Fear itself

3

For Pender and Dorie, Saturday had been a day of rest and recuperation. They never made it out of the house-they barely made it out of bed. Canned soup-Dorie’s cupboard had more Campbell’s than a gathering of the Scottish clans-and sleep had sustained them. For Dorie, who had never married, or even shacked up with a man for an extended stretch, this nonsexual bed sharing was something new. Pender, having endured a twenty-year marriage that had gone sour after the first five, was, of course, familiar with it.

By Sunday morning, Pender had had two nights to learn that Dorie hadn’t been kidding about her snoring-she was indeed a window rattler. He didn’t mind, though-at least when she was snoring, she wasn’t thrashing, moaning, or crying out in her sleep.

Not that he blamed her. After what she’d been through, Dorie would be lucky if sleep disturbances were the worst, or last, of her problems. And awake, despite all she must have gone through in that basement in Berkeley, she never complained, which Pender found extraordinary in a day and age when everybody who’d ever had their fanny patted as a kid called themselves a sexual-abuse survivor, and feeling sorry for yourself was practically a cottage industry. Pender was impressed-he only wished he could somehow rescue her from the psychological and emotional shitstorm as successfully as he had from physical danger.

He knew, of course, that it was a risky game, this white knight business. The relationship burying ground was littered with the corpses of failed white-knight/damsel-in-distress romances; nowadays they even warned recruits in the Academy about the syndrome.

But what was a secret sentimentalist to do? Pender was a goner long before the relationship was consummated late Sunday morning. The consummation itself was necessarily gentle. Due to their injuries, they were forced to make love, in Pender’s phrase, like porcupines-very carefully-but perhaps because of the time they’d already spent in bed together, there was little of the awkwardness, emotional discomfort, or uncertainty that so often marked first sexual encounters, even at their age.

Afterward, Dorie went back to sleep; soon she was tossing and whimpering again. Pender reached across his body with his good arm, patted her shoulder, stroked her side all the way to the swell of her hip, then back again, murmuring that it was all right, that everything was okay now.

Which was a lie-everything was not okay. Simon Childs, the man who’d done this to Dorie, was still out there somewhere. And if this case had been personal before, it was doubly so now. Pender tiptoed out of bed without waking Dorie this time, and took his cell into the bathroom with him.