An Unexpected Grace (4 page)

W
hen Lila was a senior in college, she called her father and announced that she was dropping out of school to paint full-time. He was an investigative journalist, and he was rabid about an education and career for his only child.

“For Christ's sake!” he barked into the phone. “You can't quit school. A degree will help you get a decent job.”

“All I want to do is paint.”

“Umf.” His shortened version of “harrumph.” “Lila, goddamn it. For once will you just try not to be stubborn?”

She pictured his face, red whenever someone crossed him. His teeth would be clenched on the pipe he'd stopped filling with tobacco since his heart attack four years before. He would be shaking his head with exasperation and motioning to her mother to get on the extension phone and back him up.

Before Lila gave in and agreed to finish school, he said, “You've got to be able to take care of yourself. You have to be independent.”

She'd heard that from her father since she was three and didn't understand what independence was. Her sneaker's shoelace had been slapping the floor, and she asked, “Daddy, fix this?”

A sturdy oak tree of a man, he rested his hands on his hips and looked down at her. “You're a big girl now. I'll bet that's something you can do for yourself.”

Together they sat on the floor, and several times he tied and untied her shoe. “Now you try,” he said. For half an hour she struggled until shoelace bows were ingrained in her for life.

As she grew up, her father drilled independence into her so she would be in control of every situation. On backpacking trips he taught her how to survive in the wild in case her plane crashed in the mountains and she had to wait for help. Before she left for college, he signed her up for a karate class so she could protect herself on campus alone at night. Later, he showed her how to change a tire and what to pack in a first-aid kit to prepare her for future cuts and burns.

However, he did not prepare Lila to get shot, or to become the newly dependent woman Cristina was pushing out the hospital's glass doors in a wheelchair, grabbing on to like a fragile vase, and helping into her car. Lila's father didn't prepare her for Cristina to reach across and fasten Lila's seat belt, either. “There you go!” Cristina said. Lila could have been her daughter, Rosie, age five.

“Thanks, Cris. You're being wonderful. I appreciate it more than I can tell you,” Lila said.

“You don't have to thank me. You just have to get well.”

“It's hard to be needy.”

“You won't be for long.”

“I felt safer in the hospital.”

“Don't worry.” Cristina gave Lila's shoulder a reassuring pat.

But vulnerability stung her. Her rational mind couldn't seem to tame her anxiety about being out in the world, where someone could shoot her even if she kicked and bit and smacked him with her plaster cast. Lila chewed her lower lip and scanned the block for men with guns as Cristina, with her man-luring curves, walked around the Volvo to the driver's side. She got behind the wheel and pulled into the street.

As Cristina drove through Golden Gate Park, she said, peppy and upbeat, “It's such a gorgeous day. Look at the daffodils around the pond. Spring's finally here.”

“Right,” Lila said, trying to sound enthusiastic. But the bright springtime sun made her a more visible target for someone to shoot at, and she'd have been glad for tinted one-way windows.

When Cristina approached the San Francisco Bay, she pointed through a stand of pines to the fluttering sails of boats. “Look. Beautiful!” She glanced at Lila as if she hoped for an eager reply.

“Right,” Lila said again. She kept her eyes on the road so she could warn Cristina if she started to swerve. If they crashed into the water, Lila would be unable to swim with her arm in a cast. She'd drown.

Cristina raked her fingers through her dark hair, which she wore free and sexy to her shoulders. She nudged Lila's knee. “Earth to Lila. Come in, Lila.”

Lila was supposed to laugh, and she wanted to. But a slight curve at the corners of her mouth was all her uneasiness would allow. She, who used to love to ride her bike in this very place, would have preferred today to travel in an amphibious tank. Lila and Cristina crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in silence.

 

Cristina drove through a tunnel and turned off the freeway toward Mill Valley, the small town where she lived—and where she'd invited Lila to stay for a week till she was well enough to go alone to her apartment. Rising in the distance was Mount Tamalpais, known as the “Sleeping Lady” because of her reclining human form against the sky. But in Lila's mind she wasn't sleeping; she looked like someone had shot her, and she was lying, wounded, above the hills.

Lila and Cristina traveled down Miller Avenue, past flowering plum trees and businesses that whizzed by in a blur: Tam Market, Closet Transfer, Oil and Water Art Store, Elsa's Chocolates, the Framery, and Jenny's Chinese Kitchen. After Cristina drove across Mill Valley's main street, where baskets of petunias hung from lampposts, she and Lila headed down Emerson Avenue and followed a stream into a forest.

Cristina turned onto a winding, narrow road and traveled up the mountain to her house. Lila had always thought it was charming, the kind of place Hansel and Gretel might have left a trail of crumbs through the forest to reach. Today, however, Lila felt apprehensive, so the ivy-covered stone walls and leaded-glass doors and windows made her think of a castle that a witch had cast a spell on; and the gnarled old wisteria entwined in the porch's iron railing looked choked.

As Cristina pulled into the garage, Lila glanced back across the bay at San Francisco, which, before, had always seemed like a far-off shining jewel. Now, though, the city had lost its magic; it was a place of shootings and murders, a tangle of troublesome buildings crowded on hills.

 

Cristina guided Lila to the front door, which had ten panes of streaky, antique glass. Cristina's two toy poodles were clawing their needly toenails on the bottom ones, and a scruffy golden retriever with a red bandana around her neck was smudging her nose on the pane next to the doorknob.

Lila stiffened when she saw the retriever. She had to be Grace, and she was far scarier in the flesh than she'd been in the poster. She had mange on her back, which had not been visible in the photograph; mange could make her irritable and, therefore, more prone to attack. Her troubled face, with forehead furrows and dark, mistrustful eyes, looked like she was contemplating bites. Though her fangs were hidden, they had to be sharp.

“Isn't Grace adorable? I'm fostering her for a little while,” Cristina said.

“I thought she'd be with your friend. The one in the photo.”

“You mean Adam. He couldn't take her, so I agreed to it.”

“You didn't tell me she was here.”

“If I had, you'd have insisted on going home. You forget how well I know you.” Cristina smiled. “You'll love Grace. She's a sweetheart.”

“Menace” was the word Lila would have used. She steeled herself for sharing a house with an animal who at any time might bare her teeth and lunge. You could never tell what a dog like that might do.

Cristina worked her key into the lock. When she opened the door, the poodles yapped and jumped on her. Grace had the decency to move aside, but something was wrong with her left front leg, so she hobbled into a corner and slouched. Her glower informed Lila that she'd picked up Lila's fear of dogs and disapproved of her invasion of the house. If dogs could talk, Lila was sure Grace would have said,
This is
my
house, you odious toad. Why don't you leave?

Cristina must have noticed Lila's frown. “Don't be afraid. Honest, Grace is very shy. She wouldn't hurt a flea.”

Lila walked sideways through the door, the better to look the dog straight in the eyes and dare her to turn savage. Lila and Grace sized up each other with mutual suspicion. When Lila passed, Grace yawned and exposed her fangs, along with two horseshoes of teeth a shark might have envied. Then she went back to slumping. Lila kept her distance.

F
or her first couple of days at Cristina's, Lila lay on the guest room bed and willed her strength to return. But she learned that strength wasn't something you could will, demand, or control. It was a gift, and it took its own sweet time, as did peace, of which Lila had little. During the day she sweated through flashbacks, and at night she woke yelling for help in a recurring nightmare of men hacking down her apartment door and stepping through the rubble to kill her.

Also unsettling was Cristina's scheduled departure. The day after Yuri shot Lila, Cristina's husband, Greg, an environmental lawyer, had started a six-month consulting job with the EPA in Washington, D.C. Cristina had stayed behind to pack and look after Lila, but Cristina and her daughter, Rosie, would leave to join him. They were as close as Lila had to family—and she dreaded how much she would miss them.

Many times each day she leaned against a blue corduroy bolster and took deep, steadying breaths. She stared at the trees out the window to receive what Cristina called “redwood therapy,” which was supposed to calm her and lift her spirits, and she dozed and listened to jazz on the radio.

In the afternoons Rosie came into Lila's room after kindergarten, and they played Go Fish. Or they sat on the bed and took “trips,” as they had before in Cristina's Volvo; and Rosie, wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat, her ponytail threaded through the back, drove Lila to the North Pole to see what Santa was up to and to the moon for apple juice and cookies.

Lila and Rosie also played with Gerald, her imaginary lion friend, who had antelope breath. They made up special menus to feed him: flamingo beak soufflé with sunbeam muffins; sautéed ostrich toes on a bed of marsh grass; zebra tail in peanut butter sauce, accompanied by a tomato and hippo-eyelash salad. While Lila drew Gerald a pride of mates, Rosie drew a portrait of Lila with fingers sticking out of her cast like an electrocuted spider's legs.

Occasionally, as Lila and Rosie passed the time together, the poodles ran lawlessly up and down the hall. Once in a while, Grace shuffled by, her fangs glistening more brightly than Gerald's, her gold fur rumpled, and her plumed tail sagging. She was on her way to and from her favorite hiding spot under Cristina and Greg's antique four-poster bed. Grace never came into Lila's room. She seemed to know she wasn't welcome.
Thank goodness.

 

Late one afternoon Cristina was making dinner in the kitchen, and Rosie was chasing the poodles around the backyard. Lila was surfing TV channels with hope for information about Yuri Makov, as usual, though in the last few days coverage of the shootings had waned to almost nil. Nevertheless, the TV kept her company, which she welcomed as the sun slipped behind the mountain and the forest darkened. Uneasy in the shadows, Lila turned on her bedside lamp and kept the TV volume high so the reporters would seem like they were in the room.

As she flicked the remote control from a weatherwoman to a sportscaster, footsteps heavier than Cristina's thumped on the hardwood in the hall. Out of the corner of Lila's eye she saw something move. She whipped her head around to look. A broad-shouldered man in a moss-green sweater was standing in her doorway. He was taller than she by a good four inches. He had to outweigh her by seventy pounds.

Lila's stomach pole-vaulted to her throat. Common sense would have told her that the man had not shown up to kill her. But her frayed nerves canceled logic, and an image of Yuri Makov in her office entry flashed through her mind. She couldn't run to Cristina in the kitchen because the man was blocking the way and trapping her as surely as Yuri had. She jumped out of bed to protect herself, then froze like a deer in headlights.

Finally, she managed, “Who
are
you?!”

“I'm . . .”

“What are you
doing
here?!” As Lila curled her good hand into a fist, her nails dug into her palm.

“Cristina sent me to meet you. I'm Adam Spencer.”

“Oh.” The sun rose on Lila's mental landscape. The man in the dog poster's photo. If he'd not frightened her so badly, she might have recognized him.

She rested her hand over her heart to slow the pounding, but that hardly helped. Coming down from an adrenaline rush of fear would take a while. Lila's brain raced as quickly as her pulse, so she couldn't settle on the right response to Adam, such as “Nice to meet you” or “I'm Lila.” In an accusatory tone, she blurted out, “You scared me half to death.”

“Nothing scary about me,” he said, as cool as lettuce. “I'm an ordinary person.”

But he wasn't ordinary. Besides being big, he had a handsome face you might expect to see chiseled in stone. A straight patrician nose. Strong chin. Full lips. Intelligent eyes. You could tell nothing got by them, including Lila in her faded flannel nightgown with its arm slit for her cast. Today she'd not yet washed her face or brushed her hair.

“You should have knocked or warned me you were coming,” she said.

“Sorry.” But his remorse did not seem especially sincere.

He wasn't sensitive enough to understand her anxiety, Lila decided, so she didn't bother to explain herself. As she searched her mind for what to say next, Grace hobbled in, wagging her tail with exuberance. She whined and whimpered and threw herself at Adam.

As he bent down and hugged her, plastered against his knees, her ecstatic drool polka-dotted the floor. He murmured “good dog” and petted her shoulders with big sweeps of his hands. She trembled and nuzzled his neck, and her eyes, which had always looked troubled, were shining.

Lila grabbed the bedpost and shrank back from Grace, though shrinking put only an extra inch between herself and that dog. Lila had almost gotten used to being in the same house with her, but not in the same room. And now that the dog's mood had flipped from dejected to ecstatic, Lila knew that Grace was bipolar—and more unpredictable than Lila had thought.

“Grace isn't supposed to be in here. Will you please take her away?” she asked.

“She won't hurt anything. She's just being herself. After all she's been through, it's great to see her happy,” Adam said.

“I don't want her here.”

“Why
not
?”

“I'm not wild about dogs.”

Adam narrowed his eyes as if she'd just mentioned the leprosy she'd picked up while serving her term in San Quentin.

“I had a bad experience with a dog,” Lila said, defending her position.

Without bothering to ask what it had been, he said, “Grace should help you get over it. She's wonderful.” There was judgment in his voice. Clearly, he thought she was as worthy as a dust mote.

Anyone could see that Adam was a dog fanatic. Lila pictured him living with a pack of hulking Irish wolfhounds, who licked spilled milk off his kitchen counters and slobbered over raw hamburger in metal bowls. Huge wet noses streaked the back window of the pickup he hauled the brutes to the park in every day. To get across his living room, he had to hopscotch over dog beds as big as barges. His kitchen walls were covered with dog-show ribbons.

He ruffled the fur on Grace's forehead so it looked like a rooster comb. “Come on, Grace. Let's go. You shouldn't stay where you're not wanted.” Adam stood and gently slipped his fingers through her bandana. Without saying goodbye, he led her away.

 

The next morning before Cristina drove Rosie down the hill to kindergarten, she brought Lila the
Herald
. With hungry eyes, she skimmed the front-page headlines—mostly about mayhem in the Middle East and scrapping in Congress—and she combed the news section.

She was looking for an article about Yuri Makov or anyone else who had gone postal and who might help her understand him. But the only story that came close to workplace violence was two paragraphs on the last page, about an armed robbery in a San Francisco grocery store. The Korean owner had come around the counter and grabbed the criminal—about five-six, in a black ski mask and blue fleece hoodie. He'd shot the owner in the thigh, and so far the police had no suspects. At least Lila was lucky to know who'd shot her, but the article brought her no closer to learning why Yuri had done it.

She looked through the
Herald
's entertainment and business sections and found nothing related to going postal there. Disappointed, she folded the paper and pressed the crease along the middle extra-hard. Once she got back to her apartment, she could search the Internet for information about Yuri Makov, and she wouldn't have to dodge Cristina always insisting, “He was nuts! Let it go!” If Lila mentioned his name more than twice a day, Cristina lectured her about obsessing and said, “Get some more redwood therapy.”

Except for the grandfather clock's chimes in the living room and a distant whoosh of a street sweeper down the mountain, the house was silent. Ever since Adam Spencer had frightened Lila, she listened for footsteps. Cristina's house was across a wooded gulley from the nearest neighbor, and Lila could yell for help till she was hoarse—and no one would hear. She wrapped her good arm around herself, but it was paltry protection. Two weeks ago, she'd have said the only thing that frightened her was large, erratic dogs, but after Yuri Makov, nothing seemed secure.