The Last Precinct

I describe to her what happened. Lucy had gone to the Medical College of Virginia to bring Jo home from the hospital, and when they pulled up to my house after midnight, Chando

"Was he speaking French?" she asks.

The question catches me off guard. I try to remember. "I think so."

"Then you understand French."

I pause again. "Well, I took it in high school. I just know it seemed at the time he was screaming for me to help him. I seemed to understand what he was saying."

"Did you try to help him?"

"I was trying to save his life, trying to stop Lucy from killing him."

"But that was for Lucy, not for him. You weren't really trying to save his life. You were trying to stop Lucy from ruining her own."

Thoughts collide, canceling each other out. I don't reply.

"She wanted to kill him," A

I nod, staring off, reliving it. Lucy, Lucy. I repeatedly called out her name, trying to shatter the homicidal spell she was under. Lucy. I crawled closer to her in the snowy front yard. Put the gun down. Lucy, you don't want to do this. Please. Put the gun down. Chando

"You are quite certain it was Lucy's intention to kill him, even though it wasn't self-defense?" A

"Yes," I reply. "I'm certain."

"Then should we reconsider that perhaps it was not necessary for her to kill those men down in Miami?"

"That was totally different, A

"I ca

"That's right," I reply. "I don't think anyone can imagine something like that until it happens. I know if I were the one driving up and it was Lucy in the yard, and he had tried to murder her, then…" I pause, analyzing, not really able to complete the thought.

"You would have killed him," A

"Well, I might have."

"Even though he was no threat? He was in terrible pain, blind and helpless?"

"It's hard to know the other person is helpless, A

"Ah. But you knew enough to talk Lucy out of killing him." She gets up and I watch as she unhooks a ladle from the iron rack of pots and pans suspended overhead and fills big earthenware bowls, steam rising in aromatic clouds. She sets the soup on the table, giving me time to think about what she just said. "Have you ever considered that your life reads like one of your more complicated death certificates." A

I search to remember what I have told her about my past.

"You are who you are in life because you became a student of death at a very young age," she continues. "Most of your childhood you lived with your father's dying."

The soup is chicken vegetable and I detect bay leaves and sherry. I am not sure I can eat. A

"This isn't about my father." I pick up my spoon. "This isn't about my childhood, and to tell you the truth, the last thing I care about right now is my childhood."

"It is about not feeling." She pulls out her chair and sits back down. "About learning not to feel because it was too painful to feel." The soup is too hot to eat and she idly stirs it with a heavy, engraved silver spoon. "When you were a child, you could not live with the impending doom in your house, the fear, the grief, the anger. You shut down."

"Sometimes you have to do that."

"It is never good to do that." She shakes her head.

"Sometimes it's survival to do that," I disagree.

"Shutting down is denial. When you deny the past, you will repeat it. You are living proof. Your life has been one loss after another ever since that original loss. Ironically, you have turned loss into a profession, the doctor who hears the dead, the doctor who sits at the bedside of the dead. Your divorce from Tony. Mark's death. Then last year, Benton's murder. Then Lucy in a shoot-out and you almost lose her. And now, finally, you. This terrible man comes to your house and you almost lost you. Losses and more losses."

The pain from Benton's murder is frighteningly fresh. I fear it will always be fresh, that I will never escape the hol-lowness, the echo of empty rooms in my soul and the anguish in my heart. I am outraged all over again as I think of the police in my house unwittingly touching items that belonged to Benton, brushing past his paintings, tracking mud over the fine rug in the dining room he gave me for Christmas one year. No one knowing. No one caring.

"A pattern like this," A

I tell her my life is not in a black hole. I don't deny there is a pattern. I would have to be as dense as dirt not to see it. But on one point I am in adamant disagreement. "It bothers me considerably to hear you imply I brought him to my door," I tell her, referring again to Chando

"It is what I am asking." She butters a roll. "It is what I am asking you, Kay," she somberly repeats.

"A

"Because you would not be the first or last person to do something like that. It is not conscious."

"Not me. Not subconsciously or unconsciously," I claim.

"There is much self-fulfilled prophecy here. You. Then Lucy. She almost became what she fights. Be careful who you choose for an enemy because that is who you become most like," A

"I didn't will him to come to my house," I repeat slowly and flatly. I continue to avoid saying Chando