Her afternoon was relatively easy. Some paperwork, some reports, a phone call from a lawyer that informed her that another one of her clients would not be returning. Back in jail. Sorry. But would she like to have lunch? No thanks. I eat lunch with the birds at San Jacinto Plaza. She actually told him that. She hated men who mixed business with pleasure. Especially the ones who were married. Call your wife.
She had one last session with a client who was moving to Chicago. And she had a two-hour session with eight gay and lesbian high school students. She’d never cared for group sessions—but these kids, she liked them. They were smart and wonderful and a lot less damaged than most of the people she saw. Survivors, all of them. She let them talk. That’s mostly what they needed. She asked questions. No crisis among them this week. A discussion of who was worse, ignorant teachers or homo-phobic bullies. “Those are our choices?” one of them asked. They all laughed. Not a hard afternoon. She was grateful for that.
At five-thirty, she wrote out an informal report on her first session with Andrés. He was self-possessed and well spoken. He was clearly the man who’d written the words on those creased pages she had in her possession. It was also clear to her that he was the man who’d held four policemen at bay.
She looked around the room. It still smelled slightly of smoke, despite the fact that she’d opened her window and lit a cinnamon candle. Not that she cared all that much.
There was a knock at the door. Before she could say, come in, the door opened. She found herself staring at the smiling man in the doorway. It had been a long time since she’d seen that smile. She remembered the first time she laid eyes on him. No smiles, not back then.
“Dave? What are you doing here?” She got up from her chair and offered him a friendly, if formal hug. He kissed her on the cheek. Too much cologne. She preferred cigarette smoke.
“How are you, Grace?”
“You didn’t really come here to ask me how I am.”
“No. But that doesn’t mean the question was insincere.”
“I suppose not.”
“God, Grace. You’re still the same.”
“Older.”
“Probably tougher.”
“Probably. Life does that. You haven’t changed much, either. Well, your wardrobe’s changed.”
“Why does everyone pay so much attention to what I wear?”
“Because you want them to.”
“You know, you should’ve gone all the way and become an analyst.”
“I’m fine where I am.”
He shook his head. “How come you never remarried, Grace?”
“How do you know I didn’t?”
“Did you?”
He was wearing that familiar grin. “I didn’t want to remarry.”
“You’re really very beautiful.”
She ignored his compliment. “What about you? What are you, in your mid-to-late thirties?”
“So?”
“You’re really very beautiful.”
“You’re mocking me.”
“You had it coming.”
He laughed. “Women keep breaking up with me.”
“For no reason, I suppose.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“How is she?”
“Never better—since my father died.”
“That’s a mean thing to say.”
“Yes. But it’s also true.”
“You came here about Andrés, didn’t you?”
“You don’t change, do you, Grace? Always getting to the heart of the matter.”
“You should know better than to show up at my doorstep and expect me to discuss a client.”
“Grace—”
“What?”
“He’s been arrested.”
“What?”
“They say he killed a man. With his fists.”
“I don’t—” She stopped in the middle of her sentence. “You think he did it?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“It does matter. It always does.”
“I think there are extenuating circumstances. That matters, too.”
“So you’re taking his case?”
“Absolutely.”
“I suppose you came to tell me he won’t be seeing me again.”
“Of course he will.”
“From jail.”
“I can work that out. He needs to see you, Grace. He needs to see someone.”
She nodded. “But I don’t work for you, Dave. I work for him.”
“Meaning?”
“What he says stays in this room.”
“If he tells the story once, it hurts less the second time.”
“You think that if he tells me what happened, then he’ll tell you, too.”
“Something like that.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“You’ll keep seeing him, then?”
“I’ll wait to hear from you.”
She looked at him. There was an urgency in his voice. She nodded, remembering. How old had he been when he’d come to her office? Hard and lost and still a boy. No, a man who had not yet learned to be a man. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“You don’t seem fine.”
“Don’t I?”
“I think I can tell.”
“You haven’t seen me in years.”
“He’s important to you, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It’s a long story, Grace.”
“Listening to long stories is what I do for a living.” The faint smell of cigarettes kept nagging at her senses. And then suddenly the odor of stale cigarettes gave way to the smell of gardenias and agave. Gardenias and sage and agave. How very strange.
“Grace?”
She looked at him. His eyes seemed to be holding a question. Such a handsome man in that particular white-boy-all-American-no-one-can-hurt-me kind of way. Except that he had been hurt. But he was fine now. More or less. And she was overcome with a strong sense of affection for him. But he seemed so far in that instant.
“Grace?”
Everything was fading, all the lights in the room going out. And the sun, too. It was all so odd, as if the whole world had stepped out, run away from her—left her. Alone. In the dark. God. Everything was as black as Andrés Segovia’s eyes.
“Grace? Grace?” She heard a voice. It was Dave. The boy who had been sent to her by his desperate mother, will you see our boy? Will you talk to him? Dave, who had refused to speak to her for sessions and sessions until one day he did nothing but cry, for hours. And she’d held him all that time, and she remembered how her blouse had been soaked in his tears. Dave. She stared in the direction of the voice. Dave?
“Grace? Are you all right?”
She reached out her hand in the darkness.