Yours, Mine, and Ours Page 17

  I had left. Olive saw; Patrick, too busy bleating at his hands at whatever dreadful thing he thought he did, did not.

  chapter fifty-six

  Shiro can’t come to the phone right now Shiro is crying

  Shiro NEVER CRIES Shiro never what did you DO? What did you do with the geese what did you do with the Shiro

  Don’t! Don’t! you are a

  BAD Baker Boy you turned

  Turned the wheel

  The wheels on the bus

  The wheels on the bus go

  Poor Shi-ro

  Poor Shi-ro

  Poor Shi-ro

  Shiro we should fly

  Shiro Dr. Max will teach you to fly

  And you won’t cry anymore anymore you can’t cry and fly

  The wheels on the bus go

  Poor puppy! Looklook! She’s happy she’s happy to see me she KNOWS me she knows I’ll never I’ll

  never

  let her get hurt

  she knows I

  she knows me

  puppy is George

  I will hug her and pet her and call her George

  No one gets hurt no one hurts or gets hurt and I promised and George

  George loves me and I

  love Shiro and she never cries she never and she never hides so why is she doing things why is NEVER not true anymore?

  It’s YOUR fault, Baker Boy!

  Dr. Max would never bake!

  You shouldn’t have

  Baker Boy

  But you did

  And now I have to now I must now you are dead now you are because I will I will

  I will!

  I can’t.

  I can’t hurt you, Baker Boy, I can’t hurt you

  am I broken, too?

  You need to go away, Baker Boy! You need to go away before I remember

  how to hurt you because I can

  You know I can

  You know I will

  (I won’t!)

  Am I crying?

  Am I crying with Shiro in the dark?

  Don’t cry don’t cry see? I’ve come

  To keep you company

  We’ll hide

  (no not hide we are not hiding we are NOT HIDING)

  NOT NOT!

  We’ll hide here

  Until you feel better.

  Poor Shiro

  Shhhhhhh …

  chapter fifty-seven

  The bell woke me. I was in my own bed and … naked? I flipped up the sheets and peeked. Yup. Naked. But no tattoos, no bruises, no casts, no Ace bandages. No body glitter … gah, I was so happy when that silly shiny trend died out. No henna … but to be fair, the henna designs on my hands those other times were actually pretty cool. They were so intricate and gorgeous, and lasted for days and days. Still, they were my hands, darnitall. It would have been nice to have been asked.

  No temp tattoos, no treasure map scribbled upside down on my belly so I could read it while looking down at myself (Adrienne’s logic can be … convoluted). No mysterious Japanese characters on the underside of my arms. No piercings, no sunburn, no frostbite. Annnnnd … I felt my face. The mirror was in the bathroom, but it didn’t feel like I’d had my face painted.

  Nope, I was fine. The tinkling of a bell, that’s what woke me up. I tossed the covers back, pulled the top quilt off the bed and wrapped it around myself, plucked my cell phone off the bedside table, then followed the tinkle.

  Dawg was sitting in front of the sliding door. A bell on a string had been tied to the door handle; it was still swaying. The bell had been hung so it was level with her nose; she poked it again, then heard me and trotted over, wagging her tail.

  “Does that … you want to go out?” Dawg had a red collar, I saw, and was looking sleeker than usual. No, not sleek … clean! She’d been thoroughly washed and brushed, and smelled terrific.

  I knelt to pet her and … whoa! “What have you been eating?” Her little belly was practically distended, and she was more alert and bright-eyed than I’d ever seen her. Full of dog food and treats, I was betting. For the first time in her life she was getting fed more than what a turd-faced poopie-brain remembered to toss her way.

  I popped the lock on the door, then on the screen door, and slid them both open. Then gasped … aaggh! Still December. Dawg trotted out, headed straight for a small grove of trees twenty or so feet away, squatted to do her business, then came trotting back. Which was great, because too late, I’d realized I didn’t have her on a leash and she might run off without one.

  No one ever came back here … when there was snow it was unshoveled and depressing. When there was grass, it teemed with wood ticks.

  Bemused, I shut and locked the door after Dawg finished and docilely came inside. While she was doing her business I’d taken a quick-and-dirty look around the place. There weren’t any clandestine poops, or mysterious wet spots on the carpet.

  And Dawg had accumulated a lot of stuff in my absence. There were a couple of dog toys in the living room, a leash hanging up beside the coat closet in the entryway, a food and water dish just inside the kitchen … and that was just the stuff I’d spotted in a glance.

  “Wow,” I told her, stooping to pet her sleek (and clean) head. Dawg nuzzled my palm and then frisked around my bare legs. “You caught on really…” Fast. Yeah. She had. But maybe not. How long had I been gone?

  I looked at my phone, afraid. One push of a button and I’d know the date and time. And that wasn’t all. Shiro had loaded all sorts of helpful apps into the thing (I mostly used it for calls and feeding koi).

  If I hit the right buttons, I could also find out where I was in location to BOFFO’s office—imagine my surprise once to wake up with the Mississippi River on the wrong side, until the app told me where I was. And that wasn’t much of a complication compared to waking up with the ocean on the wrong side.

  I could also find out what the weather was like (which always seemed like an “oh, duh!” move, but a weather forecast could be surprisingly helpful) and what it would be like for the next few days.

  My phone would also assist me in finding the closest drugstore, grocery store, post office, hospital, car rental, airport, gas station, and bar. Or spit out voice memos from Shiro (“Do not be alarmed, but you are in South Vietnam and you have promised to marry the man who is trying to kill you in an honor duel. Also we are low on milk.”) or Adrienne (“Duck duck gray duck! Duck duck gray shotgun! Oooooh, the shotgun! Shiny. Where’s the milk?”).

  I could also track flights, Google the Earth with Google Earth, translate languages (my Spanish was workable, my German only fair, my French nonexistent, my Arabic was a joke), and … eh?

  I squinted and saw a brand-new app; it hadn’t been on my phone the last time I looked. It was a white cross against a red background: Dog First Aid. “Wow,” I said to Dawg. “Shiro’s not taking any chances with you.”

  All this to say Shiro had gone to a lot of trouble to make our cell phone more than just a phone, stuffing it with apps that would help us when we woke up on a strange continent.

  I had been so grateful to her for that. And so angry it needed to be done at all. Cadence Jones: when she’s annoyed, she’s annoyed. And when she’s grateful, she’s annoyed.

  I should nip this referring to myself in the third person thing in the bud, now. And stop asking myself questions when I say, do you know what I mean? Now.

  I took a breath and pushed the button. December 6th, 9:00 A.M. So, one day. One whole day. Gone.

  I trudged back to my bedroom, tossing the blanket on the bed and pulling open drawers so I could get dressed. I don’t know why the date bothered me. Sure, I’d lost a day, but there had been times I’d lost days, even weeks. Once I was gone for two months.

  Imagine: in my head, it was still hot-dogs-on-the-grill time when I went to bed, but when I woke up it was twenty degrees cooler, the trees were riots of red, orange, and yellow, and everywhere I went there were school buses full of children annoyed summer had gone so qu
ickly. Oh, children, I can absolutely feel your pain.

  I’d gone to bed wondering if the humidity was ever going to let up—the shortest of shorts still felt like overdressing—and woke up needing a sweatshirt just to walk from my building to my car.

  That had been a lot worse. Much, much worse than one lousy day.

  Telling myself that wasn’t helping. I sighed and renewed my lethargic closet poking. This? I didn’t want to wear a skirt to work. This? No, not even a super-cute skirt. Okay, how ’bout this? No, I’d bought the khaki slacks because I’d loved how they looked on the mannequin and refused to admit the slacks made my waist disappear. No matter what top I wore, be it blouse or sweater or crisp T-shirt with blazer, I looked like God had finished my legs and just dumped my head on top of my thighs as an afterthought. The stupid things had been too expensive for me to feel good about packing them off to Goodwill. Of course, I wouldn’t wear them, either, so they just sat in my closet.

  My phone began playing Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” Adrienne had changed my ringtone again. I made up my mind to suck it up; the last time she’d done it, she’d replaced Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died”—the most wonderful romantic scary song ever—with some dreck by Maroon 5. That’s insanity.

  Ah! It was Cathie. She’d cheer me up. She probably had some zany adventure of her own—a painting she couldn’t finish so she drenched it in orange juice, maybe, or another gallery owner wanting “this one and this one, and can you do seven more just like that one?”

  “Hey, Cath. So you know those khaki pants I—”

  “Why is my brother in jail?”

  “—hate,” I finished, so astonished I almost dropped the phone. “What? Patrick’s in jail? What?”

  “Yes! Jail! And he won’t say anything and the cops won’t say anything and are you going to fix this or am I going to use your eyeballs to hold my brushes?”

  “Really, the whole thing sounds very bad.” My brain kept trying to grasp the concept. And the concept kept refusing to be grasped. Every time I thought I had a handle on it, it just slid away. “Cathie, tell me everything you know.”

  “He’s in jail.”

  I was hopping through my bedroom—which Dawg thought was a wonderful game—pulling on slacks I hated and trying to hold the phone with my chin and ear. That never worked with these skinny cell phones, but old habits died etcetera.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Michaela called and told me!”

  “What … Michaela?” In my horror, I nearly dropped the phone. “My boss, Michaela? That Michaela?”

  “Yes! I guess he called her, and asked her to call me to tell me not to come—you believe it? She was his one phone call. He could have hired the best lawyer in the tristate area, but he used his call to tell her to tell me not to help him.”

  “But of course you ignored that.”

  “Duh, Cadence.”

  Charming. I could almost see Shiro, smiling sardonically. She frantically calls you for help, and gives you “Duh, Cadence”? So gracious.

  I shoved the thought (almost a vision, I guess you could call it) away.

  “But the slippery son of a bitch wouldn’t tell me which jail,” she was saying. “Which in the Cities … you know.”

  I did know. There were a number of counties in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. The largest was Hennepin, which was home to over a million people. That was one, in one city. There were many more just within Minneapolis, never mind St. Paul and the surrounding towns and cities.

  I didn’t even know where Patrick had been arrested … well, when we got right down to it I didn’t even know why he’d been arrested, or what he’d done, but those were secondary considerations. If he’d been arrested in Burnsville or St. Paul or Minneapolis or Lilydale … There were different counties, procedures, and yes, jails, for each. A fed didn’t have a lot of pull with the locals. Resentment was too easily stirred up.

  “—so I didn’t even know where to go, never mind what I could—”

  Hop, hop. Make reassuring grunt into phone. Shoo Dawg away from shoes. Lose balance; crash heavily into carpeted bedroom floor. “Nnnnfff! Ow.”

  “—could be any one of ten courthouses—Cadence!”

  “I’m here, I’m here, did he say anything about an arraignment or … come back! I need that, Dawg!”

  “You need that dog? What dog? Can you even have dogs in your—fuck it, I don’t want to know. Dammit, are you even listening to me? My brother has been caged like a rabid skunk, and my best friend appears somewhat distracted! More so than usual!”

  “Cathie, I’m sorry, it’s just—it’s just a crazy time right now.” Understatement. “I’m taking this seriously, I promise.”

  “Okay, granted, you usually have about eight hundred crises to deal with at a given time, but I’m calling in the best-friend marker. That’s gotta count for something, Cadence, so it’s on the table today. I am cashing the best-friend chip!” Please don’t cash it. Please don’t cash it. Put it back in your purse for another day. “Just this once, my brother and I have to be the crisis that you put above all your other weird crises this one time.”

  I’d run after Dawg, realizing I was rewarding an overgrown puppy for undesirable behavior, but too short on time and too frazzled to care. I managed to corner her and get the other half of my pair of black flats away from her. Damp, but not chewed. Excellent. Uh, relatively speaking.

  “Yep, yep,” I was saying, though I’d only caught the end of her rant. “I’ll get—” My phone beeped; another call. I took a peek … drat it to heck and back! “Oh, Fraggle Rock! That’s Michaela.”

  “No you don’t, Cadence Jones, we are your crisis du jour, we just established that, so you can’t—”

  “Cathie, she’ll have news about Patrick. Whatever it is, I promise, I’ll fix it. I promise. Hon, I’m sorry, I have to go, somebody might be dead.”

  “Somebody always is!”

  That was true enough. Cringing, I disconnected her. Ohhhh, I was going to pay for that. And pay and pay and pay. And then pay some more.

  The last time I’d incurred such Cathie-wrath, she’d painted my front door lime green with wide pastel blue stripes. The colors weren’t just awful to look at; people would actually stay away from my door altogether so they didn’t have to deal with the sensory input. And that had been over a disagreement about whether or not Van Gogh cut off part of his earlobe for love, or insanity. It wasn’t over an incarcerated family member, for gosh’s fargin’ slimy smelly sakes!

  “Michaela?”

  “We’ve got a break. Get here.”

  “I—”

  What? What could I tell her? That I had no idea what had happened, not just with Patrick but with JBJ? That I’d been out of the picture a whole day and had only been back five minutes and oh, by the way, I have a dog now?

  And lest we forget: for some reason my boyfriend had been arrested, which Michaela knew all about? Ah, yes, I’m sure those facts had nothing at all to do with one another.

  How to tell my boss, a woman who frequently waded hip-deep into bureaucratic trouble to keep me licensed/employed/sane that whatever the break was, I cared more about finding and helping Patrick than I did about … well … anything else right now?

  Did that make me a good girlfriend, but a bad agent?

  And would going to Michaela right now make me a good agent, but a bad girlfriend?

  Max Gallo wouldn’t get you in this kind of jam. He’d solve his own problems. Anyone with eyes like his knows all about holding cells.

  And just where had that come from? Of all the things not to be wondering about right now, Max Gallo’s thousand-yard stare was number one on the list.

  Honestly, I had a question that wasn’t rhetorical: How do people who aren’t medicated and/or under psychiatric care handle these day-to-day stressors? Because I really wanted to know!

  I knew what it felt like to have a psyche pulling me in different directions
. To feel mad or glad or sad, but also know that another part of me felt happy or depressed or euphoric about the very same thing.

  It was strange but also a known quantity. It was dizzying but familiar, like when you hit the roller coaster when the state fair came to town. You knew it’d leave you with an upset stomach for a good hour, but to not ride it was unthinkable.

  I’d never known what it was like to have my heart torn—shredded—in multiple directions. Not since the day my mother killed my father and I’d split from one to three. For the first time, I truly understood on an emotional level, not just an intellectual one, what a coping process that had been. My brain had tried to protect itself from shattering into a thousand pieces by forcing controlled splitting into three.

  Like the man said, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  I couldn’t help but notice, though, that no matter how frazzled and freaked and stressed I got, Shiro wasn’t stepping up to help me. Progress? Or a strike? The more tense I got, the more I half expected to wake up and find it was a day later. But I was still here.

  That was what a nightmare my day-to-day existence had become: when I was disappointed not to be yanked out of the control room of my own body.

  To know that the part of me that lived for solving puzzles and catching bad guys could demand as much of my heart as the part that wanted to drop everything and go to Patrick right now—that was something new and terrible and wonderful.

  And Dr. Gallo? Dr. Max Gallo? A mere acquaintance and, worse, the family member of a victim. A man I should think of in purely professional terms … and I never had. Not once.

  I guess you could say I was having a mental split decision. (Perhaps several.)

  “Hmm, well, Dan, I guess the judges are putting their heads together to see if … nope, no one’s backing off of this one, Dan! We’ve got a winner, and one of the judges is not happy about it!”

  Yeah, well. I knew how he felt.

  chapter fifty-eight

  “I gotta give it to that twitchy son of a bitch,” was how George greeted me. “He knows his shit.”