Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [106]
“My roommate in Philly called my cell phone this morning. My cat died in the night.”
“Oh, no—I’m so sorry. Had he been sick?” “Not really—but he was very old.”
“How old?”
“I don’t even know—he was a rescue cat. It’s odd,” she said. “He was there, and now he’s not. It feels impossible that his consciousness could disappear so abruptly, and so—finally. I have this strange lingering feeling of his presence, as though he’s still around in some way.” She let out a deep sigh, heavy with unshed tears. “I don’t mean anything mystical about it, but there is something profound about it—almost as if he’s left an energy footprint of some kind.”
“When my grandmother died, I saw women on the street who reminded me of her for weeks afterward,” Lee said. He looked away, afraid she might ask him about his sister, but to his relief, she didn’t.
The waitress appeared, a sweet, moonfaced young thing with clanking goth jewelry and a purple streak in her short black hair. Lee ordered a coffee—the coffee at the Life Café was strong and dark and good.
“It’s weird,” Kathy said, absently wrapping her paper straw cover around her index finger like a white ring. “Ever since she called, all I can think of is him, slinking into the bedroom, or padding into the kitchen to demand food. Except that he’s not there at all.”
“Maybe there is some kind of an energy footprint—who knows?” Lee said. “There are still so many things we don’t understand yet.”
“I never thought absence itself could have such a strong … presence.”
Lee tried to push from his mind those awful days and nights of thinking about Laura, of picturing her last hours, her last moments, the recurring nightmares of seeing her dead body—but only in his dreams. He never had the chance to mourn her properly, because there was never a definitive moment when anyone could say that she was dead—though he knew in his heart that she was. In those days every young woman reminded him of his sister, and he resented them for being alive when she wasn’t.
“At least I didn’t have to make the decision to—you know,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. “I had to do that for my dog.
“What was that like?”
“It caught me off guard. I wasn’t prepared for how difficult that decision would be, even when it was inevitable. It was uncomfortable and somehow it felt wrong to have that kind of power over another living creature. And then I was shocked by how irrevocable it was. Afterward I had the impulse to take it all back, to reverse my decision and bring him back to life—as if that were possible.”
She smiled wanly. “I should know as well as anyone how irreversible death is, but when it’s someone—something?—so close to my heart, part of me doesn’t understand how that could be.” She looked at him with that rueful little half-smile he found so endearing. “Does that make any sense at all?”
“Of course,” he replied, saying the words she needed to hear. “Sure it does.”
“I don’t know how people do it for members of their family,” she said, shaking her head. “If it’s that hard to do for a dog, I can’t imagine—oh, God, I’m sorry,” she said, her face reddening. “I didn’t mean to—I mean, I didn’t mean to be insensitive.”
He put his hand on hers. “We’ve all suffered losses, and we all have to grapple with death at some point.”
“It’s just hard for me right now, coming on top of the work I’m doing at the site. It’s too much death—too much loss.”
“That must be so hard for you,” he said.
She bit her lower lip and stared at her coffee cup. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this work. I’m used to identifying bodies, but … so many. The enormity of it. I keep thinking it will get better, but it’s only getting worse.”
“Maybe you should talk to someone about it.”
“You mean like a professional?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m no good at that.” She stirred her cold coffee. “The other day there was a pocketbook next to one of the … victims. A little red purse, and in it there was a rabbit’s foot keychain, like the kind I had when I was a kid. I started wondering if she had children, and if one of them had given her the keychain