Roz, Kate (who was not a detective for nothing) was not too surprised. Nor was she too worried, since she could also read the signs that the affair was long over.
Besides, everyone she knew was in love with Roz, even those who were not in lust with her. Even straight people—hell, even those who hated Roz loved her. She was not only charismatic, she was even good to look at; although she was hardly fashionably slim, her tall, voluptuous shape and wide shoulders gave the impression of a serious swimmer gone slightly to seed (actually, she had never been much of a swimmer). Her shiny brown hair had just enough wave in it to overcome Maj’s amateur haircuts, her dark eyes were large and long-lashed enough to compensate for her habitual avoidance of makeup. Increasingly in recent months, when television broadcasts needed a spokesperson for a gay perspective, they had begun to call on Roz; when the papers printed a shot of the opening of a center for gay, lesbian, and bisexual teenagers or the ground breaking of a crisis center, Roz’s face looked out at the reader; when the governor put together a task force on lesbian and gay parenting, Roz was on it. That the mayor of San Francisco had appeared at Mina’s school play was no mere happenstance.
So no, Kate was not jealous—or rather, she was honest. Jealous, yes, a little. But hell, if Roz Hall had asked her to bed, she’d probably have gone too.
Roz had not asked. Instead, when Kate had been injured during a case the previous winter, while Lee and Jon were both away, it was Roz’s concerned face Kate saw from her hospital bed, Roz’s red Jeep that drove her home at her release, and Roz’s longtime partner, Maj, who brought Kate food and comfort and just the right amount of companionship to keep her going. The two women were now family, closer to Kate than any of her blood relatives, and if Kate sometimes felt like a poor relation bobbing in the wake of a glamorous star, well, Roz had a way of making one feel that even poor relations were good things to be. After all, even presidents had blue-collar cousins.
Kate relaxed back against the soft sofa pillows, looking with affection at their guests. The talk had circled back to Mina and her seven-weeks-to-go sister-to-be, and half of her attention was on that. The other half drifted back to the Larsen murder, which seemed to be progressing on as straightforward a path as investigations ever did, but which nonetheless niggled at the back of her mind.
One of the things she had to find out, she decided, was what Larsen was doing in the Presidio parklands at that hour. Emily had not been able to think of anything that would have taken her husband there, and neither could Kate. A trap, maybe. Perhaps Crime Scene’ll come up with something in the Larsen house, she thought, and then woke to the fact that Roz was talking to her.
“Sorry,” she said, sitting upright to demonstrate her attentiveness. “I was miles away.”
“Difficult case?”
“Puzzling,” she conceded. Good manners required that she answer, but she could hardly go into the details of an active case. This was a problem she’d faced countless times over the years, however, and she had become skilled at the diversionary side-step in conversation. “I was thinking about this interview I had today with an abused woman. I just… it continually amazes me, what women will put up with for the sake of security.”
“Oh, that’s not fair,” Lee protested. “It’s not even true, to call it security. They often live in a constant state of fear.”
“So why do it? Because the known, however awful, is better than the great unknown?”
“Sometimes it is,” Roz broke in. “Especially when there are children, and no other family or friend to lean on. We’re a terribly solitary culture, you know. It’s not easy to find a support network in modern society, especially if you’re a woman who already feels humiliated by being someone’s punching bag. Self-respect is a luxury, and sometimes all these women can afford is pride, that they won’t admit failure.”
There was nothing in Roz’s face or voice to show that her words were anything but general; nonetheless, Kate eyed her with the uneasy sensation that there was some underlying message there for her alone. Roz’s next words confirmed it, and the evenness of her gaze.
“We all do this, to some degree, even if we’re not in an actively abusive relationship. We let ourselves be shoved into a corner, humiliated, used, and abandoned, and then when our partner turns back to us, in the joy of reunion we forgive.”
A memory swept into the room, so vivid in the space between Roz and Kate that it seemed to quiver visibly in the air.
It was a scene from the previous December, a few days after Kate’s release from the hospital to her cold and empty house. The morning had been taken up by one of her blinding headaches, legacy of a suspect’s eighteen-inch length of galvanized pipe. In the afternoon Kate had wakened from a drugged sleep, stumbled into the bedroom she and Lee had shared until Lee’s cruel and abrupt departure in August, and at the sight of the antique Wedding Rings patchwork quilt on the bed, she was seized by a rage so powerful it felt as if the spasm of migraine had finally invaded her mind.
She had not heard Roz letting herself in downstairs. She only became aware of her visitor when Roz was standing in the doorway, looking down at Kate where she sat on the floor, surrounded by the ten thousand shreds of faded cotton fabric and cotton batting that had been a quilt. Kate paused in her methodical and heavily symbolic destruction, saw in Roz’s face the full, calm knowledge of precisely what she was doing, and then erupted into tears, wracked by hard, painful sobs of fury and despair that were wrenched out of her abandonment and betrayal. Her headache reawoke and her eyes and throat were seared raw, but Roz held her and rocked her, more maternal and comforting than Kate would have imagined possible.
They had never spoken of it after that day, and Kate had occasionally wondered if Roz had told Lee, but at that moment, sitting in front of the fireplace with their coffee cups and their partners, Kate saw that Roz had said nothing to anyone about the depths of the despair that Lee’s leaving had visited on Kate. The sanctity of confession held, Roz’s eyes said, even for the pastor of a church without confessionals.
The memory, and the knowledge, flashed between them in the blink of an eye, an instant of complete communication that Kate had only ever known in the intimacy of an interrogation room, with a suspect on the edge of a very different sort of confession, or a bare handful of times with Lee. The memory puffed away and vanished, leaving Kate disconcerted, and depressingly aware that she was even more deeply indebted to Roz Hall than she had thought. She cleared her throat and reached back urgently for the tag end of the conversation they had been having.
“Forgive, sure,” she said. “But only so many times. These women, though, their forgiveness is pathological.”
Roz, still holding Kate’s eyes, nodded. “True. We are told to turn the other cheek in offering up our humility. We are not told to go on doing it indefinitely.”
“Or told to put a club into the hand that slaps us. There was this picture on the wall in one of the law offices, that showed a woman who’d had the crap beaten out of her, all black-and-blue and bandages, with the caption ‘But he loves me.” And you know, that’s exactly what the woman I was interviewing said, that the husband who’d been beating her for years and years was, I quote, “a good man’ who ‘loved us.” “ To Kate’s relief, Roz’s attention finally shifted.
“Love and rage,” Roz said thoughtfully. “They’re never that far apart, are they?”
This time, the brief reaction that shot through the room reached across the other diagonal: Lee and Maj both twitched, almost imperceptibly. A faintly ironic smile played briefly over Maj’s mouth before she wiped it away with a sip of her tea. Roz did not seem to notice anything, since she was now exploring an idea, a frown of thought between her eyebrows.
“That’s more or less what I’ve been doing in the thesis, looking at how in the Old Testament you see God as creator, nurturer, loving mother/father, and protector, yet also as judge and executioner, enraged at a wayward people and on the verge of destroying them completely.”
“Is it linked with the male/female imagery?” Lee asked her. Anyone who had been in Roz’s circle for more than a few days was made quickly aware of the Bible’s references to God’s femininity, the metaphors of childbirth and child rearing used to describe the Divine. The God known by Roz Hall both begot and gave birth, and Roz was not about to let anyone forget it. Even a certain homicide cop was familiar with that bit of theological interpretation.
“You’d think it would be, wouldn’t you?” Roz answered. “That in the passages referring to childbirth, God would be the loving mother, and in the God-the-father passages there would be judgment and wrath, but it’s not that simple. The two go hand in hand, just like the ancient Near Eastern goddess figures that switch between love and destruction at the drop of a hat. It may have something to do with agricultural fertility— that floods bring
