Scott Turow - Personal injuries

She talked mostly to herself I couldn't place him. I really couldn't place him. I walked right past him." It had to have been around 1986, because they were still building Hogan's Alley, a little town where crimes were staged for training purposes. It was the first time she'd been invited back to Quantico to teach firearms. Ancient history. Another life. A tiny inappropriate burp of laughter jumped up to her throat. Naturally, she remembered him as so much betterlooking.

"Yeah," he said. "A one-nighter. Just a stray dick at closing time. I've been there." When she caught Robbie's look, she understood the rest. The emotions tumbled through his dark face. He was gripping the walnut wheel with both hands and the deep eyes flicked up at her the same way they had the first day when she told him they'd already caught a bad guy.

"Robbie," she said, then stopped.

He gunned the car, backing into the alley.

"Great cover," he told her.

"Do you remember?" she asked. "We talked. That night. After Kosic. Do you remember that? And you described lying in the dark. And feeling so uncertain. Do you remember?"

She heard the hollow glottal echo as he drank. "So are you saying-?"

"I'll tell you what I'm saying," she said. "But answer me first. Do you remember that?"

"Sure."

"Well, here's what I need to know. Was that a play?"

He made a low sound, perhaps a groan. "Nope," he said at last. "That was straight shit."

"So then, can you imagine reaching inside yourself and being uncertain about what's there? Not being sure you can really feel what you crave. Can you imagine that?"

In the dark, he took his time to ponder. After he'd removed the FoxBIte and told her what Walter had said about Carmody, they had driven around before heading back to the LeSueur. Contempt bristled off him-him of all people, enraged because he thought he'd been deceived. But his anger proved strangely hard to bear. She felt lost and mangled as it was, still trying to calculate the costs of this breach of cover to the Project and to herself, shocked that out of nowhere her former life had come, like some unwelcome relation, to reclaim her. If Feaver had dropped her on a corner, she could never have wandered home.

He'd finally asked her what was true. Was she or wasn't she? She refused at first to answer.

`We're not going there, Robbie. It's not appropriate. I have a job to do.'

`And you've fucked that up, too.' As the dust from that wrecking ball rose, she received a darting sideward look, softer than anything she'd seen since they left Walter. `Not fair,' he said after a moment and reverted to silence.

Somehow they reached a consensus not to remain at the LeSueur. Feaver circled the block, while she tossed the FoxBIte to McManis from the door to his office. Jim didn't say much. He wanted to know if Walter had looked sold when he'd turned back to the elevator. She thought so. So did Feaver. But, she'd realized, even if Walter had doubts, there were no odds for him in confronting her.

She asked if Sennett had gone crazy.

`Yes,' Jim answered. `He thinks the Movers should have picked this up on background.' Grave as the situation was, he smiled at the notion of that questionnaire: List every wild and crazy evening for the last ten years. He nodded kindly when she told him she just wanted to beat it. `This isn't on you,' he told her.

She knew that was true. It was nothing more than wicked coincidence. UCAs got made most often by cops or prosecutors who recognized them. But that was logic. If the Project cratered now, it would always follow her. Back to Iowa and whatever might come next. Don't embarrass the Bureau. The Ouantico watchword was burned like a brand onto the mind of every recruit. McManis and Sennett were talking anyway. Balancing risks. That was why he was just as happy to let her go. They didn't know yet what they were going to do with her.

Back in the Mercedes, Feaver had asked if she needed a drink, which God knows she did, and he volunteered to go into a package store to get her a bottle. Until they abandoned ship, the Mormon girl shouldn't be seen buying liquor. She was not really ready to be alone, and it seemed at least a form of recompense to finally let him into her apartment. She mixed the vodka with some frozen lemonade she had in her freezer and, after they had drunk much of it in silence, impulse had welled up in her, almost like the piston push of sickness. She wanted to explain. Why? she asked herself, hoping to find a clear rationale for restraint. Why?

Because. Because silence would be fatal to something fragile in her.

Because it seemed unbearable to have the precious truth, so hard to speak, taken for a lie.

The light had disappeared. She'd never closed the drapes. Refractions of the streetlights and a neon sign across the avenue limned the room. Her eyes were closed for the most part. Robbie sat on the floor against the flowered sofa the Movers had rented. In the cushions, when she lay on it at night watching TV, she could detect the trace remainders of stale cigar smoke and the gassy chemicals that had failed to remove it. Feaver had taken off his suit jacket and his boots. His toes wiggled in his fancy patterned hose as he drank, but he'd gone still now while he deliberated on his answer. Could he imagine?

Yes, he said, in time. He could imagine that, yes.

"Is that how it is for you?" he asked her.

"How it was," she said, "for years. Years. I thought I was just not interested or didn't care. I wasn't sure. Maybe I was putting all of it into sports." Athletes were their bodies. After a game, there was a supersensory awareness: the bruises, pulls, the aches within. Her skin felt as if something keen had been drilled through every follicle into the deeper layers of the derma. For most of her teammates, that electricity must have flowed into sexual expression. But for her, the game was the excitement. Her inchoate sensations of herself seemed almost superstitiously forbidden. Not merely because of the church-taught sense of plague or peril. But because it would deplete her somehow, put at risk the radioactive core of passion that sent her storming down the field.

In high school, she was the great jock, too much for many boys to want to take on. And it was a Mormon town anyway; more than half the kids weren't allowed to date until they were sixteen. She wanted to go out, naturally, once all that swung into motion. She wanted to belong. She was seventeen years old. She went to the senior prom and had sex that night, as if it were part of the same ceremony, which for many in Kaskia it was. She lay out in the grass on the lee side of the local ski mountain and let Russell Hugel wrestle off her undergarments and plunge into her. It didn't last a minute. He helped her up. He carefully plucked every leaf and grass strand from her dress, then walked her back down the hill in silence. The poor boy was probably embarrassed, probably thought he'd made a hash of it. A rooster in the barnyard, flapping his useless wings, went at it longer than Russell had. Such was sex. She reviewed it in her mind periodically. The interlude passed like the dance itself. Long-anticipated and brief and disappointing. She put away the dress. And concluded, as she went off to college, it was all too much of a mess.

Gay-the thought that there was anyone on earth like that-was still kind of a legend, as far as she was concerned, one of those terrible things that people tell you about the world that you suspect is exaggerated or not even true. She sounded like a hick, she knew. But she'd grown up on a ranch. Rams with ewes. Bulls with cows. She'd heard about Sodom in church. But God had destroyed them.

"I made it through hockey camp the first summer with no clue. And some of those girls were so dykey, so out, one of them, Anne-Marie-the girls joked about not being alone with her. I still didn't get it."