aching with the stress and frustrations of a fourteen-hour day, aching for a friendly voice, aching for Lee, aching, most of all, for a drink, many drinks; craving alcohol like a drowning person craves air, she yearned for the world's oldest painkiller to knock the edges off the intolerable day. She heaved her things onto the kitchen table, plucked a bottle of wine from the rack without looking to see what kind it was, took it over to the drawer to get the corkscrew, and then stood with the corkscrew in one hand as a strong and distressing thought intruded itself into her actions.
How long has it been since you did not finish off the better part of a bottle of wine at night? Since the middle of August, maybe?
Oh God - she shook her head - not tonight, no guilt tonight. It's been a hell of a day.
What day isn't? If not tonight, when?
Fuck off; it's only wine.
Only…?
I want a drink.
Or six.
She stood there for a very long time, aching and frightened and knowing at last, on this gray and dreary night, that she was walking on the edge of a precipice, the one that began with just a bit of letting go and ended up with a few shortcuts and reassuring herself that nobody would notice, until finally she would be just another cop who gave up the fight, a woman who couldn't cut it with the big boys, a lesbian who wasn't as good as she thought. And no, she was not exaggerating the importance of this night's bottle of wine that she held in her hands, because she had at last admitted that if she opened it, the wine would be drinking her, not she it, and if knowing that, she went ahead, then she was also being consumed by tomorrow's bottle, and Friday's…
And oh God, who would care? She put the point of the corkscrew to the foil over the cork, and no further.
It was, oddly enough, Jules who pulled her back from the edge, that annoying young reminder of yet another responsibility unmet. The thought of Jules was bracing. Maddening, but bracing, like a slap in the face. She put the bottle away and made herself a cup of hot milk in the microwave, then sat with it at the kitchen table while she sorted through the mail.
Junk mail, bills, catalogs,
She put everything but this last in a precise stack, largest on the bottom and smallest on top, the lower left corners aligned. She leaned the cheap envelope addressed to her in Lee's heavy black pen against the saltcellar, then took a swig from her mug, grimaced, got up and found an apple and a piece of leathery pizza in the refrigerator, and ate them standing at the sink. Then she took a can of split pea soup from the cupboard and two slices of bread from the refrigerator, opened the can, put half of the soup into a bowl and put that in the microwave oven, dropped the bread into the toaster, ate the soup, ate one slice of toast plain and the other with a sprinkling from the clotted shaker of cinnamon sugar, reached into the cupboard for the bag of coffee beans and then put them down on the sink and turned and took three steps to the table and ran a finger under the flap of the envelope and pulled the slip of paper out and smoothed it open on top of the table with one rapid hand before it could burn her. Then, because it lay open before her, Kate read Lee's brief letter.
'Dearest Kate,' it began. That was something, anyway. Doing well, getting stronger. Learning to use a hatchet, could Kate believe that? Wearing one of Agatha's flannel shirts and a down vest, cold mornings. Beautiful trees. Strong hills on wise islands. Pods of orcas in the Sound. All of burgeoning nature helping her to find herself, transferring the energy of the hills into her body. Still confused, though, and sorry, so very, abjectly sorry, to be putting Kate through this, but…
But she couldn't say when she would be home. But Kate couldn't come to visit. But she couldn't tell Kate what to say to her clients, her friends. But as soon as she had her head together, Kate would be the first to know, be patient. 'Love, Lee.'
Kate looked down at her hand on the table. She had clawed the page together into her fist and it lay there now in a tight wad. She opened her hand, picked at the edges of the letter, smoothed it onto the tabletop with long movements of her hand as if trying to bond it to the wood of the table. She leaned forward, stood, pushing the chair away with the backs of her knees, and turned away.
Beaten, flayed, and too weary to weep, Kate went upstairs to bed.
Thursday's brightest spot came early, when Kate succeeded in running two miles and still managed a (very slow) near jog coming back up the hill. The rest of the day went downhill fast.
On Friday, Hawkin was back, and she and Calvo went out to the Sunset and arrested the dead child's father, a pleasant, rather stupid, frightened, unemployed eighth-grade dropout who had been abused himself as a child and who sobbed uncontrollably when Kate read him his rights, then - sure sign they had arrested the right man - fell asleep in the squad car from sheer relief.
His interview and confession brought no satisfaction. He was only a cog in a deadly mechanism, grinding on to produce yet more poverty and brutality. He was no killer, yet he killed, unforgivably, his own child.
Al Hawkin was near the interview room when Kate came out. Waiting for her? He dropped in beside her as she marched away.
'Al, good to see you. You should be home; you look like hell.'
'How'd it go?'
'We got a confession.'
'And?'
'And what? He'll go to prison and get himself a fine set of muscles in the weight room, and when he gets out, he'll find his girlfriend has two more kids by two other men, and everyone will go on beating everyone else, happily ever after.'
'One of those days, I see.'
'Do you ever think, Al, that maybe someone should just sterilize the whole goddamn human race, admit that it was a mistake, leave the planet to the dolphins and the cockroaches?'
'Often. Let's go get some dinner.'
'I can't, Al. I have to see a man about a car.'
'What kind of car?'
'A piece of junk, by the sound of it, but cheap.'
'Oh, right. Tony said you'd been having car problems.'
'I don't have a problem now. I just don't have a car. Three thousand dollars to fix it so it won't quit on me - I don't have the money.'
'What's wrong with Lee's?'
'Nothing. Everything. It's too complicated to go into, Al. And Jon lent his to a friend while he's away.'
'So where's the car you're looking at?'
'It's just up Van Ness.'
'I'll take you; then we can have dinner.'
'If I'm buying, it's a deal.'
The car proved impossible, too big to park, too shaky to corner, and probably had had its odometer turned back at some point. They went to a Greek pizza house to eat a feta and pesto pizza, and at 9:30 Hawkin pulled up in front of her empty house and turned off the engine.
'Lee's not back yet,' he said after a glance at the windows.
'Nope.'
'You heard from her?'
'Short letters. They're in her handwriting, but they're not Lee.'
'What's going on?'
'Ah, shit, Al, I wish I knew.' When he continued to study the side of her face, she sighed and squinted at the house. 'She's been getting flaky over the last few months. She said she wants —' She stopped, realizing that she really didn't want to go into Lee's fantasies and desires, not even with Al. 'She wants all kinds of things she can't have, in the shape she's in. And she's become secretive. She's never been one to hide anything, but suddenly there were all these things she wouldn't talk to me about - Lee the therapist's therapist, who's always talked over every
