“It is about not feeling.” She pulls out her chair and sits back down. “About learning not to feel because it was too painful to feel.” The soup is too hot to eat and she idly stirs it with a heavy, engraved silver spoon. “When you were a child, you could not live with the impending doom in your house, the fear, the grief, the anger. You shut down.”
“Sometimes you have to do that.”
“It is never good to do that.” She shakes her head.
“Sometimes it’s survival to do that,” I disagree.
“Shutting down is denial. When you deny the past, you will repeat it. You are living proof. Your life has been one loss after another ever since that original loss. Ironically, you have turned loss into a profession, the doctor who hears the dead, the doctor who sits at the bedside of the dead. Your divorce from Tony. Mark’s death. Then last year, Benton’s murder. Then Lucy in a shoot-out and you almost lose her. And now, finally, you. This terrible man comes to your house and you almost lost you. Losses and more losses.”
The pain from Benton’s murder is frighteningly fresh. I fear it will always be fresh, that I will never escape the hol-lowness, the echo of empty rooms in my soul and the anguish in my heart. I am outraged all over again as I think of the police in my house unwittingly touching items that belonged to Benton, brushing past his paintings, tracking mud over the fine rug in the dining room he gave me for Christmas one year. No one knowing. No one caring.
“A pattern like this,” Anna comments, “if it isn’t arrested, takes on an unstoppable energy and sucks everything into its black hole.”
I tell her my life is not in a black hole. I don’t deny there is a pattern. I would have to be as dense as dirt not to see it. But on one point I am in adamant disagreement. “It bothers me considerably to hear you imply I brought him to my door,” I tell her, referring again to Chandonne, whom I can scarcely bear to call by name. “That somehow I set everything into motion to bring a killer to my house. If that’s what I hear you saying. If that is what you’re saying.”
“It is what I am asking.” She butters a roll. “It is what I am asking you, Kay,” she somberly repeats.
“Anna, how in God’s name can you think I would some-how bring about my own murder?”
“Because you would not be the first or last person to do something like that. It is not conscious.”
“Not me. Not subconsciously or unconsciously,” I claim.
“There is much self-fulfilled prophecy here. You. Then Lucy. She almost became what she fights. Be careful who you choose for an enemy because that is who you become most like,” Anna tosses Nietzsche’s quote up into the air. She serves up words she has heard me say in the past.
“I didn’t will him to come to my house,” I repeat slowly and flatly. I continue to avoid saying Chandonne’s name because I don’t want to give him the power of being a real person to me.
“How did he know where you live?” Anna continues her questioning.
“It’s been in the news numerous times over the years, unfortunately,” I conjecture. “I don’t know how he knew.”
“What? He went to the library and looked up your address on microfilm? This creature so hideously deformed who rarely went out in the light of day? This dog-faced congenital anomaly, almost every inch of his face, his body covered with long lanugo hair, pale baby-fine hair? He went to the public library?” She lets the absurdity of this hover over us.
“I don’t know how he knew,” I repeat. “Where he was hiding isn’t far from my house.” I am getting upset. “Don’t blame me. No one has a right to blame me for what he did. Why are you blaming me?”
“We create our own worlds. We destroy our own worlds. It is that simple, Kay,” she answers me.
“I can’t believe you think for a minute I wanted him coming after me. I, of all people.” An image of Kim Luong flashes. I remember fractured facial bones crunching beneath my latex-gloved fingers. I remember the pungent sweet odor of coagulating blood in the airless, hot storeroom where Chandonne dragged her dying body so he could release his frenzied lust, beating and biting and smearing her blood. “Those women didn’t bring this upon themselves, either,” I say with emotion.