It is still dark out when Dana pulls up to the big gate in her white Jetta. She rolls down her window and presses a four-digit code into the keypad on the pole, and the big black iron halves swing open slowly and she eases through, past the white Spanish housefront and through an arch, past the garage bays in back and down a little hill to a small pea-gravel parking area where two black Suburbans are parked beside a little cottage with a terra-cotta tile roof, its shuttered windows bleeding seams of light. Behind her in the car, her dress with the peach-colored flowers hangs inside a clear bag for the wedding. She shuts her engine off.
She shoulders her backpack and steps out, and she looks up at the house. The lower floor is dark, and up above are two bright squares, and then two with the sort of soft blue glow that night-lights make in a room. The rest is dark.
Dana walks the path to the cottage, her feet crunching in the gravel. Crickets chirp and sprinklers hush against the thick green leaves of the camellia bushes that hem it in. She presses her code into a keypad on the wall, and when the door swings open, the room is empty. Just a wall of folding tables laden with computers and monitors partitioned into grainy black-and-white quarter-screen views of the property. On the fourth monitor she can see a blurry figure heading uphill toward the house, and then in another quadrant crossing into view next to the tennis court, and then on screen three opening the door to a shed next to the greenhouse. “Hi, Larry,” she hears through a speaker on the table. “Dana just keyed in at the gate. I wanted to go over a few things with you before I check her in.” She reaches to turn one of the volume knobs down.
There are still sounds in the small room after she does this. Street noise from one of the speakers: the passage of a car in front of the gate. She can also hear the cricket noise she had heard in the yard, and the hush of the sprinklers, and she leaves these on, setting her backpack on the floor with her eyes on the screens, and sitting down in the empty chair in front of them.
She looks at each quadrant in turn. The long rectangle of a covered swimming pool. A play structure with a tube slide beneath a tree. Hedge lines and fence lines. Street and gate. Tennis court. Greenhouse. And finally a fish-eye view of the front doorstep to the house, four small sneakers lying jumbled beside the mat.
She begins the sequence again: swimming pool, play structure, fence line, hedge line, street, gate, tennis court, greenhouse, door.
The sound of a jogger comes over one of the speakers: heavy steps on pavement; a cough. Only his shadow appears in the screen shot of the gate itself, but then finally he appears on screen two, in the shot of the north approach up the street.
The door opens behind Dana then, and she stands. A bald man in a black knit shirt and tan pants like her own.
“Little change of plan,” he says. He sits down in the chair and looks up at her. “Today’s detail switching to travel duty. Principal One is taking a road trip to Las Vegas. Length uncertain, but up to two nights likely. I can get backup to drive there and swap with you midday if you can’t extend beyond your scheduled shift. If you have another commitment.”
Behind Larry on the screens every part of this small personal world they have been asked to monitor for dangers holds still; nothing moves.
The moment between his question and her answer stretches out in Dana’s mind, although she does not allow it to last more than a few seconds. Already she has tried out and discarded the private pretense that the urge to say yes is born of professionalism. Dana is not a woman who fools herself. She will say yes because weddings make her uncomfortable anyway; because the news she planned to tell Ian in the chapel parking lot is bad; because she prefers to lose him over the phone, from a motel room. On the floor something inside her heavy backpack settles suddenly, tipping it to rest against her leg.
“Certainly,” she says.
“Fantastic.” He picks up a stack of tabbed folders from the table behind him. “She’s shooting for leaving at six thirty. She wants to drive herself, and she’ll be picking up a dog from her father’s house in Summerlin and then visiting him at Summerlin Hospital. Velasquez went ahead a few hours ago to do reconnaissance and reserve rooms at a motel that takes dogs. I’d like you to follow her on the drive up.”
He holds out one of the folders. “Maps from here to house, house to motel, hospital to motel, motel to hospital.”
Dana reaches out to take it.
He says, “Velasquez sketched out an internal map of the hospital. He says they check identification and restrict movement inside, so he scheduled contingency doctor’s appointments for both of you.”
He hands her two more folders.
Then he picks up a clipboard and takes a pencil from beside his keyboard. “Okay. Protective Asset Inventory. You ready?”
Dana crouches on the linoleum at his feet and unzips her backpack.
He looks down at his checklist. “Current company-issued first-aid kit?”
She withdraws a red zippered pouch and sets it on the linoleum floor.
“Satellite phone?”
She lays one of these on the linoleum as well.
“Flare gun?”
She pulls out a black plastic case.
She takes out a ziplock bag containing a box of waterproof matches and a green disposable lighter.
“Emergency food rations?”
Four vacuum-sealed pouches of silver foil.
“Pepper spray?”
A small orange canister.
“Camera?”
A Nikon D3 and a telephoto-lens case.
“Duty weapon?”
From under the hem of her shirt she withdraws a SIG Sauer 229 9mm pistol and lays this on the floor as well.
“Have you consumed any alcohol in the last twenty-four hours?”
“No, sir.” She begins repacking her supplies.
He makes a checkmark. “Have you maintained your contractual commitment to abstain from use of nicotine and recreational drugs?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you in good health?”
“Yes.”
“Any recent fever, unusual fatigue, vomiting, or other signs of illness?”
She looks up at him, one hand on her open backpack. “I vomited twice yesterday, sir.”
He looks down at her from his chair.
She says, “I was able to complete my Stress Inoculation Training with an improved score. I don’t have any concerns about my ability to accept this detail and perform to my highest standards.”
“But what about getting your protectee sick?”
“I won’t, sir.”
“How can you know that?”
“It’s not contagious.”
He rocks back in his chair. “How the hell can you possibly know that?”
The room is really no more than a shed’s width, so small they are almost touching. “I’m pregnant, sir.”
He puts a hand on top of his bald head like a yarmulke.
She says, “It’s just morning sickness, and I can control it.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“I felt nauseated before I even put my bite suit on yesterday, and I put on my equipment, completed the test, left the yard, went inside to the bathroom, closed the door, and took off the helmet and suit jacket before I vomited.”
“Jesus, Dana.” He forces his hand back to the desktop. “I mean, congratulations.”
“Thank you. Although I should point out that it’s not news I would otherwise share since I don’t plan on completing the pregnancy.”
“Oh. Well, okay. Let’s see.” He looks down at his clipboard again. He has lost his place. Over a speaker on the monitoring table they can hear the sound of a door opening and shutting. On the upper right-hand quadrant of screen four a dog streaks by the play structure, and then, a second later, an older dog limps past, and then another second later, a smaller dog with its hindquarters dragging behind on a wheeled platform.
Larry says, “One more on the list: ‘Have you experienced any recent emotional challenges that would compromise your concentration on this mission?’ ”
“No, sir.”
“Because I could understand if, um … if that kind of decision …”
“It doesn’t, sir.”
“Tony is on backup call this morning. He has his bags here.”
“I hope you’ll trust me on this.”
He scratches his chin.
She says, “If I might be bold here, agents have stressors all the time that they keep private if they feel they’re below a certain threshold of distraction. That’s what I would have done in this case had it not been for my honesty about the vomiting question.”
He purses his lips, considering. Dana lowers her head and continues repacking her backpack, taking care with the things inside. Finally she zips it and stands, lifting the hem of her shirt to holster her gun.
He reaches for a set of keys on a hook on the wall. “This one has a full tank,” he says, handing them to her.
“Thank you, sir.”
She picks up the briefing folders, the last thing she needs for this journey, and she steps out into the purpling dawn.
The black Suburban is beyond her own car, in the deeper dark of the shade cast by an avocado tree bearing a swing made of a tethered tire. She walks toward it, past her own car with her dress for the wedding hanging in back, past a tricycle and an empty milk crate, past the litter of fallen fruit, to stand in the narrow space between the swing and the door of the car. The swing is little used, it seems, the rope frayed, and inside the circle of black rubber hides something inanimate and invisible save for a pair of white plastic eyes that reflect back the first bit of light clouding in below the tree. Dana does not touch it, but she stares a moment, standing among the fallen avocados, her eyes adjusting, until she makes out the shape: a dark-cloaked action figure holding a sharpened pike.
Dana turns away then, toward the pale shine of chrome keyhole and door handle standing out in the heavy shade. She unlocks it and gets in, closing the door on the noise of sprinkler and crickets, setting her backpack and folders on the seat beside her, and she sits there in the quiet. The clock on the dashboard reads 6:15.
She takes out her phone and opens a text template. She enters Ian’s name and types:
Work detail changed to overnight travel duty. I’m sorry. I know this is really bad for you.
She looks at it a few seconds, the cursor blinking. She looks to her left, not out her window but at it—at the way it curves and the way it meets the door frame. Most people cannot tell, but the glass on the cars their company issues is thicker than normal window glass: bulletproof. She looks back down at her BlackBerry, at her start of a message to Ian. She adds:
Meanwhile, I have some important news to share so
She backs up and tries again:
Also, I’ll call you during one of my breaks because there’s something I should
something I owe it to you to
something I feel obliged
She backs all the way up again and looks at what she has. Just a last-minute regret for the wedding, and an apology for the smaller disappointment she knows this will be.
She presses Send.
She sets her BlackBerry in the cup holder then, and with her remaining time, she makes some preparations. She eats a saltine and takes a sip of water. She lays an empty ziplock bag and a soft-pack of wet wipes on the passenger seat. She takes a small white trash bag from her backpack and sets it up, pinning the long top edge behind the glove-box door. She takes the folders she prepared the night before—“Insurance Claim Denial Appeals” and “Planned Parenthood Clinic Forms”—and moves them to a rear exterior pocket in her backpack to make room for the folders that her shift manager has given her in the front. In the cup holder her phone lights up suddenly. A reply from Ian. Above an excerpt from her own message, “I know this is really bad for you,” he has typed this:
We’ll see.
Dana breathes a little puff of surprise through her nose. She sits staring at it for so long that when she checks the clock again she sees that it is time to leave. She sets her BlackBerry back in the cup holder. She puts the key in the ignition and turns. She backs up in the armored Suburban, past her white car with the dress for the wedding still waiting in the backseat, and turns around, pulling forward finally, up to a closed garage door and stops just shy of it so that she is not blocking the threshold.
Jessica stands in the center of a big walk-in closet stuffed full of the things she wears and the things she wants to hide. On the shelves jeans and T-shirts sit stacked among clear plastic bins of sunglasses and baseball caps, and in the corners, on either side of a big mirror she avoids looking in this morning, skirts of evening gowns spill out from behind baskets heaped high with dirty laundry, a big gilt-framed collage Akhil made of her film reviews, and the life-sized cardboard cutout of her in a flight suit that her daughters would not let her throw away. The skylight is dark above her, and she is already dressed in her big sweatshirt and jeans. Her running sneakers are on and tied. She is bending to place an extra baseball cap into an open duffel bag when Akhil appears in the doorway in his T-shirt and striped pajama bottoms, his hair wild with sleep, rubbing his eyes.
“I let the dogs out to pee; they were scratching. Wait—what are you doing?”
“I’m going.” She slides open a drawer.
“I thought we talked about this last night. I thought you agreed with me.”
She sifts through her socks. “Please don’t try to talk me out of it.”
She puts a pair of socks in her duffel, and Akhil disappears and appears again quickly with a laptop and a serious, purposeful look on his face. He opens it on top of her dresser. He begins tapping.
She tries to keep packing as he reads. He is not the type to exaggerate his delivery, but his raised eyebrows and his pattern of emphasis betray his disdain. “ ‘I’m so worried about you, Sweetheart. I care about you so deeply, and I know you well enough to know that you will never love yourself if you let yourself be lured by the spoils of fame into turning your back on your family. You are not the type to be ashamed of your humble beginnings. Perhaps one of the members of your entourage could redo the seating charts and find a little space in the back for me, behind all the stars?’ ”
Jessica’s lip trembles. She bites it and looks at the ceiling in front of her open drawers. “It’s such poisonous crap. Such evil manipulative garbage. I don’t know why I still let it bother me.”
“Because it’s poisonous evil manipulative garbage from your own dad,” he says.
“I wasn’t keeping him away because I was ashamed of him! And there were no stars at our wedding! There was no entourage!”
“Baby, it’s me.” He smiles sadly and tries to catch her eyes with his own. “I was there, remember?”
She turns back to her drawers. “It doesn’t matter. I still want to go.” She opens another drawer.
Akhil keeps reading: “ ‘Because I love you so very deeply and I worry over the moral anguish I know you feel in your heart about having let your fame separate you from your family, I need to share with you the tragic story of my great-aunt Peg, who might have died without bitter regrets if she had only forgiven her father their past misunderstandings and allowed him just once to meet his grandchildren.’ ”
Jessica grabs a fistful of underwear and stuffs it in the bag at her feet. “You’re not changing my mind.”
He says, “Or this: ‘I’m so confused by your anger, Dearheart. I tried to call and ask your permission but your handlers wouldn’t let me speak to you, and it honestly never occurred to me you would say no because it’s such common practice among the more compassionate stars. Didn’t Angelina sell family photos to People to benefit UNICEF? Didn’t you say you cared about the plight of children in India?’ ”
She leans over and zips the bag shut.
He says, “It’s a setup, Jessica. You’re doing exactly what he wants you to do.”
“We can’t know that for sure. It wasn’t even him calling.”
“Who cares? For all we know that woman on the phone was one of the paparazzi friends he splits commissions with. He’s a pretty creative guy, remember?” He flips the laptop around: a scanned screen shot from TMZ with a headline that reads, “Father’s Day in Beverly Hills: No Dads Allowed” next to a picture of a sparkly-eyed older man smiling for the camera outside the gate in front of their house with a sign that says, JESSICA PLEASE FORGIVE ME!
Akhil says, “They actually have that one posted as a sample on one of the celebrity photo brokering websites with dollar signs stamped across it.”
She picks up the duffel by the strap and slings it over her shoulder.
“You were right last night, Akhil.”
“About what?”
“I have to stop hiding in here. Growing up with a mother who’s afraid to go outside or answer the phone is way worse than growing up knowing your grandfather is an asshole.”
Akhil’s hands shoot up in the air. His eyes are wide with surprise and excitement. “Good! Great! Hallelujah! That’s my girl!” Then he lowers them and grabs her gently by the shoulders. “But that means go back to work. That means go outside. That doesn’t mean run headlong into one of your dad’s ambushes.”
“I have to.”
“Why?”
“Because.” She puts her hands on her hips. “Because I want my dog.”
He shakes his head briskly, as if someone slapped him. “Wait, what?”
“I want the dog, Akhil.” She folds her arms across her chest. “That’s my dog. Grace Kelly. That’s one of the dogs he bought for me.”
He narrows his brows skeptically. “When you tracked him down at seventeen … After he abandoned you as a baby …”
“See! I knew you would say that. That’s why I didn’t tell you last night.” She reaches into a basket of sunglasses on top of her dresser and grabs a pair.
He says, “One of the litter of eight puppies he got on impulse for his tenement studio—”
“Yes.”
“For you to rush home and feed between your high school classes while he was out sprinkling bits of broken glass into his food at Denny’s or slamming on his brakes in front of teenage drivers.”
“Yes.”
“There is probably no dog at all, Jessica; she should have died years ago; she’d have to be ancient by now—”
“I thought of that! It’s possible! I looked it up, even!”
“Or there might be a different dog he paid that woman to call Grace Kelly to lure you out there for a photo ambush. ‘Jessica Finally Forgives!’ ‘Dog and Threat of Deathbed Trump Five-Year Star Grudge!’ ”
She puts on her cap and glasses. “Maybe.” Then she muscles past him into the dark hall with her bag, past the two closed doors and down the narrow stairs into the kitchen. She fills the coffee carafe with water and pours it into the coffeemaker. She scoops coffee into a filter, making a sloppy job of it, while Akhil stands behind her blinking, watching her. Finally she opens the refrigerator and takes out a little ziplock snack bag of leftover bacon.
“Let me make you an egg,” he says.
“It’s not for me, it’s for Grace,” she says, and she bends over her duffel bag to stuff it inside. When she stands again, he is closer, and he takes her head gently in his hands. He kisses her on her hair. “All the more reason to make you an egg, then.”
Jessica sits down on a stool at the counter, and watches him take a carton of eggs from the refrigerator. He pours a little oil in a pan and turns on the flame beneath it. In the wake of her struggle against them, his bald truths make her feel cared for, every bit as much as the egg. Her father’s false comforts had been flawless. Perfect fits. Measured with some bloodless micrometer against the opening of her sorrow and then jiffy-milled—quick-crafted behind his shining eyes, as if turned on a lathe. The egg sputters and pops on the stove, and Akhil watches it while beside him the carafe clouds with steam and finally releases a trickling stream of dark coffee, and then he slides the egg onto a plate, the same kind of flowered dish she had used for the girls the night before. The whole time they were dating, he never once flattered her or sent her too many flowers or told her anything she loved hearing that later turned out to be untrue. Instead he sent an envelope of vitamins to her trailer. He told her he liked the smell of her breath after she ate grapes. Now he takes a fork from the drawer and hands it to her and watches as she cuts into the egg with the side of her fork and takes an enormous bite. A little ghost of red glitter spangles the floor beneath her. The skin around her eyes is puffed and splotched pink from crying.
He says, “At least let me come with you.”
She shakes her head.
He says, “I can be dressed in two minutes. It’s perfect. I’m not on duty until Wednesday.”
“I might not be back by then.”
“I’ll catch a flight if that happens.”
“What about your class for the residents?”
“Not until Thursday.”
“But you have all those articles to read! And a recertification exam on Friday!”
“I can prep in the car while you drive.”
She opens her mouth to raise another objection, and before she can speak he adds, “And the girls will be fine; my mother is probably already awake in her bed reading John Grisham and munching a bag of Kashmiri mix.”
“Okay, you’re right.” She blinks, looking baffled, or caught, or both. “I guess I just don’t want you to come.”
“Why on earth not?”
“I want to face him on my own. All these layers of protection!—”
When Akhil opens his mouth to object, she waves her fork impatiently; “I don’t mean Security. I’ve already talked to Larry. He’s assigning two people to come with me.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“You were right about the unread scripts. You were right about me hiding in here for the last four years. But it’s not just the house. It’s you and the girls I’m hiding behind. You know me. I like the version of me you see. It feels so safe. All the lousy distorted things people say—even nice people! Even people who think it’s a compliment!—none of it confuses or depresses me when you’re with me. I need to learn to do that for myself.”
He watches her stand and take a silver travel mug from the cupboard and fill it with coffee. As much as he’d like to go with her, he will not try to argue her on this. She had once laid out a collection of her red-carpet photos from the days before she met him, and although she looked stunning, right away he knew what she was trying to show him. There was a sad, tense look in her shoulders and mouth that was absent in the pictures with him at her side. In the manic strobe-lighting of camera flashes, under the cacophony of pleas (“Over here, Jessica!” “Give us those eyes, Jessica!” “Jessica, tell us who you’re wearing!”) he’d taken to whispering his own in her ear (“Mommy, cut my crusts!” “Jessica, who did your epic bedhead!”). It’s true it would be good for her not to need him.
“You get how bad it could be, though, right? A whole team of photographers with telephoto lenses in his neighbor’s yard to watch you with the dog. If there is a dog. His hospital room bugged so he can sell the conversation to Hard Copy. If he’s in the hospital. Have you called the hospital?”
“No. I don’t want to draw a bigger crowd by tipping anyone off that he’s getting a visitor. But I do get it. Paparazzi. Unfair headlines. Heartbreaking betrayal. I get it, Akhil, and I want to go anyway.” She clips the lid on the cup with a hard snap.
He studies her face. The wet lashes and the pinked skin and the set jaw.
“Why what?”
“Why do you want that dog? If there is a dog.”
“I don’t know.” She shakes her head, looking first at the tree of photos on the wall and then all around the room. The dirty socks and the struggling Chia pet and the bin of broken toys. “Because it’s someone from my family I can take care of? Because it’s someone from my childhood I can share with the girls? Because it’s something he took from me that I can take back from him?”
Akhil reaches out and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. He smiles. They have been married ten years, and still it fills her with relief to see how he accepts this about her—her fathomless depths of uncertainty. He is the only mirror she can stand to look in. “Okay,” he says.
She picks up her duffel bag, and he follows her into the garage then, its walls lined with shelves of baby gear and old clothes and games they’ve outgrown, things she is almost ready to give away. She moved these items first to bottom shelves and then into boxes in a hall closet and then here, and on any given day they waver and change in her eyes from keepsakes to junk and then back again. Akhil could sort through them in an hour and never regret (never even remember!) any of his choices. He sheds things so easily, and just as easily he decides what to acquire and what to keep. His mother is the same. Every night she cleans out her purse sitting at the kitchen table, discarding, discarding, but on her bureau she still has a ticket stub from a Zubin Mehta concert she went to as a girl. On shopping trips she never holds an item aloft for long minutes, or circles back on it after she has moved on, or decides to return it as soon as she gets home. She knows her heart, just as Akhil knows his. Their keels are so deep. When Jessica expresses envy over this, he shrugs or kisses her ear or smooths her hair. The primer of his early life was simpler than hers, he says; when she sorts out what to trust from a textbook as convoluted as her childhood, she will know it even more deeply. Maybe so, but until then the ease they feel in the world seems like a magic trick to her. When Akhil first brought Jessica home to meet his parents it was for Lakshmi Puja dinner, and she imagined an arctic front of prejudices would chill their introduction (famous girl, not Indian, higher income, no parents for them to include), but instead his mother stepped forth from the throng of cousins and siblings and aunts and uncles in her sari with her arms outstretched. “Can I be the first one to hug you?” Jessica had tried to invent reasons for such an unconditionally warm greeting in her mind (a love of celebrities, deference to Akhil, a cultural custom), but over the next few years she saw his mother say the same to each new girl- or boyfriend one of her children brought home to her. It was that simple. The people her children loved were people she opened her heart to. They were on the list of things to acquire and keep.
Jessica reaches over an old high chair and a stack of LPs and presses a button on the wall. There is a great cracking and whirring sound, and the garage door begins to draw up and back on its track, filling the garage with the soft gray light from outside, and Jessica opens the door of her Suburban to toss her bag on the passenger seat. When she turns back to say good-bye to him, she sees Jaya standing by his side in her pajamas, holding her stuffed dog and wearing her sparkly red shoes.
“Where are you going, Mommy?”
Prisha was wary and sweet-smart even as an infant nursing in her arms, searching Jessica’s face for clues, and then along came Jaya, who nursed with her eyes closed and would drift off to sleep in anyone’s lap. To hear her ask a question is to learn for the first time that most questions are asked with a certain guarded skepticism of tone, as if evasion is expected in the answer. Jaya’s inflections are so cheerful and open they rise like the shoe-store balloon she once tagged and released with glee on their patio, certain it would drift on hospitable winds to the green yard of a Dutch or Ghanaian or Chinese girl just waiting to be her friend.
Jessica says, “To visit someone in the hospital.”
“Who?”
Jessica swallows. Behind Jaya, Akhil is watching her—not expecting her to fail; not expecting anything. The way he studies her face never changes. It is the only scrutiny that makes her feel safe.
“Someone I knew when I was a little girl.”
“Can I come with you?”
Jessica smiles at her sadly. “No, sweetie.”
“Why not?”
“He’s sick in a way that’s not safe for kids to be around.”
Jaya hugs her stuffed dog to her chest. “Is it safe for you, though?”
“Yes.” She bends to kiss her on the top of the head, but as she does so the girl herself bends to do something. When she straightens she is barefoot and holding out her red shoes, and tears spring to Jessica’s eyes. She laughs and wipes them away. “I don’t need those, sweetie.”
The girl doesn’t lower her arm. “How do you know?”
“It’s just a hospital. It’s not the kind of place you get stranded.”
“You might not know, though. I don’t think Dorothy knew.”
“Okay,” she says. She takes the tiny shoes and sets them on the seat next to her duffel bag. “But don’t worry. Tell your older sister I’ll be back soon, will you? Tell her I said good-bye.”
The girl hugs her dog. “I’ll let Daddy tell her.”
“Why?”
“She’ll tell me something scary. She likes to scare me.”
“There’s nothing to be scared of.”
“Last night she said the witch was Dorothy’s neighbor. She said maybe Mrs. Lucas is one and we don’t know it yet.”
Akhil steps forward and lays his hands on Jaya’s shoulders. He winks at Jessica over her head. “Turns out witches aren’t as hard as they seem to get rid of, though. She turned back into a neighbor as soon as Dorothy splashed her with water, didn’t she? She was Dorothy’s to dissolve all along.” He leans over Jaya’s head to kiss Jessica on the cheek. He whispers, “Call me. I’ll call you if you don’t. I still think it’s crazy not to take an ally.”
Jessica gives a little nod toward Dana’s Suburban idling quietly just shy of the threshold. “I’m taking her, aren’t I?”
“Yes. And thank you. But that’s not the only kind of safe I want you to be.”
He pulls away and lets her go then, shutting the door gently and stepping back as she slowly backs out, looking at her with sad eyes but waving cheerfully until she turns, her rear bumper lining up with Dana’s, and they pull out together, picking a path among the tricycles and the balls, over the chalk drawings, all of them more brightly colored now with the first direct sun, and as the big gate halves swing open, Jessica glances at her rearview mirror for one last look at them behind her. Then she drives out through her gate into the street to begin her journey, fitfully at first, with traffic lights making her pause and watch strangers pass, until she crosses up over the green hills and down onto the long stretch of highway through Death Valley, dry and silent on either side of her for miles, with Jaya’s small red shoes sparkling on the passenger seat next to her, and Dana following behind.
After hours of parched flat desert, they come up over another small mountain pass, and Las Vegas appears in the distance, a weird emerald expanse of golf greens around a center of glittering buildings thrown up to look like the rest of the world’s wonders—marvels other cities shaped with time and trial. The last stretch of gray highway bears them around a bend over the barren sands and dumps them abruptly into that uncanny green valley, and Jessica follows her map to Villa Ridge, a wide curving clean street of lovely stucco houses, all of them with high arched windows and sparkling lanterns above their front doors. A palm tree sprouts from each jewel green front lawn, except for the last, where a yellow skid loader sits parked on a plot of fresh soil next to a giant hole and a small fan palm, its root-ball wrapped in burlap. Even with her car windows closed, Jessica can hear the barking.
She pulls up in front of it and turns her engine off. She reaches over Jaya’s red shoes for the bag of bacon in her duffel, and feels an upwelling of a familiar dread, not at the prospect of entering her father’s yard, or of being photographed by waiting strangers, but of something more immediate and more common—her smallest, most ridiculous fear—of greeting Dana. She suppresses it certainly (she is grateful every day for the protection they provide from the shadows her job has cast on her family—the predatory photographers, the stalkers, the few famous kidnappings of children of stars), but the truth is she does not go whole days or even whole hours at home without wondering what these kind people think of her. It’s embarrassing. It seems to her the pinnacle of vanity and self-absorption, this discomfort she feels around people who are paid to protect her privacy, people who in reality are probably bored by her. It is bad enough that she allows herself to be buffeted by magazines’ misleading snapshots and captions (Sex Symbol! Rich Bitch! Super Mom! Selfish! Icon! Bad Daughter!), but secretly she finds herself feeling insecure and self-conscious even in her own yard, where from behind a shuttered window she knows good people can see her. She has made her world so small trying to escape the judgments of strangers, drawing in and in, shopping online and hosting events, until she rarely leaves home, and they are the only strangers left to fear. And she finds that for her they are plenty. They, after all, have more pictures to piece together, and although of course all they see her doing is collecting sippy cups and pushing her girls on a swing, she finds herself haunted by a mystical idea of the composite they see on those four quarter screens—as if (crazy! she knows it!) they see more than she herself can, some kind of objective collage, a magical slide show of her life’s most telling details, a window to her past, herself, her soul.
She looks in the rearview mirror to adjust her cap and glasses and sees that Dana is already getting out of her Suburban and approaching, a tall thin woman with a blank pale face, khaki pants neatly pressed and her black polo shirt loose, hanging low over her belt to hide a gun.
She arrives at Jessica’s window. The scar on her upper lip is a bright spot in her face, which is so neutral it makes Jessica first nervous, and then ashamed in exactly the way she expected to be. She rolls her window down, resolving not to do it this time. She will not try to influence this woman’s opinion. She will not work to project what she wants others to see (Kind! Down-to-earth! Humble! Normal!). But even as she does so, she finds herself saying, “Thanks for coming on this trip. Dana, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Larry said really great things about you.”
“That’s nice to hear, ma’am.”
“Jessica.”
Dana just smiles. Jessica has to cut her eyes away for a moment, because of the frankness of Dana’s scrutiny, and because of the revealing strangeness of what she is working up to ask. “Anyway, thank you, really. I appreciate the help,” she says. Then into the long opening of her nervous hesitation Dana interjects:
“I think I should lead you around the corner, to park farther from the house.”
Jessica blushes and glances at her father’s raw yard, as if Dana has divined something about her just from looking at it. The dog’s barks are sharp and evenly spaced, as if they too are measuring something.
“We’ll attract less attention if the cars are not together,” Dana explains. “I thought I’d keep mine closer, in case we have to leave quickly.”
And the relief Jessica feels at this practical explanation shames her all over again.
“I’ll show you where,” Dana says, and jogs ahead of her. Jessica drives slowly, following the figure of her, this slim woman running along the sidewalk and around the bend to where more clean houses lie. The barking there is just as loud. It could be the same street, but for the missing spectacle of her father’s unfinished yard. She adjusts her cap and sunglasses again. She stuffs the bag of bacon into the patch pocket on her sweatshirt and looks at the shoes her daughter gave her. She gets out of the car.
Dana stands, waiting.
Jessica clears her throat. Although her own eyes shift toward the corner with every bark, Dana’s hold steady, watching her. In Larry’s travel-support summary, Jessica saw that in high school Dana was a decorated member of the Marine Corps Junior ROTC. That she speaks Arabic and served four years in the barren and bloody deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq. What must she be thinking? And when will she, Jessica, ever, ever stop wondering what people are thinking? It is an advantage only in character acting, to indulge so compulsively in speculation about the private thoughts of other people. She closes her eyes briefly and pictures her two daughters on the swing set in her backyard. I am just a mother. I am just a mother who loves, like all mothers, to watch her girls swing. But she knows Dana is staring at her, waiting. No doubt wondering why she is so nervous around a woman whose job it is to keep her safe. Ridiculous. It’s ridiculous, this beating around the bush. Jessica tries again: “I need to ask you for something.”
“Certainly.”
“So I guess you know all about my dad. Read about him online or seen him on TV or—”
“Larry briefed me this morning, ma’am.”
Jessica’s eyes cut off to the side and flutter uncomfortably. She crosses her arms and forces herself to look back at Dana’s eyes. This woman will not understand it, what she wants to ask for. Even Jessica does not understand it.
She says, “So I don’t really know what to expect here. I mean, I don’t know who might be waiting—”
“There’s currently no one in the yard with the dog, and the house itself is still empty to the best of our knowledge.”
Jessica’s forehead wrinkles in confusion.
“Velasquez did a pretext visit,” Dana says. “He left for the hospital just a minute before we pulled in.”
“He rang my dad’s doorbell?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Who was he pretending to be?”
“A census taker.”
Jessica longs to be more like them. That is part of it, she remembers now—part of her shame around them. It’s not just physical danger they’re willing to face bravely—it’s everyday decision. It’s logistics and interpersonal nuance. Things are complicated; they’re imperfect; and they deal with it. They don’t lament and stall. They don’t get paralyzed or rush forward in a fog of generalized anxiety and confusion. They assess and act, breaking up a heterogeneous mass of problems into discrete chunks and pairing up often regrettable ends with the best of available means. It seems impossible that they wouldn’t be able to call upon these well-honed skills in the daily complexity of their own personal lives. Were she to undertake to play Dana in a film—say, a Dana with a con-man father and a beloved childhood dog condemned to impoundment—she would prep by making a list. She would method-act a set of specific goals and clear desires. She can’t imagine they would any of them set off on a journey without knowing what they wanted to find.
The dog is still barking. On either side of them, house upon identical house is lined up impersonally in either direction. Jessica can see that along the hairline of Dana’s close-cropped hair there is moisture, but her face is placid, utterly calm.
Jessica says, “So, okay. That’s good, then. Um … so what I wanted to ask you is … to the extent possible, at least … just on this trip I’d like to … Well, for starters with the dog, I mean, I’d sort of appreciate it if …” Jessica is astonished and jealous and annoyed all at once that Dana’s face is so unreadable. It seems a feat of strength to betray so little emotion. She presses on, “I mean even if things change, even if photographers show up or are already waiting in the neighbor’s house or yard, I’d prefer to be alone. When I go back there to get the dog. Without you, I mean. Even if it means they get a better shot of me going into the yard.”
“Certainly. I’ll wait right by my car,” she says, and she stands there unmoving. Her eyes flick to the right and then to the left and then settle on Jessica again.
“Thank you,” Jessica says, still unsatisfied, as if she had hoped her own motives might be revealed to her by Dana’s reaction. What is she expecting to encounter in her father’s yard? Why is she so desperate to face it so completely alone? But Dana has revealed nothing, and Jessica realizes that the moment has come. There are no tasks that stand between her and what she has come all this way for, whatever that turns out to be.
She sets off for the corner and Dana lags behind her, just as she asked her to, and as she rounds the bend, there in the otherwise unbroken stretch of perfect houses is her father’s—pink stucco with a beveled bay window like the others, but marked by the oddly foreboding moat of churned brown soil. Frozen half-submerged in its surface, like sacrifices or weapons borne by visitors who have come before them, are the palm sapling in burlap and the skid loader listing to one side. Jessica pauses on the sidewalk. Then she takes a step, and her father’s yard receives her sneaker like the ashy surface of the moon. There is a brown wood gate to the left of the house, a break in the pink stucco wall that separates her from the backyard. It gets larger as she crosses, as do his windows. When she is within grasping distance of the latch something occurs to her. She hesitates and takes a step to the side to peer in through the glass.
What is she hoping for? Perhaps a bit of magic—the flash of insight that comes with a peek into a crystal ball—but what she sees instead is first her own reflection, so familiar and unwanted it chafes at her. She blocks it out impatiently, cupping her hands on either side of her eyes against the glass, but what this reveals is a space almost like a motel room in its impenetrable anonymity. Beige couch. Brown coffee table. Wing chair. Neither shoddy nor expensive. Even the houseplant by the door a minor mystery. It could be a sign he has tended something in the years he has misused her, but just as easily it could be fake. She cannot tell from this distance, and she will never know.
In the wake of each of his mercenary stunts, she had been first outraged and then reflective, finally obsessive. Sleepy-haired over coffee, sautéing onions at the stove, lying in bed with a hand clapped over her eyes, she interjected into the easy marital silence a long memory of her eighteen months living with her dad, stirring the details, sifting them like sand for some clue. Akhil was always patient, listening and watching her with his kind eyes, not even speaking, but she knew what this meant. She responded as if he’d spoken. “Really?” she said. “He’d be off your list? You’d stay away from him? No racquetball or coffee date for him? I thought you said I’d be happier if I accepted my family for what they were.”
“I did, and I meant it,” he said mildly. “But that means you stop trying to make them into something they’re not. You don’t attach your happiness to their changing.”
“So that means hating him?”
“No, it means not hating yourself for not being able to change him.”
“Okay, fine but—” she said, still lost, still none the wiser; how could something that was so clear to him be so opaque for her? “But why can’t I be with him and not try to change him?”
“Because he’s a grizzly bear of a man. A bumblebee. You don’t hate them for what they are, but you keep your distance.”
Grace barks again, and Jessica steps away from the window and unlatches the gate to face the scene of her journey’s first trial: an empty swimming pool, like a tomb, surrounded on all sides by more churned brown soil, and at the far side a dirty white dog tethered by a chain to a pallet of paving stones. Nearby in the dirt is a mound of dry kibble spilling from a torn-open twenty-pound bag and an orange bucket that says HOME DEPOT across the side. A green hose snakes over the stucco wall and into the bucket from the next yard. The neighbors’ walls on all sides are buttressed by a row of high trees—dense Leyland cypress, almost a hedge of it—to block the view of this ragged yard, and although there is no way for Jessica to be certain of it, it is the case that there is no one hiding in among the needled branches. She has what she asked for. She is truly alone.
She lets the gate click shut behind her. Grace doesn’t look toward her or change in her pattern of barking as she approaches. Jessica’s footing in this soil is unreliable, and she has to wheel her arms for balance and the chasm of the dry white pool looms, tipping and rising in her peripheral vision as she draws near, watching the dog bark, and bark, and bark, at her father’s vacant house. Even when Jessica reaches her, stopping five feet from where she has stationed herself, straining at the end of her tether, the dog seems not to see her, and Jessica sees that the whites of her eyes are clouded over like the skins of steamed dumplings. Jessica waves her arms. She claps her hands. Nothing. At last she breaks the ziplock and pulls out a piece of bacon, and as she crushes it in the palm of her hand, the dog finally flinches. She begins to growl.
There is a quick release on the chain attached to her collar. Grace’s eyes are unfocused on a point in the sky to the right of Jessica, and her black lips are curled back showing an ugly row of teeth and speckled gums. Jessica takes another step forward, just three feet now from the dog at the end of her tether, and she tosses a few bits of the bacon into the dirt at the dog’s feet. Grace stops growling and snuffles for it, biting up a mouthful of soil with each scrap, chewing and swallowing sloppily and then sniffing the air again. Jessica takes another step forward and holds out the last slice, her hand trembling. Grace sniffs the air, and then, so suddenly she has no time to withdraw, lashes out and nips her hard on the hand. Jessica stumbles backward and looks down. Two little puncture marks, the blood welling. She covers it with the cuff of her sweatshirt and looks with astonishment at the old dog who is growling and looking right through her with cloudy eyes.
“I’m right behind you,” a voice says.
Jessica turns. There in the dark churned soil, a heavy pack on her back, is Dana.
She says, “Do you know if she’s current on her shots?”
Jessica looks down at the puncture marks. The skin around them is beginning to swell and darken. She shakes her head. “I think I surprised her. She seems deaf and blind now.”
“Were you trying to feed her?”
“Yes.”
“Good. A reason to bite besides rabidity, I mean. Rabies is really rare around here anyway, but it’s worth considering.”
Dana crouches in the dirt and opens her giant backpack and finds it full of things Jessica needs. She takes out a half-liter bottle of spring water and what seems to be a white matchbook, which she thumbs open to reveal the kind of tiny sewing kit they give away at hotels. She takes out a needle and punctures the top of the bottle.
The dog is still growling.
“What are you doing?” Jessica says.
“I’d like to irrigate it quickly. To reduce the chance of infection.”
Jessica pushes up her sweatshirt sleeve and gives Dana her hand. Dana grips her fingers gently as she squeezes the bottle, projecting a fine jet of water at the bite marks. She holds their joined hands low to keep the splash from spraying them in the face, and Jessica steals a glance at Dana’s eyes and mouth, which have that same inscrutable look she wore when Jessica told her she wanted to approach the dog without protection, and Jessica knows that Dana is thinking something about what has occurred, she does have an opinion, and even so she is washing Jessica’s hand. She looks back down at them where they are joined together.
When the bottle is empty Dana sets it back in her backpack and swabs Jessica’s hand with a clean piece of gauze.
“I’ll drive you to the hospital,” she says.
“No,” Jessica says. “I mean—wait.” Her hand is throbbing a bit, and it is puffy and blue, and Dana is inches from her, holding it, seeing it tremble and swell. Although at home she might have received all the help she needed through the filter of Dana’s black-and-white quarter-screen views, here now in her father’s yard there is no choice but to expose herself fully. The object of her dread has taken shape. This is what she was trying to avoid by making Dana wait on the curb.
“I mean, I’m not sure I’m ready. To visit my dad. I might want to wait a bit. Not for anything specific, even, I’m sorry, but I can’t even tell you how long it might be.”
“To the Emergency Room, I meant.” She points to Jessica’s hand. “You should get that examined. Tested for nerve damage. Evaluated for rabies prophylaxis.”
Jessica feels lightheaded. Something else is bubbling up inside her. Another layer of embarrassing secret longing revealing itself to her. Something more she’ll have to share.
Dana is sealing the used gauze in a clean ziplock. She tucks it into her pack.
Jessica says, “But what about Grace?”
“She’s tied up pretty well.”
“But Animal Control is coming.”
“I doubt anyone else will come back here and get hurt before they can get here.”
“No—” Jessica says. The dog barks again, higher and sharper. Jessica’s uninjured hand floats trembling to her forehead. She says, “I’m worried they won’t try to find a home for her.”
Dana stands. “Probably not. Not with a bite history.”
“I’m worried they’ll just put her down.”
“They use pentobarbital. It’s an anesthetic, so it puts them to sleep before it kills them. It’s totally painless.”
“But I want to take her.”
Dana switches gears seamlessly. “Certainly. I’m pretty sure they allow owners to observe when they do it, and I’d be happy to discuss that with them for you, but it would be safer to have them transport her and then meet them there.”
“No, I mean—” Jessica has no choice but to say it. “I mean I want to take her home with me. I want to try to keep her.”
Dana blinks, and Jessica sees that finally she has done it. She has done exactly what she feared. She has given Dana a full peek into her deep well of irrational, emotional, tortured, contradictory, past- and future-bound secret needs. And Dana is shocked. It is the longest Jessica has seen her pause for anything. She begins to believe Dana is stuck; that she has finally frozen her by giving her a set of irrational ends with unimaginable means—a Sophie’s choice of her two prime directives, assist and protect. Even for Jessica they are contradictory—Would she bring this angry dog home to her daughters? What is it that she wants?—but there it is. She knows only that she does not want to leave the dog behind, and she has let Dana see this. She has shown her this bit of insanity. Perhaps Dana will stand here in her father’s unfinished yard forever; perhaps her head will explode.
But suddenly Dana nods and says, “I can help you with that,” and takes off at a jog across the spongy yard, holding her cell phone up to her ear.
Jessica cannot imagine what she will do. She has left her backpack behind, and Jessica eyes it now lying in the dirt. Its top is open, and inside it Jessica can see a roll of duct tape, a set of tiny screwdrivers, the tops of half a dozen ziplock bags—so simple; so capable; Jessica envies her her bag of separately bagged tools. Her hand is throbbing a bit under the cuff of her sweatshirt, and she feels hot, but the feeling is not unfamiliar to her. She thinks it could be the bite, but just as easily it could be shame. Over expecting the dog to greet her. Over having a father who leaves a dog to rely on the charity and self-preservation instincts of peace- and sleep-starved neighbors. Over getting caught injured by her own needs in her father’s yard. It has somehow also to do with being famous, as if instead of a professional accident this too were a choice, and a laughably arrogant and shortsighted one, given how uncomfortable it has made her.
Grace lies down suddenly in the dirt. The hair on her muzzle is a different white, almost gray, and her heavy breath troubles the dry layer of soil, scattering it, setting it rolling. Jessica can hear a car door chuck open and shut, and Dana returns, carrying—what on earth?—a rubber-backed carpet mat from the floor of her Suburban.
She reaches into her backpack and withdraws a roll of duct tape. She wraps the mat around her left arm. She says, “Can you hold this in place a second?”
Jessica is astonished by how relieved she feels to be given such a simple instruction, to have something so physical and uncomplicated to do. She pinches it shut with her left hand while Dana tears off a strip of duct tape. They make an awkward job of it, both of them one-handed, but they manage to tape the mat tight around Dana’s arm.
Dana reaches into her backpack again and takes out a ziplock bag of neon green zip ties—extra large, for baling bundles of cable or pipe. “Do you still have some mobility in your right hand? Does it feel okay when you open and close it?”
Jessica clamps her fingers open and closed. “Yes.”
“Okay. Here’s what I want you to do. I’m going to feed her my left arm, and when she bites down, I’m going to grab her muzzle with my other hand. When I tell you I have full control of her mouth, I’m going to ask you to step in with the cable ties.”
She hands the bag to Jessica and takes a step forward. Grace stays where she lies, and for a moment it seems Dana might be able to grab her muzzle with a bare hand before the dog even notices her, but when she draws close enough to reach out, Grace springs to her feet. Dana thrusts out the wrapped arm, and Grace strikes it with her teeth, bouncing once before sinking them into the car mat so hard it buckles. Dana is quick, pinning her muzzle with her free hand and then wrenching her padded arm to get a second hand free and encircle the snout completely. Grace thrashes and Dana straddles her hindquarters and sits on her, bringing her down hard in the dirt. Her turds lie all around them. The dog’s breath is loud and wet through her nose. She growls once between Dana’s tight-closed hands.
“Ready?” Dana says.
Jessica winces.
Dana says, “Put one of those zip ties right between my two hands.”
“But how will she drink?”
Grace scrabbles her paws under Dana’s weight, straining to stand, but she doesn’t get very far. “Easy, girl,” Dana says. To Jessica she says, “I called Velasquez and asked him to meet me at the hospital with a basket muzzle, and then we’ll clip off the ties. They can drink through a basket muzzle.”
Jessica is still wincing. “Won’t it be hard not to cut her?”
“Once we’ve got the basket on, I can reach through the holes and peel her lips back easily. You’ll see.”
“Okay,” Jessica says. She holds a cable tie limply between her two hands. The blood on her hand is smeared, just tinting the puffy wound pink. “Okay.” She steps forward and fits it around the dog’s snout, slipping the tip through the eye and then tightening it with a slow, heartbreaking series of clicks.
“Tighter,” Dana says.
“But how will you cut it then?”
“I can peel her lips back. It will be easy, I promise. But if you don’t do it tighter, she’ll push it right off with her paws.”
Jessica pulls it tighter.
Dana removes one of her hands. “Let’s do a few more.”
Jessica winces as she tightens each one. She has to do four before Dana finally lets go of the snout. Right away the dog buries her nose in the soil and scrapes at the ties with her paws, just as Dana said she would, puffing loudly. The two women stand watching, Dana with her hands on her hips and Jessica covering her wounded hand with her sleeve. When it becomes clear she cannot remove them, Grace lies down and whimpers. Jessica’s lip trembles, and she bites it to hold back tears. She has always been a sensitive woman, prone to unseemly swells of feeling and tearful sentimentality, and while it has made her a good character actress, Jessica knows, it has also made her quite easy for her father to con. The lip biting doesn’t help though. It rarely does. The tears fall and Dana sees them. Jessica begins to cry a little harder; she can’t help it. There are more tears, and there is snot she wipes with an ugly sound, and Dana can see and hear all of it standing there beside her, and still nothing changes in the yard.
Then Dana walks past her, past the dog, to the pallet of pavers where the dog’s chain is tethered, and, like a character from mythology, Dana lifts a stone to free it. She drags the chain behind her and comes forward to take the dog by her collar and lead her. When Grace tries to stand she struggles a bit, making clear her age and the pain in her joints, but she does not pull away from Dana at all, or thrash. She follows meekly, with her head bowed now, and so does Jessica, staring up at her father’s house behind Dana and the dog.
When she nears the gate Dana stops short. “Wait here. I’ll go out ahead to check the area and get her secured in the car.”
Jessica does as she’s told. She hangs back in the shade of the pink stucco wall while Dana unlatches the gate and passes through it with the dog, out across the raw soil to the curb, where a compact elderly woman in a gold velour warm-up suit stands next to a teenage girl in cutoff shorts and a halter top. The girl pulls a purple cell phone from her back pocket and raises it up in front of her face at arm’s length between her and Dana. Dana turns her back and walks toward her car.
“Well, wait,” the old woman says, walking after her. “Who are you?”
“Just here for the dog, ma’am.”
“Are you with Animal Control? That is a famous woman’s dog, I’ll have you know, and she is on her way here to take care of it. You could have yourself in a spot of very bad PR. DeeDee, are you getting all this?”
“Dang. Hang on a minute. I didn’t know there would be anything YouTubeable.”
Dana is already across the street. She opens her tailgate and, with unbelievable briskness, slides the makeshift bite sleeve off her arm, hoists the old dog up onto the deck, lowers the door shut with a click, and locks it with the remote in her pocket. The girl scurries across the street and holds the little cell phone up to the window, but with the dark tinting and the reflected light the little screen on her phone shows nothing.
“Burn! Do you think she’ll still come, Lulu?”
“Of course she will!”
“I had Mindy and Paco and them coming for pictures and autographs. Mindy made three hundred dollars last year on eBay, and Paco’s got a photo credit on Gawker.”
The old woman turns to Dana. “Won’t you wait a few minutes?”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible, ma’am.”
“I think it’s very unprofessional of you not to wait. She had to drive all the way from Los Angeles, you know. She’s going to be just sick over this, she is a very conscientious woman and her father is ill in the hospital. She doesn’t have time to be chasing that dog all over creation.”
“My apologies, ma’am.”
“Let’s go inside, DeeDee. We’ll call her right now on her cell phone. We can offer to meet her at the hospital.”
She puts a hand at the small of the girl’s back and ushers her across the raw front yard, right by the gate behind which Dana instructed Jessica to stand waiting. Dana hears the big mahogany door open and shut. Jessica hears it too. As soon as it latches, the brown gate opens and she hurries out and down one block to her own car, parked at an inconspicuous distance where Dana knew from experience to leave it.
On the way to the hospital, Dana leads. Grace is whimpering in the back of her Suburban—a high, rhythmic whine like a squeaky pump—but Dana keeps her eyes on the road, and on her rearview mirror, where she can see Jessica at the wheel of the Suburban behind her. When the hospital rises into view, Dana swings in at the far end of the lot near the Emergency Room portico, past Velasquez nodding Jessica into a parking spot he has waiting for her, and Dana continues on alone, slowing as she passes the benches at the big front entrance, where a young man with mutton-chop sideburns and low-hanging jeans cranes his neck and visors his eyes to see her, a tripod hidden clumsily in the azalea bushes behind him.
She parks at a distance between a silver minivan and a dark maroon Cadillac. She leaves the engine idling, getting out and making a show of looking at him before she crouches out of his sight line to find that Velasquez has done exactly as she instructed. Behind the left front tire of the minivan is a Petco bag, and inside it are two stainless-steel bowls, a bag of chicken-flavored treats, a black plastic muzzle with a leather strap, a nylon leash, and a plastic card key for the Holiday Inn Express with “Rm 105, North Entry” written in black marker above the magnetic strip. It is one of the things that Dana loves about her job—that her coworkers are by requirement predisposed to reliability, to procedure and preparation.
She is still relishing these assets when Grace gives her the first hint that with her they may be useless. When Dana gets back in her car, the dog does not stop whining. Not after Dana climbs over the seats and opens the pouch of treats. Not after she fits the muzzle gently over her nose and clips the cable ties with a pair of blunt-tipped bandaging scissors she brings up from some unknown recess in the backpack from Ian’s dreams. Not after she fills a bowl with water from her cooler and sets it down in front of her, splashing a bit to make her take notice. Dana dribbles a bit through her muzzle with a cupped hand and even then Grace holds still, whining, holding her head at a dispirited cant.
It’s all she has time for. Dana glances out the back window and sees Jessica and Velasquez pass into the far end of the building while the boy with the camera sits on the stone bench by the door, his eyes fixed on her own car instead. This portion of the mission, at least, will go exactly as she plans. She drops a treat on the surface of the water bowl, hoping the scent might draw the dog’s attention later, and she begins unbuttoning her black shirt, leaning forward to remove it. She has to stretch her arms out behind her to do it, and when she wiggles out of it, she reveals a black tank top beneath, a military tattoo on her left bicep, and a pair of shiny aluminum dog tags on a stainless-steel chain. She removes her hip holster, slides up the leg on her khaki pants, slips the gun into an ankle holster on her boot, and pushes the pants back down. She opens an outer pocket on her backpack. Between a bag of cable ties and a clear film canister of safety pins is a cheap pink plastic travel soap case which she snaps open to reveal a selection of lipsticks. She checks the stickers on the bottom and finally uncaps a blackish color and cranks the rearview mirror toward her to put it on. Then she repacks her backpack, cracks all of her windows an inch, and switches her engine off.
The boy sees her coming from a long way off, of course. He squints, shading his eyes under a purple-and-yellow Lakers cap turned sideways. Dana walks differently now, with more sway in her hips, and when she gets close, she sits on the bench opposite without even looking at him and takes a pack of cigarettes out of a side pocket of her backpack. All the while she can see out of her peripheral vision that he is watching her closely. Dana lights her cigarette and takes a drag, blowing it out to the side between her dark lips. Then she unzips her backpack and leans over, moving things around inside, her dog tags jingling, and draws out the camera. It has a wide canvas strap, and she slings it around her neck.
The boy raises his eyebrows. “Who you here for?”
“My grandmother,” she says.
The boy snorts.
Dana sets her cigarette on the concrete bench and makes a few adjustments to her camera settings, sighting through the lens at the automatic doors before letting it rest again in her lap on the concrete bench. She leans over her backpack and takes out a small padded zip bag with a different lens in it and removes it from its case. She twists the old lens with a series of tidy clicks, like a soldier disassembling a rifle, and she swaps it out for the longer lens and re-sights on the door.
All the while the kid in the baggy jeans is watching her.
“How long you been doing this?” he says.
Dana says nothing. Instead she picks up her cigarette and takes another drag. Then she takes her BlackBerry out of her backpack.
“Ooh, that’s cold,” the kid says.
Dana thumbs the keys. Nothing yet from Velasquez. Nothing work-related at all, in fact, but the boy is watching her, and Dana needs him to believe she is corresponding with someone who knows more than he does. So she opens Ian’s text.
And above his “We’ll see,” she types:
Please provide examples of the lucky turns of fate that might flow from my standing you up at your sister’s wedding.
Didn’t you say motel rooms are magical for you? Maybe you’ll come home full of pent-up energy from two excellent nights’ sleep and need to burn it off.
She smiles.
It works perfectly. “Good tip?” the boy says.
Again Dana ignores him, staring at her screen.
“Your loss,” the boy says. He takes out his own cell phone. “I got a girl tipping me about an A-lister.” He makes a show of leaning over to check his texts. “I thought we could help each other out.”
Dana hits Reply again, but already the burst of pleasure that comes from any communication from him has been replaced by a familiar ache.
She types:
I’ll try to call you on one of my breaks because there’s something I need to tell you.
For a long time the ache has been born of something abstract—just that sense from experience that she cannot long hold on to anyone who gets to know her well enough to be disappointed—to discover that there is not more inside her, something she is holding back, some source of warmth or freedom they can uncover or thaw. More recently it has also flowed from something more concrete but still unscheduled—his death, which could be so much sooner than most; it could be anytime; it could be tomorrow. But the ache seems to be taking its final shape now. The object of her dread is more immediate. Dana can see now exactly how she will lose him. She even knows some of the words that will be spoken. And she knows when. It makes her want to hurry. It gives her project a deadline.
She opens the file she e-mailed to herself from her apartment the night before.
Dana reads through the bullet-pointed recommendations. She reads them twice, even a third time for good measure, still fingering the dog tags between her breasts and taking drags from her cigarette, drawing the boy’s attention. She can do this in her sleep—better than she can sleep in fact—all these careful, planful, protective acts. She can perform them for Jessica and for Ian at the same time. Two at once. It is that easy. She has packed into her backpack and BlackBerry and heart everything she needs for an endless stream of defensive feats. Here outside the hospital Dana has disguised herself to appear like the boy—callous, cavalier, shortsighted, mercenary—and although Dana is none of these things, it appears to be working. He is watching her and trying to match her, adjusting his camera settings and eyeing the door and checking his own phone. He cannot know what Dana herself is really reading. He cannot know that Dana is preparing not to unleash pain but instead to try to contain it.
She is on her fifth Sample Letter of Appeal when a text tumbles forth—not from Velasquez (not yet), but from Ian:
Is it yes?
And she is confused for a moment. As he knew she would be, apparently, because before she can parse it, or hit Reply to ask, he sends a second text:
On the after-motel nooky, I mean.
She smiles again, but she forces herself to hesitate this time, because above all Dana is careful. She watches the cursor blink, and knows that somewhere, probably in his breezy, messy, bird-filled apartment, he is waiting to know how she will answer. The answer that had welled up inside her was “We’ll see,” but she believes (Dana knows) it is not the right thing to say. It is not right because it will mislead him about her plans. The plans she will follow when she is off duty and can call him to tell him the truth about what’s inside her. She cannot type, “We’ll see,” because she will not see. Dana never waits to see. Dana decides and prepares. She decides and prepares based on what she already knows.
So there on the bench in front of the hospital, Dana shifts the big camera between her legs and blows smoke toward the boy, and she tests and weighs, experiments and edits, typing out sterile, cautious phrasing after sterile, cautious phrasing—“Maybe” and “Let’s talk first” and “I’m not sure”—until finally she settles on this:
I should leave that up to you after we talk.
And Ian of course does not hesitate. As soon as she sends it, he answers back:
Yes then. If it’s up to me it’s always yes.