The Dog Who Knew Too Much Page 13
“Tell me what happened, Marsha.”
“Lisa came to visit us, at the holidays, for Hannukah, in December, and she told us she was going to go to China.”
I reached for her hands.
“Not to visit,” Marsha said, her voice cracking. “To live.”
When I’d first seen the envelope from a travel agent, I had assumed it was like the ones I get, junk mail, a brochure touting a guided tour to Africa or a discount trip to Rome with Mr. Italy. I’d assumed, even though the fifth law of investigative work is, Don’t jump to conclusions. I’d also assumed all those letters from real estate brokers were like the ones my landlords always got, letters that started, “Dear Owner, If you’ve been thinking of selling your apartment, if you’ve ever wondered what it would be worth in today’s seller’s market …” But one of them had been a countersigned contract to sell the condo Lisa’s father had bought for her so that she could walk to work.
“This didn’t make her father very happy, did it?”
“He was wild. Just like the first time. Saying the same things. Only now Lisa was a woman, not a child. She didn’t need his permission, his approval. Perhaps that’s what she wanted, for her father to approve of her decision, to give her emotional support. But that is not what happened.”
Her head was down, the scarf covering part of her face; her arms clutched each other, and she rocked as she spoke.
“She, too, flew into a rage. ‘Daddy,’ she said to him, ‘I’m a grownup now. This time you can’t force me to do what you want me to.’ ‘It’s for your own good,’ he said, just like before, when she was a student, a young girl, ‘for your protection.’ She jumped up from where she was sitting, Rachel. ‘This time I’m going,’ she said, cold, like the inside of a refrigerator. And she was gone. Out of the house. I thought we wouldn’t hear from her or see her for a long time. Or ever. I thought she might just go, and never write us. But she called, she pleaded, she explained, she wanted so much for David to let her go with his blessing. She was not so grownup that she didn’t still need this from her father.”
“What did you say to Lisa?”
“I gave her my approval. Of course, I thought my heart would break, that if she went to China, that would be the worst tragedy that could occur to me, to have Lisa so far away. What did I know then about tragedy?”
She looked away for a moment, toward the shore where gulls were landing and taking off and Dashiell was constructing a long, curvy trench, shoveling the sand with his big front paws and backing up as he dug. When she turned back to me, her cheeks were flushed, her eyelashes wet with tears.
“‘David,’ I told him, ‘you have to let her go. She’s not a child.’ When we were alone, he wouldn’t talk to me, not about this, but I said to him, ‘David, if you let her go, you will still have her. And if you don’t, if you make her defy you in this, you will lose her.’”
“What did he say when you told him that?”
“He said, ‘How could she do this to me?’ You see where it is, was, between them?”
I nodded.
“It didn’t get resolved?” I asked, thinking of the sad way things can be in families.
Marsha shook her head.
“And that’s why you thought the letter was written to you, or to David?”
“Yes. I feel my daughter was torn in half, wanting so much to study in China, to live there. And wanting so much to please her father. To have his love. I believe we did this to her, Rachel, this terrible thing. That the apology she wrote was for hurting her father so much. I don’t think Lisa could do that. She was never able to defy her father. So, I think, perhaps she changed her mind, but that made her so unhappy—”
“And you hired me—?”
“We were hoping,” she said very slowly, “that you would find out—”
“Something else,” I said. “Another reason for this tragedy.”
“Another reason,” she repeated. “So that we could begin to make peace with this one day.” She looked back toward the ocean where Dash was now racing back and forth where the waves hit the sand.
More than anything, I wanted to help. But what could I say—that the note may have been written to her and David, but that I didn’t believe it was a suicide note? That I felt this, I didn’t feel that, or I thought this happened, or this didn’t happen. Not knowing how to comfort her, I sat there biting my lip until I tasted blood.
“It took courage for you to be able to say what you did. A lot of courage,” I finally said. “This should help me find out what we need to know.”
“Do you really think so?”
I nodded.
I followed her back to the gate where her groceries and shoes sat.
“‘Why did she want to go over there to live with those goddamn Communists?’ he asked me a few days ago. ‘To ride a bicycle to work. Here she could have had a car. I would have bought her a car. She knew that. I would have given her anything she wanted.’”
When she handed me back my shoes, I put my arms around her.
“I’ll call you as soon as I can,” I said.
She nodded, picked up the groceries, and headed toward home.
When I turned around, Dashiell was pleading with his eyes. I waited until Marsha was crossing the street, then, leaving my shoes and socks near the gate, I headed slowly down the beach, toward the surf. We headed back to the point, where the bay flows into the ocean and where you can see the Verrazano Bridge looming over the narrows, connecting Brooklyn to the once isolated Staten Island.
I stopped and picked up a short, fat driftwood log, which I swung back behind me and let fly into the ocean. Dashiell dove into the chilly water, all his attention on the task at hand.
I sat where the sand was hard but not wet, rubbing my hand on the cold sand and feeling it adhere to my skin. It’s not only at a crime scene that we leave something and take something away. I had come here with Lillian and Ceil after my mother had died, to scatter her ashes in the ocean.
“She always wanted to travel,” Ceil said as the ashes arced gracefully across the surface of the water. “But with two young children and no money, you can’t go far. Then with your father dying so young, poor man, only fifty-two, where would she go by herself? And then,” Ceil sighed, “the cancer. So she traveled to the hospital and back. And now here.”
I picked up a broken shell and began to write in the sand.
I’m sorry. Lisa.
“The same, the same,” Rabbi Zuckerman had said.
I wished he hadn’t. I wished I had been able to tell the mother that her daughter hadn’t written the note. One way or another, I was always wishing for things to be different, the way I had wished last night, first in the park, next in Lisa’s bed, that the beautiful young man at my side were not connected to a criminal case.
But he was. He was right in the middle of it.
Last night, sitting on Lisa’s couch, my fingers trembling, my mother’s soft velvet shawl wrapped around me, I had opened the envelope I’d slipped out of Paul’s pocket. There, with the ticket, I’d found the list of immunizations required for bringing a dog into China. Lisa hadn’t abandoned Ch’an. She had planned to take her along.
I thought about Beatrice again, the way her ashes hadn’t floated out to sea, as we foolishly thought they would, but had come right back to shore with the next wave. We could see them lying still and sodden on the wet sand in front of our feet. I hadn’t known there were so many shades of gray. Lillian, ever the hostess, had brought a bottle of wine to the beach, and plastic cups.
“To Mom,” she said, lifting her cup and draining it.
“To Beatrice,” Ceil and I said as one, and we drank our wine and thought our private thoughts.
I hadn’t made peace with my mother before she’d died. Now it was too late. I’d left her remains here, but I hadn’t left the bitterness I’d felt, nor the sadness. Those I had carried away with me. Those I still held on to.
For a while I just sat there, looking o
ut over the ocean, toward the horizon. Then, scratching at the hard sand with my broken piece of shell, I began to dig a little hole, watching it fill with water from beneath. When Lili and I would dig in the sand, back when we were kids, Beatrice would poke my father to get his attention. Look, Abe, she’d tell him, they’re digging to China.
I called Dash, dried his ears carefully on the end of my shirt, and following the lacy footprints of the gulls along the shore, we headed back to the car.
21
I Thought I Spotted a Sadistic Gleam in Her Eye
On my way to the gym to see Janet, I stopped at Lisa’s. When I had gone through her drawers and her closet, I had noticed a Lycra bodysuit, like Janet’s, and a pair of cross-trainers. Leaving Dashiell there because the gym with all those machines moving and heavy weights swinging around was too dangerous a place for a dog, I changed quickly and headed out.
Janet, wearing men’s boxer shorts and a cutoff T-shirt with the logo of the gym on it, was on the phone, making faces as she listened.
“Go warm up on the treadmill,” she said, as if I were a hamster. Minutes later she came to fetch me.
“Most women have more strength in their legs than their arms and chest,” she said. She had a clipboard with her and a form with my name on top of it. “Let’s start with your legs and work up.”
“What?” I said. The music was deafening.
She took me over to a machine that you lie down on and took the pin from where it was, moving it down for more weight. I would have thought the other direction more appropriate. Getting on the machine, I was squinched into a little knot, my knees practically inside my mouth. When I pushed against the plate my feet rested on, I was propelled backward and my legs, which felt as if the bones might shatter, partially straightened out. Janet positioned my feet and told me to begin. I thought I spotted a sadistic gleam in her eye, but I couldn’t be sure. It might have been a trick the fluorescent lights played with reality.
“This hurts,” I said, after a dozen or so leg flexes.
“It’s supposed to,” she said. “If it doesn’t hurt, you’re not going to get stronger.”
Just about when I thought someone had set fire to the whole damn gym, Janet looked up from her notes to offer some encouragement.
“Okay, Rachel, you’re doing good, now let’s see three more. Five, four, okay, good form, woman, keep it up, four, three, two, let’s do it, don’t give up now, three, two, one, excellent.”
The woman, besides being an admitted and practicing sadist, couldn’t count her way out of kindergarten. My legs felt as if someone had torn them out of my body and sewn them back in without anesthesia.
Janet stopped counting, but when I stopped, she flicked her hand at me, a motion that I assumed meant I was to continue.
“So how are you doing with Avi?” she asked absentmindedly, but instead of waiting for an answer, she resumed. “It’s like I said, isn’t it? Just being around him. Okay, rest,” she said, but by the time I’d taken one breath, she was flicking her hand for me to push again.
“You can tell him anything,” Janet said, sighing. “He’s like the parent you always wanted and never had, very wise, and really interested in you. No one listens like that man. Okay,” she said, “three, two, one. Good.”
To my surprise, when Janet expressed her approval, I wanted to double the weight and do twenty more reps. Fortunately, she was off to the next machine before I got the chance. I got up and trailed after her, as imprinted as Conrad Lorenz’s geese.
All around us, half-naked, muscle-bound men were grimacing in pain, grunting even louder than the earsplitting music, lifting weights as big as compact cars, and looking at themselves in the mirror any chance they could. There were females at the gym too, thin, pretty young girls reading magazines full of new hairstyles as they rode their stationary bicycles, others with earphones running on the treadmills, and some passing through on their way downstairs to step aerobics class. There were heavy women, too, two of them, both working on the thigh machines.
“Come on,” Janet said, “we’re going to work on your butt.”
I followed her across the gym to yet another torture machine and listened carefully while she told me how far back to push the lever and how long to squeeze my glutes before releasing the lever so that it could come forward again.
And here I thought this would be mindless.
“He’s such a stitch,” she drawled. It took me a second to realize she was talking about Avi again. “Like he always says, ‘You talk too much,’ the minute you finish.” Janet shook her head and laughed. “You talk too much,” she repeated, and laughed again. “But only after he’d listened to every word you had to say, and only as a way of telling you it was time to do the form, to get your energy moving again.”
She began to count, “Only three more, woman, let’s do it,” reminding me of the dentist my family used when I was a kid, always saying “Almost done” as he was about to set the all-time world record for drilling without a pause.
“You’re going to be wearing that butt of yours behind your knees if you don’t work it,” Janet said on one of her many breaks in the middle of counting.
“What did you say?” I asked, the blood pounding in my head, my breath sounding like the ocean during a storm.
“Your butt, woman. It’s going to sink if you don’t work it. Five, four, three, good work, Rachel, hold it, hold it, okay, bring it forward, three, two, one. Other leg.”
“My butt’s going to sing?” I asked her.
“Yeah, but please don’t let it do that until I’m out of the way,” she said. “Just keep working.”
We did shoulders, arms, back, chest, calves, quads, abs, and a few dozen parts I didn’t know I had. When Janet’s six o’clock showed up, I wanted to offer him a car. I thought we were finished. But I was wrong. While he warmed up in anticipation of his torture session, I got to stretch. It would have felt terrific to stretch out the muscles I had just worked so hard to tighten up, except for Janet, who pushed each limb a few inches farther than where I took it on my own.
“Doesn’t that feel good,” she drawled. “Don’t forget to keep stretching later today and tomorrow. Don’t you feel just fabulous?” She began to laugh in a way that made me think she knew exactly how I felt.
I left Janet in her world of grunts and groans and headed back to Lisa’s. I had taken off the silver bracelet in order to work in the gym. I reached into my pocket and put it back on, feeling the cold weight of the metal first in my hand and then on my wrist.
Be My Love.
It had arrived after Paul and Lisa had broken up. After he had proposed. After she’d told him she was going to China and turned him down. Rejected him.
Had this been his way of asking again?
I had hoped, he’d started to say in the car.
I had hoped.
What? That Lisa would change her mind and stay? That she’d marry him after all?
He had reversed the truth, telling me that it was Lisa who had wanted to marry when it was he. And he had tried to take away the proof that his story had been a lie. To save face.
Big deal. Everyone had a story, the facts skewed to fit his own needs. They were probably all lying to me. Even Avi.
Everyone lies, my shrink used to say. People need to puff themselves up, she’d said, to make others believe they’re more special than they themselves feel they are. Maybe there’s something they want they wouldn’t get with the truth, she’d said. Or maybe they’re really lying to themselves. It’s something they need to believe, and you’re almost beside the point.
Lisa had been scheduled to leave the day after tomorrow.
Who else knew that?
A little while ago, I had wondered what the questions were. Now I had too many that needed answering. As I stood in Lisa’s shower, the hot water pounding my sore muscles, they were swimming around in my head like fish. I needed to get dressed, take my dog for a long walk, and think things through.
Be Prepared
Early the next morning I took Dashiell straight to Bank Street, climbed the stairs, unlocked the door, and taking off my shoes, walked onto the polished studio floor and just sat. There wasn’t a sound in the place, not even the ticking of a clock. I sat still, my thoughts still spinning like the specks of dust swirling in the sunlight.
I don’t know how long I was there by myself before Dashiell heard him on the steps. He stood and wagged his tail.
“What are you doing?” he asked, pushing up the elastic that held his ponytail.
“Nothing,” I told him.
“Good,” he said.
He went into his office to change his shoes, then came back to where I was sitting.
“How long have you been doing nothing?”
“Long,” I told him.
“Excellent,” he said. “May I join you?”
“Suit yourself,” I told him.
He sat next to me. Now we were both doing nothing. Well, truth be told, I wasn’t exactly doing nothing. I was watching those dust motes twirling in the air, wondering what made them move so fast.
Avi wasn’t doing nothing either. He was scratching Dashiell’s thick neck. Dashiell began to moan.
“There’s a saying that trying to understand Zen is like looking for the spectacles that are sitting on your nose,” he said after a while.
“I don’t wear spectacles,” I told him.
“Give it time,” he said with a wicked grin. “You will.” He pushed up the band around his ponytail again. “Come,” he said, “let’s get to work.”
We practiced the form twice without speaking. The third time, Avi stopped working to correct me. Suddenly he grabbed one wrist and pulled me off my feet, into him. “T’ai chi is a martial art,” he said. He spoke softly, but he was still holding on to my wrist. “When someone wants something, you give in to them.”