After all these months, Kate no longer paused to think, just reacted automatically in her role as counterpoise, shifting as required, making all the minute adjustments that kept the marriage balanced, because the one thing that could not be allowed, that must not happen no matter the cost, was that the balance collapse. The end of the marriage was the end of everything.
But now, there was no weight to balance. Caring for an invalid might not be addictive, but it was clearly habit-forming. She had to admit that she'd been sent sprawling when her burden was removed; it was time now to adjust, she told herself. Get used to an empty house. There might even be a degree of satisfaction to be found in having only her own wants and needs to take into account.
She lay there, considering Al's brutally honest judgment, running her mind over the texture of her relationship with Lee, becoming more and more convinced that he was right. She was smothering Lee. She would stop it. She contemplated how she would go about freeing Lee and herself, and as she lay there, she grew more awake every minute, until she was twitching as if she'd had two or three double espressos rather than a cup of weak decaffeinated coffee. Finally, she threw off the covers, went into Lee's study, and began to write a letter.
It was a long letter, full of love and understanding, of apology and the commitment to change for the better. The phrases flowed, two pages filled, three: "Lee," she wrote, "I am so grateful to Al for pointing out what I was doing; it must have been intolerable to you, even though you knew I was only trying to help. But I'm aware of it now, and I promise to keep hands off your life. I'll let you walk through the SoMa district at midnight if you want; I'll —"
She stood up so rapidly, the chair fell over backward, and she hurled the pen across the room and took the letter and tore it down the middle, then again, and a third time. She walked out of the study, turning off the lights behind her, then, picking up a warm blanket from her bed, went out onto the balcony. There she sat, bundled up, looking out across the northern edges of the city at the waters of the Golden Gate, reflected in lights from shore and ship and the island opposite.
Yes, Al, I'm terrified. I'm so angry at her, I never want to see her again, but if she doesn't come back, I don't know what I'll do. I can't imagine life without her; it would be like imagining life without air. I love her and I hate her and I'm lost, completely lost without her, and all I can do is wait for her to tell me what she is going to do with me.
She slept, finally, and woke in the deck chair, with a mocking-bird singing and Saturday's sun coming up. She watched the dawn, and as the sky lightened, her inner decision dawned as well, until, with a peculiar mixture of bitter satisfaction and gleeful mischief, she knew what she was going to do.
Sunday morning, Al Hawkin pulled open the door of his fiancée's apartment and stood blinking at the apparition in the hallway. He had reassured himself through the peephole that the unidentifiable figure had no visible weapon, and now he pulled the belt of his robe a bit tighter and ran a hand across his grizzled hair.
"Can I help you with something, er, ma'am?" he asked uncertainly. "What apartment number were you —' The figure before him reached a gloved hand up to the helmet strap, bent over to remove it, and straightened up, shaking her hair out of her face. Even then, for a split second he failed to recognize her; she had more life in her face than he'd ever seen there.
"Kate!" She grinned at him, glowing with enthusiasm and exuding waves of fresh air. He ran an eye over her, new boots, new gloves, old leather bomber jacket a bit snug around the waist, the massive new helmet under one arm. "Let me guess," he said, stepping back to let her in. "You bought your new car. What kind?"
Jules came out of the kitchen behind him and stopped dead. "Why are you wearing that outfit, Kate?" she asked, but Kate answered her partner.
"A Kawasaki."
"Kawasaki doesn't make an automobile," he said, studying her leather jacket.
"By God, the man's a detective."
"You're not thinking of taking Jules out on it?"
A cry of protest rose from the kitchen door, but Kate ignored it. "Of course not," she said, and her grin became even wider. "Can I borrow the car keys, Dad?"
OCTOBER,
NOVEMBER
FIVE
October came. Jon arrived back from Boston and London, flitted around the edge of Kate's vision for a few days, and, before she could catch hold of him, was off to Mexico with his friend. Short letters from Lee: She was well, getting stronger. Yesterday she'd dug clams for dinner; had cut a cord of stove wood already, could Kate believe that? And the trees were so beautiful, so calming. Finding herself, yet still filled with confusion, and sorry, so very sorry, to be putting Kate through all this, but…
But she still couldn't say when she'd be home.
In October, Kate's baffled anguish began to turn, to harden. Her letters north became shorter, sharper. She bruised her thigh once too often on Lee's chair lift at the top of the stairs, and in a fury at two o'clock one morning she took a wrench to it, dismantled it, and heaved the seat, followed by the wrench, into Lee's room, the room that had once been theirs. The next things to go were Lee's books in the dining room, again into Lee's room. She began deliberately to leave the dishes in the sink overnight, for two nights, a thing neither Lee nor Jon could have tolerated. She even began to leave the bed unmade and the cap off the toothpaste.
October settled into a pattern of work and home. Her new form of transport set off another flurry of raucous comments and irritating harassments from her co-workers, and she lost count of the number of Xeroxed articles about Dykes on Bikes she had found on her desk or tucked into the cycle, but she had, after all, expected something of the sort, and if her teeth ached from being gritted, at least she did not show that any of it bothered her.
She told herself that it would pass, and concentrated on the pleasures of a motorcycle in California. The fall weather held, a whole month of Indian summer, and she took long rides north into the wine country and the mountainous land behind it, glorying in the nearly forgotten freedom and sweet spark of risk that two wheels brought. When she needed four wheels, she hired the neighbor with his immaculately restored 1948 Chevy pickup, or she used Al's car. Even the house on Russian Hill did not seem quite so aggressively empty as it had; merely quiescent.
By the end of the month, the pleasure of her minor rebellions against the absent householders began to wane, when she found an unmade pile of sheets and blankets an unbearably slovenly greeting at the end of a long day, and found, too, that leaving the cap off the toothpaste tube made the contents go hard and stale. Still, she allowed the dishes to accumulate until she had no clean ones, vacuumed and swept only when her feet began to notice the grit, and ate when and what she felt like, rediscovering the illicit joys of pizza for breakfast and cereal with ice cream on top for dinner. She ran every morning, got the weights out of storage and set them up in Lee's consultation rooms, and began to sleep more soundly.
Other pleasures slowly began to reemerge into her life, as well. Before the shooting, she and Lee had had a few friends - not many, but good people, mostly women. Then for the long months of Lee's recovery, Lee had possessed friendly helpers, and Kate had had her work.