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It is a dark and stormy night. The dogs are cowering next to Cath on the couch while Dulcie fetches another bottle of wine. They have yet to grow accustomed to Deadloch's awful late-winter storms, the kind that rattle windows in their frames, tear branches free and send them cartwheeling across the lawn, and fill the cellars with seeping rain.
"Make it a red, sexy!" Cath calls after Dulcie, then returns to murmuring reassurances at the dogs. Fern whimpers and pushes her snout under her forepaw.
"There you are," Dulcie says, and opens the door for Eddie.
Eddie has been standing on the deck for some time now, letting the rain lash at her. She has been watching the bright, warm rectangles of light cast across the storm-tossed lawn.
Her hair is plastered to her head, she's swearing a mile a minute, and, so far, this is just an ordinary night.
After pushing inside, Eddie slaps her belly. "Starving, where's the tucker?"
"You know what happens when someone's late," Cath reminds her.
Fists at her sides, Eddie glowers at Cath. Her jaw works as her eyes narrow. She'd look terrifying, highly intimidating, were it not for the cowlick of hair poking up and the puddle she's standing in.
Cath tilts her head and returns Eddie's gaze. "Go on."
Eddie shoots a glance at Dulcie, then, sagging, sighs and heads for the kitchen. Her dinner is waiting for her there, already packed away in glass vessels wrapped in eco-friendly beeswax-coated fabric.
"You're always feeding Collins," Eddie mutters as she goes. "Seems unfair."
"Different people, different relationships!" Cath calls after her. "Remember what Claire said!"
Eddie grumbles something in reply, but her voice is pitched low enough that the other two can only note that she says something, not what its content is.
What Claire said at their first—and so far only—session as a trio was that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to interpersonal relationships. She used several different metaphors, including, but not limited to: bird song; wild-caught yeast versus the industrially-produced stuff; quantum positioning of atomic elements; and the squabbles of characters on a children's show called Bush Chums. Eddie made far too many jokes out of the last.
Claire also recommended books to read. Cath ordered all of them before the session was even over, and has, by now, read them all. Dulcie was intrigued by The Ethical Slut, but put it back on top of the pile after Cath, seeing it in her hands, gasped sharply. She has been trying to read More to Love: Stories of Non-Conventional Families, but finding it hard-going.
It is not about love. Nor is it sex. Those are concepts with which all three of them, separately and together, have already wrestled, to various degrees of success or defeat.
In fact, it is their inability to name what there is among the three of them that, first, brought them to Claire and now keeps them away, since she said, as gently as possible, that she couldn't help those who could not speak their own truths.
"Sure we can," Eddie had insisted, flushing dark. "'Course we can! Easy as anything, here we go, here we fucking go — ready?"
Cath put a hand atop Eddie's, but Eddie shook her off.
Dulcie cleared her throat, then said, "We're holding several truths in mind at any one time."
Claire nodded excitedly at that, the chain on her glasses hitting the ear-pieces, and leaned forward, jabbing her vape pen at Dulcie. "Yes! Go on, go on. Explore that —"
Before Dulcie could elaborate, however, Eddie blew out a long, wet raspberry through her pursed lips. "Nup. None of that relativism for me, thank you very much."
Cath bounced in her seat. She looked back and forth among their faces. "I —" she started to say, then subsided and sat back, brow furrowed, chewing her lower lip.
"What is it, love?" Dulcie asked her.
"Yeah, York, spit it out," Eddie said.
Claire recrossed her legs and curled over the armrest of her chair toward Cath. "Yes, please. We need to hear from you."
"That's all we ever do!" Eddie protested. The three turned as one to glare at her; against the heat of their combined displeasure, she lifted her chin. "Well, we do. That's why we're here, isn't it? Because she wanted it."
"No," Dulcie said. Always hard to tell with her, whether she was speaking her mind or simply trying to keep the peace. "No, that's not right."
Claire tapped her vape pen against her chin. "Tell us about that, then."
Dulcie rubbed the back of her hand against her forehead. After a moment, she said, "No, that's it. I dispute Eddie's version of events, that's all."
"Going on record, like," Eddie said. She might even have been trying to be helpful.
"Yes." Dulcie smiled. It was a small, private expression, but she did not do large, public ones, did she? "On record."
Cath had her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her shoulders rounded and bowed, her fringe in her eyes. "I'm not a bully."
"No one said that," Dulcie assured her.
Somehow, Eddie managed to keep mum.
Claire, however, chortled. "That's ridiculous! You're one of the most honest, forthright, humane women —"
"Dial it back, mate," Eddie said.
Claire blinked at her, big eyes magnified like strange fish behind her lenses. "Excuse me? Excuse me?"
"She didn't mean anything," Dulcie put in.
"I fucking well did!" Eddie was on her feet now, pacing, seemingly having forgotten entirely about Claire's request that they all keep seated. "Meant what I said, or I wouldn't have said it!"
Sniffling, daubing at her eyes with a tissue extracted from her sleeve, Claire mumbled, "I don't follow?"
"She's just loud, that's all," Cath assured her. "Eddie's truth comes at the top of her lungs."
Eddie stopped pacing then and, planting her fists on her hips, she beamed in Cath's direction. "That's right."
Cath smiled back at her while Dulcie, head swimming, sank back in the upholstery and resisted the urge to close her eyes. She was smiling, too. She'd been smiling so much lately.
In the end, frustrated and confounded, Claire told them not to come back until they could be honest about their truths. Or was it truthful about their honesty? It was some sort of pop-psych mumbo-jumbo, as Eddie said, a koan for unlocking toxic traits and the trauma trails of ingrained behaviours, as Cath put it.
Dulcie was, more than anything else, relieved that the attempt at group therapy had been put aside.
Her relief was difficult to articulate. She did not know what they were to each other and as a group, simply that they are, together.
*
These are the facts, so far as they stand: Ray McLintock, the Deadloch MankillerTM, is dead. Despite this, the case is not yet closed; after the clownish bumbling led by Commissioner Shane Hastings was detailed in an explosive three-part series by Megan Lang, there is talk of a special inquiry by the Minister of Police, even a federal-level commission.
For the first few nights after Ray's death, Eddie crashed on the couch at Cath and Dulcie's. She would get drunk in town, then call Abby to drive her around in search of the Southern Lights. Abby, smartly, instead took her to Dulcie's.
The third night, Eddie showed up on her own, just as they were sitting down to dinner.
By the time the week was out, she was chivvying Dulcie to wrap up the paperwork so they could get home: drumming her fingers impatiently, tossing the keys at Dulcie, even starting up the truck and leaning on the horn while Dulcie was still at her desk.
"What are we supposed to do with her?" Cath asked one night. She'd fallen asleep in her usual way, wet open mouth against Dulcie's shoulder, hand clutching Dulcie's far tit, only to wake with a start several hours later when Eddie knocked over a lamp downstairs on her way back from the bathroom.
"I don't know," Dulcie admitted. Cath settled against her, tucking her head atop Dulcie's arm, and the pressure, the weight, the true soft solidity of her wife's body infused her with the kind of calm and certainty she longed for in the course of ordinary days. She pushed her hand into Cath's thick hair and scratched lightly at her scalp; murmuring happily, Cath bumped her head against Dulcie and wriggled. "What do you think?"
Cath took her time answering. "She needs..." She wiggled again, pulling back a little so she could find Dulcie's gaze with her own. "A lot of attention."
"True." Dulcie drew long spirals down Cath's forearm.
"But we've taken in strays before."
"I don't think she'd appreciate —" Dulcie started to say, but Cath was shaking her head.
"I mean, no! Not like that!"
"All right," Dulcie said. "Like what, then, love?"
"Like home," Cath replied sleepily and tightened her hold on Dulcie as she burrowed closer. "Like what we need."
She informed Eddie of the decision, such as it was, the next morning. Eddie was complaining about the bowel-blasting effects of the uncracked bulghur cereal, so it took her a moment or two to catch up with what Cath was saying.
"Not a charity case," Eddie said first. "Not looking for —"
"We know that," Dulcie put in as smoothly as possible. "But it makes sense, don't you think? Living here, working together."
As she said it, her thoughts filled with several scenarios in which the situation could go terribly, horrifically, astonishingly wrong. There were flames in more than one of those scenarios.
"Maybe," Eddie said. One of her eyes twitched and she kicked the leg of her chair as she thought it over. She and Cath were oddly similar in that way: they think and feel with their entire bodies. There is no gap between what happens internally and what gets expressed outwardly.
Dulcie envies them that. There is so much distance from her heart and her mind to her body. Things get lost along the way, defused and defanged. Shrunken.
Maybe, she thinks as Eddie microwaves her dinner and regales Cath with tall tales from the pub, that's why she loves these two. They keep her in the swim of things, right up front, and will not, ever, let her slip away.