Chapter 12

IT WAS A DAY that had been ripped from the pages of a child’s coloring book. Bright yellow sun. Birds tweeting and the flowery smell of summer everywhere. Even the pollarded trees on the hospital green had sprouted flamboyant hands of leaves since I’d last been outside, three weeks before.

A lovely day, for sure, but somehow I couldn’t reconcile life as usual with my creeping feeling that all was not well. Was it paranoia—or was another shoe about to drop?

Cat’s green Subaru Forester cruised around the elliptical driveway at the hospital entrance, and I could see my nieces waving their hands and bouncing up and down in the backseat. Once I strapped into the passenger seat, my mood lifted. I even started singing, “What a day for a daydream —”

“Aunt Lindsay, I didn’t know you could sing,” six-year-old Brigid piped up from the backseat.

“Sure I can. I played my guitar and sang my way through college, didn’t I, Cat?”

“We used to call her Top Forty,” said my sister. “She was like a human jukebox.”

“What’s a joooot box?” asked Meredith, age two and a half.

We laughed and I explained, “It’s like a giant CD player that plays records,” and then I explained what records were, too.

I rolled down the window and let the breeze blow back my long yellow hair as we drove east on Twenty-second Street toward the rows of pretty pastel two- and three-story Victorian houses that stair-stepped up and across the ridgeline of Potrero Hill.

Cat asked me about my plans, and I gave her a big wide-open shrug. I told her I was benched pending the IAB investigation of the shooting and that I had a whole pile of “injured on duty” time I might put to good use. Clean out my closets. Sort out those shoe boxes full of old photos.