"Was he speaking French?" she asks.
The question catches me off guard. I try to remember. "I think so."
"Then you understand French."
I pause again. "Well, I took it in high school. I just know it seemed at the time he was screaming for me to help him. I seemed to understand what he was saying."
"Did you try to help him?"
"I was trying to save his life, trying to stop Lucy from killing him."
"But that was for Lucy, not for him. You weren't really trying to save his life. You were trying to stop Lucy from ruining her own."
Thoughts collide, canceling each other out. I don't reply.
"She wanted to kill him," Anna goes on. "This was clearly her intention."
I nod, staring off, reliving it. Lucy, Lucy. I repeatedly called out her name, trying to shatter the homicidal spell she was under. Lucy. I crawled closer to her in the snowy front yard. Put the gun down. Lucy, you don't want to do this. Please. Put the gun down. Chandonne rolled and writhed, making the horrible sounds of a wounded animal, and Lucy was on her knees, in combat position, gun shaking in both hands as she pointed it at his head. Then feet and legs were all around us. ATF agents and police in dark battle dress clutching rifles and pistols had swarmed into my yard. Not one of them knew what to do as I begged my niece not to kill Chandonne in cold blood. There's been enough killing, I pled with Lucy as I pulled myself within inches of her, my left arm fractured and useless. Don't do this. Don't do this, please. We love you.
"You are quite certain it was Lucy's intention to kill him, even though it wasn't self-defense?" Anna asks again.
"Yes," I reply. "I'm certain."
"Then should we reconsider that perhaps it was not necessary for her to kill those men down in Miami?"
"That was totally different, Anna," I reply. "And I can't blame Lucy for the way she reacted when she saw him in front of my house_saw him and me on the ground in the snow, not even ten feet from each other. She knew about the other cases here, the murders of Kim Luong and Diane Bray. She knew damn well why he had come to my house, what he planned for me. How would you feel if you had been Lucy?"
"I cannot imagine."
"That's right," I reply. "I don't think anyone can imagine something like that until it happens. I know if I were the one driving up and it was Lucy in the yard, and he had tried to murder her, then…" I pause, analyzing, not really able to complete the thought.
"You would have killed him," Anna finishes what she must suspect I was going to say.
"Well, I might have."
"Even though he was no threat? He was in terrible pain, blind and helpless?"
"It's hard to know the other person is helpless, Anna. What did I know outside in the snow, in the dark, with a broken arm, terrorized?"
"Ah. But you knew enough to talk Lucy out of killing him." She gets up and I watch as she unhooks a ladle from the iron rack of pots and pans suspended overhead and fills big earthenware bowls, steam rising in aromatic clouds. She sets the soup on the table, giving me time to think about what she just said. "Have you ever considered that your life reads like one of your more complicated death certificates." Anna then says, "Due to, due to, due to, due to." She motions with her hands, conducting her own orchestra of emphasis. "Where you find yourself now is due to this and that and due to on and on, and it all goes back to the original injury. Your father's death."
I search to remember what I have told her about my past.
"You are who you are in life because you became a student of death at a very young age," she continues. "Most of your childhood you lived with your father's dying."
The soup is chicken vegetable and I detect bay leaves and sherry. I am not sure I can eat. Anna slips mitts over her hands and slides sourdough rolls out of the oven. She serves hot bread on small plates with butter and honey. "It seems to be your karma to return to the scene, so to speak, over and over," she analyzes. "The scene of your father's death, of that original loss. As if somehow you will undo it. But all you do is repeat it. The oldest pattern in human nature. I see it daily."
"This isn't about my father." I pick up my spoon. "This isn't about my childhood, and to tell you the truth, the last thing I care about right now is my childhood."
"It is about not feeling." She pulls out her chair and sits back down. "About learning not to feel because it was too painful to feel." The soup is too hot to eat and she idly stirs it with a heavy, engraved silver spoon. "When you were a child, you could not live with the impending doom in your house, the fear, the grief, the anger. You shut down."
"Sometimes you have to do that."
"It is never good to do that." She shakes her head.
"Sometimes it's survival to do that," I disagree.
"Shutting down is denial. When you deny the past, you will repeat it. You are living proof. Your life has been one loss after another ever since that original loss. Ironically, you have turned loss into a profession, the doctor who hears the dead, the doctor who sits at the bedside of the dead. Your divorce from Tony. Mark's death. Then last year, Benton's murder. Then Lucy in a shoot-out and you almost lose her. And now, finally, you. This terrible man comes to your house and you almost lost you. Losses and more losses."
The pain from Benton's murder is frighteningly fresh. I fear it will always be fresh, that I will never escape the hol-lowness, the echo of empty rooms in my soul and the anguish in my heart. I am outraged all over again as I think of the police in my house unwittingly touching items that belonged to Benton, brushing past his paintings, tracking mud over the fine rug in the dining room he gave me for Christmas one year. No one knowing. No one caring.
"A pattern like this," Anna comments, "if it isn't arrested, takes on an unstoppable energy and sucks everything into its black hole."
I tell her my life is not in a black hole. I don't deny there is a pattern. I would have to be as dense as dirt not to see it. But on one point I am in adamant disagreement. "It bothers me considerably to hear you imply I brought him to my door," I tell her, referring again to Chandonne, whom I can scarcely bear to call by name. "That somehow I set everything into motion to bring a killer to my house. If that's what I hear you saying. If that is what you're saying."
"It is what I am asking." She butters a roll. "It is what I am asking you, Kay," she somberly repeats.
"Anna, how in God's name can you think I would some-how bring about my own murder?"
"Because you would not be the first or last person to do something like that. It is not conscious."
"Not me. Not subconsciously or unconsciously," I claim.
"There is much self-fulfilled prophecy here. You. Then Lucy. She almost became what she fights. Be careful who you choose for an enemy because that is who you become most like," Anna tosses Nietzsche's quote up into the air. She serves up words she has heard me say in the past.
"I didn't will him to come to my house," I repeat slowly and flatly. I continue to avoid saying Chandonne's name because I don't want to give him the power of being a real person to me.
"How did he know where you live?" Anna continues her questioning.