The small figure in the bright red leathers with a zigzag of purple down each arm bent over in a deep bow, pulled off the purple helmet, and straightened up, shaking out a head of pure white curls. She held out a hand to Lee.
"You're Lee," she stated. "You look like your father."
"Aunt Agatha," Lee answered, with an uneasy sidelong glance at Kate. The woman followed her glance, then stretched her hand over the roof of the car to Kate.
"And you must be Kate."
Kate looked at the small brown hand, the wrinkled little face, sallow beneath a deep tan, the sparkling blue eyes that looked like Lee's, but she did not see them, saw only, clear before her, the evidence that Lee had made a great number of plans that patently did not include her. There had been nothing at all vague about this arrangement, how she intended to meet Aunt Agatha. Kate looked away from the older woman, back to her beloved.
"What has happened to you, Lee?" she whispered hoarsely. "This is… it's foul. Deceitful. You never intended me to go to the island, did you?"
"Oh dear," said Aunt Agatha with a sigh, and stood back.
"Kate, I never meant —"
"Oh Christ, Lee, don't make it worse." Kate found herself shouting, and she did not care. "You manipulated me to get you up here and now you want me to leave you alone. It's a shitty thing to do, and I'd never have believed it of you. You may not love me, but I thought at least you had some self-respect. Obviously I don't know you, not at all, not anymore. Well, fine, you're here, your aunt's here, and you don't need me." She yanked the back door open and began to heave Lee's possessions out onto the blacktop, beginning with the wheelchair. Lee, babbling incoherently and with tears on her face, began to inch her way around the car, leaning her full weight on the dusty hood. Her aunt followed - making no move to interfere, just shadowing this unknown crippled niece of hers. Kate finished in the backseat and turned to the trunk. She dropped a carton to the ground, sending books spilling out under the front of the car behind them, which for some reason had its engine running. A number of cars had started up, she noticed. The ferry was boarding, and the car was now empty of Lee's things except - Kate slammed the trunk shut and continued around to the passenger side, where she leaned in, pulled out Lee's arm braces and the waist pack she used as a purse, plucked a pair of sunglasses from the dashboard and a paperback from the door pocket and threw them onto the ground, slammed the door (Lee had reached the trunk by this time), and walked forward again around the front of the car and back to the driver's door. Lee, too, was back where she had started from, looking across the Ford's roof at Kate, protesting, crying, reaching, and cars were driving past, the passengers staring with greedy curiosity at the scene. A horn sounded. Kate opened her door, pausing before getting in.
"Do you want me out of the house when you get back?"
"NO! Oh God, Kate, if you'd just listen, you don't understand —"
"No, I don't. I don't understand anything. Let me know when you're coming home," she said. She got into the car, turned the key, put it into gear, and drove away, leaving Lee staggering at the sudden loss of support. She would have fallen but for Agatha. Kate drove between the white lines that led down the loading area toward the ferry, then cut back in the opposite direction to the empty off-loading lane. As she passed the two figures with their piles of luggage and the gaudy motorcycle, she heard Agatha Cooper's penetrating voice asking, "Can you ride on the back of a motorcycle, Lee?" She could not help looking back in the rearview mirror. Her last view of Lee for many months was of Lee watching her, but also of Lee beginning to straighten up and formulate the answer, a determined "Yes."
Kate had not even stayed to watch the ferry depart, had not even hoped that Lee might change her mind at the last moment. Instead, she drove up the hill, away from the sea and around the corner from the ferry terminal, where she pulled over into a wide spot, put her arms on the top of the steering wheel, and began to weep.
When she was empty and exhausted from the effort of tears and her eyes and head ached and throbbed, she drove on, somehow missing the way back to Seattle and ending up instead on the next island, where a cluster of motels and bars had sprung up around a military base. She checked into a motel, walked to the next-door bar for a drink, and woke up two days later, sick and wretched and wishing she were as dead as she felt.
She did not die, instead, she drove her hungover body out to the shore and sat watching the waters ebb out of the Sound, toward the sea, and then turn and push their way back in. The next morning, she checked out of the cigarette-permeated motel room and drove to Reedsport, where her car was still not ready. She walked far up and down the hard wet sand of the Oregon beaches all the following day, until finally, barely twenty-four hours before she was due back at work, the car was running. She drove back to the City, fueled by coffee and kept awake by food, to arrive home at five in the morning. And four hours after that, she was awakened by Jules, leaning on her doorbell.
The memories faded; Kate's body quieted, and then she slept.
EIGHT
Was it still August? There was a man in the bar, she remembered, a small man in a shiny suit; that was why she'd bought herself a bottle to take back to the hotel room, to get away from him.
No, it was December now, although inexplicably August's hangover was still with her - a head so fragile that if her queasy stomach did what it wanted to, her skull was sure to split right down the middle. Someone groaned, she thought, and grinned like a skull.
"Kate?" said an unfamiliar voice. "Katarina Martinelli? Are you awake?"
She worked her throat a bit, swallowed, cleared it gingerly. Her head didn't split, although she thought it might be a good idea to keep her eyes shut.
"Somebody had a headache," she muttered.
"What did she say?" said the voice.
"She seems to be disassociating herself from her experience," said another woman. Something familiar about this second voice. "How interesting."
"Not," began Kate, and then thought, The hell with it. Let them be interested.
"Not what, Kate?" said the second voice, the one with the mild accent, and when Kate didn't answer, she continued, "Do you know where you are?"
"Hospital," Kate answered immediately. She knew these smells and noises even with her eyes shut and a hangover thudding through her. She'd know them even if she lay here dead.
"Do you know how you got here?"
Kate had no immediate answer for that one.
"Who had a headache?" voice two persisted.
"Joke," said Kate to shut her up, but the word set off an echo and bits of memory began to flake off and fall down where Kate could gather them up. Joke (joke/buckets from the morgue catching scraps - no, drops, drops of rain/macabre cop humor, sorry, Grace/ is he with you?/ you're looking for a boy called —)
"Dio," she croaked, and opened her eyes into those of Rosa Hidalgo. "Dio. Is he alive?"
"The boy? The doctors say he's responding well, he'll be fine. You know how you got here, then?"
"I was in the squat, with, um. Rawlins. Rawlings," she corrected herself. "Did I get shot?"
"You were hit, with a piece of pipe. You were lucky, it seems, that God has blessed you with a thick skull."
"Thank you, God. How long was I out?" Kate was aware that the other woman was fussing with vital signs, her hand on Kate's wrist, but she ignored her.