"It's been in the news numerous times over the years, unfortunately," I conjecture. "I don't know how he knew."
"What? He went to the library and looked up your address on microfilm? This creature so hideously deformed who rarely went out in the light of day? This dog-faced congenital anomaly, almost every inch of his face, his body covered with long lanugo hair, pale baby-fine hair? He went to the public library?" She lets the absurdity of this hover over us.
"I don't know how he knew," I repeat. "Where he was hiding isn't far from my house." I am getting upset. "Don't blame me. No one has a right to blame me for what he did. Why are you blaming me?"
"We create our own worlds. We destroy our own worlds. It is that simple, Kay," she answers me.
"I can't believe you think for a minute I wanted him coming after me. I, of all people." An image of Kim Luong flashes. I remember fractured facial bones crunching beneath my latex-gloved fingers. I remember the pungent sweet odor of coagulating blood in the airless, hot storeroom where Chandonne dragged her dying body so he could release his frenzied lust, beating and biting and smearing her blood. "Those women didn't bring this upon themselves, either," I say with emotion.
"I did not know those women," Anna says. "I cannot speak
to what they did or did not do."
An image of Diane Bray flashes, her arrogant beauty savaged, destroyed and crudely displayed on the bare mattress in- side her bedroom. She was completely unrecognizable by the time he finished with her, seeming to hate her more completely than he did Kim Luong_more completely than the women we believe he murdered in Paris before he came to Richmond. I wonder out loud to Anna if Chandonne recognized himself in Bray and it excited his self-hate to its highest level. Diane Bray was cunning and cold. She was cruel and abused power as readily as she breathed air.
"You had every good reason to hate her," is Anna's reply.
This stops me in my mental tracks. I don't respond right away. I try to remember if I have ever said I hate someone, or worse, if I have actually been guilty of it. To hate another person is wrong. It is never right. Hate is a crime of the spirit that leads to crimes of the flesh. Hate is what brings so many of my patients to my door. I tell Anna that I didn't hate Diane Bray, even though she made it her mission to overpower me and almost succeeded in getting me fired. Bray was pathologically jealous and ambitious. But no, I tell Anna, I didn't hate Diane Bray. She was evil, I conclude. But she didn't deserve what he did to her. Certainly, she didn't invite it.
"You don't think so?" Anna questions all of it. "You do not think he did to her, symbolically, what she was doing to you? Obsession. Forcing her way into your life when you were vulnerable. Attacking, degrading, destroying_an overpowering that aroused her, perhaps even sexually. What is it you have told me so many times? People die the way they lived."
"Many of them do."
"Did she?"
"Symbolically, as you put it?" I reply. "Maybe."
"And you, Kay? Did you almost die the way you lived?"
"I didn't die, Anna."
"But you almost did," she says again. "And before he came to your door, you had almost given up. You almost stopped living when Benton did."
Tears touch my eyes.
"What do you think might have happened to you had Diane Bray not died?" Anna then asks.
Bray ran the Richmond police department and fooled peo- pie who mattered. In a very short time, she made a name for herself throughout Virginia, and ironically, her narcissism, her lust for power and recognition, it appears, may be what lured Chandonne to her. I wonder if he stalked her first. I wonder if he stalked me, and suppose the answer to both questions is that he must have.
"Do you think you'd still be the chief medical examiner if Diane Bray were alive?" Anna's stare is unwavering.
"I wouldn't have let her win." I taste my soup and my stomach flops. "I don't care how diabolical she was, I wouldn't have allowed it. My life is up to me. It was never up to her. My life is mine to make or ruin."
"Perhaps you are glad she is dead," Anna says.
"The world's better off without her." I push the place mat and everything on it well away from me. "That's the truth. The world is better off without people like her. The world would be better off without him."
"Better off without Chandonne?"
I nod.
"Then perhaps you wish Lucy had killed him after all?" she quietly suggests, and Anna has a way of demanding truth without being aggressive or judging. "Maybe you would pull the switch, as they say?"
"No." I shake my head. "No, I would not pull the switch on anyone. I can't eat. I'm sorry you went to so much trouble. I hope I'm not coming down with something."
"We have talked enough for now." Anna is suddenly the parent deciding it is time for bed. "Tomorrow is Sunday, a good day to stay in and be quiet and rest. I am clearing my calendar, canceling all my appointments for Monday. And then I'll cancel Tuesday and Wednesday and the rest of the week, if need be."
I try to object but she won't hear it.
"The good thing about being my age is I can do whatever the hell I want," she adds, "I am on call for emergencies. But that is all. And right now, you are my biggest emergency, Kay."
"I'm not an emergency." I get up from the table.
Anna helps me with my luggage and takes me down a long hallway that leads to the west wing of her majestic home. The guest room where I am to stay for an undetermined period of time is dominated by a large yew wood bed that, like much of the furniture in her house, is pale gold Biedermeier. Her decor is restrained, with straight and simple lines, but cumulus down-filled duvets and pillows and heavy draperies that flow in champagne silk waterfalls to the hardwood floor hint at her true nature. Anna's motivation in life is the comfort of others, to heal and to banish pain and celebrate pure beauty.
"What else do you need?" She hangs up my clothes.
I help put away other items in dresser drawers and realize I am trembling again.
"Do you need something to sleep?" She lines up my shoes on the closet floor.
Taking an Ativan or some other sedative is a tempting proposition that I resist. "I've always been afraid to make it a habit," I vaguely respond. "You can see how I am with cigarettes. I can't be trusted."
Anna looks at me. "It is very important you get sleep, Kay. No better friend to depression."
I am not sure what she is saying, but I know what she means. I am depressed. I am probably going to be depressed, and sleep deprivation makes everything so much worse. Throughout my life, insomnia has flared up like arthritis, and when I became a physician I had to resist the easy habit of indulging in one's own candy store. Prescription drugs have always been there. I have always stayed away from them.
Anna leaves me and I sit up in bed with the lights off, staring into the dark, halfway believing that when morning comes, I will find what has happened is just another one of my bad dreams, another horror that crept out from my deeper layers when I was not quite conscious. My rational voice probes my interior like a flashlight but dispels nothing. I can't illuminate any meaning to my almost being mutilated and killed and how that fact will affect the rest of my life. I can't feel it. I can't make sense of it. God, help me. I turn over on my side and shut my eyes. Now I lay me down to sleep, my mother used to pray with me, but I always thought the words were really more for my father in his sickbed down the hall. Sometimes when my mother would leave my room I would insert masculine pronouns into the verses. If he should die before he wakes, I pray the Lord his soul to take, and I would cry myself to sleep.