Free Gaits of Heaven by Susan Conant Page B

accidental overdose, Eumie could be frivolous and silly, but she wasn’t stupid. At one time or another, she took practically every prescription drug in existence, and so did Ted. Pills, capsules, liquid. And they shared. She talked about it all the time. But she was more careful than you’d expect. And lots of people had things against her. Wyeth hated her. So did his mother, Ted’s ex-wife. And she collected people’s secrets. Her patients’ secrets. Everyone’s. And in case you wondered, the house is practically never locked. The door on the side of the house, the one to Ted and Eumie’s waiting room, is almost always unlocked. We moved from the city four years ago. They thought Cambridge was safe.”
    “New York City,” I translated.
    “But they were wrong,” Caprice said. “They couldn’t have been more wrong.”

CHAPTER 8

    As I see her in my mind’s eye, Anita Fairley sits at the desk in her room at CHIRP, the Center for Healing, Individuation, Recovery, and Peace. The room is all polished wood and natural fabrics. Its windows overlook fields and woods. The desk is bare except for Anita’s notebook computer, a telephone, a sheet of paper with a rather long list of handwritten names, a box of thick cream-colored notepaper, and a Montblanc pen with blue ink. The notepaper and the blue ink are not figments of my imagination; they are facts. Anita, too, is a fact, as is her appearance: her long blond hair, her lovely features, her slimness, and the hauteur of her expression. She is wearing new and expensive clothes appropriate to the occasion and the setting. She always does; therefore she does so now. Consequently, I see her in a designer version of the loose, comfortable clothing invariably recommended for yoga and meditation classes. Although the diagnosis of global chemical sensitivity is now passé, having been replaced by unfortunate systemic reactions to mold, I see Anita in unbleached and thus off-white cotton: a loose long-sleeved top and drawstring pants that fall in flattering drapes.
    Online, she looks up my address and makes a face. Still, she selects an envelope, addresses it to me, and, on one of the thick sheets of notepaper, pens a few sentences of apology for the pain she has caused. She is tempted to sign herself Anita Fairley-Delaney but reluctantly settles for Anita Fairley. Why the hell do there have to be twelve steps? she wonders. Eleven would more than suffice.

CHAPTER 9

    “You haven’t been married all that long,” Caprice said. “Your husband probably won’t want some stranger here.”
    We were drinking tea at my kitchen table. Steve’s and mine. Our kitchen table, which I’d set with mugs, spoons, a saucer of lemon slices, and, after some internal debate, a bowl of sugar and a pitcher of whole milk. No one in the house drank low-fat milk, so I’d had none to offer, and although there was cream in the refrigerator, I couldn’t bring myself to put it out. Anyway, the collectively owned object that was embarrassing the hell out of me wasn’t the table but the jacket of the book Steve and I had written together. The book itself wasn’t due out until October, but our editor had sent us a solicitation cover, as such a thing is called, the book jacket with no book inside. Delighted with this preview of our work, we’d pinned it on the bulletin board in the kitchen, where it now seemed to me to have grown to poster size and practically to thrust itself in Caprice’s face—with special attention to disfiguring pouches of fat. The jacket art was in the style of Marcel Duchamp and consisted of a series of drawings that depicted the transformation of the obese dog on the left to the lean one on the right. The title was No More Fat Dogs . Professional dog writer that I am, I’d tried to inveigle Steve into selecting a cutesy, if derivative, title such as Dr. Doggie’s Diet Revolution or even The South Bitch Diet Book , but in his amateur fashion, he’d insisted that the