Free Skull Session by Daniel Hecht Page A

beat-up neighborhood.
    Everyone was clustered around a little white clapboard house with peeling paint. Someone had stabbed to death a woman and her two kids. The mother was still on the porch stairs. Head down, tangled in her own arms and legs. Every drop of her blood had drained out onto the stairs and sidewalk. The way she was lying—it was like she'd . . . she'd been wrestling with herself."
    "Christ, Lia."
    She took a moment to pull back from the memory. "My point is, after that I'm not going to be upset by some broken furniture."
    Paul imagined the little girl, trying to integrate the horrible scene into her world view. Somehow she'd miraculously emerged as the Lia he knew. In the long run, maybe it was something that strengthened her. Or maybe those images were part of what drove her, rode her. Because something was riding her, a desperation she revealed only very rarely.
    He'd seen it the first time they'd spoken to each other, a little over two years ago. For two months he'd been auditing a night class in Adolescent Psychology at Dartmouth and covertly admiring her from across the room. She was in her first term as a special student pursuing an independent project for her master's in social work.
    That Wednesday night, after class, he had stopped for a beer at Murphy's Pub. He was surprised to see Lia at a table alone: It had never occurred to him that a woman that pretty would ever be unaccompanied. Seeing her there was a revelation, like a window to some long and gorgeous vista opening in his mind. He got a beer from the bar, walked to her table, and asked if he could join her.
    Lia took his intrusion gracefully, made him feel welcome. They talked. She told him she was working twenty hours a week at a family advocacy organization where she investigated claims of spouse and child abuse, plus doing full-time graduate school work. Despite her vitality, he could see the fatigue in her.
    She'd been telling him amusing anecdotes about being a police detective's daughter. But at some point the tone of her stories had changed. "There were a lot of nights," she said, "when I'd be at home with my mother. My father would be at work. I knew he was a police detective, but I didn't know exactly what he did. My mother would clean the kitchen, and my brothers and I would stay up doing homework at the kitchen table. She kept a police scanner on the counter. I hated it—the sharp-voiced messages, all the static, once in a while my father's voice, sounding like a stranger. I see now she needed to know where my father was, what he was doing. Some nights I'd say something to her and she wouldn't answer. One night I figured out why. On the scanner, there was some dangerous thing going on, calls for assistance, officers down at the scene. My mother had her back to me, not moving. I finally went up to her. When I saw her face, her eyes were glittery like a rabbit's, and it finally dawned on me: She's afraid my father might not come home."
    Lia stopped in her narrative to blow out a breath of air. "Until then it had never occurred to me that anything could happen to him. I didn't know that people could die. I didn't know that my mother couldn't control everything. After that, I hated those nights. I'd be good, helping her in the kitchen, cleaning my room, being extra nice to my brothers. As if that could help my mother feel better."
    She shook her head, adjusted the man's dress tie that held her lopsided fountain of hair, smiled a ragged and apologetic smile. "Wow. I must be tireder than I thought. I'm really sorry. I'm really not like this."
    Then she surprised him again, switching gears completely. "What's it like to have Tourette's syndrome?"
    Paul was taken aback. It was his first real glimpse of her observational powers. "And here I thought I was doing a pretty good job of keeping it under control," he said, laughing uneasily. This wasn't good first-date material.
    "You are. But I've been watching you in class for a while," she said.