She sees it as somewhat of a sign that she ends up with her father on the ride-along thing that Maureen talked her into doing.
Whether or not this is actually the case, Kathleen isn't particularly sure, but what she does know is that she has two hours to pretty much sit around in a car with him. It's awkward enough without the thoughts of the last argument they got into sitting between them, and nothing but silence other than that. When she moved in with her older sister, she didn't realize that their 'home precinct' was the 16th, until she had to ask Maureen about it for the forms she had to fill out.
You knew exactly what you were doing, didn't you, she'd asked, and Maureen had done nothing but give her that same smirk their father got every now and then when they were wrong and he was right, and both parties knew it. Kathleen had ignored it, for the most part, because they'd already come this far, and there wasn't really any point in dropping out. So when the call had come, she'd gotten herself out of bed, gotten dressed and taken the short walk to the precinct.
Ten minutes into it, she already wants to scream.
After another five minutes, she dares to look at her father out of the corner of her eye. He is staring straight ahead, out the windshield, but what it is that he's looking at, she can't see. And she doesn't realize that he knows she's looking until he speaks.
"You aren't invisible, you know."
She nearly laughs. Somehow, she manages to bite down on her lower lip hard enough that she doesn't, but at the same time, she draws blood. The bitter, metallic taste fills her mouth and she wipes at it quickly, with the back of her hand, before Elliot notices. And then she replies.
"Could have fooled me."
When Elliot actually turns to look at her, she has already turned away, to look out the side window, at the people walking by.
He can still remember a time where she was the one who was more likely to talk to him than any of the others. Now, of course, things have changed, because she's grown now, and she's been through the system, and community service, and a whole lot of other things.
"What's that supposed to mean?" he asks, and when the light turns green, he goes, because as much as he wants to just sit there and talk, he knows he can't.
The reflection of Kathleen rolling her eyes at him in the window is not at all lost on him, and he wonders when it is that she changed into this person that he barely knows anymore.
"You know exactly what it means," she informs him, with an air of finality reminiscent of her mother, the same air that tells him to drop it.
But Kathleen is not her mother, and as much as she can make herself sound like she wants him to drop it, she really doesn't.
The last time either one of them played their family's somewhat twisted version of Twenty Questions was before the separation, before everything pretty much got shot to hell and she started hating him and he started wondering what the hell had gotten into her.
But now seems as good a time as any to do it, because there isn't anything else for them to do, and so, Kathleen glances at her father again, briefly, and breaks the silence again.
"If Maureen was the accident, then what was I?"
The question distracts Elliot enough that he nearly misses the fact that this next light has turned red and hits the brake hard enough to send them both flying forward. Kathleen catches herself on the dashboard, hands out to break the impact, and stares at her hands, unwilling to look him in the eye.
"What did you say?" he asks, in that quiet voice that tells her she's either in for it later on or that she's really managed to get to him.
Somehow, she manages to swallow her sudden fear of finding out. "You heard me. If she was the accident, then what was I?"
He doesn't want to answer her, but then again, he does. At the same time, Elliot finds himself wondering if she only agreed with her older sister's theory of doing this stupid ride-along because she wanted him in a place where he couldn't avoid her.
"Your sister wasn't an accident, so to speak," he says. "At least, not as far as most people know. What makes you think it was an accident?"
To hear him admit that he's actually royally fucked something up once in his life amuses her for some reason, but at the same time, it doesn't.
"Maureen and I did the math once, for one of her projects," Kathleen admits, now. "You know she sucks at math. She asked me to help, and I did, and that's how we figured it out, but she's too afraid to say anything."
Once upon a time, Elliot thinks at this, I used to know all of my children's secrets. They go again, and he looks at Kathleen, all twenty years of her, and he wonders what else she knows that she shouldn't know.
"If you're trying to ask me whether I regret it, the answer is no," he says, and she looks up at him, startled by the fact that somehow, he's read her mind.
When they stop again, this time, it's because he's somehow managed to parallel park in front of some random coffee shop that she's never even heard of, but she isn't too surprised that he has. Elliot gets out of the car and motions for Kathleen to follow him; she does.
"You know, your mother and I always meant it when we said that you could tell us anything," he says. "If there's anything you want to ask…"
There are a lot of things that Kathleen would love to ask, but for some reason, all she does is shrug.
"There's nothing, really," she says, and takes the offered plastic cup that holds the iced raspberry mocha drink that she didn't even hear him order and had no idea that he knew that was what she had taken to drinking rather than other things.
"Kat…" Elliot trails off as they go to sit and a low sigh escapes him before he continues. "You might be able to fool your mother, but you don't fool me. What's on your mind?"
Should have figured, Kathleen thinks at this point, also thinking that she's gonna kill Maureen when she gets back to their apartment, for talking her into this. They'd had a conversation about this, once, the two of them, and the twins. About how no matter how much they tried to hide what was going on, their dad the cop always knew about it.
"Too much," she says, staring down at the drink in his hands, and then, "What could you have done that would be bad enough to make Mom leave?"
For once, he is glad that Olivia isn't there. His partner had been highly amused by the fact that he was getting stuck on a ride-along with his own kid, telling him that it served him right after the events of the past two and a half years. He'd rolled his eyes, grabbed the keys off her desk and gone without saying anything, expecting the two hours to be over, just like that.
But then again, a watched pot never boiled; Elliot looks at his watch and is surprised to find that they still have thirty-five minutes left of the first hour.
"There are a lot of things," he admits. "Things that we…didn't want you and the other three to have to know about, so we never said anything."
"So, pretty much, you just wanted us to think that you two were happy with everything and then Mom finally got fed up enough to walk, is that it?"
Her bluntness doesn't surprise him; in fact, he would even go so far as to say that she gets it from him, because it certainly doesn't come from her mother.
"It's more complicated than that," he says, and the pained expression that flits across his face and lasts for all about two seconds isn't at all lost on Kathleen.
The next question that comes out of her mouth actually scares the hell out of her.
"Did you cry?" she asks. "When you came home, and found Mom's note, and saw that all the lights were off, and figured out that we were gone…did you?"
The last time she remembers seeing her father cry, really cry, it was February 21st, 1993, and the only reason she knows this date is because it was the day that the twins were born. But those hadn't been tears of anything except joy, and maybe even relief that nothing had gone wrong, when so many things could have.
The answer to Kathleen's question is one that she halfway expects and doesn't want to hear.
"Yeah, I did," Elliot says, finally, with just enough hesitation that she knows he isn't just trying to give her the runaround. "Probably not what you expected, but…"
She cuts him off. "I did, too," she admits. "When I figured out what Mom was doing, I mean."
If he is surprised by this, it doesn't show, but she doesn't really care, and so she goes on, anyway.
"I hated you both," she says, fiddling with her straw, so she doesn't have to look at him. "I guess it was because it wasn't just Mom, and it wasn't just you, either, but…I don't know. It all got turned upside down and then there was like…nothing."
For a moment, Elliot wonders what she means by 'nothing', but finds that he's almost afraid to ask.
By the time they leave the coffee shop a few minutes later, they aren't arguing, but they're not really talking, either. He wants to know why this bothers him so much now, when it never seemed to before, and realizes vaguely that it probably did, and he just never noticed.
"So, what made you want to be a cop, anyway?" Kathleen asks, when the silence starts getting on her nerves again. Elliot casts a sideways look at her, unlocking the car and getting in. She does the same, and waits.
"I don't know," he tells her. "At first, it was just because I needed to do something, and then it was just one of those things."
One of those things. She knows what he means, even if she doesn't want to admit it, and she shakes her head, almost amused by this.
"There was never a real reason, was there?" she asks. "Just something you felt you had to do?"
"What was I supposed to do, sit around the house all day and do nothing?" Elliot asks, unable to keep from sounding like he wants to laugh at her. "I'd have driven myself up the wall in the matter of a few days."
Kathleen smirks. "Now you know how I feel, having to sit around all day," she tells him, and then, "Ok, so if it was just one of those things to you, then why'd you take the transfer over here into Manhattan?"
"Only place that needed someone when I made detective," says Elliot, because it really is the only reason he took the transfer.
"Department says two years in SVU before people start to burn out," Kathleen says, bringing him back to the present, out of his thoughts. "You've been there since two years before the twins were born. Why?"
That's actually a good question. It hits Elliot at this point that he hasn't actually asked her anything in return, but it doesn't really matter to him.
"I don't…Kat, the department can say what it wants, but it doesn't necessarily make it true. Two years isn't really that long when you think about it."
"Yeah, but seventeen years is," Kathleen counters, "That's almost my entire life, it is the twins' entire life, and technically, according to the department's retirement age, you don't have to retire until Eli's twenty-one, so it'll be most of his life, too."
"Am I to take it that this is a bad thing?"
"You know, we're not as naïve as you think we are. We know how to find things, and we do actually know what the Special Victims Unit really is."
He doesn't miss the sudden hostile note that her voice has taken on, and it makes him sigh.
"There used to be a time where I'd have given anything for the lot of you not to find out," he says. "Your mother was the one that told me it couldn't last forever."
"What couldn't?" Kathleen asks, curiosity piqued by this statement, because she has rarely, if ever, heard of her mother making comment such as this. "The fact that you could keep us from finding out what SVU was, or your marriage?"
A faint laugh escapes Elliot at this, and he turns as the green arrow appears. "At first, it was only the latter."
"Liv called Mom after you got shot in the courthouse, you know."
A brief silence had fallen in between Elliot's answer to Kathleen's question and this remark, which comes as Kathleen stares out the side window, watching people walk by as they drive.
"I didn't know," Elliot says, after a few seconds. "Guess I was more out of it than I thought."
Kathleen turns to look at him, eyebrows raised. "You're always out of it," she tells him, unable to resist the chance to poke at him. "When's the last time you actually knew what one of us was talking about, off the top of your head?"
"That's not being out of it, that's just me getting old."
This time, she laughs. "I wish I had a tape recorder, so I could play that back to you every time you think you know what's going on."
"When I think I know what's going on?"
At this, Kathleen shakes her head. "Ok, let me put it this way. Most of the time, you do know, but when you try to put it all together out loud, it comes out wrong."
"Does it, now?" Elliot trails off, upon realizing that she was trying to distract him from the topic she'd brought up in the first place, and then continues. "Are you gonna tell me how many people were listening in on the conversation Liv had with your mom?"
"You know us too well," Kathleen says under her breath, and this time, Elliot is the one laughing.
"Tell me," he says, and somehow gets the feeling that she will.
She does.
"The twins started it," she confesses. "They saw Liv's cell number on the caller ID and then they heard Mom pick up downstairs in the kitchen, so they went in your room and picked up in there."
"And you just happened to stumble across them doing this?"
"Actually, Maureen did, so she went down and picked up the phone in the living room, then she came into the office and told me to pick up in there."
Elliot shakes his head. "I take it your mother never noticed this," he says, more of a question than an actual statement and Kathleen nods.
"She thinks we only knew that you were in Bellevue 'cause we heard everything on the news," she says.
He remembers, then, waking up, to find the four he'd had at that point standing over him, anxious expressions on their faces until he'd told them it wasn't anything too serious, just his arm.
"She was kinda pissed off that we skived off school to come see you, though," Kathleen is saying when he is paying attention again. There is a somewhat defiant look on her face as she continues. "Totally worth it, though."
"You think?"
"Well…yeah." She bites down on her lower lip again, this time because the thought that he could have actually died has hit her. "I mean, it would've sucked if that kid had shot you in like, the chest or something and you'd like…died."
The last time he'd actually thought about his kids worrying about this particular occupational hazard, it was when he'd had his head slammed full on into a glass window, leaving him temporarily blinded.
"That would be why the department insists that everyone has a partner," he says. "Granted, Liv wasn't there in the courthouse, but she was there, afterwards."
"Why wasn't she in the courthouse?" Kathleen asks, startled by this revelation, and Elliot shrugs.
"She and Fin had something else to deal with and Munch decided to tag along to the courthouse with me," he replies. "Technically, we have assigned partners, but it doesn't mean we can't work with other people."
"Oh." Kathleen fiddles with the charms on the bracelets she's wearing, and goes on. "You and Mom wouldn't have a problem if any one of us wanted to be a cop when we grew up, would you?"
"Please tell me that's not where you're thinking of going," says Elliot, almost worried by this, but Kathleen gives him a sideways look, and shakes her head.
"Nope," she says. "I don't think I'd be able to make it through the training. The twins, on the other hand…"
"Ah. So that's why they wouldn't talk to you this morning."
"I've been ordered to give them details when I get the chance."
"I doubt they'll be impressed. This is about as exciting as it gets, unless something's going on."
The radio in the car crackles then, suddenly, as if someone from dispatch is about to say something, but nothing comes.
"What made you get in the car that night?"
Yep, Kathleen thinks at this point, their family's version of Twenty Questions is definitely more than just a little bit weird. She looks at the clock on the dashboard, and is startled to see that fifteen minutes of the first hour remain.
"You mean the first time I got arrested?" she asks, slowly, and watches Elliot nod out of the corner of her eye.
"Yeah, that night," he says. "What made you do it?"
Kathleen shifts uncomfortably under his gaze, not really wanting to answer, but the rule of the game is that once the question is asked, you have to answer. She mutters something under her breath about how she never should have allowed herself to start playing in the first place. But she answers anyway.
"I wanted to piss someone off," she says. "Not necessarily you or Mom, but just...somebody, so when I got pulled over, I started talking crap to the guys who arrested me, but I wouldn't tell them who I was. And then they found that shield thing you gave me, and it all went from there."
"I see," says Elliot, and then, "Were you really that afraid of what I was going to do?"
She knows exactly what he's getting at, and it makes her look away.
"Yeah, I was," she admits. "Everything was just so screwed up, and everyone just kept talking, you know, all the department kids, and they...well, you know them, they can't ever keep their mouths shut."
"You know, I've been called worse things than Detective "Unstabler", Kat," he tells her.
The shocked expression that crosses her face upon hearing the nickname that she and everyone else had assumed he didn't know about makes him laugh."You weren't supposed to find out about that," she tells him, after a long moment in which he knows she was trying to figure out how she was supposed to reply to this.
"Well, who started it?" Elliot asks, amused. "And for the record, I know it wasn't someone in the department. It sounds a little too 'high school' for that."
"Yeah, it was high school all right," Kathleen mutters, and then, "You remember that day you came by the school to ask me about that one guy?"
The fact that she doesn't remember his name is another source of amusement, but somehow, Elliot manages to keep from saying anything and instead nods. "Yeah, I remember."
"Yeah, well, after you left, those girls I'd been talking to...they were all department kids by the way...they'd been talking about something else while I was talking to you, but they all shut up when they saw me coming back, so I asked 'em if they had anything to hide."
"And they told you."
"Yeah, they told me. How do you think Alyssa fell off the top of the pyramid at the homecoming game that year?"
Elliot looks at her for a long moment and then laughs. "You shouldn't tell me that," he remarks and Kathleen shrugs.
"She doesn't know it was me," she replies. "Besides, she didn't really hurt herself, though it's probably really wrong that I wish she had."
"I would say so, yes," says Elliot, and then, "So she was the one who started it, huh?"
"Yeah. Figured she had the pyramid thing coming."
Elliot turns back to the road and shakes his head. "Y'know, you remind me of my aunt Erin," he says.
Kathleen grins as the image of her father's police captain aunt out on Staten Island comes to mind.
"Nothing wrong with that."
There really isn't, either, Elliot thinks, except for the fact that he knows when Erin gets annoyed with someone, anything that happens to them usually isn't traced back to her. It's never anything serious; usually just something to make everyone else laugh, but the fact remains that it gives the illusion that one can get away with anything.
"Don't you go asking her how to get away with stuff," he says, then, a lame attempt at some kind of warning that Kathleen will probably ignore anyway. Sure enough, she smirks at him.
"How do you know I haven't already?" she asks, and then, "How'd you end up so close to her, anyway?"
"It's a really long story," says Elliot, and from the look that crosses her face, he knows that she's going to wait until he tells her. He sighs. "You really want to know?"
"Well...yeah," says Kathleen. "I mean, if you don't want to talk about it, then I don't have to know, I'll get it if you tell me to back off."
"I'm not going to tell you to back off, it's just that...it really is a long story, and I don't think an hour is long enough to tell you with all the questions you might have."
"You're off shift in an hour; Olivia told me when I came in. If you really don't want to talk about it, just tell me."
Elliot looks at the dashboard clock and then at her. "I haven't eaten all day," he says. "We'll go somewhere, and then we can talk."
Ironically, they end up at the same place they were when she showed him exactly how easy it is for underage kids to get alcohol just because they look old enough, and the same place they were when he burned her license.
"What is it with you and this place?" she asks. Elliot shrugs.
"Your mother and I used to bring you guys to this place, when you were all younger and it was easier to get you all in the car at the same time," he says. "Guess it's just habit."
Kathleen wonders how many times he wandered into this place, then, during the time in which her parents were separated, but not counting the two times he came with her, if it's just 'habit'. Familiarity is comforting, she muses, especially when you don't know where things are going to go.
"So, are you gonna tell me about why you and Aunt Erin are so close?" she asks, finally, when they sit, across from each other.
"I had issues with my parents, kinda like you have with me," Elliot says, dryly. "Some days, it got to the point where I thought I'd drive myself nuts if I stayed in Queens any longer, so I went to Manhattan and jumped over to the island."
"Isn't that where your mom's family is from, anyway?"
"Yeah, it is, but I couldn't tell you where in the city everyone else ended up. There are so many people married into the McGuire family, one can hardly tell where it all began anymore."
Kathleen laughs. "Y'know, I actually sat and tried to figure it out once," she admits. "It was easy enough with Grandma, and Aunt Molly, and Aunt Erin and Aunt Angie, but after that it got complicated."
"Too many kids and not nearly enough people to marry 'em off to," Elliot says, amused, even if it isn't exactly true. "Seriously, though, Kat, the reason I'm closer to her than to my own parents is because they never really made any effort to hide the fact that I was, to put it nicely, a surprise."
She knows almost at once what he means, and she gapes at him.
"You're kidding me," she says, almost startled. "That's not...well, never mind."
"You asked," Elliot tells her, without looking at her. "I think it's a little late for 'never mind', now. But there is one thing I want you to understand, Kat, and that one thing is that no matter what anyone else has to say about it, no matter what else you might have heard, I was always going to come home if your mom wanted me to."
She knows that what he means, what he's leaving unsaid is that he would have come back regardless of the fact that her mom got pregnant again and eight months later got into a car wreck and had a baby and everything else that came in between.
"So, when they found out that Mom was pregnant with Maureen, what'd they do?" she asks.
He knows that he should have figured she was going to ask that, but as it is, he hadn't been thinking about it, hadn't really been thinking about anything at all besides wondering what the hell was making her want to know all of this all of a sudden, because the truth was, he didn't really want to talk about it. But if the rules of the game applied to her, then they applied to him as well.
"Well, they're the reason why your mother and I lived with Erin until a couple of months before you were born, and even then, we stayed on the island until you were four."
She remembers this. "You ever wish you'd stayed out there instead of moving into Queens?"
Elliot laughs. "Not really," he says. "You stay out there long enough, you start getting tired of it; I still don't see how Mike managed to work out there for ten years, but that's beside the point. Why do you want to know all of this, anyway?"
Kathleen shrugs. "I don't know," she says. "Maureen said the only reason she wanted me to do this was 'cause she was tired of me always complaining about you and Mom and everything else, and she wanted me to talk to you."
"Presumably in a place where she knew I wouldn't be able to get away from it."
"Hey, I gave you a chance to get out of it; if you don't wanna talk to me, you're perfectly welcome to drop me off at the apartment on your way back to the precinct."
"The rules say two hours."
"Since when do you ever follow the rules?"
This question is what makes Elliot wonder exactly how long his children have been following his career, because he knows that over the past couple of years, the press has been all over anything, though he can't for the life of him figure out why this is.
"You know, sometimes if you go by the book, things get more screwed up than they already were. The rules aren't always in black and white, either," he tells her, "But you're changing the subject again. You didn't tell me why you want to know all of this."
"Dad...I don't know, all right? I really don't. If I'd known everything was screwed up from way back when you were a kid, I wouldn't have started, 'cause hell, I wouldn't want to talk about it, either, which is why I'm changing the subject now."
"But you don't have to change the subject. If you really want to know everything, then ask."
"I don't want to ask. This isn't something I should've asked about in the first place. Does Mom even know about this, or is that one of the reasons why she left?"
"It wasn't because of that. And yes, she does know, because she grew up with me. Well...close by, anyway. We didn't actually know each other until high school, but there you have it."
She's heard the term 'opening a can of worms' many a time before, but never knew what it really meant until now. In all the years that she's been in this world (twenty-one in July, and old enough to drink, she thinks, and pushes the thought away, quickly), she never would have thought that there was something like this that happened in her father's life.
"Is that why you were always so pissed off all the time?" she asks, tentatively. "Because it was all starting to come out on the surface and you didn't want to deal with it, so you just got mad at everything?"
"It's part of it, yes," Elliot admits, even though he doesn't want to. "Kat, you know...I was never mad at you, or your siblings, or your mother, even after she left and took you all with her, because I know why she left."
"Why, then?"