On Friday morning, at five minutes to eight, Ben was headed down the street to Big Al’s. Ten minutes later, he slammed back into the house. Vivi knew the visit hadn’t gone well. She leaned against the kitchen counter, finishing her coffee. “What’s the matter?”
“The apprentice won’t testify.”
“He just came right out and said that?”
“No, I started out by thanking him for chasing the thief, and the little shit was really unfriendly, wouldn’t even look up.”
“Big Al wasn’t there?” she asked.
“No.”
“Where was he?”
“How would I know?”
“Don’t take out your frustration on me.” She opened the dishwasher, rattled the mug into place, and shut the door more loudly than necessary.
“That gun is important. The deputy said so, too.”
“Do you want to go look for it again?”
“It’s hopeless.”
But in spite of his words, his head had lifted.
Luna was peering in the door, leaving nose smudges on the glass. He let the cat into the kitchen and sprinkled kibble into her bowl.
“We can go as soon as I get home from yoga,” she offered.
“Yoga with the hot teacher?” he teased.
She smiled, glad he was regaining some of his sense of humor.
He scrubbed his face with his palms. “Do you remember if the pawnshop was going to open today? Next thing would be to call them. Put them on the lookout for the ring.”
“And the gun,” she said.
Listening to Ben make the call brought the burglary right back, a rush like her life had sailed without her on board. When Ben went out to the garage to practice his drums, the uneasiness spread even though he was right there. She reminded herself that it had only been a day and a half.
She had another hour before yoga. In the comfy desk chair in the office, she tried to fill the time by writing comments on students’ papers. Volunteering in a high school writing program was not proving to be a satisfying retirement activity. The students weren’t hers, and half the time she thought the teacher wasn’t doing an adequate job.
With their sound-proofed garage, she couldn’t hear Ben’s playing, but the vibrations traveled through the vents and along the floor, connecting her bare foot to Ben’s body fifty feet away, his haunches lifted, his weight over his kit. “A muscular drummer,” he’d said when the band took a break, and he came over to talk to her. She’d been waiting for a colleague friend and leaning back against the bar admiring the thick black curls tossing around as he played.
“How did you start drumming?” she’d asked.
“My Grandma Russo gave me a drum set because she hated my mom. She wasn’t Italian. Worse yet, not Catholic.”
Vivi stirred from the memory to find herself staring at the photo of her mom over the desk. Ninety years old, but she sported a red hat, pluming with red feathers.
Talons squeezed Vivi’s heart. She leaned back and closed her eyes, then blinked them damply open. She avoided the photograph by looking out the window to the garden gate. The one Dwayne had crawled over.
This was not going well. Everywhere she looked blew up another emotion.
The doorbell chimed. Her hand jerked, sending the computer mouse crashing off the desk. She picked it up, hoping it wasn’t broken, and checked out the window before heading to the door. A sheriff’s vehicle sat at the curb.
Holding a paper in his hand, Deputy Hashimoto stood on the steps. “Good morning, ma’am. How are you doing?”
“I’m pretty jumpy.”
He nodded. “I came by to see if you would take a look at a six-pack of mug shots. See if you can identify Dwayne Williams.”
She invited him into the entrance hallway. “Would that do any good?”
“Why do you ask that?” Cops were supposed to keep a neutral demeanor, but Hashimoto was particularly hard to read.
“I saw his photo in the newspaper yesterday. That seems prejudicial.”
“I would say give it a try anyway. It could be one of these men or none of them.” He showed her the sheet.
She bent close. Studied the first row, then the second. She turned on the hallway light and repeated the process. None of the black-and-white photos resembled the one in the newspaper. “All these guys have bushier hair than the burglar.”
“Just do your best.”
“I know how unreliable eyewitnesses can be,” she said.
“Maybe. But eyewitness accounts are one of only two kinds of evidence not considered circumstantial.”
Surprised, she flicked a look at him. “What’s the other?”
“Video.”
His words weighed on her as though her choice could affect the outcome. She reached for the six-pack, and the deputy relinquished it. She held it close, considering each face. She’d encountered the idea of the cross-race effect in her teacher training; most people were unable to distinguish well the physical differences in another race, but she’d never experienced it in such an acute way.
“I don’t know. Maybe this one.” She pointed to the young man with the fairest skin, the feature she remembered the most.
Hashimoto didn’t flinch or tic, but she sensed that she’d chosen the wrong one. “That’s not him, is it?”
“I can’t say.”
When she entered the gym, Vivi couldn’t wait to start yoga, to find some calm. Picking a face from the six-pack agitated her, made her worry that she’d undermined Ben. She unrolled her mat, but kept a corner tucked, the way Winn had students signal they were okay with adjustments. She bowed to a couple of yoga buddies, then bent her legs into full lotus.
Winn was out of the room. The Mantra for Healing played on the sound system. She shifted on her sitz bones to get centered.
Winn breezed into the room and turned off the music. She didn’t know much about him except he didn’t depend on yoga for a living. He’d let it slip one time that he trained EMTs.
She waited hopefully for the process of following her breath, listening to Winn, and escaping a barrage of thoughts about Dwayne Williams and the gun. She should be thankful Ben hadn’t been murdered, but it was pretty frickin’ hard to reach a state of gratitude just yet.
Winn unfurled his mat without hurry, as though his every action taught yoga. She smiled at the memory of Ben suggesting Winn had checked her out, a silly yet flattering idea. But then there had been that weird electricity when he’d touched her arm. What was that about?
The teacher’s unlined face suggested someone younger than her fifty-seven, but maybe that was the effect of regular meditation. Besides, if chemistry existed, did the years matter?
Sitting in virasana, Winn reminded the class of the upcoming retreat in Mexico. “Two spaces still available.” He looked right at her, and her heart lurched. “Tropical beach. Yoga under a palapa.”
The peaceful image tugged at her. She’d absolutely love to be there, to escape the tension from the burglary. But that was why she couldn’t go; she needed to support Ben.
Breathing together, the class quieted. She rolled her shoulders.
Winn talked almost non-stop, but his voice was melodic and the patter informative.
“Right now…” Winn said.
Perfect words.
She set her intention for class: be present. Not so easy. They had a gun to find, and she’d possibly fingered the wrong person to the sheriff’s deputy. Plus, whenever she became still, her mother’s absence visited. And had she made the right choice to retire?
She counted her breathing, eight beats inhaled, pulling in air from the back of her throat, eight beats out, the sound like air soughing through wheat, a sound from her childhood.
“As we close our eyes, we close off the outer world,” Winn said. “Of the eight branches of yoga, many classes focus on only one, the asanas, the postures. But in the Tibetan style I offer today, we concentrate on the inner world. Closing our eyes eliminates sight, which informs us that I am here and you are there, that we are separate and things are solid and fixed.
“In reality, we are moving electrons—energy—and we can change and move that energy, that prana, that chi. We can change the stories we tell ourselves, and when we do, we can free ourselves from the prison of our minds. We can change the way we operate in the world, and then we start to change the world.”
Be the change. Cliché. She adjusted her right hip down toward her turquoise mat, her lower vertebrae clicking into place. She peeked at Winn, the toned biceps outside the sleeveless tee. A fantasy embrace snuck in. Oh my God. She rolled her eyes. “Focus.”
“We sit here in the same class, listening to the same words, feeling the same breeze through the window,” he continued in his liquid honey voice, “but some of us will be thinking, ‘When will we get out of this posture?’ and others might think, ‘When will he stop talking?’ and others may say, ‘This is so relaxing,’ so what is the truth of this moment? What narrative do we tell ourselves?”
He had his eyes closed. She was a naughty spy. She closed her eyes and tuned back into his words.
“We have control over the story, and that creates our reality. Why not create a reality in which everyone can be happy and free?” He directed them to cup their hands into gentle fists, to breathe in, and to stir the energy up from the first chakra. “As we breathe out, we’ll offer that energy to the world with the thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all be happy and free?’”
Not Dwayne Williams. She didn’t want him to be happy and free. Was she practicing yoga if she hoped he was miserable and locked up?
On the inhale, she lifted her spread fingers. Maybe? He was only eighteen and needed to hit some kind of bottom to rise up. Like Ben’s son Art.
Her exhale shrouded her in sadness. Dwayne Williams was a kid. During her career, she’d encountered too many students for whom it was a heroic feat to make it to school—kids from shelters and migrant camps. People all had choices, but not all had the same choices.
Inhaling. Dwayne has time. Like her, he was energy in flux. But she could only visualize him running from her home. Living the life of a thug. Using a gun.
Winn started their asana practice. As she pushed into her first downward dog, his footsteps padded across the floor. He placed a hand on each of her hipbones and gave her pelvis a tug back toward his body. Blood rushed to her face. He gently ironed her spine with one warm palm. “Beautiful,” he whispered.
Vivi and Ben returned to the fire road off Scenic, the place where Dwayne had almost certainly fled after the burglary. They passed the footpath that led to the homeless family. The swampy water shouldn’t have been a surprise. Playa Maria County was a watershed. Each community had a river from the mountains as well as numerous little creeks running down through it.
As the fire road rose away from the dip, sunlight dappled the dirt.
A certain slant of light. The phrase popped into her head even though Emily Dickinson had been writing about oppressive pale wintery light, not the soft light of autumn.
Ahead of them, a couple with a yellow Labrador retriever veered off the fire road through a copse of eucalyptus.
“Remember how the newspaper article about Dwayne mentioned construction?” she asked Ben.
“Yeah.”
“It’s right up there.” She pointed after the couple. “And Dwayne had to get off this fire road. Cruisers can drive down it.”
He stopped with her to study the possibilities. Here the slope of the road faced south, and the trees grew taller and farther apart with less underbrush.
“Let’s follow them,” she said. “They look like they walk here all the time and know the way through the trees. The path Dwayne might have taken.”
“Okay. Let’s do this like in the movies. You go over there.” Ben indicated a spot beyond where the dog walkers had turned. “I’ll start here.”
Vivi stepped into the soft earth, scattered with rotted leaves. Neck bent, she combed the ground with her gaze. Slick spears of bay laurel and fingered maple leaves on a sprinkle of rusty pine needles. Then she saw it. Stopping abruptly, she kneeled. “Look at this!”
Ben hurried over. He studied the ground. “What?” His face crumpled in disappointment, as though he’d expected to see the gun.
“See this gouge in the dirt?”
“So?”
“About four feet up is another one.”
He leaned closer.
“Look how they’re curved. Those are heel indents. Wednesday the ground was damp. Dwayne would have been running, hitting the ground hard.”
He smiled. “Nancy Drew. How did you get so smart, anyway?”
She puffed with pride even though the discovery didn’t mean much. At least not by itself. Unless the imprints led to the gun.
They followed the trajectory of the prints up a bank of dried grass and came out onto a neighborhood street. It dead-ended at a fenced-off, wide swath along the freeway. On the other side of a chain-link fence, a backhoe, grater, and dump truck rested near blocks of concrete and piles of mangled rebar. “Maybe he threw the gun there.”
“If your theory is correct, and Dwayne held on to the gun until the end, more likely he ditched it as he started cutting through back yards.”
“But that would be hard to retrieve.” And the family or some little kid might find it.
Ben turned away from the chain-link and crossed to the nearest house. He peeked through the cracks of a wooden side fence that butted up to the freeway fence. He studied the height of the planks.
Vivi grabbed his arm. “We can’t go into people’s yards.” Ben’s decisiveness had saved them many times, jumping them off a bus with bad brakes in Costa Rica, commanding her to run from two men in Venezuela before she even saw the glint of their knives. Still, his quickness to act never failed to make her anxious.
“I know.”
“When you made the field I.D., did the sheriff bring you down this street?”
“No. I’ll show you.”
They walked down a block of small homes, quiet except for the pervasive freeway hum. A white minivan rolled by with a dog—a boxer—panting a bright pink tongue out the passenger window.
At the end of the block, Ben said, “One more block, that’s where the arrest was made.”
“He cut through a lot of back yards.”
“One of the homeowners called 9-1-1. That’s how they nabbed him.”
On the return home, they altered their route, checking the garbage cans of the continuation school next to Bay High School. It served students at risk of not graduating from normal high schools. The cans were empty except for small candy wrappers and bits of paper stuck to the gunk in the bottom.
They cut back to the fire road near where they’d seen the heel prints. She found another backpack, but it was smashed and covered with mold. “Who knew backpacks were such common trash?”
“We’re near schools.” He sounded discouraged. “And homeless camps.”
When they reached Scenic Drive, they crossed to search the area beyond the automotive shops, in case Dwayne had run along the boulevard longer than they thought. She moved ahead of Ben, who shuffled along behind like he’d given up. But the thought of the gun had taken up residence in her head: Dwayne didn’t have it, and neither they nor the police had found it. Where was it?