Orchids and Stone

by Lisa Preston

  When he pulled out, pushing hard on the accelerator, Daphne was forced into the seat back, her body unstable in the awkward position, sliding on the vinyl seat.

  The discomfort of leaning back in a car with her hands trapped in the small of her back was astounding. Her shoulders complained more than if she’d just spent the morning loading shingles the old-fashioned way. The outside of her wrists pulled on the hard-edged metal cuffs.

  She knew her wrists would be red later, maybe bruised.

  She knew Suzanne’s corpse had borne similar marks and her life would never be the same.

  CHAPTER 8

  Two decades back, when the boy crooned about Suzanne’s perfect body and cried, “… you have no love to give her …” and every adult at Suzanne’s closed-casket funeral gasped, young Daphne’s bewilderment at losing her sister muddied into a bleaker ache, a haunting.

  That boy, Ross Bouchard, said things out loud, interrupted in church. In a funeral. He said strange, strange things and he used the shocking word lover. Even now, the old memories were confusing, but at the time, watching the scene unfold with a congregation stunned by a shrieking young man’s impropriety, the words scandalized.

  At eleven, sheltered Daphne hadn’t quite understood the entire concept of sex, beyond knowing it had to be done in order to make children. It seemed like an embarrassing, faraway prospect to her childish eyes. Suzanne had told her not to worry about it, that a family with an early bloomer needed a late bloomer to compensate.

  That’s it, Daphne thought, we never had the rivalry.

  Well, one doesn’t compete with a hero. Someone a hundred times greater is not a rival. A rebel goddess, but not a rival.

  Before Suzanne died, awe and confusion were what she provoked in her little sister. Then and now, Daphne felt puzzled by her big sister, baffled by all the wondrous, bewildering things Suzanne did.

  Why run away to Lopez Island? Why braid feathers into your hair? Why go through a phase of wearing long, flowing robes and eating vegetarian? Why run away at all?

  Suzanne always laughed and tossed her baby sister’s uncertain questions aside with a spray of more puzzles: Oh, Daffy, why did I sleep with my English professor? What was I thinking?

  What? Daphne had asked, bouncing on the bed in her preteen confusion. Partly wanting into Suzanne’s world, she mostly wanted Suzanne to stay in hers. I don’t get it.

  Don’t give it up early, Daffer.

  What? Daphne’s then-girlish confusion, doubt, and perpetual question of whether or not she fit in at all clouded her mind. Give it up early? She’d no idea what Suzanne meant.

  Just don’t worry about it, Daffy.

  M’kay. She’d nodded to her big sister, happy to be relieved of the burden of worrying.

  Because sometimes, Suzanne laded her baby sister with more than worry.

  Sometimes, Suzanne left to young Daphne the duty of calling in the cavalry lest she had gone too far. Daphne hadn’t quite grasped the whole concept of this either, but she’d known she was ready to do something important from the first time an alarm clock went off and Daphne awoke at five in the morning to find an empty bed across the room and a note from her big sister.

  D-call this number and tell the woman who answers that we went out with Ross and the rest of the guys last night. We’re going to drive up Mount Baker as far as we can. Maybe the snow was too much. She’ll know what to do.

  They hadn’t happened too often, those notes Suzanne left to cover some secret contingency. Just enough for Daphne to be forever bound in their mystery.

  D-if I’m not back by 5:30, tell M and D I snuck out last night and went to the party they said I couldn’t go to at the U.

  Besides, Suzanne always made it home in time.

  Daffer-tell Mom I borrowed the car and she shouldn’t worry but you’ll all have to get to church another way this morning because if I’m not back by 5AM, I made a decision and I’m not coming back.

  Suzanne’s tiny travel alarm had chimed that morning at four fifty-five. At five, Daphne pulled on jeans under her nightshirt, staring at the bedroom door and then opposite, at the window where Suzanne snuck out onto the porch roof to climb down the trellis and vanish into the night.

  Daphne had lowered her eyes and turned to the door again, prepared to go wake her parents and find out what happens when a girl handed over this kind of cloaked distress call. She thought she imagined the soft padding of footsteps on the roof beyond the window because she so wanted to hear them.

  “Made it,” Suzanne said, closing one hand over Daphne’s, over the note. Her other hand kept the bedroom door shut, and her grin solidified, naughty and exhausted, as she flung herself into bed. “Hey, you’re half-dressed. Do you want to wear some of my stuff for a change?”

  Her sister had waved at the right-hand side of their closet, the Suzanne side.

  The last time Suzanne snuck out was Christmas break. Her best friend and boyfriend had just driven her back from Bellingham, dropping Suzanne off first out of geographical convenience. That night, with her sister just settled back into Seattle for the holiday, Christmas died for Daphne, although she didn’t know it right away.

  Even the next morning when she awoke alone, even later in the day, after several calls from college kids asking for Suzanne, she didn’t know.

  Even throughout the evening and the next night, when it was clear Suzanne was gone but they all hoped it was temporary, Daphne didn’t know Christmas was over.

  But after the body was found, after the funeral, after the dead Christmas, she knew.

  For years and years afterward, Daphne found Christmas a joyless time. Not until she met Vic and he introduced her to Jed and Josie, whose childish enthusiasm at seven and eight for sharing Christmas together heralded everything good and happy, did the delight reawaken. Again she found the pleasure, the giving, the excitement, and general fun of decorations and treats and carols and too much cocoa.

  The realization brought her to the not knowing.

  Not every time Suzanne snuck out involved a note. She thought Suzanne had not left a note that final night.

  But she didn’t know. And now every time she visited her mom, every time she went upstairs to her old bedroom, every time she twisted the knob to her old closet door, Daphne stared, not at the empty left side she’d cleaned out back when she moved in with Thea, but the still-hanging side, Suzanne’s.

  She’d continued to share the bedroom closet with her dead sister. It would have felt wrong to take over Suzanne’s side. There were few things Daphne felt comfortable wearing amongst her sister’s eclectic collection, but by high school, Daphne did wear the occasional pullover or skirt that had been Suzanne’s.

  Being her mother’s good girl meant dressing with more modesty than Suzanne ever considered. It meant not voicing the outrageous, the ill-considered tantrum. It meant remaining a late bloomer.

  Not long after Suzanne’s funeral, their mother had made an effort, boxed up Suzanne’s school papers, diaries, and knickknacks, but she hadn’t gotten to Suzanne’s clothes or other belongings, and the sealed box had remained on the closet shelf until Daphne absconded with it.

  She’d kept it under her bed when she roomed with Thea and she kept it under her side of Vic’s bed now. Sometimes, she opened the box to read and wonder. On an earlier anniversary of this dreadful weekend—one of the two times a year she most thought of her sister—Vic had found her crying over Suzanne’s papers on their bed and listened for hours as Daphne tried to make sense of loss.

  The most eyebrow-raising thing she found in the box was the college essay Suzanne entitled BETRAYAL.

  But she never found what she thought she’d find. With the span of years, with reflection borne of ache and maturity, Daphne wondered where it was, if it existed, what it said.

  If she visited her mother this weekend—and she knew she should—she’d sneak upstairs to her old bedroom and cast about yet again for this one tangible thing, the thing no one but Vic knew abou
t.

  The note she never found.

  The patrol car cornered and Daphne leaned into the turn, splaying her legs to keep from falling over. The cop drove past a newsstand in the teeming downtown district and headlines from around the world teased her. Beseeching scents from open coffee shops and ethnic stores may have wafted on the street, but they failed to penetrate the car’s closed back windows. Street sounds were muffled, too, but the police radio intermittently blared, making her flinch. Outside, people in suits appeared to talk to themselves and the air while they held half-private conversations via ear-mounted phones. The sense of deafness made panic flirt with Daphne’s mind.

  She stared hard at the street and all the freedom displayed, busy people doing important things or nothing at all, their choice. Shoppers passed the homeless who held handwritten begging signs. Kids in grunge clothes texted away at bus stops, ignoring each other.

  The officer spoke into his radio again as he pulled into the garaged entrance of a gray concrete building. She took a breath and held it. Another police car and a plain blue car of the same make and model she sat handcuffed in were parked in the bowels of the building, but she saw no people. A burst of electronic gibberish sounded back from the dashboard, but Daphne couldn’t discern one intelligible word of the lingo. A buzzer sounded, and a fortresslike garage door sealed them inside. Her last view of normal life disappeared and they drove past a sign warning: Secure Area – Authorized Personnel Only.

  Daphne thought about telling her officer—and he did now seem to be her appointed officer, though he wasn’t one she’d have picked if given a choice—that she wasn’t authorized personnel so maybe they should call it quits right now, but her spirit flagged and she couldn’t make a joke.

  He grabbed paperwork, swung out of the driver’s seat, and stretched. Then he unlocked and opened her door.

  “Hop out.”

  She stuck her left foot out, but with her hands manacled behind her back and no momentum, she lacked the balance to rise as she pushed off the floor with her other foot. The officer’s hand on her elbow steadied her. She would have paused to regain her bearings, but he propelled her forward past a steel door that banged shut with a warning buzz as they entered a solid, off-white corridor. They were caged.

  A few small keys hung from locks on little rectangular panels that looked like built-in safe deposit boxes. The officer unholstered his pistol and placed it in one locker, pocketing the key before he steered Daphne forward again. Now she saw the sign looming at the next steel door under a red light.

  No Weapons Beyond This Point.

  The light turned green, a buzzer blasted, and the next steel door opened. Daphne entered before the officer, directed by his left hand on her right elbow.

  More forbidding signs faced her. She was not to smoke or spit. She was being monitored, although she didn’t know what that meant. Video? Audio recorded?

  A torrent of profane screaming shrieked through an open doorway just ahead on the left. In a room to the right, men’s laughter roared, and dead ahead, behind plates of Plexiglas, the muted sound of a can of soda being popped open left her staring at a man’s back. He wore a gray uniform. A janitor, Daphne thought before realization dawned.

  Not a custodian, a correctional officer.

  There were lots of gray-uniformed people here, men and women. The man in a sealed booth ahead slurped his soda, nodded at Daphne’s officer, and pressed a button on a console before him. A buzzer sounded and more metal slammed.

  Daphne found herself steered to the left and came face-to-face with an obese, sweating, tattooed young woman on a long plastic bench.

  “What’s your problem, bitch?” the young woman asked from the bench. A long metal bar ran just over the bench, behind the woman’s shoulders. At the near end of the bench was an empty jail cell. In the back of the cell, Daphne saw a shoulder-high steel partition.

  Daphne recoiled and peered through the open doorway opposite the cell, blinking at the computers and clipboards and papers within. With the scrape of a metal chair on linoleum, another man in a gray uniform appeared in the depths of the next room, leaning back in his chair, quick-sipping from a steaming Styrofoam cup. With a bare glance at Daphne and her officer, he let the chair’s front legs fall back to the linoleum, whisking him from view. A man with a crew cut typed away on a computer in that room.

  “Okay, contestant number whatever.” A heavyset man in a gray uniform appeared, accepted paperwork from Daphne’s police officer, then gestured for Daphne to turn around.

  He took Daphne’s handcuffs off and gave them back to the police officer. She relaxed a tiny bit, rubbing her wrists in real pleasure.

  “Fuck me, fuck me, fuuuck me.” The woman on the bench sighed in a drunken drawl then kicked her feet out from the bench, splaying her legs wide.

  Daphne studied her with furtive glances. The woman’s tangled dark hair hung in her face. Tattoos snaked across her arms, bare shoulders, and neck. She leaned forward on the bench and heaved herself to her feet, letting loose another stream of verbal abuse, impugning the correctional officer’s family, sexual appetite, and intelligence.

  The man with a crew cut stopped typing and hollered, “Sit down, Josephina.”

  Josephina flung herself to the bench, flailing her huge legs in a fat, drunken tantrum.

  “Put her in the tank,” the portly man said, pulling on rubber gloves and waving Daphne toward the wall.

  The tank? There’s a worse place to go? Daphne prayed not to be put in the tank.

  “Nah,” called the other man. “She’s just about to calm down.” He pulled a piece of paper from a printer and entered the room smiling at the young drunk. “Aren’t you?”

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  “See?” He gestured for the woman to stand. “C’mon. Got a very nice room ready for you.”

  “Fuck you,” she said, lying rigid on the bench. Another correctional officer called to the crew cut man, and he stepped away nodding, firing off names and numbers.

  “Put your hands on those two squares.”

  Daphne flinched when the big man tapped her shoulder and ordered, “You. Put your hands on the squares.”

  Daphne looked at the wall where he pointed and saw two brown squares painted on the wall at shoulder height.

  She gingerly placed her palms on the squares and closed her eyes while he patted her down.

  “Great,” he said. “Empty your pockets.”

  “They are empty.”

  “Inside out.”

  She reached into her front pockets, but unlike jeans, Carhartts pockets didn’t pull inside out. She pulled her hands back out of her pockets and bit her lower lip.

  “Have a seat,” the man said, pointing to the end of the bench at the tattooed woman’s feet.

  “Seriously?” Daphne’s stomach lurched at the thought of sitting here, of sharing space with that woman.

  At the massive Plexiglas wall, the man behind the consoles pushed a plastic tray under a small access point. The police officer tossed Daphne’s pencil onto the tray and waved several papers at her before adding them to the tray.

  “Info on your traffic accident. Give the case number to your insurance company. They’ll know what to do. And don’t forget to send in this form or your driver’s license could get suspended. That would make it a crime for you to drive.”

  Daphne closed her eyes, but tears formed and threatened to spill over unless she opened her eyes wide.

  “About this jacket thing with this guy Guff …” The police officer had his notebook out again.

  Tilting her face at the man, Daphne waited, then answered his spare questions. He copied down specifics about her jacket, wallet, and phone, then wrote a note on a business card.

  “My card and the case number on this suspicious incident-slash-theft thing on Eastpark.”

  “What?”

  He looked back at her.

  She swallowed. “Never mind, I get it. Kind of.”

  He
high-fived another correctional officer and walked into another room with the rest of his paperwork.

  Don’t leave me here, Daphne wanted to cry. But he did. From the bench, she could hear a man in a faraway cell and she wondered how big the cell was, how many men loitered farther back.

  Competing scents of urine and disinfectant came to her as she sat on the grimy bench. The enormous tattooed woman squinted at Daphne’s pencil in the tray.

  Josephina wore a huge, tight black tank top several sizes too small for her double D breasts and rolls of rib fat. Still supine on the bench, she tilted her neck back and rolled her eyes up to fix a studying stare on Daphne.

  Managing a weak smile, Daphne said, “I know a girl named Josefina. She goes by Josie. She’s my, uh …”

  Josephina worked her mouth as Daphne spoke, then swung her legs down, sat up, and let loose a tremendous wad of phlegm. The splat across the room silenced Daphne worse than the tattooed girl’s grin.

  “Do. Not. Spit.” The order came from the crew cut man at the end of the room.

  “I was aiming for the garbage can,” Josephina said.

  “I have to pee,” Daphne said, not quite meeting the correctional officer’s eyes, hoping the plea in her voice would be understood.

  “We got a nervous pee-er here,” Josephina announced, cackling. Her comment earned a laugh from the unseen man in a distant cell and a quick grin from the heavy correctional officer.

  Closing her eyes, Daphne saw a replay of her pursuit of Minerva Watts, the car, the crash. She thought of her first encounter with Minerva Watts in the park. She had seen something, heard something. She made an effort.

  Nothing good had come from her effort. Maybe those people wouldn’t have taken Minerva anywhere if Daphne hadn’t gone to the house on Eastpark Avenue in the first place. She opened her eyes when tears trickled from the outer corners.