Twenty-Three

Stephanie Jacobs phoned me well after dinner that night, and I had to avoid the rueful gaze of my wife as I sat and took the call at my desk. Abigail Stein is not to be trifled with. And even though I wasn’t trifling with her, she was looking at me as if I were.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner,” Steph said. “I’ve been all over the place. First, there was Louis’ mother, and then. . .”

“Listen,” I said more urgently than necessary. “I talked to the D.C. cops. They’re planning on making an arrest in Legs’ murder, soon.”

“I know,” she said. “They’re going to arrest me.”

Leah and Ethan were engaging in the traditional “whose-side-of-the-couch-this-is” argument, and I stared at them for a long moment, digesting what Stephanie had just said.

“You know they’re going to arrest you?” I said.

“Yes. You know, I hear things, too.” She sounded a bit miffed that I assumed I was the only one monitoring her arrest status.

“You sound awfully calm about it,” I said. She was taking a good deal of the fun out of it for me, and I must have sounded disappointed.

“I suppose I could panic,” she said, “but I don’t see how that would help. Besides, my attorney is already taking their case apart, and he says he might be able to stop this before it happens.”

“That would be a first.”

“Aaron, I’ve set up a time you can talk to Louis’ mother, but his brother Lester wants to be there,” Stephanie said, her change in tone not nearly as smooth as Abigail’s. “Is that okay with you? Louise really hasn’t been too strong since Louis. . .”

“I have no problem with it,” I told her. “I wanted to talk to Lester, anyway.”

“I don’t know if he’ll talk to you,” she said quickly. “He said he just wanted to be there for the interview with his mother.”

I rolled my eyes, since she couldn’t see me, anyway. Leah got up from the couch, threw a pillow at Ethan, and ran up the stairs.

“Well,” I told Steph, “we’ll play it by ear. When and where should I show up?”

She told me, and I wrote it down. I was about to ask how an attorney—any attorney—could stop an arrest before it happens when a bloodcurdling scream came from the upstairs of my house. A small, female bloodcurdling scream—from Leah.

I told Steph I had to go and hung up, and within one frame of film was on my feet, running for the stairs. Abby, running from the kitchen, was just behind me. We exchanged a glance that said: Preston Burke? But that thought was too awful.

I was first up the stairs, and first into Leah’s room. The usual tangle of clothes, toys, hangers, books, and CDs was scattered about the floor, and in the center of it was my daughter, crying, holding out the index finger on her left hand.

“It was E-LIZ-abeth!” she wailed. “She bit me!”

There was such outrage, such a sense of betrayal, in that little voice that I scooped her up into my arms and was halfway to the bathroom before something struck me. I stopped in mid-hallway, and looked at my sobbing daughter.

“Leah,” I said, “where is the lizard?” The fact that it wasn’t in its tank had just registered on my brain.

“I don’t know,” cried Leah. “I took her out to play with me, and she bit me. I dropped her.”

I handed Leah off to Abby, and as parents, we exchanged another glance which said, “ugh, a lizard running loose in our daughter’s bedroom.”

While Abigail got Leah into the bathroom and began seeing to her finger, which was not bleeding, I got down on all fours and began searching for the Mini-Me version of It, The Terror From Beyond Space.

I can now definitively report that there is no more rewarding an experience than crawling around on sharp plastic toys and beads in search of a bloodthirsty pet that looks like it just left the auditions for a GEICO commercial.

It took a good fifteen minutes (and that “good” is a subjective term if ever I’ve used one), during which Leah, her finger washed, dried and bandaged, refused to walk into her own room because she was afraid of her beloved pet, now on the loose. I managed to cut my left palm on the edge of. . . some toy or another, then crunch a CD jewel box with my knee, bang my head on her bed frame, and get nipped by E-LIZ-abeth when I finally found her/him/it hiding in a doll house, lounging on the four-poster bed Barbie used to sleep in before Leah decided Barbie was “stupid.”

After a good deal of crying and whimpering, some of it from my daughter, Leah was put to bed. I washed my various wounds and hobbled down the stairs. Ethan, on the sofa in the living room, hadn’t moved a muscle through the whole adventure. After all, The Bernie Mac Show was on. Ethan thinks he’s a riot.