Robert followed Katie through the halls of the old adobe, which was originally an art school that had since relocated to Santa Fe. Her graceful body glided like smoke above the brick-colored tile floor, silent and ghostly, the thongs on her feet not even slapping the tiles.
She explained the function of each room, mostly for Brian’s benefit, Robert thought. Robert cared about the house, but he would have rather spent the afternoon alone with her, answering each other’s questions about their ordeal, about escaping it, about all the ways it had haunted them since.
In this library the residents received peer counseling and support, she said; in that classroom they were taught basic life skills, such as how to manage finances; in this workshop they received job training. The standard program was nine months. Some of the women needed more time, some less. The house, for women only, had twenty-five beds, she told Brian, who talked more than she did. Eighteen were presently occupied. Two residents had graduated last week, after three years of dedicated work, and taken homes and jobs in Albuquerque. She was so proud of them.
Robert listened but did not hear very much. This woman was the Katie he remembered and yet she was not, and the difference had nothing to do with her blindness or her age or her voice, which was in many ways the same and in others deeper and breathier, maybe an effect of the fire. The change that he could not describe was both familiar and foreign, as apparent as her rich dark curls and as hidden as her thoughts about his sudden emergence in her life. He believed if he focused hard enough, he might soon identify this thing, the way one finally recalled an obvious name or fact that had been elusive for hours.
That might have been the case if he could have studied Katie privately, without the constant distraction of Brian. Somehow he would muster the patience to wait until Brian returned to Arizona.
“Out here in the boondocks is a pretty good place for a person to hide if she wanted to,” Brian observed. Most of his questions so far had been slanted observations like this.
“That depends on what you mean by hide,” Katie said, pausing at the entrance to the kitchen and turning her eyes toward the sound of Brian’s tapping stylus. “If you mean it in the sense of not wanting to be discovered, like a criminal running from the law, no. That’s not why we’re here. That’s not why these women come. But if you mean it in the sense of finding a protected place where a person can safely recover from wounds, then I could live with a word like that.”
She gestured to a wooden plaque above the doorframe. Robert’s and Brian’s chins turned up simultaneously.
Hide me in the shadow of your wings from the wicked who assail me, from my mortal enemies who surround me. Psalm 17:8–9
“You’re a religious group,” Brian declared.
Katie’s mouth pursed—to suppress a smile, Robert thought.
“We’re a realist group,” Katie said.
She stepped into the kitchen, an enamel-coated marvel that appeared to be ancient and yet suitable for commercial-scale cooking. Standing over a butcher block, a woman wearing a blue apron glanced up at them. She was crushing garlic, from the smell of it.
“You offer a Bible study,” Brian insisted. “I saw it on the weekly schedule.”
“Participation in that isn’t mandatory.”
“What parts of the Bible do you study?”
“Anything that applies to these women’s situations. Which is about all of it.”
“And I’ll bet your funding comes largely from churches.”
“What makes you think that?” Katie indicated they should sit at a Formica-topped island, then moved to a cupboard and withdrew three glasses.
“Where does it come from then?”
“People who care.”
“Isn’t there a shortage of such people these days?”
“Not at all.”
“But you said earlier that you were facing something of a funding shortage.”
“Money’s scarce, big hearts aren’t. People help in other ways.”
“What kinds of wounds do you treat here?” Robert asked, wishing Brian’s tone were less confrontational.
“I’ve seen all kinds.” She turned her head toward him.
Brian reinserted himself. “What inspired you to come work in this place so soon after you were injured? I mean, what’s the connection between your experience and substance abuse?”
Katie was so slow to respond that Robert thought she either hadn’t heard Brian or was finally offended by his line of questioning. She filled the glasses with ice and removed a pitcher of tea from the refrigerator before saying, “The answer to that is likely outside the scope of your article, if I understand it correctly.”
“Not really, if it’s true that you and Robert here are the only survivors of the Mikkado Massacre. That’s what I’m mostly interested in—what would make one of you choose to hide, if you don’t mind me using that term, while the other seeks justice in a comparatively public way.”
Katie poured without missing any of the cups and filled them equally. Robert noticed her cheeks blanch.
“You could say we’ve both devoted our lives to protecting others from similar tragedy,” Robert said, keeping his eyes on Katie. At the sound of his voice, she exhaled and seemed to relax. She turned to the windowsill over the kitchen sink and plucked some mint off a plant growing in a small pot.
“But with very different methods,” Brian insisted. “Why this one for you, Katie?”
She dropped a few leaves into each glass before setting the men’s drinks in front of them. Her eyebrows had drawn together in a contemplative frown, and for a moment Robert thought she would tell Brian that the question was too personal.
But she said, “Tragedy shows us what we really are, Brian. The truest, most comprehensive picture of what’s at our core. And if we’re truthful about what we learn, the path we must take afterward is usually pretty clear. Do you agree, Robert?”
“I do.” He took a mint leaf out of his glass and crushed it between his thumb and finger. Smelled it. Recalled how Janeal had often put mint leaves in her tea.
He stared at the leaf. How long had it been since he’d thought of that?
“So that looks different for different people,” Katie was saying to Brian. “No surprise there.” She turned back to her own glass of tea and raised it to her lips, then paused. “Most of the women who come here understand the importance of being honest about what we are.”
“You mean who we are.”
“No. What we are. Fragile human beings prone to failure. So we have that in common, since you asked about connections.”
Robert wondered if Katie had found any answers to the questions he had been asking for the past fifteen years, and if he had any right to ask her to share those with him. He wondered if she had discovered any explanation for the tragedy, any sense in the senseless, any justice or hope. For all the moral goodness of a place like the Hope House, he didn’t see how a little hideaway in the mountains could provide the kinds of answers that mattered.
But because he wouldn’t ask in the presence of this kid reporter, he mentally urged Brian to ask the bold question that he couldn’t—yet. What meaning had she found in this place to salve the pain of their tragedy?
Clearly, Brian was no mind reader.
“You’re saying you had addiction problems at one time.”
Katie’s laugh burst out of her in a spew of tea. Robert saw the woman at the chopping block grin, not at all shocked by Katie’s display. He couldn’t help but smile himself, mostly because Brian, sitting there looking perplexed, was the outsider in this little joke. The idea of sweet Katie ever being addicted to anything but goodness was outrageous.
“Brian,” Katie said, blotting her mouth with the back of her hand, then reaching for a dish towel, “I’m pretty sure I’m not the right person for your article.”
“Of course you are.”
“I was never one to stand at the center of anything.”
“Plenty of people think you deserve to.”
“It’s not about deserving, Brian. It’s about wanting. I know you and Robert came a long way to speak to me, and I’m glad to have you here for as long as you’d like to stay, but I don’t have a story to tell the world. My stories are much more private.”
“I have the editor of a national magazine and several book publishers who think otherwise.”
“Let them think what they like. I don’t parade my personal life before a national audience. Whatever stories I do have to tell are only for the people who need to hear them.”
“How do you decide who needs to hear?”
“I don’t have a formula, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“You realize that the more you protest, the more you make a reporter want to dig?”
Katie crossed her arms. “Poor boy. You haven’t outgrown that willful-defiance stage yet, have you?” Impatience had crept into her tone, but she maintained enough kindness to silence Brian. Temporarily, Robert thought.
“You’re quieter than I remember you being, Robert,” she said into the awkwardness.
“You’ve changed too.”
“For the better I hope.”
Robert nodded and saw a shadow pass across Katie’s eyes. He mentally slapped himself. She couldn’t see his body language, of course, and his remark had been obtuse.
He groped for an appropriate compliment. “You had very little to improve upon.”
Katie dropped her eyes and turned her face away from him. She reached for her tea glass and misjudged its location, tipping the cup. It shattered on the tile floor, and everyone watched the brown liquid slip across the tile.
“Oh, Robert.” She sighed. “You have no idea.”