An Unexpected Grace

by Kristin von Kreisler

  “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.

  6

  Without Cristina’s feminine touches, Greg’s den would have looked like a Victorian lawyer’s office. He had an antique partner’s desk, a wall of leather-bound books, a dark green leather wingback chair and sofa, and a painting of a ship cutting through the froth of a stormy sea. Cristina had added peace lilies, poodle statues, needlepoint pillows, and a wild-goose-chase-pattern quilt, under which Lila was curled up on the sofa. Today was her first time out of the guest bedroom and bath since coming here. The change of scene freed her.

  That morning Cristina had cut the sleeve of Greg’s oldest flannel shirt and guided Lila’s cast through, then buttoned her up and helped her into a pair of jeans. Though Lila had resisted the assistance, she had to accept it until she could manage buttons and zippers with only her right hand. Just as she’d learned to tie her shoes as a child, she’d have to conquer simple tasks—changing her chest bandage, squeezing toothpaste onto her brush, pulling a nightgown over her head, showering with her left arm in a plastic bag, washing and drying her hair. Sometimes the list seemed daunting.

  Still, Lila felt better being up. Though the shirt and jeans were frumpy, sitting, dressed, in Greg’s den helped her feel less like someone who’d been shot and more like a normal person. The only drawback to being in the den was Grace, sprawled on a pillow across the room. She looked like she’d been poured there, a gold puddle of a dog. Though she pretended to sleep, occasionally she opened one large, dark eye and aimed it at Lila, who was sure it had a malicious glint. She eyed Grace back, and on the windowsill she noted a large wooden poodle that could serve as a club, if needed.

  Grace was resting her chin on her vile, bacteria-ridden tennis ball. She’d dug it up in the backyard, where it had probably been buried for two hundred years. Though Cristina never seemed to mind Grace’s bringing the ball inside, it dripped slobber and contaminated the house as surely as her mange did. As usual, however, far more unsettling than mange and germs were her teeth, only ten feet away.

  Cristina set a tray with napkins, cups of tea, and a plate of sweet rolls on the glass-topped table that, thankfully, stood between Lila and the dog. Cristina kissed her fingertips the way Italian waiters do to say something is delicious. “Come on. Mangia! I didn’t bake these for nothing. I don’t want you to waste away.” As the den filled with a rich, cinnamon smell, she picked up a roll and took a bite.

  Though Lila’s appetite had run off with the use of her left arm, to please Cristina, she took a roll. The vanilla icing melted in her mouth. “You’re dear to do all this for me, Cris, but you don’t need to work so hard. Really, I’m all right.”

  “You are not. You’ve got black circles under your eyes. You look like someone just let you out of a dungeon.” Cristina kicked off her loafers and eased into the wingback chair.

  “I don’t think I look so bad,” Lila said.

  “Maybe not as bad as last week, but you’ve got miles to go.” Cristina polished off her roll in four bites and blew at the steam curling from her tea. “On the phone last night Greg and I decided you can’t go back to your apartment this weekend. You’re not well enough.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

  “That’s not true. You couldn’t make it up the stairs to your front door. You need to stay here till Rosie and I leave, and then you should house-sit for us.”

  Lila shook her head. “I couldn’t commute to work.”

  “You wouldn’t have to go back to work. Greg and I will pay for your utilities and food so you won’t have any expenses.”

  “I could never let you do that.”

  “We want somebody in the house while we’re gone. It should be you.”

  “You’ve never said you wanted a house sitter before.”

  “We decided we need someone to water the yard. This summer’s supposed to be dry.”

  “I can’t pack my stuff and move it here.”

  “I could do it in a day. Look, you’d be doing us a favor. We need your help.” Cristina took a swallow of tea and set her cup on the table. “If you stay here, you can paint full-time. I know you want that more than anything.”

  A direct hit to Lila’s heart. She couldn’t argue with that, as Cristina well knew.

  It went without saying that Lila wanted to help her, especially after all Cristina had done for her for eighteen years—and more than ever since Yuri had shot her. There were hundreds of small kindnesses, such as birthday cakes, Christmas dinner invitations, and chicken soup for Lila’s colds. And there were hundreds of times when Cristina had given moral support. After Lila’s parents had died two days apart from an infection in Peru, Cristina went with her to pick out cemetery plots. When Lila’s income as an artist had dropped below anemic, Cristina commissioned a portrait of Rosie; and after Lila had walked out on Reed, Cristina invited her home till she found an apartment. Besides owing Cristina, Lila loved her like a sister.

  Still, house-sitting for six months would be complicated. A banner saying BE
INDEPENDENT traveled across Lila’s inner sky. Though Cristina had said she and Greg needed help, Lila had a nagging sense that they wanted to help her. Though well meant, their subsidy was hard to accept. Every day in Cristina’s house, Lila would have to talk her pride off a tenth-story window ledge.

  Also, secret longings made Lila hesitate to house-sit.

  Five years before, she’d been with Cristina and Greg when Rosie had refused to be born. After nine hours in labor, Cristina was gripping her watermelon stomach, and despite the counting and breathing they’d learned in birth classes, she was moaning with pain. Nevertheless, as Lila draped Cristina’s shoulders with the Italian flag she’d bought for her, Lila would have traded places with her in a finger snap. Greg was massaging and kissing her arms and telling her he loved her, and she was about to have his baby—and Lila was living with baby-disdaining Reed, with whom her good judgment had been urging her to break up, but she had not yet gathered the conviction to do it.

  After seventeen hours, Rosina Patrizia Harrison presented herself for their devotion. Her eyes were puffed closed, her hands looked like small starfish, and her skin was an extra-deep shade of rose madder. When she howled at being squeezed out into the world, her lips curled up and exposed endearing little gums. To Lila, she was the anointed queen of the universe; she would rule the sky and wind with one nod of her charming head. As her godmother, in the next few years Lila would buy her princess costumes at the thrift store, invite her teddy bears to tea, paint her face like a cat for Halloween, and play five thousand games of Go Fish with her.

  But Lila was not Rosie’s—or anybody’s—mother, and she had no husband. Reed was out of her life for reasons she didn’t think she could ever forgive. She also had no financial security or beautiful home of her own, as did Cristina, whose life was a sophisticated version of a Norman Rockwell painting

  If Lila stayed in Cristina’s house for six months, everything around her would be shouting about what she longed for but was missing. The photos in every room would underscore this feeling: Cristina and Greg stuffing wedding cake into each other’s eager mouths and sledding down a hill in matching red parkas. Rosie toddling across the living room or sitting in a Shaker rocking chair in her pink sweat suit and looking cute enough to smother in a hug. Rosie was everywhere—in the mouse drawing on the refrigerator, the step-up platform to the bathroom sink, the tiny green galoshes with frog-face toes in the mudroom. Evidence of a happy marriage was also all over the house. You couldn’t miss it in the silver Victorian tea set that Greg had bought Cristina just because she liked it.

  Lila’s envy came to life only when provoked, such as during Rosie’s birth or on the afternoon when Cristina showed Lila a dime-size clamshell that Greg had given her.

  On its smooth interior, Greg had written with a ballpoint pen, “I love you.”

  Cristina said, “We were on the beach. He acted like he found the shell in the sand like that. Isn’t it the dearest thing?”

  Indeed, it was. Envy flew into Lila’s face like a hornet, but she swatted it.

  Despite Lila’s longings for security and family, though, Cristina was right: Lila wanted to paint. It was essential for picking up the pieces of her life. For months she’d been planning a series of doors, gates, and windows. When a new idea for a painting came to mind, her fingers ached to curl around a brush. Painting had been the heartbeat of her life, and she had to get her heartbeat back. Cristina was making an offer Lila could never refuse.

  “You’d take the poodles?” she asked.

  “We’d never leave behind those preciouses,” Cristina said.

  “And that golden retriever?” Lila pointed across the room at Grace, who was lying on her back with her legs flopped out, like she was working on her stomach at a tanning salon. The fur there was more sparse than on the rest of her so pink skin showed through.

  “Adam’s put up posters. She’ll have a home in no time. Everybody loves goldens,” Cristina said.

  Everybody minus me.

  “So you’ll house-sit?” Cristina asked.

  “Whatever you need. I’m glad to help.”

  Cristina clapped her hands together. “Fabulous!”

  For the first time in months, Lila’s heart brimmed with hope.

  7

  When two strange men walked up to Cristina’s front porch, Lila’s breath caught in her throat. She told herself they were selling or campaigning for something, but the reality check didn’t neutralize her fear, which was stark because Cristina had taken the dogs to get Rosie at school. Lila was alone.

  If the men hadn’t seen her through the front door’s glass, she’d have gone to her room and pretended no one was home. One, in a dark suit and wide, lime-green tie, was about to knock; when he saw her through the panes, he dropped his hand to his side and waited for her to answer the door. The other, in a rumpled blazer, scowled as she approached. She scowled back because the last thing she wanted was to talk with men she didn’t know.

  She cracked the door an ultra-wary four inches, narrow enough to slam shut. Not that slamming the door would do any good when the men could knock it down like the ones did in her recurring nightmare.

  “Lila Elliot?” the man in the rumpled blazer asked.

  “Yes.” She cleared her throat. It was tight, as if she were squeezing back a cry for help and holding it in reserve in case she needed it, though neighbors were too far away to hear.

  The man in the lime-green tie flipped open a leather case and showed her a badge. “Rich Mason. San Francisco PD. We want to talk to you about Yuri Makov.”

  His name hit Lila like a cloud of pepper spray. She studied the badge. She’d heard of men impersonating police, then robbing or killing people. But the badge looked real, and the men knew who she was. With resignation, she opened the door.

  Rich stepped into the entry and thrust out a large, friendly hand, like a dog’s paw, for a shake. His clammy hand made hers feel clammy too. He said, “Sorry to bother you. You must be upset about what happened.” He was tall, slim, and clean-cut. Lila could picture him jogging along a beach or drinking wheat-grass juice at a health bar.

  The other man was pudgy and dour. He introduced himself as Joe Arruzzi and grunted something about how hard it had been to find her. His clothes smelled of cigarette smoke. He had thick, bushy eyebrows, and the bags under his eyes looked like small hammocks filled with fat people.

  Lila led the men into the living room. As her mother had taught her to do when visitors came, she offered them a Coke. They declined. Rich settled into one of Cristina’s red club chairs, and Lila sank into the other. Joe leaned against the oak fireplace mantel, jingling the coins in his pockets and surveying Cristina’s poodle sculptures on the tabletops and windowsills.

  When Rich leaned forward almost close enough for his knees to touch Lila’s, his coat fell open; at his waist the handle of a gun stuck out of a leather holster. She winced—his gun was the first she’d seen since getting shot—but Rich seemed not to notice her discomfort. Smiling, supportive, and sunny, he uncapped his pen and flipped open a notepad. Clearly, he was going to take the lead, and Joe was going to stand by watching.

  “You were new at Weatherby, weren’t you,” Rich said, not so much a question as a fact.

  “I’d worked there three months,” Lila said.

  “Did you know Makov very well?” Rich asked.

  “No. We just talked once in a while.”

  “How would you describe him? Outgoing? Secretive? Troubled?”

  “Maybe a little odd. He didn’t know much English. He was quiet.”

  “Withdrawn?”

  “No. Just hesitant to talk.”

  “So you tried to talk to him?”

  “Not exactly. I was polite. I thought he wanted his words to be perfect.”

  “Anybody give him a hard time about his English?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Rich scribbled something in his pad without taking his eyes off Lila. “Was he close
to anybody in the office?”

  “I have no idea.” She shifted her weight in the chair.

  “What else can you tell us about him?”

  She thought for a second, wanting to help. “He dressed really well for a janitor.”

  “So you noticed what he was wearing?”

  “Because he seemed like he was trying to look prosperous. Janitors don’t usually wear sports coats and ties.”

  As Rich made another note, a delivery truck sped around a curve on Cristina’s winding mountain road. Her grandfather clock struck two.

  Joe crossed his arms over his paunch. His shoulders brushed Cristina’s silver candlesticks on the mantel. “Tell us about your conversations with Makov,” he said, like he was trying to nudge Rich to more fruitful questions.

  “There’s not much to say,” Lila said.

  “You must’ve talked to him,” Joe said.

  “Rarely. When I started working at Weatherby, I was more aware of him as a service than a person.”

  “So when did you notice him as a person?” Rich asked.

  For a second Lila searched her mind. How was she supposed to answer that? “A couple of months ago, I guess. He showed up in my office after work.”

  “What’d he say?” Rich asked.

  She leaned deeper into her chair and wrapped her good arm around her chest. She told herself there was no reason to hide the truth. “He asked if I liked his valentine.”

  Rich’s face stayed blank. Joe’s caterpillar eyebrows arched their backs toward the cathedral ceiling, and his earlobes turned pink. “Whadaya mean, valentine? You . . .”

  “Tell us about it,” Rich interrupted.

  Lila squirmed and wished she were at her easel, mental miles from these men. A plane flew overhead with an irritating hum. For days she’d been wondering about the card. Should she have responded to it differently? “I found it on my desk.”

  “Makov write anything?” Rich asked.