Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [99]
“What kind of creatures are we?” Kathy said, running her fingers lightly over the lip of her coffee cup.
“Creatures of extremes,” Lee replied. “We seem to be capable of the worst and the best that Nature has to offer.”
“Or is that just our egocentric view of things?” Kathy mused. “Are we really all that—from Auschwitz to the Sistine Chapel? And is it all because we happen to have opposable thumbs?”
Lee smiled. “You’re the scientist. Don’t forget our enormous brain … and the capacity for speech. I suppose orangutans would build cities if they could.”
“Do you think they’d also build concentration camps?”
“Even dolphins engage in ‘criminal activity'—according to the Science Channel.”
“Wise guy, eh?” she said, imitating a thirties movie mobster. “Bringing dolphins into it?”
He did his best to imitate her accent.
“Yeah, sure—you gonna do something about it?”
She made a fist. “Why, I oughta—”
Lee glanced at the eavesdropping woman, who quickly pretended to be reading. He looked back at Kathy. “You know, I keep feeling I failed Ana.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m afraid that if she had been any other patient—any other person—I might have taken it more seriously and she might not have died.”
As he said this he could feel the lady at the next table leaning in to listen.
Kathy frowned. “What do you mean ‘any other patient'?”
Suddenly he felt an impulse to tell her everything—he hated having secrets from her.
“What is it?” she asked, seeing the look on his face.
He rubbed his eyes and looked away. “There’s more to it than I told you before.” He proceeded to tell her about the way Ana tried to seduce him. He left out nothing, including the fact that she almost succeeded—partially succeeded, actually. By way of explanation, he talked about the seductive nature of the therapeutic relationship, but as he did he saw Kathy stiffen.
The lady at the next table continued to pretend to read, not taking her eyes from the print, but she didn’t turn the page once.
When he had finished, Kathy was silent.
“Well,” she said after a painfully long pause, “maybe you’re right. Maybe you would have reacted differently. But I don’t know what you could have done.”
She looked away, clearly uncomfortable. Her voice lacked its normal warmth, though she was obviously trying to hide her reaction.
“Kathy?” he said. “Do you view my past with Ana as a threat to—to us?”
“No, of course not,” she answered too quickly.
“It was my first year in practice. I was naïve and unprepared—”
“You don’t have to explain it to me,” she said, still not looking at him.
He thought the lady at the next table was going to fall out of her chair if she leaned in toward them any more.
“I want to explain,” he said. “I feel I owe you—”
“You don’t owe me anything,” Kathy replied, studying her untouched cake.
“Please, Kathy, I really need you to understand.”
“Look, can we just move on?” she said. “Can we talk about something else?”
“But I want to—”
“You don’t get it, do you?” she said, looking directly at him. “It’s in your past, and there’s nothing either of us can do to change it—or my reaction to it. I think it’s childish and petty, and I’m not proud of the way I feel, but for now I’m stuck with it. So let’s just move on, okay?”
He saw a pained expression he had never seen before in her face. It cut him to know that he was the cause of it.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll move on.”
They tried to talk about other things, but the air between them was strained now, her discontent hanging over them like a fog. After a few desultory attempts