone as disturbed as Patrick Sherrill could build up rage from what he saw as persecution at his job. But Yuri was different. He had a mother who adored him and a girlfriend who was eager to marry him. He was educated and interested in the arts. He would have had a successful future in the U.S. if he'd worked for it. In time, he could have had a good life, like his forum name on NICOclub.com.

So why had he chosen violence? If Lila tracked down every person he'd ever met, she'd surely get a different reason from each one. He'd be like the elephant that the blind men touched in different places and concluded it was a flapping ear or a spindly tail. Lila had thought she might have hurt or angered Yuri. Agnes Spitzmeier thought he was mad she'd fired him. His landlord might have felt Yuri was working too hard at a job he didn't like, and his cousin Marina might say he felt overwhelmed in the U.S. and he resented not earning enough to get married.

Maybe all the irritations added up, and Yuri was miserable and mad. So what? Plenty of people had irritations like his, but they didn't go out and shoot people. Somehow they coped. He should have.

Cristina's voice came to Lila's mind: “Yuri was nuts!”

In her head, she heard Adam say, “You're trying to make what some lunatic did seem rational.”

They'd understood Yuri better than she had. They'd seen he was a psychopath—and certainly not the spurned, gentle soul her Pleaser might have inadvertently led on. You peel off a layer of an onion, and you've got an onion underneath—and from Yuri's surface to his core, he'd been an unfaithful sneak, a predator.

Lila would never know what had made him that way. His shooting people would never make sense. She saw it plainly now while she slowed in the traffic and crept along the freeway south of Santa Cruz.

When the traffic thinned, she was free to pick up speed. She continued north and put more distance between Olga and Marina Makov and herself, and the miles calmed her anger. By San Jose it had turned from fire engine red to tangerine. By Millbrae, it was salmon pink; by San Francisco, a sickly, urine yellow. By the time Lila crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, relief elbowed the anger out of the way, and she felt like she'd opened up her chest and let extra-black buzzards fly out.

It was pointless to think about Yuri anymore, not with her mind or her heart. Adam had been right that sometimes bad things happened to good people—and to good dogs, like Grace. Sometimes bad things happened for no discernible reason and through no fault of your own. You didn't ask for them, and you couldn't control them. Betsy would say you had to accept them, but accepting wasn't the same as forgetting they'd happened.

Last week after discussing Yuri, Betsy had covered Lila with the Navajo blanket and said, “There's plenty we can never forget, but we can forgive who's hurt us.”

Lila had said, “Even if I understood why Yuri shot everybody, I can never forgive him.”

“Oh, yes, you can,” Betsy had said. “You're thinking of forgiveness as kissing and making up like you learn in Sunday school, but I'm talking about something different.” She'd adjusted the blinds so the room got shadowy. “My kind of forgiving means looking for freedom.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Well, you don't have to do a whole lot. You just set down your grievance and let go the best you can. Then you wait for the Great Spirit to send you the grace of healing.”

Though Lila still didn't see how she could forgive Yuri even in Betsy's way, she guessed she was willing at least to ask the Great Spirit to heal her. Since her search for answers had prolonged the pain and gained nothing, she could at least try to set down the misery and anger Yuri had caused her.

Okay,
Lila told herself.
I know I'll never forget what he did. But hereby, as of this minute, on Freeway 101, I will do my best to let it go.
Mount Tamalpais was a witness, as were the clouds and sun and egrets wading through the tidelands in the distance. Maybe nothing would change; maybe Lila would keep carrying her grudge till the day she died. But she was open to whatever the Great Spirit wanted. She would try to forgive and move on.

 

Grace, who would be waiting on Adam's porch, was the model of Betsy's forgiveness, Lila believed. Grace might never have forgotten Marshall's cruelty, but she'd put it down somewhere and walked away. She accepted whatever happened as if she knew far better than Lila did that you can't always explain abuse and dwelling on it is a waste of time. Here Lila had thought that to heal, she'd have to figure out why Yuri shot her, but Grace was what had been healing her all along.

Lila parked in Adam's driveway and hurried through his gate, past the flourishing tomato plants and the zucchini, which would soon be hiding huge broods under their leaf skirts. As she made her way along the brick path that curved around to the back of the house, all she could think of was how much she wanted to hug Grace.

Soon she would be dancing around Lila's feet and wagging her whole back end the way she always welcomed Lila, who could hardly wait to bury her face in Grace's golden fur. Lila would tell Grace how much she'd missed her. Lila would thank her for seeing her through the most troubled time she'd ever had, and for showing her what was important and how she should live.

At the back steps to Adam's porch, Lila stopped as if someone had turned a switch and paralyzed her legs. The screen door's lower half was ripped; a giant plus sign had been cut through it. Though Adam's foot could have torn it, Lila knew better. She also knew that if Grace had been in the yard, she'd have run to her.

Lila didn't want to get to the top of the steps and learn the truth. She wanted Grace to be waiting on the porch more than she'd ever wanted anything in her life. But when she reached the top step and looked, Grace was gone. Lila couldn't breathe. Her hands began to tremble. She knew how a house felt when a flood washed away its foundation.