With Child

day (meniscus, braggadocio, and haruspex were among the sesquipedalian ones, but the shorter mensch, spirit, and vagrant interested her, as well); the difficulties of getting a good education when surrounded by fools who were obsessed with clothing, hair, and boys; the psychological need for a peer group; the homeless again, and what they did for companionship; the friends Jules had made in her new home; the difference between a boyfriend and a boy friend; clothing, hair, and boys; the politics of clothing, hair, and boys; the pros and cons of short versus long hair; a boy friend called Josh; Kate's work; life in general; life in particular. To her surprise, Kate found herself patient with these adolescent maunderings, and, more than that, positively missing them when three or four days passed without a phone call.

The truth was, the house on Russian Hill was too damn big and too damn quiet. One night, she came home and found a message on the answering machine: Jon was thinking of hopping over to London, since Lee was not there to need his assistance; he would ring when he got back to Boston. 'Cheerio, ducks.' He did not explain how he knew that Lee was still away. Pride kept Kate from calling him back on the number he had left, but the inevitable conclusion that Lee and Jon had been in communication made the house ring with silence. She tried leaving the radio on, to defuse that first awful minute of coming home to rooms that had not breathed since she left, but the ruse did not work.

One day in mid-September, unpacking the bags after a desultory trip through the aisles of the supermarket, Kate discovered a box of cat kibbles in a bag between the packages of dried pasta and a jug of red wine. She held it up, a totally unfamiliar box she could have sworn she'd never touched before. The orange cat on the front of it grinned at her.

'My subconscious wants me to get a cat,' she said aloud in disgust. She took the kibbles to the back door, poured half of them onto the brick patio for the birds, and left the box next to the door. No damn cat.

The next night, late, she was getting into bed when she heard a strange slapping noise down on the patio. Cautiously, she looked over the upstairs balcony and into the face of an obese and disgusted raccoon, who all but shook the empty box at her and tapped its foot. On her way home from work the following day, she stopped at the local corner store and bought five boxes of bone-shaped dog biscuits. The Vietnamese man who ran the cash register looked at her in surprise.

'You have dog now, Miss?'

'No, it's a payoff to the neighborhood protection racket, so they won't turn over my garbage cans.'

The man smiled his polite incomprehension and gingerly held out her change.

In one of her long letters north, she told Lee about the raccoon, whom she called Gideon ('Rocky's friend,' she wrote in explanation). She also told Lee about work, the neighbors' building project that filled the street with pickup trucks, Dumpsters, and lumber deliveries, the new owners of the exercise club, a rumor that the restaurant at the base of the hill was about to reopen, a phone call from a client of Lee's who had wanted to tell her that his HIV test was blessedly negative, about Al and Jani and Jules and a few mutual friends. She received a handful of brief notes in return.

She did not tell Lee everything - not how she hated opening the door when she came home, nor how she'd taken to sleeping in the guest room or on the sofa. She did not write Lee about her fruitless search for Dio through the shelters and the streets, the hot lines and church soup kitchens and crack houses, the continual rounds of her informants. She did not write Lee about the brief, bloody spasm of gang killings in late September, set off by a theft from a high school locker, that left three kids dead and four bleeding in the space of a few days. She did not write to Lee about these shootings because they proved to be the shock needed to begin the process of corning out of the drifting malaise she had been subject to since driving Lee north in August.

The youngest of the three students to be killed was a slight thirteen-year-old girl with a plait of long black hair that curved down her thin backbone and across the rucked-up remains of what had been a white blouse. When Kate arrived on the scene and pulled back the blood-soaked flowered bedsheet that someone had covered her with, her heart thudded painfully for two fast beats: Her eyes had seen the body as that of Jules Cameron, lying in a pool of crimson agony on the weed-choked sidewalk.

She went on with her job; she took her statements and began her paperwork for the case, forgetting that moment of shock in the familiar routine. She went home and had her dinner and put out the dog biscuits for the raccoon; she ran a hasty vacuum cleaner over the floor and bathed and went to bed half-drunk, and toward morning she dreamed. It was not a particularly nasty dream, just wistful, and in it she was talking to the kid sister who had been killed by an automobile when Kate was in college many years before. They talked about a book and a baseball game, and when the conversation ended and Kate was beginning to wake, she saw that the person she had been talking to was actually Jules.

She came fully awake with a wry smile on her face. For some people, messages from the unconscious mind needed to be pretty blatant. Kate got the point.

When the sun was a bit farther up, she phoned Jules. Jani answered, a lovely, low voice with a lilt of accent.

'Good morning, Kate. Are you looking for Al?'

'Er, well, no, actually. I was hoping to catch Jules before she left for school.'

'She is still here. Just one moment.' Kate heard the muffling distortions of receiver against hand as Jani called, 'Jules!' and then, again to Kate, 'She will be here in a moment. How are you, Kate?'

'Fine. Just fine.'

'And Lee, how is she progressing?'

'Lee's fine.'

'Will you come to dinner soon? Both of you?'

'Well, that might be difficult.'

'I understand,' she sympathized, not understanding in the least. 'But as soon as it is possible. Here is Jules.'

'Kate?'

'Hey, J. How're you doing?'

'Did you find him?'

'Find… Oh, Dio. No, I'm sorry, nothing's come in. I was calling to see if you'd like to go and do something this weekend. I'm supposed to be off, unless something comes up, and I thought you might like to spend Saturday in riotous living. If it's okay with your mother,' she added, belatedly aware that she sounded like an acned teenage boy with sweating palms, asking for a date.

'What would we do?'

'Whatever you like. Movie, the beach. Shopping,' she suggested desperately. What do girls like Jules do in their spare time, anyway? Go to the library? Maybe this wasn't such a great idea.

'I'd like that. Let me ask Mom.' Again the muffled sounds, the occasional mutter and word of a brief conversation. 'Kate? She says fine, what time, and do you want to come back here for dinner?'

'Ten too early for you? And if you want, we could stay out, have a hamburger or some Chinese. Cruise the bars, look for some action?'

That raised a giggle, unexpected from that particular set of vocal cords.

'Ten is fine. Thank you.'

Twenty minutes later, the telephone pulled Kate out of the shower, where she'd been berating herself for such a dumb commitment, picturing herself locked up in the car with Jules, driving up and down mumbling, So, what do you wanna do? and Jules answering, I dunno, what do you wanna do?

'Hello?'

'Kate? It's Jules,' the girl said, sounding oddly furtive. 'There's something I would like to do on Saturday, if it's okay with you.'

'Is it legal?' Kate asked warily.

'I think so. If it isn't, don't worry - it was just an idea.'

'What is it?' Kate wiped a dribble of shampoo away from her eye with the edge of the towel.

'I'd like to try shooting a gun somewhere.'

Probably the very last thing Kate had expected.

'Sure. What kind of gun?'

'What do you mean?'