"What will you do with your helicopter? Will you keep it up there?" I hear myself say to my niece. "Seems like that will be a problem."
"Probably Teterboro."
"So you'll have to go all the way into New Jersey when you want to fly?"
"It's not that far."
"The cost of living up there, too. And you and Teun…" I hammer away.
"What about me and Teun?" The lift has left Lucy's voice. "Why do you keep picking on that?" Anger rolls in. "I don't work for her anymore. She's not ATF or my supervisor anymore. There's nothing wrong with us being friends."
My fingerprints are all over the crime scene of her disappointment, her hurt. Even worse, the echoes of Dorothy are in my voice. I am ashamed of myself, deeply ashamed. "Lucy, I'm sony." I reach over and take her hand in the fingertips of my plaster-confined one. "I don't want you to leave. I'm feeling selfish. I'm being selfish. I'm sorry."
"I'm not leaving you. I'll be in and out. Only two hours away by chopper. It's all right." She looks at me. "Why don't you come work with us, Aunt Kay?" She is out with what I can tell is not a new thought. Obviously, she and McGovern have discussed quite a lot about me, including my possible role in their company. This realization gives me a peculiar sensation. I have resisted contemplating my future and suddenly it rises before me like a great blank screen. While I know in my mind that the way I have lived my life is in the past, I have yet to accept this truth in my heart. "Why don't you go into business for yourself instead of the state telling you what to do?" Lucy goes on. "Have you ever given serious thought to that?"
"It's always been the plan for later on," I reply.
"Well, later on is here," she tells me. "The twentieth century ends in exactly nine days."
Chapter 7
IT IS ALMOST MIDNIGHT. I SIT BEFORE THE FIRE IN the hand-carved rocker that is the only hint of rusticity in Anna's house. She has set her chair at a deliberate angle so she can look at me but I don't have to look at her if I find myself in sensitive discovery of my own psychological evidence. I have learned of late that I never know what I might find during my conversations with Anna, as if I am a crime scene I am searching for the first time. The lights are switched off in the living room, the fire in its agonal stages of going out. Incandescence spreads along smoldering coals that breathe shades of orange as I tell Anna about a Sunday night in November a little over a year ago, when Benton got uncharacteristically hateful toward me.
"When you say uncharacteristically, you mean what?" Anna asks in her strong, quiet tone.
"He was accustomed to my peregrinations late at night when I couldn't settle down, when I would stay up late and work. On the night in question he fell asleep while reading in bed, Not unusual, and it was my cue that I could have my own time now. I crave the silence, the absolute aloneness when the rest of the world is unconscious and not needing something from me."
"You always have felt this need?"
"Always," I tell her. "It's when I come alive. I come into myself when I'm absolutely alone. I need the time. I must have it."
"What happened on the night you mention?" she asks.
"I got up and took the book out of his lap, turned out the light," I reply.
"What was he reading?"
Her question catches me by surprise. I have to think. I don't remember clearly, but I seem to recall Benton was reading about Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America that is less than an hour's drive east of Richmond. He was very interested in history and had double-majored in it and psychology in college, and then his curiosity about Jamestown was ignited when archaeologists began excavating out there and discovered the original fort. It slowly comes back to me: The book Benton was reading in bed was a collection of narratives, many of them written by John Smith. I don't recall the title, I tell Anna. I suppose the book is still in my house somewhere, and the idea of happening upon it one of these days pains me. I go on with my story.
"I left the bedroom and quietly shut the door and went down the hall to my office," I say. "As you know, when I do autopsies, I take sections of every organ and sometimes of wounds, as well. The tissue goes to the histology lab where it's made into slides I must review. I can never keep up with micro-dictations and routinely take slide folders home, and of course the police asked me all about this. It's funny, but my normal activities seem mundane and beyond question until they are inspected by others. That's when I realize I don't live like other people."
"Why do you think the police wanted to know about slides you might have in your house?" Anna asks.
"Because they wanted to know about everything." I go back to my story about Benton, describing being in my office, bent over my microscope, lost in heavy metal-stained neurons that looked like a swarm of one-eyed purple and gold creatures with tentacles. I felt a presence behind me and turned to find Benton standing in my open doorway, his face filled with an eerie, ominous glow, like St. Elmo's fire before lightning strikes.
Can't sleep! he asked me in a mean, sarcastic tone that didn't sound like him. I pushed my chair back from my powerful Nikon microscope. If you could teach that thing to fuck, you wouldn 't need me at all, he said, and his eyes flew at me with the bright fury of the cells I was looking at. Dressed in pajama bottoms, Benton was pale in the partial light spreading out from the lamp on my desk, his chest heaving and shiny with sweat, veins roping in his arms, his silver hair plastered to his forehead. I asked him what in the world was the matter, and he ordered me back to bed, jabbing his finger at me.
At this point, Anna interrupts me. "Nothing else might have preceded this? No forewarning whatsoever?" She knew Benton, too. This wasn't Benton. This was an alien who had invaded Benton's body.
"Nothing," I answer her. "No warning." I rock slowly, nonstop. Smoldering wood pops. "The last place I wanted to be with him that moment was in bed. He may have been the FBI's star psychological profiler, but for all of his prowess at reading others, he could be as cold and uncommunicative as a stone. I had no intention of staring up at the dark all night while he lay with his back to me, mute, hardly breathing. But what he wasn't was violent or cruel. He had never talked to me in such a demeaning, abusive way. If we had nothing else, Anna, we had respect. We always treated each other with respect."
"And did he tell you what was wrong?" She presses me on this.
I smile bitterly. "When he made the crude comment about teaching my microscope to fuck, that told me." Benton and I had grown comfortable living in my house, yet he never stopped feeling like a guest. It is my house and everything about it Is me. The last year of his life, he was disillusioned with his career, and as I look back on it now, he was tired and without purpose and feared getting old. All of it eroded our intimacy. The sexual part of our relationship became an aban- doned airport that looked normal from a distance but had no one in the tower. No landings, no takeoffs, only an occasional touch-and-go because we thought we should, because of the accessibility and old habit, I guess.
"When you did have sex, who usually initiated it?" Anna asks.
"Eventually, just him. More out of desperation than desire. Maybe even frustration. Yes, frustration," I decide.
Anna watches me, her face in shadows that deepen as the fire dies. Her elbow is propped on the armrest, her chin resting on her index finger in what has become the pose I associate with our intense time together these past few nights. Her living room has become a dark confessional booth where I can be emotionally newborn and naked and feel no shame. I don't see our sessions as therapy, but rather as a priesthood of friendship that is sacred and safe. I have begun to tell another human being what it is like to be me.