Maureen is out of bed, tapping a small festival of pills out of an amber prescription bottle, into her palm. “Here.” She plucks out a skinny pink tablet. “Take this. I’m sorry for what you had to go through today. But you saved your friend. As a bonus, you put a piece of human garbage into the dumpster.”

Cate takes the pill, washes it down with the glass of water Maureen has put on the nightstand. And she thinks, I guess. Then backs up a little. Maureen’s judgment seems too summary, made from a position already held. Although she supposes you could say the guy was human garbage, Cate wouldn’t frame it that way. She doesn’t have a frame on him big enough to make any sweeping assessments. She hates what he did to Neale, and she hates what she had to do to stop him. She hasn’t had time to assess him and his place in the universe. All she can do just now is close her eyes and roll away before Maureen says something else, something that might make Cate like her a little less.

Half an hour later, Cate is still awake. Even as she gets groggy, her mind is too busy trying to herd thoughts into some corral. She has a vague ringing in her ears, not really a ringing so much as an extremely tiny voice of Linda Ronstadt singing “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.” She’s surprised she remembers the words so well.

She rolls over. Maureen’s not asleep either; rather, she’s on her side, watching a YouTube clip on her phone. Linda Ronstadt.

“When she could still sing, before the Parkinson’s, she could really sing. Nothing will ever take that away from her. Does the music bother you?”

“No. It’s okay. I think the pill is kicking in.” This is a total lie. There isn’t a pill that could subdue her heart; she can feel it as a muscle, even now pumping blood through her at a level necessary to heroics.

The next morning, in spite of being in an apartment overstuffed with an ex-husband, a boy, a dog, and a girlfriend, Cate wakes shivering and sore everywhere, also massively alone. She understands she has arrived on another side of everything. No one is over here with her.

crosswinds

Everyone, of course, weighs in on the matter. When Cate calls her father, he and Seneca put their phone on speaker and listen together and almost simultaneously insist she come down to Puebla for a break. She can’t now, she tells them, and they ask if she needs them to come up there for a while, stay with her. This brings her to tears, ducts fill and empty. An unusual occurrence for her. But she’s okay, she assures them.