After (12 page)

“Of what?”

Carson has never dared to think about why he became a thief, not even when he confessed the transgression to Eric, yet he says with absolute certainty, “My life. I felt in control of my life. It only lasted a few minutes, the time it took to strong-arm them and take their wallet. But the look on their faces. That look always eventually shot my high. Watching them fumble in their pockets, sweat, plead with me not to do anything to hurt them, all that cut right through the alcohol or the weed. But for those first brief moments when those people looked at me, when I caught them by surprise, they saw me. I had their attention.”

“The way you could never get the attention of Jimmy Blake?”

“It wasn’t about him. I was drunk. High. Stupid. Young.”

“Yes, but you were also everything your stepfather said you’d end up being.”

“It wasn’t about him,” Carson insists, refuting his conclusion that Jimmy Blake inspired his crime spree, so angry that the specter of Jimmy Blake looms over this moment, that he feels as though there is an apocalyptic tremor shattering his vision of his world.

“I think you know it was about him, Carson.”

“I could take him on. I didn’t need those people to stand in for him. He was a punk. A bully.”

“Weren’t you?” she asks, leaning forward, sliding a few inches closer to Carson when he turns in retreat from her gaze. Carson looks at his watch, hoping the session is over, and Carrie tells him, “You’re my last client of the day—we can go longer if we have to. How long did all this go on?”

“A couple months. We musta done thirteen, fourteen robberies, all three of us together like that. Each of us taking a turn.” Carson reveals this reluctantly, fully aware that he cannot untell the story he has begun. “Usually it was women, old people, White people, who we figured would be scared of us without us having to use a weapon. We’d toss the credit cards and spend the money. It even got in the papers. We did so many that I guess the cops figured all the reports pointed to a pattern, a serial robber or a gang. I guess that’s what we were. A gang. They wanted to warn the public. It wasn’t even about the money after a while. We couldn’t stop doing it. I knew we’d get caught, and part of me didn’t care. Because I was usually stoned when we did it, I’d wake up the next morning and I’d feel dead. And I could only vaguely recall why I felt so bad.”

“How did you manage at home and with your parents?”

“I stayed in my room behind a locked door, looking at the things I collected from the people I robbed. A wallet, a driver’s license, store receipts. I didn’t want to be around my mother at all. I felt so guilty. And I was sure that Jimmy knew I was involved, that when he looked at me he could see what I’d done. It was my senior year. One night over dinner Jimmy started talking about the robberies, saying what he’d do if somebody tried to rob him, how he’d beat the crap out of them. ‘Don’t you think a man or woman’s got a right to defend themselves, Carson?’ he asked me.

“He damn near gave a sermon, telling me that whoever was robbing those people wasn’t just stealing money but their peace of mind. Told me the victims would have flashbacks, would be afraid to go out of their houses or go to the store. ‘I’m just giving you something to think about, that’s all. You been staying out awful late recently. You sure you ain’t got something you want to tell me, your mama? The police?’ he asked me. My mother was sitting at the dinner table between us and she kept looking at me and looking at him. Each time she looked at me after looking at him there was more surprise and more questions in her eyes. I wondered if he’d been in my room, looking through my drawers. Maybe he found those things I’d kept. I figured he’d call the police. I was sure it was just a matter of time. I got up from the table. I couldn’t stand them staring at me like that. Both of them. Jimmy stood up and bounded over to me and held me in place so I couldn’t move. I was struggling to break free of his grip. The next thing I knew we were on the floor and my fingers were around his neck. My mother’s scream made me try to choke him even harder. Then I felt his steak knife against my groin. It drew blood. And I’ll never forget, there wasn’t an ounce of fear in his eyes. But I was scared. Of what I was pretty sure by then he suspected. That knife cut through the fog I’d been living in. I’d been bleeding inside for a long time anyway.

“After that night I stopped robbing people, and so did Keith and Damion. We never got caught, but I never felt like I got away with anything. I never forgot the things I’d done. And before today I never told anyone but my friend Eric.”

“But Jimmy Blake got you off the streets. You owe him that much. You said when you robbed those people you felt in control. You said the night of the shooting you wanted to take control of the stop. You couldn’t control what your mother did. Who your father was. What Jimmy Blake denied you. You’ve been trying to control things for a long time, haven’t you? Isn’t that why you joined the force? So you could take control, be in control, and so nobody could ever hurt you?”

Carson sits awash in a split second of living death and resurrection, this moment and every moment he’s lived suddenly clear through the fog of denial and shame. He sits across from Carrie, wondering why he’s not on the floor howling. Her words have sparked a cataclysm that rumbles and roils in his stomach and his groin and that breaks the seal on his heart.

“Yeah,” he whispers, gruffly, the word lodged like a pebble in his throat, offered up so unwillingly that Carrie Petersen has to read his lips.

“I always figured one day I’d have to pay for all the bad things I did. I’m paying now. That man I killed was doing good things with his life. He’s dead. I was a thief. I was illegitimate and hated the man who gave me his name. I’m a murderer and I’m alive. Tell me what sense that makes?”

They talk
mostly when they meet about where they find rare moments of balance: for Carson, working with his hands; for Matthew Frey, writing a novel based on several cases he’s handled. When Carson comes to see him, Frey ushers him into his office, watches Carson sit in the chair across from him, and leans back in his swivel chair, his shock of prematurely white hair thick and tousled, wearing what Carson now knows is his uniform—white tie-less shirt and khakis—and asks him, “How’s work?” When Carson first told Matthew that he built furniture in his spare time, Matthew urged him to develop the hobby into a livelihood, suggested he take pictures of his pieces and put them in an album, urged him to get business cards, have an open house one weekend afternoon to display his furniture for invited friends and potential clients. And he has jovially monitored Carson’s progress, his willingness to turn a hobby into a business.

“I get lost down there sometimes,” Carson tells him this day. “Lose track of time, and even though I often have a blueprint for a cabinet, or a shelf, there’ll always come this moment when all those lines dissolve and I’m sawing and cutting and shaving from pure instinct.”

“I finished the chapter I told you about last time,” Frey announces, raising his arms and threading his fingers behind his head. “And the motive was totally different from what I thought it was.”

He’s written five novels, which various literary agents have rejected, and talks about the novel he’s writing now as a kind of mental Olympics that keeps him up until 2:00 a.m. some nights.

“You said you were going to a writers’ conference in Tennessee?”

“Oh yeah, I was the only man in the class. I’m convinced, women are the superior species.” Frey laughs. “The workshop leader liked what I’d written and we’ve been in touch by e-mail. She said to get back to her when I’m finished.”

“Good luck,” Carson tells him.

“I wanted to see you today to let you know that the grand jury will be impaneled next week. I wanted to talk to you about this even though you won’t testify.”

He’s been waiting for months for this to happen, and now that it has, Carson is unsure what he feels. “I still don’t understand why I can’t tell them what happened.”

“You can’t tell them what happened because I can’t be in the room with you during your testimony. You’d be asked why you didn’t wait for backup, what the procedures are for a stop like the one that night, why you pulled your weapon on Paul Houston.”

Those are the questions he has asked himself two, three thousand times a day. They are the questions he’ll be asked if there is a trial, the questions Internal Affairs will ask. The questions for which, despite the routine prep he undergoes with Matthew for the inevitable Internal Affairs inquiry, he still feels he has no answers. “What do you think will happen?”

“I’m not going to promise or predict,” Matthew tells him with a shrug, as though insulted by the inquiry.

“I could be indicted on murder, manslaughter, voluntary manslaughter, right?”

“Murder would be highly unlikely. If there was an indictment, it would most likely be involuntary manslaughter. Let’s go over again the basics of what happened that night. You knew backup was on the way, correct?” Matthew isn’t even looking at Carson, his eyes are cast out the window, staring at a small plane thousands of feet in the air yet passing his window with an eerie illusion of closeness.

“Yes.” Matthew has told him not to elaborate on yes or no unless asked.

“The movement of his hand reaching into his groin, that’s what made you afraid for your life?”

“Yes.”

“He kept walking toward you and even though you told him, ordered him to drop what he was holding and to halt, the movement of his arm toward you seemed an aggressive move—is that how you interpreted it?”

“Yes.”

Matthew turns from the window to look at Carson, who says, “I feel like you’re putting words in my mouth.”

“I’m trying to save your career. Carson, all stories are true. It’s true that Paul Houston could not have shot you with his cell phone. It is true that you thought his cell phone was a gun. It’s true that even with only a cell phone in his hand he could have posed a threat to you. It’s true that you knew that.”

“If all stories are true, how is there ever justice?”

Matthew rises from his chair and goes to the window, looks out at the sky briefly, and then turns to Carson and sits on the sill, bracing himself on either side with his hands. “If there was real justice in the world, this incident would never have happened at all. The men and women on the grand jury are concerned about public safety, and they know how difficult your job is. And your job is to protect them in an imperfect world where you are outnumbered by the bad guys, an imperfect world that offers few easy answers.”

“You ever defend anyone else who tried to end it all?” Carson asks.

“You mean commit suicide?”

“Yeah,” Carson says.

“Actually, no. Part of my job, as I define it, is to keep that from happening,” Frey tells him, gazing openly and expectantly at Carson.

“Would you tell me if you had?”

“No, I wouldn’t.” Frey smiles grimly and asks, “How’s it going with Carrie? She’s worked with a couple of other officers I’ve represented.”

“She’s good.”

“You heard from any other officers?”

“Naw.” Carson shrugs, feigning indifference.

“That’s not unusual.”

“I ran into Wyatt Jordan, my backup that night, at a gas station last week. I didn’t know what to say to him. He didn’t know what to say to me.”

Gassing up their cars, the two men had stuttered out greetings that seemed too much and too little. Wyatt asked, “How you holding up? Some of us were talking about you the other day, wondering how the case was going.” Carson stood before Wyatt, flush suddenly with the weighty memory of Wyatt’s arm on his shoulder, wondering if he had told the other officers what he saw on Carson’s face when he arrived on the scene. Had he told them about the pool of vomit a few feet away from the body of Paul Houston?

Wyatt was off duty, his muscles bristling and shimmering in a sleeveless T-shirt, wearing Bermuda shorts and sandals and wraparound sunglasses that obscured half his face. Wyatt’s wife was sitting in the car in a backless sundress. A cooler was in the backseat.

“You on vacation?” Carson asked.

“Yeah, we’re headed to Ocean City.”

“I wanted to call you, but I didn’t know what to say. Carson, that night’s been with me too. I realized now how I got no time for bullshit. A couple days later I talked to my wife about going to marriage counseling. I’m trying to make it right with her. I know you been thinking about heavy shit, man, heavier than my drama, but I been thinking too.”

“Was I supposed to feel good because my shit turned his life around?” Carson asks Frey.

“He was offering what he could, and he was honest.”

“I’d do the same, I guess. I thought administrative leave was like some paid vacation. Who could complain about getting paid to do nothing? Out of harm’s way. I never figured I’d feel so powerless, knowing so many people were holding my life in their hands.”

8

It’s more difficult
than he expected it to be, to tell Bunny how he feels when the grand jury votes not to indict him.

“I thought you’d be in a better mood once you were cleared,” Bunny says as they sit on the backyard deck the evening after Matthew Frey calls to tell him the news. He sits on the deck many evenings now, playing checkers with Roslyn or sitting alone watching the sky shift and change as the mystical retrenchment of sunlight gives way to the slow creep of darkness.

“It’s hard to feel a sense of victory. There’s the Internal Affairs investigation. And there could still be a wrongful death suit.”

“Carson, let’s not think about that now.”

“I don’t know what else to think about.”

Bunny takes a sip from a glass of lemonade and places it carefully on the wicker table between them. “Maybe about leaving the force.” The words are a pronouncement, one that she makes with ease, but to Carson they are a slap in the face.

“Why would I do that?”

“Why wouldn’t you?” Bunny asks, turning in her chair to gaze resolutely at Carson.

“Because it’s not just my job. It’s my career.”

“And it’s a career we’ve all paid a high price for.”

“I thought you wanted me to be in a good mood?” He attempts to laugh off Bunny’s inquisition. “How long have you been thinking about this?”

“A long time.” Bunny folds her arms across her chest and crosses her legs, turning her body into a wall of resistance.

“Everything that’s happened gives you, gives us, a chance to look at our choices, our past.”

“Don’t bullshit me. Don’t play psychologist. You mean my choices, my past.”

“Maybe I do. But Carson, everything that was yours was mine. All of it. You know that.”

“And now you want me to bail?”

“Now I want you to consider where you, where we as a family go from here.”

“You’re making me feel like I
was
indicted. In eight more years I can retire if I want to.”

“That might be too late,” she tells him with a certainty that makes him shiver even as the humid evening pulses around them.

“Too late for what?”

“To put this all behind you.”

“I’ll never be able to do that.”

“Not if you remain on the force.”

“It’s not just my job, Bunny—it’s my life you’re talking about.”

“You deserve a new one, Carson. I always thought somebody would shoot you. That’s the nightmare I’ve lived with for twelve years. And you know what? This feels almost as bad. What would you go back to? What would you go back for? We can end this all and we can end it now. You’ve got your woodworking.”

“No, I’ve got a career that I’ve worked hard to build. Cops bounce back after an incident like this.”

“Lots of them don’t,” she tells him, the words dire, precise, haunting.

“And of course that’s the category you put me in,” he shoots back, belligerent and loud.

He sits waiting for Bunny’s denial, her quick assurance that what he fears, her tallying of the odds against him, is wrong. She’s his wife. If anybody believes in him, surely it’s her. But Bunny says nothing, and she won’t take her eyes off him. Carson stands up and goes into the house and grabs his car keys. He’s got to go somewhere. Anywhere that he can breathe.

When they were first married, when he was on the evening shift, Carson usually came home to find Bunny in bed, propped up on pillows, looking at TV. “Hey,” she’d say, offering up the word sleepily, lazily, in a kind of half whisper that filled the room like the sound of worship. Some nights he arrived home wired. Some nights that were slow he was still tired, because doing nothing was more exhausting than answering eight or nine calls, and she’d reach for Carson and hold him, to confirm he was really there. That he’d made it home. Alive. Some nights they just held each other when he got into bed and they’d fall asleep like that. Sex was so many things between them back then. It was play and deadly serious. Still, there were times when Carson shut down. Shut down and couldn’t talk, wouldn’t talk, didn’t talk. Times when a darkness partitioned him from himself and Bunny and everyone else. This darkness had been with him always. Nobody could ever defeat it. Bunny called it a funk. It was not as deep as clinical depression, but it was more than the blues. And when it occupied Carson, sex became a language, a cure, a bridge, and the sex they had when he was in that dark place was a reckless campaign to feel alive. And the lunging and thrusting and biting and humping said what neither of them could. In the throes of that feeling Carson didn’t think of Bunny as his wife; that was part of the cure, that she allowed him to be a stranger and she became a stranger too. This was not the way they had coupled to make Juwan or the girls. No, then he loved her like she was already carrying his child. The darkness lifted and he was filled with, and he filled Bunny with, light.

He knew everything about Bunny. She had no secrets. The abortion at nineteen. How she loves her dad more than she loves her mother, and the guilt and bewilderment this causes. The cousin who fondled her when she was nine. Carson accepted everything, every secret, like a tithe or a tribute.

But there were the evenings when he came in from the streets and he didn’t shower and he’d lie down beside his wife. Carson kissed Bunny gently on her cheeks so even though she was asleep his lips penetrated her and she would know that he was home, then he left the bedroom and slept on the floor in the living room. The darkness hung, pendulous and uneasy. He dreamed of everything he convinced himself that he had forgotten. His skin held him like the bars of a cell. There was freedom and incarceration those nights on the floor. He was blue and black and shivering with disbelief at what he had made of his life. Made of himself.
If Jimmy Blake could see me now
.

Bunny woke to find him on the floor and could never understand. How could she? It was years before he understood himself. Understood his need to be separate, to replenish the loneliness, the aloneness, bred into him. Sneaking out of the bedroom he shared with Richard and sleeping on the ratty, sweat-soaked sofa bed in the basement. Leaving the beds of countless lovers to sleep occasionally without them on their living room floors. Countering love with this nocturnal declaration of independence.

“Did I do something wrong?” Bunny asked the first time, padding into the room barefoot, wrapped in the chenille spread. She sank onto the floor, hugging herself protectively. It was 6:00 a.m. and Carson wondered what she must have felt when she turned over in sleep, when her arm reached out to find his side of the mattress cold and empty, bereft even of his shadow.

“Naw, baby, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Did I snore?” she asked with a laugh, obviously thinking there was a rational, reasonable excuse for what he’d done, willing to take the blame.

“Uh-uh.”

“Then why?” The question ached with childlike petulance, a mewing innocence molded in steel.

“It’s got nothing at all to do with you, Bunny. It’s all about me.”

“All about me,” she sneered with a weary shake of her head. “Where have I heard that before? Carson, husbands and wives are supposed to sleep together.”

“I know,” he said, touching her upper arm, a triangle of flesh exposed despite the fact that she was bundled up in the spread.

“I know, but there are times. Not often. But there are times when I need to do this.”

“What is it you’re doing?” The petulance has evaporated, her eyes narrow, tight, and wary.

“I know you think it’s rejection, but it’s not.”

“Then why does it feel like that? I don’t understand.”

“I don’t always understand myself.”

“You’re closing me out.”

“I’m sleeping on the floor.”

“I don’t want to sleep alone,” she insists, lying down beside Carson, burrowing into his side on the pallet of blankets and sheets.

“Sometimes you’ll have to.”

“So I’ve lost you already.”

“You haven’t. You never will.”

“Can we talk about it?” Bunny’s toes massaged his ankle; her breath, dank with sleep and night, smelled almost tropical grazing his nostrils.

“It?”

“Why you have to do this.”

“There aren’t words for everything.”

“Yes, there are.”

Once Carson had dared to ask Bunny
why
she loved him.
Were there words for that?
She had laughed in that rumbling-up-from-her-belly-button way and thrown back her head, that lovely head that he just cupped sometimes in his hands and massaged, her auburn hair like tendrils against his skin and his fingers, digging down to the roots, the tight curls, the nappy part, and his hands loving, feeding on both textures. She laughed as though the question was ridiculous, irrelevant. And when she answered she told Carson that she loved how serious he was, and she loved that he had never lied to her and she loved that he is wounded and sought her out as the cure. She loved him because she knew their children would be strong and indomitable, and she loved the manner in which he became his own father.

Carson tries to convince himself but is never really sure that he is the only one who suspects how little he has expected life to give him. His victories, The Job, Bunny, his children, even when they seem rock solid, belong, he sometimes suspects, to someone else. And for a while, for the first year or two of their marriage, the first couple of years, he felt redeemed just thinking of Bunny at home while he was on the streets.

One evening when in the middle of a slow night, unexpectedly partnerless for the shift, he drove home three hours before the shift ended. He knew that Bunny was working on a design or reading a novel in bed, waiting for him. Carson cruised back into the quiet, dark cul-de-sac where his house sat. For a while he sat in the car, looking at the house, grateful that it belonged to him. That what he wanted he actually had. The modest house, all brick with the wide picture window with a sill that Bunny had filled with tiny ceramics and photos. The house with three bedrooms, rooms for the children they would have. Before going inside, putting the key in the front door, Carson just sat and watched the house, going through every room in his mind. Not until he bought this house had he allowed himself to acknowledge just how orphaned he’d always felt.

Inside, he found Bunny at the kitchen table working on a logo for a mall and condominium complex planned for Crystal City.

“Hey, what are you doing here?” she asked, looking at her watch.

“It’s a slow night.”

“But what if…?”

Carson put his fingers to his lips and whispered, “Our secret.”

He removed his gun and radio and put them on the table. “My radio’s on.”

He stepped toward her. “I just came by to see if my wife is really home alone.”

“She is.”

Carson sat down and watched Bunny as she explained, “It’s going to be in the city, but there’ll be built-in parks, a small lake, and recreational facilities, so we want to get across the idea that in a way it’s like being in the country while still being in the city. So that’s why I chose yellow and green.” She showed Carson several designs the firm was considering. After a while she yawned and rubbed her eyes, saying, “I’m bushed.”

They stood up at the same moment, and his arms encircled her waist. He kissed her playfully, delicately, then Carson cupped Bunny’s face in his hands and kissed her hard and deep and long. Bunny took his hand and led him out of the kitchen. Carson reached for his radio as he followed Bunny up the stairs.

When he unfastened her bra and her breasts spilled out onto his chest, she whispered, “You could get in trouble. Am I like an accessory to a crime?”

“This ain’t no crime we’re committing here, baby. No crime at all.”

But there was much, so much that he did not ever tell her. Carson tried not to talk about seeing people so often at their worst. Didn’t she know that’s the
last
thing he wanted to talk about? How he’d learned
not
to think about it.
His death. The death of someone because of him
. The power he had. Just thinking of it sometimes chilled him. He’d be on the streets eight hours with a gun and the permission to use it when he felt threatened, when he felt the situation warranted it, and he didn’t have to ask a soul. He was the first line of defense between the ordinary citizen and the state. Carson never told Bunny about Angelo Rodriguez, who shot a suicidal sixteen-year-old girl in a standoff outside her house, and three weeks later ate his own gun. He didn’t tell her how it got out that Rodriguez was having visions and dreams about the girl and couldn’t stop seeing her face. Bunny wanted to know everything. Kept saying, “I’m your wife.” But
he
could hardly stand to know everything. Everything might
kill
Bunny. Or drive her away from him, make her wonder how she ever thought she could be a cop’s wife. And there were times when he came in, got in the shower, and Bunny wanted to join him. But he would say no. In the shower he washed off the tension, the sweat, the blood that wasn’t there but might be one day, the spit of some junkie he’d arrested, the grimy prints of a crack whore. Even the night he caught a rapist, chased and tackled him, running through a secluded walking path near Allen Pond, away from his victim, a woman huddled like a pile of leaves or a dead log on the ground; even when he spotted smoke coming from a bungalow and was the first to call the fire department, and he rushed into the house and led a teenage boy out, his pajamas on fire, even after shifts like that when Carson came home a hero, the hero he joined the force to be, he hesitated to tell Bunny too much, because it all cost, and even on nights like that he felt like he had one foot in heaven and the other in hell.