Free Blind Spot by B A Shapiro Page B

when Suki came upon her in the darkened living room. “ Not now .” Suki knew from experience that there was no intruding on this lethargy. She closed the door and prowled the house, her restlessness increasing as her mind jumped from one worry to the next. Kyle and her father cooked in the kitchen. They didn’t ask how the funeral had gone, nor how she was doing, and for this she was tremendously grateful.
    Suki stood over the desk in her study, a tiny space tucked off the side of the family room; it was half-buried, two casement windows at dirt level bringing in thin rectangles of light. The Kern file jutted from her open briefcase, and she longed to escape into it, into an all-absorbing quest for a solution to an academic puzzle—even if this case promised to be more than just academic.
    A general text on posttraumatic stress disorder lay on her desk, and she turned to the section on sexual abuse. As she had thought, it was not uncommon for extremely severe childhood abuse to cause dissociation and hallucinations in adulthood—she had once had a patient whose violation had been so horrific a PET scan indicated that the abuse had actually altered her brain structure. It was possible Lindsey had been mistreated as a child. Although Suki had only met the woman twice, and hadn’t received the medical and psychiatric history from Mike yet, she was pretty confident Lindsey did not fit the profile: the dissociative amnesia, the numbing, the depersonalization, the recurrent images and flashback episodes.
    Suki put the book down and looked at the collage of photos she’d tacked to a few squares of pegboard: Alexa and Kyle at ages six and three, riding a pony at her cousin Tracy’s wedding; her high school clique at their twenty-fifth reunion; Stan and two buddies dressed as the three amigos on a trip to Mexico they’d made decades ago; Alexa and Jonah at the tenth grade Star Ball. In the bottom corner of the board was a picture of her mother and Alexa; even though Alexa was only two, the same smile shone out of both faces. Suki turned and walked from the study.
    After another hour of aimless wandering, her jittery energy was finally exhausted, and Suki found herself standing at the living room window, staring out at nothing. That’s when the cars began driving by. She moved behind the pulled bundle of drape, so that she could see but not be seen, and watched the procession make its way slowly down Lawler Road. Suki knew the funeral had to be over, that Jonah’s body must have been buried for at least an hour now, and yet a string of cars, their headlamps lit, was streaming past her house.
    Her father came up behind her and touched her arm. “The lentil soup’s ready,” he said as if nothing out of the ordinary was occurring, as if she had been eating three hearty meals a day instead of choking down a fraction of what he placed before her. “Come. Have a bowl with us.”
    She shook her head without turning around, her eyes glued to the grim parade in the road.
    He gave her shoulders a squeeze. “I’ll keep the soup warm for when you change your mind.”
    Suki listened to his steps return to the kitchen. Since Saturday, he had made noodle pudding, manicotti, vegetable stew and now lentil soup. Comfort foods.
    As she watched the cars, Suki wondered if her father could possibly be right about troubles passing, about everything being enlarged under the electron microscope of the present; he had always been so wise about so many things. Just as she was allowing herself to warm to the notion, as she was thinking she might be able to swallow a bit of lentil soup, she caught her breath. Something was happening outside the window. Something more than a few cars cruising by.
    A pattern was emerging. That green Camry had been by before, as had the white station wagon and the mud-covered van. Somewhere beyond her vision, the cars were turning around. Circling back.
    How long she stood there Suki could not say, but it felt both