“Did you have counseling after your incident?” Dana asked.
Matt shifted in his chair and shrugged his shoulders. “If you could call it that. Internal Affairs ruled it a good shoot; the department shrink asked me if I was okay; I said sure; and my captain said, ‘Okay, then, take a couple of days R&R and we’ll see you on Monday.’”
Dana laughed. “I guess counseling wasn’t a big deal back then. Maybe there’s too much made of it these days.”
“Who knows?” Matt said. “You just work with what you have and do the best you can.”
Dana loved Matt’s honesty She tried to imagine what her dad would have said. She heard his deep, confident voice, lecture-style: Follow the rules, Dana, they’re for your own good, and you’ll be glad later. A not-so-subtle difference. Matt wasn’t giving her any guarantees. If she didn’t know before last Friday night that life promised nothing, she knew it now.
Her eyes were tearing up again. It didn’t take much. Dana fished in her purse for a tissue and felt the edge of the ID card she’d found in Robin’s closet. She couldn’t fathom the connections—the Indian gunshot victim, the consulting firm her father worked with, and her roommate. She toyed with showing the card to Matt, but he was a cop, after all, and Dana wasn’t sure she wanted to get the police involved. Even the Massachusetts police. She tried to figure why not. Was she afraid they’d investigate her? And find her small stash and pipe?
Before she had to decide, Dr. Barnett’s secretary appeared at the door and, with a sweeping wave, invited her in.
Dana tried to pay attention to Dr. Barnett. The therapist’s pageboy and blue-and-white seersucker suit were from another era, as if she’d had been called forth from a simpler time. The doctor’s questions seemed simple, but to Dana they were complicated.
“Any physical signs of stress?” How can I tell? I’m on edge most of the time.
“Headaches?” Yes. But more than usual? I don’t know.
“Changes in sex drive?” Ha, no way to tell. I haven’t had sex since Scott left.
“Dizziness? Changes in eating habits? Sleeping?” Yes. No. Maybe.
“Poor concentration? Problems making decisions?” What else is new?
“Dana? Dana.” Dr. Barnett’s voice was sharp, bringing Dana back into the room.
Dana had no idea how her verbal responses had compared to her mental reactions, but Dr. Barnett’s look said her out-loud answers had been garbled at best.
“Is there anything you’d like to ask me, Dana?”
Dana frowned and tried to focus. She smoothed Robin’s skirt and wished she had a joint, or better yet her pipe, a present from Scott Gorman during happier days. She pictured the swirls of green and orange and purple on the beautiful glass bowl. “I can’t seem to forget,” she said. “I remember every detail, like in slow motion, Tanisha walking toward the building, falling. Then on the ground.”
“You can’t heal what you can’t remember, Dana. So you’re doing well.”
Dr. Barnett sat back and folded her hands on her lap. She seemed pleased with herself, as if she’d just delivered a favorable verdict.
“Okay then I’m on track,” Dana said.
That seemed to be what Dr. Barnett wanted to hear.
Maybe things hadn’t changed all that much since Matt’s early days.
“Two down, one to go,” Dana said to Matt as they drove in Dana’s brown-and-cream Jeep to the Berkeley PD.
“This should be easy,” Matt said. “Cops are the good guys.”
Dana turned to see how serious Matt was, and caught his grin.
The scene in the Berkeley PD building reminded Dana of a coloring book she’d had as a child. The pages had line drawings of uniformed men and women in working poses. Handcuffing a bad guy, seated behind a high counter answering a phone, tapping away at a computer terminal, handling a drug-sniffing dog, closing a barred jail-cell door.
No insulating blanket around this building, Dana noted, as the sounds of the busy street outside competed with those within. Phones, pagers, printers, fax machines, clacking keyboards. Dana picked out angry, loud voices and guttural human sounds, like the kind you heard from the homeless on Telegraph Avenue and around the Shattuck BART station. It was expensive to ride the Bay Area Rapid Transit system but cost nothing to sleep in its stairwells.
Matt seemed right at home, leading her up a wide staircase to the offices, and she remembered he’d been here before. She noticed he’d put on a sports coat. Professional courtesy, she figured, but it was a weird shade of blue that looked awful with his maroon polo shirt.