Missing Pieces (12 page)

“Is that true?” I asked. “Are you repulsed by it?”

For one long, horrible second, Arthur McKay said nothing, then: “How am I supposed to feel?”

“How about grateful I’m alive?” Lois snapped.

“I
am
grateful you’re alive.”

“Grateful but repulsed.”

Another interminable silence. Arthur McKay rose to his feet, began pacing back and forth in front of the window, like a caged tiger in a zoo. “This is just great. Now I’m an even bigger shit than I was before. It didn’t seem possible, did it? You’d think you couldn’t sink much lower than a guy who plays golf while his wife is on the operating table and then doesn’t visit her in the hospital. But hey, we’re just getting started. It seems this guy is actually repulsed by his wife’s surgery. And he knows it’s not going to
change. He can’t help the way he feels. And he’s sick and tired of feeling guilty.”

“Losing my breast didn’t make me any less of a woman,” Lois McKay said, tears streaming freely down her cheeks. “It just made you less of a man.”

For several seconds, Arthur McKay stood absolutely still. Then he walked to the door, opened it, and stepped into the hall. The door closed behind him.

I jumped to my feet.

“Let him go,” Lois said quietly, twisting the tissue in her lap.

“We can work through this,” I told her, knowing only a few words were necessary to bring her husband back into the room.

She shook her head. “No. It’s too late. Actually, it’s a relief to finally get it all out in the open.”

“He’s terrified of losing you,” I told her, knowing how strange those words probably sounded in light of the things her husband had said.

“Yes, interestingly enough, I think you might be right,” she agreed, surprising me. “But I don’t think it matters anymore.”

“He may come around.”

“I don’t have that kind of time,” Lois McKay said simply. “Besides, he’s right—he can’t help the way he feels.”

“How
do you
feel?”

She took a deep breath, the words tumbling out of her mouth as she exhaled, like children tossed from a sled. I could almost see them hit the air. “Hurt. Angry. Afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“The future.” She shrugged. “Assuming I have one.”

“You’ll have one.”

“A fifty-five-year-old woman with one breast?” She smiled, but it was a smile heavy with sadness, like a cloud
threatening rain. Before she left, she scheduled a number of other appointments. Just for herself, she stressed. She’d be coming alone.

Moments after she’d left, I was out of my gray suit and into my sweats, marching determinedly on my treadmill. I wondered how I’d feel if faced with the loss of a breast. I wondered if Larry would react the same way as Arthur McKay.

I already knew the answer, at least as far as Larry was concerned. He wouldn’t give a damn about the breast, any more than he would care whether I gained twenty pounds or lost all my hair. We’d met on a blind date in college. Some friends fixed us up. I was very reluctant—dating had never been my strong suit. At almost twenty-one, I was still a virgin, although less by choice, at this point, than by circumstance. I hadn’t had a date in ages. My days were spent in classes, my nights at the library. I went home only as a last resort. I’d go to bed hearing my stepfather’s rants; I’d wake up to my mother’s sobs. I think that’s why I finally agreed to go out with Larry: anything to get out of the house.

We went out for dinner, a small Italian restaurant close to the university campus. He told me later that he fell in love with me that very first night. “Why?” I asked, anticipating a wealth of compliments regarding my eyes, my lips, my towering intellect. “Because you ate everything on your plate,” he answered.

How could I not love him?

There were no games, no pretenses. His kind eyes were an accurate reflection of his generous spirit. I felt safe around him. I knew he’d be good to me, that he’d never intentionally do anything to hurt me. After all the abuse I’d witnessed at home, that was the most important thing to me. Larry was decent and honorable, and as moral a
man as I would ever meet. I knew that he would love me no matter what.

I was on my treadmill when the phone rang. Normally, I’d let my voice mail answer it, and I’m not sure why I chose to jump off the treadmill and answer it myself. Probably I thought it was Jo Lynn, who’d taken to calling every day with a breakdown of the day’s events. The prosecutor had spent most of the last week trying to convince the jury of the exactitude of DNA evidence, calling witness after witness to break down and explain the complicated and often tedious procedures involved in its testing. The defense had spent an equal amount of time trying to discredit the claims. Jo Lynn was getting antsy. She still hadn’t met with Colin Friendly, was becoming convinced that there was a conspiracy afoot to keep them apart.

“Family Therapy Center,” I said into the phone.

“May I speak with Kate Sinclair, please?”

“Speaking.”

“Kate Sinclair,” the voice said, “Robert Crowe.”

Immediately my heart started to race and my breathing became labored, as if I were back on the treadmill.

“Hello? Kate, are you there?”

“Yes,” I said quickly, ashamed and angry at my body’s automatic response to the sound of his voice. Hadn’t I just been waxing rhapsodic about my husband’s strong moral core? Where was my own? “How are you?”

“Great. I missed you in court this morning.”

“You were there?”

“I was. You weren’t.”

“I can only go on Wednesdays.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. I saw your sister.”

“She’s hard to miss.”

“That was an interesting mention she got in the paper the other day. ‘Friendly’s New Friend.’ Catchy little phrase. What’s the real story?”

“There isn’t one.” Was that why he was calling? To get the inside scoop?

“Well, you didn’t miss anything today. The judge adjourned the trial until next week.”

“He did? Why?”

“Apparently Colin has a touch of the flu. Poor baby wasn’t feeling very well, so his lawyers asked for an adjournment. Who knows? Maybe he just needed a break.”

“We could all use a break.” I hoped Colin Friendly would develop pneumonia and die.

“That’s exactly why I’m calling,” Robert said, and I wondered for a moment whether I had missed part of the conversation. “I thought maybe I could take you out to lunch.”

“Lunch?”

“How about next Wednesday? That’s if you can tear yourself away from the courthouse.”

“You want to have lunch?” I repeated, biting down on my tongue to keep from saying it again.

“I have an interesting proposition for you.”

“What kind of proposition?”

“Something I think you’ll like.”

“Are you going to tell me what it is?”

“I will on Wednesday. Where should we meet?”

We agreed on Charley’s Crab over on South Ocean Boulevard. Twelve o’clock noon. I hung up the phone, wondering what the hell I was doing. “Oh God,” I muttered, about to call Robert back, cancel our date, except it wasn’t a date, I reminded myself, deciding I was being silly. It was just lunch. And an interesting proposition. What did that mean? “Guess I’ll find out on Wednesday,” I said, letting go of the phone.

Immediately it rang.

“You can’t make it,” I said into the receiver, convinced Robert had had second thoughts.

“Can’t make what?” Larry asked.

“Larry?”

“Kate, is that you?”

I laughed, a strange combination of guilt and relief. “This one patient of mine, she can’t seem to make up her mind whether she wants to come in or not.” I stressed the word “she.” Twice.

“She’ll be there. How can anyone resist you?”

I tried to laugh, ended up coughing instead.

“You okay?” I could hear the concern in his voice. “You getting a cold?”

“I’m fine,” I said, feeling awful. “What can I do for you?”

“Just checking to see if we’re free a week this Friday night.”

“I think so. Why? What’s up?”

“A satisfied customer has invited us to dinner.”

“Sounds good.”

“Great. I’ll tell him to count us in. Love you, funny face,” he said, instead of goodbye.

“Love you too.”

I hung up the phone. “Okay, you’re going to call Robert Crowe back right this minute and cancel lunch. Enough of this foolishness. If he has anything interesting to propose, he can do it over the phone.”

The door to my waiting room opened, then closed. I checked my watch, then my appointment calendar. Sally and Bill Peterson were early, and I was running late. Not a great combination. Hurriedly, I pulled off my sweatshirt, getting it tangled around my head. “Serves you right,” I muttered, hearing the door to my inner office open, frantically tearing the sweatshirt away from my face. Who on earth would just walk into someone’s office unannounced and uninvited?

“Mother!” I gasped.

She backed against the wall, her face as gray as her uncombed hair, her dark eyes wide with fear.

“Mother, what’s happened? What’s the matter?”

“Someone’s following me.”

“What?”

“Someone’s following me,” she repeated, glancing furtively around the room.

“Who’s following you? What are you talking about?”

“A man. He’s been following me for blocks. He followed me into the building.”

In the next instant, I was in the outer hall, my head snapping quickly to my left, then right. There was no one there. I walked down the rose-carpeted corridor, past the elevator, approaching the stairway at the far end of the hall with caution, then flung open the door. Again, there was no one. I heard the sound of elevator doors opening, watched as an attractive young woman got out, hurrying past me with a wary eye. It was then that I realized I was wearing only sweatpants and a bra. “And I’m the therapist,” I announced.

“There’s no man out there,” I told my mother, reentering my office and grabbing my sweatshirt, pulling it back over my head. I looked around. My mother was nowhere to be seen. “Mother?” I walked into the narrrow inner hallway. “Mother, where are you?” I pushed open the door to my second office, expecting to see her standing by the window, staring out at the magnificent palm trees along Royal Palm Way. But she wasn’t there. “Mother, where did you go?” Had she been there at all? Or had my guilty conscience conjured her up to try to talk some sense into me?

And then I heard the whimpering. Halting, muffled, as if trying desperately not to be heard. It was a sound from my past I remembered only too well, despite the passage of the years. It froze me to the spot. “Mom?”

I found her sitting crouched behind the office door, her knees grazing her chin, her face wet with tears, her eyes narrow slits, her mouth a large open wound. I rushed to her side, slid down beside her, surrounded her with my arms. She was shaking so badly, I didn’t know what to do. “It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay. There’s no one out there. You’re safe now. It’s okay. You’re safe.”

“He was there. He was following me.”

“Who, Mom? Do you know who he was?”

She shook her head vigorously.

“Someone from your apartment building?”

“No. It was someone I’d never seen before.”

“You’re sure he was following you? Maybe he was just walking in the same direction.”

“No,” she insisted. “He was following me. Every time I turned around, he stopped, pretended to be looking in a store window. When I slowed down, he slowed down. When I walked faster, so did he.”

I wondered whether I should call the police. Why would someone be following my mother? “Had you just been to the bank?” I asked, thinking an old woman was probably an easy target for robbers. Except that her bank was located close to her apartment building, which was on the other side of the bridge and miles away. It would have taken her all day to walk here. “How did you get here?” I asked.

She looked at me with blank eyes.

“Mom,” I repeated, growing fearful, although I wasn’t sure why. “How did you get here?”

The eyes darkened, flitted anxiously about the room.

“Mom, don’t you remember how you got here?”

“Of course I remember how I got here,” she said, her voice suddenly calm as she climbed to her feet and straightened the folds of her flower-print skirt. “I took a cab to Worth Avenue, did some window-shopping, then
decided to walk over here to say hello. Along the way, some man started following me.” She took a deep breath, patted her hair into recognizable shape. “Probably just wanted to snatch my purse. Silly me—I guess I overreacted. You’ll have to forgive an old woman.”

The door to my outer office opened, then closed. I looked warily in its direction, then back at my mother.

“It’s just your next client,” she assured me, running a calming hand across my cheek. “I’ll go, let you get back to work.”

I excused myself to Sally and Bill Peterson, and accompanied my mother downstairs, waiting until she was safely inside a taxi. “Mom,” I ventured gently before closing the car door, “maybe you should see a doctor.”

“Nonsense, dear. I’m perfectly fine.” She smiled. “You’re looking a little peaked, however. I think you work too hard.” She kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll talk to you later,” she said, and seconds later, she was gone.

D
efine sociopath.”

The man on the witness stand—looking both distinguished and patriotic in a dark blue suit, white shirt, and red-striped tie—took a moment to consider his answer, although as an expert witness for the prosecution, he undoubtedly had his answer well prepared. “A sociopath is a person who is hostile to society,” he began. “He feels little in the way of normal human emotions, except anger. This anger, combined with an almost total self-absorption and a complete lack of empathy for others, allows him to commit the most heinous crimes without any guilt or remorse.”

“And a sexual sadist?”

Again a measured pause. “A sexual sadist derives sexual pleasure from inflicting pain.”

“Do the two terms go hand in hand?” The prosecutor patted his brown paisley tie, looked toward the jury.

I followed his gaze, noted that the jury was paying strict attention. All it took was the mention of the word “sex,” I thought, glancing over at Jo Lynn. She was wearing tight white jeans and a white tank top, the center of which was emblazoned with a bright pink heart.