Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [37]
The first time Claire had entered an endurance race, she’d been thrown by her horse and went careening down a rock-strewn slope. The animal stood there patiently, in a cloud of red dust, as she managed to climb back on with a dislocated shoulder. She continued for two miles before giving up and turning with an un-bloodlike intelligence, something more to do with reason and survival, to follow the yellow markers back to the camp at Robinson Flat. The horse had balked as it descended a canyon and she had already forgiven it. Horses had their sudden demons too. Someone rolled her a joint, and she smoked that before she telephoned her father.
He got there an hour later with a horse truck. He came up to her and saw in her eyes the look of a dog who’d run too far and wild, injuring itself with a lack of knowing how much it could take on or achieve. She told him it was nothing, but at the farm, when she climbed out of the truck, she could hardly walk and he carried her into the house. It was the first time he had touched her in a year. He put her down on the long kitchen table and pressed a hot towel around her shoulder, put his knee onto her back, and torqued the shoulder up so that she burst into tears. When he did it again she passed out.
When Claire woke, she was where he had left her. There was a pillow under her head. She saw him sitting on the old tartan sofa, watching her, for safety. She tried rolling to the right and to the left. Then she got into her car and drove the forty minutes to San Francisco, where she was expected at work the next day.
The Public Defender’s Office provided legal defence to those with no money, and Claire had worked there for five years. Aldo Vea, a state lawyer, had two assistants helping him with research; she was one of them. Vea met Claire and Shaun every morning at a café on Geary Street, and they ate while Vea discussed pending cases. He was brilliant at freewheeling the possibilities, conceiving and laying out angles for defence. By nine-thirty they’d go off to their phones, talking to anyone in the defendant’s past—school friends, lovers, employers. Then they’d investigate the victim. There might be a hint of violence in the victim’s past that could turn the case. They carried an obvious notebook and a hidden microphone. They were better than cops, Vea said. And they were a family. Claire knew everything about Shaun, and about Vea and his family. When Vea’s wife was ill, Claire picked the kids up after school and brought them along on stakeouts. When Shaun broke her silence about her growing attraction to women, Claire and Vea had dinner with her and gave her a game plan.
Claire would always turn up on Monday mornings wearing a pastel-coloured dress. The homespun image and the sense of defencelessness was important, Vea said, but she suspected that he also liked it. She wore a ring she could move from finger to finger, depending on whom she was interviewing. To men her dresses suggested gentleness and courtesy; she did not appear to be in charge. If someone hit on her, the ring on her finger came into the foreground and she’d softly announce that she was pregnant. (When one dangerous-looking sort quizzically responded, ‘With child?’ she lowered her head to hide her smile. Now she was going to be treated like a Madonna.) She was supposed to be a creature of empathy, revealing no moral stance, just easiness and compassion. She knew the best times to get people to talk. Women were better on the phone, because they could do something else at the same time. During stakeouts, if curious neighbours