With Child (11 page)

Easing onto her back to look at the digital clock on the video machine, she felt a twinge along the right side of her skull, but that was all. Just after eleven - she'd slept for seven hours. Gingerly she tried sitting up, then got to her feet, and other than a couple of dull thuds at each change of position, the headache remained lurking in the background - not gone, but not actively attacking, either.

Enjoying the freedom of movement, exploring how far it would stretch, Kate folded the blanket and tossed it across the back of the sofa (a brief awareness of pressure at the throwing motion, not really a pain) and went to look out the window at the night. All the lights seemed very distant, but it was a comforting sensation, not an alienating one. The wind stirred the bushes, and she wondered how long Gideon the raccoon had continued to come before deciding that she was a lost cause. Maybe she would put a handful of dog biscuits out tomorrow night, on the off chance he cruised by.

She was thirsty, and, yes, actually hungry, although there was not likely to be much that was edible in the refrigerator. She pulled the curtains against the night and went to the kitchen.

There was a vase of flowers on the table, a fresh, fragrant mixture of florist's blooms, and beside it a note, the first part of which, strangely enough, was in Al's handwriting. Surely he would have mentioned any message that afternoon? She picked it up and read:

Beneath it on the page, in the same ink but by someone with a much lighter hand, was another message:

Kindness, the simple kindness of friends, the last thing she had expected, and it reached in through her weakness and she felt tears start up in her eyes as she sat at the table and read the words over again. On the third time through, it occurred to her that she had been driven in here by hunger, and she seemed miraculously to have at hand something more appealing and substantial than the bowl of cold cereal she had resigned herself to.

Six containers of food awaited her: two white deli cartons, two glass jars, and two ovenproof containers reminiscent of potlucks. Noodle salad with the spicy, fragrant sesame dressing Kate loved - how had Rosalyn known? One jar with a strip of masking tape labeling it mushroom soup, the other chicken vegetable. Two kinds of beans. And a large bowl of creamy white pudding, drifted with black-brown powdered chocolate. Kate reached in and began greedily to pull out containers.

At midnight, replete and much steadied, Kate turned off the kitchen light, turned on the light over the stairs, and began the climb to bed. Halfway up, she paused, then reversed her steps back into the kitchen. She found a stemmed wineglass and a pair of scissors, turned to the bouquet on the table and teased a few of the flowers from it, trimmed their stems short, and dropped them into the wineglass. She put the scissors in the drawer, ran some water into the glass, put the denuded stems into the trash, turned off the light again, and took the miniature flower arrangement up the stairs with her. The flowers sat on the table beside her bed, keeping her company while she looked at the television, and later they watched over her while she slept.

Kate was in the garden chopping weeds with a hoe when she heard the doorbell. The garden was on the north side of the house, and usually cool and shaded, but despite being mid-December, it was one of those warm winter days that explains why California is over-populated, and Kate was sweating with the effort. She straightened and, with resignation, felt the inevitable jab in her head travel on down her spine and seize her stomach, setting off the vague nausea she had come to dread.

She was by now a connoisseur of headaches, a seasoned expert in knowing just how far she could go, when to back off and fetch the dolly rather than lifting a heavy object, how a change in the weather would affect the nerve endings inside her skull. Two weeks after the injury now, and she was beginning to resign herself to a permanent degree of ache. It was bearable, however, if she took care not to push herself.

Except for the other headaches, those bolts of pain that came out of the blue like slow lightning, rippling across her brain and turning her stomach upside down. Those sent her straight for the powerful tablets the doctor had given her, left her groping up the stairs, blind and retching and seeking the dark sanctuary of the bedroom. They would pass, after four or five hours, as suddenly as they had come, although the combined dregs of pain and painkillers in her body meant that she was worth nothing for the rest of the day. Kate had had three of these since leaving the hospital, and she would have given a great deal to avoid having another one, but the doctors said there was no knowing what triggered them or how long they would be with her. What they did tell her was that she could not go back to active duty until she was free of the threat.

This headache that was now settling in seemed to be somewhere in between the basic nagging kind and the bullet-in-the-brain sort, which all in all might be a hopeful sign, Kate thought as she pulled off her muck-encrusted shoes against a boot scraper and walked through the house to the front door.

Any change was for the better, and any visitor a welcome one. Kate was thoroughly fed up with sick leave. The first two days home she had spent in front of the television, falling asleep over the large collection of unwatched videos Lee and Jon had taped for her over the months. On the third day, boredom had set in, and she found herself wandering through the house cataloging the unfinished jobs she found there, until eventually she went downstairs for a screwdriver and replaced the switch plate that had cracked back in September.

In the five days since then, interrupted only by an afternoon when she had to put on her official clothes and go in for a hearing about the shooting, she had trimmed and rehung two sticking doors, replaced the broken sash cords in the upstairs window, fixed the drip in the bathtub, finished grouting a patch of tile in the under-the-stairs bathroom that she and Lee had put up two years before, climbed a ladder to replace a cracked pane of glass and touch up the paint around it, and shifted everything in the living room to wax first one half of the inlaid wood floor and then the other.

The floor had been the worst, because having her head down made her skull pound so horribly that she could only bear an hour at a time, whereas with an upright job she could stretch it to two hours before she had to lay down her tools and take herself trembling to bed for an hour or two. On the whole, however, physical work, done with care, seemed actually to help, particularly in the fresh air. Today she had been digging and weeding for nearly three hours before the doorbell interrupted, she saw as she glanced at the clock on her way through the living room. It looked as though she was going to pay for the exertion.

Kate picked up the loose knit cap she had taken to keeping on the table in the hallway and pulled it on as she went to answer the door. At first she saw nothing through the peephole; then, with a growing and fatalistic sense of deja vu, she looked down, and there she saw the top of a head of black hair, neatly parted. She slid the bolt and opened the door.

"Morning, Jules."

"Uh-oh, you're not feeling well."

"I'm okay."

"Are you mad at me, then?"

"Why would I be mad at you?"

"It's just that you usually say, 'Hey, J.' 'Good morning, Jules' sounds so formal."

"So I'm feeling formal. Don't I look formal?"

Jules examined her muddy, sweat-stained clothing and grubby bare legs. "No, you don't. We tried to call, but we kept getting your machine, so we thought we'd come by anyway. Can I come in?"

"Who's 'we'?"

"Al." Jules turned and waved at the road. Kate bent to look and saw Al's car pull out from the curb and drive away. She cursed under her breath as Jules continued. "He has to pick something up from the office. I wonder why you call it an office when it's just that big room you guys share. Anyway, I wanted to say hi, so he said he'd drop me and come back. He won't be long. Are you sure you're feeling okay? You don't look like it."

"I'm fine. Come on in, Jules."

"I like that hat," Jules said, looking over her shoulder as she headed for the kitchen. "Where did you get it?"

"A friend made it for me. It hides the stubble."

"Can I see?" Jules asked, turning to face her, going suddenly serious.

"Not much to see," Kate said, but she pulled the cap off anyway and dropped it on the table. Rosalyn's partner, Maj, a woman of many talents and with a recipe for killer tiramisu, had come by the house with it and a pair of electrical clippers the week before. The resulting haircut was not all that much shorter than Kate's last one, though slightly lopsided, but it necessarily revealed too much of the still-clear lines where the surgeons had cut a flap in the skin to give access to the bone below. Maj's hat was pretty, but there was angora in it, and the damn thing itched. She pretended not to feel the girl's eyes on her as she reached for two glasses and took a bottle of juice from the refrigerator.

"You like cherry cider?" she asked.

"Sure, I guess. They didn't have to put a metal plate in your head, did they?" Jules demanded.

"No. They thought they might, but it wasn't that bad."

"That's good. A friend of mine has an uncle with a big plate in his skull. He has to carry a letter from his doctor around with him, because he sets off metal detectors."

Kate came near to laughing at the thought of the number of detectors she went through in the course of a week, all of them going off madly in her wake.

Jules absently accepted the glass of cider that Kate handed her, but her mind was still on the topic of the consequences of metal plates. "That must be a real pain," she reflected.

"It must be," Kate agreed seriously, and sat down. "It's good to see you. How've you been? How's Josh? Have you seen Dio since he got out of the hospital? And why aren't you in school?"

"It's a half day, for finals week. Dio's fine. And I haven't seen Josh in a while, except in school, of course. He has a girlfriend." She sounded disgusted.

"I thought you were a girlfriend."

"I was a friend. Am a friend still, but he's busy. He'll get over it," she said, as if talking about the flu, which Kate thought reasonable enough.

"What's your shirt say today?" Kate asked. Jules held the lapels of her windbreaker open so Kate could see the writing, and when she saw the words, she began to laugh.

"Good, huh?"

"It's great." Kate did not tell her she had seen it before, worn by women who intended a rather different take on the message, but it was still a fine shirt: A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE.

Kate was about to ask about the word for the day when the girl blurted out, "Can I come and stay with you when Mom and Al go on their honeymoon?"

Kate opened her mouth, then shut it again.

"They were going to take me with them to Baja, and at first I thought it sounded great, but then I realized it was impossible. Talk about spare wheels." Kate wondered if she was hearing the voice of a friend behind the girl's words, that devastating peer criticism that could reduce even a self-contained person like Jules to a quivering mass. "Taking the kid along on a honeymoon," Jules said dismissively, her demeanor cool but with a clear thread of discomfort through it, and Kate stood up to take a random plate of food from the refrigerator in order to hide her smile. Jules, she guessed, had belatedly connected the traditional activities of a honeymoon couple with her mother and the amiable cop she was marrying; the mortification when her friends pointed this out must have been extreme.

Still. "I don't know when I'll be going back to work, Jules. I couldn't have you here alone while I'm out. They can be long days."

"Do you know when you'll be going back?"

"I see the doctor tomorrow afternoon. What were you planning on doing if I wasn't available?"

"Staying with Rosa, I guess."

"Or have Trini the airhead stay with you?"

"Not her. She's in trouble. She got caught shoplifting the day after Thanksgiving, and Mom won't have her in the house."

"Don't you have any family?" Kate hoped she hadn't sounded too plaintive, but Jules seemed not to have noticed.

"Mom has some relatives in Hong Kong, but nobody here. My father's dead," she said in a tight voice. "I don't know if there's anyone on his side, but Mom says they all hated her. Anyway, there's nobody to stay with."

"Have you met Al's kids? Not to stay with. I just wondered if you'd met them."

Jules relaxed suddenly and grinned. "You mean my sister- and brother-to-be? I met her - she's really cool. Him - Sean - I'll meet this weekend."

"They're coming up for the wedding?"

"Sure."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"It's important to Al, I know. Kate, do you think I should keep calling him Al if he's my mother's husband? I don't know if I could call him Daddy."

"Give it time," Kate suggested mildly. "
Dad
may feel comfortable after a while."

"I guess. Maybe he'd rather be just Al."

"I think, if you're asking me, that Al Hawkin would burst with pride if you took to calling him Dad, but I'm also sure he wouldn't want to push it. He loves you very much."

Jules became very interested in the trace of cider in the bottom of her glass. "He must be nuts," she muttered.

"Nuts because he loves you? Jules, you're one of the greatest people I've ever met."

"You don't know me," the girl said darkly.

"I know you better than you think I do." At this, Jules shot her a hard look composed of equal parts suspicion and apprehension, with a dash of hope thrown in. However, Kate had done about all she could just then. All the time she had sat talking, the ache in her head continued to build, until it could not be ignored. Hating the display of weakness, she went to the cupboard and took out the pill bottle, shook a tablet out onto her palm, and swallowed it with the last of the juice in her glass.

"You aren't okay," Jules said with concern.

"I have a perpetual headache. I'll live."

"I should go." Jules stood up.

"Not until Al comes back."

"I'm sorry, Kate, I shouldn't have bothered you with all this."

"I'm glad you came. Did I ever thank you for the flowers, by the way?"

"Yes. Twice."

"Good. Those tiny white ones - what are they called? Baby's breath, I think. They dry well - did you know that? I have a sprig of them upstairs." Jules began to look positively alarmed at this uncharacteristic show of sentimentality, and Kate, peering at her through the distance of the headache and the onset of the painkiller, would have laughed if she hadn't known how much it would hurt. "It's okay, Jules, I'll go to bed and sleep it off. It comes and goes. You stay here until Al comes. Promise?" And what was it Jules had come here for? Oh, yes. "And I'll talk to him tomorrow, when my head is straight, about having you here. Bye, girl. Take care."

She did not hear Hawkin come, but when she woke five hours later, refreshed and ready to start the next cycle, the house was empty. Whistling tunelessly, she went to put in another hour with the hoe before dark.