Читать книгу Blood Orange - Drusilla Campbell - Страница 12

Chapter 6

Later she regretted everything: the saturated fat in the eggs and bacon and butter; the floral sheet; going to the emergency veterinary clinic when Dr. Talbot would have served as well and charged a quarter as much. Worst of all, she had forgotten what every defense attorney’s spouse must always remember: the client is never guilty until the verdict is in. And sometimes not even then. She should have walked onto the front porch with David and Bailey; they should have stood together like a team.

As they prepared for bed that night, she thought how mean she was to David, how she withheld herself as if she wanted to punish him when he had done nothing but give his best. She thought of saying she was sorry, but she was no good at apologies.

Sometimes she let herself think what their life would have been like if Bailey had been normal. There would have been another child by now, maybe two. They had bought the Miranda Street house because Mission Hills was a safe neighborhood and they wanted a big family. As Dr. Wren told her every time she saw him, there was no reason not to have another child. Bailey’s disability was no one’s fault. Though she understood his words with her logical mind, another part of her felt responsible. She had soured on her body. Occasionally David brought up the idea of another child, though rarely in the last few months. She knew he hoped for a son, someone to play ball with and dream for. So why not just say yes, let’s have another baby?

She did not want to think about what might be holding her back.

“You want to watch the news?” she asked.

“God, no. I don’t even want to think how that sheet’s going to televise.”

She felt the blush of heat in her cheeks. “I used the only thing big enough—”

As soon as the police and press left, David had called his partner, Marcus Klinger, who appeared an hour later with a bag of nails and several large sheets of plywood that they hammered into place over the window.

“I’ll call the glass man tomorrow.”

“You won’t have to.” David got into bed wearing short-legged sweat pants and a T-shirt with the Miami of Ohio Athletic Department logo fading on the front. “They’ll be lined up after seeing the mess on TV.”

Dana’s diaphragm tightened. “Did you tell the reporters what the note said?”

“Just that it was a threat.”

PERVERT LOVER, YOU’LL GET YOURS.

“Maybe Marcus should take the case. If you were second chair—”

“I won’t be intimidated, Dana. You know me better than that. Whoever did this, he’s a coward. Only cowards and kids throw rocks and run away.”

She grabbed a hairbrush off her dresser and dragged it through her thick dark hair.

“Frank Filmore deserves a fair trial just as much as anyone.”

She nodded.

“I know you hate the work I do.”

Her temper flared. “I don’t hate your work. I believe in it. But couldn’t you for once defend someone who’s not a scumbag? What’s wrong with a clean-cut bank robber?” She thought of George Clooney or Cary Grant. “Maybe a nice jewel thief?” She sat beside him and laid her hand on his chest, feeling the heat of his body beneath her palm. “Why does it always have to be the dregs of the earth? Can’t you see how these people pollute our life?”

He couldn’t leave them behind at the end of the day. He brought them home from the office and court and jail—the rapists and drug addicts, the thugs and derelicts. And not just their crimes and cases, but their agonized histories, too, all their rage and pain and deprivation. He couldn’t help it.

“You weren’t so miserable when I showed you that hundred-thousand-dollar retainer.”

Giddy described them both when they’d counted the zeros on the check. And astonished when it didn’t bounce, when it settled comfortably into the business account beside the two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar payments on time, the five-thousand-dollar checks for twenty-thousand dollars’ worth of labor. Overhead at Cabot and Klinger was high, and the money was gone in less than a week; but for a day or two they’d both felt rich.

“If this trial goes the way I think it will, there’ll be plenty more big retainers. You can pay off all the charge cards and Bailey’s school and finish fixing the garage apartment and get yourself a new car. Think about it, Dana, no more pinching pennies, no more debt.”

“This isn’t about money.”

It was about injured dogs, broken windows, and the danger Dana smelled in the air like a grass fire circling them.

“This is the Super Bowl, Dana. You don’t walk away from—”

She stood. “It’s not a goddamn game.”

“Don’t I know that? I have a man’s life in my hands.”

And he could not forget that any more than he could overlook his loyalty to his family. He was made that way, and Dana knew she should trust him. He would die before he let his family down. But there had never been threats before. And their home had not been violated.

He put his arm around her shoulders. As he pulled her to him she had to tell herself to relax. This man who meant everything to her: when had she begun having to work at loving him?

“Dana, I know this is rough on you, and I’m not much help. But I’ve had hard cases before. This is nothing new.”

Except that the stakes were higher now because their life—stressful, trying, imperfect as it was but still theirs and precious—had been threatened.

“This isn’t the time for us to fall apart, Number One. We have to make some plans.” She recognized his take-charge voice. “I want you to check Bailey out of Phillips tomorrow. Tell the principal we’ll be back when the case is over. She’ll understand.”

“Phillips Academy has a waiting list. Bailey’ll lose her place.”

“You explain it to the principal.” A muscle moved in his jaw. “You can do that. Say you’re going to homeschool her for a while.”

“David, she’s a special child. She needs to be at a special school. I can’t teach a kid like Bailey.” And Dana had a job and a thesis to write. There was a limit to the number of extensions her advisor could give her on it. And small as her salary was at Arts and Letters, it helped pay interest to the credit-card usurers so the Cabots could continue to live thousands of dollars beyond their means while they waited for the big cases to roll in.

“Bailey has friends at Phillips, and she loves riding the bus every day.”

“You used to like teaching before you decided to study art history.”

“You make it sound like art’s not important. I should have stayed with teaching, that’s what you’re saying. What I want, what I care about, it doesn’t matter?”

“Dana, who’re you fooling? You haven’t worked on your thesis since you got back from Italy. We spent all that money so you could do research—”

“I don’t have enough time.”

His jaw tightened. “This isn’t about you, Dana. It’s about Bailey’s safety. Can we just stick to the issue?”

This was the way the defense attorney/husband argued. He got her off the subject, and she lost track of the point she had been trying to make and then said all the wrong things so that when they finally got back to the topic her confidence was gone.

“Dana, you’re the one who’s been going on—”

“I haven’t been going on about anything.”

“—about danger and risks.”

“You want me to quit work, like what I do, my life, doesn’t matter!”

“That’s crazy. I’m the one made you go to Florence to do the research. But I don’t believe you even care about getting your degree anymore.”

A passing car cast light and shadow across the bedroom ceiling. “You don’t know anything.”

He sighed. She hated when he sighed at her.

He reached behind him and switched off the reading lamp on his side of the headboard. “If you can come up with a better plan, great. But I’ll tell you, Dana, I’m through being the bad guy around here.”

He fell asleep immediately while Dana tossed for another half hour. Fighting did not seem to trouble David. It was, after all, what he did for a living. She hated it, felt torn apart, her insides twisted. One day she imagined her loyal and steady husband would say he could not take it anymore, drive away and leave her alone on a porch in the dark. Dana thought this way even though she knew no one was less like her mother than David.

The night Dana had been abandoned, her mother had probably been high on something. Dana remembered her taking speedboat turns in the old Chrysler, sometimes jerking the wheel so hard Dana flopped from side to side. No seat belt. She was five years old at the time and already the grown-up in the family. She remembered asking her mother to slow down. Swift as a snake, the back of her mother’s hand had swung off the steering wheel and slammed against Dana’s mouth. Her lip burst and bled down the front of the Dead Head T-shirt she wore. She had been quiet then, squeezed her eyes tight, hung on to the edge of the seat, and waited for whatever came next.

Five years old, wearing a T-shirt to her knees, standing on the porch of an old frame bungalow on a dark city street, a bulging duffel bag beside her. Dana still remembered her mother’s last words to her. “Ring the doorbell. Keep on until she lets you in. Tell her I can’t take it anymore.”