“Don’t touch my stapler,” Lisbet said, using Milton’s voice from the movie Office Space.
“Where are your TPS reports?” I asked, and we exchanged grins at being in synch with movie shorthand humor.
I moved to the next wall and looked at two different Rene Magritte prints. Lisbet must have interpreted my nod as meaning something and asked, “Do you have any art at your house?”
“I don’t, but Sirius does: Dogs Playing Poker. It’s not as bad as it sounds, though. It’s on velvet.”
There was one other piece of wall art in the office, a reproduction of an old map of the world. It bore some resemblance to the present-day world maps, but there were the notable omissions of a continent or two.
I pointed to the words “Here there be dragons” and said, “The cartographer got it right.”
“How is that?”
“Where he wrote those words is right where LA is.”
The master bedroom was filled with mission-style furniture. Along the longest wall were shelves that held books, CDs, and an assortment of keepsakes. In the corners of the room were sconces for soft lighting. Lisbet’s green thumb was evidenced in a number of houseplants, and a variety of fresh and dried flowers filled half a dozen vases. One of the walls was devoted to a display of framed familial pictures, and among them were a number of smiling faces that resembled Lisbet.
“Four sisters,” she said, “three nieces, two nephews, and one brother.”
“And a partridge in a pear tree,” I sang.
In the air was the scent of potpourri, the balsam of pine sachets, the sandalwood of scented candles, and the fragrant gummy smell of eucalyptus leaves. It was a feminine room, because few men would take the time to make a space so appealing to the senses, but it was a room that would be easy to leave your boots in.
Her apartment couldn’t have been more than eight hundred square feet, but she’d managed to pack a lot in. Mirrors, recessed lighting, and Lisbet’s good taste made the space feel much larger than it was. She left exploration of the loft-or what she called “my meditation space”-for last.
The loft was a fusion of East and West. There were definite shrine elements to it: a tatami mat, a shoji door, and a small rock garden with trickling water. The space was set off by wall dividers of shadowed ravens and cranes. There was no altar but a table that seemed to be a memorial of sorts. Laid out on it were items Lisbet must have deemed significant: a piece of amber with a fossilized insect; some sea shells; a few interesting-looking stones; a tiny pink baby blanket that held an ostrich egg; a cameo locket; a feather; a snow globe; a well-thumbed Bible; a book-sized container filled with white sand and a tiny rake; a small music box; and a framed black-and-white picture of the Garden of Angels.
I picked up the picture and studied it for a moment. It wasn’t one of those views of a cemetery with creeping fog and shrouded images, but neither was it an inspirational shot of the sun rising. The picture showed the youthful reminders without the youths. It was sort of like seeing a deserted playground; you knew what was missing and what should have been there in place of the grave markers.
“You’ve made a special place on this planet,” I said, carefully returning the photo to its place.
“A lot of people have made it a special place. Today you saw how many are involved. I always like to quote from one of the memorial bricks: ‘Our share of night to bear.’”
“Sometimes it seems like a long way to dawn.”
“Sometimes it does, but not tonight.”
“No, not tonight.”
I took her in my arms and we held one another. The moment seemed to stir a lot of memories and feelings in me: the burial of Rose, Sister Frances’s miracle, the pleasure of holding Lisbet, and the thought that I wouldn’t be alive if she hadn’t saved me with a fortuitous phone call.
“If you’re ever up for sainthood, I wonder if you saving my life would qualify as a miracle.”
“I already told you that I don’t want to be a saint.”
As if to emphasis this, she offered up a long and passionate kiss. When our lips finally disengaged I said, “I’m beginning to believe you.”
She felt along the right side of my face, gently touching the scar tissue there. “Do you mind?”
“Do you?”
“I want to feel free to touch you.”
“I hereby give you permission to ravage me wherever you want.”
“Are you sensitive here?”
“I can show you a few spots where I’m a lot more sensitive.”
“I’m being serious, Michael. If touching you here isn’t pleasurable for you, I’ll stop.”
“Don’t stop. What’s prickly is my personality, not my skin. The scarring makes that area not as sensitive to the touch as other parts of my face, but your warm hand still feels good to me.”
“I’m glad.”
“You’re actually feeling my buttocks, you know.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“That’s where they took that particular skin graft from.”
“So you’re speaking out of your ass?”
“You really have forever dispelled your saint image.”
“Good,” she said, still stroking my face. “You know, the first time we met I asked around about you. That’s when I learned that you were the officer that was burned while bringing in the Strangler.”
“That explains why you were nice to me. You felt sorry for Quasimodo.”
“You mean I heard bells ringing?”
I used the pretense of stretching to move my face away from her hand. I don’t like being self-conscious, but I am.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” I said, changing the light tone of our conversation to something more serious.
Lisbet took a read of my eyes and then a more pointed read of my scarred face. “I hope you’re not implying that this is some kind of mercy date. Yes, the first time we met I couldn’t help but notice the scarring on your face, but I stopped seeing it after that.”
“You’re doing better than me, then. Sometimes I’m still startled when I see myself in the mirror.”
“Sounds like me when I have a bad hair day.”
I didn’t have to force my smile. “I’m getting used to the new me, but I was really self-conscious when I first started going out in public and noticed all the surreptitious staring directed my way.”
“I’ll bet not as many people were staring at your scars as you thought.”
“You’d lose that bet.”
“I’m not saying that people weren’t staring, but not all of them were looking at your scars. They were staring at a hero. Your capturing the Strangler was a huge story. I still remember all those breaking news reports on how you and Sirius were doing.”
“I guess I missed all the hoopla being in the burn unit. Everything was sort of a blur the first few days. There was a TV in my room, but I couldn’t watch it because the fire had burned my eyelids and corneas, and my face was swaddled in bandages.”
“That must have been awful.”
Her sympathetic voice kept me talking. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so isolated. What made it even worse was that my doctors told me I might lose my sight. So there I was in my personal darkness with nothing to do but worry, except on those too frequent occasions when I was being tortured.”
Thinking that I’d offered up too much poor, poor, pitiful me, I finished with, “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you enjoy the play?”
Lisbet had the good sense to groan.
I said, “You’d think all of that would put a few scars in perspective, wouldn’t you?”
“Didn’t it?”
I shrugged. “I wasn’t only worried about my life or my sight. I was afraid that without a full recovery I wouldn’t have a job on the force.”
“If I was fighting for my life, the last thing I’d think about was my work.”
“When Jen died, work took on a new importance for me. It gave me a reason to keep going. So even when the doctors told me I was out of the woods, I kept worrying about the department finding some medical reason that would prevent me from returning to the force. That’s why I memorized eye charts and prepared for how to best answer questions about my physical and mental health. To tell the truth, I’m still paranoid.”