Last Run

by Hilary Norman

  Something was going on there, Cathy thought. Something bad.

  Chapter Twenty

  September 11

  It was early Sunday morning before they transferred Saul, still under heavy sedation, to Miami General, the plan to give him time to settle down before allowing his levels of consciousness to rise; after which the first of the remaining operations would begin.

  The Naples police had been hoping to have some form of communication with Saul before his departure, hoping that he might at least have been able to give some small clue, even ID his assailant.

  No one wanted that more than Sam.

  ‘Only when the doctors say he’s ready,’ he told Joe Patterson. ‘Not a minute earlier.’

  They were Joe and Sam now. On good terms, all things considered, not withstanding Sam’s frustration and sense of powerlessness into which he had managed, somehow, not to rub the noses of the Naples PD. He’d stuck like glue to Saul’s bedside, especially when his dad had gone to get some rest, even when – especially when – Terri had been there, which had been most of the time.

  He couldn’t fault her devotion – if that was what it was.

  Though even if she did love her man, Sam knew all too well that didn’t mean she might not be capable of savagery in the name of love.

  Not his kind of love, God knew, and maybe – he hoped with all his heart – not Teresa Suarez’s kind either.

  On Sunday afternoon, Cathy came out of Miami General and saw her right away.

  Kez Flanagan looking as Cathy had never seen her before. No ripped shorts and T-shirt, no Nikes, no tracksuit. This Kez was wearing black silky pants and a semi-sheer black silk top with a single flash of red the exact colour of her hair.

  She was wearing make-up too. Just a touch of aqua eye shadow that brought out the green flecks in her eyes, black mascara and a hint of lip colour.

  ‘You look amazing,’ Cathy said.

  ‘Thank you.’ Kez looked pleased. ‘You too.’

  ‘I look like hell,’ Cathy said.

  ‘A little tired,’ Kez admitted. ‘But you could never look like hell.’

  They were standing outside the main entrance of Miami General where a steady stream of vehicles drove in and out from Biscayne Boulevard, dropping off and picking up patients and visitors.

  ‘How’s he doing?’ Kez asked.

  ‘Still out of it,’ Cathy said. ‘But they say he’ll be fine.’

  Kez eyed her. ‘You don’t buy that?’

  ‘I guess it’s a question of perspective. From their point-of-view Saul’s doing OK, and any time now they’re going to let him wake up properly, but then they’re going to knock him out again and start operating.’ Cathy shook her head. ‘So far as I’m concerned Saul won’t be doing really OK until he’s ready to come home.’

  ‘Day at a time,’ Kez said. ‘All you can do, right?’

  Cathy made an effort. ‘So where are we going? Do I need to change?’

  ‘No way.’ Kez surveyed her jeans and cornflower blue T-shirt with FAST embroidered on it in fuchsia. ‘I told you, you look great.’

  They had prearranged for Cathy to leave her Mazda in the hospital parking lot so Kez could pick her up and they could go have some dinner.

  ‘If I tell you,’ Kez said slowly as they got into her old green Golf, ‘that I can’t remember the last time I felt this happy to see anyone, would you mind?’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Cathy’s warm cheeks grew pinker. ‘I feel the same.’

  ‘Do you like Indian food?’

  ‘Love it.’

  Kez drove out of the parking space, glanced at her. ‘Sure?’

  ‘I don’t say things I don’t mean,’ Cathy said.

  ‘No,’ Kez said. ‘I don’t think you do.’

  They went to Anokha in Coconut Grove, and sat outside; Cathy relishing the relaxing ambience, finding to her surprise that she was ravenous, though Kez watched her devouring her aloo chaat and patrani machchi, but ate very little of her own dishes.

  ‘We didn’t need to have dinner,’ Cathy said, ‘if you weren’t hungry.’

  ‘You were starved and I had lunch,’ Kez said. ‘And I need to drop a few pounds.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Cathy said. ‘You look great to me, I told you.’

  ‘Trust me,’ Kez said. ‘My times were shit up in Jacksonville.’

  ‘God,’ Cathy said. ‘I haven’t even asked you.’

  ‘Other things on your mind,’ Kez told her. ‘And believe me, the eight hundred wasn’t worth reporting on, and the fifteen hundred was even worse.’ She took a sip of white wine. ‘I guess I missed my training mate.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Cathy said.

  ‘Not your fault,’ Kez said.

  They decided against dessert, picked up some Oreo cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory in CocoWalk and headed back to the apartment on Matilda Street, where they talked for a long time out on the porch, drinking coffee, Cathy eating cake, Kez refusing any. And then she went inside for a few minutes and came back with a pretty carved walnut box out of which she took the makings of a joint.

  ‘OK with you?’ she asked first.

  She had not asked the last time – but then everything today seemed different between them, Cathy felt. Easier. Better.

  ‘Sure.’ Cathy smiled. ‘I like sharing with you.’

  She wasn’t sure afterwards if it was the dope that might have made at least part of the difference, if it had heightened her responses, the intensity of the lovemaking. All she knew for sure was that she had never, never, known anything like it, and not just, she thought, because it was with another woman.

  The marijuana had, she supposed, helped her to relax about that, had eased her inhibitions and helped tip her over the edge of her uncertainty. But the thing was, Cathy thought a little fuzzily, while they were still at the early stages of their lovemaking – foreplay, she guessed, though it didn’t feel like that, she already felt so folded into a warm, amazing cocoon of sensuous joy . . .

  The thing was that wondering about being gay or straight seemed suddenly to have nothing to do with this. This was something else, something entirely separate; this was about Cathy and Kez being together, simply being themselves.

  She had imagined – and she had done a lot of imagining, she realized now, even in Naples in the hours when she’d been trying to rest and keep her mind off Saul, when thinking about Kez had helped blot out the awfulness of what had happened to him. But she had imagined that she might find Kez’s body – a woman’s body – too soft, even a woman as athletic and toned and lean as Kez. She had thought she might miss the power of a male body, the different texture of a man’s skin, had thought she might find the softness of a female mouth too strange, maybe too weird; she had thought she might miss that moment of first awareness of erection – though the truth was that the few men Cathy had been with had started out burning her face with their stubble and ended up hurting her with their dicks.

  Nothing to miss.

  Kez led the way and Cathy followed, learning swiftly, finding nothing strange or remotely weird, finding exactly the opposite as Kez rubbed her face over her breasts and licked her nipples – and Cathy did the same, discovering another small tattoo in the shadow beneath Kez’s left breast, a tiny black and yellow wild cat.

  ‘Cheetah?’ Cathy asked, kissing it.

  ‘Jaguar,’ Kez told her.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Cathy said. ‘Are there any more?’

  ‘Consider this,’ Kez said, ‘a voyage of discovery.’

  And then she kissed her so deeply and passionately that Cathy forgot to think about the fact that she was kissing another woman, began to find it impossible to think at all, and they might almost have been young animals cavorting and nuzzling and fondling, any remaining inhibitions being cast off as swiftly as their clothes had been when the marijuana had kicked in.

  ‘A boat!’ Cathy delighted in a third tiny tattoo on the inside of Kez’s right thigh, a delicate blue boat with
a white sail. ‘How many more?’

  ‘Just one.’

  Kez wrapped herself tightly around Cathy, stroked and tantalized and simply held her, and Cathy did the same right back and felt the other woman shiver with pleasure and moan, and Kez was touching her in places, physically and emotionally, that Cathy realized she’d never let anyone touch or uncover before. She was on fire, she was melting, and all the old doubts she’d had about her own ability to love sexually were being blown away; those fingers were inside her again and Cathy was open and wet and crying out, and she wanted to do the same for Kez, but right now she was powerless to do anything but respond, all her thought processes blown away to kingdom come.

  ‘How do you feel?’ Kez asked, after they had slept for a while.

  It was after nine, and dark, but the street lamps on Matilda Street cast a pale glow into the bedroom, picking out the shapes of the lovers curled together beneath the white sheet, the rest of the room inky black.

  ‘I feel – ’ Cathy’s voice was soft – ‘like I’ve been on a long journey, and now I’ve come home. To you.’ She paused. ‘Is that too corny, or too much?’

  Kez didn’t answer.

  ‘If it’s too much,’ Cathy said, ‘tell me, please.’

  ‘You have no idea,’ Kez said, ‘how special that was for me.’

  ‘I think I do.’ Cathy smiled into the dark.

  They were silent for a few minutes, and then Kez said: ‘I want to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else.’

  Cathy waited, stroking the inside of Kez’s left forearm, its skin as soft as her own, wondering idly if this kind of similarity, familiarity, might be part of what made this so special, so right.

  ‘I needed the dope,’ Kez said. ‘Really needed it.’

  Cathy stopped stroking, became still, waited to be told her lover was an addict.

  ‘I needed it,’ Kez went on, ‘because I was afraid that when it came down to it, you might be turned off by my body.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Cathy recalled the evening after the meet in West Palm, when they’d had dinner together in Fort Lauderdale and Kez had said she painted her nails intricately to distract people from the rest of her, and she’d called Cathy beautiful and Cathy had laughed, and for a moment Kez had looked so hurt.

  Cathy sat up, the sheet falling from her, exposing her breasts. ‘Didn’t you feel – while we were making love – couldn’t you tell what was happening to me?’ She sought the right words. ‘How blown away I was?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Kez said.

  ‘No,’ Cathy said. ‘It’s not. Not unless you believe . . .’

  ‘I do. That’s the point. That’s how I was able to tell you that about me. Because I think you feel – you give me the idea that you feel – I’m more special than I am.’

  ‘You are,’ Cathy said. ‘Very special.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Kez said. ‘Feeling’s mutual.’

  They lay down again, Kez resting her spiky red head against Cathy’s breast.

  ‘I can hear your heart,’ she said.

  ‘Is it fast?’ Cathy asked.

  ‘Nice and steady,’ Kez said.

  ‘OK,’ Cathy said. ‘That’s about how I feel now.’

  In their bedroom back home, Grace was lying beside Sam; wide awake.

  It wasn’t the baby keeping her from sleep. Nor the knowledge that Cathy had met up again with Kez earlier and had not come home, because right now Grace was grateful if Cathy was managing to grab a piece of happiness. It wasn’t even Saul keeping her awake, because David was staying overnight at Miami General, wanting to stay close on his son’s first night there.

  Her thoughts were just too torn up.

  No possibility of talking to Sam either, even if he had been awake.

  There had never, throughout their marriage or before, been this kind of emotional distance between them, and it was hurting so badly. Grace had tried repeatedly to explain the motivations behind her secrecy about Terri, had told him she understood his anger. Sam had said he knew exactly why she’d acted as she had, but that did not lessen the impact on him of discovering that they did not – as he had previously believed – feel the same way about sharing.

  ‘Everything,’ he’d said. ‘Rough and smooth.’

  ‘I know,’ Grace had said. ‘And I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know you are.’

  So she’d waited to be forgiven, for him to get past it, over it, but he had not.

  Which was, if she was honest, starting to piss her off just a little.

  ‘I’ve apologized,’ she had said yesterday soon after they’d got home. ‘You know I mean it.’

  ‘I know,’ Sam had said.

  ‘So can we please put it behind us,’ she’d asked. ‘Learn from it.’

  ‘Sure,’ he’d said.

  ‘Why don’t I feel you mean that?’ Grace had asked.

  ‘Because I can’t just forget it, not just like that,’ Sam had told her.

  ‘What do you want from me, Sam?’ she’d asked.

  ‘I want,’ he’d begun, then stopped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want it not to have happened,’ he’d said frankly. ‘Which is absurd and childish and not the way I’d like to be with you, of all people. Not any time, and certainly not now.’

  ‘So can’t you try?’ Grace had asked him.

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Try harder.’

  ‘I am. I will.’ He’d paused. ‘It’ll be OK.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Grace had said.

  He had taken her hand then and pulled her close, and for a moment or two she had believed they were mending. But then he had stepped away again and the gap had felt even wider, and a little deeper, which had scared her.

  Which was why she was awake.

  Claudia had called again this evening – had been phoning regularly since Grace had told her the half-truth about Saul – and Grace had told yet more lies, saying that they were all coping, but now she was lying in bed questioning her motives for that deceit, too. She’d thought it was for Claudia’s sake, but maybe it had been for her own, because she couldn’t face listening to her sister right now telling her that leaving the sunshine and Grace and moving to Seattle had made her remember the bad old days in Chicago.

  Not just a liar, then.

  Selfish, too.

  The baby moved inside her womb.

  ‘Some mom,’ Grace murmured.

  ‘Mmm?’ Sam said.

  ‘Nothing,’ Grace said. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  At three o’clock on Monday morning Cathy was roaming around Kez’s living room with a cup of camomile tea in one hand, knowing already that it wasn’t going to be enough, which was a damned shame, since all she really wanted to do was go back and cuddle up to Kez; but she had fallen asleep a couple of hours back and Cathy had lain still for as long as she could stand it, and then she’d slipped out of bed and crept out of the bedroom, managing not to wake her.

  No sense in both of them losing sleep.

  She’d taken a bathrobe from a hook on the bathroom door – Kez had told her earlier to make herself at home – and had gone out on to the porch, opening the creaky door with care, and it had been lovely to sit for a few minutes out there in the warm darkness with the gentle night breeze stirring the banyans and ruffling her long hair. Suddenly though, she’d experienced a sense of feeling landlocked and oddly claustrophobic, which was why she’d come back inside, gone into the small kitchen and made her tea.

  Too much excitement.

  Cathy remembered her mom admonishing her about that when she was a child, back in the still happy days after Arnie had entered their lives and they’d lived in their house on Pine Tree Drive.

  The house in which they’d been murdered.

  In the past now, where it belonged. Another world now, another family.

  And now, Kez Flanagan.

  Another drag or two of dope, she thought, might help re
trieve that wonderful, suddenly elusive, relaxation.

  She looked around for the small carved box, then remembered Kez bringing it out earlier from what she had called her junk room.

  ‘It’s supposed to be my dark room,’ she’d said, ‘but mostly I use the facilities at Trent, and everything seems to end up getting stashed in there.’

  Cathy hesitated briefly, then opened the door.

  Junk room was about right, clutter and dust the most noticeable features – and the broken mirror in the corner by the window, an old cheval glass with a large, jagged crack right through it. Cathy had already noticed the absence of a real mirror in the bathroom, only a powder compact standing open on the shelf; something to do perhaps, she had supposed with a rush of protectiveness, with Kez’s inexplicable dislike of her own appearance.

  The photographic developing equipment stood on a table over to the right, bottles of fluid dusty, everything dusty, trays empty, no signs of any work having been done in a long while, and that surprised Cathy a little, because even if Kez did use the facilities at college, she’d have expected an enthusiastic photographer to work when impulse took her. Though maybe the photography major was more of a cover, a needs-must, because what Kez wanted most from Trent was the athletics side – which went, if Cathy was honest, for her too.

  More in common all the time . . .

  She went in search of the dope, not easy among the cardboard boxes and bin bags and old running shoes – a whole pile of them, and that certainly made perfect sense to Cathy who had her own heap at the back of her closet at home.

  There was no sign of the box, but in the corner opposite the mirror stood a large walnut chest carved in a similar style – a few fingerprints in the film of dust around the lid, making it the most likely place to look. Cathy was only intending to search for the marijuana and rolling paper, but once she had the chest open and saw two silver trophies and two certificates, it was impossible to resist. She knelt and began rummaging gently through, swiftly striking gold: old snaps of Kez as a child running in what looked like elementary school races, more at high school age – and oh, the intensity of the concentration on her face, even then, and Kez had said she’d been an ugly teenager, but that was so untrue, and if she’d felt like that, there must have . . .