Everyone, of course, weighs in on the matter. When Cate calls her father, he and Seneca put their phone on speaker and listen together and almost simultaneously insist she come down to Puebla for a break. She can’t now, she tells them, and they ask if she needs them to come up there for a while, stay with her. This brings her to tears, ducts fill and empty. An unusual occurrence for her. But she’s okay, she assures them.
Her father offers to call Ricky with the news, which pleases Cate to no end—Ricky having to find out secondhand. When she calls an hour later, Cate lies to her, on principle. “I was just about to call.”
At first Ricky seems properly empathic, but then she quickly segues into fatuously confusing the fire extinguisher with a Crock-Pot. The perpetrators she categorizes as hoboes. Assembling a version that’s slightly cartoonish.
“Well, I didn’t get a choice, really,” Cate says. “I didn’t get to pick light saber and Armani underwear model for my weapon and victim.” She’s pretty much done with the conversation at this point. Her most immediate preoccupation is how sick to her stomach she is from the antiretroviral meds, another crummy aspect of the whole thing she doesn’t want to present to her mother.
“How’s Neale?”
“Banged up. Her cheekbone is fractured. She’s going to have to have surgery. Her wrist is sprained. I’m not sure exactly how that happened.”
“Did he—?”
Ricky’s slightly gossipy inflection further softens with a velvety tone of concern that makes Cate decide she doesn’t have to answer this essential question.
“And of course the whole thing will now be distorted into heartwarming. Like you’re the crossing guard who saved some kid from a hurtling truck. And now you’re taking him to Disneyland because that’s always been his secret wish.”
Cate waits, hoping Ricky will dial this down a little, but she doesn’t.
“And it’s a shame they brought your hand into the story. Here. Wait a minute.” Cate sits through the giant crackle of a newspaper opening and folding. “ ‘In spite of her disability—’ ”
Cate presses the red hang-up icon. Later, she’ll say the call got dropped and she really should change networks.
A few days later, after the nameless guy has died and Cate is officially a killer, another local TV station asks if she’d be up to doing a news feature on home invasion, “a sort of DIY piece,” what someone can improvise when their home is invaded. This is put to Cate with a feminist cast, and she’s persuaded her story might be of help to other women. How it turns out, though, is her sitting on one of two low sofas, around a coffee table, with two morning show hosts and another guest, a guy who sets a bear trap by his back door every night before he goes to bed and how this paid off big-time when a couple of robbers jimmied the door open one night. He sits with the bear trap in his lap throughout the segment.
“That’s it,” she tells Neale. “I’m getting off the parade float. If other people want to murder their intruders, they can find their own crappy weapons.”
Graham comes at the event from a completely different angle. She comes in to find him at the kitchen counter, fiddling with a small piece of electronic equipment. She doesn’t bother asking what he’s tinkering with; she’s too tired. His paranoia now seems ephemeral and elective. Like her own worries before. Before.
“The lab called. They said you can stop taking the meds.”
“Great! That means he tested negative. If HIV is the worst thing in the world, the pills are the second worst. I won’t go into detail.”
“Can I get something for you? Espresso?” A new, Italian machine has found its way onto the counter. Nice, but she hopes not a sign of him settling in.
“What’s toasting?”
“Cranberry crumpets. You can get them from this place in London. Frick and Frack. You know. Crumpeters to the Queen. Something like that.” Since he’s been living here, Graham has become expert at ordering expensive everything from everywhere.
“You know, when T. E. Lawrence was eight years old, he became convinced his destiny was to save a captive people. That seems unbelievable, but I do think some people have a clearer path than the rest of us. Along those lines, I think what you did was inevitable, a moment all your previous fine moments were paving the way to. You were there for a reason. Because you could take care of it.”
“Graham. I mean thanks, but I don’t think anything about it was foreordained.”
“Remember when we were first married? That heat-wave summer the temperatures were in the hundreds. The power was out? And you were bringing bags of ice up to old people in high-rises?”
“Are you kidding? Everybody was doing that. And truthfully, that’s one of the things in my life I feel worst about. I only got up fifteen floors. I’ve always worried somebody on sixteen died of heatstroke.”
“Well, that’s one way of looking at it. The penitent path. Go sprinkle sand in your sheets, put pebbles in your shoes. You’re still my hero.”
“So, I’m not sure I want to ask, but are you still seeing Eleanor?”
“She’s been in Fort Lauderdale doing that new Doll’s House. So we just Skype.”
“Often?” She’s hoping for once a week.
“Just at night.”
Not a good answer.
“Do you want me to put some guava jam on your crumpet?” he says, changing the subject. “It goes great. With the cranberries in the crumpets. There’s this guava orchard in Honduras. You can only get it in certain months. And only one jar per year.”