The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(56)

I hadn’t been there in years, but I knew which one he meant. “The stairs that lead nowhere.”

“Exactly. That’s what she said when she saw the video, and that the stairs to nowhere matched up nicely with ‘rise.’ I hadn’t even remembered how much she liked those stairs. I was only matching up the word to the escalator.”

“A happy coincidence.”

He shook his head. “Everything’s connected, Bex. Whether we understand it or not.” He drummed his thumbs against the steering wheel, tapping out a happy rhythm. “She asked about you.”

“She did?”

“I told her you helped me. I was worried it might upset her—that she might get jealous, or whatever. Change stresses her out, and Dr. Kapoor has been monitoring her since your visit. No—don’t be worried,” he said when I groaned. “It wouldn’t matter if it was you or someone else. Little things set her off, and she’s been juggling meds since the seizure. But it’s cool. She likes you.”

“I’m glad,” I said, and he grinned at me, squinting over the top of his sunglasses.

The address for the wood-carving shop was near the edge of UC Berkeley’s campus. Jack parked Ghost on a side street just off Telegraph Avenue, a few blocks away, and since we still had forty-five minutes to waste, we strolled past bookstores and cafés and herb shops until we found a curry place that had a bunch of vegetarian dishes, where we ate a quick lunch (validating our lie). At exactly one o’clock, I strode by a blonde in a green Jaguar who stared at me so hard I gave her a dirty look, and marched through a glass door into Telegraph Wood Studio.

True to its name, it smelled strongly of wood shavings. The front of the shop was cluttered with totem poles and carved fireplace mantels. Sculptures of dancing women. A solid-wood globe. Even a mermaid figurehead dove out of a wall, looking as if a ship might crash through behind it at any second. A long counter separated the front from the workshop, where multiple tables stretched around carving equipment and large pieces of furniture.

“Whoa,” Jack said in a low, reverent voice. “Check out the old cable-car replicas. They’re gorgeous.”

I looked at the handwritten price tag. “Fifteen hundred? That’s one hell of a toy train set.” And it wasn’t half as detailed as my artist’s mannequin, which lay at the bottom of my red bag. I didn’t think the guy who’d made it would need a reminder, but just in case …

A woman’s voice floated out from behind the counter. “Hello. Would you be Beatrix?”

Her gray hair was loosely clipped behind her head. Long strings of wooden beads dangled over a flowing caftan.

“Yes,” I said. “Are you Mary?”

She nodded. “And I have someone here who wanted to see you. I really hope you don’t mind the subterfuge too much.”

Before I could unravel what that meant, she gestured to someone behind a carved Japanese screen, and out stepped the man who’d ruined my family.

My father had changed his hair. Grown it out from his old, boring VP crew cut so that silver-streaked locks of brown now curled around the collar of his expensive sport coat. His face was a lot tanner than I remembered, and crow’s-feet now furrowed the outer corners of his eyes. But his wire-framed glasses were the same, and so was the way he stood: head high, chin up, back made of steel—and a look on his face like someone had just shoved a big, fat stick up his butt.

Yep. He’d looked at me exactly the same way the last time I’d seen him. When he’d told me that the separation had nothing to do with me, and that nothing would change between us.

The biggest lie of all.

“Beatrix,” he said in a low voice.

I couldn’t even answer him. I just turned and stormed out the door. “Please, take me home,” I managed to say to Jack, who stuck to me like a shadow while I started down the sidewalk. That stupid blonde in the Jaguar was still staring at us from the curb.

“Beatrix!”

My father had followed us outside, and he was angry now. Big surprise. I swung around so fast he had to jerk himself backward not to run into me. “How dare you,” I said to him.

“If she’d said I wanted to meet you, you wouldn’t have come.”

“No, probably not. But that’s my decision, not yours.”

“What could I do? Your mother wouldn’t let me see you.”

“So you sent me the artist’s mannequin to lure me here, like some creepy old man in a white van?”

His face looked pinched. “No, I sent it because I wanted to give you something that would make you happy. I knew you would like it.”

“Because you know me so well.”

The depressing thing was, he’d gotten it right. He, not Mom, was the one who’d actually sparked my interest in anatomy. When I was a kid, he had these big pull-down diagram charts of the human body hanging on the wall in the home office of our old house. The brightly colored muscles and organs were endlessly fascinating to my ten-year-old brain, and after school he’d spend hours answering all my questions about bones and arteries and blood. Of course, he didn’t know half of what Mom knew about anatomy, so when he didn’t know the answer, he’d make something silly up.

He’d always had a knack for lying.

I started to walk away again, but he held his hands out as if to show me he wasn’t armed.