She Who Sees Through Darkness

Part Four

Dr. Fisher called his lawyer, resulting in a heated exchange of words when the lawyer urged him to take Katrina's offer. Then he called the employee in question: the afternoon receptionist, all of eighteen years old. Katrina waited alone for her arrival, skin itching. Kyle had decided he was too mad to confront the leaker and stormed off to wait at the nearest café.

Katrina waited by the reception desk, fiddling with her phone to keep her memories from spinning. It didn't work. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw Anaïs, pulling a bottle from her hands. That had been at Thanksgiving dinner, four years ago. Katrina would have hit her sister-in-law if Anaïs hadn't sent a gust of wind to knock her over. Annie had stepped back into the living room just as Katrina had stumbled to her feet.

Now the memory left her hands cold and trembling. Alcoholism. Around Shawn, it was easy for her to brush off his worries as the way a big brother might monitor a kid sister with a peanut allergy. Some of her law school friends knew. Hard to keep a secret when you got fired a month out from graduation and all but dragged into rehab at gunpoint. For them, she'd made it into a punchline: Man, I sure did some crazy stuff in my twenties. I was such an alcoholic. For the past few months, the campaign had eaten up too much time for her to attend AA meetings or visiting her sponsor. She'd been fine. So far.  But sitting here alone, remembering how she'd nearly shown the little girl she loved her despicable weakness, the word burned.

A short brunette walked in the door, her outfit professional and put-together. Katrina hoped she'd done something fun with the money, but knew it had probably gone to her dealer.

"Carla." Dr. Fisher stuck his head out of his office. "We need to talk."

The girl was in tears a minute later. Katrina explained her legal situation—Senator Winters wouldn't press any personal charges if the girl made a public apology—but she'd already known Carla wouldn't appreciate the reprieve. She denied stealing the senator's file, then screamed and cursed at both of them when Fisher said he knew she'd taken it. Katrina told her Fischer had tried to protect her, and the brunt of the snot-filled cursing was turned against her. She didn't mind. Fisher signed the termination papers, and Katrina made photocopies.

By the time she returned to Kyle and their car, every muscle in her body was as tense as if she'd been electrocuted. Hello. My name is Katrina Harris, and I'm an alcoholic, and wherever I go, people get hurt.

"Do you want to go down to the range?" Kyle asked as they drove. "Shooting always helps me relax."

"Have to get back to the office." The range they frequented was all the way down in Jersey. Kyle himself went down three days a week. Katrina was a competent, experienced target shooter, but Kyle lived for his guns. He'd even made the 2008 Olympic shooting team. They'd made sure his biographic paragraph on the 'Meet Emma!' section of the campaign websites had photos of him holding a red, white, and blue gun blown up large and 'proud member of New York's LGBT community' written very small. "Feel free to drop me off and head down yourself. I don't want your mom thinking I'm slacking off."

"You mean, like me?"

The uncharacteristic bitterness in his tone made her sit straight upright in her seat. The belt tugged at her shoulder. "Kyle, I wasn't talking about you—you're her son, for fuck's sake, not her employee." Unbidden, a memory rose up of the senator telling off a staffer for being 'lazier than my damn son'—but she would have cursed out Jesus for not folding his shroud on Easter Sunday.

He sighed. Dark circles sat under his eyes. "I'm sorry. It's just—remember when I told you about Bean Choice?"

"That artisanal coffee shop your friend Rob started?" He'd taken her there, once, and the coffee was good, if not worth eight dollars a cup.

"I borrowed ninety thousand dollars from my mother to fund it. And now it's going out of business." He ran his hands back through his curly hair and stretched out his long body. "She'd be so much better off if I'd never been born. What am I supposed to tell her?"

"The truth," Katrina said, knowing it was bullshit. Kyle looked at her like a lost puppy. She reached deeper, searching for some solution, some combination of words that could change the world. "I'm sorry, really sorry. Tough break. But what do you expect me to do? I'm more screwed up than you are!"

"Screwed up? You?" He shook his head. "You're like my mom. Strong, aggressive. You've got everything pulled together—you're fine. Me, I'm thirty-one years old and still living off my mom. That's my life. That's all my life will be, until she dies and I go leech off my cousins."

Katrina Harris: everything pulled together. The thought warmed her, and she seized onto that warmth, trying to spread it through her whole body. What could she tell him? What would put-together-Katrina say?

"Relax, Kyle. Just relax and try not to think about it." It was bad advice, but she didn't have much more to say. "Try and have some fun." Fun Kyle she knew and understood. Depressed Kyle she didn't.

"Fun," he repeated. "Right. Let's have a little fun before everything ends. One of my exes is throwing a birthday party tonight. Rented out a whole club." A sad smile flickered across his face. "We'll go, we'll dance, and then we can be responsible adults in the morning. Remember all that fun we had back in college? Let's convince ourselves we're still young."

She remembered those days keenly, the weekends he'd come up to visit her at NYU. They'd always spun out into crazy adventures—the time they stole the unicorn piñata, the time they convinced Belgian tourists in Time Square to lift your middle finger to hail a cab, that time they'd snuck into the music building and filled all the trumpets with glue. She'd always felt so light on her feet afterwards, convinced she could accomplish anything, magic or not. Surely that feeling hadn't only been the effects of the alcohol. Those hours with Kyle had meant something. Meant something more that us being assholes. She'd considered telling him about her drinking problem for years, now, but tainting those memorieswas the last thing she wanted to do.

Shawn would be on his way north by now, determined to flush out the valkyrie with the suspicious questions. Anaïs would have gone with him—she was an agent as well—and Annie would be staying with friends. His top agents would be gone as well, leaving behind only the few with emergency duties. Even if it struck him to search the future for her relapsing, there was no one he could send to stop her.

Besides, she could control herself. Indigo had trained her to resist torture. She could resist an open bar.

"I'd love to," she said, and meant it. 

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