****
Half a mile from her house, Dakota spoke, breaking the silence between them only because she had to. “Let me out here.”
Tyler stopped the car without a word, staring ahead smugly. He’d won, and his tires gloated on his behalf, squealing as he sped away.
Dakota jogged on the shoulder until she reached the corner and the Pedersons’ mailbox, a plain silver container atop a battered fence post. It had been run over more than once. She opened her backpack and removed the large white envelope she’d addressed that morning, still uncertain whether she would send it at all.
Now, anticipating what was to come, it seemed necessary, like a lifeline.
No. Not a lifeline. A whip. A way to lash back at the universe. At Tyler—what a prick. At Hannah—who was supposed to have Dakota’s back, not stab her in it. At her father, of course. But mostly at her mother. Dakota listened to her mother’s voicemail again—the fifth one she’d left in the last five hours—to remind herself, like pressing a bruise.
In this message, unlike most of the others, Mom was done crying. The wetness in her voice had hardened into ice. She spit it back at Dakota like only she could, aiming her icicle darts at all the soft places.
You think you’re grown up now?
You think you can handle things on your own?
That you can just go where you want to when you want to and lie to me and your father and not answer my calls? Make me leave work early because I was so worried sick?
Well, I’ve got news for you, missy. You can’t. At your age, I was practically raising myself. What have you done besides get some bird-brained boy to like you? Congratulations. We’ll see how long that lasts when you don’t give him the only thing he wants.
Dakota clenched her fist tight before she realized she’d crumpled the envelope’s edge.
Inside it, the school picture she despised. Not because of the pimple that had cruelly showed up on her chin that morning, but because she looked like a little girl. A plain one at that. Nothing like Hannah with her expertly made-up face.
But no matter, it was the kind of picture a grandparent would cherish. She’d inscribed it on the back and tacked a note to the front, written in tiny print on two of her mother’s Post-its.
Dear Grandpa,
I don’t know you, but I’d like to. I’ve asked Mom about you, but she won’t say much. She doesn’t know I’m reaching out. She’d be really mad, so don’t tell her. Could I come to visit you at Mol’s? If you want to meet me too, come to the Napa Public Library this Sunday at 1 p.m. If you’re not there, I’ll be disappointed, but I’ll understand.
Your granddaughter,
Dakota
P.S. Mom said you named me. Thanks!
Dakota smoothed the envelope’s bent edge, stuck it between the Pedersons’ outgoing bills, and closed it tight. The small red flag was already raised, and she pondered it for a moment.
Red for stop.
Red for danger.
Red for blood.
Then she turned away and began to walk home.
AFTER
Chapter
Fourteen
(Thursday, October 4, 2018)
I wake, still on the sofa and oddly contorted. Head pounding. Back aching. Face smushed into one of the throw pillows that’s no doubt made the sort of red lines that will take hours to fade from my cheeks. I find the bayonet on the floor. It must’ve slipped from my hand during the night. Some guard I am. I’m not even certain when I fell back asleep, only that I’d stared at the ceiling for what seemed like hours, listening for the faintest noise and gripping the bayonet’s handle, my nerves frayed down to the bare ends.
“What was out there last night, buddy? Tell me.”
Gus cocks his head. It’s not the first time I’ve asked him a question like that. When he’d wandered back onto the front lawn, the day after Dakota went missing, fur wet and tongue hanging, his collar missing, I’d dropped to my knees and begged him to take me to her. Until Cole had pulled me away, guided me upstairs, and put me to bed with two Valium while the police scurried around our home like mice.
At first, I’d been relieved when Gus came back. Because those chestnut brown eyes had borne witness, and as long as Gus was alive, a part of me had hope of knowing, however miniscule. My girl’s final moments locked away inside his canine brain. It reminded me of a joke Cole told Dakota the day we brought Gus home. What do you call a blonde with a brain? Dakota had twittered, still giddy, as she’d waited for the punchline. A golden retriever.
But then relief turned to disgust. Disgust to resentment. Resentment to hate. I’d needed a scapegoat. A place to lay blame. Why didn’t you protect her? I’d asked Gus that too, demanded it until he’d cowered, afraid of me. When really, I’d been asking myself. That was my question to answer. Because what is a mother if not a protector? My own mother had taught me that, even if her plan blew up like one of Dad’s homemade bombs, right in her face.
As soon as I stand, Gus whines and trots to the door. I crack it open, and he’s through my legs and pushing his way out, nose first. He darts across the grass, paying no mind to the squirrel scrambling up the fence post or his favorite oak tree, the one he usually takes his time marking. I stuff my bare feet into sneakers and run after him, down the path to my office.
“Show me,” I call after him as he disappears behind the trees. “What did you see?”
I sound crazy. I feel crazy. But maybe this time, finally, he’ll answer me.
When I round the corner, I skid to a panicked stop, my brain a slate wiped clean. On it, writ large, two words. A name. Wendall Grady. He’s propped up against the Cadillac, one hand on the hood. The other lifts in a slow wave.
I curse myself for not checking the clock before I’d sprinted from the house braless, in sweats and a ponytail, still half-asleep.
Gus stops too, in the center of the driveway. His tail drops low, only the end wagging. I wait for his throaty bark, but it never comes. Instead, like that old wind-up cowboy, Wendall takes a knee and coaxes Gus to him. When he runs his bony hand over Gus’s head, smoothing the fur on his neck, my own hair prickles.
“Get back here!”
But Gus is smitten with Wendall’s cowboy hat, sniffing it in earnest the way he’d done at the dog park in another life. A past life when Dakota and I would load him into the Jeep and drive to Canine Commons for another butt-sniffing session. That’s what Dakota had called it. And after she’d googled the question Why do dogs sniff other dogs’ butts, we’d laughed until our stomachs hurt. Then we’d marveled at our Gus, with his nose 100,000 times more sensitive than ours.
“It’s alright,” Wendall says. He dodges Gus’s snout and reaches into his pants pocket, revealing a small pack of saltine crackers. “The nausea gets so bad these days, I don’t go far without them.”
I’m grateful he doesn’t seem to notice my bedhead or my thin T-shirt, but I wrap my arms across my chest anyway.
“May I?” he asks.
I nod as Gus prances with excitement. Never one to delay gratification, he gobbles the whole pack of crackers in a single chomp and stares up at Wendall waiting for round two, cowboy hat forgotten.
“I’ve always been fond of doggies,” Wendall says, tottering a little as he stands. “Before this damn cancer devil came to collect his due, I volunteered down at the shelter on Jackson. Never did have a dog of my own. Tilda was allergic. But way back when, the sisters at Holy Pines let me feed this stray mutt for a while. Until he hauled off and bit Sister Frances. Can’t say I blame him. But he had to go. They took him straight to the pound, and I lost the best buddy a boy ever had. Nowadays, I’m just a sick puppy myself. Ready to be put down.”
I swallow hard at the image. If Wendall was a dog, he’d be a hound, long jowls and droopy eyes. The sort that spends half the day snoozing in a spot of sunshine and can’t
be bothered to walk on a leash. But there’s something unpredictable about him. Now that he’s back on his feet, at eye level, I shift uncomfortably under the weight of his gaze.
“Am I running very late or are you very early?” I ask.
Wendall glances at his watch, loose on his skeleton arm. “Didn’t we say eight o’clock? Or did my old brain have a thinko again?”
I search his face for evidence of untruth, but all I find is a faint blush of embarrassment over his usual yellowed pallor. He looks away and reaches to stroke Gus’s head again. Eight hundred days ago, I would’ve sent him away, told him to come back at his scheduled time, and then grilled him at said time like it was the Spanish Inquisition. A violation of the therapeutic frame, however small, was worth exploring back then. Now, I only care about one thing. Wendall said he could help me.
“I believe we’d decided on ten as our regular time. You told me your home health care nurse stops by around nine. And you usually have your chemo appointments in the early afternoon. But it’s alright. If you just give me a moment to . . .” With a sheepish smile, I gesture to the whole mess of me. “. . . look a bit more presentable. I can be with you in about fifteen minutes.”
“Shall I wait inside?”
I’m grateful I didn’t bring the key. It means I don’t have to lie or invent a thin excuse. “Would you mind waiting outside? I’ve left the key up at the house.”
I take a few steps, then pat my leg, summoning Gus. He’s busy licking the saltine crumbs from Wendall’s hand. Apparently murderers taste no different than the rest of us.
****
I fill Gus’s bowl, pocket my office key, and make myself presentable in seven minutes flat. An impossible feat for the Dr. Roark of olden days who’d been a bona-fide member of the frequent-buyer Botox club and a master of the flat iron. That woman had never readied herself in under one hour. But then, she’d had Cole to impress. Along with the other doctors’ wives, most of whom bought their boobs and counted carbs and gluten among their worst enemies. Frankly, I’m glad the former me bit the dust. Her loss is no loss at all. To prove it, I stuff a store-bought mini-muffin—twenty-five delectable grams of carbs—in my mouth as I truck it back down the path to Wendall.
He’s still there, sitting sideways in the front seat of the Cadillac, door open and humming along to the radio, his snakeskin boots keeping time against the quarry stones. I recognize the song’s melody well before the swing of the chorus.
“I’m a ‘Girl Watcher’ by The O’Kaysons,” I say. “Now that’s an oldie.”
“Indeed. But not as old as this codger. That song came out in 1968, the year after I joined up. I’m surprised you know it.”
“It was one of my father’s favorites. I’m not as young as I look.” I chide myself for being too casual. Wendall’s showing up here early and unannounced has me off my game. Maybe that’s the whole point.
“Well, your father has good taste.” One eye disappears behind the veined skin of his lid, and I can’t tell if he’s winking at me or squinting against the sun. He hums a little of the song, the part about watching girls go by, snapping his fingers to the rhythm.
“Shall we?” I ask, gesturing to the door. I need to get back on my turf. Where I set the pace. Where I make the rules.
Wendall kills the engine, silencing the song, and follows me, laboring with each step.
A turn of the key, and here we are again. In this place that feels like a tomb. Cold and inky and reeking of the past. I flip the switch, and the ghosts retreat to the shadows. For now. My gaze flits to the place where they gather, dark and hungry, at the door to my real office. Thankfully, I’d remembered to close it. I take up my spot at the edge of the ergo chair, relieved.
Wendall slinks in behind me and assumes his usual position beneath the lamp, black hat resting safely on his knee. “I’ve got a confession to make, Doc.”
I wait for him to tell me what I’ve already figured out. It’s not the first time. Most of therapy is simply waiting for the patient to tell you what you already know. What you’ve known all along.
“I told a fib. A little white lie.” I lean in, encouraging, and brace for it. “I didn’t forget our session time. I got here early on purpose, hopin’ you’d be around. You see, I want to clear somethin’ up. Somethin’ you might’ve misunderstood.”
His eyes are a cool blue, but his knee jiggles with a mind of its own. His hat moves atop it as if there’s a frantic animal trapped underneath. I want to reach for it, but I don’t.
“Go on. I’m listening.”
“I’ve killed people. A whole heap of them. But not like you think.”
In my mind, I see the field stretch before me, the gravestones he’d described sprouting there like dead flowers. Nearby, a heap of bodies—all shapes and sizes and states of decay—waiting for the proper interment in Wendall’s boneyard. But mostly, I think of Dakota. How I’d railed against burying her. Against putting my baby in the ground and turning my back as they’d shoveled dirt on the pale-pink casket someone had picked out for her—probably Cole—because I couldn’t do it myself. What other choice is there? Cole had asked, his voice breaking.
The muffin I’d scarfed starts to push its way back up. I swallow it down again, its acidic sweetness burning my throat.
“What is it that you believe I think of you?” A dangerous question for a therapist. To invite the transference into the room, prop it up on a chair, and give it a voice. At Napa State, I might spend months working up to a question like that, especially with the sort of patients I had there. With moods that could turn like the weather and sanity as fragile as a Fabergé egg.
“Well, to put it bluntly, you probably have me figured for some sicko. Like Bundy or BTK or Zodiac. Hell, like that Shadow Man who killed your little girl.”
I flinch at the last bit, but I don’t deny it. “Have you often felt misunderstood?”
“My whole cotton pickin’ life, Doc. Starting way back at that godforsaken Holy Pines when I stabbed this big ole bully—Tony Berlucci—with a pencil for callin’ my momma a streetwalker. Tony had a thing for pickin’ on the underdog. Heck, I’d say I was a bit of an antihero for a while. But Sister Frances didn’t think so. She made me take off my shoe, and she beat me with it somethin’ awful. In front of everybody. The holier the woman, the harder she’d hit. I spent the entire night in the naughty room.”
He lowers his head, looking every bit a scolded hound dog now. Tail between his legs. “That’s the way you made me feel, Doc. Looking at me the way you did yesterday, the way you did when you saw me this morning. Like I’m right back in the naughty room.”
“To be fair, you did mention a graveyard filled with bodies. Might some part of you be invested in being misunderstood? Asking for it, even? Like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
His eyes light up, and he smacks the poor sofa with his hand. The thwack of flesh on leather pistol-starts my heart.
“You hit the damn nail right on the head. Why else would I have volunteered for Nam? The most misunderstood war in history, I tell ya, and I was on the frontline. Nobody knows what it was really like over there. Not unless you lived it yourself.”
“I’m here to listen, if you’d like.” I don’t push. Wendall’s leading me in circles. But at the center of it all is whatever he’s holding back. The bone he’s got buried. I’m hoping—there’s that godforsaken word again—it’s the very thing that can help me.
“It started in bootcamp. The brainwashing. They never called ’em Vietnamese. Always Charlie, Viet Cong, other things too. Words I won’t say in front of a lady. By the end of it, the enemy were animals to me. But worse. Animals that didn’t deserve mercy. Once I got there, it was like a dream. The worst dream you ever had that you couldn’t wake up from. Did you know Uncle Sam started passing out amphetamines—pep pills they called ’em back then—to keep us awake? I was twenty-one years old. Ca
n you imagine? Twenty-one! High as a kite, crazy as a loon, and so goddamned angry. No wonder I had the highest body count in my unit. That’s how I made Lieutenant. How I became a regular ole war hero.”
Body count. Those words take me back to Mol’s in an instant, twelve years old and watching my father etch another line on that rusted-out barrel. I dig my fingers into the plush arms of the ergo chair and breathe until the memory passes.
“Are those the bodies in the graveyard you spoke of?”
“Some,” he says. “Truth be told, I couldn’t even tell ya how many I killed over there.”
“And the others?”
Wendall leans back against the sofa and lets out a long sigh. His black hat stills on his knee, the animal I’d imagined beneath it long gone now. “I suppose I should just come right out with it. Like ripping off a Band-Aid.”
“That’s usually the best way to say a hard thing.” Don’t I know it. I thought Cole had too. He was a cancer doctor after all, supposedly trained in the empathic and skillful delivery of the worst news of your life. But when I’d returned empty-handed from the grocery store, drained from dread, he’d tried to pussyfoot around it. Sit down, Mollie, he’d said. As if that mattered. As if sitting down made it easier to bear the loss of your only child.
I study Wendall’s face. The veined valleys beneath his eyes, the furrows that frame his mouth as it moves. Who is he really? What has he done? Questions I’ve been asking myself about every man since my father.
“The other bodies belong to the Shadow Man.”
****
I don’t shock easily. As a shrink, especially a shrink at Napa State, shock is a job hazard. It tells the bad patients too much about you. What makes you tick. What twists your stomach. And the good ones clam up like oysters if you gasp or look at them funny. So, like every good therapist, my reactions happen underground. I choose what stays buried and what rises to the surface.
Shadows Among Us Page 16
