Jonathan Kellerman: Self-Defence

"Does the girl in the dream resemble anyone you know?"

"Her back's to me. I can't see her face."

"Can you describe her at all?"

She closed her eyes and, once again, her head swayed. "Let's see… she's wearing a short white dress - very short. It rides up her legs… long legs. Trim thighs, like from aerobics… and long dark hair. Hanging down in a sheet."

"How old would you say she is?"

"Um… she has a young body." Opening her eyes. "What's weird is that she never moves, even when the man carrying her jostles her. Like someone… with no control. That's all I remember."

"Nothing about the men?"

"Nothing." Eyeing her purse.

"But one of them is definitely your father."

Her hands flew together and laced tightly. "Yes."

"You see his face."

"For a second he turns and I see him."

She'd gone pale and her face was sweaty again.

I said, "What's bothering you right now, Lucy?"

"Talking about it… when I talk, I start to feel- to feel it. As if I'm dropping back into it."

"Loss of control."

"Yes. The dream's scary. I don't want to be there."

"What's the scary part?"

"That they're going to find me. I'm not supposed to be there."

"Where are you supposed to be?"

"Back inside."

"In the log cabin."

Nod.

"Did someone tell you to stay inside?"

"I don't know. I just know I'm not supposed to be there."

She rubbed her face, not unlike the way Milo does when he's nervous or distracted. It raised blemishlike patches on her skin.

"So what does it mean ?" she said.

"I don't know yet. We need to find out more about you."

She brought her legs out from under her. Her fingers remained laced, the knuckles ice-white. "I'm probably making much too big a deal out of this. Why should I whine about a stupid dream? I've got my health, a good job- there are people out there, homeless, getting shot on the street, dying of AIDS."

"Just because others have it worse doesn't mean you have to suffer in silence."

"Others have it a lot worse. I've had it good, Dr. Delaware, believe me."

"Why don't you tell me about it."

"About what?"

"Your background, your family."

"My background," she said absently. "You asked me about that the first time I came in, but I avoided it, didn't I? And you didn't push. I thought that was very gentlemanly. Then I thought, Maybe he's just backing off as a strategy; he probably has other ways of getting into my head. Pretty paranoid, huh? But being in therapy was unnerving. I'd never done it before."

I nodded.

She smiled. "Guess I'm waffling, right now. Okay. My background: I was born in New York City twenty-five years ago, on April 14. Lenox Hill Hospital, to be precise. I grew up in New York and Connecticut, went to fine upstanding girls' schools, and graduated from Belding College three years ago- it's a small women's college just outside of Boston. I got my degree in history but couldn't do much with that, so I took a job as a bookkeeper at Belding, keeping the accounts straight for the Faculty Club and the Student Union. Last thing I thought I'd be doing, never had a head for math. But it turned out I liked it. The orderliness. Then I spotted a job card from Bowlby and Sheldon on the campus employment bulletin board and went for an interview. They're a national firm, had no opening except in L.A. On a whim, I applied and got it. And came West, young woman. That's it. Not very illuminating, is it?"

"What about your family?" I said.

"My family is basically Peter, whom you met. He's one year older than me and we're close. His nickname's Puck- someone gave it to him when he was a little boy because he was such an imp."

"Is he your only sib?"

"My only full sib. There's a half brother who lives up in San Francisco, but I have no contact with him. He had a sister who died several years ago." Pause. "All my grandparents and uncles and aunts are deceased. My mother passed away right after I was born."

Young, I thought, to be so surrounded by death. "What about your dad?"

She looked down quickly, as if searching for a lost contact lens. Her legs were flat on the floor, her torso twisting away from me, so that the fabric of her blouse tightened around her narrow waist.

"I was hoping we could avoid this," she said softly. "And not because of the dream."

Wheeling around. The intense stare Milo 'd seen in the courtroom.

"If you don't want to talk about him, you don't have to."

"It's not a matter of that. Bringing him into it always changes things."

"Why's that?"

"Because of who he is."

She gazed up at the ceiling and smiled.

"Your line," she said, extending one hand theatrically.

"Who is he?"

She gave a small laugh.

"Morris Bayard Lowell." Enunciating.

Another laugh, totally cheerless.

"Buck Lowell."

I'd heard of M. Bayard Lowell the way I'd heard of Hemingway and Jackson Pollock and Dylan Thomas.

When I was in high school, some of his early prose and verse were in the textbooks. I'd never thought much of his paint-splotched abstract canvases, but I knew they hung in museums.

Published in his teens, exhibited in his twenties, the postwar enfant terrible turned Grand Old Man of Letters.

But it had been years since I'd heard anything about him.

"Shocked?" said Lucy, looking grim but satisfied.

"I see what you mean about things changing. But the only relevance he has to me is his role as your father."

She laughed. "His role? Roll in the hay is about it, Dr. Delaware. The grand moment of conception. Old Buck's a love-'em-and-leave-'em kind of guy. He cut out on Mother when I was a few weeks old and never returned."

She smoothed her bangs and sat up straighter.

"So how come I'm dreaming about him, right?"

"It's not that unusual. An absent parent can be a strong presence."

"What do you mean?"

"Anger, curiosity. Sometimes fantasies develop."

"Fantasies about him ? Like going to the Pulitzer ceremony on his arm? No, I don't think so. He wasn't around enough to be relevant."

"But when he comes into the picture, things change."

"Who he is changes things. It's like being the President's kid. Or Frank Sinatra's. People stop perceiving you as who you are and start seeing you in relationship to him. And they get shocked- just like you did- to find out the Great Man spawned someone so crashingly ordinary."

"I-"

"No, it's okay," she said, waving a hand. "I love being ordinary: my ordinary job, my ordinary car, my ordinary apartment and bills and tax returns and washing dishes and taking out the garbage. Ordinary is heaven for me, Dr. Delaware, because when I was growing up nothing was routine."

"Your mother died right after you were born?"

"I was a couple of months old."

"Who raised you?"

"Her older sister, my Aunt Kate. She was just a kid herself, new Barnard grad, living in Greenwich Village. I don't remember too much about it other than her taking Puck and me to lots of restaurants. Then she got married to Walter Lazar- the author? He was a reporter back then. Kate divorced him after a year and went back to school. Anthropology- she studied with Margaret Mead and started going on expeditions to New Guinea. That meant boarding school for Puck and me, and that's where we stayed all through high school."

"Together?"

"No, he was sent to prep academies, and I went to girls' schools."

"It must have been tough, being separated."

"We were used to being shifted around."

"What about the half siblings you mentioned?"

"Ken and Jo? They lived with their mother, in San Francisco. Like I said, there's no contact at all."