by Sara Gruen
Isabel couldn't bring herself to deal with Stuart just yet, but she did turn off the tank light and unplug the water filter.
Her voice mail was full to capacity with messages dating back to immediately after the bombing:
"Hi, Dr. Duncan. This is Cat Douglas. We met yesterday. I'm really hoping I can--"
"Hi, Isabel. This is John Thigpen. We met ... uh, well, I'm sure you remember. I called the hospital, but they wouldn't tell me anything. I hope you're okay. I'm so, so sorry. I just can't imagine. My wife and I are staying at the--"
"Yeah, hi, my name is Philip Underwood. I'm a feature writer with The New York Times and I would really appreciate--"
"Good afternoon, Miss Duncan. I'm calling from the offices of Bagby and Bagby. We were wondering if you had talked with anyone yet about your injuries. The attorneys at Bagby and Bagby have more than twenty years' combined experience helping people like you get the money they--"
There were none from her mother, none from her brother, none from acquaintances or neighbors, or even colleagues, with the exception of Celia, who had plenty to say about being turned away from the hospital. Isabel deleted them all.
She picked up the pizza box, remembering how she'd sat cross-legged in front of the coffee table the morning of the explosion and choked down a single leftover slice of pizza. She closed its lid and tossed it like a frisbee at the front door.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of a dissymmetry that stopped her in her tracks. Her computer, unlike the pizza box, was not exactly where she had left it. When Isabel set a glass down, it was perfectly placed along the outside edges of her place mat. When she folded towels, or even fitted sheets, their edges were aligned exactly. And when she set her laptop on her desk, it was always precisely two inches from the front edge and absolutely parallel. She hesitated, staring at its silver case. She took several deep breaths, sat down at her desk, and reached for it with icy fingers.
The "recent documents" list revealed that someone had gone through her email, documents folder, pictures, and trash.
Had the FBI searched her hard drive? She scanned the room again, mystified. Wouldn't they have left a mess of everything else as well? Drawers overturned, couch cushions toppled, closets emptied?
She opened her browser and found that someone had added a bookmark. It led directly to the ELL video. This was the first time Isabel had seen it.
When it came to a close, leaving the final, menacing image onscreen, Isabel was frozen, leaning forward with hands pressed to her cheeks. They had been here. It was the only thing that made sense. The bookmark was a calling card.
After a couple of seconds, she turned her head quickly, checking that she had put the chain on the door. She went from window to window, yanking the blinds down and pulling the curtains closed; and then from room to room, collecting chip clips, hair clips, and safety pins, and affixing them with trembling hands, making sure the edges of all the curtains were completely sealed. She turned off all but one table lamp in the corner of the living room, and withdrew to the couch to perch, hugging her legs and pressing her chin to her knees.
An hour later, she had not moved. She lifted her chin and gasped, as though coming to.
She scanned the room. Almost every surface in the room was adorned with framed photos of the bonobos--Mbongo, putting together a marble run; Bonzi, playing an electric keyboard with a rock star to whom she famously signed, SIT DOWN! BE QUIET! EAT PEANUTS! after becoming impatient with his entourage; Sam, using a computer to play Ms. Pac-Man; Lola, riding on Isabel's shoulders as they walked in the woods, clutching Isabel's chin with one hand and using the other to point to where she wanted to go. Richard Hughes and Jelani, sitting under a tree, earnestly discussing a hardboiled egg in ASL. Makena, exchanging a kiss with Celia, both of them with lips extended and eyes closed. Isabel stared at this last one for a long time.
Isabel heard the ding of the elevator and froze, looking toward the door. Within a second she lunged for the table lamp, nearly knocking it over in her hurry to turn it off. She ended up curled into a ball on the floor by the end table.
There was a shuffling of plastic bags, the closing of the elevator, and then an interminable silence. Finally footsteps began. They came to her door, paused, and continued.
Isabel sat in the dark, breathing so fast she was lightheaded. She closed her eyes and lifted her chin, willing her heart rate to come down.
After several minutes she sat up and switched the table light back on. She reached for the phone. Her fingers paused above the keypad as she contemplated numbers. Finally, she chose.
"Hello?" said the voice at the other end.
"Celia?" she whispered into the receiver. "It's me. I need you. Can you please come over?"
12
When Amanda came through security, she ran to John, who lifted her and spun her around. People stared and John didn't care. The scent of her skin, the feel of her hair--he might never let go.
"Oh, John," she said, laying her head in the crook of his neck in a gesture of trust so absolute it slayed him. "God, I've missed you."
"Me too, honey. Me too."
When he finally set her down Amanda glanced around and self-consciously straightened her clothing. Her cheeks were flushed.
John reached for her backpack. "Is that all you brought?"
"I'm only here for three days."
"Don't remind me."
"Are you sure you can't take tomorrow off?" she asked.
"Can't. The column runs on Sunday."
When they got home, their lips were locked before the door was even latched. John dropped her bag to the floor.
"Careful!" she said breathlessly, between kisses. "Laptop!"
"Sorry!" he gasped, struggling out of his coat as she unbuttoned his shirt.
Minutes later, at the critical moment, Amanda leaned in and whispered, "Let's make a baby."
The effect was immediate and horrifying. Despite Amanda's best ministrations--and she was in fine form--John could not recover. Eventually she gave up and rolled off.
"What's the matter?" she asked after several minutes of silence. The candles she had paused briefly to light flickered against the wall, their wicks grown long, their shadows deep.
"I don't know," he said. "It just happens sometimes." He wished the mattress would swallow him whole. Glurp, just like that. One tiny sinkhole in the universe. Was that so much to ask?
"It's never happened before," said Amanda. "Is it because of what I said?"
"No, of course not," he assured her. Yes, of course it was, screamed the voice in his head.
"Do you want to employ a little ... help?" she said playfully.
When John was young, his mother used to go to Tupperware and Avon parties. Later, she had gone to Top Chef and candle parties. By the time Amanda was invited to such a party by friends in New York City, it was for lingerie and sex toys. Amanda, having been plied with cheap wine by her hostess the entire evening and then taken into a "consultation room," came home giggling and tipsy and handed John a bag of items that left him speechless, a little bit horrified, and entirely intrigued. Very soon, he had come to realize their usefulness. After eighteen years together, variety could be good.
"Mmm," he said. "Sure."
"Any special requests?"
"Nope. Surprise me," he said. He stretched his arms out over his head while Amanda opened the top drawer. She reached in and patted around. After a moment, her expression became quizzical and the patting more determined. Finally her hand hit something that crinkled. She flipped over to investigate. Then she shrieked. She began making yakking noises similar to those Magnificat had made immediately before discharging a hairball, and bolted from the room.
John raised himself on his elbow and looked in the drawer. Everything in it had been placed in individual Ziploc bags and sorted by size against the back.
John flopped back on the bed. His retinas hurt just from thinking about Fran opening the drawer and realizing what she
had found. He could picture it so clearly: smug in her discovery; enjoying her shocked outrage as she cleaned, bagged, and sorted; her prurient delight in imagining their reaction when they discovered what she had done. John could only imagine how Amanda felt. In fact, he could hear how Amanda felt. She spent ten minutes in the bathroom wracked by dry heaves. By the time she returned to bed, the sex toys and lubricant were buried deep in the downstairs trash and the candles extinguished.
"You okay?" he asked.
"No," she said, sliding into bed and under John's arm. She was sniffling, either from crying or because she was congested from hanging her head over the toilet. "She probably expects me to thank her for that, along with her stupid antimacassars."
John stroked her hair, smoothing it down her back. "Yes, I expect she does."
----
Ariel's wedding did not seem at all as though it had been thrown together at the last moment. In fact, it looked rather as though Amanda's aunt and first cousin had been planning this moment for every second of Ariel's thirty-three years on this earth. John looked in astonishment at the bushels of flowers and ribbons, the swags of tulle that connected the pews on the aisle.
He and Amanda had arrived minutes before the ceremony started, stifling giggles over a sign they had just passed. (GUNS 'N' WAFFLES, it had read. John said, "Sounds like a Ma and Pa operation, doesn't it?" and Amanda had retorted, "Yeah, only in my family, Mom would be responsible for the guns.")
At the church, they were ushered hastily to their seats. Fran glared briefly in their direction before lifting her chin and turning majestically away. Amanda sighed, all merriment dissipated, and John squeezed her hand.
The ages-old pattern of fallings-out between Amanda and Fran was carefully choreographed: Fran sulked until Amanda broke down and tearfully apologized, at which point Fran folded her to her bosom and blamed everything on John before graciously forgiving him since they were, after all, family. This last was usually accompanied by a direct stare at John that would have caused her to be burned at the stake in previous centuries.
Amanda had never before held out this long--it had been three weeks since the Great Escape--and Fran's face was nothing short of armored.
Ariel's tuxedoed groom took his place at the end of the aisle, looking for all the world like a panicked deer. John half expected to see a stream of urine leaking down his leg.
When the procession started, Ariel was preceded by four bridesmaids wearing ill-fitting sea-foam-green dresses. By comparison, Ariel was a vision of loveliness. The combination of waist-length veil and trailing bouquet almost succeeded in hiding the baby bump.
Many of the women wept, dabbing their eyes discreetly so as not to disturb carefully applied makeup. But not Amanda--halfway through the procession, John saw her eyes darting from person to person, frowning. She was doing mental arithmetic. Later, in the car on the way to the reception, John discovered why.
"She's got them all turned against me. I didn't apologize, so she's been recruiting for her side."
"What are you talking about?"
"Janet is a second cousin. I'm a first cousin," she said. "They didn't even invite me to the shower! She must have had a shower. Of course she had a shower! I'm so stupid."
John's mental cogs chomped and masticated, finally spitting out a pellet of possible explanation. He glanced quickly at his wife. "You wanted to be a bridesmaid?"
"Of course not! No one wants to be a bridesmaid, but it would have been nice to be asked. I know exactly what happened," she said, thumping her seat. "Mom told Aunt Agnes all about how I ignored her advice and abandoned her at the house and was ungrateful for all the crap she did and now nobody's talking to me. But you can be sure they're talking about me." She slapped a hand over her mouth, stiffling a cry. "Oh my God. The sex toys. If she told them about the sex toys I'm going to die."
John wished he could reassure her, but he'd been part of the family too long.
She spun to face him, eyes gleaming, fingers splayed on the seat. "Let's ditch it."
"What?" John gripped the wheel tightly and glanced over several times, trying to gauge her expression.
"The reception. Let's ditch it and go home."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes. Nobody's going to talk to us anyway. And how can I face all my relatives knowing what they know?"
"You don't know what they know."
"Oh, I think I do. Want to bet Aunt Agnes hands me a thank-you card to give to Mom?"
Again, John wanted to reassure her, but this very thing had happened two years before, when Amanda was apparently not grateful enough for some other "favor" provided by Fran.
"Let's do it," she said, growing increasingly animated. "Turn around here. Here!" She jabbed her finger at the window. "We'll mail their gift."
John was tempted by this proposition--so tempted, in fact, that it was hard to force the next words from his mouth. "We have to go. If you don't, it will just give your mother more ammunition, and then it will be even longer before you two make up."
When he looked over again, Amanda was staring fiercely out the windshield.
"I don't want to make up," she said.
"Yes, but you know you will eventually."
Amanda dropped her head against the side window.
"Baby, if you really want to skip it, we'll do it. But it's not something you can take back, and I think you'll regret it."
She continued to lean on the window. She sighed wearily. "Okay. Fine. We'll go. But I'm not apologizing."
"I never said you should."
"Fine."
He glanced over at her, hoping that this wasn't turning into an argument. They were both on edge: last night's reunion was hardly what they'd hoped for, and John got the sense that Amanda was not very happy in L.A., although she hadn't said anything specific. For John's part, he was increasingly bitter about losing the ape story to Cat. Her reports about the ongoing investigation appeared regularly in the front section; meanwhile, John's latest "Urban Warrior" assignment was to experience firsthand the city's new efforts at flushing out vagrants, meth-heads, and other undesirables from the places they congregated by spraying them with skunk oil. He had been perfectly amenable to the idea of following along with police and city employees as they tested this technique, but Elizabeth decided that would be boring and predictable. Oh no, she said--how much more effective this would be if written from the perspective of a homeless man! And so John had gone undercover and been skunked out of a doorway earlier in the day. Three tins of tomato juice later, and the scent still lingered.
----
"Amanda! My dear! Lovely to see you," said Uncle Ab, the proud father of the bride. He was in clear violation of orders, but drunk enough to be impervious to the look of searing reproach coming from his wife and her female relatives.
Fran sat stiffly at a table across the room, emanating silent fury beneath the flashing glint of a disco ball. Tim looked defeated, and played with his swizzle stick. The sound system belted out Sister Sledge's "We Are Family" as people old enough to know better flung themselves around with drunken abandon. Arms flew into the air, stayed for a moment, and then were yanked back down as the owners realized they had no idea what to do with them.
Uncle Ab was weaving a little. He hugged Amanda and planted a wet one on her cheek. As she wiped her face with a cocktail napkin, he shook John's hand. Ab's nose crinkled in disgust and the corners of his lips turned down. "What's that smell?" he said, bobbing his head from side to side and sniffing in the general vicinity of John.
"It's skunk."
"It's what?"
"Skunk," John said firmly.
"How the hell did you manage that?" asked Ab.
"Ariel looks wonderful," said Amanda, sipping her drink. She gazed at the dance floor over the rim of her glass.
"She should look good," replied her uncle. "Do you have any idea how much that cost? The nails, the makeup, the eyebrow waxing! Eyebrow waxing!" He wagged a finger for emphasis. Hel
d his breath and nodded sagely. Leaned forward conspiratorially, floppy jowls reeking of cologne, pie hole reeking of Red Label.
"You know, I've always admired that about you, Amanda. You never felt the need to do any of that nonsense."
Amanda's eyebrows shot up. Her hand flew to cover them.
Rank lexical relation indeed, thought John, staring at the old man with pure, unadulterated hatred.
When they got home, Amanda tossed her beaded purse onto the hall table and rushed into the bathroom. A moment later she wailed.
"What's the matter?" John asked. He was headfirst in the fridge, getting a beer.
"He's right!"
John closed the refrigerator door. "Who's right?" He went into the bathroom and stood behind her. She bent forward until her face was inches from the glass, holding her hair back with one hand and using the other to point at the space between her eyebrows.
"Look."
John leaned in close, scrutinizing the area. "There's nothing there."
"There are hairs. Uncle Ab saw them."
"That is not what he said."
"It was between the lines. He said I was hairy and unkempt."
"No, he didn't. And anyway, since when do you take fashion advice from a man who wears Old Spice?" John wrapped his arms around her shoulders. "You're sexy. And so are your eyebrows."
"You mean my eyebrow," she said, twisting free.
He followed her into the living room, where she flopped onto the couch.
"Why are you letting this get to you?" he said. "It's Uncle Ab, for Christ's sake."
