Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

her, I sat there biting my lip until I tasted blood.
    “It took courage for you to be able to say what you did. A lot of courage,” I finally said. “This should help me find out what we need to know.”
    “Do you really think so?”
    I nodded.
    I followed her back to the gate where her groceries and shoes sat.
    “ ‘Why did she want to go over there to live with those goddamn Communists?’ he asked me a few days ago. ‘ To ride a bicycle to work. Here she could have had a car. I would have bought her a car. She knew that. I would have given her anything she wanted.’ ”
    When she handed me back my shoes, I put my arms around her.
    “I’ll call you as soon as I can,” I said.
    She nodded, picked up the groceries, and headed toward home.
    When I turned around, Dashiell was pleading with his eyes. I waited until Marsha was crossing the street, then, leaving my shoes and socks near the gate, I headed slowly down the beach, toward the surf. We headed back to the point, where the bay flows into the ocean and where you can see the Verrazano Bridge looming over the narrows, connecting Brooklyn to the once isolated Staten Island .
    I stopped and picked up a short, fat driftwood log, which I swung back behind me and let fly into the ocean. Dashiell dove into the chilly water, all his attention on the task at hand.
    I sat where the sand was hard but not wet, rubbing my hand on the cold sand and feeling it adhere to my skin. It’s not only at a crime scene that we leave something and take something away. I had come here with Lillian and Ceil after my mother had died, to scatter her ashes in the ocean.
    “She always wanted to travel,” Ceil said as the ashes arced gracefully across the surface of the water. “But with two young children and no money, you can’t go far. Then with your father dying so young, poor man, only fifty-two, where would she go by herself? And then,” Ceil sighed, “the cancer. So she traveled to the hospital and back. And now here.”
    I picked up a broken shell and began to write in the sand.
    I’m sorry. Lisa.
    “The same, the same,” Rabbi Zuckerman had said.
    I wished he hadn’t. I wished I had been able to tell the mother that her daughter hadn’t written the note. One way or another, I was always wishing for things to be different, the way I had wished last night, first in the park, next in Lisa’s bed, that the beautiful young man at my side were not connected to a criminal case.
    But he was. He was right in the middle of it.
    Last night, sitting on Lisa’s couch, my fingers trembling, my mother’s soft velvet shawl wrapped around me, I had opened the envelope I’d slipped out of Paul’s pocket. There, with the ticket, I’d found the list of immunizations required for bringing a dog into China . Lisa hadn’t abandoned Ch’an . She had planned to take her along.
    I thought about Beatrice again, the way her ashes hadn’t floated out to sea, as we foolishly thought they would, but had come right back to shore with the next wave. We could see them lying still and sodden on the wet sand in front of our feet. I hadn’t known there were so many shades of gray. Lillian, ever the hostess, had brought a bottle of wine to the beach, and plastic cups.
    “To Mom,” she said, lifting her cup and draining it.
    “To Beatrice,” Ceil and I said as one, and we drank our wine and thought our private thoughts.
    I hadn’t made peace with my mother before she’d died. Now it was too late. I’d left her remains here, but I hadn’t left the bitterness I’d felt, nor the sadness. Those I had carried away with me. Those I still held on to.
    For a while I just sat there, looking out over the ocean, toward the horizon. Then, scratching at the hard sand with my broken piece of shell, I began to dig a little hole, watching it fill with water from beneath. When Lili and I would dig in the sand, back when we were kids, Beatrice would poke my father to get his attention. Look, Abe, she’d tell him, they’re digging to China .
    I called Dash, dried his ears carefully on the end of my shirt, and following the lacy footprints of the gulls along the shore, we headed back to the car.

21

I Thought I Spotted a Sadistic Gleam in Her Eye

    ON MY WAY to the gym to see Janet, I stopped at Lisa’s. When I had gone through her drawers and her closet, I had noticed a Lycra bodysuit, like Janet’s, and a pair of cross-trainers. Leaving Dashiell there because the gym with all those machines moving