I CALLED A COUPLE of friends, pacing my room while Lena and the Lindas wandered up and down the beach. You shouldn’t be rushed in this decision, they said, tell him you need a week. They were kind, but their support didn’t help me, beyond the warmth of reassurance.
It seemed to me I had weak information about my choices, so I made more calls. I asked Don for a family lawyer’s number, he had a personal friend who would take my call even today, he said, so back in my room used his name to get her on the phone. But she didn’t tell me much more than I already knew, and while I was half-listening another call came in—Ned’s voicemail had said he’d love to have lunch with “his girls,” it’d be no problem for him to “swing by.”
When I called him back my call went to his voicemail, which pleased me. I said I’d need till Tuesday, but don’t come for lunch. Ease up.
I was wary of calling a lawyer in Anchorage. Ned knew so many people in the city that I couldn’t be sure of steering clear of his contacts or friends. When I thought of lawyers there I saw two faces of lawyers he’d slept with, a young blonde and a middle-aged hardbody who ran marathons. A few other lawyers were investors of his. But Juneau, at least, wasn’t his territory yet—maybe I could find a lawyer there, one who wasn’t beholden to him. So when Lena came back from her walk I assigned her some reading and scanned search results.
Then I remembered Will Garza. He was intelligent, I thought, and kind and easy to talk to. I let Lena watch television, since it generates more background noise than reading, and stepped outside to make my call. We barely knew each other, of course, so I hadn’t asked anything of him. But now it struck me that maybe I could ask his advice, and he, unlike my distant friends, was here.
We decided to meet; it needed to be someplace warm, someplace Lena would play hard and ignore us. Will remembered an outlet mall in the hinterlands, a mall with an indoor playground you paid for. It sounded to me like the worst place in the world for a first date, but I needed someone to talk to more than I needed to set a scene, at that moment, and I said yes.
The place was full of inflated slides and bouncy houses, with tinny pop music playing and bright lights shining and the red, blue and yellow decor of fast-food restaurants and clowns; it smelled like sweat and dirty socks and off-gassing vinyl. For me there was nothing to like, for Lena there was everything. She’d put her shoes in a cubby before I finished paying and was off climbing, running between the machines, making friends: not two minutes had passed before she was holding hands with an older girl as they tumbled down a wide blue slide.
I sat self-consciously under the fluorescents on a sticky chair and waited, following Lena with my eyes as she pulled the older girl from one puffy structure to the next. I wondered if my face was clean but was too self-conscious to check it in the cell phone’s camera. I’d seen that a few times: people trying to look as though they were doing something else on their phones when it was clear from the angle of their head, sometimes a set of pursed lips or a hair toss, that they were studying their faces.
Then he got there, carrying a cardboard tray of drinks—a hot chocolate for Lena and a coffee for me, which he handed over without saying anything. There was a little milk in the fourth cup, he said, did I take my coffee with milk?
He brought with him a microclimate of calm. I was drawn to it, his warm calmness that set the stage for trust.
African ball-rolling dung beetles exploit the sun, the moon, and the celestial polarization pattern to move along straight paths, away from the intense competition at the dung pile . . . this finding represents the first convincing demonstration for the use of the starry sky for orientation in insects and provides the first documented use of the Milky Way for orientation in the animal kingdom. —Abstract, “Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation,” Dack, Baird et al., Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 4
I’VE DECIDED TO call Ned’s bluff, though I have no idea how he’ll react. I’m afraid, but I took a couple of Valiums, dredged up from the bottom of my cosmetics bag, and thought of how he’s never had a genuine wish to be in the same room with Lena. He’s never wanted to be near her, listen to her, keep her safe—never.