“Lon?”
“Yes!” he yells over the sound of the rain. “What you are doing out here?”
“What are you doing out here?”
“I am block captain,” he says, still in the high-pitched, reedy voice. Lightning flashes on the roof across the street. “If I do my job better, maybe Celia—”
“No.” Dana stops. In the light from the streetlamp, she can see his face, his eyebrows raised, his mouth a thin, grim line beneath his hood. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault,” she says. “Certainly not yours.”
“It was her killer’s fault,” he says, and Dana nods.
“So why are you out in this horrible—”
“I am watching out my window,” Lon Nguyen says, “and I see someone in your yard.”
“My yard? Our yard?”
He nods.
“When? Just now?”
He shrugs. “I could not find my raincoat right away, but when I did, I come right out.”
“And did you . . . ?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “My wife say my nerves are bad. Since Celia is killed. She say I should stay away from windows—that I am seeing ghosts.”
“You’re not alone,” Dana mumbles. “I see them, too.”
Lon Nguyen looks puzzled. He takes a step forward, and they are nearly nose to nose. Dana thinks that if this were a movie, they would kiss. “Who?” he says.
She shrugs. She looks back toward her house, where she’s left the front door open wide. Behind it the living room is lit up like a stage. “I don’t know,” she says. “A figure in a hoodie. In our backyard. At least I thought so.”
“A hoodie?”
“A jacket. Like yours.”
A porch light goes on at Lon Nguyen’s house. Dana can see his wife’s head poking out the front door, her words streaming through the rain in Vietnamese.
“I will walk you back,” Lon Nguyen says, but Dana waves him away, hurrying to her yard through the lightning bolts that drift like tiny bombs across the sky.
When the rain has nearly stopped, leaving a light fog in the air, a thin layer of mist to hover over the hedges, the neglected, unmowed grass of the backyard, Dana falls into a restless sleep. She dreams bright, colorful dreams of falling animals and cars, of wandering in a lush, green world where tree trunks are translucent, where the bark is crystal clear. She can see roots, like veins, inside the trees, sucking water up into their branches, into their bright lollipop leaves, round and sharp and see-through. She can hear the murmur of the flowers, the whisper of the wind, the sudden inching-up of the grass. In her dream she looks behind the row of lollipop trees, across the empty fields, and sees the blue vase that killed Celia growing up beneath the flowers. In the few seconds between sleep and waking, she can feel the heavy smoothness of the vase in her hands—a memory that forces her awake to lie still as a stone and try to bring back when it was exactly that she held the purchase that her neighbor showed her with such pride. “It was a steal,” Celia had said of the art-sale piece that killed her, picking it up carefully from a shelf near the foyer. Was it at that point Dana held it? Was it then she felt its cool, flat surface? Or was it on the afternoon Celia died?
She moves in tiny increments to the edge of the bed. Beside her, Peter snores. His watch says 3:17. She roams back to the living room and grabs the New York Times, finds the crossword puzzle in the back of the third section. She wanders to the kitchen for a sharpened pencil and curls her legs beneath her on the couch. The answers come to her easily, as if her brain is finely tuned, as if the dreams have made her smarter, and she fills the squares in quickly, moving on to the KenKen, which she also does with ease. Keeping busy helps her focus. The crosswords and sudokus, the KenKens—all these tiny, trivial things—they help her, they keep her sane, keep at bay the dread that hovers thick as smoke just above her right eyebrow. She places the completed puzzle page on the coffee table as outside a dog barks, running down the street toward their house and stopping out in front. The barking becomes louder. Threatening. The dog growls and yelps, and Dana thinks she hears the sloshing, swishing sound of someone dashing through the wet and slippery grass. She presses her hands over her ears. She hopes it’s Lon Nguyen out there in his flip-flops, making his rounds, or that the paperboy has stopped to grab a quick, illicit smoke, leaning his elbows on the handlebars of his bicycle.
CHAPTER 16
Peter doesn’t say good-bye before he leaves for work. When she’s certain he’s gone, Dana rolls out of bed and showers, glancing afterward at her thin frame, her small breasts, her long, stick-thin legs. She sits on the toilet lid and stares at the mirror, concentrating on one small area at a time—lashes, lips, cheeks—as she applies her makeup, preparing to carry out the plan she made the day of the brunch.
When she’s satisfied, she walks back to the bedroom. She checks the closet, a quick, appraising search, stopping at the short black dress she bought at Macy’s on a whim. For a night out with her husband, she thought at the time. She sighs now, thinking of how different things were then, or seemed to be at least. She pulls the dress over her head and lets it fall just at her knees, feels it sway against the backs of her legs as she glances toward the mirror on its wooden stand in the middle of the room.
She walks down the hall to the third bedroom, where Jamie’s electric guitar and amps still stand, where sheet music lies in lonely piles across the tops of things. She hates it now, with him away at school, hates the silence of the room, this empty tribute to her son. She moves over to Jamie’s computer, still sitting on an old desk in the corner, and she Googles Manhattan hotels. She waits while myriad options pop up on the screen. Ronald wouldn’t stay just anywhere. It would have to be very clean, with an excellent bedbug rating. “He speaks in haikus,” is what she remarked to Peter the day she met Ronald. It was the way he arranged his words, chirping them out in small, sharp, colorful chips of sound.
Midway through her list, she finds him at the St. Giles Hotel, where a rushed desk clerk offers to put her through to the room.
“Thanks,” Dana says, “Room 2—”
“Five-twenty-two,” the voice informs her, and Dana jots the numbers on a small pad, ripping off the square of white and folding it into fourths.
She hangs up while the phone rings into Ronald’s empty room—she’s sure he’s back at work by now—and shoves the folded paper into her purse. In the kitchen she pours herself a cup of Peter’s leftover coffee and nibbles a half-toasted frozen waffle, washing it down with several swallows of the coffee, bitter and too strong, the way Peter likes it.
She locks the front door and sits for a moment in the driveway, the sun beating down on her car, shining in its aging maroon glory, dappled with bumper stickers in the brightness of a day wiped clean from storms the night before. She backs out of her driveway, glancing down the street where yellow crime tape clings to the ragged, browning hedges of the Steinhausers’ once-perfect yard. There is no one there. No cars. No cops. She wonders if their dog came back on his own. If so, she wonders if he knew what to do. If Celia should be murdered, she imagines Ronald telling him ahead of time, neighbor’s. Door. Howl. Whimper. Food bowl. It’s all good.
She and Peter stayed at a pricey hotel in midtown as a treat for her birthday several years before—the Marriott, she thinks, although she’s no longer certain. She’d reveled in the luxury of ordering in, of breakfast in bed, of the outstanding view. Like old times, Peter said, although they both knew it wasn’t. Even so, it was festive, romantic, getting away, staring out the seventh-floor window at the tourist sights. “This is wonderful,” she’d gushed, but then it turned, with Peter beside her, pointing out MOMA and Saks and various other points of interest as if she hadn’t recognized them, as if she were an idiot, a small child. He seemed so pompous—sneering, she’d thought, in his inimitably demeaning way. There was another time, a cocktail party in a large downstairs room—his office party. Christmas, she thinks, but she’s forgotten the hotel. She turns on the radio, and the car plunges throu
gh a puddle, sending water sloshing off the road, and her heart pummels against her rib cage.
She can’t drink coffee. Not now, especially Peter’s coffee, thick as sludge. The radio seems too loud, the music too confusing, the song too vibrant, and she stabs at the OFF button as Michael Jackson continues to sing through the car. This is it! She glances at St. Christopher, a pleading, desperate look, and he seems to nod as Michael Jackson fades back through the radio, a trail of blue light sucked inside the dash.
She chews on her cuticle. Her foot trembles on the gas pedal, and she shakes off her shoe. She shakes off both her shoes—black sandals with heels—and she imagines Celia coveting them, trying them on, wavering across the room in them, dangling her cell phone with the photo of Peter and the Tart, screaming, They’re fucking! She imagines herself saying, You can have the sandals, Celia. You can keep the sandals. She sees the hotel up ahead and touches her foot to the brake pedal, slowing the car to a crawl. “But not my husband,” she says now, completing her musings. “You can’t have Peter.”
She knows what she has to do as she pulls in to a garage a few blocks up the street from the hotel. Still, she hasn’t yet decided how to do it. She’ll wing it. Dana has always thought well on her feet. On the fly, as they used to say, by the seat of her pants. Lately when she thinks things through, she sees them from every angle, too many angles, too many possible outcomes, and she loses confidence. She fumbles. She drops the ball. She fails.
She slides her bag over her bare arm and steps onto the sidewalk. She has to get inside Ronald’s room, even though security is tight these days, especially here in the city. She straightens her skirt and thinks of Gwyneth Paltrow slipping in and out of cabs and lobbies, gliding past doormen and nosy streams of concierges. She stands straighter, tossing her hair over her shoulders. Her sunglasses cover a large portion of her face. She could be anyone, walking up the sidewalk toward the heavy doors. For all they know, she is a star. She could even be Gwyneth.
As she nears the building, a doorman steps outside. “Good morning,” he says, opening the large front door and stepping back for her to pass. He smiles. “Welcome!” She walks past him toward the concierge, the clots of men and women. They look odd to her, cartoonish, and Dana knows that this is a dream. This is her dream from the night before, the lollipop trees, but somehow she is here inside it. She’s walking through it; she has to find the phone. If the picture is there the way she remembers it, then she will know she was sane that afternoon—that things occurred the way she thinks, at least the parts she can remember. If, on the other hand, she imagined the entire afternoon that began with Celia showing her the photo in the phone, then she was totally unhinged that day. She could have done anything, including kill Celia. First she’ll find the photo, and once she knows that part of the afternoon was real, she’ll go from there. She’ll have a starting place. It will spark her memory, prod her through the blank spots. She’ll also be in Ronald’s room. She’ll see what else turns up.
She stops.
“Yes?” A young man stares at her through thick black-framed glasses. She wonders if they’ll pop out at her, if the eyeballs will leap out on springs.
“Terribly sorry to bother you.” She fidgets with her dress, takes off her dark glasses. “This is a little embarrassing.”
The young man leans over the curved smoothness of the counter. His eyes are large behind his lenses. Yellowish. Dana looks away.
“I spent the night here,” she says, “last night. It was lovely.”
The yellow eyes squint slightly. The young man leans farther across the counter.
“I’m afraid I’ve left my cell phone in our room,” Dana says, “and I’ve already turned in my key. I have to catch a flight out,” she says, “so I have to get my phone, and I think Ronald’s probably left for work by now. My husband. He probably isn’t there.”
The desk clerk’s cartoon lips curve upward at their corners. Dana stares at her shoes. “It was room 522,” she says. “Could I have the—”
“I’m sorry,” the desk clerk says, stepping back a pace or two, “but I can ring the room if you like. Your name?” He holds the receiver to his ear.
“Sarah Steinhauser,” Dana says. She has always liked the name Sarah. Had she and Peter had a daughter, Dana would have named her Sarah. It’s a strong name, she has always thought. Dana is an odd, pale, wispy name.
“ID?” His eyes spring here and there around the room. Dana rummages through her bag. The lobby is filling up with people. The young man looks alarmed. Three women clamor at the counter. He disappears briefly, reappearing with a slim gray key card. “ID?” he says again as a small group of people nears the counter.
“Thank you so much,” Dana says. “You’ve saved my life,” and she grabs the card, turns toward the elevators, lined up in a straight, neat row on the other side of the lobby. She thinks she hears him, thinks he calls out, “Sarah! Wait!” but she doesn’t turn around.
CHAPTER 17
When the elevator doors close behind her, Dana breathes a sigh of relief. She reaches over to press the button for the fifth floor, and the elevator zips seamlessly upward, not stopping until, with a dull dong, it arrives at Ronald’s floor.
“Excuse me,” Dana says, and she pushes past a gaggle of cartoon passengers. She moves to the front of the elevator, stepping out before the doors have fully opened. She moves quickly down the carpeted hall, avoiding the busy, teeming patterns on the rug. When she arrives at 522, she inserts the key card in the lock, and the reassuring click is loud in the silent hallway.
There’s no one in sight. She pushes the door open and slides inside, closing it behind her. The room is not impeccably neat, as she’d imagined it would be. Instead Ronald’s things are scattered everywhere—his boxers, his wrinkled shirts and khaki pants. Newspapers lie across a second queen-size bed, open to articles about Celia—a small piece on her life as an adult-education teacher, an earlier article that Dana has already read about the death itself, and a sheet of hotel stationery with a short, handwritten section of an obituary she assumes Ronald has written. “Loving mother and mentor. Funeral arrangements pending completion of police investigation.” Dana shudders. Several pairs of socks are scattered willy-nilly on the floor, and the bathroom is a nightmare tangle of shaving paraphernalia and robes, of dental floss and toothpastes and brushes. Ronald even thought to pack a whitener booster, which Dana finds impressive, if surprising.
The room smells of alcohol and peppermint, of old stale wine stuck to plastic motel glasses, of unwashed socks and sneaker insides. Hotel, she thinks. Wine. Smells. Death. Life. Socks, as she sorts through a pile of clothing on a desk. The rubber duck lies on its side on a long, low bureau next to the TV, and Dana reaches out a finger, touches it lightly on the head. She tears through the piles of papers, of clothes, of shaving equipment. Everything, it seems, is here but Celia’s phone.
She glances at her watch. Eleven-fifteen. She wonders if Ronald comes back to the hotel for lunch, if he brings a salad upstairs every day, if he sits at the small, cluttered table eating and penciling in a crossword puzzle from the Times—if he’ll come back to this cramped, rank-smelling room to catch Dana thrashing through his personal belongings in her high-heeled sandals and her sexy black dress. She hopes not. She wishes she’d memorized Celia’s cell-phone number, wonders if she ever even had it. She opens the dresser drawers, working her way through pajama bottoms and socks.
She sits down on the bed where Ronald sleeps, and it gives slightly under her weight. For a crazy minute, Dana thinks she might be able to sleep here in this anonymous place, where everything is topsy-turvy and foul-smelling, where nothing is expected of her. She even closes her eyes, stretching out across the bed. Her feet in the black sandals cross over each other precisely at the ankles, and she spreads out her arms, feeling like Jesus being crucified. She thinks of St. Christopher nodding on the visor. “Please,” she says. “Please.” She whispers it. She opens her eyes. Something peeks out
from the gap between the mirror and the bureau, something black. Dana crosses herself and mumbles, “Please, please, please,” as she picks her way across discarded clothes, trips on a loafer, and grabs the black, half-hidden phone.
“Thank you, God. Thank you, St. Christopher,” she says, “or. . . well, Christopher.” She closes her eyes. She sees Celia punching the code into her phone, the way her fingers crossed the number pad in a diagonal line from upper right to lower left. Twice. Three seven, three seven. The screen springs to life. She brushes her finger across the backdrop—Celia’s boys in Martha’s Vineyard—and it takes her only a moment to locate the pictures, the different groupings. GRADUATION DAY, THE YARD, LADIES IN MORNING CLASS. Dana thinks that the one of Peter and the Tart was at the end of the graduation pictures. She scrolls through them, but she doesn’t see it. She scrolls back through again, to make sure, but there are only several shots of the two boys, looking gawky and prepubescent; of Celia, pretty and thin in a pastel, sleeveless dress; of Ronald, standing with the boys. She scrolls ahead, thumbing through a collection of plants—close-ups of Ronald’s roses, the sprouts of a spring garden in their backyard. Nothing. She thumbs through again, going backward, going more slowly. She moves to the group of women in Celia’s English class—the Bolivians and Peruvians, the Somalis and Bangladeshis, the Afghanis, the Romanians, the Chinese—women sitting at a table filled with food from all the countries represented in the class. They look happy. Celia looks happy. A Christmas party, Dana guesses from the way they’re dressed, or maybe an end-of-term party. She zooms in on Celia’s smiling face. Was she sleeping with Peter then? Was she meeting him in dark bars or motel rooms after her night class? Were they sliding into each other’s front seats in the parking lot, Celia scrambling across the cold, dark leather of Peter’s car, her skirt hiked up, his hairy-knuckled fingers tugging at her bra? Dana scrutinizes each of the party pictures, and then she thumbs back through the photos, from beginning to end, until she’s sure that Peter and the Tart are not there.
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