And apparently I have not gotten over the shame of all this, because here I am months later getting drunk in a turquoise Mexican restaurant until the heavy table corner stabs me every time I stumble to the bathroom. I get in a fight with Greg then Yegina then Greg and Yegina and Kaye about who will take me home. Greg has volunteered because he still wants to talk to me—about what? About his worries for his famous, beautiful missing girlfriend? Screw her and her death obsession! Not every woman fantasizes about being a sex slave or a starlet or a murder victim! Some of us just want to get sucked into a good novel and grow our own tomatoes one day when we have more time. When Rick asks me if I’d like to call a taxi instead of riding Babe over the hills again, I say with great dignity that I love Babe because she is a back-looking creature and I love the past, too, the past defines us and to ignore it is like putting down roots in a city that will one day fall into the sea and what is wrong with words anyway why is everyone here so obsessed with pictures I’ve got a picture for you what kind of person wears flip-flops to a riding party?
Greg’s voice is far above me and spinning. It’s farther than the ground, which is awfully close and spattered with wet, sour-smelling chunks. In the distance I hear neighs, hooves stamping. I didn’t want to vomit in the taxi, so I held it in. Now, in the ranch parking lot, it’s all coming out.
“Feel better?”
My stomach heaves again, and a pair of hands catches my hair.
“No,” I say, wiping my mouth.
There’s a blurry station wagon ride down through the hills. Then Greg walks me into our bungalow, through our old kitchen, with its still mismatched cups and plates and the knife his mother gave us, and out the back door, where he sits me down on the patio in our old hard chairs. I haven’t swept the fallen leaves in a long time, and they crackle underfoot. Why is he here? I’m too tired to understand. The evening returns to me in flashes: Kaye’s face wrinkles with concern as I tell her for the umpteenth time that, yes, my hip hurts but I’m fine, I know how to roll (as if leaping off horses is a hobby of mine). Then Rick the ranch hand says, “I might need to rope her horse.”
Then Yegina tries to stop me from refilling my glass and gets a heavy splash of margarita on her blouse. “All yours, Greg,” she says, throwing up her hands.
I’m not anyone’s, but here we are, Greg and I, sitting side by side on our old patio in the dark. It’s a small rectangle of concrete and brick between my house and the next bungalow, planted long ago with an avocado tree and a guava tree and a dark-green bush with glossy jagged leaves. A wooden fence blocks the view to the courtyard. The wood is so ancient, it has a soft gray texture and the nails have turned to circles of rust. A child could punch the whole thing down.
Greg shifts in his chair but doesn’t speak. The cool air makes my sticky cheeks feel stickier.
If we were still a couple now, our silence would be the dull, smooth silence of two people who are so accustomed to each other that they don’t need to talk.
This silence is different. Prickly and hesitant. Why doesn’t Greg just go? We gaze up into the avocado tree, me sipping the sparkling water he has brought for me. I guess he’s waiting to see if I’ll be sick again. I try to stand, but the effort makes me dizzy so I subside into my chair.
“How did you get there anyway?” I say. My throat is acid, sore.
“Where?”
“I mean, why didn’t you drive to the ranch?”
“I wanted to walk.”
“You walked. From Echo Park.”
“I walk a lot these days,” he says.
“Hoping to run into her?” It comes out more harsh than funny.
“Kind of. I can’t sit still and I can’t sleep.”
The avocados are ripe now, and they hang like dark jewels in the high branches. The squirrels around here are as fat as cows. They’re smart, too. We used to call them the squirrels of NIMH. Last week I saw one using a fence post to cut through a peel.
“I’m sorry I hurt you, Maggie,” Greg says quietly. “You never did anything to deserve this.”
A stillness descends through me. My hip throbs, but otherwise I feel senseless, weightless. Even Greg seems distant, though I could touch his arm from here. His voice seems detached from him, too.
“After my mom died, it became frighteningly clear to me: you wanted to settle down and I didn’t,” his voice continues. “You were ready to have children whose father would be around for them. I wanted to do something that … changes things. Culture. I didn’t want to be a father yet, and I refused to let my son or daughter grow up without me.” Greg’s shape shifts and the chair wheezes. “So I moved out. I told myself it was to protect you, but really it was to protect myself from seeing you hurt.”
I was hurt anyway, I think, but I don’t say it. I don’t want to stop this voice, because it’s going to apologize and then it’s going to tell me that Greg wants me back, wants someone whose bare shoulders he held in the South China Sea and marveled, “God, they fit my palms exactly.”
“And then when I saw you at the Gala, it hit me,” says Greg. “You’re the only person—”
The voice breaks off.
I’ve ever really loved, I hear him say.
“—in Los Angeles that I trust completely,” Greg says. “My mother even said it, that I would always be able to trust you.”
His mother. That specter of strength and bitterness and pain.
Greg is still talking. “But how could I ask you for help now?”
“Help?” I wobble back to the present.
Of all the apologies and reconciliations that I fantasized about, I never imagined this one.
“I’m the police’s lead suspect. I have no alibi for Wednesday evening. I was out walking that night, too.” There’s a catch in Greg’s voice.
I glance over at him, but it’s too dark to see his face.
“I told them about Kim seeing Bas with some man she thought was stalking her. But I can tell they don’t believe me,” he says. “Frankly, I didn’t believe Kim.”
“She saw Bas with her stalker?” My stomach suddenly roils, and I sip the bubbly water.
“On Monday. On the West Side somewhere.”
“But what kind of stalker was he? Was he following her, sending her messages? Was he threatening her?”
“She wouldn’t tell me.” Greg sounds hurt and defensive. “She said it was complicated.”
“But she knew who he was?”
“She thought she did, but she wouldn’t say.”
“What would Bas be doing with him?”
“I don’t know. She thought he wanted to get at her through her art. I don’t know. The show was making her hysterical,” Greg says. “She was barely sleeping, and she wasn’t … taking care of herself.”
It’s dawning on me: why he hasn’t seen her since Tuesday. “And you fought about that and she left. And you don’t know where she went.”
“Yes.”
“Must have been a serious fight.” I drink another slug of my water.
“It was. But I never thought—”
I hear the same dread in Greg’s voice as earlier, when Babe reared beneath me, pitching us backward. I don’t want to hear any more.
“You’re absolutely sure it was Monday?” I interrupt.
Greg says he’s certain. I tell him about Bas’s bizarre behavior in the elevator, and the board vote on his directorship, and the press release that Jayme had me copyedit.
“That’s impossible.” Greg bolts up in his chair. “Kim needs that money as much as anyone. So does Nelson.”
“As much as Bas needs his job? The gift would make him look really good. Especially if it was announced to the public. It might make it hard to fire him.”
As I say it, I still can’t see how the gift would be a motivation for Bas to make Kim Lord disappear.
“Giving away millions of dollars makes no sense for her,” says Greg. He tugs a hand through his hair as if trying pull free an explanation for Kim’s alleged donation.