Maureen knew, though they never discussed it, that the main reason for the meetings was Preacher’s constant worry about her. He was checking up on her. Until today, she had appreciated the attention. She knew he was taking a risk. They both were.
Maureen and Preacher weren’t supposed to see each other, to have any contact, until she’d been officially reinstated to the police department. Or fired from it. She didn’t know who at the NOPD, if anyone, watched or kept track of such things. She certainly couldn’t see Preacher reporting to or checking in with anyone. And if someone was watching the two of them, there was no way Preacher didn’t know about it. He probably knew the person doing the spying, and that person probably owed Preacher any number of favors. Everyone in New Orleans, cop or not, owed Preacher a favor. In his way, Preacher could reach as deep into the convoluted viscera of New Orleans as the Heaths. They reached down from the top. Preacher reached up from the bottom. Both got results.
Maureen coasted to a stop, stepping off the asphalt track onto the grass to meet him. She plucked out her earbuds and silenced the music on her iPod with her thumb.
“I’m waiting,” Preacher said.
“For what?”
“For you to say thank you,” Preacher said. “Because I just saved you from making a huge mistake.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Maureen said, studying the tops of her running shoes.
“We really going to play this game?”
Maureen set her hands on her hips. She puffed out her chest and raised her chin. But she said nothing.
“What you’re doing right now,” Preacher said. “Not talking? You should do more of that.”
Preacher scanned her with his eyes, evaluating her from her head to her feet, as she approached. She couldn’t miss the scrutiny; he didn’t even try to hide it. It was the first thing that happened each time they met. It wasn’t a sexual appraisal. She’d never gotten the slightest kind of attention from him that way. This time, Maureen wasn’t sure what he was thinking as he added up what he’d observed about her. Whatever it was he saw today, she could tell from his face that he didn’t approve, beyond what she had tried with Heath.
“What now?” she asked.
“Do you ever eat?”
“The amount of exercise I get?” Maureen said. “I eat constantly.”
“Not that nuts-and-berries shit,” Preacher said. “Real food. Cooked food.”
“We’ve only known each other a few months,” Maureen said, grateful for the change in subject, “but we’ve spent a lot of time together. You’ve seen me eat. You really think I’m a nuts-and-berries kind of girl? C’mon.”
She bent forward, her hands on her thighs, huffing for breath, sweat trickling from under her headband and down the sides of her neck. She gave Preacher a hard time, goofed at things he said, but she understood his point. It wasn’t like she didn’t know what was happening to her.
She was losing weight. A lot of it. No one needed eyes as keen as Preacher’s to see that. She’d never had much extra weight to spare, she’d always had angles where other women had curves, but during her suspension she had started losing the muscle she’d added over the summer in the police academy and her first months on the streets. Muscle she had worked hard for, that she needed in her arms and shoulders and back and backside to meet the physical requirements of her job. To protect herself on the streets.
She’d noticed this wearing away. She saw it in her hands, which were looking almost like a waitress’s hands again. She saw it in the way her newer clothes no longer fit her. The running shorts she wore had fit when she’d bought them online two weeks ago. Now they sagged on her hips. She studied herself in the mirror after showers. Her ribs showed like they had in her cocaine-fueled middle twenties. Her hip bones were visible, too. For a few weeks there she’d almost had an ass. She was even losing that.
More than what she saw in the mirror frightened her. The visuals may have been what hurt her the least. What made her more nervous was that she could hear it, too, what was happening to her, when she was alone in the quiet of her house.
She could hear the grinding, the sound and the feel of stone working on stone, a feeling like the grinding of gears in her belly. Each day she was having a harder time ignoring the fierce devouring machine running every hour of the day and night in the arch under her ribs. And so she ran to take the machine’s energy away. To burn the fear and the rage that she knew fueled it. To exhaust it before it ate her alive.
Her suspension was the first time since she was eighteen years old that she’d gone more than a couple of days without a job or a class or both to go to. So she ran.
She ran too often, too long, to the point where her body had started breaking down in protest. She ran through shin splints. Through swollen knees. Achy hips. She ran through every caution sign her body threw up in front of her.