Thoughts collide, canceling each other out. I don’t reply.
“She wanted to kill him,” Anna goes on. “This was clearly her intention.”
I nod, staring off, reliving it. Lucy, Lucy. I repeatedly called out her name, trying to shatter the homicidal spell she was under. Lucy. I crawled closer to her in the snowy front yard. Put the gun down. Lucy, you don’t want to do this. Please. Put the gun down. Chandonne rolled and writhed, making the horrible sounds of a wounded animal, and Lucy was on her knees, in combat position, gun shaking in both hands as she pointed it at his head. Then feet and legs were all around us. ATF agents and police in dark battle dress clutching rifles and pistols had swarmed into my yard. Not one of them knew what to do as I begged my niece not to kill Chandonne in cold blood. There’s been enough killing, I pled with Lucy as I pulled myself within inches of her, my left arm fractured and useless. Don’t do this. Don’t do this, please. We love you.
“You are quite certain it was Lucy’s intention to kill him, even though it wasn’t self-defense?” Anna asks again.
“Yes,” I reply. “I’m certain.”
“Then should we reconsider that perhaps it was not necessary for her to kill those men down in Miami?”
“That was totally different, Anna,” I reply. “And I can’t blame Lucy for the way she reacted when she saw him in front of my housesaw him and me on the ground in the snow, not even ten feet from each other. She knew about the other cases here, the murders of Kim Luong and Diane Bray. She knew damn well why he had come to my house, what he planned for me. How would you feel if you had been Lucy?”
“I cannot imagine.”
“That’s right,” I reply. “I don’t think anyone can imagine something like that until it happens. I know if I were the one driving up and it was Lucy in the yard, and he had tried to murder her, then…” I pause, analyzing, not really able to complete the thought.
“You would have killed him,” Anna finishes what she must suspect I was going to say.
“Well, I might have.”
“Even though he was no threat? He was in terrible pain, blind and helpless?”
“It’s hard to know the other person is helpless, Anna. What did I know outside in the snow, in the dark, with a broken arm, terrorized?”
“Ah. But you knew enough to talk Lucy out of killing him.” She gets up and I watch as she unhooks a ladle from the iron rack of pots and pans suspended overhead and fills big earthenware bowls, steam rising in aromatic clouds. She sets the soup on the table, giving me time to think about what she just said. “Have you ever considered that your life reads like one of your more complicated death certificates.” Anna then says, “Due to, due to, due to, due to.” She motions with her hands, conducting her own orchestra of emphasis. “Where you find yourself now is due to this and that and due to on and on, and it all goes back to the original injury. Your father’s death.”
I search to remember what I have told her about my past.
“You are who you are in life because you became a student of death at a very young age,” she continues. “Most of your childhood you lived with your father’s dying.”
The soup is chicken vegetable and I detect bay leaves and sherry. I am not sure I can eat. Anna slips mitts over her hands and slides sourdough rolls out of the oven. She serves hot bread on small plates with butter and honey. “It seems to be your karma to return to the scene, so to speak, over and over,” she analyzes. “The scene of your father’s death, of that original loss. As if somehow you will undo it. But all you do is repeat it. The oldest pattern in human nature. I see it daily.”
“This isn’t about my father.” I pick up my spoon. “This isn’t about my childhood, and to tell you the truth, the last thing I care about right now is my childhood.”