The Astral, or, Till the Day I Die. V. J. Banis

rains came. They did not in any way deter her, though by now she went only once or twice a week. The gravesite was on a knoll from which bright green lawns, salt and peppered with gravesites, spilled down to the Golden State Freeway with its endless rush of cars, their sound a murmur at this distance. She stood without umbrella and let the cool droplets fall upon her, in hope that they would wash away her grief, or at least the numbness.

      Both remained. Her soul was condemned to hold on to every memory, until surely it must break from overloading. She knew that she must one day come back to herself. She had to return to the world of the living. She could not continue as she was. If you were condemned to be alive, you ought at least to live.

      At home, she and Walter shared the house, they moved about in the same finite space and yet they remained light years apart. Sometimes she could hear him in his office, crying. Most of the time he watched her warily with red-rimmed eyes and sniffled until she thought she must scream, but how could she, eyes tearless, rail at him for his grief? She wished that she had solace to offer him, but of that her heart was empty.

      He spent more and more time at the restaurant, pleading increasing numbers of diners. She had no doubt that he found it more comfortable away from her, just as she was relieved to see him go. It was not that she hated him, nor that she even consciously blamed him for what had happened. They could hardly share their home day by day, however, without reminding one another of what was missing from it. And you could only say, “it’s all right,” so many times before that began to sound silly.

      He had lost ten pounds and gained ten years. He looked faded, like a shirt too often washed. It wasn’t only Becky those two men had killed, she thought grimly. They were killing Catherine and Walter Desmond day by day, inexorably and she felt helpless to prevent it.

      A casual question one day—“Will your mother be coming for Christmas?”—made her aware of the time she hadn’t noticed passing.

      The question caught her by surprise. “Is it December?”

      “The second.” The gravity of his tone made it sound the most important thing in the world.

      Which meant, she realized, that Thanksgiving had come and gone without her noticing. They had always made such a big deal of it in the past. Becky had been quite set in her preferences. The turkey’s wings were hers, both of them, and woe betide the foolish mortal who thought to claim one. The pie must be pumpkin.

      “Punkin pie, punkin pie, punkin pie.” She used to chant it while her mother cleared the table, brought in the pie, took the ice cream—pumpkin ice cream it must be—from the freezer. “Punkin pie.”

      “I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” she told Walter. She got up and began to clear the table, but she did manage to rest a hand, briefly, on his shoulder. She really did wish she could comfort him.

      He sniffled and said nothing.

      When he had gone, she went into the garage and got down a box of Christmas ornaments and carried it into the living room. The first one she unwrapped turned out to be Becky’s favorite, the little Christmas angel they had bought the year she was born. She set that aside and found another one: the papier-mâché camel with one leg missing. Becky had insisted they hang it anyway each year, legs or no legs.

      “Jesus will love him anyway, won’t he, Mommy?”

      There were, it seemed, memories attached to every ornament. She put them back in the box and taped it closed again, and carried it out to its shelf in the garage.

      A car, a fire engine red Bronco, pulled into the driveway just as she came back into the kitchen. It was unfamiliar to her and at first she didn’t recognize the woman who got out and walked briskly to the door. Not until she had rung the bell and Catherine had studied her long and hard through the glass in the front door, stared at the red hair that clearly refused to obey any bidding of brush or comb, did she realize that it was the FBI agent who had interviewed her in the hospital. What was her name, she wondered as she opened the door?

      “Mrs. Desmond.” The visitor stepped inside.

      She remembered then. “Officer Chang.”

      “Agent Chang.” She smiled to show that no offense had been taken. “Just Chang. Or you can call me Roby, if you like, there’s no need to be formal.” When Catherine still looked blankly at her, she added, “Roby. As in Roberta.” She saw the familiar puzzlement and waited for the customary question. Catherine Desmond’s glance took in her decidedly Asian face, heart-shaped, sloe-eyed, and went up to the frizzy hair. At least she put the question a bit differently from most.

      “You must get told a lot, that doesn’t sound Chinese.”

      “Not as much as I hear, ‘funny, you don’t look Jewish’.”

      Catherine laughed briefly. She must have done that often, before, Roby Chang thought, and felt her throat tighten with anger at what had been done to this woman. Watching her, she was surprised to discover how beautiful Catherine Desmond was. When she had seen her earlier, in the hospital, her face had been purpled with bruises, her head swathed in bandages. The gold hair, glinting with its own copper highlights, had mostly grown back out, the bruises had faded from a face that just missed classically beautiful and was the better for it. She was taller, too, than Chang had realized. Five nine, she guessed, maybe five ten, and full-figured. She was no fashion model, but rather what the boys described as “a babe.”

      “Daddy’s the Chinese part,” she said aloud, “Momma was a Jewish princess. Still is, to tell the truth, but she would have a fit if she heard me say it. That explains this, too.” She put a hand up to her spiky orange hair. “I’m afraid I’m the classic American mongrel.”

      Who looked not at all like an F.B.I. agent, Catherine thought. It wasn’t just that she was little, nor that her heart shaped face and the frizzy red hair gave her a comic-cute look entirely at odds with any kind of police work. Her costume, too, was something less than authoritative: jeans, a gore-tex jacket, some kind of boots that Catherine couldn’t put a name to.

      “Maybe hybrid is the better word,” she said aloud. Really, she chided herself, how was she to know what an F.B.I. agent should look like? “Come in, please. Can I get you something? Coffee? A drink?”

      “Nothing, thanks, I won’t stay long.” She looked around, avoiding Catherine’s eyes.

      “Have you come with news? Have you found them?” Catherine asked, hope flaring for a moment.

      Chang looked directly at her then and Catherine knew the answer before the agent shook her head. “Nothing, unfortunately. Actually, I was hoping you might have something for me. I thought maybe you had remembered something after all this time, some detail that you forgot earlier.” Her look was so earnest, so pleading, that Catherine hated having to disappoint her.

      “Nothing that I didn’t tell you before.”

      Chang hesitated a moment. “There’s been another one. Several, actually, over the last few months, but a couple of them look awfully similar to your...your case. Yesterday a girl got snatched from a shopping mall. The mother got just a glimpse, but the description she gave us sounded like the same two men.”

      “That poor woman. I wish...I wish I could do something to help her.” Catherine swallowed a lump that rose in her throat and looked away. “There’s something that I’ve...I’ve struggled for hours at a time to understand: how anyone could do what these men do? Can you help me to understand that, Agent Chang?”

      Roby Chang sighed deeply. She had struggled with that same question many times and every answer she came up with ultimately seemed inadequate.

      “I think it’s the innocence of their victims,” she said. “These animals—I won’t call them men, they aren’t that—they see that innocence, what we perceive of as something beautiful and precious, and to them it appears as a stain, as a flaw in their scheme of things, and they feel compelled to remove that stain.” Like all the others, this answer too sounded inadequate when she tried to put it into words.

      “So