“No, Dina, I’m not. I was seeing someone until recently, we broke up, I’m not planning on getting back in the saddle for a while. OK?”
“I didn’t know,” Dina said, a lot more quietly. “Sorry.” She subsided onto one arm of the sofa. “Do you still talk to Laura?” she asked, after a moment.
“Sometimes.” Hearing Laura’s name filled up the room with her perfume, sharp and sweet. I took a big swallow of coffee to get it out of my nose.
“Are you guys going to get back together?”
“No. She’s seeing someone. A doctor. I’m expecting her to ring me any day to tell me that they’re engaged.”
“Ahhh,” Dina said, disappointed. “I like Laura.”
“So do I. That’s why I married her.”
“So why did you divorce her, then?”
“I didn’t divorce her. She divorced me.” Laura and I have always done the civilized thing and told people the breakup was mutual, nobody’s fault, we grew in different directions and all the usual meaningless rubbish, but I was too tired.
“Seriously? Why?”
“Because. I don’t have the energy tonight, Dina.”
“Whatever,” Dina said, rolling her eyes. She slid sinuously off the sofa and padded into the kitchen, where I heard her opening things. “Why don’t you have anything to eat? I’m starving.”
“There’s plenty to eat. The fridge is full. I can make you a stir-fry, or there’s lamb stew in the freezer, or if you want something lighter you can have porridge, or—”
“Ew, please. I don’t mean stuff like that. Fuck the five food groups and antioxidant blah blah blah. I want like ice cream, or one of those shitty burgers you stick in the microwave.” A cupboard door slammed and she came back into the living room holding out a granola bar at arm’s length. “Granola? What are you, a girl?”
“No one’s making you eat it.”
She shrugged, threw herself on the sofa again and started nibbling a corner of the bar, making a face like it might poison her. She said, “When you were with Laura you were happy. It was sort of weird, because you’re not one of those naturally happy people, so I wasn’t used to seeing you that way. It actually took me a while to figure out what was going on. But it was nice.”
I said, “Yes, it was.”
Laura is the same kind of sleek, highlighted, labor-intensive pretty as Jennifer Spain. She was on a diet every day I knew her, except birthdays and Christmases; she tops up her fake tan every three days, straightens her hair every morning of her life, and never goes out of the house without full makeup. I know some men like women to leave themselves the way nature intended, or at least to pretend they do, but the gallantry with which Laura fought nature hand to hand was one of the many things I loved about her. I used to get up fifteen or twenty minutes early in the mornings so I could spend that time just watching her get ready. Even on days when she was running late, dropping things and swearing to herself, for me it was the most restful thing life had to offer, like watching a cat put the world in order by washing itself. It always seemed to me that a girl like that, a girl who worked that hard at being what she was supposed to be, was likely to want what she was supposed to want: flowers, good jewelry, a nice house, holidays in the sun, and a man who would love her and put his heart into taking care of her for the rest of their lives. Girls like Fiona Rafferty are complete mysteries to me; I can’t imagine where you would start trying to figure them out, and that makes me nervous. With Laura, it seemed to me that I had a chance at making her happy. It was moronic of me to be taken by surprise when she, with whom I had felt safe for exactly that reason, turned out to want precisely what women are supposed to want.
Dina said, without looking at me, “Was it because of me? That Laura dumped you?”
“No,” I said, instantly. It was true. Laura found out about Dina early on, in much the way you would expect. She never once said or hinted, I believe she never once thought, that Dina wasn’t my responsibility, that I should keep her crazy out of our home. When I came to bed, late on nights when Dina was finally asleep in our spare room, Laura would stroke my hair. That was all.
Dina said, “Nobody wants to deal with this shit. I don’t want to deal with this shit.”
“Maybe some women wouldn’t. They’re not women I’d marry.”
She snorted. “I said I liked Laura. I didn’t say I thought she was a saint. How stupid do you think I am? I know she didn’t want some crazy bitch showing up on her doorstep, fucking up her whole week. That one time, candles, music, wineglasses, both of your hair all messed up? She must have hated my guts.”
“She didn’t. She never has.”
“You wouldn’t tell me if she did. Why else would she have dumped you? Laura was mad about you. And it’s not like it was your fault, like you hit her or called her a slag, I know how you treated her, like some kind of princess. You’d have brought her the moon. Her or me, did she say that? I want my life back, get that loony out of here?”
She was starting to wind tight, her back pressed against the arm of the sofa. There was a flare of fear in her eyes.
I said, “Laura left me because she wants children.”
Dina stopped in mid-breath and stared, open-mouthed. “Oh, shit, Mikey. Can you not have kids?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t try.”
“Then . . . ?”
“I don’t want to have children. I never have.”
Dina thought about that in silence, sucking her granola bar absently. After a while she said, “Laura would probably chill out a lot if she had kids.”
“Maybe. I hope she gets the chance to find out. But it was never going to be with me. Laura knew that when she married me. I made sure she did. I never misled her.”
“Why don’t you want kids?”
“Some people don’t. It doesn’t make me a freak.”
“I didn’t call you a freak. Did I call you a freak? I just asked why.”
I said, “I don’t believe in Murder Ds having kids. They turn you soft: you can’t take the heat any more, and you end up making a bollix of the job and probably the kids too. You can’t have both. I’ll take the job.”
“Oh my God, great big bullshit. Nobody doesn’t have kids because they don’t believe in it. You always blame everything on your job, it’s so boring, you have no idea. Why don’t you want kids?”
“I don’t blame things on my job. I take it seriously. If that’s boring, I apologize.”
Dina rolled her eyes and did a huge fake-patient sigh. “OK,” she said, slowing down so that the idiot could keep up. “I’d bet everything I’ve got, which is fuck-all but there you go, that your entire squad doesn’t get sterilized their first day on the job. You work with guys who have kids. They do the exact same job you do. They can’t be letting murderers go all the time, or they’d get fired. Right? Am I right?”
“Some of the guys have families. Yeah.”
“Then why don’t you want kids?”
The coffee was kicking in. The apartment felt small and ugly, harsh with artificial light; the urge to get out, start driving too fast back to Broken Harbor, nearly launched me right out of my chair. I said, “Because the risk is too big. It’s so enormous that just thinking about it makes me want to puke my guts. That’s why.”
“The risk,” Dina said, after a moment’s silence. She turned the wrapper of the granola bar inside out, carefully, and examined the shiny side. “Not from the job. You mean me. That they’d turn out like me.”