The Face of Death

sunny days. Muteness, night screams, and all. Penance should involve suffering; Bonnie brings me smiles.

I think about all this in an instant, looking at her. Thought moves fast.

'How about we hang out and be lazy for a few hours, and then we go shopping?'

Bonnie considers this for a moment. This is one of her traits. She doesn't blithely respond to anything. She gives it real thought, makes sure that when she answers, it's the truth. I don't know if this is a product of what she went through, or a quirk of character she was born with. She lets me know what she's decided with a smile and a nod.

'Coolio. Want breakfast?'

This requires no consideration, food being a consistent exception to that quirk. Affirmation is instant and enthusiastic. I putter around, making bacon, eggs, toast. As we munch, I decide to broach the coming week with her.

'I told you I took a few weeks off, didn't I?'

She nods.

'I did it for a lot of reasons, but one in particular. I wanted to talk to you about it because . . . well . . . it'll be a good thing, but it might be a little bit hard too. For me, I mean.'

She leans forward, watching me with a steady, patient intensity. I sip my coffee. 'I've decided it's time to put some things away. Things like Matt's clothes, his bathroom stuff. Some of Alexa's toys. Not the photos or anything like that. I'm not talking about erasing them. It's just . . .' I'm looking for the words. I find them, and they form a simple sentence: 'It's just that they don't live here anymore.'

Succinct, a single line. Filled with all of the meaning and knowledge and fear and love and hope and despair in the world. Spoken after crossing a desert of darkness.

I am the head of the Violent Crimes Unit in Los Angeles. I'm good at my job--real good. I oversee a team of three other people, all handselected by me, all exemplary law-enforcement professionals. I could be modest, I suppose, but I would just be lying. The truth is, you really don't want to be the psycho that my team is after. A year ago, we were hunting a man named Joseph Sands. Nice guy to his neighbors, loving father of two, bearer of just a single flaw: He was hollow inside. He didn't seem to mind, but I'm sure the young women he tortured and murdered did.

We were hot on his trail--close to figuring out that it was him, in other words--when he changed my world. He broke into my home one night and, using just rope and a hunting knife, ended the universe as I knew it. He killed my husband, Matt, in front of me. He raped and disfigured me. He pulled my daughter, Alexa, up, using her as a human shield to catch the bullet that I had fired at him. I returned the favor by filling him up with every bullet in my gun, and reloading to do it all again. I spent six months after that deciding whether I was going to go on living or blow my brains out. Then Annie got killed, and Bonnie was there, and somewhere along the way, life got a firm grip on me again.

Most people can't truly conceive of being in a place where death might be preferable to life. Life is strong. It grips you in many ways, from the beating of your heart, to the sun on your face, to the feel of the ground beneath your feet. It grasps you.

Its grip on me was as thin as a thread. A strand of spider's silk, holding me over the edge of the chasm of forever. Then it was two threads. Then five. Then it was a rope. The chasm began to recede, and at some point I realized that life once again had a grip on me. It had snared me back into the moment to moment of drawing breath and pumping blood, and I cared about it all again. The chasm was gone, replaced by a horizon.

'It's time to make this a real home again, honey. You understand?'

She nods. I can tell she understands it in every way.

'Now--here's the part you might like.' I give her a small smile.

'Aunt Callie took some time off, and she's going to come stay with us and help out'--this elicits a smile of pure delight from Bonnie--'and Elaina is going to be coming over too.'

Her eyes become lighthouses of happiness. The smile is blinding. Definite approval. I grin. 'Glad it makes you happy.'

She nods, we get back to eating. I'm woolgathering when I realize she is studying me again, head cocked. She has a soft, quizzical look on her face.

'You wonder why they're coming?'

She nods.

'Because . . .' I sigh. It's another single, simple sentence: 'Because I can't do it by myself.'

I'm resolute about this, about moving forward. But I'm a little bit afraid of it too. I've spent so much time being fucked up, I'm suspicious of my recent bout of stability. I want friends around to support me if I get a little bit wobbly.

Bonnie gets out of her chair, comes over to me. I feel such softness in this child. Such goodness. If my dreams contain the face of death, then this is the face of love. She reaches up and traces the scars that cover the left side of my face with a light finger. Broken pieces. I am the mirror.

My heart fills and empties, fills and empties.

'I love you too, sweetheart.'

Quick hug, canyon of meaning, back to breakfast. We finish and I sigh with contentment. Bonnie burps, huge and loud. A shocked silence follows--and then we both break out in laughter that comes straight from the belly. We laugh until we cry, it subsides to giggles, ends in smiles.

'Want to go watch some cartoons, munchkin?'

A blazing smile, like the sun on a field of roses. I realize that this is the best day I have had in the last year. The very, very best.

2

BONNIE AND I ARE GOING THROUGH THE GLENDALE GALLERIA--

mall to end all malls--and the day has only gotten better. We stopped into a Sam Goody's to look at the music selection. I got a CD set-- Best of the Eighties--and Bonnie got the newest Jewel CD. Her current musical interests seem to match her personality: full of thought and beauty, neither unhappy nor joyous. I look forward to the day that she asks me to buy her something because it makes her toes tap, but today I could care less. Bonnie's happy. That's all that matters. We buy some giant salted pretzels and sit down on a bench to eat them and people-watch. Two teenagers wander by, oblivious to anything but each other. The girl is in her mid- teens, brunette, homely, slender on top, heavy on the bottom, wearing low-slung jeans and a halter top. The boy is about the same age and adorably un-cool. Tall, skinny, gangly, sporting thick-lensed glasses, lots of acne, and hair down past his shoulders. He's got his hand in the back pocket of her jeans, she has her arm around his waist. They both look young and goofy and awkward and happy. Two square pegs, they make me smile.

I catch a middle-aged man goggling at a beautiful twentysomething. She's like an untamed horse, full of an effortless vitality. Perfect jet-black hair down to her waist. Flawless tanned skin. Perky smile, perky nose, perky everything, exuding confidence and a sensuality that I think is more unconscious than purposeful. She walks by the man. He continues to catch flies with his open mouth. She never even notices him. The way of things.

Was I like that once? I muse. Something beautiful enough to lower the male IQ?

I suppose I was. But times change.

I get looks now, it's true. But they're not looks of desire. They are looks ranging from curiosity to distaste. Hard to blame them. Sands did some of his best work when he cut my face.

The right side is perfect and untouched. All the really grisly stuff is on the left. The scar starts at my hairline in the middle of my forehead. It goes straight down to between my eyebrows, and then it rockets off to the left, an almost perfect ninety-degree angle. I have no left eyebrow; the scar has replaced it. The puckered road continues, across my temple, arcing in a lazy loop-de-loop down my cheek. It rips over toward my nose, crosses the bridge of it just barely, and then turns back, slicing in a diagonal across my left nostril and zooming one final time past my jawline, down my neck, ending at my collarbone. There is another scar, straight and perfect, that goes from under the middle of my left eye down to the corner of my mouth. It's newer than the rest; the man who killed Annie forced me to cut myself while he looked and hungered. He loved watching me bleed, you could see it in his eyes, an exaltation. It was one of the last things he felt before I blew his brains out.

Those are just the scars that are visible. Below the neckline of whatever blouse I happen to be wearing, there are others. Made by a knife blade and the cherry-end of a burning cigar. For a long time, I was ashamed of my