With Child (12 page)

"So what do you think, Al?" Kate was on the phone to her partner, the following evening.

"You're on workman's comp now?"

"Sick leave is just as boring as suspension."

"Must've been a relief, though, to be cleared."

"God, yes."

"Pretty hairy?"

"Oh, not really. The worst part was anticipating it. Have you ever...?"

"No. I fired my gun once, though I didn't hit him, but that was in the old days, not even forms to fill out. But about Jules; you'll be out for another couple of weeks, you said?"

"At least that. The doctor wants to see me then, before he approves me for even light duty."

"You sure you want her? It's a long time, when you're not used to having a teenager around."

"Two weeks is nothing. We'll go sit on Santa's lap, have turkey with all the trimmings while you and Jani are so sunburned that you can't touch each other and have the squits from drinking ice in your margaritas."

"God, you're such a romantic."

"It's a talent. Jules and I will have a good time. If anything comes up, I'll call Rosa, have her come and pick Jules up."

"If you're not up to it, dump her. Promise? It's her own damn fault she's not going. The reason we chose this date in the first place was that she's off school for the holidays, and then she says she'd rather stay home."

"She wants to give you two some privacy, Al."

The phone was silent for a long time.

"Did she tell you that?" he said at last.

"More or less."

"God, I can be a damned fool sometimes. Why didn't I think of that, instead of assuming she was just being -- What a sweetheart. She's nuts, of course. This is a vacation, not a honeymoon. I'll talk to her, see if I can get the other room back at the hotel."

"Al? Don't. Just leave it."

"But --"

"Jani might prefer it this way, and I know Jules will. Baja will be there next year. You two go away and relax; Jules and I will stay here and wrap presents."

"If you're sure."

"I'm sure, Al. So, how are the wedding preparations coming along?"

"Why didn't we elope to Vegas?" He groaned. She laughed.

"Let me know if I can do anything. Otherwise, I'll see you at the church on Sunday, and I'll bring Jules home with me then. I won't be on the bike," she reassured him.

"You're okay for driving?"

"No problem. There's no danger of blackouts or blurred vision, just these migraines; they don't know what's causing them or when they'll stop. But I will say, I'm getting a hell of a lot done on the house."

The next interruption caught her again working outside, two days after Jules's visit. She was in the bottom of the garden, a place nothing human had ventured into for at least two years, and she seriously thought of ignoring the doorbell. However, she was thirsty, and the compulsive rooting out of brambles would be waiting for her anytime. She dropped her tools on the patio, pulled her rubber boots off against the scraper, and went to answer the door.

This time, it was Rosa Hidalgo, looking cool and neat in linen pants and blouse, every hair in its place. She looked startled at the apparition in front of her, and Kate looked down at herself: tank top and running shorts dark with sweat, ingrained dirt to the wrists and in a line above where the rubber boots had covered her calves, and red welts, some of them dotted with dried blood, where first the roses and then the blackberries had had at her.

"I was gardening," she said in explanation.

"I see."

"Come in." She gestured down the hallway toward the living room and followed her guest through the house. "I don't know if you can call it gardening, really. "Gardening" always makes me think of Vita Sackville-West in her jodhpurs and floppy hat. What I was doing was committing assault on the weeds. What would you like to drink?"

"Whatever you're having."

They took their tall glasses of iced tea onto the brick patio, which was cool and would allow the earthy fragrance Kate knew she was exuding to dissipate in the open air.

"I never really thanked you for everything you did for me when I was in the hospital," she told Rosa.

"You did thank me, and it was nothing."

"How've you been? How are the herds of small children?"

"One at a time, they are very appealing," she answered brightly, swirling the ice around in her glass.

"And Angelica, how is she?"

"Angel is fine, thank you."

Shallow conversation was tiring, Kate reflected. "Was there anything I could do for you, or did you just stop by to say hello?" she asked, knowing full well it was not the latter. Saying hello did not cause women like Rosa Hidalgo to be nervous.

"Ah, yes, I did have a reason to talk to you. Actually, Jani and Al asked me to come."

"This is about Jules, isn't it?"

"It is. There are some things they thought you ought to know, before you have her under your care for a number of days." Her accent was back.

"I told Al I didn't want to know. More than that, I think it's a bad idea."

"I know that is what you think. I presumed that was why you did not return the call I made a few months ago."

"Jules thinks of me as a friend, not a therapist, not an authority figure."

"I am aware of her feelings for you."

"Then, pardon my rudeness, but why are you here?"

"I am here because you are nearly the age of Jules's mother, and because Jules has chosen you, her soon-to-be stepfather's partner, to confide in, and because I feel I can trust you to use your knowledge of the child's past with care."

"I don't want to know," Kate said forcibly.

"Of course you don't. But you must. Because you won't know Jules unless I tell you about her."

Kate put her face in her hands. The woman was not going to leave without telling her what she thought Kate had to know. Kate might forcibly eject her, or lock herself in the bedroom until the woman went away, or plug her fingers into her ears and hum loudly, but by this time she was undeniably curious. She was, after all, a policewoman, to whom curiosity - nosiness - was both nature and training.

"Okay. All right. If you have to, then let's get on with it." Kate sat back in the chair and crossed her grubby legs in the woman's face. The body language of noncooperation, she thought with an inner smile.

"It begins a number of years ago. In the years after the revolution in Russia. To put it simply, Jules's mother and her grandmother were both born as the result of rape."

Kate's crossed leg came down.

"
Both
of them?"

"Jani's mother was born in Shanghai in 1935, of a Russian Jewish mother raped by a soldier, either Japanese or Indian. Twenty years later, the child of that event was caught up in a riot in Hong Kong, and she, too, was raped. Jani was born nine months later. When Jani was three months old, her mother took her to the local Christian missionaries, then went home and committed suicide."

"Good... heavens," said Kate weakly.

"Jani became the brightest student the missionary school had seen in a long time. She received a scholarship, then came to this country to go to university. She was a sheltered young woman who was nonetheless aware of her past, and it was an almost textbook example of the cyclical nature of abuse when she met and married a young man who loved her extravagantly, wanted desperately to protect her delicate person, and turned on her whenever she stepped outside the guidelines he set. He began to beat her. And although it was not at the time legally recognized that a husband forcing himself on his wife is rape, that is what it was.

"However, Jani was not living in a war-torn city, and she had a few friends and some very employable skills. She left him, and she saw a lawyer. A restraining order was granted, he violated it, and when they came to arrest him, he had a gun and he used it against one of the policemen, who fortunately was not killed. Jani was there when it happened, and Jules, who was about six months old, was sleeping in the next room. He was, somehow, granted bail, but when he came, inevitably, to look for her, she was already gone. She divorced him while he was in jail. He was killed a few months after the divorce was finalized, apparently in a prison brawl, but Jani had the satisfaction of knowing that she had broken free, that she, of her own will, had saved both herself and her daughter.

"You will understand now why it took her so long to accept Al."

"Does he know all this?"

"Of course."

"And Jules?"

"Jani told her the bones of it last summer, just after school was out. Not the details, not the extent of his violence nor that he had threatened Jani with a gun, just that he'd threatened her, she had divorced him, and he was later killed."

"Last summer, huh?"

"The incident in Germany becomes more explicable, does it not?"

"What incident in Germany?" Kate asked, then kicked herself. She didn't want to know.

"Of course. Why should I think you knew about that? Curious. When they were in Koln, Jules disappeared from the hotel one morning, after what was apparently a mild argument with her mother. When she didn't come back by noon, Jani called the police. They found her just before midnight, coming out of a movie theater. Jules said that she'd spent the first part of the day in the park, and the evening in the theater, which was playing an American movie dubbed into German. Jules said she'd sat through it three times. She was trying to teach herself the language,she claimed, and chose the movie because she had seen it already in English."

Kate had to laugh. "You know, that sounds like Jules."

"It's possible. Nonetheless, Jani was insane with worry."

"Who wouldn't be? I'm not saying it excuses Jules, but it does sound like something a kid would do. A kid like Jules, anyway."

"And would a kid like Jules have screaming nightmares regularly every four or five days? You need to be prepared for those, Kate. And would that kid attack a teacher the first week of school, following a writing assignment to describe one's family history?"

"Attack? Al told me there had been some trouble, but he didn't say she'd attacked anyone. Physically, you mean?"

"Verbally. The woman was in tears, shamed before the class. Young and inexperienced, she could have used a greater degree of tact in the assignment - after all, many children come from broken homes, and at that age they are going to be sensitive about it. Still, the degree of hostility shown by Jules was extraordinary. And quite devastating."

Kate sat and listened to the silence for several minutes, then stirred.

"What else? Any attempts at suicide, or threats?"

"Strangely enough, no. I agree, it might have been expected."

"Drugs? No, I would have noticed that. Tattoos? Body piercing? Shoplifting, for Christ's sake?"

"Nothing. She seems instead to have befriended a cop."

Kate thought about this statement for a few seconds, then decided that although the woman had not actually meant to rank friendship with a cop alongside bodily mutilation, a degree of irritation, if not anger, might be allowed nonetheless.

"Mrs Hidalgo, I haven't heard --"

"Rosa, please."

"I haven't heard anything that would even begin to justify your presence here." Kate was surprised to find that the spark of irritation was actually something that burned hotter, and she gave in to it: straight for the woman's professional pride. "Frankly, I don't think you had any right to tell me. I think that if Jules had wanted me to know, she'd have found a way of telling me herself. She's a tough young lady, and I don't know that you or her mother give her credit for that. Personally, I think she's coping very well with what must have been devastating news: some nightmares and a tantrum against a teacher who probably deserved it strike me as a damned healthy way to react. If anything, she seems in better shape now than she did a year ago." Kate was working herself into a fine old rage, and enjoying every second of it. "When I first met Jules, she talked like an eleven-year-old college sophomore. I'll bet she didn't have a single friend her own age. She was a prig with a big vocabulary, and if that isn't a defense mechanism to rival a brick wall, I don't know what is."

"I didn't mean to --" Rosa Hidalgo tried to interject, but Kate plowed on.

"Now she's a human being, as close to being a normal kid as you can get with a brain like hers. She's got friends - kids her own age, not just one inappropriate friendship with a cop." She put an ironic bite on the word
cop
, and again ignored the other woman's protests. "I know you people live in a hothouse down there, and I can see that Jani has a load of problems of her own, but I really think you'd be doing Jules a great service if you'd just back off and let her find her own way. Stop coddling her on the one hand and watching her like a hawk on the other, waiting for signs of mental and emotional problems. Give her a chance, for God's sake. Try trusting her."

The final exhortation came out more as a whine than as a command: Kate's rage had deflated as quickly as it had grown, leaving her with a bad taste in her mouth and no choice but to sit while the woman across from her earnestly explained the need for therapy and guidance and supervision. By the time she got rid of Rosa Hidalgo, Kate was feeling like a sullen teenager herself, more firmly convinced than ever that Jules was on the rightest possible road.

But, oh my, she thought as she climbed back into the muddy rubber boots, it was fun to get mad.

Kate half-expected that after Rosa reported back on their interview, permission for Jules's plans would be withdrawn. However, the rest of that day and all the next went by with nothing said, so it appeared to be settled: Jules would come and stay with her from the wedding until New Year's.

With one adjustment to the plan.

On the phone, the afternoon before the wedding, Kate talked to Al, who was at his own place on the other side of town.

"Al, I was thinking. If it's all right with you and Jani, I thought Jules and I might go north for a few days over Christmas. Maybe as far as Washington."

"To see Lee?"

"Possibly. If we feel like it. I had a letter from her last week, asking me to come to her aunt's island for Christmas if I could get it off."