An Unexpected Grace (9 page)

Just then, something exploded like a cannon fired off the deck behind the house. Lila jerked with a start.
A gunshot. It had to be.
In a flash, Yuri Makov was running down the hall to kill her, and she was shaking like an aspen leaf in the wind.

Lila broke out in a sweat. Her heart beat like it was trying to crack her ribs. Her head was ringing. Doors slammed up and down the hall. People shrieked outside her cubicle. She smelled gun smoke. She had to run to protect herself.

When Lila looked for a place to hide, she saw Greg's den. His law books. Peace lilies. The wild-goose-chase quilt folded on the sofa. The wingback chair.

Lila mentally grabbed herself by the scruff of the neck and shook herself to bring back reason:
Get control of yourself. This was a flashback. You're safe. The explosion was thunder. The shrieks are coming from Grace.

Wrenched out of sleep, Grace was making anguished, panicked cries. She ran into the living room, crouched down, and buried her face in her paws. Apparently finding no reassurance, she got to her feet but didn't seem to know in what direction to run—so, confused, she hobbled around the room in a circle. Then howling and whining as her crippled leg buckled under her, she zigzagged down the hall to Greg and Cristina's bedroom.

Lila knew firsthand how terror could pulverize you. Grace was as scared as Lila had been. Seeing Grace fall apart added to Lila's distress, yet it also made her feel sorry for the dog.

Since Grace could not be a threat when she was so afraid, Lila rushed into the bedroom and found her hiding under the bed. Lila kneeled on the floor and raised the bed skirt. In the darkness, Grace's haunted eyes glowed like hot coals. Quivers from deep inside her rolled out in waves. Her meaty breaths were jagged, and her ears were pressed back in fear.

“Grace, it's okay. It was thunder. It won't hurt you.”

When more thunder rumbled in the distance, Grace's body vibrated. Her whimpers seemed to be more than sound; they brushed Lila's face like cobwebs.

She kept repeating Grace's name. “You've heard thunder before, haven't you?” Of course Grace had—when chained to a tree. Storms must have terrified her. Lila had not realized that dogs could have such intense and primal feelings.

But comforting Grace exhausted Lila. So recently shaken herself, she had little strength to help the dog. Lila dropped the bed skirt, leaned against the wall, and closed her eyes. As the neediness in Grace's whimpers overwhelmed her, Lila identified with the vulnerability and anguish.

Grace and Lila stayed in the bedroom until the thunder stopped. Eventually, Grace crawled out from under the bed and looked at Lila with glazed eyes that asked,
Who
are
you? What are you doing here?

“You poor thing. I'm so sorry. You're going to be okay,” Lila whispered.

She, the former dog distruster, patted Grace's shoulder.

L
ila started down the mountain road toward town. The forest smelled of redwood fronds and bay leaves. Fuzzy shafts of morning sunlight shone through the trees onto clover, ferns, and miner's lettuce and dappled them like camouflage. Around a bend, the road passed through a patch of brighter sun and thickets of blackberries and Scotch broom, behind which murderers could hide. Lila searched for them in each clump of vegetation. She peered into a passing car.

Three years ago when she and Cristina had been hiking in the Mill Valley woods, a man with a rifle had stepped out from behind a redwood trunk. His overalls were filthy, his waxy dreadlocks brushed his shoulders, and a lens in his glasses was cracked. He shoved his rifle toward Lila and Cristina and looked like he was a breath away from taking aim and shooting them. Cristina screamed. She and Lila tore down to the creek bed and ran home.

That was when Cristina told Lila about David Carpenter, the Trailside Killer. Nearly thirty years before, he'd sneaked up on three women and stabbed or shot them to death on Mount Tamalpais, practically in Cristina's backyard. Eventually, he was caught and convicted of seven murders, and Lila would never forget him because he'd begged the police who arrested him, “Please, don't hurt me!” After what he'd done, who could forget such audacity and cowardice?

Because of him, Lila had had to convince herself this morning to walk to the store. If she hadn't needed yogurt and tofu, her staples, and if she'd had two working hands to drive a car, she'd never have set out by herself on a road where another human being passed by only every few minutes—and the human being could shoot her.

After breakfast, she'd Googled David Carpenter to make sure he wasn't preying on women anymore. Though he was a serial murderer, not a mass shooter, she hoped he might give her insight into Yuri Makov—and one sadistic brute might have something in common with another.

As Grace snored in the kitchen, Lila read an online article about Carpenter, who'd worked as a salesman, ship's purser, and printer. Though he'd been condemned to death, he was still alive and well in San Quentin, across the freeway just a few miles north of where Lila was sitting, she thought with a pang of fear.

In a mug shot, Carpenter, dressed in a coat and tie, looked like he was going to a dance instead of to prison. His nose was as wide as a gorilla's, and one eye seemed larger than the other, making him look off balance and disturbed. He was mostly bald, and probably to compensate he'd grown long sideburns, which curved toward his mouth. That was an unfortunate emphasis, since at his arraignment he'd stuttered so badly that he could hardly answer “yes” when the judge asked if his name was David Carpenter.

He'd stuttered since age seven, maybe because his alcoholic father had beaten him and his near-blind, tyrannical mother had forced him to take ballet. The article suggested their cruelty might also have caused his bed-wetting, torturing of animals, flying into rages, and retreating behind a carapace of shyness. At seventeen, he molested two of his cousins. Later, he drove a woman to the woods, straddled her, and told her he had a “funny quirk” she had to satisfy—and then attacked her with a hammer. Intending to rape another woman, he slammed his car into hers to get her to climb out—and stabbed her when she fought him.

He killed six people whom he found in isolated places like Mount Tamalpais, but he lured his last victim to him by promising to sell her a used car. He had been teaching her to use computer-typesetting machines at Econo Quick Print, where he worked, and it was rumored that he had driven her home several times and tried to date her.

Lila imagined his furtive glances at her, sitting with her legs tightly crossed in his passenger seat and feeling unease that she could not yet fully understand. He would radiate violent lust and plan how to prey on her, and he would stutter, red with shame, a dinner invitation. Maybe she would feel sorry for him, living with a speech impediment like that, yet she would recoil at his fat lips, which might be all over her if she accepted. Her “no, thanks” would make him seethe. Those two simple words would unleash death for her, an unintended consequence like the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil and starting a hurricane.

When Lila studied Carpenter's photo, the computer screen seemed to darken, as if the computer itself were repulsed to bear such slime. She wondered if Yuri Makov had molested, raped, or attacked anybody before he shot her and her colleagues, and if he'd been a troubled child whose parents had abused him.

What kind of parents would raise a killer? What mistakes would they make? How much could you blame parents for what their children did, anyway? Weren't choice and free will part of the picture?

No matter what Yuri's parents might have done to him, Lila could not dismiss his violence as just their fault. Still, she pictured his father as a stern, flinty man—in a beaver hat and tall black boots—who might have learned torture methods working for the KGB. He might have hauled Yuri to the basement of their apartment building, where no one could hear him yell, and slid his belt out of his pants' loops and whipped Yuri till he bled. Maybe his father had said that Yuri's insolence gave him no choice but to beat him. Maybe when the leather crackled on Yuri's skin, his father smiled.

Yuri's mother may have been as sadistic as his father or too submissive to intervene. She could have encouraged the violence to discipline and strengthen Yuri. Lila imagined her in a babushka's kerchief, waiting in line for bread with Yuri, age six. As they inched toward the baker's counter, she would make him stand as still as a soldier at attention, allowed only to stamp his feet in the cold. He would not know till later that children could be happy and free; but then it would be too late, and the damage would be done. He would murder to calm his anger, as the Trailside Killer had. Yet that was no excuse.

 

The Mill Valley Library was a shingled wood-and-glass structure with a roof that looked like a gently sloping wing. Since Cristina had canceled her
Herald
subscription, Lila stopped there and scanned the previous week's newspapers for going-postal stories. Finding nothing of interest, she went back to the street. She passed a church with arched windows, and houses behind tall fences, one of which had wooden frogs nailed to the top of each post.

On Mill Valley's main street, cherry trees were planted along the sidewalks, and redwoods grew in clumps around the town square. The windshields of cars, parked at an angle, reflected the sun. A bus chugged by. Most important for Lila, people were milling around.

Though she now knew you could never tell what psychopaths might be sharing your street and you couldn't count on safety in numbers, at least there was comfort in them. If someone shot her, she wouldn't die alone, as she would when walking down the mountain. She breathed more easily.

Lila passed geeks in a computer café, aging hippies in a head shop, and well-coifed women knitting around a table in a yarn store. A man in a business suit and wing-tip shoes climbed out of a Jaguar as a Buddhist monk in a magenta robe and Reeboks walked by beating a drum. Ahead of Lila, a missionary handed out brochures on Darfur, and a gray-haired woman in a tennis skirt loaded bags of kitty litter into a Volkswagen bus, whose license plates said, “Cat Power.”

At the Wayfarer's Market, which was crowded with people, Lila bought yogurt and tofu, and to celebrate her victory at venturing out alone, a gourmet black bean sauce—all she could carry home, one-handed. Then she went to browse in the Second Time Around Shop.

It smelled of aging furniture polish, crumbling paper, and milk that someone had soaked china plates in to hide craze. The light was dim, and dust motes traveled through the air. The manager was eating lunch behind a tattered red velvet curtain. He clinked a fork on porcelain and tuned a radio to NPR.

In the housewares section, Lila's hope always abounded because you never knew what you might find. Her breathing quickened with the joy of the chase, like a hunter galloping on horseback behind a beagle pack. Once for a dollar she'd bought a spoon and polished it—and discovered “sterling” stamped on the back. She paid $18.95 for a tiny engraving of the Greek Pythius, galloping on horseback; at home with a magnifying glass, she read that the artist was the famous English painter William Turner.

The Second Time Around Shop had a thrift store's usual baskets and mismatched dishes and glasses, one of which was cranberry red and would have made an interesting vase, but it was chipped. The only “painting” was a landscape print, on which someone had brushed varnish to try and fool buyers into thinking the varnish strokes were oils and the painting was original. Lila found rusty bread and yogurt makers; a bin of sheet-and-pillowcase sets held together with masking tape; and a sign with G
RANDMA'S
K
ITCHEN
carved in wood.

Nothing beckoned to her to buy it. Like a disappointed fox hunter, she turned her horse around and called the beagles home.

 

When Lila got halfway up the hill, she sat on a curb and rested. Her fatigue reminded her that she had far to go to get her body strong, and her chronic fear of attack said that her post-traumatic stress was alive and well. But after rarely leaving Cristina's house for weeks, being out among people had buoyed her spirit, and her cast seemed to weigh less than before. The sun felt like it was shining straight into her brain and brightening the dark, threatened corners. Being away from Grace for a couple of hours felt like she'd set down a burden.

When she got up and moved on, her footsteps were lighter. But the closer she got to home—and to Grace—the more her feet shuffled. Grace had been with Lila for almost two weeks. Lately, she'd put on a little weight, and someone would be more likely to adopt her. But not once had Adam reported on his search for her home. As far as Lila knew, he wasn't searching at all, and even her Pleaser would say he was inconsiderate. Lila stared at the pavement's cracks. If they'd been Rorschach inkblots, she'd have seen trouble in them.

She didn't need more trouble. She needed to take charge. If Adam wasn't going to call her, she'd call him when she got home.

A
s Grace pressed her nose against the front door's sidelight, the wood around the window framed her face so it looked like a portrait of sorrow. She could have been standing in line at the pharmacy for her prescription of Zoloft. Mourning crepe would have been more fitting around her neck than her red bandana was.

But when Lila started down the path toward the door, Grace saw her coming and brightened. Grace got to her feet as if she were president of the Welcome Wagon, and her breath fogged the glass pane by the doorknob. When Lila unlocked the door, Grace moved only enough to let Lila step into the entry. Since she'd comforted Grace out of her panic attack from the thunder, Lila had clearly risen a notch in Grace's estimation. So she no longer kept a distance.

“How's it going, Grace?” Lila no longer kept a distance, either, and she and Grace had been getting along well enough to pass the time of day.

Grace's panting said,
I'm fine!
Her eyes shone as brightly as when she'd run to Adam. She padded behind Lila to the kitchen and watched her put away the groceries.

Lila could have sworn that Grace's slouch had grown less droopy than before. Her back and shoulders seemed straighter; someone might have tied an invisible rope around her middle, pulled it up, and taken out her slump. She also held her plumed tail out straight and swished it back and forth, as if she were a slave fanning an imaginary sultan lying on the floor.

Lila couldn't be sure, but the slow swish of Grace's plume might have been a wag of pleasure that Lila was home. Though she was glad Grace was improving, Lila felt burdened all over again because Grace might want more from her than she was able to give.

 

When Lila went to the bedroom, Grace followed and plopped down next to the dresser so her bottom and front legs made a small tripod that was reflected in the TV screen. A sliver of her tongue hung below her charcoal-lump nose. She panted slightly, like she was asking about Lila's trip to the store. If Lila were a dog, Grace would have expected her to pant a reply.

As Lila shrugged out of her fuchsia jacket, a stab of pain traveled down her injured arm. “
Ow!
”

Grace shrank back like she'd felt the pain too.

“I can't help it. This awful man shot me, and my arm still hurts.” What was Lila doing telling her troubles to a dog?

Grace blinked and cocked her head with rapt attention; she looked like she was listening with all her heart. If Grace had been a person, Lila would have believed she was concerned. But surely dogs couldn't feel empathy or pick up people's feelings.

 

After lunch Grace's eyes followed Lila as she pulled the sheets off the bed with her right hand. She unfolded a clean bottom contour sheet and tossed it over the mattress the best she could, then wrestled, one-handed, with the sheet's lower right corner. When she got it in place, she tackled the lower left corner, but the sheet's right one snapped off. No matter how hard Lila tugged, her injury prevented her from fitting the lower corners at the same time.

Finally, struggling till her forehead was sweaty, she worked a safety pin through the sheet and mattress cover to hold the lower left corner, and then she yanked the second into place and pinned it, too. Though she pulled till her right hand trembled with fatigue, she couldn't get the sheet over the upper left corner—and she had to admit to herself that fitting the upper right one would also be impossible. For now she was going to have to sleep in a rumpled, sheetless bed.

Flopping onto it, she told herself that having no sheets wouldn't kill her, but it would remind her how gravely she'd been hurt and how limited she was. Frustration sidled up to her, as if it planned to be a permanent guest at her table and there wouldn't be room for anyone but the two of them. With her good hand, Lila squeezed part of the sheet into a frustrated ball.

When Grace limped over and pressed her body against the mattress, Lila was about to shoo her away so she wouldn't get fur in the bed. She pressed her cheek against Lila's hand so the silky tufts of fur above her ear brushed Lila's wrist. To her surprise, the softness felt soothing; she released the sheet and stroked Grace's fur with the backs of her fingers.

Perhaps Lila had been wrong about empathy in dogs. Grace seemed to have come to console her, just as Lila had consoled Grace during the storm. If she couldn't hug or speak, she might be comforting the best she could by presenting a part of herself for Lila to hold. Astonished that Grace might be offering solace, Lila stroked Grace's ear again.

Grace rested her chin on the mattress and looked at Lila with eyes that said,
I care! I really, really care!
But slowly they got a troubled slant, as if she were thinking about something that hurt her.

Soon Grace's eyes gave Lila a gut-wrenching speech that no one would need words to understand. Grace said that she sympathized with Lila's distress. And even though Grace had lately been putting on a chipper front, deep down she was distressed herself, and she needed someone as much as Lila did to encourage her out of sorrow. Grace had had a miserable time at her cruel, sick owner's hands, and she was desperate to be with someone who would love her.

Can't you be that person? Won't you give me the home I want more than anything in the world?
Grace's sad eyes begged.
Please, please, I'll do anything if you'll let me be your dog. Please, love me
.

Grace's eyes were moist with longing. She could have been a street urchin, looking in the window of a candy store and clutching a penny that could not buy a single chocolate-covered cherry wrapped in gold foil. Lila closed her own eyes to cut off the emotions pouring out of Grace, but her neediness was too compelling to escape.

Lila's sympathy urged her to help Grace. The dog wasn't bad; Lila hadn't minded being around her nearly as much as she'd expected. But she couldn't possibly keep Grace when she couldn't even change her sheets. Lila still had months to go before her life's dust would settle and she'd be herself again. She didn't have the time or strength for Grace, who was a constant distraction when Lila needed to focus on healing.

For both their sakes, Grace and Lila needed to get on with their lives and go their separate ways. The sooner Adam found Grace a home with people who'd love her, the better. Lila removed her hand from Grace's shoulder and sat up in her rumpled bed. She sighed. “I care about you, but I have to do
something
. It's time.”

“Adam?” Cristina's contact list was on the desk next to the phone. Grace was at Lila's feet. “This is Lila Elliot.”

“I recognized your voice.”

He sounded welcoming. An artful ploy to coax Lila into keeping Grace for another month?

“How are you and Grace getting along?” he asked.

“She's growing too attached.”

Adam ignored the negativity implied in “too” and said, “I told you she was a loving dog.”

“She is,” Lila conceded and set her hand on Grace's head, a natural resting place. “I've been waiting for you to call. Isn't it time for you to come and get her?”

Adam's pause told Lila that his engineer's brain was outlining ways to dodge her request. “I can't get Grace now.”

“You've quit looking for her home?!”

“No. I'm asking around all the time.”

“Is asking around enough? Can't you do more? What about the posters?”

Lila's Pleaser urged,
Don't be pushy!

“You don't have to get upset,” Adam said.

“You told me Grace would be gone in a few days, and it's been two weeks. Don't you think you're being thoughtless?”

Lila's Pleaser hopped around and shrieked,
Don't talk like that, for heaven's sake. Your mother taught you to be gracious.

If Lila had listened to her Pleaser, she would have clamped her hand over her mouth and told Adam that something must have gotten into her; she was never so blunt. But her Crazy Aunt jumped out of her Ford Explorer and snarled,
You have a right to speak your mind! I'll smack you in the chops if you apologize to him.

“It can't be so hard to feed a gentle dog,” Adam said. In his words, again lurked judgment.

“Feeding Grace is only part of it. Having her around is difficult,” Lila said. “I'm scared I'll trip over her. I got shot. I can't do half of what I used to.”

“I remember. The broken arm.”

The broken arm?
“It's not a simple broken arm.”
You could be more understanding.

“I know you've had a hard time,” Adam said.

Lila would not allow that concession to sway her. “Before you left Grace with me, you never asked if I could manage a dog.”

“I thought your injury might be too personal for me to mention. I didn't want to pry.”

“You could have asked. You could have made sure Grace wouldn't be too much for me.”

Adam exhaled, loud enough for Lila to hear. “Actually, I thought Grace could help you heal.”

“Heal?!”

“By keeping you company. Being there for you.”

“It's been the other way around,” Lila said.

But, then, she wasn't being honest. Grace had just tried to comfort her when she was distressed about her sheets. And Grace had kept her company and tempered her distrust of dogs. Lila didn't know what else to say to Adam, and suddenly she felt too tired to argue. Walking to town that morning had sapped her strength. She wanted off the phone.

Grace's chin rested on Lila's toes as if claiming her as her very own. Grace's closed eyes gave her a proprietary look, which notified anyone else who might want Lila that Grace had gotten title to her first, and negotiation for her was impossible.