For someone who hadn’t slept all night, Susan looked good. Her hair was tangled and she had no makeup on. But her eyes were clear and her skin looked smooth and healthy. She broke the end off her croissant and ate it.
“Whole wheat,” I said. “You can get them at the Bread and Circus in Cambridge.”
“I’ll bet you fit right in, shopping there.”
“Like a moose at a butterfly convention,” I said. “But the Shamrock Tavern in Southie doesn’t carry them.”
Susan nodded and broke off another small piece.
“Not many people your size in Bread and Circus, I suppose.”
“Only one,” I said, “and she’s nowhere near as cute.”
I poured more coffee from the percolator into my cup and a little more into Susan’s. It was early and the light coming in the window was still tinged with the color of sunrise. Hawk was asleep. Susan and I sat at the table in the safe house in Charlestown feeling the strangeness and the uncertainty, wary of pain, slowly circling the conversation.
“You got my letter,” Susan said. She was holding the coffee cup with both hands and looking over the rim of it at me.
“About Hawk? Yes.”
“And you got him out of jail.”
“Un huh.”
“And you both came looking for me.”
“Un huh.”
“I knew that security intensified. Russ always traveled with bodyguards, but a little while after I wrote you, everything got much more serious.”
“Where were you when it got serious,” I said.
“At a lodge Russ has in Washington State.”
“Had,” I said.
“Had?”
“We burned it down.”
“My God,” Susan said. “We were there to fish for trout, but one day Russ said we had to go to Connecticut. He said we could fish the Farmington River instead.”
“They were setting an ambush for us.”
“Which didn’t work.”
“No.”
Susan drank her coffee, and kept looking at me over the rim.
“Start from the beginning,” she said. “And tell me everything that happened up to last night.”
My eyes felt scratchy and I was jittery with coffee and raw from sleeplessness. I finished my croissant and got up and put another one in the oven to warm. I took an orange from the bowl on the counter and began to peel it.
“I had a leg cast made with a gun in the foot. Then I got myself arrested in Mill River and when they put me in jail I produced the gun and Hawk and I left.”
The smell of the orange peel brightened the room. It was a domestic smell, a smell of Sunday morning mingling with the smell of coffee and warming bread.
“ ‘Death is the mother of Beauty,’ ” I said.
Susan raised her eyebrows, like she did when something puzzled her.
“Poem by Wallace Stevens,” I said. “The possibility of loss is what makes things valuable.”
Susan smiled. “Tell me what happened,” she said over the rim of the cup.
I did, chronologically. I paused occasionally to eat a segment of orange and then, when it was heated, to eat a second croissant. Susan poured more coffee for me when the cup was empty.
“And here we are,” I said when I finished.
“What did you think of Dr. Hilliard,” Susan said.
“I didn’t spend enough time with her to think much,” I said. “She’s smart. She can decide things and act on what she’s decided. She seems to care about you.”
Susan nodded.
“Now you have me and you haven’t done anything about Jerry,” she said. “What about that.”
“We’ll still have to do something about Jerry,” I said. “We have a lot of things we can be arrested for and unless we get the feds to bury them, we’ll have to be on the dodge for the rest of our lives.”
“And you couldn’t be acquitted if you gave yourselves up and went to court?”
“Susan, we did the things we’re accused of. We’re guilty. Hawk did kill a guy. I did bust him out of jail. And all the rest.”
Susan had put her cup down. Most of the coffee was still in it. It had the little iridescent swirls on the surface that cold coffee gets.
“You have to kill Jerry Costigan or go to jail.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of a government is that? To give you that kind of choice?”
“The usual kind,” I said.
“They’ve required you to be simply a paid assassin.”
“They helped me find you,” I said.
She nodded. There was a small rounded end of croissant on her plate. She rolled it between her fingers, looking at it and not seeing it.
“And,” I said, “we have annoyed the daylights out of Jerry Costigan. We have burned down his lodge, trashed his factory, invaded his home, taken his son’s girl friend, killed some of his people.”
“You think he’ll shrug and put another record on the Gramophone?”
“No,” she said. “He’ll hunt you down and have you killed.” Her voice was quiet and clear, but flat, the way it had been in the car last night.
“Or vice versa,” I said.
Susan stood and began to clear the table of the cups and plates. She rinsed them under the running water and put them on the drainboard. Without turning from the sink she said, “What about Russ?”
“My question exactly,” I said.
She rinsed the second cup and put it on the drainboard and shut off the faucet and turned toward me. She leaned her hips against the sink. She shook her head. “I don’t know how …” she said.
I waited.
She took a deep breath. She picked up a pink sponge from the sink and wet it and wrung it out and wiped off the table and put the sponge back. She walked into the living room and looked out the window. Then she walked over to the couch and sat on it and put her feet on the coffee table. I turned in my chair at the table and looked at her.
“First, you understand. I love you,” she said.
I nodded. She took her feet off the coffee table and stood and walked to the window again. There was a pencil on the window ledge. She picked it up and carried it back to the sofa and sat again and put her feet back on the coffee table. She turned the pencil between the thumb and forefinger of each hand.
“My relationship with Russ is a real relationship,” she said.
She turned the pencil between her hands.
“It didn’t start out that way. It started to be a gesture of freedom and maturity.”
She paused and looked at the pencil in her hands and tapped her left thumb with the pencil and sucked on her lower lip. I was quiet.
Susan nodded. “It’s hard,” she said. “The work with Dr. Hilliard.”
“I imagine,” I said. “I imagine it takes will and courage and intelligence.”
Susan nodded again. The pencil turned slowly in her hands.
“You have those things in great number,” I said.
Susan stood again and walked to the window.
“Growing up …” She was looking out the window again as she spoke. “You don’t have any siblings, do you?”
“No.”
“I was the youngest,” she said. She walked from the window to the kitchen and picked up the bowl of oranges and brought them into the living room and put them on the table. Then she sat on the sofa again. “When you came back from California and asked more from me, needed me to help you recover from failure, needed the support of a whole person, there wasn’t enough of me for the job.”
I sat without moving in the imitation leather armchair across from her.
She stood again and went to the kitchen and got a glass of water and drank a third of it and put the partly full glass on the counter. She came to the entry between the kitchen and the living room and leaned against the entry wall and folded her arms.
“You did help,” I said.
“No. I was the thing you used to help yourself. You projected your strength and love onto me and used it to feel better. In a sense I never knew if you loved me or merely loved the projection of yourself, an idealized …” She shrugged and shook her head.
“So you found someone who didn’t idealize you.”
She unfolded her arms and picked up the pencil again and began to turn it. Her throat moved as she swallowed. She put her feet up on the coffee table and crossed her ankles.
“You can’t have us both,” I said. “I’d be pleased to spend the rest of my life working on this relationship. That includes the damage your childhood did you, the damage I did you. But it doesn’t include Russell. He goes or I do.”
“You’ll leave me?” Susan said.
“Yes,” I said.
“If I don’t give up Russell?”
“Absolutely.”
“You could have killed him in Connecticut.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know as much as you know, about civilization and its discontents. But I know if you are going to be whole, you’ve got to resolve this with Russell, and if he dies before you do, you’ll be robbed of that chance.”
Susan leaned forward on the couch, her feet still on the coffee table, like someone doing a sit-up. She held the pencil still between her hands.
“You do love me,” she said.
“I do, I always have.”
She leaned back on the couch. She swallowed visibly again, and began to tap her chin with the eraser end of the pencil.
“I cannot imagine a life without you,” she said.
“Don’t fool yourself,” I said. “If Russell’s in your life I won’t be.”
“I know,” she said. “I can’t give him up either.”
“I can’t force you to,” I said. “But I can force you to give me up. And I will.”
Susan shifted on the couch.
She said, “I’ll have to give him up.”
“If t’were be done, t’were well it be done quickly,” I said.
She shook her head and folded her arms and hugged herself, the pencil still in her right hand.
“What are you waiting for,” I said.
“The strength,” she said.