Naomi's black crepe suit was impeccably pressed. Since I was congenitally unable to even bend over without wrinkling my own clothes, I was always amazed when other people could make it through a workday looking as though they had a miniature haberdasher with a steam wand stuffed in their briefcase.
I acknowledged her curt "Hello," and then I waited to discover if she'd learned of the emergency response that was taking place on Jay Street. I rehearsed my arguments while she settled herself on her chair and found a place for the big Vuitton bag. The thing thudded to the floor as though she were transporting dumbbells.
"You know," she said finally, "you never asked me what I thought about Royal Peterson's murder. We talked about the boys, and their reaction, but you never asked about me and my reaction. After I left last time, I found that odd, that you hadn't asked me about it."
No, I thought. Instead of discussing your reaction to Royal Peterson's murder, we discussed peri-menopause, a topic I find so engrossing that it often distracts me from pursuing more important things, like murder.
"You would like to talk about-"
"I didn't feel a thing." As she trampled over the end of my sentence, I couldn't tell if my words had been superfluous or if she was just ignoring me. "I didn't feel bad that a man had been killed. I didn't feel particularly good that the man who'd released my daughter's rapist was dead. Hearing that Peterson had been murdered didn't move me at all."
I said, "What do you make of that?"
Like "How does that make you feel?" it was one of those questions that made me feel like a caricature of a psychotherapist. Every time I spoke those or similar words, I was secretly embarrassed. But I asked the questions nonetheless, probably more frequently than I would like to admit.
The reason? Sometimes they worked.
And they always bought me time to think.
Naomi's response sounded rehearsed to me. She said, "Vengeance is a funny thing. If you read the final reports about Klebold and Harris-and believe me, I've read everything-and what they did at Columbine High School, their passion for vengeance had deserted them at the end. After fifteen, twenty minutes they'd lost their energy, they'd stopped hunting down kids, they'd even given up trying to explode their ineffective little bombs, and eventually they just turned their guns on themselves. I think when the adrenaline was finally totally depleted they realized that they'd failed to achieve whatever it was they'd spent a year trying to achieve. I wonder sometimes if vengeance is ever satisfying. I discuss it with Leo all the time. Every visit to prison, it seems we talk about it.
"He maintains that what he did that day in Denver wasn't vengeance. He says it was simply an act of self-respect. In his mind, he did what he had to do as a father. That was all."
"And you, Naomi, what do you think?"
"Leo? He's kidding himself. What he did to the rapist was vengeance, pure and simple."
"But he's satisfied? You just said that you wonder if vengeance is ever satisfying."
"Leo's in prison, for God's sake. He'll rationalize anything to survive that. You would, too. Don't feign ignorance, Doctor; it's not becoming." She flipped her hair off her collar with the fingers of her left hand.
As Naomi's admonition filled the space between us like a bad odor fills an elevator, it finally struck me that she and I had not spoken a single word about the bomb squad's arrival at Royal Peterson's house. We were talking about something else: high school slaughter and an imprisoned husband and father and teenage boys with enough vitriol expanding in their veins to explode their spleens.
I stifled a relieved sigh, not unaware of the irony.
"What?" she demanded.
"You didn't actually answer my question earlier. About your reaction to Royal Peterson's murder."
"You were asking me how I feel about not feeling anything? It's a preposterous question."
I cautioned myself to portray more patience than I was feeling. "What I'm wondering is… how you understand… your reaction."
Naomi crossed her legs. The toe of the dangling foot rotated side to side as though she were extinguishing an imaginary cigarette. "Don't talk to me like I'm an idiot. What I'm wondering is why I'm sitting here with you. If I understood my reaction to Roy Peterson's murder, why on earth would I put myself through this? You think sitting here with you is fun?"
Fun? No. How about rewarding, at least. Therapeutic, maybe? I suspected she wasn't done. I waited.
Suddenly, her eyes moistened and I thought she might be near tears. My immediate reaction was to consider the possibility that the sorrow I was witnessing was an act. I cautioned myself to be receptive to the possibility that the emotion was sincere. She leaned over and tugged a tissue from the box on the table by the sofa. The gesture was abrupt and fierce, as though she feared someone might be holding on to the other end of the tissue and she was determined to have it.
She said, "God. I don't want to be this way with you."
"What way?"
"This way. Exasperated. Critical. It's how I am at work. It's how I am at home. I criticized the mailman today for putting two rubber bands around the bundle of mail when one would do fine. What's that about? All the time, I'm irritable, I'm critical… I'm bitchy. I swear it's my hormones."
"You know, you have been under a little bit of stress, Naomi." I'd intended the comment to sound slightly sarcastic; Naomi's gentle laughter convinced me that I'd hit my mark.
"Yeah, I guess I have," she said.
From those hopeful words of conciliation my worst fears began to materialize. For the rest of the session I followed Naomi as she led me down the rocky path that took us back into the world of peri-menopause.
My kingdom, I prayed, for some estrogen.
I usually had no trouble generating empathy for the plight of women struggling with the assault of unbalanced hormones. But these circumstances were anything but usual. My impulse was to insist that Naomi prioritize. And insist that her number one priority should be helping me figure out what the hell Ramp and Paul were up to.
Any relief I might have been feeling that my patient hadn't mentioned the discovery of an explosive device in Royal's home was simmering away in front of my eyes. Now that I knew that a bomb had indeed been stashed in the house, I needed to discuss it with Naomi, whether she brought it up or not.
I batted the issue back and forth, back and forth, as Naomi tried to numb me with tales of mood changes, body temperature regulation problems, and menstrual irregularities. At one point she said, "And don't even ask me what this has done to my sex life."
I didn't ask. Her husband was in prison. I assumed that fact alone should have greatly impeded her sex life. In my mind, Naomi and I didn't have ten minutes to waste, and I figured any expansive gripes about her sex life could easily devour ten whole sessions.
Nor did I ever decide what to do about Ramp and Paul and the wouldn't-it-be-cool games.
Just peri-menopause.
When our time was up, Naomi and I found a time to meet on the following Monday. She composed herself enough to say thank you. I was surprised to discover that I felt that her sentiment was sincere. As she stood to leave, she picked up her big bag and performed whatever sleight of hand she did to produce her pack of cigarettes, and then she started toward the door to my office.
Halfway there she paused and pivoted on one foot to face me. "By the way," she said. "Did you hear the news this morning? About that bomb?"
By the time I was ready to stammer out a reply, she was out the door.
CHAPTER 16
The neighborhood around South Dahlia Street in Denver is an urban oasis, sequestered in relative privacy between the suburb-mimicking big-box sprawl of University Hills Shopping Center and the always-congested multilane ribbons of concrete that comprise Interstate 25, which bisects southeast Denver like a bypass scar on a cardiac patient. Unlike Washington Park, Highland, University Park, and a dozen other old Denver neighborhoods, the area hugging South Dahlia Street had somehow escaped the infectious gentrification that accompanied Colorado's recent high-tech firestorm of population growth.