Dry Ice (24 page)

    I said it didn't matter to me where we met. She gave me her address.

    Kirsten's cottage had a new copper-roofed porch over the north-facing entrance. The metal had just begun its evolution toward verdigris. That's where I was standing when she offered the "Amy went to a friend's house" information.

    I said, "I appreciate you letting me interrupt your weekend."

    She was wearing faded blue jeans and a thin sweater that was the muted gold of the sky just before the sun cracks the dawn horizon. Her hair was in a ponytail, her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. Despite the cool spring day her feet were bare.

    She'd painted her toenails the red of Valentine hearts. I didn't miss the fact that I had noticed that her feet were bare. It meant that my eyes were down. I forced myself to bring my gaze up to meet hers. I thought she looked pretty, and soft, and much younger than she did in her going-to-court clothes. I hoped I didn't look as pitiful as I was feeling, but I suspected that I did.

    She pulled the door open wide. "Don't be silly. Since Amy's gone we don't have to go out. We can talk here," she said. "Come in, come in."

    The cottage was recently renovated. Years before, Kirsten had entered the Witness Security Program with abundant financial assets from her marriage. She had apparently invested a serious chunk of those assets in the purchase and reconstruction of this little house. I felt as though I'd just crossed the threshold into the front room of an overpriced suite at a mountain resort. The colors in the room were from gemstones thrown in rich soil. Most of the plebian artifacts of the home's humble origins had been replaced by modern flourishes and expensive finishes. The floor was bamboo, the furniture covered with down cushions in soft chenilles. The effect was charming.

    Kirsten's home was a cocoon, a place for retreating, not for transitioning. It was the antithesis of my new waiting room, but I thought Diane would approve.

    "Nice," I said, taking in the single large room that was visible from the entryway.

    "Thank you," she said. "It was a lot of work. The place hadn't been touched in seventy years when I bought it. We took down walls. The original floor was still in the kitchen. Layers and layers of wallpaper everywhere. Eight layers in the bedroom, if you can believe it. And the bathroom? It was cold enough to age meat in there in January. I put in a new boiler and radiant heat. I even heated the floors. Can you feel them? Take off your shoes." She crossed her arms, gripping her biceps. "I get cold in the mountains. Remember, I'm a Southern girl."

    I kicked off my shoes. She led me to a loveseat and we sat side by side facing a small fire that was burning in the river-rock fireplace. Horses or donkeys had probably carted the round stones up the hill from nearby Boulder Creek a century before.

    "I made tea," she said. "Green? Is that okay?" She had also put out some iced cookies that shared a small platter with an array of dried apples and apricots.

    I took the tea from her and cradled it. After my sojourn at Kaladi I didn't need any more caffeine, but the weight and the warmth of the mug felt good in my hands.

    "It's cozy here," I said. "Thanks."

    The tea tray was resting on a table fashioned from an old wooden hibachi. She put her bare feet up on the edge. A few inches from her painted toes sat a clear glass bowl brimming with Dum Dums. The little lollipops brought back memories. During her time in my care Kirsten had been addicted.

    "My mother used to say that cozy is Southern for 'small,' " she said.

    I kept my stockinged feet on the warm floor. "It's lovely. Small can be good."

    Her feet were slender. I noticed that I'd noticed. I also noted that it was not because I'd been looking down.

    She took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and said, "It's enough for Amy and me. We each have our own rooms and . . . bathrooms." She smiled. "That's important for girls. The contractor removed dump trucks full of rocks and dirt from below the house so I could have a tiny basement with an office. I can walk to work in minutes. I ride my bike to Ideal for groceries. I can be on the Mount Sanitas trail like that." She snapped her fingers. "There are lots of restaurants. Bookstores. The library. I love all of it."

    The psychologist in me heard the distortion in the sounds as the faint echoes of her words bounced around the room. I recognized that this darling West Boulder cottage wasn't merely a comforting cocoon for my ex-patient and current lawyer, it was also a bit of an emotional abdication, or at least an acknowledgment of circumstances that felt immutable. By renovating this sturdy, intimate house, Kirsten was admitting to herself—in a form as concrete as the mortar between the heavy rocks in the walls—that she no longer had overt hopes that her small family would be getting any larger.

    "Amy's getting older," she said. "Growing up. You'll know soon enough what that means."

    "What?" I could guess, but making assumptions had been proving dangerous.

    "She's gone more than she's here. Friends. School things, sports things. She plays club soccer. You know about club soccer?"

    Lauren and I had some friends with kids who played club ball. All I knew is that they traveled a lot on weekends to towns most Coloradans don't visit. Some parents were happier about it than others. "Amy's a keeper, right?" I said.

    I could tell that Kirsten was pleased that I remembered her daughter played goal. "You will soon. If it's not soccer it'll be something else. The activities take so much of the kids' time. And then there're her friends, and the phone, and IM. She used to be my best buddy. Sometimes I feel as though I'm getting a taste of what it will be like when . . ." She didn't finish the sentence.

. . . she goes to college? . . . gets married?

    I was digesting how different Kirsten felt to me from the woman who had been figuratively—and occasionally literally— standing toe-to-toe with Sam Purdy on my behalf over the recent past. And how different she felt from the woman who had stepped into my office so full of grief and terror after the murder of her husband.

    I was disarmed by it all, and realized that I was having a rare opportunity to recognize that what a therapist sees about a patient in his office has scant correlation with that person's life the other twenty-three hours and fifteen minutes of any given day.

    I'd sought Kirsten out that afternoon for the comfort she could provide. I was under orders not to speak with Lauren or with Sam, and both were under orders not to speak with me about anything to do with Kol. Diane would have been willing to hear me out, but she was still recovering from her own traumas and I didn't entertain burdening her with mine. Adrienne was in Israel.

    The list of people I could turn to for comfort should maybe have been longer, but it wasn't. My instincts told me that legal comfort was better than no comfort at all. But Kirsten was vulnerable, too. Not as acutely as me, but in her own way perhaps nearly to the same degree. The awareness shouldn't have surprised me—I'd been her psychotherapist, after all—but it did. My self-protective radar failed to recognize that the fact her vulnerability didn't trouble me enough to back away might signify I was suffering a problem with my judgment.

    "Cozy will be back tonight," she said.

    Was she making conversation? Or was she suggesting that I wait and share my fresh news about Cole's suicide—I'd decided on the drive back to Boulder to try to goad myself to mentally replace the K with a C and to add the e—with Cozy instead of her? I wasn't sure.

    She added, "I think he made an offer on that place in La Jolla."

    "I hope he loans it out to clients," I said. "I could use a month at the beach."

    She laughed. "And associates," she said. "Though I wish he were buying in Sanibel, or on the Outer Banks somewhere." She crinkled her nose. "In the South."

    She had no way of knowing I was being ironic with my comment about the beach.

    
Bimini
was what I'd been thinking.

    Where I lived far across the valley, I could watch the shadows' tides. I could watch each night's dark steal away the light and then see the reflection on the Flatirons as dawn's glow burst and reclaimed the day.

    At Kirsten's home, like at my office blocks away, I could
feel
the day ending.

    The difference was important.

"You want a drink?" she asked after a long interlude when the only sounds were the muted explosions of gases escaping tiny caverns in the logs in the fireplace, and a dog barking somewhere in the neighborhood. "A real drink? A glass of wine?"

   Her question felt more complicated than it should have. I wasn't sure why at first, but I didn't have a quick reply ready. She filled the void—she stood up, stepped in the direction of the kitchen and said, "Well, I do."

    I touched her hand as she moved past me. I stood too.

    The fingers of my right hand snaked up into her hair. My left hand pressed on her back, just above her ass. I felt her breath on my neck.

    There are moments in life when good and bad collide. A heroin addict described it to me. Just as the needle enters the vein, just before the plunger starts to descend on the syringe. I was there. I knew that moment.

    Stopping time—literally—might have allowed me the chance to sort out what I should do next. But stopping time was the province of gods and if I were any god at that moment I would have been the deity the Greeks called Chaos.

KIRSTEN DID get herself some wine, though I declined to join her.

    Going home with alcohol on my breath would have added a level of complication to my already complicated afternoon. I was unwilling to contemplate the house of cards of lies it would take to explain it all to Lauren.

I did not grab Kirsten's hand as she stood to get the wine. Nor did I pull her into an embrace. I didn't bury my fingers in her hair. Or feel her breath on the flesh of my neck. I didn't do any of what would naturally have come next.

    I wasn't even on the couch when she returned from the kitchen with the wine. I was standing in front of the fire, looking out a western window at the first pastel stripes on the stratified clouds above the foothills.

    She set the bottle of wine and two glasses on the hibachi. She busied herself popping the cork before she stepped over and joined me by the fire. She said, "Hi."

    The word felt like a novella.

    She put her arms around me—I could feel her hands spread, her fingers curling onto my shoulder blades—and she gave me a firm hug, the side of her face against my chest. I inhaled a soft scent from her, an olfactory whisper, like yesterday's perfume.

    "That wasn't very lawyerly," she said when she'd pulled away from me. "But I thought you needed it. You haven't had a very good week."

    I had needed it, so much so that I allowed myself the discomfiting awareness that the embrace had ended before I was ready.

    The moment she pulled away from me is when the whathappened-next fantasy played out in my head—unbidden, I would argue; undeterred, I would admit. I remained near the fire gazing out the window as I allowed the fantasy to run to credits. Even as the inherent peril caused my pulse to soar I found the prurient daydream oddly comforting.

    When I joined her again on the loveseat I poured three inches of wine for her and turned sideways, handing her the glass. She had one leg curled beneath her and her left arm around a cushion that she was hugging to her breasts.

    I left my glass unfilled. She noticed. "This must be hard for you," she said.

    "It is," I said. "I assume you mean being a suspect in the suspicious death of one of my patients?" It was an awkward attempt to be glib.

    "That's part of it," she said with a kind grin. "But simply losing your patient to suicide. The way you did, finding the body? The hostility of her killing herself the way she did, and where she did? At your
home.
At your home, Alan. I mean—oh my God—Grace could have found the body. Plus being cut off from all your usual supports. Lauren. Your best friend. Not being able to talk about this. It must be like being on an island."

    "Yes," I said. "It is."
Bimini.

    "I'm glad if I can help," she said. "Even a little. And I'm glad you called," she said, averting her eyes.

    "Me too." I felt like a sixteen-year-old. Or somebody else as a sixteen-year-old. I'd totally forgotten what my life had been like at sixteen. Psychologically speaking the correct word was "suppressed." Not "forgotten." My actual sixteenth year, along with the couple before and the couple after, had disappeared into a cave. I hadn't been spelunking in those climes since.

    Kirsten said, "I know that part. The island part. I've lived it. But the part I know best is how it feels to have a madman after you and your family. There's nothing worse."

    She had given my situation a lot of thought. My breath was growing shallow. Partly because her compassion was disarming me. Partly because she was stumbling closer and closer to the truth.

    Kirsten said, "Lauren isn't well, is she?"

    
What?
How did she know that?

    "I don't mean generally," she said. "I mean lately."

    "How can you tell?"

    She shrugged. "Coping is exhausting. She seems . . . especially exhausted. I've seen her . . . during better times. We were close, remember?"