Blood Orange. Drusilla Campbell
pink were her favorite colors, right? You told me that?”
Dana nodded. She blinked, and her eyelids ached.
“By next Sunday afternoon there’ll be thousands of these on car antennas from here to L.A. If I have to tie this ribbon around their throats, no one’s going to forget Bailey. I promise you that.” Beth seemed to read Dana’s mind. “I know they look trivial, kind of silly in a way, but they’re not. Our biggest challenge is to keep the public thinking about Bailey, watching for her.”
The first few weeks Dana had not been able to sleep but refused the sleeping pills the doctor prescribed, fearing that if she started taking them she would sink into oblivion. One night she dreamed of Bailey at the glass, Bailey knocking at the window crying “Mommy” and Dana too deeply asleep to notice. When Dana was five and her mother left her with her grandmother, she had for weeks slept sitting up and wearing shoes, terrified she might not hear the lugging idle of her mother’s old Chrysler New Yorker if it pulled up to the curb.
Beth was saying, “The worst thing that can happen, is if we let people forget—”
“Forget?”
“I don’t mean that you’d forget, Dana. Not you, not anyone who ever knew . . .” Beth stopped, looking stranded.
These days no one talked to Dana as if she were a normal person. They treated her like fragile goods, broken by a breath. And she had lost the gift of conversation. She imagined hostility and irritation all around her; her feelings were easily hurt, and she took offense even when she knew none was intended.
The door to the hall opened, and Lexy Neuhaus, the priest at St. Tom’s and Dana’s best friend, stepped into the room.
“Dana, I thought I’d find you here. I saw your car parked under the telephone line getting pooped on big time.”
Dana lifted her shoulders and let them drop. She hadn’t washed her car in three months.
“Can I steal her for a little while, Beth?”
“Go right ahead. I’m fine here. Jason and I have plenty to do.”
Lexy looked at the blue box from Bella Luna. “Do I see chocolate croissants?” She turned her head away, moaning. “Sometimes I think the whole course of history might have changed if Satan had offered Jesus a chocolate croissant.”
Chapter 2
Lexy held the door open, and Dana passed through, ahead of the priest but aware of the businesslike click of her high heels on the cement stairs as they both stepped into the bright September heat. Without speaking they walked across the tree-shaded parking lot separating the church from the remodeled single-story house of no distinction that held the church offices. Their feet crunched on the litter of curled oak leaves. Though the September days were still hot in San Diego, the nighttime temperatures had begun to drop into the sixties; and in front of the office the leaves on a pair of large liquidambar trees were changing from bright green to orange and glossy red. The shrubs and flowers had spent too many long, warm days madly manufacturing chlorophyll. In the planters lining the path the marigolds, zinnias, and pink cosmos nodded on their leggy stems and looked fevered, on the verge of breakdown, as exhausted as Dana.
In the heat Dana’s white polo shirt stuck to her back, and she felt dumpy beside Lexy, who always managed to look stylish in priestly garb and collar and ankle-breaking high heels. Like many at St. Tom’s, Dana had been confused and vaguely put out when the search committee called a redheaded former model, a divorced woman and recovering alcoholic, to replace St. Tom’s retiring priest. Some parishioners had drifted off to churches with more conventional clergy. Those who remained praised the wisdom of the search committee and fell in love with Lexy’s humor and plain speaking, the goodness she carried within her.
Before Bailey disappeared, Dana and Lexy had made progress in overcoming the inhibitions imposed by Lexy’s clerical collar. The first time they met for coffee at Bella Luna, Lexy had told her, “Hardly anyone speaks to me like a real human being anymore, and even my brothers have stopped giving me a bad time. They don’t know how much I long to be silly.” She was not a Bible-quoting priest. “I refuse to act like I’m holy. I’m as big a sinner as anyone.”
Gradually, Dana and Lexy had worked through their histories to what Dana thought of as the “deep stuff”: God and family and feelings, and though there was much she believed she would never talk about to Lexy or anyone, their friendship had been a revelation of freedom to Dana.
But Bailey’s disappearance had set a wall of awkwardness between them. Lexy was God’s representative at St. Tom’s, and Dana was angry with God.
Lexy’s office occupied what had once been the master bedroom of the bungalow. Across from a large corner window open to the street, a wall of bookcases was packed tight with books that Dana had at first assumed were seminary texts. Looking closer she saw Buddhist titles as well as psychology, biology, and physics, Sufi poetry, the enneagram, and even astrology.
“I don’t mean to be rude, Lexy, but can we cut to the chase here?” Dana perched on the edge of a worn leather couch. “I’ve got a lot to do today.”
Lying had always come easily.
Lexy sat behind her desk. “I’ve been missing you.”
Dana had not been in church the past two Sundays. If it weren’t for the Bailey Committee, she would have stopped attending altogether.
“I always like to watch you during my sermons. Your face is so responsive.”
“I’m not even sure what that means.” What she did understand was that Lexy wanted to control this conversation and move at her own pace. Short of walking out, Dana was stuck. She slipped down off the arm of the couch and onto a cracked, overstuffed cushion. She used to love this couch and the long talks with Lexy, both of them stretched out, their heads propped on the padded arms at either end. Lexy and David were the only people Dana had ever completely trusted.
Lexy said, “The first time I remember seeing you, you were wearing a green sweater—it must have been around Christmastime. . . . That would be right. It was the first Sunday of Advent, and I’d only been at St. Tom’s for a couple of weeks. Very insecure.”
Dana did not believe a woman six feet tall ever felt insecure.
“I talked about ‘keeping’ Advent, and you just sat there shaking your head.” Lexy’s laugh was deep-throated and hearty. She was the fifth child of six and the only girl. Dana imagined her learning to laugh with her brothers. “I thought about stopping right there and asking if you wanted to preach for me. Or we could do one of those point-counterpoint things like on TV.”
“You seemed so out of touch. How was I supposed to keep Bailey content with an Advent calendar and a wreath? The day after Thanksgiving she started nagging for a tree.” Dana strangled on the words.
“You took me on right after the service. You can be tough, Dana.” Lexy removed her plain gold earrings, hoops the size of quarters, and laid them on the blotter in front of her. She massaged her earlobes. “Like right now, what you want to do is punch me out.”
Dana smiled.
“Am I right?”
“Do you blame me?”
“You’re mad at God and that makes you mad at me. Yeah, I blame you. It’s not fair to me.” She played with the earrings. “I’m more than a priest, Dana. I’m your friend.”
Dana focused on the earrings—circles—and refused to be drawn in.
“I don’t think it matters to God that you don’t believe right now. I mean He’d probably rather you did, but under the circumstances . . .” Lexy tipped back. Over the years the back of her office chair had rubbed a raw swipe on the woodwork behind her desk. “Dana, humans are the ones who want our faith to hold steady under all conditions. And I don’t think it’s about God most of the time. I think we want a steady faith because