Four

Kate woke early after a night of fitful sleep, and she decided the time had come to find her running shoes again. It took her a while, but she uncovered them at last in a box on a shelf in what she had begun thinking of as Lee’s closet, where Jon must have put them some months before in one of his fits of tidying. They were old friends on her feet, and she did a careful round of stretches before letting herself out into the gray half rain of an early, foggy morning.

By the base of the hill, her calf muscles were quivering, and the intended easy run of two miles was whittled down still further. At the end of the short circuit, she returned up Russian Hill, walking, and slowly at that, with a red face and heaving lungs. Inside the house, the red dot on the answering machine was glowing, an excuse to sit down on the carpeted stairway to listen to the message—three messages, it turned out; the telephone must have rung the whole time she was out. The first one was from Jon, his voice sounding distant, exaggerated: defensive.

“Katarina, dearest, why do I always get the machine? Are you never at home? I do hope you’re getting these messages; I’ll feel terrible if you haven’t been. Anyway, I’m back in Boston, but only for a few days. A friend wants me to go to his place in Cancún, and you know how I adore Mexico. Just for a week or two, maybe a bit more, I don’t know. I may be back in the City first, but if not, I’ll drop you a line and let you know just where I am, exactly. If you really have to get ahold of me, that same number in Boston will do; they’ll know where I am. Did you get my postcard from London? Don’t you think those helmets the bobbies wear are just so adorable? Why don’t our boys wear them? Couldn’t you suggest it to the police commissioner or whoever is in charge of the uniforms? Ah well, enough of this, I’ll use up the whole tape. Toodle-oo now, Kate, as they say in jolly old. I hope you’re well. I’ll be in touch soon.”

The next message was a brief one from Rosa Hidalgo, who said, “Kate, I just wanted to tell you that if there’s anything I can do to help you with Jules, just call me. She’s a real sweetheart, but she can be a handful, and I’m happy to offer advice.” Kate stared at the machine, wondering what on earth the woman was talking about. She shook her head at the neighborhood busybody and dismissed her from her mind.

Fortunately, the third message was from Jules.

“Hi, Kate. I, um, I suppose you’re asleep, and don’t bother calling me back. I just wanted to say thanks for yesterday; I really enjoyed it. Especially when that guy in the next lane who was giving you a hard time turned around and dropped the ball on his foot. God, that was funny. Anyway, thanks, I really had a great time, and, if you ever want to do it again, I’d love to. I mean, not just the same things, but anything. Oh, this is Jules—I forgot to say. As if you wouldn’t have guessed by now, duh. Gotta run—the French club’s going to the beach. Bye, Kate. And thanks again. Bye.”

Kate was grinning when the tape clucked to itself, and she pushed herself off the stairs to go shower.

The message from Jules was to prove the high point of a very long and very trying week, a week designed by malevolent fate to push the most phlegmatic of detectives over the edge. Kate was not exactly riding the most even of keels to begin with.

Monday her car would not start.

Cable car and bus got her to work late, irritable, and with leg muscles still quivering from Sunday’s run, to find that Al Hawkin was out with the flu and she had been paired with Sammy Calvo, easily the most abrasive and inefficient detective in the city. And of course they caught a call first thing, so she had the pleasure of listening to his offensive jokes—told in all innocence; he truly could not comprehend why a woman might not think a rape joke funny—and going back over his interviews to see what he had left out.

Tuesday, the tow truck was delayed, so she was late a second time. She was further irritated by the truck driver’s friendly offer to take Lee’s Saab down from its blocks so Kate could drive it—because the thought had already occurred to her and been squelched by the need to reinstate its insurance at a moment’s notice, by the knowledge of the comments a Saab convertible would stir up when she climbed out of it at a crime scene in one of the more unsavory parts of town, but mostly by pride. The car was Lee’s; Kate would have nothing to do with it.

Wednesday, she sat in the department’s unmarked car and had a shouting match with Sammy Calvo over his treatment of a witness, the fifteen-year-old mother of the child whose death they were investigating. His final querulous remark made her blood pressure soar: “I don’t understand why you’re so hot about this, Katy. I just asked her if she’d ever heard of the Pill.” Although sorely tempted to whack him over the head with the clipboard he invariably carried, she satisfied herself with snarling, “It’s because you’re an insensitive jerk, Sammy. And for Christ’s sake, don’t call me Katy.” She slammed the door of the car behind her and went back into the house to calm the teary young mother and her angry family, finally retrieving some of the answers she needed.

It was a long time until night, and longer still before she came through the door of the house, her very skin aching with the stress and frustrations of a fourteen-hour day, aching for a friendly voice, aching for Lee, aching, most of all, for a drink, many drinks; craving alcohol like a drowning person craves air, she yearned for the world’s oldest painkiller to knock the edges off the intolerable day. She heaved her things onto the kitchen table, plucked a bottle of wine from the rack without looking to see what kind it was, took it over to the drawer to get the corkscrew, and then stood with the corkscrew in one hand as a strong and distressing thought intruded itself into her actions.

How long has it been since you did not finish off the better part of a bottle of wine at night? Since the middle of August, maybe?

Oh God—she shook her head—not tonight, no guilt tonight. It’s been a hell of a day.

What day isn’t? If not tonight, when?

Fuck off; it’s only wine.

Only…?

I want a drink.

Or six.

She stood there for a very long time, aching and frightened and knowing at last, on this gray and dreary night, that she was walking on the edge of a precipice, the one that began with just a bit of letting go and ended up with a few shortcuts and reassuring herself that nobody would notice, until finally she would be just another cop who gave up the fight, a woman who couldn’t cut it with the big boys, a lesbian who wasn’t as good as she thought. And no, she was not exaggerating the importance of this night’s bottle of wine that she held in her hands, because she had at last admitted that if she opened it, the wine would be drinking her, not she it, and if knowing that, she went ahead, then she was also being consumed by tomorrow’s bottle, and Friday’s….

And oh God, who would care? She put the point of the corkscrew to the foil over the cork, and no further.

It was, oddly enough, Jules who pulled her back from the edge, that annoying young reminder of yet another responsibility unmet. The thought of Jules was bracing. Maddening, but bracing, like a slap in the face. She put the bottle away and made herself a cup of hot milk in the microwave, then sat with it at the kitchen table while she sorted through the mail.

Junk mail, bills, catalogs, Psychology Today and the Disability Rag for Lee (at least she hasn’t changed the addresses on her subscriptions, Kate thought with black humor), and two letters—one for Lee, one from Lee.

She put everything but this last in a precise stack, largest on the bottom and smallest on top, the lower left corners aligned. She leaned the cheap envelope addressed to her in Lee’s heavy black pen against the saltcellar, then took a swig from her mug, grimaced, got up and found an apple and a piece of leathery pizza in the refrigerator, and ate them standing at the sink. Then she took a can of split pea soup from the cupboard and two slices of bread from the refrigerator, opened the can, put half of the soup into a bowl and put that in the microwave oven, dropped the bread into the toaster, ate the soup, ate one slice of toast plain and the other with a sprinkling from the clotted shaker of cinnamon sugar, reached into the cupboard for the bag of coffee beans and then put them down on the sink and turned and took three steps to the table and ran a finger under the flap of the envelope and pulled the slip of paper out and smoothed it open on top of the table with one rapid hand before it could burn her. Then, because it lay open before her, Kate read Lee’s brief letter.

“Dearest Kate,” it began. That was something, anyway. Doing well, getting stronger. Learning to use a hatchet, could Kate believe that? Wearing one of Agatha’s flannel shirts and a down vest, cold mornings. Beautiful trees. Strong hills on wise islands. Pods of orcas in the Sound. All of burgeoning nature helping her to find herself, transferring the energy of the hills into her body. Still confused, though, and sorry, so very, abjectly sorry, to be putting Kate through this, but…

But she couldn’t say when she would be home. But Kate couldn’t come to visit. But she couldn’t tell Kate what to say to her clients, her friends. But as soon as she had her head together, Kate would be the first to know; be patient. “Love, Lee.”

Kate looked down at her hand on the table. She had clawed the page together into her fist and it lay there now in a tight wad. She opened her hand, picked at the edges of the letter, smoothed it onto the tabletop with long movements of her hand as if trying to bond it to the wood of the table. She leaned forward, stood, pushing the chair away with the backs of her knees, and turned away.

Beaten, flayed, and too weary to weep, Kate went upstairs to bed.

Thursday’s brightest spot came early, when Kate succeeded in running two miles and still managed a (very slow) near jog coming back up the hill. The rest of the day went downhill fast.

On Friday, Hawkin was back, and she and Calvo went out to the Sunset and arrested the dead child’s father, a pleasant, rather stupid, frightened, unemployed eighth-grade dropout who had been abused himself as a child and who sobbed uncontrollably when Kate read him his rights, then—sure sign they had arrested the right man—fell asleep in the squad car from sheer relief.

His interview and confession brought no satisfaction. He was only a cog in a deadly mechanism, grinding on to produce yet more poverty and brutality. He was no killer, yet he killed, unforgivably, his own child.

Al Hawkin was near the interview room when Kate came out. Waiting for her? He dropped in beside her as she marched away.

“Al, good to see you. You should be home; you look like hell.”

“How’d it go?”

“We got a confession.”

“And?”

“And what? He’ll go to prison and get himself a fine set of muscles in the weight room, and when he gets out, he’ll find his girlfriend has two more kids by two other men, and everyone will go on beating everyone else, happily ever after.”

“One of those days, I see.”

“Do you ever think, Al, that maybe someone should just sterilize the whole goddamn human race, admit that it was a mistake, leave the planet to the dolphins and the cockroaches?”

“Often. Let’s go get some dinner.”

“I can’t, All. I have to see a man about a car.”

“What kind of car?”

“A piece of junk, by the sound of it, but cheap.”

“Oh, right. Tony said you’d been having car problems.”

“I don’t have a problem now. I just don’t have a car. Three thousand dollars to fix it so it won’t quit on me—I don’t have the money.”

“What’s wrong with Lee’s?”

“Nothing. Everything. It’s too complicated to go into, Al. And Jon lent his to a friend while he’s away.”

“So where’s the car you’re looking at?”

“It’s just up Van Ness.”

“I’ll take you; then we can have dinner.”

“If I’m buying, it’s a deal.”

The car proved impossible, too big to park, too shaky to corner, and probably had had its odometer turned back at some point. They went to a Greek pizza house to eat a feta and pesto pizza, and at 9:30 Hawkin pulled up in front of her empty house and turned off the engine.

“Lee’s not back yet,” he said after a glance at the windows.

“Nope.”

“You heard from her?”

“Short letters. They’re in her handwriting, but they’re not Lee.”

“What’s going on?”

“Ah, shit, Al, I wish I knew.” When he continued to study the side of her face, she sighed and squinted at the house. “She’s been getting flaky over the last few months. She said she wants—” She stopped, realizing that she really didn’t want to go into Lee’s fantasies and desires, not even with Al. “She wants all kinds of things she can’t have, in the shape she’s in. And she’s become secretive. She’s never been one to hide anything, but suddenly there were all these things she wouldn’t talk to me about—Lee the therapist’s therapist, who’s always talked over every little nuance, suddenly there were these areas she’d go silent about.”

“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 south 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?”