Kate
Spoilers: Mannon, Hostage, Kitty Shot—implied only
Disclaimers: The characters of Matt, Kitty, and Doc are not my creations. Miss Kate is.
The shadows cast by the six tall, floral patterned oil lamps fluttered in much the same way as Kitty's stomach as she paced the distance between her private suites of rooms above the Long Branch.
Even the shot of twenty-year-old brandy didn't quell her discomfort as the impending confrontation drew closer with each passing minute.
Kitty Russell was in a rare state of panic. And she was smart enough to realize it.
Did Kate remember?
How much?
What were Kate's feelings?
Then, worst of all, was the clinging matter of her guilt.
Why had Kate appeared in the saloon?
Why was she dressed as a man, complete with big hat and low-slung, fast-draw holster?
One question led to the next until they'd gone full circle. So many questions. So many needed answers.
The knock on the door shattered her immediate thoughts.
"Kitty."
Matt's strong voice.
"Open the door."
Kate was still and small against his broad chest and wide shoulders, no more than a rag doll as he carried her to the guest bedroom. Doc followed behind, two heads shorter with a stride nowhere near that of the Marshal's.
Matt laid the red headed girl on the bed with a great amount of attention to gentleness. Kitty wasn't surprised. Matt had the capacity for great tenderness.
"You and Doc got some serious explaining to do." Matt straightened and glared from Doc to Kitty.
"I know," Doc started, no hint of contrition in his voice as he felt Kate's pulse, "but I, we," he glanced quickly Kitty, "didn't want the general public to know the boy was really a young woman." He patted the hand he'd just released. "Still can't believe it myself." His shallow crowned hat bounced from side to side as he shook his head. "Never saw anything like it."
Kitty busied her hands and pulled the white bed sheet over the pale orange nightgown Kate wore. It was one of her's and added just a hint of color to the girl's wan face.
"Kitty," Matt stood close, "do you know her?"
She felt the heat of his body but thought only of the possible answers to his question.
She could lie. Again.
She could say yes and get it over with.
She could keep her words to herself.
"Well," Matt said after a reasonable amount of time had passed, "I gotta make rounds. I'll be back in the morning and talk with her then."
"I see what you mean, Doc." Matt paused on the third step from the top of the back landing so he could talk face to face with his old friend.
"Yup. Something's going on there. She hasn't been right since that kid got shot." Doc combed through his bristly mustache with his fat fingers.
A moment of quiet passed between the two men. Comfortable silence. They didn't need to fill the time with idle chatter.
"I'll stay with them for a while. Good night, Matt."
Doc watched Matt descend the rest of the outside staircase and disappear into the alley that separated this block from the one that housed his second floor office. He'd not asked why Matt Dillon was so familiar with the inside of Kitty's private living space. He didn't have to.
On those sleepless nights he had way too many of as he got older, he often observed Matt climbing these very steps. Not that he was a voyeur, he just happened to be looking out his window. Then there were those nights when Kitty's lights stayed on after midnight. He couldn't help it that his window overlooked hers, seen the big man's silhouette.
It didn't surprise him in the least when Matt extracted a key to Kitty's back door as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have in his pocket.
Kitty fairly withered with Doc's intense examination, felt his plea for answers without a word being spoken aloud. Doc had that way about him and right now he was making her down right uncomfortable. Well, he was just adding to an already uncomfortable situation.
"Kitty," his quiet tone was apologetic, "I know I promised I wouldn't push you, but you gotta talk or this is gonna eat you alive."
The old man with the sun browned face tossed his worn and dusty hat on the hook of the corner hall tree.
For an eternity of time, or so it seemed, Kitty felt his careful registering of her every breathe, her every subtle movement. Could he see, she wondered, her lifetime of joys and hardships? The consequences of actions? Her regrets?
Kitty managed to give her old friend and mentor a faint semblance of a smile.
"I haven't seen her in four years." She stood, still feeling the weight of Doc's passionate contemplation. "She's changed, become a woman."
Was she ready? She didn't think so. Her life was already changed and drastically so, by Kate's physical presence. She felt Doc's need to know, his desire to understand her actions. She was his friend and she was worrying him.
"I'd like you to meet," she took a deep cleansing breath of air and freed the words behind her behavior, "Kathryn. My daughter."
Wide open, round eyes, a quick blink, a slack jaw.
"Kind of figured." Doc's composure was back as quickly as he'd lost it. "You know I never pried into your personal life, just let you tell me what you wanted me to know." Doc tugged on his ear lobe and looked anywhere and everywhere but at his friend.
"You old fox." She felt the lifting, if only a little, of her nervousness. At least one other person in Dodge City knew her secret, even if it was only part of it. "Bet you want to know how old she is and who her father is, right?" Kitty offered the man a challenge to be truthful.
Doc gave her a blank stare. "Can't help but wonder."
"She's seventeen. And yes," she waited, made the first two words separate from the last two, "she's Matt's."
The doctor struggled to the thickly padded chair in the corner of the room, the meaning of Kitty's words heavy on his old body.
Her secret lay more exposed now. There was still more to tell.
"After I bought half interest in the Long Branch I didn't take but one cowboy into my bed." She thought back to the intensity of her relationship with the young Matt Dillon. He would have dealt with her chosen profession; but she couldn't. "I had my own income and I didn't have to do the rest. And I certainly didn't want to."
No after knowing Matt Dillon wanted her.
Doc's breathing and color returned to normal. "Why'd you keep it a secret?"
Why indeed?
Kitty tidied the log cabin quilt with its various shades and patterns of yellows and browns while searching for just the right words.
"You don't force something like this on a man like Matt Dillon. We were serious, no doubt about it," she touched Kate's cheek, "but I always knew it wouldn't be wise to burden him with a family, a wife. You know how he is. That would have been too much baggage to carry along with the big badge of his."
If she were courageous enough to tell the rest, she'd have to admit to a fear of which Matt Dillon would have chosen: a wife and family or his badge. She wasn't brave enough to test it.
Kitty knelt in front of her best friend and mentor and reached to cradle his stubbly face within her hands. She hoped he could see the desperation of a situation so many years before.
"But I loved that man then, just like I do now. Matt Dillon's child would have a chance at life. One day I always hoped that Matt and I would be a part of it."
Tears rolled freely down Doc's cheeks. "Matt has no idea." He said the words like the fact it was.
"No."
"Things are different now, Kitty." He nodded to the young woman on the bed. "Matt's got a right to know."
She laid her head on his bony knees and felt the reassuring caress of his hand on her shoulder.
"I'll keep your secret."
"Thanks, Curly." She hadn't called him that in ages. It brought back the image of a much younger man with a smoother face and darker hair. Time passed by quickly.
She felt Doc suddenly fill with energy.
"First I couldn't believe he was a she, now I have a hard time imagining you keeping a secret like this for so long. I just can't believe it."
"I didn't have much of a choice." Kitty was still serious.
"No, I suppose not, especially if you wanted to stay with that stubborn galoot of a marshal."
And that was it. She gave life to Matt's child but chose to give that child away to stay with the man she loved.
"Do you think she knows?"
Kitty nodded.
"I sure don't envy your position. I'll stay with her if you want to go downstairs."
"No, Doc. I've spent too much time away from her already. And when she wakes," an all too familiar shiver of trepidation meandered coldly down her spine, "we're going to a lot to talk about."
"He's a nice man, Mamma."
Her daughter's voice may have been small and weak but the word mamma came out like a foul taste. Kitty's resolve needed the doorframe for support and a grand effort to look into her daughter's alert face.
"Yes, yes he is." She felt her bottom lip quiver. "He's been a very good friend of mine as long as I've been in Dodge City. So," she compelled herself to stand on her own, "how long have you been awake?"
Kate's attempt at a laugh brought a groan of pain. "Long enough to learn a whole lot of things."
"Like who your father is?"
A familiar smile crossed Kate's pale lips. "He's a big man, my Daddy."
"In more ways than one. I'm sorry, Kate," Kitty chided herself for forgetting her manners, "how are you feeling?"
"I'll live."
"That's what Doc said."
Kate's dark blue eyes were watching Kitty's every move. Kitty wasn't certain, but she thought she saw a hint of anger that matched the venom of the word mamma.
"How'd you find me?"
"It wasn't hard." Kate turned toward the heavy curtains that framed the window, away from Kitty.
Perhaps Kate wanted to escape as much as she did.
"Well," Kitty came closer to the edge of the bed, "inform me."
Kate turned back to examine the soft shiny taffeta skirt, moved up from the sunshine orange to the white bodice and long sleeves, to finally rest on Kitty's meticulously painted face and flaming red hair.
Kitty accepted the perusal and ignored the judgment that lay behind the child's eyes.
"Mamma Martha sips too much brandy when she gets upset. Then that tongue of hers gets real loose." A challenge and a threat lay behind those words.
"She didn't like what you did, leaving me for her to raise with her family, only seeing me once in a great while."
Kate used her arms to attempt to raise her upper body to a sitting position.
"Don't think you should be doing that." Kitty put a hand on either side of Kate's shoulders and lightly pushed her back down to the mattress.
"Don't get protective of me now, Kathleen."
The sharpness of those words sliced through Kitty's frail façade of strength and she pulled her hands away as if Kate were a hot coal.
"Mamma Martha did like the money you sent." Kate lifted an unplucked eyebrow. "Came in handy when Daddy Conner started taking up with the whores at the Silver Palace."
"But I thought…"
Kate stared at the ceiling. "Conner, rich man, poor father. He hits her."
"I had no idea."
"Well, that's not surprising, you didn't come around enough to notice and Martha surely wouldn't write about that kind of thing in her letters. She being so proper and all."
Kitty had another reason to regret her seventeen-year-old decision. Perhaps she'd been blinded by her own need, her desperation to place her daughter with married friends that lived as far from Dodge City and Matt Dillon as possible; oblivious to the consequences.
Kitty really wanted to escape through any of the doors to the safety of a room full of anonymous drunk and rowdy cowboys. They'd be infinitely easier to deal with than this blunt-tongued daughter of hers.
Even if Kate was speaking the truth.
But then she'd be leaving. Again. Running out. And with no greater reason than her cowardice.
No. She'd stay and follow through on whatever was going to come out of the child's mouth.
"How'd you find me?" Kitty asked once more with just a modicum of control.
Expressionless, Kate continued. "I always knew I didn't belong to them. No redheads anywhere in that family. They always treated me differently, not bad, just different."
The fingers of Kate's hands joined over her stomach and worked against each other matting the yellow quilt between them. She looked at Kitty, her face still unfriendly.
"And those few times when you came Martha and Conner would fade away and it would be just you and me."
Kitty saw the slight movement in Kate's lower lip.
"You smiled so nice, had the same hair as mine. You bought me, only me, nice things. You were so much fun."
Kate's voice cracked and she forced her words through clenched teeth.
"I hated to see you go. And then you just never came back."
Kate's eyes were sad. Moist.
Kitty took one of Kate's hands in her own without hesitation, pleased that Kate did not recoil from her touch.
"Then," Kate continued, "there was the time Martha forbade me to go to a party. Didn't approve because it wasn't the proper thing for a respectable lady of good breeding to do."
The sarcasm on the words 'good breeding' was not lost on Kitty.
"Said if I went," she met her mother's blue eyes, "I'd turn out just like my fancy Aunt Kathleen."
Kathleen.
The guilt kept piling up. Some of Kate's words were hits of excruciating pain aimed directly at her heart. Kitty knew she should say something. Anything. But no words could be the right ones.
A careful shrug and Kate went on. "I did Martha one better. I went to that party and I never went home again. I've been on my own for five months."
Memories, mostly bad, flooded Kitty's recollection of her own similar independence at Kate's age. The decisions she'd been forced to make bordered on survival. When the hunger got too bad she offered the one thing men would pay her for. She wanted to ask Kate if she'd done the same, but, really, she couldn't stand to know. There was a limit to how much she could handle, be responsible for.
"Martha never said anything about that in her letters."
"I'm sure she didn't." Another one of those smug looks followed. "Wouldn't want to jeopardize that extra income. Oh, that's how I knew where you were. The letters from my Aunt Kathleen."
Kate threw off the covers and swung her feet to the floor as she sat on the edge of the bed. Kitty's hand kept the dizzy girl from pitching one way or the other until the room stopped spinning. Kate followed Kitty's hand to her arm, to her shoulder, until she was looking into the near image of herself.
"Why didn't you come back?"
Kitty circled her daughter with her arms and held her close. Where would she begin? At the beginning when she was young and desperate? Or at the end when one bad situation led into another?
"I just couldn't. We'll talk about, but not now." Kitty took a thick strand of Kate's red gold hair and twirled it in her fingers. "There was never a day that I didn't think of you. Wonder," she kissed Kate's forehead, "what you were doing. How you were."
Kitty felt Kate's body relax, meld into her own. She wondered about the future she would have with a child she barely knew.
The slow rumble of an empty stomach broke the silence.
"You're hungry."
"Mmm."
"We'll just have to do something about that. Are you ready to sit in that chair?"
A nod of agreement then came the question, "Have you ever been shot?"
"Twice."
One of those bullet wounds still ached and when it did it brought back the frightful faces of a pack of human animals. The other? Simply the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"What are you thinking?"
Kitty was thinking too much about one single scenario. She'd given Kate a secure life, even if it was away from her parents, away from the enemies of Matt Dillon.
Things had changed, just like Doc said.
Soon Matt would have two women in his already complicated life, two women who bore an uncanny resemblance to one another. How many others would find out, seek to capitalize on it. Revenge was a strong motivator.
"Let's get you into that chair." Kitty forced the unpleasant thought away. For the moment.
Kitty put both her hands on Kate's cheeks and kissed her again. How had she been able to put this child into another woman's arms and walk away?