Cactus Heart - [22]

“Dr. Sharon? The highest functioning woman in Phoenix?”

“Trust me,” Lindsey said. “I know.”

She had distracted me just enough that I launched into a story about Mike and Sharon from years ago, when he was just a deputy and she was a mousy housewife. It was a funny story. An illuminating one.

“Dave.”

I stopped talking.

“Linda died today.”

Her mother.

It took about fifteen minutes to drive through the deserted streets to Lindsey’s apartment in Sunnyslope, an eclectic neighborhood strewn across the high ground rising up to North Mountain. I had a leather jacket over a sweatshirt and jeans: It was colder outside, a definite chill from the High Country. I was wide awake.

She had about a dozen candles burning in the book-filled apartment and music on the CD player from a band that I had learned from her was called Pavement. I’ve lost enough people in my life, hell, I started with losses even before I was out of diapers. So it’s second nature to know there are no words that really give comfort and many that can make things worse. I’d be worthless as a writer of sympathy cards. So I just made her a martini, dry with Bombay Sapphire, and held her, slowly stroking her soft, straight hair. She didn’t cry.

Then we ended up making love on the hardwood floor in front of her sofa. Clothes halfway off, her miniskirt bunched up around her waist, her heavy black shoes still on and cutting into my back. It didn’t seem right, appropriate, whatever. But I lost myself in it. She came with an angry, anguished screaming, clinging so tightly to me I thought my neck would snap. But I let her hang on, and she did for a long, long time. She says I am a “dark, sensual creature.” But that’s really a description of her.

We’d been together for only five months. She was my ally on that first case last summer, when I was newly back in Phoenix, a year out of the divorce with Patty and still feeling my way back into the cop world. Lindsey was the one holding my hand when I woke up in a hospital with a bullet hole in my shoulder. We read books to each other, made love with an athletic joy, and shared a rebellious sensibility that verged on the misanthropic. But she was also an unfolding mystery and I liked that.

She wanted me to teach her history and we shared a love of literature. But she drew the line at jazz. Her musical tastes tended toward indy rock, a campy love of 1970s disco and even some rap. So we carried on an uneasy truce across a green line of music and love. Neither of us had spoken that word yet, “love.” We hadn’t had the conversations that once were a given at certain points in what our age calls “relationships”: the “where are we going?” talk, the “what do you mean to me?” talk, the “forever” talk.

That was fine with me. Maybe it was a naive hope that if we didn’t abandon the mystery of early courtship we wouldn’t lose its passion. Maybe some of it was our age difference, but not the way people would think. Most of it was the knowledge that comes after you realize that love doesn’t last forever, that lovers move on, parents grow old, children die. That we live in a time of disconnection and abandonment. Maybe people in her generation seemed to come to that knowledge sooner. I didn’t know.

“She killed herself.”

I stroked her hair and said quietly, “Oh, baby.”

“She used a gun.”

I had never met her mother. Another of the rituals of courtship we never consummated. I knew her parents were divorced. Her father had been killed in Vietnam when she was a baby and her mother became a hippy-she was a true child of recent history. Lindsey and her mother weren’t close. I could remember no visits or phone calls, just a passing reference to her mother living somewhere in the suburbs, Chandler, I think.

I felt her swallow hard. “Women usually use pills,” Lindsey said.

Then, in a different voice, “Tell me about your case, History Shamus. What did we find down there under that warehouse?”

“Lindsey, tell me about your mother.”

I could feel her tense a little, then let it go.

“Oh, Dave.” She sighed. “God, I wish I hadn’t given up smoking.” She drummed her fingers on my calf. “I hardly knew her.”

She flashed the blue eyes at me. “She heard voices. It scared me when I was little. I didn’t know what it was all about. She took us from place to place. I used to see the different men she’d bring home, and she’d moan and screech behind the bedroom door. I thought they were hurting her. And she’d go into rages. She’d just walk away for days at a time. It was years before she got help, and she didn’t always take her drugs. The legal ones, I mean. She did really well with the illegal kind. My upbringing wasn’t Leave It to Beaver.”

I just listened. She stroked my leg with a light, detached touch, making my leg hair stand up straight.

“It was all properly seventies and absurd,” she laughed low and humorless. Then, in another voice, “I don’t hate her. She was younger than I am now and she had a thing for drugs and booze and bad men. She sure didn’t want to be a mother. It’s just that I couldn’t bring myself to love her, and if that makes me a monster, fuck everybody. Fuck everybody.”