“If you can be compassionate and selfish at the same time,” Cicero said. “If she needed to feel alive, I needed that, too. In those days, sometimes I’d leave work so numb from what I’d been doing all night that I felt like a walking dead man. That was before I realized how lucky I was just to be walking.” He said this very simply, without self-pity. “I was 34 then. I told myself the same lie a lot of ER staff tell themselves: I didn’t have time for a relationship, that no woman would tolerate the crazy hours or understand the stress I was under. Other women in the ER did, and I hooked up with a few of them, but those were just friendly trysts. Relief sex, we called it sometimes. And I had some one-night stands with women I met in bars. Underneath it all, I was probably pretty goddamned lonely, although I couldn’t have seen it back then.”
I was sitting on the floor; now I slid closer to him so that I could take his hand. Cicero let me, but he said, “Don’t feel sorry for me. I deserved everything that happened next. Her sister came over from Manchester and helped her file a lawsuit against the hospital. In the hearings, a lot of things came out that I hadn’t known. Since her suicide attempt, this woman had been seeing a psychiatrist, and had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She had a terrible time with men, couldn’t trust them, but at the same time had been known to fixate on men she barely knew, as potential lovers and saviors. She’d been transferred to a female psychiatrist after transference had caused problems with a male therapist.”
“You didn’t know any of that,” I said.
Cicero ’s expression told me I should have known better. “The mentally ill cannot be expected to identify themselves as ill.”
“I just meant, it seems like an awfully harsh punishment for what you did.”
“ ‘Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick,’ ” Cicero said. “It’s part of the Oath.”
I looked down into my empty coffee cup. “Is it guilt, then, that makes you keep seeing patients under these circumstances?” I indicated the small and underequipped exam room that lay beyond his bedroom door.
Cicero considered that. “Not really,” he said. “It’s selfishness, almost. You know how some dogs- herding dogs, rescue dogs- are bred to work? Even when they’re raised as house pets, they wake up in the morning and look at a human to say, How can I help? It’s bred into them. Some people are that way, too. I have to do what I’m trained for. I’m a working breed.” He lifted a shoulder in something that wasn’t quite a shrug. “I can’t change now. I am what I am.”
I caught the last bus home, sometime after midnight. As I got on, a young woman got off at the back exit. Just as she did, our eyes met. Ghislaine, for once without Shadrick, eyed me quite curiously for a long moment before she dropped down the back steps and through the doors.
19
It’s a detective’s prerogative to use a car from the motor pool, and it didn’t raise any eyebrows at work when I began using one. If word had spread that the BCA had my car for testing, no one referred to it, even implicitly, in my presence. Meanwhile, I used the motor pool car not only for work but to drive out in the evenings and visit the Hennessys.
Kids adapt to the whims and dictates of adults the way the rest of us adapt to changes in the weather. The Hennessy boys accepted my new role in their lives with a shrug. I checked the details that Lorraine had mentioned; it was clear that the laundry was getting done, and the house was as clean as anyone could reasonably expect with four young people living in it. The Hennessy home wasn’t meant to look aseptically neat, anyway; that was part of its charm. It was an old house, and everywhere were testaments that this was a longtime family home. There were nicks in the shabby-elegant pine furniture, and along an upstairs hallway, there were dots and dashes of bleach, a Morse-code tale of someone’s haphazard attempt to scrub out stains. From the length of the pattern, I didn’t think it was Kool-Aid. Blood, maybe, from a nosebleed or some childhood mishap.
But on a day-to-day basis, the kids kept the house fairly tidy. It was soon plain to me that these kids had been self-directed from an early age; Hugh hadn’t been a micromanager as a parent for a long time, perhaps never. Other kids might have fallen apart after what had happened to Hugh; the Hennessy kids had taken the reins of their lives also automatically.
The absent Aidan was still on my mind. But by now I was familiar with Marlinchen’s ready defenses. If I was going to make any more progress on the subject of her brother, I’d have to approach the issue a lot more carefully than I had last time. For now, I was letting it lie.
I did speak to her around ten o’clock one evening, when I’d stayed later than usual, because she was standing alone on the back porch, her slight figure a dispirited silhouette. She was looking out into the darkness of her nearest neighbor’s land. There was absolutely nothing of interest out there, but she seemed troubled.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, slipping through the French doors from the family room out onto the deck.
Marlinchen turned. “No, not really. It’s Snowball,” she said.
“Your cat?”
“She’s never out this late,” Marlinchen said. “She always comes in around eight-thirty or nine. Like clockwork.”
“I wouldn’t assume the worst,” I said. “A friend once told me about a cat she’d owned that liked to ramble. Turns out the cat had a double life. Another family was feeding it and giving it water; they had pictures of the cat in their home.”
Marlinchen smiled but said nothing.
“Snowball might have gone into someone’s home or garage and got locked in,” I went on. “She’ll turn up tomorrow.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” she said.
“Are you really feeling okay?” I said. “You seem a little down.”
“Just tired, I guess,” she said, and a muscle twitched in her cheek as if she were trying to suppress a yawn.
I nodded. “What do you hear about your father?”
A strand of hair slipped loose from her high ponytail, and Marlinchen wiped it away from her face. “He’s in physical therapy,” she said. “He’s walking with a quad cane now. That’s a cane with four little feet on it, for greater stability.”
“Like training wheels that don’t roll?”
“Right,” she said. “After that, he moves on to a regular cane, and then walking on his own.”
“That sounds like good progress,” I said.
“It is,” she said, “physically.”
“Physically?” I asked, thinking that she meant Hugh’s spirits were low.
“His verbal skills aren’t getting much better,” she said. “They think he understands a lot of what’s going on around him- which is good for chances of getting the conservatorship- but he can’t really speak or write. It’s all garbled. He confuses me with you, or he with she,” Marlinchen explained. She looked over at me as if expecting some kind of response. Then she said, “Aphasia is the worst thing that can happen to a writer.” Hearing her own words, Marlinchen quickly clarified them. “It’s not about the money. We’ll get by, even if he never writes again. But writing is the core of who Dad is,” she said. “If he gets everything else back, but can’t write again… it’s the worst thing the stroke could have taken.”
There wasn’t much that I could say that wouldn’t be false comfort. “Give it time,” I said.
You never get a car back from the crime lab quite how you turned it over. I’d heard this before, but hadn’t understood it until I picked up the Nova at the Hennepin County impound facility, which was where the BCA sent it after testing. A chemical odor clung to the car’s interior. When the early-evening light hit the Nova’s windows, revealing a faint purple-white haze, I realized what it was. Superglue. They’d fumed for prints with it.