Good Karma

by Christina Kelly

  She turned on both faucets until the milky streams ran clear. The rubber stopper fit snugly into the drain, and the tub took several minutes to fill. After pouring in bath salts, she stood in the middle of the room, then pulled her T-shirt over her head, untied her sweatpants, unhooked her bra, and stepped out of her panties. She lowered herself into the water.

  Once when they were vacationing in Maine, her husband had asked her, “You ever feel like you’re the last lobster in the tank and the waiter is rolling up his sleeve?” She settled into the warmth and let her mind go.

  IT HAD BEEN exactly a year—the first week in May—since she and Alex had first moved into the Tattnall apartment. They had just relocated from Cleveland and she’d been outside adjusting an American flag when a neighbor appeared. With a strong Southern twang, the woman introduced herself and welcomed Amity to the neighborhood. She suggested dinner once Amity and her husband got settled. They even exchanged phone numbers. Her real estate agent had said it was a friendly street, had explained Savannah was called the “Hostess City” for its hospitality. So several hours later when the phone rang, Amity imagined it was her neighbor calling to follow up.

  “Hello?”

  The woman’s voice on the phone was strong and clear, as if she were standing next to her in their bedroom. “Is this Amity?”

  “Yes.” Within moments she was already imagining the dinner with her neighbor and trying to remember where she’d put her datebook. How wonderful that she’d called so promptly. Maybe they could grab a drink first at the Crystal Beer Parlor. If they made a date for the following weekend, she’d have time to get a pedicure.

  “It’s about Alex.”

  Amity heard no drawl. No beating around the bush. This was not the woman from down the street.

  Her thoughts immediately went to an accident. A catastrophe. A crash. The span of their ten-year marriage retreated to a few seconds. “My husband?” In case there’d been some mistake she spoke his name: “Alex Higginson?”

  “Yes. Alex.”

  “Who is this?” One moment became two became three became ten. The silence hung between them. An empty laundry line. “What happened?”

  Amity imagined a dented rental car. A bruised Hertz bumper lying on the shoulder of a highway. He’d been traveling for business and could be easily distracted. And he liked speed. He’d even taken a few helicopter lessons, but he could never get the hang of the thrust. There was such a shocking fragility to life; he might have been hit point-blank by a golf ball during one of his outings. They’d known a man who’d been struck in his temple on a par five. He was dead before he hit the tee box. But words barely formed in her mouth.

  “Is Alex all right? Is he hurt?”

  “We didn’t plan it like this. I need you to know that.”

  Amity sat down on one of the extra-large moving boxes. She’d bought six dozen cardboard containers to relocate books and knickknacks and photos, but even that had not been enough to fit in all the props of their lives.

  “Pardon?” She planned to sort the books by genre, not size. Mystery. Romance. Nonfiction. Travel. A new house in a new state warranted a new arrangement. After all their work and planning, they deserved an organized library.

  “He didn’t want to hurt you.”

  She liked novels with happy endings. Boy meets girl. Boy marries girl. Boy and girl can’t have a family but they have each other.

  “We know it’s not an ideal time.”

  Amity noticed the caller kept saying we, as if she and Alex had been together for years, a vaudeville team that performed across the country.

  “He didn’t ask me to call. But I wanted to do the right thing. Before you got settled.”

  Amity tried to picture the woman. To imagine a face. But she couldn’t pull anything into focus. She just thought of an empty call center with a telemarketer sitting with a script before her.

  “We feel it’s best for everyone. Considering.”

  “Considering?”

  “We’re sorry.”

  “Considering?”

  And then, “There’s a child.”

  She remained quiet.

  “A son. Our son.”

  She thought of her doctor visits. Her hostile uterus. His slow swimmers. She might have referenced medical terms if she could remember them. That would certainly clarify the situation, and the misunderstanding could be dropped. She heard the faint chime of music, a tinkling glockenspiel in the background. “I appreciate the phone call, but you’ve got the wrong Alex Higginson.”

  But the music got louder and Amity recognized the tune. Lullaby, and goodnight. Brahms. As a boy, Alex had even had a wooden music box that played it. He said it was his favorite. Dwing-dwing dong, dwing-dwing dong. She could almost hear the lyrics: May you sleep now and rest / May your slumber be blessed. Finally Amity heard crying. That’s what she heard, crying. A baby’s at first, and then her own.

  STARTLED BY HER vivid memory, Amity sat up. The bathwater had grown cold. It was time to act.

  She emerged from the polar bear tub, wrapped herself in a terry cloth towel, and moved to the master bedroom closet. To one side, golf outfits were sorted by color: aquamarine, fuchsia, mint. Scarves and leather belts dangled in the middle. To the right hung an impressive selection of long dresses. Surprising even herself, she chose a red silk gown with brocade running along one side. A gown her future self might have worn to the Telfair Ball had she and Alex stayed married and in Savannah. She stepped into it and pulled up the side zipper, though it was several sizes too large.

  It’s showtime, she thought.

  She sat at an antique vanity table and looked into the beveled mirror. Her puffy eyes and mottled skin surprised her. In the drawers before her she found tools to pluck and tease. She found combs and barrettes and hairnets. She pulled plum lipstick across her lips and black mascara along her eyelashes. She applied buttery eyeshadow and twirled her long, damp hair into a loose bun, clipping it to the nape of her neck. The foundation she discovered was lighter than she would have chosen, but she’d been out creeping so often her skin had become bobcat brown. After taking another good long look at herself, she retreated to the living room. Ceramic coasters from voyages—on the Rotterdam, the Volendam, the Zuiderdam—sat on the coffee table and reminded her of her honeymoon. She and Alex had taken a cruise from Turkey to Italy. Before the ship sailed, they’d had a couples’ bath at an Istanbul spa, where bubbles as big as babies floated around them.

  Without wasting more time, she took the fanny pack off the table and unzipped it. She placed the needle-nose pliers and key pick on the wooden surface and pulled out four burnt-orange bottles. Hydrocodone. Xanax. Valium. Ambien. They had all been prescribed and she was just following the labels’ instructions. Take as needed. She emptied a fistful of pills into her palm then took the goblet, filled with enough water to do the trick.

  As she raised her glass in a toast to the dying potted plant before her, she stopped to listen. After a moment she heard it again, the plaintive bleat from the cell phone in her fanny pack, as if someone, somewhere, needed her.

  chapter 26

  After parking in her garage, Catherine scrambled out of her car and took the steps to the mudroom two at a time. It was just before nine o’clock.

  “Ralph?” she called. Then louder, “Karma?!” Maybe her dog had somehow found his way home. Maybe he and Ralph were watching the Golf Channel upstairs, Karma’s wet nose pressed into Ralph’s thigh, while Ralph pushed a towel under the dog’s head so as not to get slimed. Maybe some balding pro was telling them it was all about getting arc on a five iron. Maybe they’d been worried about where she’d been.

  As she walked to the kitchen she spied small tufts of wet grass on the floor. Ralph had probably been on the golf course when the storm arrived, and in his rush to get inside, to close the windows or grab a beer, he had forgotten to remove his shoes. The sink dripped steadily, the water hanging momentarily, teardrops falling to the basin. When she turne
d the handle off she saw the remains of a half-eaten chicken breast, its puckered skin on a plate. Part of a bone sticking out of white meat. Welcome home, she thought.

  And then on the counter she found the note. Slanted letters, rushed, as if he had a plane to catch: Don’t forget . . . poker night. Back late. He’d done that more and more. Gone off for the evening to the wood-paneled clubhouse with his new friends. Men she’d never met, but names she’d heard over and over. John. Kevin. Richard. Paul.

  Catherine pulled out the chair at the kitchen table and sat. For the first time in three months, since they’d packed up their things and left their friends and gotten Georgia driver’s licenses, she felt completely alone. Karma, usually underfoot, wasn’t nudging her with a tennis ball. And it occurred to her she hadn’t made a network of new friends to rely on in a crisis. Whom could she call? Someone who signed her in at the gym? Audrey Cunningham? Martha, who was five hours away and probably in the middle of a date and shouting “Holy Toledo!”? Fred had already alerted security, and this really wasn’t a matter for Savannah Fire and Rescue, so she called the only person she could think of.

  The phone rang six times, then snapped off, not even going to voice mail. Perhaps it was a satellite issue. Catherine pressed the number again. It was answered on the seventh ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Amity?” There was such a long hesitation, for a moment Catherine thought the line might have gone dead again. Maybe the storm had knocked out a circuit. “Amity? Can you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Catherine.” She considered going into a long apology. Explaining that she understood their creeping was a one-time deal, but there was really no one else Catherine could turn to. Instead of I found you she heard herself say, “I need you.” She started to tell her about the incident. About how the dogs got out and Karma was gone and that she’d met a kind man at the dog park, but she heard something in Amity’s silence. A long exhale of breath. “Did I reach you at a bad time?”

  “I was just going to have”—Amity hesitated—“some quiet time.”

  Catherine recognized the fatigue in Amity’s voice. Catherine had felt it herself lately. Her new friend had probably been at the gym all day, going round and round on an elliptical machine. “It’s just I didn’t have anyone else to call.”

  “I see.”

  “Karma’s gone and Ralph’s out and I’m just—” She heard her voice waver. It’d been such a long day. Her life had come down to this: a broken marriage and a lost dog. “I just don’t know what to do.” Floundering. The word came to her again.

  Then Amity seemed to recover a bit. It was the firmness Catherine recognized from their first meeting: “Okay. Take it easy.”

  “There’s no one else I can call. I can’t seem to find my way out of this.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “You do, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Catherine heard nine deliberate peals from a grandfather’s clock and finally Amity answered. “I’ll be over in the morning.”

  After Fred returned home from his adventure with Catherine, he took a quick shower and changed into dry clothes. He couldn’t stop thinking of their kiss, envisaging the outline of her body and her sweet vulnerability. He’d wanted to kiss her again when they reached the parking lot but hadn’t had the nerve. And she departed quickly, perhaps embarrassed by his actions. Maybe just eager to get back home to her husband, who would promise their dog was safe, who could give her the reassurance that he could not.

  He felt as if he’d been away from home for a year or more, like Odysseus on a ten-year voyage. But it had really only been six hours since he had arrived at the dog park at his usual three o’clock slot. He might have been on an around-the-world voyage, passing through the international date line, the imaginary space that separates one day from another. He thought of how far he’d traveled though nothing had changed, except that Sequoia wasn’t with him and that everything had shifted in his heart.

  Then the phone rang. It was his neighbor, Ida Blue.

  “I found your dog. And a smaller one. They’re real tired.”

  “You have both of them?”

  “Sequoia and Karma. Says so right on their collars. They just sorta fell right into my lap, you could say.” She hesitated. “But I can watch ’em for a spell if you’re busy.”

  Without delay he jumped into his car feeling invigorated, like he’d just emerged from a brisk ocean swim. He hadn’t been so worried for Sequoia coming home, but his concern was for Karma and Catherine. After he parked the car he approached the front steps to Ida Blue’s home and was a little surprised by the lack of maintenance. Piles of rotting pine straw and overgrown bushes crowded the front walk, and rain had pooled in the broken concrete driveway. He carried a canvas bag and large dog bed and just as he was going to press the bell with his elbow, Ida Blue opened the door. He was taken aback by her linebacker neck and broad shoulders. She wore a tentlike flowery dress, the type of oversize muumuu you might see on a Polynesian island. “Ms. Childs?” he asked.

  “Oh my, my, my!” She seemed skittish, like a friendly mastiff that had just been delivered a jolt of electricity. “This is a treat.”

  Fred put down the bag and they shook hands. Her grip matched those of men he had met in business, men with whom he’d negotiated contracts. It took her a while to release her hold.

  The dogs came up behind Ida Blue, and he saw Sequoia’s head hanging low, Karma just behind her. Fred leaned down to hug Sequoia but his dog let out a brief moan, something she did when her arthritis troubled her. She didn’t seem excited to see him, but he understood she’d had a long day.

  “So pleased to meet you,” Fred said. “You have positively saved the day.” She grinned and transferred her weight excitedly back and forth.

  “Paw-sitively,” she said.

  “I’ll take the little one right away. Karma’s owner is beside herself with worry. But would you mind keeping Sequoia, my Great Dane, just for tonight and perhaps tomorrow morning?”

  “Really?!” she practically yelled and held her hands at her chest as if he’d just presented her with an Academy Award.

  He had thought this through. Of course he would like to take Sequoia home, but he knew her well enough to know that after giving her the pain pills the dog would just sleep straight through the night, and getting her back into the car, even with the ramp, would be too hard on her. “I’m sure her arthritis is bothering her. I’ll take her out briefly now, give her a little food with her medication, then she’ll just sleep for fifteen hours. Always does. You see, somehow these adventurers found their way to you all the way from the dog park.”

  Ida Blue kept nodding, her throat skin jiggling.

  “Of course I’ll pay you for the imposition.” Ida Blue’s eyes were so wide and unblinking, protruding out of a normal position, Fred thought for a moment his neighbor might have a thyroid condition. “If it’s not okay I can take—”

  “I run a doggie day care and dog-walking service!” she thundered, and he looked relieved.

  Fred settled Karma into the seat beside him and set out toward Catherine’s house. After a minute the seat sensor chimed, so he reached over and pulled the safety belt behind the dog and clicked the locking mechanism, as if strapping an invisible person into the car with them. Without wasting another moment, he drove right to Greenleaf Park and her front door.

  Fred wondered if her husband might answer the door with a strong handshake and full head of hair. Fred should have felt guilty for kissing Catherine, but he didn’t. The kiss had just happened. He decided he would decline if he were invited in for a drink, but it would be nice to catch a glimpse of Catherine and see her happiness at her dog’s return.

  When Catherine answered his knock she saw him and Karma before her and in one motion grabbed the dog in her arms and they spun around in tight circles. After a few moments, without saying a word and still holding the dog, she flung one arm around Fr
ed. He felt her face in his neck, her wet tears against his skin. “But Sequoia? Where’s Sequoia?” he heard her whisper.

  Suddenly he had an idea, a little plan to bring Catherine to him again. He looked up to the sky, silently apologized to whatever force had delivered their dogs safely to Ida Blue, then replied, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” Her voice cracked as she pulled back. “Sequoia wasn’t with Karma?” She placed her fingertips from her free hand on his cheek. “I’ll be at your house by eight a.m. and we won’t stop until we find her.”

  chapter 27

  Ida Blue wasn’t getting anywhere with the old dog. While she sat on her mattress on the floor, the Great Dane just stood in the center of her bedroom, staring, as if she didn’t know what was expected. “Oh sweetheart, you are so, so very pretty,” Ida Blue cooed, patting the space beside her. “Come here.” Sequoia blinked a few times in response.

  And then Ida Blue had an idea. She padded out to the kitchen, the head on her sock monkey slippers bobbing excitedly, and dumped the rest of the frozen mini hot dogs onto a paper plate. After microwaving them, she returned to the bedroom and gave one to Sequoia just for standing there. Just for coming into her life. A gift of good faith. The second one she placed on the floor, six inches in front of the animal. Then she put others at foot-long intervals, a trail to her mattress. She left the remaining hot dogs on the plate in the center of her comforter, then sprawled out next to the greasy meat and waited.

  Maybe Ida Blue didn’t really have psychic ability, didn’t know what pets thought or what motivated them, but she wondered if she might have a talent for training. After Sequoia ate all the hot dogs, they settled together onto the queen-size mattress and, almost immediately, both fell into a deep sleep.

  A few hours before dawn, Ida Blue drifted out of a dream, felt Sequoia’s breath on her face, and realized they’d been sharing the same pillow. The Great Dane smelled like a truck driver who ate only bologna sandwiches. Perhaps she was meant to find a husband who enjoyed long-haul cuisine and drove an eighteen-wheeler. Starting with Sequoia’s neck, she ran her hand along the dog’s short fur and to her chest, feeling the comforting drub of her heart. She could almost imagine what it would be like to wake with someone in her bed. McSweeney the magician had been the only candidate, but they’d never made it farther than a nervous make out session on a rickety Ferris wheel at the Blue Ridge Fair. She wondered what had become of her old boyfriend. Probably he was married. Perhaps he had a few children and had bought an enchanting two-bedroom condo with wall-to-wall carpeting and a garbage disposal. Maybe he’d even followed his dreams, hitting the big time and performing in front of packed birthday parties. Sequoia’s unexpected entry into her life reminded her of their courtship. Sudden. Sweet. Unlikely.