Taking a deep breath, I unlocked and opened the front door of my house and stepped inside, bracing myself against what I knew I was going to see, which was nothing. Or maybe I should say everything, but all of it exactly as I’d left it this morning. Until Jana took the girls and moved to the big cedar A-frame behind her gallery off Border I hadn’t understood that inanimate things could die, that all those atoms could stop their quantum dance at once and something as full of energy and purpose as a house one day could become only a shell the next, a replica of life like the detailed husk a cicada leaves behind when it moults.
It wasn’t that I denied being mostly responsible for what had gone wrong between Jana and me, or that I didn’t understand what she was saying about the job. And for her it went beyond the fact that her brother had been killed in the desert, or that her cop uncle had been murdered by a couple of skinheads on the street in Houston. It really came down to her being through with the locker-room police culture that still hung around me like cigar smoke when I got home from work at night, the gun I put on my belt every morning – to her nothing but an ugly black killing tool – the constant anxiety, the midnight calls. She wanted no more bagpipes playing ‘Amazing Grace’ or white-gloved honour guards firing blanks at the sky as somebody with colourful medals and high rank handed young widows or widowers in sunglasses their tightly folded American flags. And outweighing all the rest of it put together, the half-ounce of copper-jacketed lead in the form of two nine-millimetre bullets that wouldn’t have had to be cut out of my body if I’d had some other job.
Her solution was direct and uncomplicated: take the fifty-one-per-cent deal Rachel and Dusty had offered us on the Flying S in Rains County, move out there and run the place, and let them take off to find out what the rest of the world looks like – something they’d been dreaming of for the last fifteen years. But the terms didn’t really matter, because for Jana the question of where we’d be going was a non-essential detail; what she cared about was what we’d be leaving behind – a folded flag of her own.
But nothing about Jana was simple. She’d been an accounting major but cared more about natural fibres than bottom lines. She had killer instincts at poker, but kids lost in stores ran to her on sight. She called herself a ‘pretty good potter’, the real-world meaning of which was that she was an at least moderately famous artist, a ceramicist exhibiting in galleries from one end of the country to the other.
Maybe it was being an artist that made her so contradictory. But whatever gifts she had, she wanted to share. One of the most vivid memories I had of her went back to a Saturday morning years ago, our daughter Casey still in her yellow footie pyjamas, an icy rain falling steadily beyond the windows of the breakfast nook where she sat at the table with her colouring book, Jana standing beside her, watching in silence, her face soft and radiant with undisguised pride.
My eyes stinging as the already-dead house somehow found a way to die a little more, I was suddenly filled with a pure, brilliant hatred of the echoing emptiness banging against my eardrums and sucking the oxygen from the air.
Mutt, my personal cat, came pacing silently in from the hallway. He was mostly black, with two barely visible tan markings above his eyes that gave him a permanently surprised expression, and he stopped and stared at me now as if I were the last thing he’d expected to find in here. Jana had taken him along when she and the girls moved out, thinking he was more attached to them than to me, but he’d run away the first day. Then three days after that I’d found him sitting on the front doormat, licking a curled paw and ignoring me. He’d somehow made it almost six miles across town to come home, probably using up several of his spare lives on the way.
As cats go, he wasn’t a bad roommate – no clawing the furniture, keeping me awake at night or spraying in the house – but he reminded me so much of Jana and the girls that I sometimes had to work at not resenting him for it. On the other hand, right now I was glad to have the company of another conscious being.
‘Ahoy,’ I said.
He gave no sign that he heard me.
The thought of other conscious beings brought to mind the only Dallas phone number I didn’t need to look up. I grabbed the phone and punched it in.
‘Dr Lee Ann Rowe’s office,’ said LaKeisha.
‘This still group night?’
‘That you, Lieutenant Bonham?’
I said what I always did: ‘Call me Jim.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘It is, and she should be out any second. I’ll put you on hold. Enjoy the music.’
The next thing I heard was a slow instrumental version of ‘Satisfaction’, strings and light brass, which I enjoyed as much as I could.
Thinking about LA as I waited – as always trying to edit out the memories that underlined my own failures and selfishness, my inability to prevent what had happened to her – I argued myself around to the position that this call was justifiable, that I wasn’t going to kick up any dust from the past that she couldn’t deal with, that she was probably tougher than me anyway, and certainly no longer had any need for my protection. If she ever really had.
Then, thinking some more about families, I looked up at the pictures on the wall: Jana in front of the fieldstone fireplace at the Flying S; Gram, my grandmother Miriam Hunnicutt Vickers, who’d raised LA and me after everyone else ahead of her on the depth chart had defaulted – a wise and beautiful woman, battered but never broken by a world that didn’t deserve her, looking sadly into the lens from among the tomato plants in her garden; and my own daughters, Casey and Jordan, on horseback, the November sun backlighting their hair against a background of red and gold leaves.
But images of Deborah Gold’s dead flesh began shouldering their way back in, her half-shut eyes gazing emptily down at me through the icy rain, her viciously violated body already gone cold on its way to rejoining the soil.
Then the soundtrack transitioned to ‘Circle of Life’, taking me smoothly back through time to an evening with the girls not long after the separation, the three of us sharing a tub of popcorn and watching a movie about cartoon animals having conversations and singing songs, Jordan saying, ‘That’s pretty dumb,’ not carping, just thinking out loud. ‘They’d be eating each other.’
A huge sigh from her sister Casey. ‘It’s a metaphor, you dink.’
‘I think you mean fable, Miss Hairball.’
All her life Casey had been what Jana called an ‘easy upchuck’, like a cat, throwing up for any reason, or no reason. When there was a purpose it was usually evil – to duck chores, an exam, or some adverse social situation – and it had earned her the nickname Hairball. She was a little sensitive about it. ‘Well, just up yours, Little Susie Einstein,’ she said, giving her hair a sulky toss.
The soundtrack clicked off. ‘Speak, troop,’ LA’s telephone voice said. ‘Start by telling me you’re not relapsing.’ I imagined her leaning back in her desk chair, sporting one of her two main looks – denim and boots that would look spot-on in a boardroom, or a serious suit in toned-down colours that she could wear to a dogfight without raising an eyebrow. Not much jewellery or makeup, probably no high heels – you don’t paint extra stripes on a tiger. Of course with her the concept of a hairstyle had never had any actual meaning because no matter what she or anybody else tried to do with it, she still ended up with the same dark, unconquerable mop that our grandmother had said always looked freshly dynamited.
‘Hi, girl,’ I said. ‘I’m fine, but I need your wisdom.’
‘Some things never change,’ she said. ‘How’s your appetite?’
‘Not too bad,’ I said. ‘But junk food has kinda lost its taste.’
A brief pause. ‘How long since you’ve been fishing?’
‘I don’t know – quite a while.’
‘But you’ve still got the boat?’
I