Before Angie there was Eileen Mack, who hopped an Amtrak in her graduation gown and was next seen a few years later on Starsky and Hutch. In twenty-six minutes, she met Starsky, slept with him, gained Hutch’s approval (though it was touch-and-go there for a while), and accepted Starsky’s stumbling marriage proposal. By the next commercial break, she was dead, and Starsky went on a rampage and found her killer and blew him away with a fierce, righteous look on his face, and the episode ended with him standing over her grave in the rain and we were left knowing he’d never get over her.
By the next episode, he had a new girlfriend and Eileen was never mentioned or seen again by Starsky or Hutch or anyone in the neighborhood.
Kara’d gone to New York after a year at U/Mass and that’s the last I’d heard of her, too. Angie and I had actually seen her board the bus as we came out of Tom English’s one afternoon. It was the middle of summer, and Kara stood across the avenue at the bus stop. Her natural hair color was a wispy, wheaty blonde, and it blew in her eyes as she adjusted the strap on her bright sundress. She waved and we waved back and she lifted her suitcase as the bus pulled in and scooped her up and took her away.
Now her hair was short and spiky and ink black and her skin was pale as bleach. She wore a sleeveless black turtleneck tucked into painted-on charcoal jeans, and a nervous, half-gasping sound, almost a hiccup, punctuated the ends of her sentences.
“Nice day, huh?”
“I’ll take it. Last October, we had snow by this time.”
“New York, too.” She chuckled, then nodded to herself and looked down at her scuffed boots. “Hmm. Yeah.”
I sipped some more coffee. “So how you doing, Kara?”
She put her hand over her eyes again, looked at the slow-motion morning traffic. Hard sunlight glanced off the windshields and shafted through the spikes of her hair. “I’m good, Patrick. Really good. How about you?”
“No complaints.” I glanced at the avenue myself and when I turned back she was looking into my face intently, as if trying to decide whether it attracted or repelled her.
She swayed slightly from side to side, an almost imperceptible movement, and I could hear two guys shouting something about five dollars and a baseball game through the open doorway of The Black Emerald.
She said, “You still a detective?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Good living?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“My mom mentioned you in a letter last year, said you were in all the papers. A big deal.”
I was surprised Kara’s mother could climb out of the inside of a scotch glass long enough to read a paper, never mind write her daughter a letter about the experience.
“It was a slow news week,” I said.
She looked back at the bar, ran a finger above her ear as if tucking back hair that wasn’t there. “What do you charge?”
“Depends on the case. You need a detective, Kara?”
Her lips looked thin and oddly abandoned for a moment, as if she’d closed her eyes during a kiss and opened them to find her lover gone. “No.” She laughed, then hiccupped. “I’m moving to L.A. soon. I landed a part on Days of Our Lives.”
“Really? Hey, congrat—”
“Just a walk-on,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m the nurse who’s always fiddling with papers behind the nurse who stands at the admitting desk.”
“Still,” I said, “it’s a start.”
A man stuck his head out of the bar, looked to his right, then to his left, saw us through bleary eyes. Micky Doog, part-time construction worker, full-time coke dealer, a former local heartthrob from Kara’s age group, still trying to hold the line of his youth against the advance of a receding hairline and softening muscles. He blinked when he saw me, then stuck his head back inside.
Kara’s shoulders tensed, as if she’d felt him there, then she leaned in toward me and I could smell the sharp odor of rum floating from her mouth at ten in the morning.
“Crazy world, huh?” Her pupils glinted like razors.
“Um…yeah,” I said. “You need help, Kara?”
She laughed again, followed it with a hiccup.
“No, no. No, I just wanted to say hey, Patrick. You were one of the big brothers to our crew.” She tilted her head back toward the bar so I could see where some of her “crew” had ended up this morning. “I just wanted to, you know, say hi.”
I nodded and watched tiny tremors ripple the skin along her arms. She kept glancing at my face as if it might reveal something to her, then looked away when it didn’t, only to come back to it a second later. She reminded me of a kid with no money standing in a group of kids with plenty at an ice cream truck, as if she were watching cones and chocolate éclairs pass over her head into other hands, and half of her knew she’d never get one, and the other half
held out hope that the ice cream man might hand her one out of error or pity. Bleeding inside from the embarrassment of wanting.
I pulled out my wallet and extracted a business card.
She frowned at it, then looked at me. Her half-smile was sarcastic and a bit ugly.
“I’m fine, Patrick.”
“You’re half in the bag at ten in the morning, Kara.”
She shrugged. “It’s noon somewhere.”
“Not here, though.”
Micky Doog stuck his head out the door again. He looked directly at me and his eyes weren’t as bleary, emboldened by some blow or whatever else he was selling these days.
“Hey, Kara, you coming back inside?”
She made a little movement with her shoulders, my card dampening in her palm. “Be right in, Mick.”
Micky seemed ready to say more, but then he patted the door in a drum beat, nodded once and disappeared inside.
Kara glanced at the avenue, stared at the cars for a long time.
“You leave a place,” she said, “you expect it to look smaller when you come back.” She shook her head and sighed.
“It doesn’t?”
She shook her head. “Looks just the fucking same.”
She took a few steps backward, tapping my card against her hip, and her eyes widened as she looked at me and rolled her shoulders elaborately. “Take care, Patrick.”
“You too, Kara.”
She held up my card. “Hey, now that I got this, right?”
She tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans and turned toward the open doorway of The Black Emerald. She stopped then, turned and smiled at me. It was a wide, gorgeous smile, but her face seemed unaccustomed to it; her cheeks quivered around its edges.