5 September 1984
Lala cannot sleep in the sterile silence of Grayson’s grand house, so her eyes are already open when she first hears the scream. Grayson had gone back to his room when she had first dozed off, but she had awoken only a few hours after – the house was too still and the air-conditioning much too cold for her to settle down in, the abundance of blankets on the bed insufficient to keep her warm. She is lying in the dark, staring at the stark white roof and the molding that borders it, when she again hears the scream that has haunted her worst nightmares since Baby was born.
She listens. There are noises, but the scream doesn’t come again. It is probably just a skinny-dipper shocked by the crippling cold of the water, she reasons, but she cannot settle, her stomach is queasy with unease.
She spends what seems like a long time looking for more blankets in the unfamiliar closets of the room. She spends longer looking for the remote to turn off the AC so sleep can be possible, and eventually she accepts that she won’t be able to go back to sleep. Lala wanders into the kitchen for a wineglass of water, which she fills from a faucet in the dark. The kitchen gleams in the glare of the moon from the skylight – the surface of the stove and the front of the fridge look like silver, the countertops like slabs of semiprecious stone. For a moment Lala thinks she should take something to remind her she was here because she is sure that somehow she will wake up and this will be a dream – she will be back in Adan’s house by the beach, trying her best to remember his name. Instead she wanders into the dining room with her water and then into the lounge where she takes a seat, nervously, not wanting to wake Grayson if nothing is wrong, having the awful feeling that something is very terribly wrong indeed. She dozes fitfully because, despite her discomfort, she is tired. She is very, very tired.
When she starts awake, it is because she hears the scream again, from just outside the house, screaming so familiar that it pulls her from her dreams. She first heard this scream the night she birthed Baby and she understands what it must mean. She is surprisingly calm, is Lala. It is as if she has been waiting for this moment her entire life. She pulls on a pair of sneakers Grayson said belonged to his daughter, pats her passport in the back of her underwear. Lala is ready to run.
Grayson bursts out of his room as she is trying to solve the mystery of the locked door to the patio. He is wearing a pair of white briefs and a white unbelted robe and his ginger chest hair is climbing out of the rectangle the open robe makes.
“Stay inside!” barks Grayson. “Call the police!”
He is grumbling as he checks his gun. When he opens the door and runs onto the patio, the open robe flaps behind him like the cape of some great white superhero. She starts to run behind him, but Grayson locks the door from outside by punching some numbers into a box at the side of the door. This is when Lala feels the first swell of panic. She shouts at him but he is running toward the screaming, which has started afresh, and he does not seem to hear her. She bangs on the door but it remains closed.
From the lounge Lala sees the woman on the steps of the patio, writhing. The furrowed sand behind her shows that she has crawled there. It is the woman who held her, who told her everything would be okay, who lives in the house with the guard wall she recognized. It was the guard wall of the house at which she found Adan that morning Baby was born. This woman, Lala realizes, is the one who had screamed that night, whose scream had haunted her. The woman is bleeding and the blood is pooling beneath the beautiful wrought-iron railings. Lala weighs the possibilities for just a second before she understands what is happening, who has done this. She does not feel safe, even though she is inside. Lala finds a wooden block on the countertop in the kitchen, in which six knives sit sleeping. She unsheathes one and uses the block to break the glass of the door to the patio.
The woman is gurgling. It is an involuntary gurgling, like she is not aware she is doing it. Blood leaks from the side of her chest and has soaked her pajamas just there. Grayson is stooped next to her, trying to stem the bleeding with his balled-up white robe. She can stop, thinks Lala, she can make sure this woman is all right, not on the doorstep of death, not bleeding her last within sight of Baxter’s Beach. Or she can run, because running is the only way she will herself escape.
“Go inside, Lala!” barks Grayson, pressing the robe harder into Mira’s side. “Call the police.”
Lala is frozen to the spot, watching the bleeding woman with her own right hand welded to the handle of a sharp chef’s knife.
“Inside, Lala!” Grayson insists. “Press the red button on the keypad by the door – press it three times, then go inside and call the police and the ambulance.”
“I,” stammers Lala, “I – ”
Grayson leaves Mira’s side, starts to push Lala back to the glass doors, runs back to Mira’s side, strips back her robe and leans in against her bleeding chest. Lala stands by the doors and cannot move.
“Call them, Lala!” orders Grayson. “Call them now!”
Lala turns toward the house, runs inside, picks up one of the cordless receivers, dials zero, and tells the operator she needs the police and an ambulance. Right now, at the back of one of the big houses on Baxter’s Beach, the one with the white wrought-iron railings. And then she stands there, helpless, while Grayson beseeches Mira Whalen to stay with him, while he presses and pumps against her chest.
Lala wonders whether she should run. There is nothing she can do for Mira Whalen now, she thinks, Grayson is the best person to be with her, and if she stays she risks running into Adan, who she knows is the reason that Mira is now fighting for her life. There is no telling what Adan will do if he finds her here. In the distance, she hears the first howl of a siren and the decision is made for her.
She runs past Mira Whalen on the patio steps, past Grayson trying to save her, and she keeps running. Past the little gutter where, years ago, she’d met Tone. She rounds the corner of Baxter’s Beach and sees the slate-gray tarmac of the street, at the other end of which is Wilma’s immaculate little stone house, its cold and calculated neatness. She stays low, crouches by dunks trees, flattens herself on the ground at the first sight of the misty light of oncoming vehicles.
Lala decides she must get to the airport. It is the only solution, it dawns on her suddenly. She has the clump of money she has recently taken to wearing in her bra. She is dressed in one of Grayson’s shirts, pants he no longer wears, a pair of stretchy leggings and sneakers belonging to a woman she doesn’t know, and a headscarf that hides her missing clumps of hair. She does not have much money, she does not have a memento of her baby, a little bag of Baby’s clothes, perhaps, to dress a future sibling in, a little bangle to save in a box and give to a grandchild a generation ahead, she does not have a little blanket in which the scent of her baby still blossoms, a scent she can get lost in when she needs to have her near, to talk to, to apologize. But she has herself, she has her hands, she has the money to buy a ticket.
She has enough.