With Child Read online

  “Any pattern to them?” asked Hawkin the detective.

  “Any discussion about the future was off-limits. Her future, our future.”

  “You think she wants out?” he asked bluntly.

  “I did finally ask her that; she seemed, I don’t know, shocked. Desperately unhappy that I’d think it. She’s just going through a lot of stuff, I think,” Kate said weakly. “Part of it has to do with her job—you know she’s dropped most of the AIDS therapy? She hated to give it up, but it was too much for her, after the shooting. She doesn’t have any stamina. She’s seeing a lot more women now, and kids. I thought it might be money that was bugging her, because we still have heavy bills and she’s not earning much, but when I suggested we move, she got really upset. I mean, look at this place. The taxes are unbelievable. She could retire on what it would bring, but she wouldn’t hear of selling it—‘Not yet,’ she said.”

  “It is a beautiful house.”

  “I’m beginning to hate it. It’s like living in a mausoleum. And that car of hers in the garage—she’ll never drive it; she could sell it and buy something with manual controls and still have money left over, but she won’t hear of it. Won’t even say why, just refuses to talk about it.”

  They sat in the cooling car, neither of them making a move to go. Hawkin finally spoke.

  “She may be finding it difficult to choose a future, having so very nearly had none, and then for a long time able to see only an intolerable future. Choices must be…painful. I just hope for your sake this phase doesn’t go on too long.”

  “I think that’s part of it,” Kate surprised herself by saying. “I think she’s testing me. Seeing just how long my patience will last. Seeing if I still love her.”

  “Or maybe—”

  “Maybe what?”

  “Hell, Kate, I’m no marriage counselor. I screwed up my own marriage thoroughly, too, so I’m no one to talk.”

  “Just tell me. I’m a big girl.”

  “Well, maybe what Lee needs to know is not how long you’ll continue to be patient, but how long it will be before you get your own feet back under you, the way she’s done.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Lee Cooper I knew before she took a bullet in the spine, which I admit was not long, would have hated the thought of being in an unequal, dependent relationship.”

  “But I’ve been so careful to maintain her independence. Jon and I have sweated to let her be strong.”

  “I don’t mean Lee has been dependent. I mean you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kate asked testily.

  “Caring for an invalid can be addictive,” Hawkin said simply, and Kate felt as if the air had been thumped from her lungs. “I’m not saying it’s the case, but I’m wondering if Lee might have thought you were becoming dependent—on her dependence, if that makes sense.”

  Kate sat there, struck dumb by the bolt of his perception. She remembered Lee saying it wasn’t her legs not working that made her a cripple. “I’m a cripple because I can’t stand alone,” Lee had said “I can’t stand alone when I’m surrounded by people who want to protect me.”

  “Kate,” Al was saying, “listen, don’t take my amateur psychologizing to heart. I think you should go talk to one of the department’s shrinks. You got along well with Mosley last year, didn’t you? Go see him again. I mean that, Kate.”

  “Yes, I hear you. I think you’re right, Al—not just about that, though I suppose I should go and have a talk with him, but about the other, as well. I must have been smothering her. No wonder she went off with Aunt Agatha.”

  “Is that the name?”

  “You haven’t met her. A rare treat,” she said bitterly.

  “Kate,” he said, in a voice almost soft with affection, “just forget it all for the weekend, get some rest.”

  “I’ll try to forget it, but I won’t get much rest, not if I’m hunting down a car.”

  “And you told Jules you’d do something with her Sunday, didn’t you? I’ll warn her you may have to back out.”

  “Don’t do that. I’ll make it somehow.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to.”

  “You’re good for her, Kate,” he said unexpectedly. “It does her good to be around someone like you. Her mother…” He paused, drumming his fingers on the bottom of the steering wheel. “Jani is a remarkable woman who has come through more than her fair share of hell. She’s a strong woman, but only in some areas, and I’m afraid she’s most unsure about herself in just those places that Jules needs her to be strong. I don’t suppose I’m making much sense, but it’s a long and ugly story and not for tonight. I just wanted to say that we both appreciate the efforts you’ve gone to for Jules.”

  “It’s not an effort, Al. I like Jules.”

  “I like her, too. I love the girl. But I sometimes wonder just what the hell I was thinking, volunteering to go through the whole teenage thing all over again with a kid who makes my first two look like saints.”

  “Oh, come on, Al, you must be getting old. I know she and Jani are having a rough time, but I got the strong impression that she feels comfortable with you.”

  “Thank God for that,” he said under his breath.

  “You’re not telling me that there’s some real problem with Jules, are you?” Belatedly, she remembered Rosa Hidalgo’s peculiar message on the answering machine.

  “Jules was very nearly expelled from her school last month—the very first week of classes.”

  “Jules?” Kate said incredulously. “What on earth for?”

  “She had her English teacher in tears and then said some inexcusable things to the principal. We had to promise to get her into therapy before they would let her back in.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Believe it.”

  “But why? She seems so…together. Balanced.”

  “She did to me, too, until suddenly in the last few months…I have an idea of what set her off, but she won’t talk about it. It’s basically an accumulation of things: her brains, her history, her mother, her mother’s history, puberty—like I said, I can’t get into it now, even if I had Jani’s permission. Let’s just say there’s a big head of pressure inside Jules, and some of it finds its way out in anger. Being with you seems to help her a lot, though. She becomes almost herself again for a while.”

  Kate stared out the window, then shook her head slowly. “I wish you hadn’t told me.”

  “You’d have to know sooner or later. In fact, the psychologist Jules is going to wants to see you.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  It had been an instinctive response, and Kate searched for the reasons behind it. After a minute, she said hesitantly, “I think it might be a mistake to identify me with all the other adults in her life. If I am important to Jules, as you seem to think, it’s because I’m an outsider. Kids her age think in terms of ‘them’ and ‘us.’ You wouldn’t gain anything by making me one of her ‘thems.’” And, she added to herself, I could lose the friendship of someone I’ve grown surprisingly fond of.

  “You could be right.”

  “I’m always right, Al. High time you recognized that.” She put on a smile and turned it toward him.

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said, matching her light tone.

  “I’ve got to go, Al,” she said. “There’s a raccoon who comes by to pick up his hush money about now, and if I don’t give it to him, he starts pulling shingles off the house. See you Sunday.”

  Even in the dim light, Kate could see her partner waver, then decide not to ask what she was talking about. Instead, he just said, “Good. And don’t worry if you haven’t got a car sorted out by then; you’re welcome to use Jani’s or mine.”

  “Thanks. Good night.”

  “ ’Night, Kate. Thanks for the pizza.”

  She stood and watched him drive cautiously down Green Street; then his left signal went on and he turned s
outh toward his own, increasingly seldom-used house in the Sunset district. She lifted her head to the sky, where no stars were visible, and then turned and dug around for her key. Damn and blast, she thought; the one thing in my life just now that I thought was uncomplicated turns out to be on the edge of an explosion. Jules, what the hell is up?

  Gideon was prowling about the edge of the patio and heard her come in. When she crossed the living room to the glass doors, he was staring in at her, nose against the glass, his small eyes glittering malevolently from the burglar’s mask of his markings. She cracked open the door, tossed out a handful of the multicolored dog biscuits, and watched him waddle over and choose one. He sat with his back to her and crunched his way through one after another, then hoisted himself up and stalked away into the shrubbery. The small dog next door barked hysterically until the neighbor cursed and a door slammed. Silence descended. Kate locked the door and went sober to bed, and it was not until her head was on the pillow that she remembered Al Hawkin’s earlier little torpedo, before the revelation about Jules and her problems.

  Jesus, she thought, staring up at the pattern of lights on the ceiling, Lee left because I was smothering her, and now Al says I’m still smothering her from a thousand miles away. It’s not enough that I nearly killed her; I have to suffocate her, as well.

  Nineteen months before, Kate had nearly been the death of Lee. It was Kate’s job that gave Lee a bullet in the spine, and the fact that she was against Lee’s involvement in the case from the beginning had nothing to do with it. She should have insisted.

  But she had not, and Lee had nearly died. The doctors had told Kate that Lee probably would die, but she had not. They had told Lee she was almost certainly a paraplegic, but she regained the use of her feet. Then they warned her that she was about at the limits of what could reasonably be expected in the way of recovery, but Lee no longer listened to doctors. She no longer listened to anyone, for that matter; certainly not to Kate.

  The months since the shooting had been a constant round of adjusting to Lee’s varying needs. When Lee was feeling strong, Kate would back off; when Lee was immersed in despair, Kate was a bastion of encouragement. A year and a half of guilt and struggle and financial problems, week after week of Lee’s agonizingly slow progress, losing ground and clawing back, all of Kate’s existence, even at work, geared to her lover’s ever-changing needs, her physical suffering and her blind determination and those odd pockets of cold air that appeared without warning, unexpected areas of extreme sensitivity such as Lee’s Saab: symbolic, emotionally charged, tabu.

  After all these months, Kate no longer paused to think, just reacted automatically in her role as counterpoise, shifting as required, making all the minute adjustments that kept the marriage balanced, because the one thing that could not be allowed, that must not happen no matter the cost, was that the balance collapse. The end of the marriage was the end of everything.

  But now, there was no weight to balance. Caring for an invalid might not be addictive, but it was clearly habit-forming. She had to admit that she’d been sent sprawling when her burden was removed; it was time now to adjust, she told herself. Get used to an empty house. There might even be a degree of satisfaction to be found in having only her own wants and needs to take into account.

  She lay there, considering Al’s brutally honest judgment, running her mind over the texture of her relationship with Lee, becoming more and more convinced that he was right. She was smothering Lee. She would stop it. She contemplated how she would go about freeing Lee and herself, and as she lay there, she grew more awake every minute, until she was twitching as if she’d had two or three double espressos rather than a cup of weak decaffeinated coffee. Finally, she threw off the covers, went into Lee’s study, and began to write a letter.

  It was a long letter, full of love and understanding, of apology and the commitment to change for the better. The phrases flowed, two pages filled, three: “Lee,” she wrote, “I am so grateful to Al for pointing out what I was doing; it must have been intolerable to you, even though you knew I was only trying to help. But I’m aware of it now, and I promise to keep hands off your life. I’ll let you walk through the SoMa district at midnight if you want; I’ll—”

  She stood up so rapidly, the chair fell over backward, and she hurled the pen across the room and took the letter and tore it down the middle, then again, and a third time. She walked out of the study, turning off the lights behind her, then, picking up a warm blanket from her bed, went out onto the balcony. There she sat, bundled up, looking out across the northern edges of the city at the waters of the Golden Gate, reflected in lights from shore and ship and the island opposite.

  Yes, Al, I’m terrified. I’m so angry at her, I never want to see her again, but if she doesn’t come back, I don’t know what I’ll do. I can’t imagine life without her; it would be like imagining life without air. I love her and I hate her and I’m lost, completely lost without her, and all I can do is wait for her to tell me what she is going to do with me.

  She slept, finally, and woke in the deck chair, with a mockingbird singing and Saturday’s sun coming up. She watched the dawn, and as the sky lightened, her inner decision dawned as well, until, with a peculiar mixture of bitter satisfaction and gleeful mischief, she knew what she was going to do.

  Sunday morning, Al Hawkin pulled open the door of his fiancée’s apartment and stood blinking at the apparition in the hallway. He had reassured himself through the peephole that the unidentifiable figure had no visible weapon, and now he pulled the belt of his robe a bit tighter and ran a hand across his grizzled hair.

  “Can I help you with something, er, ma’am?” he asked uncertainly. “What apartment number were you—” The figure before him reached a gloved hand up to the helmet strap, bent over to remove it, and straightened up, shaking her hair out of her face. Even then, for a split second he failed to recognize her; she had more life in her face than he’d ever seen there.

  “Kate!” She grinned at him, glowing with enthusiasm and exuding waves of fresh air. He ran an eye over her, new boots, new gloves, old leather bomber jacket a bit snug around the waist, the massive new helmet under one arm. “Let me guess,” he said, stepping back to let her in. “You bought your new car. What kind?”

  Jules came out of the kitchen behind him and stopped dead. “Why are you wearing that outfit, Kate?” she asked, but Kate answered her partner.

  “A Kawasaki.”

  “Kawasaki doesn’t make an automobile,” he said, studying her leather jacket.

  “By God, the man’s a detective.”

  “You’re not thinking of taking Jules out on it?”

  A cry of protest rose from the kitchen door, but Kate ignored it. “Of course not,” she said, and her grin became even wider. “Can I borrow the car keys, Dad?”

  October, November

  Five

  October came. Jon arrived back from Boston and London, flitted around the edge of Kate’s vision for a few days, and, before she could catch hold of him, was off to Mexico with his friend. Short letters from Lee: She was well, getting stronger. Yesterday she’d dug clams for dinner; had cut a cord of stove wood already, could Kate believe that? And the trees were so beautiful, so calming. Finding herself, yet still filled with confusion, and sorry, so very sorry, to be putting Kate through all this, but…

  But she still couldn’t say when she’d be home.

  In October, Kate’s baffled anguish began to turn, to harden. Her letters north became shorter, sharper. She bruised her thigh once too often on Lee’s chair lift at the top of the stairs, and in a fury at two o’clock one morning she took a wrench to it, dismantled it, and heaved the seat, followed by the wrench, into Lee’s room, the room that had once been theirs. The next things to go were Lee’s books in the dining room, again into Lee’s room. She began deliberately to leave the dishes in the sink overnight, for two nights, a thing neither Lee nor Jon could have tolerated. She even began to leave the bed unmade
and the cap off the toothpaste.

  October settled into a pattern of work and home. Her new form of transport set off another flurry of raucous comments and irritating harassments from her coworkers, and she lost count of the number of Xeroxed articles about Dykes on Bikes she had found on her desk or tucked into the cycle, but she had, after all, expected something of the sort, and if her teeth ached from being gritted, at least she did not show that any of it bothered her.

  She told herself that it would pass, and concentrated on the pleasures of a motorcycle in California. The fall weather held, a whole month of Indian summer, and she took long rides north into the wine country and the mountainous land behind it, glorying in the nearly forgotten freedom and sweet spark of risk that two wheels brought. When she needed four wheels, she hired the neighbor with his immaculately restored 1948 Chevy pickup, or she used Al’s car. Even the house on Russian Hill did not seem quite so aggressively empty as it had; merely quiescent.

  By the end of the month, the pleasure of her minor rebellions against the absent householders began to wane, when she found an unmade pile of sheets and blankets an unbearably slovenly greeting at the end of a long day, and found, too, that leaving the cap off the toothpaste tube made the contents go hard and stale. Still, she allowed the dishes to accumulate until she had no clean ones, vacuumed and swept only when her feet began to notice the grit, and ate when and what she felt like, rediscovering the illicit joys of pizza for breakfast and cereal with ice cream on top for dinner. She ran every morning, got the weights out of storage and set them up in Lee’s consultation rooms, and began to sleep more soundly.