An Unexpected Grace

by Kristin von Kreisler

  Lila could have blown a hair dryer on her clouds to get back to painting, but she did not want the loud, metallic whine to startle Grace awake and put her into bite mode like the mutt at Walmart. While Lila waited for the paper to dry, she went to the computer, surrounded by peace lilies in the den. With single-minded right-hand fingers, she typed “going postal” for a Google search.

  One article began with Patrick Sherrill, who in l986 shot and killed fourteen employees, wounded six others, and shot himself at a post office in Edmond, Oklahoma. Though a few workers had killed people in post offices before, Sherrill was the first to murder on such a grand scale. “Going postal” was coined for what he did.

  Lila leaned toward the computer screen and stared at his photo. In a checked sports shirt, he smirked at her. He had jug-handle ears, his eyes made him look sneaky, and his eyebrows turned up at the outer ends like a villain’s twirled mustache. Yet just like Yuri Makov’s photo on TV, this picture did not hint at what Patrick Sherrill would become.

  According to the article, when he was growing up, neighborhood kids had called him “Crazy Pat,” and he’d started going bald in high school. He lived alone with his mother until her death, after which he was caught peeping into neighbors’ windows and making obscene phone calls. Acquaintances labeled him an “odd duck” and believed he was lonely, but shy and gentle, the last person to kill anyone. That was exactly what Lila might have said about Yuri Makov before he shot ten people.

  Sherrill’s boss had reprimanded him for spraying Mace on a barking dog behind a locked fence, and then suspended him for leaving parcels and mail unattended and delivering five hundred letters late. On the day before Sherrill went postal, his supervisors also criticized him, and he had felt they were documenting his mistakes in order to build a case to fire him.

  Sherrill was a classic example of what Dr. Leibowitz had described on the TV news. Had Yuri also been? If he’d been upset about his job, though, Rich and Joe would have discovered it and not come after Lila for an explanation.

  With bitter resentment, she glared at Patrick Sherrill’s rodent face. What were you thinking? How could you have done something so awful? If Sherrill had never existed, Yuri might not have thought of shooting people.

  According to the article, soon after Sherrill shot his Oklahoma colleagues, other U.S. postal workers copied him. One hostile postal employee commandeered a light plane in Boston and shot up his workplace with an AK-47. Another employee wounded three and killed two, including himself, in a Dearborn, Michigan, post office on the very same day that still another postal worker killed his mother, then two colleagues in Dana, California. The article theorized that all those murders boiled down to rage.

  Could rage have driven Yuri? Once again Lila asked herself, what was he so mad about? And what about her own anger at him for shooting her? If he were standing in front of her, would she be mad enough to kill him? Probably not, though she might not be sorry if someone else did.

  She leaned back in her chair to put distance between herself and the photo of “Crazy Pat.” What were you supposed to do with anger? You couldn’t burn it because it was already fire. Burying it wouldn’t do you any good, because it would just dig itself out one day and come after you, stronger than ever. If you tried to drown it, it would pull you below the water’s surface too. There didn’t seem to be any way to get rid of anger. For the rest of your life, you had to live with it, or work around it, or pretend it wasn’t there.

  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.

  12

  Lila 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 preyin
g 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 GRANDMA’S KITCHEN 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 th
ey’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.

  13

  As 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.