“No,” I say. I take the letter from the mailbox and carry it over to him. “There was a. well, you can read it.”
He begins to do so and then he looks up.
“My daughter drinks this Blind Street,” he says.
Then he goes back to the letter.
“Where it says ‘a man and his dogs,’ would that be you?”
I nod. “Probably a lot of people drink it,” I say. “It doesn’t mean she was the one.”
“One way to find out,” he says. “She lives in the carriage house.”
“Well, you can ask her.”
“No, come along,” he says. “She doesn’t see that many people. It’ll do her good.”
We drive up to the house, then get out and walk around to a split-shake barn with an apartment upstairs. The path lights here are little Mission lanterns with sea-green brass and yellow mullioned glass. Very sharp. I tell him so.
The man turns with a pragmatic flatness to his mouth, as if he had just thought of something. His eyes are deep-set, his crewcut like iron filings.
“Do I know you?” he says.
“I don’t think so.”
“You seem familiar.”
“Ever listen to the Milo Hahn mysteries on audio?”
“No, I’m not familiar with those,” he says. “I know what it is. You work for those guys — the tree people.”
“I’m the voice on their phone system. I don’t really work for them.”
“No kidding. You do voices.” He nods, thinks this over. “That can be interesting, I imagine.”
“Oh, it’s like anything. Sometimes interesting, sometimes not.”
“Can you do Jimmy Stewart?”
“No. I don’t do voices that way.”
“I know, I’m just kidding,” he says. “I’m going to go see if she’s around. But, whatever she says, don’t get mad at her, all right? She can’t stand that.”
“You know, let’s forget this,” I say. “I don’t want to bother your daughter.”
“It’s no bother.” He turns toward the barn and half shouts the rest. “You’ve gone to the trouble to make a flyer and we’re going to get to the bottom of this.”
He goes inside and is in there for some time. I walk across the lawn to a gazebo where there’s an easel and a painting. The painting is dark and hard to figure out, but as I look closer I see that it must be the yard as it appears at night. The paint has been applied in thick slabs of black and midnight blue and it looks wet, as an oil painting in a museum might. I touch it — I’ve always wanted to do this — and I find that it is, in fact, still wet. I leave the gazebo and wipe my fingers on some ferns.
They’re still in the carriage house. Raised voices bump like bats at the windows, but I can’t hear anything specific. Don’t get mad at her, you said so yourself, I think. I figure that Ingrid’s probably calling me to come and get her by now, and here I’ve wandered into this weird family scene. Then the door opens.
She’s older than I expected. Late twenties or more, I’d guess, in a stringy sweater with red and white stripes, overlong sleeves, and one of those collars whose points sit way out on the shoulders. Her fingers clamp the cuffs of the sweater to the palms of her hands. Her nails are short and jagged, and from the marks around them I determine that she is the night painter.
“I dreamed that God came and said it was time for me to go,” she says.
There is a wooden bench nearby with a blue-handled garden shovel leaning against the seat. The father goes over and picks up the shovel and lays it on the bench. Then he picks it up again and puts it on the grass under the bench.
“Is that how we said we’d start?” he says.
Her eyes close, press tight, and open. She chews on her thumbnail and looks at me with red-rimmed eyes the color of slate.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I never thought it might hit someone. I’d had a really bad day. That doesn’t excuse it, I know. See, because I dreamed that God came into my room like the mailman, and he had these orders for me in his pouch, and he said that I would die. And I said, ‘But I’m young,’ and he said, ‘In your heart, you are not all that young.’ I woke up crying, I couldn’t stop, because it seemed so real.”
“Mariana,” the father says.
“But I don’t mean to lay all that on you. Then I drove around drinking Blind Street in the sun, and I threw the bottle out when it was empty, and I drove all the way to Zuma, and walked up and down on the sand, listening to the water, and then I came back. And I felt good then, better than I had in a long time. Because I thought, You know, I’m not going anywhere. And I never thought for a minute about anyone in the arroyo.”
“Though you should have,” the father says.
“Yes. I should.”
“And?”
She rolls her eyes and breathes out so forcefully that the wings of her nostrils flare. “And will, in the future.”
“Because you’ll. what will you do?”
“Think.” She nods her head. “I will think.”
“Look, it’s not the end of the world,” I say. “It’s just a bottle. We’ve all thrown bottles out of cars, I’m sure, at one time or another. That doesn’t make you a bad person.”
“You don’t know me,” she says.
“No, that’s for sure. But you’re honest. You could’ve said, ‘Me? I didn’t do anything.’ A lot of people would have said that. And that counts for something. Now, I think I’ve made too much of this, and I have to go.”
Mariana takes my hand in both of hers. “My apologies again,” she says.
From their house I drive straight to Mi Piace. Ingrid and her pals are at a cluttered table in the back. I know them; they know me. There are plates and glasses and cups and saucers all mixed up on the table, and they’ve pushed back their chairs because the meal is over. The help hovers nearby, dressed in black.
“Where you been, man?” Ingrid says. “I called you. Come sit by me. What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen the ghost of Jacob Marley.”
I pull up a chair. “I found out who threw that bottle,” I say.
“You and that bottle, my God,” she says. “It’s like your constant companion.”
“What bottle is this?” Else Nelson, the director of the team, says.
“Oh, somebody threw a bottle at Bobby in the arroyo. It’s all he thinks about.”
“Who threw it?”
“A woman,” I say.
“Why?” Else says.
I look at him. For a scientist, he looks sort of ramshackle: unshaven, jowly, with the mysterious light of extreme knowledge in his eyes.
“You tell me what you’re doing on Mars,” I say, “and I’ll tell you why she threw the bottle.”
October 17, 2005 Issue