An Unexpected Grace

by Kristin von Kreisler

“Not her.”

  “Who is she?”

  Lila stopped the fork on its way to her mouth and considered how to explain. Adam, like Cristina, could judge her as crazy for trying to track down Yuri’s family, and yet maybe Adam could help. Lila dove in and risked, “I’m trying to find the mother of the man who shot me. I know she lives near Monterey. I’ve tried everything I can think of on Google, but nothing’s worked.”

  “Why would you want to talk with her?”

  “I want to know why her son shot everybody.”

  “Forget him. You should be glad he didn’t kill you.”

  That word “should.” Judgment, as Lila had feared. She almost backed off, but then Adam looked at her with his eyes slanted at the edges, like his niece’s, intent and sincere. Lila said, “It’s easy for you to say ‘forget him.’ He didn’t shoot you.”

  Adam took a hurried bite of rice and washed it down with a gulp of wine. “Okay, what’s so important about finding answers? What’s the point?”

  “If I don’t understand him, I’ll never get over what he did. I won’t be able to put him behind me. At least psychologically, I won’t ever heal.”

  “I don’t mean to be blunt, but that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Not to you, maybe, but it does to me. And, please, will you not be so critical?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Adam said. “But I don’t think you need to understand the motive of some maniac. All you have to know is he was crazy.”

  “That’s what Cristina says, but I’m sure there’s more to it.”

  “Such as?”

  Why did I start this conversation? Lila wished they could go back to Goodwill. “I’ve tried hard to find out what happened. The dead ends have made me wonder if I might be responsible for what Yuri did. Yuri Makov was his name. From Russia.”

  “There’s no way you could be responsible.” Adam’s face didn’t look judgmental now. He seemed genuinely concerned.

  “He liked me. He sent me a valentine. Sometimes he tried to talk with me at work.”

  “That’s no big deal.”

  “It may have been a big deal when he asked me out one night,” Lila said.

  Remembering the “aahs” and “uuhs” that had peppered Yuri’s sentences on the phone nearly canceled her pleasure in Adam’s supper. Soon after she’d seen Yuri in the lobby, he’d called her at home and said, “You want go me . . . uuh . . . ballet . . . aah . . . night Saturday? Beautiful fun . . .”

  She pictured him, beads of self-conscious sweat on his forehead as he forced himself on. He sounded like he was reading something he’d written to impress her, but, still, his English slogged along. And the ballet, of all things? Was that meant to impress her too? Her Pleaser wanted to spring forth and sprinkle daisy petals on Yuri to make him feel better, but Lila’s mind was racing to answer a more important question: How did he get my unlisted number?

  Finally, she managed, “I’m sorry. I’d really like to go with you, but I have a boyfriend. I don’t go out with other men.” A lie, but what are you going to do?

  “Yes . . . aah . . .” Clearly, Yuri was trying to translate what she’d said, but from her tone of voice, he must have known she’d turned him down. Maybe he’d not planned how to handle rejection, but only how to say he’d pick her up at seven and he knew where she lived.

  The very thought of that was cringe inducing. After breaking up with Reed, Lila had not listed her new phone number and address specifically to prevent men she didn’t want to know from finding her.

  Adam wiped his napkin across his mouth. “So what if Yuri asked you out? You didn’t go, did you?”

  “Of course I didn’t. But it was creepy. The only way he could have found my unlisted number was by sneaking through my personnel file.”

  “You think he did that?”

  “I’m sure he did.”

  “You reported him to HR,” Adam said, like any sensible person would have done it.

  “No. I didn’t want to make a fuss.”

  “He was practically stalking you, for God’s sake. A fuss would have been appropriate. He was wrong.”

  Maybe I was too. Lila studied her salad as if she hoped for redemption in lettuce and tomatoes. “I didn’t want to go to HR because I was worried I might have led him on. He seemed so shy. I felt sorry for him, so I was nice to him. Maybe nicer than I should have been.”

  “How do you mean? You baked him brownies or something?”

  “I talked with him once in a while. I encouraged him to go back to school. I complimented him on his work so he’d feel like a worthy person.”

  “So what?”

  “So he could have thought I cared more about him than I did. When I wouldn’t go out with him, I might have made him mad.”

  “Men get turned down for dates all the time without getting angry. Even if you did make him mad, it couldn’t have led to such a disaster.”

  “Yes, it could.” The butterfly effect. “He was sensitive.”

  “Anyone who could shoot so many people was not sensitive,” Adam insisted.

  “No, I could have hurt him so he took his anger at me out on everybody.”

  “Surely he wasn’t mad at you.”

  “When I’ve looked back the last couple of months, I’m afraid he could have been.”

  Adam set down his fork. Neither he nor Lila was eating, though worry was chomping her stomach.

  “You’re blaming yourself so you can feel like what some lunatic did was rational, but it wasn’t. Life isn’t predictable. Sometimes bad things happen to good people no matter what they’ve said or done. You can’t explain it. There’s no point trying.”

  “I still think it might be my fault.”

  “You weren’t in control of what happened.” Adam puffed out his cheeks and slowly blew out air, like releasing steam. “Whatever upset him, it’s got to be some problem you know nothing about.”

  “I’ve done everything I can think of to find out what it was.” As Lila explained her months of looking for an answer, Adam listened so attentively that his whole body could have been covered with ears. “I try to tell myself I’m not to blame, but that doesn’t help. I have to find out the truth to know for sure I’m not responsible,” Lila said. “Mrs. Makov knows more about Yuri than anybody. If she can’t explain why he shot us, nobody can. I have to talk with her, or I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering. Mrs. Makov is my last hope.”

  “Did you ask the police how to reach her? They must know.”

  “They accused me of having a relationship with Yuri. I don’t want to talk with them about any of this.”

  “Okay, let me try to find her.” Seeming to forget that he and Lila were in the middle of dinner, Adam wadded up his napkin and set it by his plate. “You spell it M-a-k-o-v? She’s around Monterey?”

  “Right.”

  Adam took long, hurried strides into his study.

  The computer screen saver’s photo of a meteor shower flickered silver light on Adam’s face. Lila rested her hands on the back of his chair and watched him type “people search” on Google. It felt good that he was trying to help; truly, sharing a burden reduced its weight. For the first time in months, Lila didn’t feel alone. There was hope.

  Then the first of nearly fifty million citations for “people search” appeared on Adam’s screen. He exhaled a long breath and said, “We might be here all night.”

  He went to Yahoo, even though Lila said she’d tried it. He typed in “Makov” with no first name, then “Monterey,” and he scrolled down and clicked on “California.” In a blink, a message popped up on the screen that let him know no Makovs were listed.

  “See, that’s what kept happening. I tried several sites,” Lila said.

  “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 be
fore 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.

  29

  As 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 lo
oked 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.”

  Except when he shot people.

  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.