“Don’t call me babe,” she said. The bee was on the outside windowsill now, readying itself for another sortie. It fluttered its wings. “I’ll take it somewhere else. Someone will run it.”
“You got a contract with us,” Ian said. “Break it, you lose your job. We’re the only daily in town.” He laughed and Susan decided that instead of his xiphoid process, maybe she would go for the bridge of his nose and blind him. That way he’d live to rue the day he’d crossed her. “Who are you going to work for?” Ian continued gleefully. “The Auto Trader?”
Ouch. “So you’re going to let them kill the story? Just like that?”
“He’s dead. What does it matter? You’re brilliant. The Castle story is over. Everyone wants Gretchen Lowell now. And you’re right in the middle of it.”
“I’m trapped at the fucking Arlington,” Susan said, more loudly than she had intended. The bee smacked against the window again. “Give it up,” Susan said. “Shoo.”
“What?” asked Ian.
Susan covered her face with a hand. “I was talking to a bee,” she said.
“Oh,” Ian said. He made a little clucking sound. “I’m covering the manhunt. Woman hunt. Whatever. But we’ll set up a blog for you on the Web site. You can update it every day from the Arlington.”
“A blog?” As far as Susan was concerned, the Herald’s Web site was a wasteland. Susan glanced over at Bennett. He was reading a copy of Portland Monthly. The cover had a photograph of Oregon’s high desert and a headline that read THE BEST EXOTIC GETAWAYS. Maybe he was reading an article about windows.
Gretchen Lowell or not, Susan needed to get out of there. She was not going to write a blog. Not if they were going to kill the Castle story. She owed that, at least, to Molly Palmer.
“Listen, babe,” Ian said. She could hear the familiar tap-tap-tap of him typing on a keyboard. “I’ve got to run. I’ve got copy on the school siege to file.”
The bee was gone. Maybe it was dead. Maybe it had given up and flown away to some pollen-swollen paradise. Susan didn’t know. “You know how I said your penis was average-sized?” Susan told Ian. “I lied.”
She snapped her phone shut. She missed Parker. Parker would know what to do. Parker would make sure the story got published. Parker would get it on A-1. She dropped the phone back into her purse and walked back to her room, right past Bennett, who, she noticed, didn’t make eye contact, which meant that he’d overheard every word of her conversation. He was sitting directly across from Archie’s suite, number 602. And next to Susan and Bliss’s room, number 603. Archie and his family had a suite. She and Bliss were sharing a single room. Two twin beds. A desk. A TV. And a bathroom with no tub.
Susan wanted a bath right now. More than anything.
She opened the door to her room and there, in the small space between the end of the beds and the far wall, found her naked fifty-six-year-old mother standing with her legs together, arms raised, palms together. Her mole-dotted skin was pale, the flesh loose around the midsection and upper arms. Her breasts swung laterally as she reached down and touched her toes. Her bleached dreadlocks hit the carpet like a bundle of rope.
Susan quickly closed the door behind her. “Bliss,” she asked. “What are you doing?”
Susan’s mother jumped back into a plank position, so that her body was flat, her arms and toes on the floor. Her nipples brushed the carpet. “Sun salutations.”
“You’re naked. You’re naked in the Arlington.”
Bliss stretched into upward dog, keeping her toes on the floor but stretching her torso up, so her arms were straight and she was looking up at Susan. “I always do naked yoga,” she said. She bent back into downward dog, lifting her dimpled bare butt cheeks in the air and arching her back, and then moved one leg up between her hands, bent her knee and sank into warrior pose, so she was in a lunge with her arms extended above her head. “It’s very freeing.”
Susan’s mother had a tattoo of English ivy that began below one breast and snaked down to her upper thigh. As Susan followed the tattoo with her eyes, her jaw dropped. “What did you do to your pubic hair?”
Bliss lowered her arms into the proud warrior pose, extending one in front of her and one behind. “I had it waxed,” Bliss said. She spread the flesh of her abdomen so Susan could make out the design that had been carefully created in the rounded thatch of gray pubes. “It’s a peace sign. Bodhi did it at the salon.”
“Oh, my God.”
Bliss lifted her arms up again, sank a little lower into the pose, and closed her eyes. “It’s an illegal war, honey,” she said.
Susan spun around and opened the door to the hallway. There was Henry. And Debbie. And Archie’s two kids. They all turned and looked at Susan. And beyond her, clearly visible through the open door, Susan’s lunging naked mother.
“Namaste,” Bliss said with a wave. She stepped forward and bent all the way over, her dreadlocks piling again on the carpet.
Henry, Debbie, Ben, and Sara all stood motionless for a minute.