reached behind him and switched off the reading lamp on his side of the headboard. “If you can come up with a better plan, great. But I’ll tell you, Dana, I’m through being the bad guy around here.”
He fell asleep immediately while Dana tossed for another half hour. Fighting did not seem to trouble David. It was, after all, what he did for a living. She hated it, felt torn apart, her insides twisted. One day she imagined her loyal and steady husband would say he could not take it anymore, drive away and leave her alone on a porch in the dark. Dana thought this way even though she knew no one was less like her mother than David.
The night Dana had been abandoned, her mother had probably been high on something. Dana remembered her taking speedboat turns in the old Chrysler, sometimes jerking the wheel so hard Dana flopped from side to side. No seat belt. She was five years old at the time and already the grown-up in the family. She remembered asking her mother to slow down. Swift as a snake, the back of her mother’s hand had swung off the steering wheel and slammed against Dana’s mouth. Her lip burst and bled down the front of the Dead Head T-shirt she wore. She had been quiet then, squeezed her eyes tight, hung on to the edge of the seat, and waited for whatever came next.
Five years old, wearing a T-shirt to her knees, standing on the porch of an old frame bungalow on a dark city street, a bulging duffel bag beside her. Dana still remembered her mother’s last words to her. “Ring the doorbell. Keep on until she lets you in. Tell her I can’t take it anymore.”
Chapter 7
Just before dawn Dana rose from bed, put on shorts and a hoodie, and ran the twelve blocks from Miranda Street to Goldfinch, passing unnoticed through safe and silent, sleeping Mission Hills, with its stately Spanish colonial residences, angular, Forties-style Hollywood mansions with carefully tended yards and pristine paths from sidewalk to door, and classic Craftsman homes built half of wood and half from river stones the size of footballs. A four-bedroom pale pink stucco Spanish colonial in Mission Hills proved how far Dana had come since that night on Imogene’s front porch. In these days of hugely inflated prices the home they could really afford would probably be three cramped bedrooms baking under a flat roof on a treeless street in El Cajon. Dana wondered if Frank Filmore and more of his kind were worth the neighborhood’s high price tag.
The spring night was clear and cool, and her nose tingled with the smell of jasmine and damp gardens. Overhead the sky glowed a yellow-gray from the reflected city lights. On Arboles she surprised three raccoons scrambling into a garbage can set on the street for morning pickup. They stared at her brazenly from behind their masks. A homeless person slept on the porch of the Avignon Shop. Embarrassed, Dana looked away too quickly to note if the figure was male or female. She thought of her mother and wondered what had happened to her. Margaret Bowen had been twenty-two the night she drove off.
Dana let herself into Arts and Letters and locked the door behind her. As she did she felt a jab of alarm between her ribs and turned around quickly, half expecting to see someone standing in the shadowy store; but of course there was no one there. There had never been a break-in on Goldfinch as far as Dana knew. Her knees were doughy with adrenaline as she felt her way upstairs and into the loft, where she turned on a small corner light and sat down.
She had just begun work on her doctorate in art history when a professor told her that Arts and Letters had the best collection of art books in San Diego County. Dana had seen the store dozens of times—it was in her neighborhood, across the street from Bella Luna, where she bought her coffee—but she had never done more than browse the best-sellers and deeply discounted remainders on the first floor. Once she saw the second-floor loft full of art books, she became an habitué; and two years ago Rochelle, the shop’s eccentric English owner, had given her a key and hired her to work a few hours every week.
She dug a dust cloth from its place lodged behind an ancient edition of Tansey’s book on the Sistine Chapel. Using a wooden step stool to reach the top of the six-foot shelves, she dusted the heavy books one by one as she reran her conversation last night with David. He was right. Bailey was not safe in school when there was someone out there making threats; keeping her home was the logical course. Thinking this, Dana felt trapped. And then ashamed. She did not want to be the kind of woman who felt trapped at the thought of spending more time with her child.
Margaret Bowen’s daughter.
Imogene Bowen’s granddaughter.
She lifted down and dusted a huge book of reproductions of works by Early Renaissance Italian painters. This was Dana’s period; and someday she would buy the eight-hundred-dollar book, but for now she was content just to look at it. She laid the heavy volume on the refectory table in the center of the loft. Turning on one of the brass table lamps, she bent its swivel neck so a band of yellow light fell on the pages. Then she turned to page four hundred and thirty-six, the Nerli Altarpiece.
Just six weeks earlier Dana had been in Florence doing research for her thesis. While she was there, Lexy’s brother, Micah Neuhaus, who had lived in Florence for more than ten years, had taken her to Spirito Santo to see the great painting.
In the immediate foreground pious-faced Nerli and his wife kneel in profile facing each other. The Virgin Mary sits between them with the baby Jesus, who is mischievously eyeing his cousin, John the Baptist. The gilded frame holds other figures, but what interested Dana in Early Renaissance paintings were the background scenes—in this case, a village street scene and a nobleman pictured embracing a younger woman in a doorway. Scholars had determined those figures were Nerli and his daughter. For Dana the detailed painting opened doors into a story of ordinary lives that had nothing to do with the sacred figures. It was the mysteries of the secular narrative present in many early Italian masterworks that captured her imagination as nothing else in art had.
She closed the book and rested her head on her hands. She had to find a way to do it all. Somehow. Rekindle the excitement about her thesis; be a better, more loving wife; homeschool Bailey. It will all work out, she told herself. There had to be a way to make it all happen. She tried to pray, but her thoughts had frozen solid. She wondered if it made any sense to ask the God of Year One for help in modern times. Faith and prayer must have been simpler for Tanai Nerli and his wife.
When she was young prayer had come as easily as speech, as automatically as a language she was programmed to speak. Her grandmother had made fun of her devotion, and once she even hid Dana’s good shoes on Sunday, but Dana went to church wearing rubber flip-flops. No one cared what she wore at Holy Family Episcopal—a royal name for a storefront church that housed, as well as Episcopalians, a congregation of Korean Methodists. In that shabby church she belonged not simply to the congregation—that was easy—but to something she felt in her bones but lacked the words to describe. Years later Lexy had helped her understand that what she’d felt was a hunger for transcendence. This soul-longing was a gift, Lexy said.
Dana lifted her head and listened. Someone was knocking on the door of Arts and Letters. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was not yet six A.M., much too early for Rochelle to appear, and anyway, she was the owner and had a key. Dana turned out the lights and sat still as the knocking continued. She heard a voice say her name.
“David?”
“It’s me, Micah.”
Her thoughts shut down.
“Let me in, Dana.”
If she ignored him, Micah Neuhaus would bang with his fists until the neighbors called the police. He would like nothing better than to make a public demonstration. But if she let him in . . . He was a python curled in the darkest corner of her life.
This was ridiculous. He was an adult human being, nothing like a snake. She did not know what he was doing outside Arts and Letters, but she could guess, and it would not do. He had to leave her alone. She stood up, rubbing her damp palms on her running shorts, beginning to feel angry. What was he doing in San Diego? He had no business intruding on her life this way, and she would tell him so, and he would hear the steel in her voice and know that she meant every word.
But her knees were jelly as she went downstairs and fumbled with the