Martin Misunderstood

This was how it happened: Charlie, her husband, had just died. This was fifteen years ago. There was no one at home to cook for, no laundry to do, no shirts to iron. A big case had just been solved – a child killer was going to the electric chair. People were in a celebratory mood. An decided that she would go to the local cop bar and have a drink with her fellow brothers in blue.

They all got drunk, but An was better at holding her liquor. Or, maybe she wasn't. Somebody hit on her. Somebody made a comment not to bother. Somebody called her a dyke. Somebody called her frigid. Maybe it was the word 'frigid,' because that was what Charlie called her when, for some crazy reason, she didn't want to have sex with him after he'd beaten her.

No matter how it happened, that was when Jill was born.

Jill was a nurse who worked with children. She was a kind and caring woman. She had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. She was the love of An's life. She was dying. They all felt sorry for her. They all shut up.

The next morning, An woke up with a throbbing headache. When she got to work, everyone was quiet, respectful. A few asked how Jill was doing. 'Jill?' she had echoed, and then it had hit her, the half-drunk fabrications from the night before. She'd tucked her head down, mumbled, 'I don't really want to talk about it,' and ran to the women's room where she cleaned out her purse, filed her nails and took a nap, only to emerge to concerned stares and 'chin ups' from her new friends.

Belonging to a group was an alien concept to An. Not that she had never had friends, but as the daughter of Dutch immigrants, she had never quite fitted in. During the summers, when most girls were off at camp, she was visiting relatives in Hindeloopen, walking along the narrow streets and wooden bridges of her seafaring ancestors, still never quite fitting in with her 'y'alls' and 'fixin' tos'. Her parents fared no better. Like many immigrants before them, they had come to America seeking a new life. As with those earlier immigrants, the life they made for themselves was basically the same as the one they had back home, but in a different country. They attended parties for the Dutch-American Society. They drank Heineken and sucked on coins of honingdrop that their relatives back home were kind enough to mail. Most of their friends were childless, Dutch ex-pats, except a few shifty Norwegians who mostly stood in the corner at parties talking among themselves.

Walking into the Albada house, you would never guess that you were still in the American South. An's mother was an art teacher who was passionate about blending substance and style. Every room was colorfully decorated in bright reds, yellows and greens. The dining room was boldly striped in blue. There were cupboards they had brought from home, leafy floral patterns and swirls intricately carved into every inch of wood, then painted in complementary colors. On Halloween, her mother would don her chintz wentke, and – solely as a concession to her ignorant art students – put on a pair of wooden clogs she had bought at a tourist stand in Schiphol Airport.

Her father had been overly educated, as was the Dutch way, and he insisted his daughter be the same. When An was not studying, she was working on extra credit projects or helping her father in the lab (Eduart Albada was a botanist for the State of Georgia). He had a small shed in the back yard – her mother called it the likhus after the small houses in Hindeloopen where the sea captains' families stayed – and An would spend hours with him there over the weekends, watching his steady, square hands as he grafted together different plants in hopes of creating a tulip that was more resistant to the South's unpredictable seasons.

And so it was that An grew up a much-beloved only child with very few friends her own age. She had never been particularly lonely, or at least she thought she'd never been lonely, but what An realized when Jill came into her life was that she had always been alone. Even when she was married to Charlie, there was that sense that she did not quite belong to him, that he did not quite see her when she entered a room or asked a question.

But, not anymore. That all stopped the day An walked out of the women's room and was greeted by her colleagues as an equal. When had it happened? When had Jill crossed over from being a figment of An's imagination into a living, breathing part of An's life? It had never occurred to her as she cleaned out loose pieces of paper and various pieces of fuzz from her purse that Jill was taking on real physical aspects in her mind.

Okay, well, An had to admit that she milked it at first. She took some personal time, claiming she wanted to sit with Jill during her treatments, when really it was because she was having bad cramps and there was a John Wayne marathon on TBS. Then, there was the day she overslept and missed an important meeting. Telling them that Jill was sick from chemo and she'd had to take her to the doctor was only a little white lie. What was the point of those stupid meetings anyway? They were cops. They didn't have to be rounded up into a smelly conference room to be told that they needed to catch the bad guys.

Of course, there was no way to get around the fact that it was a whopper of a falsehood when An had taken a week-long trip to Florida under the guise of flying Jill to the Mayo Clinic to see a world-renowned specialist. A handful of people noted her suntan, which An explained away by telling them she insisted on staying with Jill during radiation treatments. Maybe it wasn't so much of a lie, because by then An felt a real connection to Jill. While the thought of lesbian sex wasn't particularly appealing (or even concrete in her mind, because what, exactly, did two women do together?), An liked the idea of the companionship, the connection with another human being.

In short, she fell in love.

Over the ensuing months, the myth of Jill had slowly evolved into a reality. An had worked on the detective squad for three years, but no one had ever bothered to talk to her before Jill had appeared. Knowing that An had a sick lover had somehow humanized her with these men. She made friendships – lifelong relationships. A couple of them had wives who'd had breast cancer. They gave An literature on survivors. Then, one day, they had all surrounded her desk and handed her a sign-up sheet. Real tears had welled into her eyes when she realized that the entire squad had agreed to participate in the Avon Breast Cancer Walk on behalf of Jill.

It was then that she knew that Jill had to die. Too much water had passed under the bridge. An was telling so many stories that she didn't know how to keep up with them anymore. The worst part was that people wanted to meet Jill. They wanted to know this strong woman who had stared death in the face. Oddly enough, the day An called into work to tell her boss that Jill had passed away (conveniently occurring on the same day that Macy's was having its annual fifty per cent off white sale), she had gotten so choked up that she'd had to hang up the phone.

It hadn't stopped there, really. There were the condolence cards to deal with. The flowers. Of course they'd had an impromptu wake at the same bar where the legend of Jill had been born. They drank to her: the nurse, the friend, the lover. They had sung sad songs and An had told them about the time Jill had saved a homeless man from a burning building and the way she always put toothpaste on An's toothbrush, even at the end when she was so sick she could barely lift her head. She had thought about cheating on Jill once – had she ever told them that? Nothing had happened, but it had been a hard time for them both, and, in the end, An felt like it made them stronger.

The worst part was that An had chosen the name Jill because she enjoyed watching Gillian Anderson on The X-Files. Her thick, red hair, her sharp chin and petite waist were all attributes An would have loved for herself. She knew now that basing Jill on a real person was a big mistake. Sometimes, An would see Anderson, introducing a PBS special or promoting one of her many causes, and would get a lump in her throat, as if she was seeing a ghost from a happier time in her life.

'Hey,' Bruce said. 'You in there?'

An nodded her head. They both stared at Martin, who was mumbling to himself.

'Hard day for you, huh?'

An nodded again. Bruce's mother had died of breast cancer when he was a child. He had brought An flowers this morning, marking the five-year anniversary of Jill's death.

'You had eight good years,' Bruce reminded her. 'That's more than most people get.'

'Yeah.' An fought the sadness that came with the false memories: Jill rubbing her feet; Jill fixing her dinner; Jill running her a bath. (It must be said that many of An's fantasies cast Jill in a decidedly subservient role.)

'I'm here for you, babe.' Bruce patted her shoulder. 'You know that, right?'

His touch was warm, and An flashed back to that crazy night six years ago when she had for some reason let herself fall for the limited charms of Bruce Benedict. They were working hard on a case, and the truth of the matter was that An missed a man's touch. She missed the gruffness, the warmness, the sense of being filled to