"I knew it, Smoky. It's in your blood, darlin'. In your blood."
I look at him for a moment, and I nod. He's right. My hand and a gun. We're married again. While it may be a rocky re lationship, I realize that I missed it. It's a part of me. Of course, the gun's not youthful anymore either. It's aged now, and scarred. That's what it gets for picking me as its bride.
2. DREAMS AND CONSEQUENCES
22
BONNIE WAKES UP in the middle of the night, screaming. This is not a child's scream. It is the howl of someone locked in a room in hell. I hurry to snap on the light next to the bed. I see with a shock that her eyes are still closed. Me, I always wake when I start screaming. Bonnie is doing her screaming in her sleep. She is trapped in her dreams, able to put a voice to her fears but unable to wake from them.
I grab her and shake her hard. The screaming dies, her eyes open, she is silent again. I can still hear that sound in my head and she is shivering. I pull her close to me, not saying anything, stroking her hair. She clutches on to me. Soon, her shivering stops. Soon after that, she sleeps.
I disengage from her, as gently as I can. She looks peaceful now. I fall asleep watching her. And for the first time in the last six months, I dream of Alexa.
"Hi, Mommy," she says to me, smiling.
"What's up, chicken-butt?" I say. The first time I ever said this to her she had giggled so hard she got a headache, which made her cry. I'd been saying it ever since.
She gives me her serious look. The one that both did and didn't fit her. It didn't fit her because she was too young for it. It did fit her because it was Alexa to the core. Her father's soft brown eyes look out at me from a face stamped by both our genes, turned pixielike by dimples that were hers alone. Matt used to joke about how the mailman had dimples, and maybe he'd given me a special delivery, ha ha ha.
"I'm worried about you, Mommy."
"Why, baby-love?"
Those eyes go sad. Too sad for her age, too sad for those dimples.
"Because you miss me so much."
I glance at Bonnie, look back at Alexa. "What about her, babe? Are you okay with that?"
I wake up before she can reply. My eyes are dry, but my heart twists in my chest, making it hard to breathe. After a few moments, this subsides. I turn my head. Bonnie's eyes are closed, her face untroubled. I fall asleep watching her again, but this time, I do not dream. It's morning. I look at myself in the mirror while Bonnie looks on. I've put on my best black business suit. Matt used to call it my "killer's suit." It still looks good.
I have been ignoring my hair for months. When I paid any attention to it at all, it was to move it so that it hung over my scars. I used to wear it free and flowing. Now I have drawn it back tightly against my head. Bonnie helped me with the ponytail. Instead of hiding my scars from the world, I am accentuating them.
It's funny, I think to myself as I look into my own eyes. Doesn't really look that bad. Oh, it's a disfigurement. And it's shocking. But . . . taken as a whole, I don't look like I belong in a freak show. I wonder why I never noticed that before, why it's seemed so much uglier until now. I guess it was because I was holding so much ugliness inside. I like the way I look. I look tough. I look hard. I look formidable. All of this fits with my current view of life. I turn away from the mirror.
"What do you think? Good?"
Nod, smile.
"Let's get going, then, honey. We're going to make a few trips today."
She takes my hand and we head out the door.
First stop is Dr. Hillstead's office. I'd called ahead and he is waiting for me. When we arrive at the office, I convince Bonnie to stay with Imelda, Dr. Hillstead's receptionist. She's a Latin woman with a no-nonsense way of caring for people, and Bonnie seems to respond to this mix of warmth and brusqueness. I understand. We walking wounded hate pity. We just want to be treated normally.
I enter and Dr. Hillstead comes to greet me. He looks devastated.
"Smoky. I want you to know how sorry I am about what happened. I never meant for you to find out that way."
I shrug. "Yeah, well. He's been inside my home. Watched me sleep. I guess he's keeping pretty good tabs on me. Not something you could have planned for."
He looks shocked. "He's been inside . . . your house?"
"Yep." I don't correct his or my use of the word he. The fact that he is actually they remains confined to the team, our ace in the hole. Dr. Hillstead runs a hand through his hair. He looks shaken. "This is really disconcerting, Smoky. I deal with secondhand accounts of these kinds of things, but this is the first time it's entered my life in reality."
"This is how it goes sometimes."
Perhaps it's the calmness of my voice that gets his attention. For the first time since I entered his office, he really looks at me. He sees the change, and it seems to bring back the healer in him.
"Why don't you sit down?"
I sit in one of the leather chairs facing his desk. He looks at me, musing. "Are you upset with me for withholding the ballistics report?"
I shake my head. "No. I mean--I was. But I understand what you were trying to do, and I think you were right to do it."
"I didn't want to tell you until I thought you were ready to deal with it."
I give him a faint smile. "I don't know if I was ready to deal with it or not. But I rose to the occasion."
He nods. "Yes, I see a change in you. Tell me about it."
"Not much to tell," I say with a shrug. "It hit me hard. For a moment, I didn't believe it. But then I remembered everything. Shooting Alexa. Trying to shoot Callie. It was like all the pain I've been feeling over the last six months hit me at once. I passed out."
"Callie told me."
"The thing is, when I woke up, I didn't want to die. That made me feel bad in a way. Guilty. But it was still true. I don't want to die."
"That's good, Smoky," he says in a quiet voice.
"And it's not just that. You were right about my team. They are like my family. And they're fucked up. Alan's wife has cancer. Callie has something going on she won't talk to anyone about. And I realize that I can't just let that pass. I love them. I have to be there for them if they need me. Do you understand?"
He nods. "I do. And I'll admit that I was hoping for that. Not that your team members would be in distress. But you've been living in a vacuum. I was hoping that getting back in touch with them would remind you of the one thing I know would give you a reason to go on living."
"What's that?"
"Duty. It's a driving force for you. You have a duty to them. And to the victims."
This idea catches me by surprise. Because I realize that it's dead-on. I may never be fully healed. I might wake up screaming in the night till the day I die. But as long as my friends need me, as long as the monsters kill, I have to stick around. No choice about it. "It worked," I say. He smiles a gentle smile. "I'm glad."
"Yeah, well." I sigh. "On the way home from San Francisco I had a lot of time to think. I knew there was one thing I had to try. If I couldn't do it, then I was done. I would have gotten up today and handed in my resignation."
"What was that?" he asks. I think he knows. He just wants me to say it.
"I went to a shooting range. Got a Glock and decided to see if I could still shoot. If I could even pick it up without passing out."
"And?"
"It was all there. Like it had never been gone."