5

5

DR. CATHY ELINGBURG'S office was north of the airport in Playa Vista, an area known as Silicon Beach because of all the tech companies and start-ups located there. Elingburg's practice was largely made up of young tech types with competition paranoia and sleep disorders. As far as Ballard knew, she was the only law enforcement officer on Elingburg's roster of clients, and that was how Ballard preferred it. She wanted no one with a badge to possibly know she was seeing a therapist on a weekly basis. It might be well into the twenty-first century, but a cop seeing a therapist was still viewed by other cops as a sign of weakness.

She arrived early and sat in the waiting room, studying the framed diplomas from UNC Chapel Hill and Elon. Both were awarded to Helen Catherine Sharpe, an indication that Elingburg was a surname she took through marriage. In the eight or so months Ballard had been seeing her, she had not gotten around to asking how someone who had been schooled in North Carolina ended up in Silicon Beach.

At noon, Ballard heard the exit door from the office open and close. The office was designed so that a departing client did not pass through the waiting room where the next client was sitting. It was a privacy that Ballard appreciated.

Moments later, the door to the office opened and the doctor welcomed Ballard into the rectangular space. To the left was a desk; to the right was a seating area that looked like a basic living room, with two couches, one on either side of a coffee table, and solo seats on the ends. Their habit was to sit across from each other on the couches, and Ballard took her usual spot.

"Water?" Elingburg asked. "Coffee?"

"No, I'm fine," Ballard said.

Elingburg started with a discussion about the next Monday being Presidents' Day and a holiday. She told Ballard that she wouldn't be seeing clients in the office that day, and they could either move their standing appointment to a different day or do it by Zoom with Elingburg connecting from her home. They decided on an office appointment on the following Tuesday and then got to work.

"So, let's begin. How is your day going?"

"Well, it didn't start out well. I mean, at first it was good—I was on the water—but then it went to shit."

"What happened? Work?"

"No, work is actually okay. But I got ripped off when I was on the water. I went up to Staircases because the apps said that was the break that was happening. But up there, you park behind the bluffs. You can't see your car from the water, and somebody was there watching. Had to be. They saw me hide my key. When I got back from the water, my badge, my wallet with my credit cards and police ID, and my gun were gone."

"Oh my gosh."

"Oh, yeah, and my phone. I spent part of the morning at the Apple Store. So not a good start."

"What happens now? You tell your boss and they investigate?"

"I haven't told anyone. I'm supposed to report it, but if I do that, I could lose my job."

"What? It was not your fault."

"Doesn't matter. If I were a man and I reported it, they might put a ding in my jacket for being careless. But for me, I'm not so sure. Like we've talked about before, I'm on thin ice downtown. There are people just waiting for me to fuck up so they can transfer me to the boondocks or get rid of me altogether. The job I have right now is where I need to be. It's where I know I make a difference. So I can't report this because it might be the thing that drives them to say, ‘You know what, we're going to make a change.'"

"But you can't go around without a badge or a gun."

"I have a backup weapon and a boot gun the thief somehow missed in the car." Ballard opened her jacket to show her backup holstered on her hip.

"What about the badge?"

"Well, I have to get it back."

"How?"

"I'm going to track down whoever the fuck took it."

Elingburg just nodded as if considering whether that was a good plan or not.

"Anyway, things got better after that," Ballard said. "We got a good case going."

"What is a good case?" Elingburg asked.

"Mostly a case where the suspect has a pulse. And also is out there living his life and thinking he got away with it. Somebody you get to put the cuffs on."

"You get a good charge from that."

"Fucking A right, I do. It's what it's all about."

Elingburg nodded again and changed the subject. "Anything new on your mother?"

"No. Nothing."

The last Ballard heard about her mother, she was living somewhere in Maui, the Hawaiian island where Renée had been abandoned at age fourteen—until Tutu had found her and taken her to California.

Maui had been ravaged by wildfires six months ago. The town of Lahaina was destroyed and the remains of nearly a hundred people had been recovered so far in the ash. Many were unidentified. Makani Ballard was believed to have lived on the east side of the island, away from the fires, but she likely frequented Lahaina to shop and seek work. At the moment, she was listed among the missing.

"I called Dan, my contact in Maui, last week but they don't have anything new," Ballard said. "They still have so many UBs that it's going to go on for months."

"UBs?"

"Unidentified bodies."

"Oh."

"We shorten everything in the cop world. My guy over there works for something called the MINT."

"Which means what?"

"Morgue Identification and Notification Task Force. That's a horrible name so we shorten it, give it a catchy acronym."

"Understandable. This not knowing about your mother, whether she's even alive—has it softened your feelings about her at all?"

There were shelves lining the wall behind Elingburg's couch that were filled with books and small statues and other knickknacks. There was also a framed mirror on a stand that Elingburg had previously told Ballard was used in therapy sessions with clients who had body-image problems. Ballard could see herself in the mirror now as she considered Elingburg's question. She saw the stress in her dark eyes and realized that she had been so preoccupied with the theft of her badge and gun that morning that she had forgotten to pull her sun-streaked hair into a ponytail for work. It fell, unbrushed and straggly, to her shoulders.

"Softened my feelings…" Ballard said. "No, not really. I feel like if she's gone, I've missed my chance to get an answer from her."

"Answer to what?" Elingburg asked.

"You know, why she fucking went off into the hills and left me like that."

"Abandoned you, you mean."

Ballard nodded. "I guess it's kind of hard to say that when it's your own mother," she said.

"That's the self-blame we've been talking about since you came to me," Elingburg said. "It's not on you, Renée. Your mother did this to you. And you did nothing to deserve it."

"But I don't get why she didn't see enough in me to stick around. I mean, we had a home, we had the water, we had a horse. She had me, but somehow… it wasn't enough for her."

Elingburg kept a notebook and pen on the coffee table. For the first time during the session, she picked them up and wrote something down.

"What did you write?"

"‘Vicarious trauma.'"

"Which means what?"

"It's when you share someone else's trauma. People with jobs where they see tragedy and trauma all the time—police, firefighters, ER workers, soldiers—it has a second-tier effect on them."

"What about therapists? Do they get it?"

"They can, yes."

"What's it got to do with my mother?"

"Well… I think maybe subconsciously you have masked the trauma of losing your father and being abandoned by your mother with vicarious trauma from your work. Taking on the pain of others camouflages your own. And that was your shield for many years, until the death of your grandmother left you with no one but your lost mother somewhere out there. It's bubbling up to the surface, and that's what causes your insomnia. It's all coming to the conscious mind."

Ballard thought about this. It was true that she had felt the need to talk to someone shortly after Tutu passed. It was ironic that she had been telling Elingburg about her mother in weekly installments when the fires swept through Maui and possibly took her life. It was almost as if the anger and hurt she'd spewed out in the sessions had ignited the flames.

"So," Ballard finally said, "what do I do about it?"

"Well, as I've been saying all along, you have to stop blaming yourself for your mother's choices," Elingburg said. "You have to remember that both of you were abandoned by your father. His—"

"Wait a minute. He drowned. He didn't abandon us."

"You're right. It wasn't an intentional abandonment. It wasn't a choice, like your mother's. He drowned. But he died pursuing a lifestyle that he knew could be dangerous. So his leaving was like an abandonment of you both. She handled it poorly, but, you know, some people are not as strong as others. You are strong, Renée. So you have shouldered this weight in your mind, but sometimes the mind grows tired and drops its defenses, and things come forward."

Ballard was silent as she considered this. She had come to Elingburg a month after Tutu had peacefully slipped away in hospice. The insomnia had begun soon after her death, and a Google search had produced Elingburg as a sleep-disturbance expert.

"And I know today was bad with your things getting stolen at the beach," Elingburg said. "But don't let that deter you from going. The water is your salvation. You need to get out on the water as much as you can."

"Don't worry. I will."