Cities of Refuge by Michael Helm Page A

practice.”
    “Well, take it up with the ancients, I guess.”
    “Oh, I do.” He laughed. “I debate daily with the Ancient of Days.”
    They talked about their courses and students, and the vague sense of the world at large bearing down on them. Father André asked about Marian – she’d been first diagnosed the winter of the lecture series – and Harold gave him the short answer.
    “If you’d like to talk about that, I’m certainly your man, Harold.”
    “Thank you. Thanks. No, actually, I wanted to get together with you because of my daughter, Kim.”
    Harold hadn’t realized he could say anything at all to another about Kim. He wasn’t sure, starting into it, that he could tell it fully, but he just kept talking and let the story run where it would.Kim emerged in the telling as a serious woman full of unrestrained heart, or love, he supposed, and anger, maybe a few notes of spite. She was not always aware of her own motives. You couldn’t really know her without watching her carefully, but even then there was something elusive. She had ascetic tendencies that seemed to distance her from her generation. New technologies didn’t interest her. She had few amusements. Few friends. She was purposeful but directionless, or at least without professional ambitions. It was not just his fatherly imagination, he stressed, that she was possessed of an enormous power that had no apparent means of expression or becoming, and he was worried this power, an intelligence, a talent, if contained much longer would grow sinister and begin to ruin her.
    Then he told the priest about the attack. He had never told anyone about it – either people had heard or they hadn’t – and he was surprised at how hard it was. He wanted to leave out the details but found himself describing them. At some point he became aware of himself trying to get the story right, and he thought of how much harder the telling must be for Kim, and his voice began to constrict and he had to leave off.
    Father André was sitting back. He’d received it all with an expression of pained but warm understanding. Harold knew the look would stay in his mind and do good there.
    “To think of what’s loose out here.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Harold. How can I help?”
    Harold had an image of himself, a rodent poking his nose out into the light of the calamitous world. The priest was at home in it. Harold hadn’t been for most of his adult life. It was obvious to both of them. But the man respected him. Around Father André Rowe, Harold almost respected himself.
    “She used to work with rejected refugee claimants. As you do, or your church does. She volunteered for an organization called GROUND .”
    “I know it. They do important work.”
    “But the work made her vulnerable. I’m not saying she was naive, but she told her mother once about never knowing enough at GROUND , never being able to see all the things in play at a given time. The faces, the body language. And in that kind of world, even an ounce of ignorance and you pay the consequences.”
    “You said the attacker wasn’t caught.”
    “She might have been followed. Which means she was chosen in some way.”
    “Chosen at random?”
    “It might be she was followed from her apartment building. That the attacker waited for her there. That he knew where she lived, and knew her. And the attacker didn’t speak English. Neither did most of her clients. And he was dark-skinned, but not black. She works with a lot of Central and South Americans because of her Spanish.”
    “Is this the police theory?”
    “Not exactly.”
    “Is it her theory?”
    “She doesn’t want to examine these questions.”
    The priest met his eye. Harold supposed he was wondering about him as a figure in his daughter’s life. Would he ask for the salient facts, for direct admissions? He was sure the man inferred it all at some level anyway.
    “Not knowing her myself, Harold, I can say only that her soul must