A few minutes early for her appointment, Kate switched off her windshield wipers and after the final mourning echoes of “Where the Streets Have No Name,” her SiriusXM. She rolled down her window to savor the cool, moisture-perfumed air, fine mist that had greeted her a few miles east of the downtown interchange, thickening as she drove into the city, promising to be even denser toward the ocean had she not pulled off the Ten onto La Cienega Boulevard toward Olympic. The sky would be overcast till the midafternoon burn off, typical of this time of every year she had lived in Los Angeles.
Unlike Joe Cameron, she did miss aspects of the city and LA’s moody, late spring mornings—“rainish,” Aimee termed them—were high on the list. Cameron professed to regret nothing about his departure, regarding his years at LAPD as exile, needed recovery from a traumatizing torture-murder case in his hometown in the early days of his police career, a painful divorce, and escape from the family demons that had served to drive him from VPD to LAPD. With the healing passage of time, he’d found his initial elation over his promotion to Homicide Special—the holy grail, the aspiration of virtually all detectives—shifting into cynicism and contempt for the politics, the game-playing, the frat-boy machismo of many of his colleagues and superiors. Who had been astounded by his request for transfer from their elite unit to a nothing town like Victorville, a stop-off on the way to Vegas. He’d sold his house in the Hollywood Hills and returned to what he termed “real police work without the TV crews.”
Aside from her personal friendship with Cameron, Kate still retained a police relationship of sorts with him: her tiny Yucca Valley town of Ricochet lay within the jurisdiction of his San Bernardino County police facility. A tiny town where, she mused, desert byways indeed held streets with no name, and inhabitants had dodgy reasons for living out there. Reasons which, since she was no longer in the cop business, she did her best to ignore.
At the appointed time she got out of the Jeep and made her unhurried way along the wet flagstone path at the side of the modest stucco house, through the side gate and into the backyard. With a light knock on the partially open door she entered the cottage office and into immediate comfort, the unchanging familiarity of the two-seater leather sofa, two matching armchairs accompanied by small end tables, a functional desk, two overstuffed bookcases. Only one element had altered since she had been coming here: the occupant, who was placing yellow roses, a last cut from the depleted bushes in the front of the main house, in a vase atop one of the bookcases.
Calla Dearborn wore a white scoop-neck top and navy slacks on a tall, high-hipped frame that had thinned with a recent and dramatic loss of weight. No illness, she had assured Kate; only a change in diet recommended along with medication for elevated blood pressure common to older African-Americans. Her frizzy halo of hair glowed with far more white than gray these days, but her face with its dome forehead and pink-brown cheeks seemed unchanged with the years.
She gave Kate a warm, dimpled smile. “Have a seat, Kate. Good to see you again.”
“You too, Calla.” Kate placed a check beside the vase of roses, inhaling their fragrance, then sat in her usual chair.
Dearborn took the one opposite her, a lined pad and her malachite rollerball pen on the table beside her. She sat back, crossed her long legs, and inquired, “So, what’s going on?”
Kate started to speak and instead laughed.
Dearborn’s vestiges of eyebrows rose. “That bad?”
“I have to be topping the list of your most fucked-up therapy clients ever.”
Dearborn lifted a hand to hold her jaw between thumb and index finger in a parody of deep thought. Then she dropped the hand to the arm of her chair and said with a smile, “I can’t seem to find that list. I can only locate you on a quite different one.”
“Which would be…”
“The one with integrity on it. Loyalty. Commitment. Courage. My most admirable list.”
How on earth did Calla perceive any of these things in her? After all their sessions together? Courage? “Damned if I can see myself on any list like that,” Kate muttered.
“Of course not. In contrast to the rest of us, you always see a very different person—”
Who the hell is that person?
“—because you’re depressed.”
Kate grimaced, didn’t reply. Who wouldn’t be depressed?
“I do understand some of your reasons for feeling the way you do. How about we go one step at a time? Where are you in your dreams?”
“Back with Anne,” Kate said promptly, glad for the question.
Dearborn nodded. “Your first partner. Who died many years ago. The eighties, yes?”
“Right.” Kate was no longer surprised by Dearborn’s recall of the most minute details from far back in their sessions together. “I’ve gone all the way back to nineteen eighty-three…”
“Another door in your hallway of locked rooms. Before you tell me about the dream, is it recurring like your other ones?”
Kate nodded. Staring beyond Dearborn at the certificates of professional status on the wall behind the desk, she began slowly. “I’m at a burial service in a funeral home…” Then, in a flash flood of words, “There’s just myself and Anne’s coffin and there’s a woman in Anne’s coffin who’s not Anne and the funeral home people tell me it’s absolutely her but I don’t know who this woman is and I keep insisting and insisting it’s not her and I finally slam the lid down on the coffin…” She jerked her gaze to Dearborn. “That’s really about it. Then I wake up.”
Frowning, Dearborn asked, “How do you feel in this dream?”
“Agitated. Really agitated. But not horrified like I am in my nightmares.”
“What do you make of it?”
“I know what it means. When Anne died, I was about two years a homicide detective—fast tracked after we won the discrimination lawsuits and women finally got promoted. The male cops acted like we were all pretend cops, treated us with absolute contempt. The homophobia—it was lethal. I was buried so deep in the closet you couldn’t have found me with a floodlight. The afternoon my lieutenant called me into his office to tell me my”—she made finger quotes—“‘roommate’ had died in that freeway accident…September seventh…it was like I’d been slugged with a baseball bat. I just stood there telling myself over and over: don’t react, don’t cry, don’t even speak…”
Dearborn said gently, “How awful for you, Kate. I see how this relates to the strange woman in Anne’s coffin.”
Kate placed both hands on the knees of her khaki pants as if to brace herself. “Anne’s sister-in-law came down from Santa Barbara, and an aunt. Took her body…everything of hers I hadn’t managed to grab and hide in the trunk of my car. The house was in my name, in those days it had to be. She was thirty-two years old, Calla. Never ever thought of a will. I didn’t have any claim on anything of hers, I didn’t know what they’d do if I told them we were…together. My police career—I felt like it was all I had left and maybe those people would turn on me and…and…I didn’t, couldn’t even take a day off work. After her family left, our house felt like it had been stripped, like she’d been razored out of my life. We had an old collie, Barney. He died about six months after she did and I got rid of the house, couldn’t bear to be there any longer. All I have now of our twelve years is a box of stuff I managed to keep.”
Dearborn’s sable brown eyes were glistening with tears, her voice anguished: “Oh, Kate, you were so alone. So very alone.”
“Yes.” She’d never truly, fully realized it until this moment. She felt her own eyes welling and tried to pull herself back together in this aftermath of what she’d never revealed to anyone. “Yes, I guess I was.”
“You’re telling me your dream is about your denial of Anne.”
At Kate’s nod, Dearborn offered, “Those were hideous years, Kate. For so many of you.”
“We all of us lived that way. We had to,” Kate replied matter-of-factly. “All of us in the same closet.”
Dearborn shook her head. “You’ve had Anne locked away all this time, all those good memories…”
“Yes, really good memories.” Kate’s reflexive smile dispelled some of the urge to weep. “I’m glad to have that room open. The crazy way we managed to find each other…all those years together in our little house in Glendale…”
Dearborn nodded. “How’s Aimee with all that’s going on with you?”
Kate instantly sobered. “Beside herself.”
“And how are you with that?”
“Okay, actually. This way she’ll stay away. I wasted so many years of her life—” Like I did with Ellie Shuster’s life. “What’s going on—more than anything I need to keep her safe.”
“Just like before.” Dearborn’s expression had altered, her gaze narrowed.
Kate was expecting the reaction and challenged her. “All this time we’ve been working through my PTSD, all those nightmares linked to my homicide cases—if you’d been in my shoes, would you have taken those murder scenes home with you to share?”
“You know I can’t bring anything that happens here home either—the ethics of my profession. Still, it’s a very fair question, Kate. I get that my work hardly compares with the visceral impact of yours. But I like to think I’d have engaged any partner of mine in a discussion about my needing to not do it. Over our time together you’ve come to realize that you were the one who decided, you shut her off. Now, like before, you’ve taken it on yourself to protect Aimee without any consultation with her. Like before, it’s at your very great expense.”
More defensive with Dearborn’s every word, Kate snapped, “This is different and you know it. This is a direct threat. It’s now and it’s real. And yeah, even though I agree with you about before, nothing I can do about what I did then, only about now.”
“Of course this threat is real, I do know that. She knows that—”
Aimee didn’t know anything about Ellie Shuster, but Dearborn didn’t know it and didn’t need to, Kate reminded herself.
“So how she feels about where you are now and what you’ve done with the condo—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Kate insisted.
“Doesn’t matter,” Dearborn repeated and shook her head. “How she feels doesn’t matter. Her opinion doesn’t matter.” Her voice flattened. “You know it does. You’ve changed, grown, you’ve gained so much insight, you’ve—” She broke off and asked, “Kate, how are you feeling about the loss of her, about all this?”
Ambushed by the question, her heart lurching, Kate shifted in her chair. She and Aimee had been estranged before, three times in these last four years when periods of sobriety had been broken up by her renewed relationship with Cutty Sark. Aimee adamantly refused to be with her when she was drinking, Calla had also told her the last time that the refuge of this cottage office was closed to her till she was sober and solidly back in the disciplines of AA, offering referrals to other therapists. Each time she had fled to the harshness and peace of the desert, two hours away from the tormenting city where alcohol offered the one reliable refuge from the demons inhabiting her. But no separation had been like this one. Never with these stakes, never this long, and never with this vast distance, this arctic silence between them…
She said raggedly, “Calla, I was there for Anne and we made a good life together. With Aimee I can’t change all those years with her, the best years of her life wasted on me.” Her voice was a rasp. “I was in the closet and she wasn’t. I locked her out of my job, that whole huge vital part of me. Even when I was with her, I wasn’t. I was soaking my brain in Cutty Sark to drown what I saw every day. All those years with her I was nothing but a mess, I was a bloody drunk, I gave her nothing.”
Dearborn’s lips had thinned as Kate spoke, her forehead deeply scored with frown lines. She picked up her pen and tapped it on the arm of her chair as she spoke emphatically: “Aimee saw you, she knew who she was with. She made a choice, she stayed with you because of what she saw in you. You were no different from a boxer taking shots to the head and suffering the cumulative consequences. She had to see that happening to you and all along she stuck by you. Because you’re worth it to her and she loves you for who you actually are.”
“Calla, the job is no excuse for what I did to her. I was just a cop. No different from hundreds of thousands of other cops.”
“That’s utter rubbish and you know it.” The tone was acid, the pen tapped more emphatically. “You were a homicide detective. With bodies and blood and smells from the most horrific crimes right up in your face every day, reaching right into your very soul. All the survivors, the mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children—you were right there with them on the very worst day of their entire lives.”
The words were like blows and it took Kate several breaths before she could say, “I should never have been with Aimee. Not ever.”
“Oh, Kate.” Dearborn shook her head. “That’s your depression speaking. Let’s get back on the topic of the condo. Can you at least see that what you did with it was a fait accompli? And your place in the desert—”
“I know.” Raising both hands, Kate said, “I never even had a conversation with her. But I did what I had to do. Calla, I had to do something. Can’t you see I had to do something significant to try and make it up to her…”
Like Geneva Fallon. How could I think I was in any way superior to her? How am I any goddamn different from her and what she did to that teacher?
Dearborn sharply tapped her pen. “Where are you, Kate? Where did you just go that you won’t tell me about as usual?”
Kate ignored this constant challenge of Dearborn’s and continued, “If we’d been legal, Aimee would have half the condo anyway and—well, she deserves a place of her own free and clear of me. You know the inheritance from my aunt bought that house in Yucca Valley. I don’t need anything more. If I’m to stay sober I have to be the person I can live with, Calla. Given what’s going on now.”
Hands in her lap, Dearborn lifted and dropped the last three fingers of her left hand, an unconscious gesture Kate had come to recognize as a letting go, at least temporarily, of a particular topic.
“What about Dylan? How does he fit into all of this?”
She lightened at this mention of her nephew. “He’s got his own life now, thank God. So immersed in transgender rights I don’t see him or his partner or his mother all that much. Especially now that I’m living where I am.”
“Do they—”
“They don’t know, and I’m keeping it that way.”
Again the three fingers rose and fell. “How is your sobriety, Kate?”
She gave the same response she’d given to Joe Cameron but in a less churlish tone: “Holding.” She added, “Pure hell.”
She had weathered another crisis two evenings ago. With her nerves incandescent filaments of need, she’d walked far into the moonlit, starry desert, gun tucked in her belt, asking herself why she should go back when the next five minutes could bring the end from the woman determined to kill her and what was the point of not drinking, what was the point of anything?
She told Dearborn, “Sometimes I want so desperately to just not feel again. For even a few minutes. To hold a drink in my hand and remember how it was to have that alcohol spreading through me and everything that hurt just fade away. But if I hold a drink, I’ll drink that drink and I won’t stop. Sometimes it’s not one day at a time, it’s five minutes at a time. I call my sponsor, he’s always there for me.” As he had been that night. One bar of cell phone signal might have preserved her life. For now.
Dearborn nodded. “I know I’ve helped you work through and lessen the nightmares, but he’s more valuable to you than I could ever be.”
“In that one way I suppose he is. Nothing like another recovering alcoholic cop who’s ex-military like me. You know what Justin told me the other night? That I’d hit the trifecta. Born a lesbian and hated for it. Served in Vietnam and hated for it. Became a cop and hated for it. He’s right there with me on everything.”
Dearborn’s eyes acquired an opaqueness while she considered this, and remained opaque while she asked, “How often are you going to meetings?”
“Several times a week. When it’s bad and I need to get out of the house I go every day. I pretty much just listen when I’m there. Being there is what helps.”
Dearborn’s eyes sharpened on her but she offered mildly, “Perhaps you and Justin might concede that the world’s a bit different now. Vietnam vets, today you’re honored. You have a community of LGBT people, a transgender nephew who adores you. A police family who’ve made it clear they value all your years of service and want to protect you. We even have a Black president.”
“Yes. All good stuff,” Kate said. And shrugged.
Dearborn looked at her mournfully. “Are you sleeping?”
Again Kate shrugged. “I nap so I don’t get too tired, so I can try and wake myself before I get too far into any dream. They’re not as horrific now, thanks to you.” She sat up in her chair. “I’ll tell you exactly how I’m dealing with this, Calla. Every day, every minute, I’m aware. And that’s different from not wanting to feel. I’m more aware than I’ve ever been. Every plant and bird and insect and living thing, with my every breath I’m aware. The one big reason I don’t dull any of that with booze is Ellie Shuster and knowing I feel so aware because I could die any minute. Since Maggie passed, those people I visit in the hospice where she was, they’re a gift. I’m so much right there with them I could even have a bed in the place. Just like them I’ve been given a terminal diagnosis.”
Dearborn nodded. “I can see that. Except there’s a possible cure for your particular terminal illness. There’s hope Ellie Shuster may come to her senses and decide she really doesn’t want to go back on death row for the premeditated murder of a police officer.”
“She won’t. Not with what was taken from her. She always said she was innocent—”
“Don’t they all?”
“Yes, pretty much,” Kate conceded. “I learned early on that ‘I didn’t do it’ usually translates into ‘I can’t believe I did it, not me, I couldn’t possibly have done it.’ But something should have told me to hear her…”
“So you haven’t come a single inch away from blaming yourself.”
“Why would I? I was lead investigator.”
Dearborn held up a hand. “I won’t go there again, Kate, we’ve argued and argued about it. So let’s take another perspective. She’s what, mid to late fifties? She has a lot of life ahead of her.”
“Right. But in her view, a half-life.”
The fingers rose and fell. “Are you being physically active?”
“When I can,” Kate deflected. Except for the sojourn into the desert, she’d not emerged for weeks from that chair next to Maggie’s urn except for meetings, for hospice, for her appointments here.
“How’s that anger you told me about last time?”
“Okay. Under control.” But she involuntarily flexed her right hand. She’d almost broken it three days ago in a fury of counter pounding when she fumbled and dropped an iced tea. And she’d nearly kicked a cupboard door off its hinges when it didn’t immediately open…
“From where I sit,” Dearborn offered in her low, sonorous tones, “I see a woman who’s estranged herself from the people who care about her. A woman in a vortex of negativity. I see a huge distortion of blame and shaming of self, self-destructive behavior—”
“I’m being self-destructive? Someone is out to kill me. All I’m trying to do is avoid collateral damage to the people I care about!”
Dearborn said calmly, “And how are you dealing with that, how are you proactively helping yourself cope with the anxiety, despair, the fear?”
“For one thing,” Kate sniped, “I’m seeing you for my usual ice-cold shower of criticism.”
Dearborn smiled. “If Maggie were still alive—”
“Right. I know.” Kate grinned at an image of Maggie confronting her, hands braced on the waist of the cargo shorts she always wore. “She’d be ten times harder on me than you.”
“Another one who tried to make you see the fine person the rest of us see.”
Kate spread her hands. “Calla, I have to do what I have to do. I can’t do anything more until Ellie Shuster acts. Realistically, there’s no point in wasting police resources protecting me when she’s had twenty years to figure out how she’ll take me down. She could have shot me this morning on the freeway.”
Dearborn sighed. “It’s an awful, awful way to live, Kate. I am so sorry.” She added, “But I have to tell you…I see your behavior as less pragmatism than fatalism.”
You’re right, Kate thought. But she said, “If I wanted to die, I could do it right here and now with the weapon I’m carrying. I’m doing the best I can.”
“I know. I know you are, Kate. I hope it’s at least helping you to talk to me about it. My door’s open to you day or night. I want you to come in as often as you can.”
“Thank you, Calla,” Kate said. “This is the one place where I can talk about it. Where there’s honesty I can trust. Where I feel seen. Understood. Right now you’re more important to me than anyone else.”
The two women looked at each other, and Kate saw and felt palpable warmth, a not uncritical but unconditional acceptance of her that she’d known only with Maggie.
Holding her gaze, Dearborn leaned forward as if to further the connection. “Then listen to me, Kate. Hear me. You tell me you’re being realistic. The test is, if Ellie Shuster were hit by a bus today, where would you be? You face a terrible threat, I do see that, feel that. I fear for you like everyone else in your life fears for you. As you face this threat, the real question is: how much value are you truly, fully, actually placing on your one wild and precious life?”
Kate nodded. Got up, grabbed her shoulder bag, and left the cottage-office with Calla’s words reverberating.