Dani said, “I’ll take the body down to the vet today. Okay? I’ll go over and get him. It’s my off day.” She’d just worked four twelve-hour shifts back to back. She yawned and opened the morning’s paper.
“Never mind. I’ll do it. I’ll be home tomorrow. Hugh’s staying longer with Dr. Steve.” She sighed. “Oh, Dani,” she said, but what Dani heard was this: I thought you were getting your act together. I don’t know what I did to deserve this.
Dani stared down at the newspaper. “Oh my god. Mom—”
But her mother had hung up. Dani kept talking to the dial tone. “They found Jess Winters. Or they think it might be her.” The phone line started bleating. She clicked it off.
Dani smoothed the newspaper page. She got the scissors and cut out the article. She pressed her finger on the photo—that same old photo of Jess with curly brown hair and eyes lined with kohl. Dani could feel the metal heat of a Bic lighter on her thumb, the hot eyeliner thickening along the tops of her lids, Jess’s breath on her face: Don’t blink. Dani let the scrap of paper flutter to the coffee table.
Before she went to get the dog out of the freezer, Dani walked to the college to water the plants in her mother’s office, which she had promised but forgotten to do, and then to the District to get a coffee at Alligator Juniper. She had moved from an apartment near the medical clinic into a studio guest house next to the college. She rented the place from Esther Genoways, her high school Humanities teacher, who had quit teaching a couple years ago to open Yum Bakery. “It’s just Esther now, honey,” she said, but Dani still thought of her as Ms. G. The guest house was tiny but clean and private, tucked under a large shady sycamore with a stone path and picket gate. For years Mr. Manning, her high school history teacher, had lived in it, but a few months ago he’d married his partner and moved to San Francisco. Dani didn’t know if she’d call it home, but it was the first place she could see herself staying for more than six months or a year. She might even buy a frame for her mattress and box spring. The weather had cooled from last week’s heat wave, and blooming milkweed, phlox, and globe mallow flung bright color along the street. Dry stalks of grass in the cracks of the pavement crunched under her shoes. A phrase began to loop in her mind, something she’d overheard years ago when she’d walked past some girls skipping rope in a driveway: One, two, Jess is coming for you, three, four, she’s at your door. She said it now under her breath, a cadence, as she stepped over the cracks.
Most of the Syc students were gone for the summer, so the brick paths were open, the buildings cool and quiet. The theater building had a familiar smell of paint and sawdust and air-duct dust. Her mother’s office: Prof. Rachel Fischer (formerly Fischer-Newell). Photo stills from New York stage shows she’d written or acted in and Playbill covers lined the walls. On the desk was a small framed picture of Dani at about age ten, standing on the front porch, her arms stiff at her sides. Back when Dani still had potential. The shadow of the photographer showed on the steps—had it been her mother? Or her father? As Dani poured water on a drooping philodendron, she argued with the imagined voice of her mother in her head. She was getting her act together. Yes, she had barely squeaked out a college degree after ten years in and out of school, and no, she never made it to med school, but she was a good phlebotomist, at the medical clinic for two years now. Her slim, tapered fingers—a surgeon’s hands, her mother used to say—handled needles like a dream. Though her coworkers were standoffish—she’d hear them talk about her, calling her Miss Stick-Up-Her-Ass and Ice Queen—she got high marks on her employee evaluations. Good rapport with patients. Natural acuity for venipuncture. It was true: she could manage the difficult sticks, the ones whose veins kept sinking and sliding, the dehydrated elderly folks, the fainters and thrashers. She could even handle Jess’s mother, Maud, coming in. Look to the side of her face. Push down the swell of emotion. It wasn’t heartless to be good at her job, to keep a professional distance. To tell them matter-of-factly, “Hold still. Now this is going to sting,” unlike the others who cooed and patted shoulders and called patients “baby.” With the Captain, she’d acted with clinical instinct: Dead dog on kitchen floor. Hot. Preserve the body.
She was about to walk inside the coffee shop when she spied Paul Overton through the window. She backpedaled and pressed herself against the wall of the building, holding her breath. She knew from her mom that his wife had recently died of breast cancer, but she’d found out he was home with his little boy from Luz Navarro, who’d told Dani yesterday when she delivered the mail. Luz wasn’t clear whether he had moved home for good. As Luz handed Dani her mail, she said, “Isn’t it so sad?” and, “Hijole, time flies, huh?” Dani had nodded, but she thought now that time wasn’t so much flying as disintegrating. That was another life ago, and she had spent so long trying not to think of it that when she did, it was as if her mental screen was smeared with thumbprints. Moments fractured into shards of color and smell and sound she strung together like a sad, crooked garland.
She moved behind the building and waited, peeking around the corner until Paul came out, coffee and keys in hand. There he was: still tall and lean with his round moon face, but all his black woolly hair was gone, shaved right off, making his ears look even larger—in the sunlight, the tips seemed to glow red. Even after all this time, she could feel the tension in her body, as if she had absorbed it into her cells. She’d dated other men over the years, had even joined an online site to meet people outside of town, but nothing stuck for more than a few months. No one worth letting in. She gathered the bottom of her T-shirt and wrung it like a washcloth. Paul Overton, her first love, the honest boy who had pulled the pin on her family’s live grenade.
Dazed and jittery, Dani walked to her mother’s house, her childhood home. Five, six, she’s gonna slit your wrists, seven, eight, lock the gate. At her mother’s house, she picked up the newspaper from the driveway, climbed the porch steps, and peered in the side window. Like going back in time, except most of the furniture from her first seventeen years was gone, sold or given away or stuffed in the storage unit, all but the refinished dining table and reupholstered blue recliners. Hugh had contributed a large leather sofa, glass-fronted bookcases, and some colorful rugs. Dani braced herself as she cracked the door, forgetting that the Captain wouldn’t come lunging at her.