Speaking in Tongues

more . . .”
    “Enduring?”
    “That’s it. Yes. You always know the right word.”
    He said, “I never had any idea what you were thinking about back then.”
    Bett’s thoughts might have been on what to make for dinner. Or King Arthur. Or a footnote in a term paper. She might have been thinking of a recent tarot card reading.
    She might even have been thinking about him.
    “I was always afraid to say anything around you, Tate. I always felt tongue-tied. Like I had nothing to say that interested you.”
    “I don’t love you for your oratorical abilities.” He paused, noting the tense of the verb. “I mean, that’s not what attracted me to you.”
    Then reflected: Oh, she’s so right—what she’d said earlier . . . We humans have this terrible curse; we alone among the animals believe in the possibility of change—in ourselves and those we love. It can kill us and maybe, just maybe, it can save our doomed hearts. The problem is we never know, until it’s too late, which.
    “You know when I missed you the most?” she said finally. “Not on holidays or picnics. But when I was in Belize—”
    “What?” Tate asked suddenly.
    She waved lethargically at a yellow jacket. “You know, you and I always talked about going there.”
    They’d read a book about the Mayan language and the linguists who trooped through the jungles in Belize on the Yucatán to examine the ruins and decipher the Indian code. The area had fascinated them both and they planned a trip. But they’d never made the journey. At first they couldn’t afford it. Tate had just graduated from law school and started working as a judge’s clerk for less money than a good legal secretary could make. Then came the long, long hours in the commonwealth’s attorney’s office. After that, when they had the money saved up, Bett’s sister had a serious relapse and nearly died; Bett couldn’t leave home. Then Megan came along. And three years after that they were divorced.
    “When did you go?” he asked.
    “Three years ago January. Didn’t Megan tell you?”
    “No.”
    “I went with Bill. The lobbyist?”
    Tate shook his head, not remembering who he was. He asked, “Have a good time?”
    “Oh, yeah,” she said haltingly. “Very nice. It was hotter than Hades. Really hot.”
    “But you like the heat,” he remembered. “Did you see the ruins?”
    “Well, Bill wasn’t into ruins so much. We did see one. We took a day trip. I . . . Well, I was going to say—I wished you’d been with me.”
    “Two years ago February,” Tate said.
    “What?”
    “I was there too.”
    “No! Are you serious?” She laughed hard. “Who’d you go with?”
    Her face grew wry when it took him a moment to remember the name of his companion.
    “Cathy.”
    He believed it was Cathy.
    “Did you get to the ruins?”
    “Well, we didn’t exactly. It was more of a sailboarding trip. I don’t believe it . . . Damn, how ’bout that. We finally got down there. We talked about that vacation for years.”
    “Our pilgrimage.”
    “Great place,” he said, wondering how dubious his voice sounded. “Our hotel had a really good restaurant.”
    “It was fun,” she said enthusiastically. “And pretty.”
    “Very pretty,” he confirmed. The trip had been agonizingly dull.
    Her face was turned toward a distant line of trees. She was thinking probably of Megan now, and the Yucatán had slipped far from her thoughts.
    “Let me take you home,” he said. “There’s nothing more we can do tonight. We should get some rest. I’ll call Konnie, tell him about Sharpe.”
    She nodded.
    They drove to Fairfax and he pulled up in front of her house. She sat in the front seat in silence for a while.
    “You want to come in?” she asked suddenly.
    His answer was balanced on the head of a pin and for a long moment he didn’t have a clue which way it was going to tilt.
    Tate pulled her to him, hugged her, smelled the scent of Opium perfume in her hair. He said, “Better not.”

Chapter Eighteen
    Crazy Megan reveals her true self.
    She isn’t crazy at all and never has been. What C.M. is is furious.
    He’s going down, she mutters. This asshole Peter is going down hard.
    Megan McCall was angry too but she was much less optimistic than her counterpart as she moved cautiously through the corridors of the hospital, clutching three boxes of plastic dining utensils under her arm and her glass knife in the other.
    Though she was feeling better physically,