by Lisa Preston
It was penance, Daphne decided. All of this.
For a nonreligious person, she was a big believer in penance. Working through time and debts owed, not quitting—this was an idea that crystallized for her in youngest adulthood.
She should have gone with Vic to take his kids back to their mother.
He said he didn’t mind, so he got points for that. She thought she’d get points because she had been in the car to go with them at first. She just didn’t see it all the way through, didn’t finish doing the uncomfortable part.
If I’d stayed with him, kept a smile on my face in front of the kids, in front of Cassandra, I wouldn’t be here.
“Do you mind?” Daphne snapped her rhetorical question as she pushed by the boys to cut across the park. She hoped Vic was home, a loving, supportive face waiting. She hoped he was out, so silence could serve as peace.
And leaving the greenbelt to cross Westpark Avenue, she saw the robin’s body, flattened into the pavement save a few wing feathers bristling in the wind.
CHAPTER 3
“So, they just drove away …” Vic said, pulling food purchases from green canvas totes with the same aplomb he’d displayed throughout her breathless rush into the house and description of her encounter in the Peace Park.
Daphne nodded, her mind pinging with the contrast of mental and physical stress while watching his methodical putting away of the groceries.
Soup was on sale, she saw. And bread was two-for-one. Almost everything Vic bought wore an orange discount sticker.
“Right,” she said, wiping sweat from her hairline. “I didn’t know what to do.”
“You didn’t do anything.”
“Right.”
Vic grabbed a can of kidney beans before it rolled off the kitchen counter. “So this old woman …” Daphne gave him a sharp look and he amended, “This older lady, you think she’s really in trouble?”
“No. Right? I mean, it had to be … nothing.” She shouldn’t get after Vic for referring to an old lady as an old woman.
The woman had said her name, hadn’t she? Daphne squinted but couldn’t recall.
Vic squeezed her hand and she smiled, studying his face. Calm and amiable, wavy hair and glasses, sweet smile. The kind of guy a girl fell in like with right away and fell in love with as she got to know him.
Damp and getting chilled now, Daphne pulled on a fleece sweater, wishing for the millionth time that Vic didn’t keep the house so cold. “She’s not in trouble, right?”
He looked at her. “I wasn’t there, Daph, but I’m sure you’re right. She’s fine. You did fine. I’d have done the same thing.”
“You’d have done nothing?”
“Well …” He stacked two cans in a cabinet. “Maybe.”
Irritation percolated. She grabbed his arm, saw her fingers on his denim shirt, then imagined her hand thin-skinned, blue-veined, and covered in age spots. Facing her dim reflection in the microwave, she half-expected to see her hair white, short, and flapping, not dark and grown-out, loose from its usual ponytail. And her skin, while showing the effects of spending days on rooftops in all weather, was of a woman in her thirties, much firmer than a thin old lady’s.
Daphne turned from the microwave, unwilling to allow the lady’s image to haunt her. “Maybe what? What would you have done?”
Vic’s gaze landed on the fridge calendar. “Depends. Whatever you think’s best.”
Daphne studied the calendar. The next day showed a soccer game for Jed and a volleyball game for Josie. Friday listed Vic on day shift and Saturday bore the note: G-Pop!
Shouldn’t the old lady in the park have been in as safe a situation as Vic’s dad? Many of the residents at Green Springs babbled nonsense. Others were mentally sharp but needed close monitoring for medical or safety reasons. G-Pop forgot things he should know, but he still did crossword puzzles and enjoyed the care facility’s activities. Daphne sighed. “I just didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to overreact. It’s so far-fetched that there was a real problem, but …”
“But you’d feel better if you told someone.” He kissed her mouth then caressed her face as he put a large sack of no-brand frosted cornflakes on top of the fridge.
“I doubt it,” Daphne said. “I just told you and I don’t feel any better.”
“Thanks for that.” His smile flickered and he reached for the telephone. “Oh, we missed messages.”
Daphne looked at the phone and took in the double-blink of the little red light indicating two missed messages. Her mom? Thea? Probably the calls were for Vic, but she leaned forward when he hit the play button. At times like this, she was glad Vic hadn’t updated electronics when he’d moved into his father’s home.
The machine’s mechanical voice announced “Message one.” Then her mom’s voice sighed and asked Daphne to call. Daphne hit the delete button. Resistance born ten years back, in the wake of their second family disaster, left Daphne forever torn in dealing with her mother.
She refused to meet Vic’s look, knowing he didn’t understand.
The machine announced message two and Vic’s ex’s shrill voice made Daphne wince, made Vic hold his breath.
Cassandra’s voice scolded. “Vic, I’d appreciate it if you’d pick up Jed’s bike at the repair shop tomorrow. He’s your kid, too. Don’t leave me to do everything while you’re over there partying with no responsibilities.”
Delete it. Hit delete the second you hear how bitchy she’s being, Daphne wanted to say.
He hit the delete button then got a dial tone.
“Who are you calling?” she asked.
“The police.”
“What? Seriously?”
“Sure. This thing in the park, it’s their job.”
“But I don’t even know if there was a real problem.”
“You don’t have to.”
“And they’re gone now. There’s no problem now anyway.”
“You can still report it,” Vic said, then turned his attention to a voice in his ear. “Yes, this is regarding something my girlfriend saw in the park. Possibly suspicious. Suspicious, let’s say. We’d like to talk to an officer.”
Daphne yanked the fridge door open, pulled out a leftover casserole, and set it down hard on the ceramic counter, wincing as she clinked the glass dish. She scooped two lumps of casserole onto a plate while he talked to the dispatcher.
“I could have done that,” Daphne said when he hung up. She set their single heaping plate in the microwave and punched a button. “I should have done that. Is that just a weather service thing, making a call?” He’d often said that for all his evaluating and predicting climate patterns, at the end of the shift, meteorologists merely made a few phone calls and sent e-mails to tell people what the weather might be. He didn’t control the storms, the fronts, the wind.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, folding tote bags and tucking them into the space between the fridge and cupboards. “Coffee? Wine? Anything?”
They settled on cider, making a fuss of warming it on the stove, adding a cinnamon stick and cloves. She didn’t want alcohol before talking to the police and didn’t want caffeine, lest she couldn’t sleep when alone tonight.
“Just us on a Wednesday evening,” Daphne said, as they shared the plate of noodles and veggies under cheese. Wednesday nights without kids didn’t happen, according to the custody schedule.
“You know Jed and Josie are here this weekend?” Vic said.
“Yeah, I know. We’ll stay home.”
The previous weekend, Vic’s ex wanted the kids, though it was Vic’s turn. He’d agreed rather than fight, but the swap meant they’d have the kids this weekend. Daphne had scheduled Thursday afternoon and all of Friday off for this week, in hope of escaping her mother’s annual tears. A long weekend getaway with Vic wasn’t going to happen now.
“Daph, I have an all-day training thing Friday. We wouldn’t have been able to run off Thursday afternoon anyway. And I’d have never guessed you’d w
ant to be out of town this, of all weekends.”
“When I asked for the time off last month, I didn’t know you’d be on day shift this Friday,” she said. They’d had this conversation two other times. She was glad he didn’t say again: And what about your mother? “But I still get to sigh over not going away for the weekend, don’t I?”
“Sure. Sigh away. You get to wish for whatever you want. Me, too. I wish for you to be happy.” He pulled his chair closer to Daphne’s and slid his arm around her. “Are you up for watching Josie play tomorrow? It’s a home game.”
Getting out of his hug, Daphne wondered if Cassandra would be at Jed’s soccer game or Josie’s volleyball match. Vic alternated between the kids’ events, scrupulously fair, and this time was Jed’s turn for Vic to attend.
When a police officer knocked on their door, Daphne hesitated, cloaked in the memory of police coming to her parents’ home on spring break her senior year of college. That morning, Daphne was barely awake, going for orange juice. When the knock came, her mother had dropped a coffee cup—her father’s coffee cup—then crunched over the broken bits of ceramic to open the unlocked door. The Mayfields were door-lockers, and Daphne had assumed her father was upstairs, on his way down to see what had broken and who was at the door. Though she’d missed the first hints that her mother had already known something was wrong, she absorbed her mother’s dreading demeanor as the door was opened and they listened to news that her father had been found in a motel room and he had left a note. It became the day she learned why a family man would go to a hotel room in the city where he lived, a reason less common than dirt and more painful than infidelity.
The officer at Vic’s door was of average build but looked stocky under his uniform and gear. He held a notebook but wrote nothing down while Daphne gave a halting account of being accosted in the park. When she was unable to give a detailed description of the two women, the man, or the big silver car on Eastpark Avenue, when she couldn’t recall the name the old lady gave, Daphne felt the urge to point out how much like any other cop he appeared.
“Nothing distinctive?” he asked.
The one distinctive thing about this cop in their living room was he wore black leather gloves while holding his pen and notebook. Who wrote while wearing gloves?
“The guy was wearing a black leather jacket,” she blurted.
The police officer promised to be on the lookout and to do extra patrol around the park.
“Nothing will happen,” Daphne said, her voice glum. “I haven’t helped anybody.”
“Look, miss,” he said, tucking his notebook into a hip pocket, “I understand you saw something upsetting, but it probably wasn’t a crime. And you’ve done more than most people would have.”
His tone offered encouragement, forgiveness. Daphne wanted none. She knew her size deceived. Strangers couldn’t see her muscles. The large shirt tucked into her small jeans fit. Were she decisive, a fighter, she could have bested the woman in black and maybe the man. But she hadn’t even been the one to call for the police officer who now thanked her and left.
She wasn’t a fighter. She teared up at sappy commercials. At Grazie’s agedness and the mean-spirited barbs of Vic’s ex. The Hawai‘ian version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” choked her up. She wanted to cry now over the coming ten-year anniversary of her dad’s death. Over her dead sister’s nonbirthday this Sunday. And Christmas was the worst, a season of sorrow ever since she was an eleven-year-old kid.
The act of calling the police and reporting the suspicious incident evaporated into a feeling of having done nothing. Daphne pulled a scrunchie ponytail holder out of her pocket, toying with the red elastic fabric. In another mood, she’d have unbuckled Vic’s belt, lowered his zipper, and slid her scrunchie onto him. He’d have laughed and played back. But tonight they sat at opposite ends of the green leather sofa, feet stretched toward each other, her hand on Vic’s knee, him rubbing her feet. When he clicked the TV on, a number of movie advertisements flashed by: thrillers, dramas, and comedies. Daphne jumped to her feet and headed for the kitchen. Vic clicked the TV off and followed her, looking baffled when he saw Daphne grab a coat and the dog’s leash.
“Vic, you know how in movies, bad guys kidnap an ordinary person and make the family withdraw all their money?”
“Like that old Michael Douglas movie we saw part of last year?”
“That wasn’t Michael Douglas; it was Kurt Russell. You always confuse them. I don’t know how you do it.”
He shrugged.
“They don’t even look alike,” she said, wishing she’d persisted today when it might have mattered. “There was another movie like that. With that British guy.”
“Hopkins?” Vic gave a mild smile. “He became American. But I think I did see the movie you’re talking about now. I remember a gratuitous butt shot of inconsequential characters. Young women. Nice butts.”
“You’re a good man in many ways, but I’m finding you lacking tonight.”
“Again?”
“Yes. What if people did that to old ladies?”
“What people?”
“The people who do it to ordinary families.”
“Do what to them, Daph?”
She bounced on her toes, agitation growing with her theory. “Like that couple on the road trip in the movie. They had car trouble and she gets kidnapped. The bad guys make the husband liquidate all the assets he can in one day in order to get her back.”
Vic shook his head, blank-eyed.
She pressed on. “Why wouldn’t bad people do that to old people? Just … overbear them, make them sign everything over super fast?”
“Bad people who kidnap an average Joe and tell the Joe’s family to hand over everything they can right away?”
“Yes,” she said, pleased he’d come around.
“I suppose they could, but you know, those are just movies.”
“But … it’s possible.” She squirmed, tucking her shirt in, zipping up. “The old lady said they were taking her house, her car, all her money. She said they were kidnapping her.”
“Honey, she’s fine. That woman you saw in the park, she’s probably as fine as she can be. She’s with her daughter and her son or son-in-law.”
“You said you would have done more.”
He put his palms up. “I said maybe. And I didn’t say what.”
When she entreated the dog to rise, Vic hung the leash back on the hook and spooned his body against hers in a full body hug, pressing her against the fridge. “Look, Daph, I know lightning has struck twice for you—”
“That’s not it,” she protested. “I’m going to the park. Now. I’m going to where she was when I first saw her, and where I last saw her. She was in trouble, Vic.”
“This was not lightning. I don’t think so, Daph.”
“You don’t?”
“No. This was some strangers having a bad day, that’s all. It’s difficult with older people, sometimes. They can be trying.”
“They just need time,” Daphne said, thinking of Vic’s father and how she’d learned to deal with how he forgot who she was, how he could take forever to answer a question. “They need patience. When it seems like they’re … trying, as you call it, old people just need time.”
“And young people?”
She soured at his prompt, looking away. He could leave her efforts with his kids out of this.
Vic smoothed her hair and said, “Daph, you saw people you don’t know having a bad moment. You know, in your heart of hearts—”
“My heart of hearts.” Her hands made fists over her breasts.
Vic placed his hands over hers, resting his chin on her head and softening his voice. “You know this happens all the time, all over the world. People have little crises. Strangers see glimpses and keep their noses out of other people’s business.”
“Some of those strangers help.”
“Daph.”
“Some of them do. And others should. Just like …”
But she couldn’t finish.
She didn’t have to. Vic knew what happened when she was in college. He even knew what happened when she was a kid.
“This was not lightning again. Not again.”
“What if it was? Imagine, like you always say, what’s the worst-case, the best-case scenario?”
“Please stop this.”
“Worst-case is she was in real trouble and—”
“That is very unlikely. Let’s leave the drama to Josie in this family. She’s quite good at it.”
Daphne would have none of his attempt at levity. “And no one, not even me, would help her.”
“Can we be done with this, please?” Vic asked. “Can we both just take it as an opportunity, a reminder? We’ll be more thoughtful. Nothing in the past can be changed. Whatever happened in the park—and probably nothing bad happened—it’s over. There’s nothing to be accomplished now, no good purpose served in agonizing.”
“But …”
“Daphne, the best-case is some little old lady has family taking care of her when she goes off in la-la land. You’re with me on that?”
“I am. I get it. That’s the best-case.”
“So, okay,” he said.
“But, Vic, what’s the worst-case?” When he wouldn’t answer, she hesitated then whispered. “The worst-case is some little old lady needed help—begged me for help—and I didn’t help her. I did nothing.”
No matter how many times Vic told her she was being a nut, that they would freeze, that it was dangerous at night, Daphne brushed away his protests.
“We’ll bring Grazie,” she said, reaching again for the dog’s leash.
The fluffy tan tail thumped on the kitchen linoleum at the leash’s advertisement of a late-night walk. Still, she stayed lying down. The old hips ached and she sometimes needed a physical boost to get to her feet.
“That’ll be a big help,” Vic said. “She’ll scare off all the thugs. Look at her.”
“If people would just do something …” She wiped her eyes. “Vic, I have to do something. Grazie, come on, get up.”
Grazie chortled, lifting one front paw.
