Читать книгу Blood Orange - Drusilla Campbell - Страница 9

Chapter 3

Four months earlier

Every afternoon at two-thirty Dana Cabot’s cell phone rang. Five days a week the driver of the Phillips Academy minibus said more or less the same thing: “I’m at the corner of Goldfinch and Washington. Two minutes, Mrs. Cabot.”

The staff at Phillips Academy said Bailey needed structure if she was to learn to manage life. And after three years, the routines, the very basic classes, and the constant positive reinforcement had paid off. Bailey was learning her letters, knew the names and values of coins, and recognized the numbers on an old-fashioned clock face—although eleven was likely to be called one-one and twelve, one-two. Since December she had become amusingly pedantic on the subject of community services. Police, firefighters: she knew what all of them did and shared her knowledge with everyone, including the housekeeper-and-babysitter, Guadalupe, who spoke no English at all. At Christmas she had insisted on baking cookies for the drivers of the recycling and garbage trucks who called out hello to her when they made their Thursday pickups.

Dana sat on the bottom stair and put on her shoes and socks. Moby Doby walked up to her, his nails clicking on the hardwood, licked her hand, and sat, eyeing her expectantly.

“Are you learning to read time, too?”

Keeping Bailey’s schedule today meant Dana had rushed home from her job at Arts and Letters, leaving Rochelle with three customers—one an art historian with an interest in Early Renaissance Italian art, which happened to be Dana’s field. Or would be, once she finished her thesis. Were it not for Bailey, she would be sitting in Bella Luna drinking a double capp, discussing the influence of Giotto.

She believed she was not cut out for a life of self-sacrifice. Almost any woman would be a better mother than she for a child like Bailey.

She did not socialize with mothers from Phillips Academy. She told herself she did not want to hear them complain. Secretly she feared conversations with those women would reveal that they never complained at all, that only she resented her child’s demands.

Dana blamed Bailey’s disability on her side of the chromosome equation. In the North Park neighborhood where she grew up, kids had called her grandmother “loony” because she’d dressed like a bag lady and yelled at them and shook her fist if they walked or rode their bikes across her pitiful square of front lawn. As for her mother, on any test for mental health she would definitely score on the peculiar side of the bell curve. She had abandoned Dana, her only child, before Dana was five years old.

When Bailey’s medical and psychological reports came in, David Cabot had sprung into defense mode before anyone could accuse him of contributing to her problems. Not only did he personally possess all the requisite DNA for scholarship, ordered thinking, and rationality, but every single person in his family was smart and accomplished. David’s brother and sister held advanced degrees, and he had been an honor student and a star athlete, accepted by Law Review, and Order of the Coif. His father had been a judge, albeit a certifiable sexist, racist, and workaholic. His mother wrote poetry and chaired committees and sang in the community choir. She spoke four languages, and Dana had never seen her when she wasn’t stoned on Valium.

The phone rang.

“Hi, Mrs. Cabot. We’re at the stoplight, Washington and Goldfinch. See you in two.”

San Diego’s chilly spring fog had burned off, leaving behind a misty blue sky; a cool breeze disturbed the pipe chimes in the olive tree in the front yard. Dana wished she had worn a sweater.

She slapped Moby’s bony hindquarters. “Let’s run, kiddo.” He took off at a lope, Dana following.

Before Bailey was born Dana had run several half-marathons, but since then she rarely had the time for more than a mile or two. Often she ran at night or at dawn through the Mission Hills neighborhood. As if she were visiting an aquarium, she looked in the windows of the houses she passed. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Validation perhaps. Some indication that her childhood had not been wacko as David claimed. In the kitchens and living rooms of strangers’ homes she wanted to see another little girl eating a macaroni-and-ketchup sandwich, another grandmother asleep in front of the television with a yellow cat around her shoulders like a fur collar.

On the far side of the park the cherry red Phillips Academy minibus idled at curbside. Dana waved to the driver, and the pneumatic doors wheezed open. Bailey bounded out and hurled herself at her mother, grabbing her around the hips and almost toppling her.

“I played football, Mommy.”

At the end of the day, Bailey was always a beautiful mess. One butterfly barrette gone, hair wild and tangled, the buckle on one of her beloved shocking pink, strappy plastic sandals hanging by a stitch.

Resentment and ambivalence and dreams of Giotto vanished, incinerated by a love so fiercely protective it rocked Dana. “What happened to your shoe?”

“I was like Daddy.” Moby trotted beside Bailey closely enough so her hand skimmed the back of his neck.

“I didn’t know they let you play football at Phillips.”

“I ran, and then I fell down.” Bailey stopped and pulled up the leg of her size-six cargo pants, revealing a knee covered with pink and yellow bandages and layers of gauze. Looking up at her mother, dark eyes alight with gold flecks in the park’s dappled sunlight, she said, “I’m brave, Mommy. Like Daddy.”

Dana whisked her up into her arms and spun around, then made a controlled tumble onto the grass with herself on top, buzz-blowing into Bailey’s neck while the little girl squealed joyfully and Moby barked and pranced on his toes. Before the squeals turned to tears—the change could occur in a millisecond—Dana let Bailey go.

At the same moment a white van turned onto Miranda Street and paused in front of their house.

Bailey began shouting, “S’cream man, s’cream man.”

Several things happened at the same time.

Dana saw that the rear bumper of the van had a sticker on it.

There was a crash of glass and a squeal of brakes.

Moby barked furiously and dashed in front of the van.

Dana heard Moby’s sharp kye-eye cry; the van swerved and sped off; and Bailey began to scream.