A deeper sleep (18 page)

"He going to jail this time?"

"Yes, Auntie." Without looking up, Kate started pitching things into the Dumpster. "Johnny saw him there, at Bernie's house. He's going to jail."

"You sure?"

What was this? Kate stood up and looked at Auntie Vi, and was surprised and alarmed to see the other woman's face drawn with strain, leeched of its usual life and color. "Yes, Auntie." She put any personal doubts she might or might not have had firmly to one side and infused her voice with confidence. "Louis Deem is going to jail. I'm sure."

"Good."

There was more than approval in her auntie's voice; there was something that sounded very much like relief. It was almost as if Auntie Vi had feared a different answer to her question.

Kate tried to remember the last time Auntie Vi had been afraid of anything.

She couldn't even remember the first time.

Enid Koslowski and Auntie Vi must have been better friends than Kate had thought. "Even better, Auntie, Jim Chopin is sure, and Judge Singh is expediting the trial."

"When?"

"Four weeks."

Auntie Vi grunted. "Good," she said again, "that good, Katya. Louis don't need to be out here with the people."

Kate couldn't agree more.

Auntie Vi poked her. "You think about what I said?"

Inches from a clean getaway, Kate thought. "I think, Auntie."

"We need you, Katya."

"I help where I can, Auntie."

"You could help more."

Kate wouldn't have agreed with that at gunpoint, so she didn't say anything. To her immense relief, Auntie Vi stretched and gave a yawn so huge, Kate could hear her jaw crack. "Long day. Tired now. Good night, Katya."

"Good night, Auntie."

Halfway across the parking lot, Auntie Vi turned and yelled, "And you give that boy a chance, Katya, you hear? Be safe when you dead."

Kate didn't think Auntie Vi was referring to Johnny, waiting for her in the pickup with his nose buried in F. M. Busby, his head pillowed on Mutt's side. She wasn't so foolhardy as to ask Auntie Vi to clarify whom she meant, though.

The sun had set and stars were creeping up the eastern horizon as they rolled through the village. The recent snowfall had been packed down enough by snow machine traffic that the winter ice on the gravel road was wearing thin, and the road's surface rattled every one of the pickup's million parts one against each other all at the same time. It took Johnny two tries to be heard above the racket. "Kate?"

"What?" The wheel vibrated beneath Kate's hands.

"What happens when you die?"

"What?"

"What happens when you die?"

She heard him the second time. She pulled off to the side of the road and killed the engine. Johnny said, "It's just—Fitz is dead. Where'd he go?"

Kate cleared her throat and was grateful for the warm presence of Mutt between them. She knotted a hand in the thick gray hair. "It's not that I haven't thought about it myself, Johnny. It's just that—I'm not religious."

"I know." Johnny sounded infuriatingly patient. "You've said that before. I just don't know what that means, exactly."

"I'm not big with organized religion, for starters. You know. Believe as we do or burn in hell. I don't think much of fear as a motivator to faith."

"Okay. So do you believe in God? Is there a heaven where we all go when we die?"

Her turn to hesitate, but she wouldn't lie to the kid. "No. I think this is it, Johnny. We're born, we live, we die."

Johnny sounded forlorn. "That's it?"

She looked over at the outline of his head against the window. "That's a lot, Johnny. That life exists, that we are here to show up and pay attention to it. We can laugh, we can cry. We can love. There is chocolate."

"Yeah, but what about Fitz?"

Kate let her head fall back against the headrest. "No easy questions today, huh?"

He was insistent. "What about Fitz, Kate?"

"I believe that the people we love live for as long as we remember them, Johnny," Kate said soberly. "Everything we learned from them we pass on to others. That way, they never die."

He sighed. "No big white light at the end of a tunnel?"

"Nope. One thing, though."

"What?"

"Live every moment of your life. Even if you're sitting around doing nothing, know you're doing it and why. Every time someone asks you a question beginning 'Do you want to go—?' say yes. Try everything once." She smiled into the darkness. "Once I chased a killer up a mountain. There was an earthquake and I lost her. So I climbed to the top of the mountain anyway, because it was there, and so was I, and I'd never been to the top before. The lights were out, and a full moon, and I swear you could see right out to the edge of the universe." She looked at him again. "You never know, Johnny."

"Never know what?"

She shrugged, and then remembered he couldn't see her. "You never know anything, really. I think a lot of people decide to believe in God because they want to feel like they're not alone, and that there are certainties, rules by which they can live their lives.

It gives them a sense of, I don't know. Order, I guess. Reason. Purpose."

"So you're a disorderly kind of person?"

She laughed. "I guess I am. I chose a disorderly profession, that's for sure."

He was silent for a moment. "So Fitz is really dead." Almost in-audibly he added, "And Dad."

"Yes. They're both dead. But not completely gone." She took a deep breath, trying to channel the air around the sharp but not entirely unexpected pain of the admission.

"I guess I was lucky," Johnny said.

"What? Why?"

"I had Dad for twelve years," Johnny said simply. "Much as Mom tried to mess it up, tried to keep me away from him, I had Dad for most all of that time. We were good friends. Best buds."

"That's more than a lot of sons can say about their fathers," she said cautiously.

"More than Fitz could say." He looked at her, but she couldn't make out his expression in the dim light. "Bernie's not a very good father, Kate. I think maybe he uses it all up on the kids on his basketball teams, and he just doesn't have enough left over for his own kids."

She couldn't deny it, so she started the truck instead. The rest of the journey was accomplished in silence. As she swung wide to pull into the narrow entrance to her access road, headlights flashed in the rearview. In spite of herself, her heart, that usually reliable organ, skipped a beat. She couldn't stop the smile from spreading across her face.

She stopped smiling when the lights, approaching swiftly, pulled even with her rear bumper and then pulled left to pass without waiting for her to get clear of the road.

She heard a loud crack, and for a split second thought the other vehicle had clipped her bumper, except that there was no corresponding lurch of her pickup. In that same moment, the driver's-side window disintegrated. Mutt was on her feet, barking wildly.

"Kate!"

"Get down!" She fought to hold on to the wheel with one hand as she reached around Mutt and caught the back of Johnny's neck with the other, catapulting him down in front of the bench seat. At the same time, she double-clutched into second gear and hit the gas. The rear wheels spun.

Another crack sounded, and the rear window splintered. Mutt barked, once, and then yipped, and then gave a soft whine, and then she slid off the edge of the seat and fell on top of Johnny.

Kate screamed something, she didn't know what, and forgot everything she knew about driving on winter roads. She slammed on the brakes with both feet. The engine jumped and bucked and died, and the pickup went into a skid that brought the end of the pickup bed around to the left. They slid off the road, bumped into the ditch, and nearly rolled, tipping up on the right wheels for a long, dangerous moment before the weight of the truck brought them back down with a hell of a bang.

And there they came to a rest, buried in snow in the ditch, headlights pointing at the sky.

EIGHT

Afterward, Jim could remember the night only as a series of stop-motion flashbacks, as if he'd lived through it through the lens of a camera, one shot at a time.

Looking up from his computer to see Kate standing in the doorway, face drained of color, her eyes fixed on him in a painful plea, blood smearing the front of her shirt and jeans, enough on the bottom of her right shoe to leave tracks.

Johnny, white-faced and mute, a retreat into the shocked little boy on the front stairs of Bernie's house.

The rubber track of her snow machine in shreds from traveling at full throttle over the twenty-five miles of near gravel between her place and town.

Helping her lift Mutt's inert body from the trailer hitched to her snow machine to the back of his Cessna.

Kate sitting next to him in the Cessna, leaning forward against the seat belt as if she could tow the plane through the air faster.

Kenny meeting them at the Ahtna airport, a comforting bulwark against the unreality of the moment.

The expression on Jennie Pappas's face when she saw who it was coming through the front door of her clinic like a freight train.

Kate's dark head bent over the gray one in the harsh lights of the examining room, crooning something wordless into Mutt's ear.

Kate fighting him when at the vet's insistence he picked her up and carried her into the waiting room.

Johnny sitting across from them, hands dangling uselessly between his knees, staring vacantly into space.

The tick of the minute hand on the round plastic clock on the wall.

The scratched plastic of the bucket chairs.

For her part, Kate's world had narrowed to the square of linoleum between the tiny waiting room and the marginally larger recovery room, where Mutt lay on a stainless steel table, her left shoulder shaved and bandaged.

"I don't know," Jennie Pappas had said. "She's strong and healthy, but that bullet tore her up plenty inside. I've repaired the damage, but shock is a funny thing. It helped that you got her here as soon as you did." Jennie, a pudgy fifty-something with a short bob of dark hair streaked with gray, gave a tired shrug. "We'll have to wait and see. First twenty-four hours are critical."

"I'll wait."

Jennie nodded as if she hadn't expected anything else. "I'm going back home now, try to get a little sleep before I have to get back for regular hours."

Kate surfaced enough to say, "Thanks for coming in, Jennie."

Jennie gave a dismissive wave. "There's a coffeepot and some snacks in the back. Help yourself." Yawning again, she shuffled out the door.

Four o'clock became five o'clock, and five o'clock became six. Sometimes Kate paced. Sometimes she sat in the waiting room, hunched over her knees, hands clasped together, staring at the floor. Mostly she stayed with Mutt, finally levering herself up on the table and fitting herself against Mutt's spine. There wasn't any room for her. She did it anyway.

She didn't think about who had done this, or why. She didn't think about what she was going to do about it. She didn't think about what happened next. She merely endured, a careful but proprietary arm around her dog, willing her to keep breathing in and out, willing the torn muscles to repair themselves, willing death to keep its distance.