Dark Rivers of the Heart

wasn't a good prospect for adoption. They told me when a dog's as emotionally crippled as he was, it's usually best not even to try to place him, just put him to sleep."
        Still watching the dog as he watched her, Rosie asked, "What happened to him?"
        "I didn't ask. Didn't want to know. There are too many things in life I wish I'd never learned… 'cause now I can't forget."
        The woman looked away from the dog and met Spencer's eyes.
        He said, "Ignorance isn't bliss, but sometimes…"
        "… ignorance makes it possible for us to sleep at night," she finished.
        She was in her late twenties, perhaps thirty. She had been well out of infancy when bombs and nfire shattered the Asian day when Saigon fell, when conquering soldiers seized the spoils of war in drunken celebration, when the reeducation camps opened. Maybe as old as eight or nine. Pretty even then: silky black hair, enormous eyes. And far too old for the memories of those terrors ever to fade, as did the forgotten pain of birth and the night fears of the crib.
        Last evening at The Red Door, when Rosie had said that Valerie Keene's past was full of suffering, she hadn't merely been guessing or expressing an intuition. She had meant that she'd seen a torment in Valerie that was akin to her own pain.
        Spencer looked away from her and stared at the combers that broke gently on the shore. They cast an ever changing lacework of foam across the sand.
        "Anyway," he said, "if you ignore Rocky, he might come around.
        Probably not. But he might."
        He shifted his gaze to the red kite. It bobbed and darted on rising thermals, high in the blue sky.
        "Why do you want to help Val?" she asked finally.
        "Because she's in trouble. And like you said yourself last night, she's special."
        "You like her."
        "Yes. No. Well, not in the way you mean."
        "In what way, then?" Rosie asked.
        Spencer couldn't explain what he couldn't understand.
        He looked down from the red kite but not at the woman. Rocky was creeping past the far end of the bench, watching Rosie intently as she studiously ignored him. The dog was keeping well out of her reach in case she suddenly turned and snatched at him.
        "Why do you want to help her?" Rosie pressed.
        The dog was close enough to hear him.
        Never lie to the dog.
        As he had admitted in the truck last night, Spencer said, "Because I want to find a life."
        "And you think you can find it by helping her?"
        "Yes."
        "How?"
        "I don't know."
        The dog crept out of sight, circling the bench behind them.
        Rosie said, "You think she's part of this life you're looking for.
        But what if she isn't?"
        He stared at the roller skaters on the promenade. They were gliding away from him, as if they were gossamer people blown by the wind, gliding, glidin away.
        At last he said, "Then I'll be no worse off than I am now."
        "And her?"
        "I don't want anything from her that she doesn't want to give."
        After a silence, she said, "You're a strange one, Spencer."
        "I know."
        "Very strange. Are you also special?"
        "Me? No."
        "Special like Valerie?"
        "No."
        "She deserves special."
        "I'm not."
        He heard stealthy sounds behind them, and he knew the dog was squirming on its belly, under the bench on the other side of the picnic table, under the table itself, trying to get closer to the woman, the better to detect and ponder her scent.
        "She did talk to you quite a while Tuesday night," Rosie said.
        He said nothing, letting her make up her mind about him.
        "And I saw… a couple of times… you made her laugh."
        He waited.
        "Okay," Rosie said, "since Mr. Lee called, I've been trying to remember anything Val said that might help you find her. But there's not much.
        We liked each other right off, we got close pretty quickly. But mostly we just talked about work, about movies and books, about stuff in the news and things now, not about things in the past."
        "Where'd she live before she moved to Santa Monica?"
        "She never said."
        "You didn't ask? You think it might've been somewhere around Los Angeles?"
        "No. She wasn't familiar with the city."
        "She ever mention where she was born,