"Well, maybe what Lee needs to know is not how long you'll continue to be patient, but how long it will be before you get your own feet back under you, the way she's done."
"What do you mean?"
"The Lee Cooper I knew before she took a bullet in the spine, which I admit was not long, would have hated the thought of being in an unequal, dependent relationship."
"But I've been so careful to maintain her independence. Jon and I have sweated to let her be strong."
"I don't mean Lee has been dependent. I mean you."
"What are you talking about?" Kate asked testily.
"Caring for an invalid can be addictive," Hawkin said simply, and Kate felt as if the air had been thumped from her lungs. "I'm not saying it's the case, but I'm wondering if Lee might have thought you were becoming dependent - on her dependence, if that makes sense."
Kate sat there, struck dumb by the bolt of his perception. She remembered Lee saying it wasn't her legs not working that made her a cripple. "I'm a cripple because I can't stand alone," Lee had said, "I can't stand alone when I'm surrounded by people who want to protect me."
"Kate," Al was saying, "listen, don't take my amateur psychologizing to heart. I think you should go talk to one of the department's shrinks. You got along well with Mosley last year, didn't you? Go see him again. I mean that, Kate."
"Yes, I hear you. I think you're right, Al - not just about that, though I suppose I should go and have a talk with him, but about the other, as well. I must have been smothering her. No wonder she went off with Aunt Agatha."
"Is that the name?"
"You haven't met her. A rare treat," she said bitterly.
"Kate," he said, in a voice almost soft with affection, "just forget it all for the weekend, get some rest."
"I'll try to forget it, but I won't get much rest, not if I'm hunting down a car."
"And you told Jules you'd do something with her Sunday, didn't you? I'll warn her you may have to back out."
"Don't do that. I'll make it somehow."
"You don't have to."
"I want to."
"You're good for her, Kate," he said unexpectedly. "It does her good to be around someone like you. Her mother…" He paused, drumming his fingers on the bottom of the steering wheel. "Jani is a remarkable woman who has come through more than her fair share of hell. She's a strong woman, but only in some areas, and I'm afraid she's most unsure about herself in just those places that Jules needs her to be strong. I don't suppose I'm making much sense, but it's a long and ugly story and not for tonight. I just wanted to say that we both appreciate the efforts you've gone to for Jules."
"It's not an effort, Al. I like Jules."
"I like her, too. I love the girl. But I sometimes wonder just what the hell I was thinking, volunteering to go through the whole teenage thing all over again with a kid who makes my first two look like saints."
"Oh, come on, Al, you must be getting old. I know she and Jani are having a rough time, but I got the strong impression that she feels comfortable with you."
"Thank God for that," he said under his breath.
"You're not telling me that there's some real problem with Jules, are you?" Belatedly, she remembered Rosa Hidalgo's peculiar message on the answering machine.
"Jules was very nearly expelled from her school last month - the very first week of classes."
"Jules?" Kate said incredulously. "What on earth for?"
"She had her English teacher in tears and then said some inexcusable things to the principal. We had to promise to get her into therapy before they would let her back in."
"I can't believe it."
"Believe it."
"But why? She seems so… together. Balanced."
"She did to me, too, until suddenly in the last few months… I have an idea of what set her off, but she won't talk about it. It's basically an accumulation of things: her brains, her history, her mother, her mother's history, puberty - like I said, I can't get into it now, even if I had Jani's permission. Let's just say there's a big head of pressure inside Jules, and some of it finds its way out in anger. Being with you seems to help her a lot, though. She becomes almost herself again for a while."
Kate stared out the window, then shook her head slowly. "I wish you hadn't told me."
"You'd have to know sooner or later. In fact, the psychologist Jules is going to wants to see you."
"No."
"Why not?"
It had been an instinctive response, and Kate searched for the reasons behind it. After a minute, she said hesitantly, "I think it might be a mistake to identify me with all the other adults in her life. If I am important to Jules, as you seem to think, it's because I'm an outsider. Kids her age think in terms of 'them' and 'us'. You wouldn't gain anything by making me one of her 'thems'." And, she added to herself, I could lose the friendship of someone I've grown surprisingly fond of.
"You could be right."
"I'm always right, Al. High time you recognized that." She put on a smile and turned it toward him.
"I'll keep it in mind," he said, matching her light tone.
"I've got to go, Al," she said. "There's a raccoon who comes by to pick up his hush money about now, and if I don't give it to him, he starts pulling shingles off the house. See you Sunday."
Even in the dim light, Kate could see her partner waver, then decide not to ask what she was talking about. Instead, he just said, "Good. And don't worry if you haven't got a car sorted out by then; you're welcome to use Jani's or mine."
"Thanks. Good night."
"Night, Kate. Thanks for the pizza."
She stood and watched him drive cautiously down Green Street; then his left signal went on and he turned south toward his own, increasingly seldom-used house in the Sunset district. She lifted her head to the sky, where no stars were visible, and then turned and dug around for her key. Damn and blast, she thought; the one thing in my life just now that I thought was uncomplicated turns out to be on the edge of an explosion. Jules, what the hell is up?
Gideon was prowling about the edge of the patio and heard her come in. When she crossed the living room to the glass doors, he was staring in at her, nose against the glass, his small eyes glittering malevolently from the burglar's mask of his markings. She cracked open the door, tossed out a handful of the multicolored dog biscuits, and watched him waddle over and choose one. He sat with his back to her and crunched his way through one after another, then hoisted himself up and stalked away into the shrubbery. The small dog next door barked hysterically until the neighbor cursed and a door slammed. Silence descended. Kate locked the door and went sober to bed, and it was not until her head was on the pillow that she remembered Al Hawkin's earlier little torpedo, before the revelation about Jules and her problems.
Jesus, she thought, staring up at the pattern of lights on the ceiling, Lee left because I was smothering her, and now Al says I'm still smothering her from a thousand miles away. It's not enough that I nearly killed her; I have to suffocate her, as well.
Nineteen months before, Kate had nearly been the death of Lee. It was Kate's job that gave Lee a bullet in the spine, and the fact that she was against Lee's involvement in the case from the beginning had nothing to do with it. She should have insisted.
But she had not, and Lee had nearly died. The doctors had told Kate that Lee probably would die, but she had not. They had told Lee she was almost certainly a paraplegic, but she regained the use of her feet. Then they warned her that she was about at the limits of what could reasonably be expected in the way of recovery, but Lee no longer listened to doctors. She no longer listened to anyone, for that matter; certainly not to Kate.
The months since the shooting had been a constant round of adjusting to Lee's varying needs. When Lee was feeling strong, Kate would back off; when Lee was immersed in despair, Kate was a bastion of encouragement. A year and a half of guilt and struggle and financial problems, week after week of Lee's agonizingly slow progress, losing ground and clawing back, all of Kate's existence, even at work, geared to her lover's ever-changing needs, her physical suffering and her blind determination and those odd pockets of cold air that appeared without warning, unexpected areas of extreme sensitivity such as Lee's Saab: symbolic, emotionally charged, tabu.