back toward the other two women, so I did too.
“Prospect has come to mean a great deal to me,” she said. “Maddie and I have family there. I don’t know how else to describe it other than to say that for me, it’s a sacred place. And when I think—when I know—that a child suffered there… Well, I want to do the very utmost I’m capable of, to make up for it.”
Amen to that.
I followed her toward the door, wondering how the hell we were ever going to find our way back to the outside world through all those shiny green Lewis Carroll hallways.
The clock in Cate’s dashboard read 6:17 as we drove away from the precinct house.
“I can give you a ride back into the city,” she said, “if you’d like.”
“I’d hate to make you come all the way in then turn right around again to go home.”
“What time’s your dinner?”
“We’re supposed to meet up at eight,” I said. “Somewhere in Chinatown. I’d love to get home for a quick shower first.”
“My guilt is assuaged, then. This time of day the subway’s your best bet.”
“Sounds perfect,” I said.
After that we drove in silence for a minute, thinking our thoughts.
“I liked what you said back at the precinct,” I said finally. “I feel the same way, even though I don’t have anywhere near your connection with Prospect, you know?”
Cate nodded. “I can’t explain it, but I feel responsible.”
“I’m all about the guilt. God knows we killed enough Indians. Not to mention the slave graves.”
“Jesus,” said Cate, “we really are related!”
As the subway sped me back into Manhattan I pondered the events of the day.
Maybe it was a blessing the child had been killed and was no longer in pain? But that was a hideous solution. The worst possible.
I’d had too much experience, in my own life, of being powerless to help fellow children when it mattered most. The only thing that had changed was me being in a grown-up body now. I still felt like a kid inside, a fierce little tomboy who wanted to defend those preyed upon at the playground or at home with my fists and feet.
I’d grown up in a time and place that left children appallingly vulnerable to the predations of grown-ups: California in the late sixties and early seventies. The adults were so busy playing at Peter-Pan self-actualization that most of us kids would’ve fared better being raised in a cave by LSD-dropping wolves.
By third grade I’d built a sturdy fort in the woods near our house, just in case any of my friends needed to run away from home. I’d stocked it with charcoal and matches and a saucepan and five cans of shoplifted chili, all of it safe in a waterproof underground cache I’d copied from my garage-sale Girl Scout Handbook.
There were just too goddamn many bad stepfathers and mentally-absent-moms’ psycho boyfriends out there.
I’d wanted to be prepared for all of us.
I still did.
11
Dean was already dressed by the time I screeched into the apartment, out of breath.
He had on crisp khakis and a Brooks Brothers shirt, his hair still wet from the shower.
He took one look at me, all sweaty in my grass-stained jeans and grimy T-shirt, bandanna tied around my neck. “I feel so underdressed.”
I stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “Shut it, tall boy. I bet you didn’t even leave me a clean towel.”
He tilted my chin up to kiss my mouth. “I left you two, folded up on the sink. Figured you’d be in a big fat hurry.”
“Thank you,” I said, racing past him.
I took the world’s shortest shower, then threw on makeup and clean jeans, followed by a white T-shirt, a string of fake pearls, and the least fucked-up pair of my dead great-grandmother’s Belgian shoes I could find in our closet, feeling the need to one-up Astrid’s ubiquitous Ferragamos.
My hair would probably dry on the way there.
I walked back out into the living room, earrings in hand.
“You know where we’re going?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Dean. “Some Vietnamese place.”
“Subway or cabbing it?”
“Cab,” he said. “You know we’re both useless below Fourteenth.”
“Sue and Pagan?”
“At that Chino-Latino diner on Ninth. Might meet us later for drinks.”
“Cool,” I said. “Let’s hit it.”
We sprint-walked west on Sixteenth to grab a taxi on Seventh Avenue. Our neighborhood wasn’t much—sort of a no-man’s-land above the Village—but we were stuck with Barneys at that end of the block.
There was something about the multistoried emporium that annoyed me profusely, not least that it was