A Place of Hiding

“It still stings,” she admitted. “Not as much. Not nearly. But a bit. It’s still there.”


“Yes,” he said. “There’s no quick panacea for being thwarted. We all want what we want. And not getting it doesn’t mean we cease to want it. I do know that. Believe me. I know.”

She looked away from him quickly, realising that what he was acknowledging traveled a much greater distance than comprised the brief journey to this night’s disappointment. She was grateful that he understood, that he’d always understood no matter how supremely rational logical cool and incisive were his comments on her life. Her eyes ached with tears, but she wouldn’t allow him to see them. She wanted to give him the momentary gift of her tranquil acceptance of inequity. When she’d managed to displace sorrow with what she hoped would sound like determination, she turned back to him.

“I’m going to sort myself out properly,” she said. “I may strike out in a whole new direction.”

He observed her in his usual manner, an unblinking gaze that generally unnerved lawyers when he was testifying in court and always reduced his university students to hopeless stammers. But for her the gaze was softened by his lips, which curved in a smile, and by his hands, which reached for her again.

“Wonderful,” he said as he pulled her to him. “I’d like to make a few suggestions right now.”

Deborah was up before dawn. She’d lain awake for hours before falling asleep, and when she’d finally nodded off, she’d tossed and turned through a series of incomprehensible dreams. In them she was back in Santa Barbara, not as she’d been—a young student at Brooks Institute of Photography—but rather as someone else entirely: a sort of ambulance driver whose apparent responsibility it was not only to fetch a recently harvested human heart for transplant but also to fetch it from a hospital she could not find. Without her delivery, the patient—lying for some reason not in an operating theatre but in the car repair bay at the petrol station behind which she and China had once lived—would die within an hour, especially since his heart had already been removed, with a gaping hole left in his chest. Or it might have been her heart instead of his. Deborah couldn’t tell from the partially shrouded form that was raised in the repair bay on a hydaulic lift.

In her dream, she drove desperately through the palm-lined streets to no avail. She couldn’t remember a single thing about Santa Barbara and no one would help her with directions. When she woke up, she found that she’d thrown off the covers and was so damp with sweat that she was actually shivering. She looked at the clock and eased out of bed, padding over to the bathroom, where she bathed the worst of the nightmare away. When she returned to the bedroom, she found Simon awake. He said her name in the darkness and then, “What time is it? What are you doing?”

She said, “Terrible dreams.”

“Not art collectors waving their chequebooks at you?”

“No, sad to say. Art collectors waving their Annie Leibovitzes at me.”

“Ah. Well. It could have been worse.”

“Really? How?”

“It could have been Karsch.”

She laughed and told him to go back to sleep. It was early yet, too early for her dad to be up and about, and she herself certainly wasn’t going to trip up and down the stairs with Simon’s morning tea as her father did.

“Dad spoils you, by the way,” she informed her husband.

“I consider it only a minor payment for having taken you off his hands.”