No kitty footprints.
The cat had dropped a small, curly brown turd on the floor right beside the box.
His little message.
He wanted out.
The party was breaking up by the time I slipped back, women milling around, chattering, saying goodbye. I threaded my way to Misty, who was bent over, strapping on her shoes. I guessed the heels at six inches. Knockoffs.
“What took you so long?” she asked.
“A cat that needs an antidepressant.”
She stared at me a moment, then grinned, displaying small, pretty, very straight teeth. “I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk more. How about lunch this week? My place? My husband’s out of town.”
“Sure.” I leapt at the friendly, casual invitation.
“Emily?”
I turned to acknowledge a fiftyish, plain, very tall woman, one of the few in the room to let her gray hair sprout however it wanted to. “I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m Gretchen Liesel. These girls are at full gossip tilt since your husband rode into town on his metaphorical horse.”
I’d gotten a good vibe off of Gretchen even though I had only observed her tonight from a distance. A nice, low laugh that carried. The night’s high scorer on trivia, besting me by a point. A gray dove in a room of peacocks. I turned to include Misty, but she had drifted away.
“Everyone tells me you’re the person to see about the baby,” I told Gretchen, smiling. “My OB in New York recommended someone, but she’s in Dallas. I’ve seen her once. At the Margot Perot Center. It’s a little farther to drive than I thought.”
“Her name?”
“Herrera.”
“I know her. She’s very good. High-risk pregnancies.” She paused as if thinking about that. “It’s not that far really. And the Perot center is state-of-the-art, embracing, even. Whatever you think of Ross Perot, you can’t argue with his ingenuity. Or generosity.”
“I voted for him,” I said.
Gretchen laughed. “Don’t say that too loudly. Here’s my card. I don’t steal patients, but I’m available to you locally in a crisis.”
We exchanged a few more words, mostly her admonitions about how pregnant women needed to be extremely careful not to get dehydrated in the brutal Texas summer. Eight tall glasses of water a day, at least. She urged me to stick a bunch of plastic water bottles in the freezer and grab one for the cup holder of my car every time I walked out of the house. Screw the environment for a few months. The water would melt just right, and I would be thirty percent less likely to faint.
Gretchen Liesel punctuated my evening with the most normal conversation of the night. I glanced around for Misty but couldn’t find her. We hadn’t set a day or a time. While waiting in line for Caroline to clasp my hand regally at the door, I wondered if I could make it home without dozing at the wheel.
Back in the Volvo, seatbelt buckled over Baby, I switched on the motor, only to be jolted by another rap, rap, rap. Letty.
Now what does she want?
Instead, when I rolled down the window, the face surprised me.
“Dr. Liesel?”
She leaned in through the window, her voice lowered, her breath smelling pleasantly like peppermints and champagne, appropriately antiseptic.
“Gretchen, please,” she told me. “This might sound strange since you don’t know me at all. But be careful around these women, Emily. They like to pry and tell. A tip from one ex-East Coaster to another.”
Before I could respond, she’d straightened and tossed a little wave to Caroline, a spidery shape in the doorway, like something etched in a Tim Burton movie. Surely, this wasn’t Caroline’s message Gretchen was delivering?
My head pounded, the effects of the wine, my two-week withdrawal from caffeine, and one of the most bizarre social evenings of my life.
I watched Dr. Liesel trot around the corner. No car. Gretchen lived in the kingdom, too.
I cranked the Volvo into gear and let Hugh take me home, away from that little girl’s pink room, frozen in time.
I smelled honeysuckle and damp wood when I stepped outside the next morning onto the turn-of-the-century wraparound porch, my porch, the one I’d dreamed of while stuck in our hot box of an apartment on 57th Street.
I reached for the envelopes stuffed into the old metal box hanging by the front door and wondered if I would always feel fear when I retrieved the mail, even though there are lapses of time between her letters. A full three years before the one recently delivered to our old apartment. Maybe she had needed a vacation. Maybe she’d been sick.
Maybe she wouldn’t track me down here, in our new home, thousands of miles from New York.
Sometimes she slams me with pages of obscenities and wishes for my early death in strong, angry cursive. Sometimes she details how she’d like it to happen.
Sometimes she just types a single word.
Murderer.
I’m not who she thinks I am. Until the most recent communication, I wasn’t absolutely sure she was even a she. My letter stalker never signed a name.
Now I knew. The last envelope that arrived in New York, the last one dropped into the shoebox, signaled an ominous change. It held a picture printed off the Internet, a painting I recognized instantly even though she had ripped three-fourths of it away, leaving nothing but the grieving mother, howling, distorted, cradling her dead child, all sharp edges and pain. Picasso’s cubist masterpiece Guernica. This latest message was directed at me, the artist with a bloody brush. Worse, there were no more pretenses about who she was.
I never told anyone about the letters. It was another of my secrets, one that would require too much explaining, lead to places I don’t want to go again.
My eyes grazed across the picturesque street, taking in the tidy patches of lawn and renovated cottages, starter homes for the iPad generation.
Nothing out of place.
I watched two young men hop out of a white van across the street, both wearing clear hard plastic backpacks sloshing with gasoline. One held the long black leaf blower in front of him with two hands, gripped like a rifle, as if he was prepared to fire, to spatter bullets across this quiet street. It wasn’t that hard to imagine that he was.
I wanted to stop thinking like this.
4
“OK, what’s the deal?” I asked, slathering my belly with Coppertone. “Are they some kind of high society Texas cult?”
My sunglasses skied down the sweat on my nose as I leaned deep into the cushion of a lounge chair cushion. I was mesmerized by the drop-off edge of Misty’s pool where water met flat blue Texas sky. It was as if there was nothing to prevent me from swimming right up into the clouds.
The sun felt good after the icy air-conditioning. A radicchio salad with fresh shrimp, takeout from Central Market, settled nicely in my tummy. Misty had called this morning to make the date for lunch and a little old-fashioned Texas “laying out,” to hell with grammar.
“I should have helped you more last night,” she said. “Those parties are like a Tilt-A-Whirl. I could hold your hand, but there’s really no way to get off until the ride stops.”
I found Misty’s own situation curious. She lived in a modernist’s dream on an exclusive hilltop: a million-dollar-plus house with geometric windows that stared down on a few Mexican-tiled roofs peeking out from the lush greenery of live oaks. The nearest neighbors, I presumed.
Up close, the stones in Misty’s dollar-sign necklace were fake, but the near-invisible, high-tech security system protecting us at the moment was worthy of a nutty dictator in Dubai. Most people wouldn’t notice. I had a former ATF agent for a husband, whose hobby was spotting them.
The place was spacious but not huge. Maybe 3,500 square feet total. Black wood floors gleamed. Triangle skylights, stainless appliances, sharp corners. Scattered Oriental silk rugs lay in the open spaces and a vivid Kandinsky wannabe sat over the fireplace, warming things up.