A Kind of Justice (38 page)

I glance up at Stephen to see if I'm boring him. He is a rapt audience.

“I think he was making a statement—to me, but more to himself and to you. It was a statement about compassion, and how it can come into conflict with duty, and how there are no easy answers when that happens. He let compassion win this time and he wanted you to know it. I guess so you'd have that to think about when you have to confront hard choices.”

I resist the temptation to go further with that thought for fear of turning this into a lecture. We sit in silence until Stephen starts talking about his father. He rambles a little, painting pictures of his father teaching him to hit a baseball, throw a football, defend himself in a fight. Talking about obeying the law, respecting others, having good manners, treating his mother with absolute respect. He talks about the gulf that grew between his parents, the separation, the divorce, his mother's lingering anger, his father's attempts to reach out to him and his sister. Stephen is lost in those memories, reciting them without being aware of where he is, spilling his heart out to a hairdresser felon he just met.

He comes back to the here and now with a jolt. His eyes blink, he shifts his body in the chair nervously. “I'm sorry,” he says.

“Don't be.” I start to say that this is just what his dad wanted, that by us talking together we both learned more about him and about each other. But I don't say it. Stephen is way ahead of me.

We sit in silence again, mourning in different ways a man we're just now getting a full picture of. This wasn't how I wanted to start my New Year's Eve, but now that we're here, it's hard to think of anything else.

Stephen stirs. “I've kept you too long,” he says.

I assure him that it's been important for me, too, to understand the
full depth of his father. “I feel like I owe you for what your father did for me,” I say.

Our meeting ends with a somber hug at the door, probably the last contact I will have with anyone from Wilkins' family. I feel strangely empty as I watch him disappear down the street.

M
ONDAY
, M
AY
25, 2009

I
T
'
S
M
EMORIAL
D
AY
in America, a day for the faithful to celebrate our fallen soldiers and everyone else to recreate. For me, it's a day of contemplation. I always visit my parents' graves and spend at least a few minutes thinking about my father. My mother said the war made him the angry man I knew, so I always wonder what my life would have been like if he hadn't served. I try to imagine him accepting his queer second-born as a child to love and support, but I can never get there. It's okay, there are lots more things to think about, and many of them are pleasant.

Betsy and Robbie are visiting Betsy's parents in Wisconsin, a long weekend cooking bratwurst on the grill and looking up old high school friends. We weren't conflicted about me staying back here alone. We've gotten past that. We're sisters who are living together temporarily. We love each other and we love Robbie. The living arrangements are going well. It will be hard for me when Betsy gets her own place, and when she falls in love and marries again, but it won't be heartbreaking. She'll never shut me out of her life, and I will rejoice at every golden moment in her life and Robbie's.

I think her next life will be starting soon. She is a different woman than the fragile, shaken person who moved in with me last fall. Her volunteer work has relaunched her career. Her marketing genius has
asserted itself in a nurturing environment. She's had several interviews for a salaried gig, and she'll find something good, even in this wretched economy.

We've come so far in these few months, Betsy and I. Learning about ourselves. About each other. I think we've learned a lot about love. True, deep, transformative love. And the bruises that come with it. And the rainbows.

Maybe it's a good thing I've been through all the things that happened this past year. Knowing that everything can fall apart in the blink of an eye keeps me from getting arrogant about how well things are going now. The salon has turned the corner. We're as busy as we ever were and we're taking a nice profit.

The one lavish gift I've purchased with my profits is a scholarship for Jalela. I haven't told her about it because then it would have been a tribute to what a good person I am and what a big ego I have. Instead, I funnel money into a special scholarship account at her school. Each month she does well, her tuition is paid. All she knows is, she's getting a scholarship that's conditional on earning it. She will, of course. She's the best student they've had in years.

Phil and I still see each other. It's casual—a jazz club date here and a dinner there. He took me to a police bar once and introduced me to all his friends, but it wasn't like he was getting ready to propose or anything. It won't ever come to that. I think somewhere along the line he'll meet a genetic woman who floats his boat and he'll get married, or else it will never happen for him.

We often end our dates in bed. The sex is fabulous. I think he gets a kinky rush from making it with a transsexual. For me it's sort of a cocktail of beautiful music and soft lights and the most erotic porn I can imagine. I just have to keep from wishing he was someone who would want to share a life with me. It used to bother me, knowing that could never happen. But gradually I realized it's not going to happen
like that for me with anyone. The best I can do is find someone who is really good in bed and treats me with respect the rest of the time. Which is the perfect definition of Officer Phil.

I haven't told him about Wilkins' final revelation to me. I think it would be awkward, and it really isn't important to talk about it. My worst fear is that he'd be afraid I'd rat him out if he quit seeing me. Whatever I get from him, I want it to come from his heart.

I've looked at him many times, trying to picture him killing Strand. It's hard to visualize because he just isn't a violent man. So when I look at him I see a man who loves me, and a man who can't permit himself to love me unconditionally. I think I understand. I'm his forbidden desire, like the woman a celibate priest obsesses over, like the slave girl her gentleman master can't be known to lay with. But he loves me and his passion runs deep. Deep enough to kill a man in cold blood so that man could not kill me. Deep enough to risk his career, his conscience, his freedom. Maybe someday we'll speak of these things, but not now. This is a time to enjoy being alive and to savor the humanity of others.

I'm lucky in many ways, and one of them is Cecelia. She is the best best-friend I've ever had. I told her this recently and added that it was hard to believe I used to avoid her because I thought she was loud and vulgar. “Well, honey,” she said, with that flare that only Cecelia has, “that's because I was loud and vulgar . . . and I still am, you just love me for it now.”

It was good for a laugh, but the truth is, she's changed a lot in the years since Mandy Marvin's murder brought us together. She is quieter now and more dignified. She's still willing to disembowel, figuratively speaking, the unsuspecting bully who has the poor judgment to target her or anyone close to her, she just does it with the withering grace of a powerful woman. She says I've made her more feminine. I don't know how that could have happened, but the opposite is certainly
true: she feminized me by insisting that I express who I am and cast aside concern for what others think.

Sometimes when I think about Cecelia and how I judged her years ago, I think about other people I've misjudged. Jalela. Detective Wilkins. And I realize there must be many others I judged wrongly but didn't get to see the parts of them that were invisible to me. It makes me realize I need to keep out of the judgment business whenever I have the choice.

I don't know what the future holds. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, or stricken with carpal tunnel so I can't do hair anymore, or develop breast cancer, or any of a thousand other things that can slam the lid on life in a hurry. I'm putting aside money with the faith that I will live to be an old woman. I can't imagine what that will be like, but I've started taking mental notes on how mature women I admire handle themselves.

But most of all, in quiet moments like this, sipping wine and soaking in a hot tub, Brahms playing in the other room, most of all I think about how fortunate I am to have been given this second life.