Lifelines: Kate's Story (32 page)

Already,
she’d mixed him with David, because wasn’t she trying to find an orgasm to
compare? She needed to locate a memory and say: David gave you that.

Stop
being so damned neurotic, Kate!

The
next time Mac came, she would be natural. She wouldn’t let sex, or Jennifer,
make her defensive. She needed Mac’s friendship, and she’d accompanied enough
women through grief to know she mustn’t become trapped in her daughter’s desire
to fix her mother in a permanent past.

A
t the
construction yard, Mac found the gate open. He drove in and parked the truck
outside the shack he now called home. Its door hung open, too. Smashed open, he
realized when he got closer. From the holes punched in the wooden door, he’d
guess a claw hammer.

He
realized whoever had done this might still be here and he spun around to search
the yard with wary eyes. Nothing, no vehicle except his pick-up truck and the
A-frame by the open gate. Both looked intact.

As
he entered the shack, he knocked the door back with an abrupt gesture, as if he
were a cop on some television series. He would have laughed at himself, but
someone had smashed the door and who knew what they’d done inside. If they’d
taken the computer, he’d lose records he couldn’t replace. Why hadn’t he backed
up the damned computer, the way the guy who sold it to him insisted he must to
protect against loss from viruses, thieves, or vandals?

Nobody
here. The door to his small bedroom hung open, but here in the office the
remote phone sat quietly in its cradle. He grabbed it on his way to the door
leading to the warehouse. The intruders must have broken through the front
door, then opened the warehouse doors from inside. They would have loaded a
truck with lumber, fittings, and paint.

He
had paid the insurance bill, hadn’t he?

Yes,
two weeks ago.

He
eyed the computer behind the desk warily as he passed it, but it looked OK. No
hammer marks. He’d dialed the first two numbers of 911 before it occurred to
him that this wasn’t an emergency. The intruder had left. He needed to report a
break-in, probably a robbery, but he didn’t need sirens screaming through the
gates in response. He turned back to the desk for the phone book to look up the
regular police number.

He
paused, caught by a reflection of light from the floor. He bent down ... a shard
of glass. He used the remote phone to push the door open, and realized he’d
used his hands on the outside doorknob. His fingerprints would mess up the
police in their attempts to get prints. He shouldn’t be inside the building at
all, not until after the cops finished with it.

Someone
had trashed his room. The television lay on its side on the floor, its face a
bowl of glass shards. Glass had flown everywhere—the doorway, the floor, and
the bed. Whoever did this had dragged his blankets off the bed, then hacked at
the mattress with something until its stuffing sprouted everywhere.

On
the floor in front of his closet, a work shirt marked the border between
bedroom and closet, its arm half-torn from the body of the shirt. A few feet
away, his alarm clock lay shattered on the floor. The Ken Follett thriller he’d
been reading lay open on the floor. Clumps of torn-out pages led from the book
to the foot of the bed, where his microwave oven lay open at an impossible
angle.

He
walked over the debris to the bathroom, where toothbrush and razor lay on the
floor in a pool of shaving cream. On the mirror, someone had written
asshole
in lipstick.

He
backed out of the bathroom, out of the bedroom. In his office, he returned the
remote phone to its cradle. He booted up the computer and opened the estimate
he’d worked on Friday afternoon. So far as he could tell, it was untouched.

Next
he went to the warehouse door. Locked, it showed no signs of a hammer attack.
He pulled his keys out and unlocked the door, but he knew already what he would
find inside the warehouse. He hadn’t been attacked by a thief, a competitor, or
a disgruntled employee. If he had, the computer would be missing or destroyed,
along with the fax machine and the A-frame he needed to haul supplies to his
jobs.

This
attack had been personal. Rachel had destroyed his bed, his book, his
television, and his clothes. He remembered how she’d cried and clung to the
truck as he drove away yesterday. He’d been relieved to escape, but of course
it couldn’t end there. After he left, her hysteria had transformed to rage. She
must have taken his spare keys from the desk, because she needed keys to get
through the gate. She’d come yesterday, or last night. She must have hammered
on the door, screamed at him to open it. When he didn’t answer, she found a
hammer somewhere and ...

Outside,
he found his toolbox spilled over the ground beside the A-frame. She’d pulled
it out, left the passenger door half-open, and the toolbox itself on the ground
where rain could rust the tools. No claw hammer. If he didn’t find that in his
bedroom, she would have carried it back to the car.

He
tidied the tools and put the box back in its place, then closed the truck’s
passenger door. He took a slow walk around the truck to check for hammer marks,
but couldn’t find any damage.

Four-thirty
in the morning. He knew he needed to confront her, but their most violent
scenes had taken place at night, with darkness outside. If that constituted a
pattern in her rage, she’d probably done this sometime in the night. Perhaps
while he was on the boat, holding Kate in his arms.

He
grabbed a broom from the warehouse. She’d torn most of his clothes, and then
she must have stomped on them. He could picture her tearing the room apart, a
hammer in her hands and a scream in her throat. The picture came so readily, he
must have known she was capable of this kind of violence.

He
pulled on his work gloves, then stuffed clothes, blankets, and the white cotton
from inside of his mattress into a garbage bag. He threw the twisted microwave,
the library book, and the alarm clock into the back of his pick-up. Then he
added the dead television set, the bags of brutalized clothes, and the bedding.
In the end, he threw the mattress on top of the mess, because even if could be
repaired, he didn’t want to sleep on it again.

He
swept the bedroom, which seemed to get rid of all visible broken glass. Then he
shoveled up the shaving foam from the bathroom floor and threw it with his
toothbrush and razor into the truck. Last of all, he washed
asshole
off
the bathroom mirror.

No
sign of Rachel now, or of his own occupancy of this room.

He
drove the truck out of the yard. No padlock on the gate. He searched the bushes
and found it, used it to lock the gate. Rachel probably wouldn’t come again.
Whatever anger she’d felt must be exhausted by the destruction she’d wrought.

The
Madrona Bay dump would be closed at this hour, so he drove ten miles to a rural
dump that hadn’t graduated to its own guard and dumping fees. He tossed out the
evidence of Rachel’s fury and swept the pick-up bed clean of glass shards.

Protecting
Rachel by hiding evidence of what she’d done, or simply keeping his business
private? Either way, he needed this chapter of his life over with.

He
drove to the house, and arrived as the sky turned slate gray. Rachel opened the
door before he could knock.

“Richard!
You’re back!”

“I
came from the construction yard. I got your message.”

“What
message?”

He
wondered if she could be as innocent as she looked. “The one on my mirror.
Asshole.”

“Oh.”
Her confusion mutated into tears. “Sweetheart, I thought you were gone forever!
I love you so much, darling, I couldn’t bear it! I don’t know what I’d do
without you.”

He
crammed his hands into his pockets. “You’d better figure it out.”

She
managed a smile through the tears. “You’re angry, aren’t you?”

“Of
course I’m angry. You trashed a library book. Why would—for Christ’s sake.”

“It’s
so like you to worry about the library book, but don’t swear at me. It’s one of
the things I love about you, that you don’t swear, no matter how mad you are.
Don’t spoil it, darling.”

“We
need to talk. We need to settle things.”

Her
sobs ceased abruptly. “If you come back, everything will be fine. I love you.”

He
knew he needed to make her understand, feared that no matter what he said, she
would refuse to see reality.

“Richard,
don’t stand here in the doorway. It’s your house too, and you’ve been away too
long. Come in.”

“I
can’t come in. This week—Friday, at our counseling session, we need to
talk—really talk.” Surely John could help Rachel deal with reality, and wouldn’t
it be kinder to force her to see the end with a therapist there to support her?

Coward.

“Friday?”
She pouted and he felt nausea as he realized he’d once found her child-like
pout charming. “I can’t wait for Friday.”

“Maybe
we can get an earlier appointment. Why don’t you call this morning and see if
we can get in?”

She
smiled and he felt his tension ease a notch, but she said, “I’ll get us in
today, and you’ll move home tonight. You can’t live at the construction yard
now, with all your things ruined. You’ll come back home.”

Mac
thought of Kate, so damned honest and straightforward she wouldn’t have sex
with him without making sure he knew she still yearned for her dead husband. He
wanted to hold Kate, soothe away her hurt and her loss, while Rachel—who he’d
promised to love forever—Rachel chilled his heart to ice.

He
hoped Kate was right that counseling could help them break up harmoniously. He
wanted to part as friends with Rachel, because there didn’t seem a hell of a
lot of point to anger. Actually, once he’d realized she was sort of a permanent
child, he hadn’t felt real anger. Even her temper tantrum at the shed hadn’t
stirred his anger. Guilt, yes, because how much could he have loved her when
all the affection drained away with one betrayal?

What
if he’d been married to Kate, and she’d aborted his child without telling him?
Would his warmth, his liking, dry up? He couldn’t get the picture to form.
Kate’s determination to do the right thing made deceit impossible. He must have
been mad to think her losing her first baby was parallel to what Rachel did. An
accident, and no matter how much blame she accepted, of course David forgave
her. He must have been insane with worry when he learned she’d been hurt. If
the cops came to tell Mac that Kate was in hospital, he’d be desperate to get
there, terrified he’d lost her forever.

David
Taylor hadn’t had anything to forgive.

J
ennifer
woke tangled in her mother’s bathrobe under the big comforter. She could see
brilliant sky outside, cupped by an overhanging branch from the dogwood tree.
She stared at the branch until the buds blurred.

Sounds.
A woodpecker bashing his brains out on a tree. A disconnected memory came to
her: Daddy, the woodpecker is going to hurt the tree.

Her
father had explained that the woodpeckers pecked to uncover worms they could
hear under the bark of the tree; that if the worms had taken residence, the
tree was already dying. Knowledge she would rather not have learned.

Her
father ... David, his arms wrapped around her mother in the living room. If she
hadn’t interrupted them, would they have made love right here? Or would her
father have stood and lifted her mother in his arms, to carry her to the
bedroom? She’d never seen her father carry her mother, and however it happened,
she wasn’t comfortable with the image of her parents as lovers.

Her
father had died last summer. How long afterwards before her mother had sex with
a man? Was last night the first time, or the fiftieth?

If
Jennifer married Alain and then he died, she would be faithful forever.

Wouldn’t
she?

Alain,
telling God how much he loved his wife, his eyes blind to Jennifer.

The
comforter around her shoulders was one her mother and father had used. She’d
fallen asleep with Socrates cuddled in her arms, her eyes closed, warmed by the
comforter her mother placed. She’d been nasty about Kate’s seeing a man, while
her mother lifted the dog into the bed to comfort Jennifer.

No
matter what, Kate loved her.

Alain’s
true loyalty had always been to his wife. What a cliché, the college student
who dated the married professor. She remembered her mother on the telephone,
years ago, speaking to either a friend or a client, unaware Jennifer could
hear. “Eleanor,” she’d said—so odd that Jennifer remembered the name, “You need
to remember that whatever he feels for you, he chooses to live with her. If he
wanted to be with you more than he wanted to be with her, he would be.”