Ian O’Donnell bent to open a small refrigerator near his desk. He pulled out a bottled water and twisted the cap. “I think you need this.”
She caught that bead of perspiration with a knuckle, then reached for the small bottle. As the cool liquid slipped down her throat, the craggy, cranky places in her smoothed and cooled.
Refreshed, she dropped the empty bottle into her bag. “Thank you.”
“It’s hot out there.” He leaned back in his high-backed chair. “So, Isabel leaving … Whenever we’re in a rough patch—if we’re arguing or her friends are being jerks or whatever—Iz—that’s what I call her—Iz just gets in her car and leaves. Since we’ve been together—it would’ve been a year on the fourth—she’s walked off about two or three times. She’s gone for a few days and then she comes back, ready to be a grown-up again.”
“Where does she usually go?”
“Palm Springs. Vegas once.”
Las Vegas used to be a great disappearing town, before the casino owners installed all those surveillance cameras, before sorority girls Snapped and Boomeranged and selfied, sometimes catching random, taggable folks in the background. It was damn near impossible to hide in Vegas now.
Gray asked, “Is it possible…”
No ink coming now from the nib of the borrowed pen.
She wanted the earth to gobble her up for good. Since the earth refused to move, she lifted the binder some, so that Ian O’Donnell couldn’t see that the words she wrote on her pad were now invisible. “Is it possible that Isabel just didn’t want to come back this last time?”
The doctor’s green eyes flared. “We have a future together. I’m a nice guy, and … and there’s her family. I don’t think she would’ve left them to get back at me. No way.
“She’s selfish, that’s her problem. Thinks only about herself, and part of me wants to…”
“Part of you wants to … what?”
He pinched his lip.
“You don’t think she wants to come back,” Gray said. “Why, then, does she need to be found?”
He turned a sad pink. “Because I want my dog.”
“Are there other folks I should talk to?”
Isabel’s parents, Joe and Rebekah Lawrence; her best friend, Tea Something; her coworkers Farrah, Beth, and Nan; and Pastor Bernard Dunlop.
“Oh,” the doctor added, “and one time, this guy Omar texted her while she was in the shower. I took down the number but never called it. Don’t know who the hell he is.”
“Did you read Omar’s text message?”
“Nope. Her phone was locked.”
“Could you send those numbers to…” Gray offered her new phone number, and Ian O’Donnell texted contact information for everyone except the Lawrences.
“I’ve never met her parents,” he said. “Tea’s been my go-between in this craziness.”
“When was the last time you talked to Tea?”
“I saw her about two weeks ago. She still hadn’t seen Iz.”
Gray held up the intake form. “On here you describe Isabel as being white. I’m looking at her and I’m … not seeing that. Which means that other people won’t see that, either.”
“She’s biracial. She prefers to check that box instead of the other box.”
“The … other box?”
Ian waved his hand. “I don’t see color. She’s human to me.”
Gray’s nerves jangled, and she was almost certain that her eyes had crossed.
He cocked an eyebrow. “What?”
Gray jammed her lips together.
“Iz and I … we’re post-racial, and really … Do you act this way with all of your clients?” He sighed at her just like the white boys she’d dated back when Public Enemy and Air Jordans had crossed color lines.
“What questions should I ask her to prove that she’s Isabel and that she’s okay?”
Ian O’Donnell rubbed his chin as he thought. “What was my first car? What was my first gift to her? And … what am I allergic to?”
Ian, Ian, Ian—even in Isabel’s proof of life.
“Did you and Isabel live together?” she asked.
“We were talking about her moving to my place, but we hadn’t done it yet.”
Probably because she smelled the crazy on him and didn’t want it to get into her favorite coat. Hard to get the stink of nuts out of wool. Gray had lost many a good outfit that way.
“I helped pay her rent, though,” he said. “Since her credit’s shot, I hold the lease.”
“Where does she live?”
“Some neighborhood. I don’t know. I don’t go over there a lot. Never went over there before we started dating.” He then recited Isabel’s address on Don Lorenzo Drive.
“That’s off Stocker Street,” Gray said. “In Baldwin Hills.”
“Sure. I don’t know that part of town.”
“Tina Turner had a home there. John Singleton, Tom Bradley, Ray Charles…”
“Wow,” he said, unimpressed. “Anyway, I can meet you there later today.”
“Awesome. So, where do you think she went? The desert or the Strip?”
He lowered his chin to gaze down at her. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be asking you for help, now would I?”
She thought of his single nice gesture toward her, the gift of water. One small bottle. Though she was fake smiling, she wanted to lunge across the desk and drive his cheap, dry pen through his golden cheek.
He frowned at her as though she were a child. “Her friends probably think I’ve done something to her. I haven’t touched her. I haven’t seen her, and I would never, ever hurt her. Like I said, I’m a nice guy. We’re a typical couple. Yes, I’d get mad. Yes, she’d get mad. I’d scream, she’d scream, we’d both scream.
“Our last argument, though? She told me that she hated me, that she’d kill me if she could get away with it, which was unbelievable. I know she didn’t mean it, but goddamn, it hurt, hearing that. And then, to take my dog on top of that?”
There was a knock on the door, and a cute blonde nurse with Michelle Pfeiffer eyes poked her head in to say, “We need you, Dr. O. It’s getting crazy out here.”
Ian O’Donnell offered Hot Nurse Pfeiffer a ready-made smile. “I’m almost done, Trin.”
A moment passed after the nurse had closed the door. Then Ian’s eyes and Gray’s eyes met—his now shimmered with tears while hers remained as dry and flat as all of Los Angeles. Those dry and flat eyes doubted that they were looking upon a man madly, deeply, truly in love.
Because weren’t men all madly, deeply, truly in love before they were no longer madly, deeply, truly in love—minutes before they shot up classrooms, sanctuaries, dental offices, or bedrooms? Boyfriends and husbands, baby daddies and one-night stands were always madly, deeply, truly in love. Bloody love. Crazy love. Love-you-to-death kind of love.
Gray was a skeptic, a cynic, an agnostic of love. She believed more in yetis, chemtrails, and human-meat restaurants than in that four-letter word. “Here’s your pen,” she said now, dropping the doctor’s nonworking writing utensil back into its cup.