After (8 page)

This is how Bunny finds him, and he doesn’t stir when he hears her come down the stairs and walk over to him.

“How was your session?” she asks.

“Just the beginning,” he tells her, standing upright and burying his face in her hair, holding her tight around the waist.

When Carson sees
Carrie Petersen a week later, she says to him during the session, “Tell me the finest moment for you as an officer.”

“I saved a kid from drowning. I was a minute or two from the house when the dispatcher got the call. I beat Emergency Services. It was a birthday party, and when I got to the house I found all these adults standing around holding their heads, crying, clutching each other, comforting a roomful of kids. There were balloons strung over the patio and a clown, a huge cake, stacks of presents the little girl hadn’t even unwrapped. She was lying on the side of the pool, no sign of life, nothing. I performed CPR on her. I remember she was wearing a lime green bathing suit and her hair was all frizzy and damp. She was as limp as a rag doll. She looked about the same age as my girls, and I kept wondering what I’d do if I couldn’t save her. The mother was crying, wailing like the little girl was already dead, and the man who I guess was the father was holding her, telling her to calm down, that everything would be all right. I couldn’t believe how much water was coming out of the girl’s mouth, while I worked on her, with her eyes still closed, even as she began jerking into consciousness. And then she started choking and coughing and opened her eyes and stared at me as though waking from a nightmare. Then she screamed. It’s weird. That scream, which sounded so horrible, told us she was alive.

“EMS got there right at the moment she started screaming. The girl’s name was Tammy, and she wrote me a letter a couple of weeks later, thanking me for saving her life. I went by her house one day just to check on her and found her outside riding her bike. I gave her a charm bracelet my girls had helped me pick out for her. Saving that kid’s life took me, what, thirty seconds, a minute? Just like with the shooting, I thought those moments would never end. But I can’t think of anything I’ve done that made me feel more valuable. Now I’m pretty sure I’ll never feel that way again.”

5

Cleaning and cooking
help Bunny to forget. For a while anyway.
My house, this at least is one thing I can make right
, she thinks, hurriedly pulling her nightgown over her head and changing into underpants, a sweatshirt, and a pair of baggy jeans in the bathroom.

Bunny knows the trick is to keep moving. To start and not stop. That way she won’t have time to think about anything. She sorts clothes in the laundry room and fills the front-loading washer. In the kitchen, from beneath the sink she grabs a plastic bucket, fills it with hot water and floor cleaner, lifts it from the sink, places it on the floor, and drops an old hand towel in the warm foamy water as she sinks to her knees. The water saturates the cloth and Bunny wrings it out, begins scrubbing the ivory-colored squares of linoleum. On her hands and knees she won’t miss any dirt, and the exertion gives her back muscles a good workout. While the floor dries, she dusts in the living room and cleans the leather sofa and recliner with a creamy liquid conditioner, scrubbing vigorously, using her arms and hands in a way that she feels is purifying, as sweat congeals in her armpits, warms the surface of her skin, cleansing her of the fog that refuses to break its hold on her spirit. Bunny cleans the toilets in the guest and basement bathrooms.

Carson got out of bed at seven, put on his jogging suit, and told her he was going for a run, that he’d get breakfast at Bob Evans and then take his car for an oil change and tune-up. Alone in the house, Bunny cleans in a frenzy for another hour. In the living room, a collection of Black figurines, some no larger than an inch or two, populate a small world inside a ceiling-high, delicately carved wooden armoire with glass windows. Black angels in billowing robes blowing trumpets; a toddler on a tricycle, a mutt at her side barking in delight; a white-haired elderly couple staring with frozen love into each other’s eyes; an African princess draped in gold and kente cloth; three children stuffed into an armchair, all reading the same book. Bunny has collected the figures over the years; some Carson gave her as gifts.

Bunny goes upstairs to tackle the master bedroom, where mourning and defeat hang like a stale stench in the air. It’s a psychic runoff accumulated during the hours Carson spends in the room alone, sleeping, watching television, drinking beer, in self-imposed hibernation and retreat.

Having cleaned every object and surface in the house, Bunny returns to the kitchen, retrieving a leg of lamb from the middle shelf of the refrigerator, unwrapping it, rinsing the meat, and placing it in a roasting pan. While slicing the pods of garlic to embed in the slits she’s made in the thick flesh, Bunny cuts her index finger and draws blood. The wound, when she inspects it closely, is not deep; it’s a gash piercing the top of her finger. Still, there is blood, ruby, thick, and there is pain. All she has to do is apply pressure. If she looks on the top shelf over the stove she’ll find the bandages she needs to stop the flow of blood.

She bandages the finger as the tears dammed up behind her eyes all morning, the pressure from which has given her a headache, finally begin to flow. Utterly exhausted, Bunny covers the leg of lamb in plastic wrap and places it in the refrigerator. She wants to cry. Again. All day. But none of the tears she has shed since the shooting have changed anything, and more tears will only make her headache worse. She stands in the middle of the living room, assessing her now-spotless house, seeing in her mind the rooms upstairs, the kitchen, the air heavy with the lingering scent of the polishes and cleansers. A good morning’s work, she thinks, biting her lip and sinking onto the sofa to weep again.

They have never had a secret like the suicide attempt, a confidence that they both know must be permanently suppressed. She cannot tell her best friend, Pam, dares not speak of it to her mother, can never tell her children. If she had shifted in her half sleep that night and assumed that Carson was in the bathroom when her leg sprawled over the cool, vacant sheet, what would have happened? What would he have done? Bitterness is a bruise on her heart. Love feels like a pretense and a masquerade. She never imagined Carson would kill in the line of duty. Until now, she’d always assumed their marriage was strong enough to see them through anything. It never occurred to her that Carson would think of throwing it all away. They are conjoined in a web of secrecy even with Carrie Petersen, who, bound by doctor/client privilege, could not reveal anything Carson told her to the department. Carson dared not even risk telling Melvin Griffin, his sergeant, that he’d thought of taking his life or that he had sought therapeutic help. The revelation of either could derail his return to work.

Bunny wonders if there will ever come a time when they laugh again. The way they used to laugh about how they met. And the fact that yes, she
was
waiting for him the day he showed up at her house. She’s extremely intuitive, can feel and sense things and, unlike most people she knows, isn’t afraid to trust what she feels. She trusts what she feels more, in fact, than what she thinks. It’s like when she’s working on a design project. Carson has asked her so many times how she decides what colors to use and what shapes a logo demands. She doesn’t know. She just keeps at it until the colors and shapes take hold of her. She tries to tell him that the worst thing to do is to think her way through a design. She has to stumble into whatever symmetry and beauty the project has to offer.
Stumble and feel
.

It was that way with Carson on the Saturday night that he stopped her and almost gave her a ticket. And she recalls it as though it happened not then but now, is happening now.
He is not particularly handsome
, she thinks as she sees his face illuminated in the glow of the flashlight beaming on her face. He’s got freckles across the bridge of his nose. It is a flat, wide, square face. His complexion is a shade, just a whisper, darker than hers. But she doesn’t fall for the face. It’s never the looks with her. It’s a man’s energy. And that night Bunny feels
it
. While Carson is gently scolding her for speeding, while she is looking at him dead on, directly, right in the eye, Bunny feels some soulful, high-frequency current pass between them. And she knows that Carson feels it too. Once or twice before she has felt this sexual/psychological voltage pass between her and a man, but never like this. Never like this.

When they marry of course she wants to know, and she does not want to know, everything about what Carson calls The Job. She’s not just a wife. She’s a cop’s wife. And that means that every time that Carson comes home from his shift Bunny counts it as a reprieve. He doesn’t like to talk about the streets, what he sees and what he does during his shift, but he doesn’t have to tell her. It’s all revealed in the tension she feels in his shoulders, his neck, his whole body, especially on those nights when Carson comes in and after a shower she gives him a massage. His body tells her everything he won’t. She’s a cop’s wife and a member of a tribe. There are Bring Your Own Bottle cop cabarets and dances and parties and weddings. And most of the cops that Bunny comes to know over the years are like everybody else and yet absolutely unique in their perspective on things. They have to be. There is the sense that they are different. Not like everyone else. Their jobs are in a special category marked life or death.

She should have seen this coming, she thinks. But how could she have seen what she still can’t believe? That Carson would kill an innocent man. Someone who was no threat to him. It was always his life she had feared for. They had been so lucky. Carson was just like most cops on the street, men and women who never once fired their weapons. Now he was someone else. Now he occupied a separate space, a parallel world, a hell of his own making where he had crossed a border and saw no way back to who or what he used to be.

Because she has cried and feels wretched but oddly chaste, Bunny allows herself to feel, full blown, the tremble of fear that swallows her up when she thinks of what Carson has done. She feels the fear even as she imagines her own version of the chilling, unalterable moment and what Carson must have felt, and she wonders what the man he killed thought, watching the bullets turn him into a target. Bunny has never been afraid of Carson. She is not afraid of him now. But if this could happen…The shudder passes and Bunny vows never to think this way again. But she doesn’t choose all her thoughts.

If he had just gotten off the streets, taken the test for sergeant like Eric—but Carson shunned the idea of becoming part of the force’s bureaucracy. Whenever Bunny mentioned Carson’s joining the police department’s administration as a way to get off the streets, he’d tell her, “I’m no paper pusher. I’d go nuts in an office, some supervisor breathing down my neck. This way I do my shift and I’m done.”

Bunny showers and changes clothes and goes back to the kitchen, where she places the lamb in the oven. By noon it will be ready and she and Carson can have an early dinner for two, she thinks, and maybe she can coax him into taking her to a movie. As she begins to think of what she will prepare to accompany the leg of lamb, the doorbell rings.

Through the peephole at the front door Bunny sees her mother and takes a deep breath, feels the familiar agitation that Doris’s presence so often inspires.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” Bunny gently complains, ushering her mother into the house.

“Since when do I have to call my own daughter? Why can’t I just stop by?” Doris asks, her voice stilted with mock hurt.

Doris’s black velour running suit is more stylish than practical, set off by large hoop earrings and a gold chain, and nails polished a startling deep red. Doris casually and quickly removes her lightweight jacket and follows Bunny into the kitchen.

“I just wish you’d called. You know how things are now,” Bunny says as Doris fills the teapot with water and puts it on the stove.

“You don’t mind if I have a cup of tea, do you?”

“Mama, come on, not today,” Bunny says with a sigh.

“Well, you always make me feel like I’m invading your home, not visiting.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“It’s how I feel, whether you want me to feel that way or not,” Doris says, leaning against the counter as she waits for the water to boil.

Bunny reaches for several potatoes from the basket on the counter and begins peeling them.

“Where’re you coming from?”

“I had lunch with some of the members of my bridge club,” Doris says. “And where are my grandchildren?” she asks eagerly.

“The girls are spending the weekend with a friend, and Juwan is on a Boy Scout camping trip.”

“And Carson?” Doris asks pointedly.

“He’s out.”

Steam blasts from the teapot nozzle. Doris turns off the burner and pours hot water into the Orioles mug Bunny has placed on the counter with a tea bag inside.

Bunny has never forgotten Doris’s dire response when she told her that Carson had asked her to marry him. “I’ve heard all kinds of things about those police officers. A girl like you could do so much better.”

A girl like you
. A girl with her father’s soft, straight hair and olive-toned skin, which had people wondering sometimes if she was Hispanic. Whose mother combed and brushed her hair as though the act was a sacrament, and told Bunny repeatedly, “Thank God you got your daddy’s hair and didn’t get mine.”

When Bunny told Doris about the shooting, Doris said, “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Real sorry.” That was all she said, but underneath those words Bunny heard the unspoken “I told you so.”

“How is Carson?” Doris asks, stirring her tea.

“I finally convinced him to seek some help. He’s seeing a therapist,” Bunny says, placing the knife and the potatoes on the counter.

“Good.” Doris beams with what appears to be sincere approval. “Who is it?”

“Mom, it’s no one you’d know. She’s in private practice.” This revelation feels momentous to Bunny, unused to sharing details of her married life with her mother. Still, it falls far short of telling Doris that Carson had thought of taking his own life. Bunny would never tell her mother about that.

“And I don’t want you telling any of your friends he’s in therapy, either, Mom.”

“I wouldn’t. But is he ashamed of needing help?”

“It’s not that. It’s just that it could change the way his fellow officers look at him, the way they feel about him, if they knew.”

“Lord God, that makes no sense. Why did this have to happen?” Doris asks, taking a sip from the mug of steaming tea. “I feel for that family.”

“We all do, Mama,” Bunny tells her, peeling potatoes once again as a mound of skins litters the counter. She realizes that she has peeled more potatoes than she needs, but she’ll make potato pancakes with the leftover mashed potatoes.

“Umph, umph, umph,” Doris mutters. “It sure is a tragedy all around. But you can’t help but wonder. I mean, you never hear of this kind of thing happening to White people. It’s always one of us gets shot like this. Seems like our lives are so cheap.”

“Are you saying Carson did this on purpose?” Bunny asks as she scoops the potato peelings into a plastic garbage bag.