"Let's go back to the night he got so angry," Anna navigates. "Can you remember when this was, exactly?"
"Just weeks before his murder." I talk calmly, mesmerized by coals that look like glowing alligator skin. "Benton knew my space needs. Even on nights when we made love, it wasn't unusual for me to wait until he fell asleep and get up with the stealth of an adulterer to slip inside my office down the hall. He was understanding about my infidelities." I feel Anna smile in the dark. "He rarely complained when he reached for me and felt an empty space on my side of the bed," I explain. "He accepted my need to be alone, or seemed to. I never knew how much my nocturnal habits hurt him until that night when he came into my office."
"Was it really your nocturnal habits?" Anna inquires. "Or your aloofness?"
"I don't think of myself as aloof."
"Do you think of yourself as someone who connects with others?"
I analyze, searching everywhere inside me for a truth I have always feared.
"Did you connect with Benton?" Anna goes on. "Let's start with him. He was your most significant relationship. Certainly, he was the longest."
"Did I connect with him?" I hold up the question like a ball I am about to serve, not sure of the angle or spin or how hard. "Yes and no. Benton was one of the finest, kindest men I've ever known. Sensitive. Deep and intelligent. I could talk to him about anything."
"But did you? I get the impression you didn't." Anna, of course, is on to me.
I sigh. "I'm not sure I've ever talked to anybody about absolutely anything."
"Perhaps Benton was safe," she suggests.
"Perhaps," I reply. "I do know there were deep places in me he never reached. I also never wanted him to, didn't want to get that intense, that close. I suppose starting out as we did may be part of the explanation. He was married. He always went home to his wife, to Connie. It went on for years. We were on opposite sides of a wall, separated, only touching when we could sneak. God, I would never do that again with anybody, I don't care who."
"Guilt?"
"Of course," I answer. "Every good Catholic feels guilt. In the beginning, I felt terribly guilty. I've never been the type to break rules. I'm not like Lucy, or should I say she's not like me. If rules are mindless and ignorant, she breaks them right and left. Hell, I don't even get speeding tickets, Anna."
It is here that she leans forward and holds up a hand. This is her signal. I have said something important. "Rules," she says. "What are rules?"
"A definition? You want a definition of rules?"
"What are rules to you? Your definition, yes."
"Right and wrong," I reply. "What is legal versus illegal. Moral versus immoral. Humane versus inhumane."
"Sleeping with a married person is immoral, wrong, inhumane?"
"If nothing else, it's stupid. But yes, it's wrong. Not a fatal error or unforgivable sin or illegal, but dishonest. Yes, definitely dishonest. A broken rule, yes."
"Then you admit you are capable of dishonesty."
"I admit I'm capable of being stupid."
"But dishonest?" She won't let me evade the question.
"Everyone is capable of anything. My affair with Benton was dishonest. I indirectly lied because I hid what I was doing. I presented a front to others, including Connie, that was false. Simply false. So am I capable of deception, of lying? Clearly I am." The confession depresses me deeply.
"What about homicide? What is the rule about homicide? Wrong? Immoral? Is it always wrong to kill? You have killed," Anna says.
"In self-defense." On this point I feel strong and certain. "Only when I had no choice because the person was going to kill me or someone else."
"Did you commit a sin? Thou shall not kill''
"Absolutely not." Now I am getting frustrated. "It's easy to make judgments about matters one looks at from the distant vantage point of morality and idealism. It's different when you're confronted by a killer who's holding a knife to another person's throat or reaching for a pistol to shoot you. The sin would be to do nothing, to allow an innocent person to die, to allow yourself to die. I feel no remorse," I tell Anna.
"What do you feel?"
I close my eyes for a moment, firelight moving across my lids. "Sick. I can't think about those deaths without feeling sick. What I did wasn't wrong. I had no choice. But I wouldn't call it right, either, if you understand the difference. When Temple Gault was hemorrhaging to death in front of me and begging me to help, there are really no words for how that felt and how it feels now to remember it."
"This was in the subway tunnel in New York. Four or five years ago?" she asks, and I answer with a nod. "Carrie Grethen's former partner in crime. Gault was her mentor, in a sense. Isn't that right?" Again, I nod. "Interesting," she says. "You killed Carrie's partner and then she killed yours. A connection, perhaps?"
"I have no idea. I have never looked at it like that." I am jolted by the thought. It has never occurred to me and seems so obvious now.
"Did Gault deserve to die, in your opinion?" Anna then asks.
"Some people would say he forfeited his right to be in this world and we're all better off now that he's gone. But my God, I wouldn't have chosen to be the one who carried out the sentence, Anna. Never, never. Blood was spurting through his fingers. I saw fear in his eyes, terror, panic, the evil in him gone. He was just a human being dying. And I'd caused it. And he was crying and begging me to make his bleeding stop." I have stopped rocking. I feel Anna's full attention on me. "Yes," I finally say. "Yes, it was awful. Just awful. Sometimes I dream about him. Because I killed him, he will forever be part of me. That's the price I pay."
"And Jean-Baptiste Chandonne?"
"I don't want to hurt anybody anymore." I stare at the dying fire.
"At least he is alive?"
"I take no comfort in that. How can I? People like him don't stop hurting others, even after they're locked up. The evil lives on. That is my conundrum. I don't want them killed, but I know the damage they do while they're alive. Lose-lose, any way you look at it," I tell Anna.
Anna says nothing. It is her method to offer silences more than opinions. Grief throbs in my chest and my heart beats in a staccato of fear. "I suppose I'd be punished if I'd killed Chandonne," I add. "Without question I'll be punished because I didn't."
"You could not save Benton's life." Anna's voice fills the space between us. I shake my head as tears fill my eyes. "Do you feel you should have been able to defend him, too?" she asks. I swallow and spasms of that agonizing loss rob me of my ability to speak. "Did you fail him, Kay? And now it is your penance to eradicate other monsters, perhaps? To do it for Benton, because you let monsters murder him? You did not save him?"
My helplessness, my outrage boil over. "He didn't save himself, goddamn it. Benton wandered into his murder like a dog or cat wandering off to die, because it was time. Jesus!" I am out with it. "Jesus. Benton was always complaining about wrinkles and sagging and aches and pains, even during the early years of our relationship. As you know, he was older than I. Maybe aging threatened him more for that reason. I don't know. But when he reached his mid-forties, he couldn't look in the mirror without shaking his head and griping. 'I don't want to get old, Kay.' That's what he would say.
"I remember late one afternoon we were taking a bath together and he was complaining about his body. 'Nobody wants to get old,' I finally said to him. 'But Ireally don't_ don't to the point that I don't think I can survive it,' was his reply. 'We have to survive it. It's selfish not to, Benton,' I said. 'And besides, we survived being young, didn't we?' Ha! He thought I was being ironic. I wasn't. I asked him how many days of your youth were spent waiting for tomorrow? Because somehow tomorrow is going to be better? He thought about mis for a moment as he pulled me closer in the tub, touching and fondling me beneath the steamy cover of hot water scented with lavender. He knew exactly how to play me back in those days when our cells came alive instantly on contact. Back then, when it was good. 'Yeah,' he considered, 'it's true. I've always waited for tomorrow, thinking tomorrow's going to be better. That's survival, Kay. If you don't think tomorrow or next year or the year after that will be better, why bother?' "