What were they doing? Eating the flowers? Chewing away at the tiny green oranges, bitter and hard as wood?
But no, all at once they were all gone, zipping up into the sky and disappearing like some cartoon tornado, and the trees looked exactly the same.
Night of the cicadas.
Magic, almost like it had never happened.
But it had. She sure had the proof.
Where was Billy?
14
Lisa, you coke-snorting bitch.
Dance with me and this is what happens.
Dance around me and this is what happens.
Oh, the joy.
Ode to joy- wasn't that Bach?
He hated Bach. In the hospital where they'd taken his mother when she had to wear a football helmet, they played Bach and other classical crap.
Trying to soothe the patients.
Patients. Inmates is what they really were.
Lisa had tried to drive him crazy.
Tried to lead.
Oh, the look on her face… dance with me, darling.
15
The domestic-violence tape played on all the eleven o'clock news broadcasts: Lisa and Cart Ramsey, both smooth and tan, immersed in Jacuzzi bubbles, lining up putts on the home green, doing a Roy Rogers-Dale Evans number on sleek horses, smooching for the paparazzi. Lisa as a beauty queen and a gorgeous bride, cut frantically with close-ups of her post-beating face.
Then somber reporters intoning about the brutality of the dead woman's wounds, followed by the department spokesman, a photogenic Parker Center captain named Salmagundi, fielding questions without really answering them.
Petra watched it at her dinette table, hunched over another sandwich, feeling violated.
After getting off the phone with Dr. Boehlinger, she'd tried to paint: a desert landscape she'd been working on for months, swirls of sienna and umber highlighted with acra red, the faintest hints of lavender, nostalgic flashes of hikes with her dad. As she dabbed, she was certain it was working.
But when she stepped away from the canvas, she saw only mud, and when she tried to fix it, her strokes felt clumsy, as if her hands had suddenly seized up.
Washing her brushes, she turned off the TV and thought some more about Dr. Boehlinger, and the mother who had yet to come home.
What it was like to lose a child. A real child.
What it would be like to have a child. That opened up the gates of hell as she remembered what pregnancy felt like, the almost crushing sense of importance.
Suddenly she was crying, just gushing tears. Uncontrollably, except for one tiny corner of left hemisphere that watched and scolded: What the hell has gotten into you?
What, indeed?
She took several gasping breaths before she was able to stop, gave her eyes a brutal swipe with a paper napkin.
Lord, what a spectacle, disgustingly maudlin. Poor John Everett Boehlinger and his wife have lost a human being, and you go on like the thing you expelled from your womb was close to human.
A grape-size piece of pulp in bloody soup.
A mass of bloody potential floating in the toilet as she'd kneeled and retched and cramped in agony, hating Nick enough to kill him for bringing it on.
Because he had; she was sure of it. The stress, the cold disapproval.
Walking out on her- exactly what he promised he'd never do. Because he'd been made to understand that she'd grown up without a mother, that her father was wasting away in a Tucson sanatorium, that being alone would be true hell. He must never, never walk out on her.
Maybe he'd been sincere when he promised.
A fertilized egg changed everything.
I thought we agreed, Petra! We were using birth control, for God's sake!
Ninety percent effective isn't one hundred, honey.
So why didn't you use something more reliable?
I thought it was good enough- Apologizing? Was she really apologizing?
Great, Petra. Fuck around with our lives like that. You're an educated woman! How could you do anything so stupid?
Bloody potential. Cramping so badly she felt she was being torn apart, she'd rested her cheek on the cold porcelain rim of the toilet, flushed, listened to it whirlpool away.
Alone, barely able to stand, she drove herself to the hospital. Tests, a D and C, more tests, three days in a semiprivate bed next to a woman who'd just birthed her fourth baby. Two boys, two girls, family members all around, cooing and ahing.
The postcard from Nick came two weeks later. Brilliant sunset over sand. Santa Fe. Taking some time off to think. She never saw him again.
The hole that opened in Petra's consciousness expanded, hollowing her, lowering her immunity. More cramps, fever, an infection, back to the hospital.
Outpatient follow-up. Feet in stirrups, too drained to feel demeaned.
Dr. Franklin's sad sympathy. Let's talk in my office. Charts and pictures.
Unable to focus any better than she had during all those mind-numbing boarding school health classes, she played dumb.
What are you saying? I'm sterile?
Franklin averted his eyes, dropped his glance to the floor. Just like suspects did when they were about to lie.
No one can say that for sure, Petra. We have all sorts of procedures nowadays.
She'd flushed away life, flushed her marriage.
Gravitated toward a career full of death. Using the grief of others as a constant reminder of how bad it could get, her situation was okay- right? In that sense, the more brutal the better. Bring on the bodies.
So why the hell was she crying? She hadn't cried in years.
This case? It had barely begun; she had no feel for the victim.
Then she heard Lisa's name and her aching eyes flew to the screen as the story flashed. Feeling stupid for being surprised- how could it be any other way? Now millions of people were viewing sixty seconds of tape that Stu and she hadn't been allowed to ask for.
Had Stu seen it? She knew he got to sleep as early as possible, especially when making up for lost nights. If he hadn't seen it, he'd want to know. She supposed.
She phoned his house in La Crescenta. Kathy Bishop answered, sounding subdued.
“Did I wake you? Sorry-”
“No, we're up, Petra. We just watched it, too. Here's Stu.”
None of the usual small talk. Kathy usually liked to chat. Something different with both of them- a marital thing? No, couldn't be, the Bishops were poster children for marital solidity, don't disillusion me, Lord.
Stu came on. “Just got off the phone with Schoelkopf. Quote: ‘We don't want another f-ing O.J. My office, eight A.M.' ”
“Something to wake up for.”
“Yeah. How'd the notification go?”
“Spoke to the father. He hates Ramsey's guts, is positive Ramsey did it.”
“He back that up with anything?”
“The beating. And he says Lisa was scared of Ramsey.”
“Scared of what?”
“He didn't say.”
“Aha… okay, eight A.M.”
“What do you think about the broadcast?”
Silence. “I guess it could help us. Make Ramsey a de facto suspect and get the brass worried about looking stupid if we don't press him a little.”
“Good point,” she said.
Silence.
“Okay, I won't keep you- just one more thing: Dr. Boehlinger runs an ER, probably a take-charge kind of guy. I'm sure he and his wife will be coming out ASAP. He hates Ramsey. What if he decides to get proactive?”