Last Run (19 page)

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.