Long Bright River: A Novel (16 page)

Today, the streets of Kensington are quieter than normal. The cold spell hasn’t snapped. It’s freezing, and the sky is stark white, and there’s a terrible wind at face level that leaves me breathless each time I have to step out of my vehicle.

Only the hardiest, or the most desperate, are outside today.

I turn the cruiser down a side street and pass six boarded-up houses in a row. Abandos, they are called here. Forgotten, condemned, some of them containing within them, no doubt, several poor souls who’ve made a shelter of them. I think of the drafty insides of these houses, the furniture left behind, the pictures on the walls. I think how lonely it must be for their new inhabitants to look upon these possessions, the remnants of the families who lived there in decades prior. Textile workers. Metalworkers. Fishermen, if the houses are old enough.

Two winters ago, there was a terrible fire in an abandoned factory nearby. It began when two occupants, desperate for warmth, started a blaze in a tin trash can, right there in the middle of the factory floor. A firefighter died trying to put it out. This has become the latest in the long list of things we are to be alert for on patrol: the smell of wood smoke from any unknown source.

No calls in my PSA for an hour. At ten I park the car near Alonzo’s and go in for a cup of coffee.

As I come out, cup in hand, two young girls I’ve seen around the neighborhood, sixteen or seventeen years old, approach me, chewing gum, walking slowly. They’re both wearing canvas sneakers with no socks, which makes me shiver a little in sympathy. I can’t tell if they’re working.

When they approach me, I am surprised. Typically, regulars simply ignore uniformed police officers, or stare at us defiantly and wordlessly.

But one of them speaks.

—Do you know anything about the murders, she says to me.

It’s the first time I’ve been asked. Rumors are spreading, it seems.

—We’re working on it, I say. We’re getting close.

My standard answer whenever anyone inquires about an open case. I feel I should say this, even though I don’t know much more than they do. Sometimes, at work, I feel the way I do when I’m talking to Thomas about his father: a little bit guilty for lying, a little bit noble for upholding a pretense that will ultimately preserve his feelings. I’ll bear the burden of the lie, for my son, for these girls.

I remember then about the video.

—Actually, I say, could you take a look at something?

I produce it on my phone: the short clip that Homicide sent to us this morning after roll call. I play it, and then pause it on a still frame that shows the POI.

—Does he look at all familiar? I ask.

Both girls look intently. Both shake their heads. No.

I go through these motions a few more times throughout the day. But nobody seems to recognize him. A couple of women make little murmuring sounds when Katie Conway crosses the screen: recognizing her, perhaps, or recognizing their own fragility, how easily it could have been them.

Just before four o’clock, as my shift is winding down, I see Paula Mulroney for the first time in a while. She’s off crutches, finally, leaning up against a wall outside Alonzo’s, holding a cigarette in one hand.

I stop the car. Get out. I haven’t seen her since Kacey went missing. I’ve been wanting to talk to her.

Paula has never let my falling-out with Kacey affect her friendliness with me.
That’s between you guys,
she said to me once, confidentially. Normally, when she sees me, she greets me with a smile and with some good-natured ribbing. Here we go, she often says. Here comes trouble.

Today, she keeps her face quite still.

—Hello, Paula, I say.

She says nothing.

—I’m glad to see you, I say. I heard Kacey was missing. I was just wondering if you had any idea where she is.

Paula shakes her head. Drags from her cigarette.

—Nope, she says.

—When’s the last time you saw her?

She snorts. Says nothing.

I’m confused suddenly.

—Is it true, I say, that you told Alonzo she was missing? Because—

She cuts me off. Look, she says. I don’t talk to the police.

I’m taken aback. I’ve never before heard this from Paula.

I try a different tactic.

—How’s your leg? I say.

—Terrible, says Paula.

She drags on the cigarette again. She’s inches away from me.

—I’m sorry to hear that, I say.

I’m not certain how to proceed.

—Do you want me to take you to the hospital? I say, but Paula waves me off. Shakes her head.

—I was wondering if I could ask you something else, I say.

—Go ahead, says Paula. But her voice is dismissive, and her implication is clear:
You can ask anything you want. I won’t answer.

I take out my phone and play the video for her. She can’t help herself: she’s curious. She leans down to inspect the phone.

When Katie Conway crosses the screen, Paula looks sharply at me.

—Yeah, she says, that’s Katie. I knew her.

—You did?

She nods. She turns back to me, looks at me hard.

—Little girl they found off Tioga, right? I knew her.

I consider Paula. I’m not sure why she’s telling me this.

—She was such a nice girl, says Paula. She was just a baby. Such a nice kid. I knew her mom too. Her mom was godawful. She’s the one turned her daughter out.

Paula is still looking hard at me. Something about her expression looks accusing in some way. The cigarette goes into her mouth. Every time I speak to Paula I recall her as she was on a particular day in high school: head held high, leading a pack of popular girls down a hallway, laughing and laughing at a joke someone told. Even now, despite how much our lives have changed, I feel a certain intimidation around her.

—Do you know anything about how she died? I ask Paula, who regards me for a moment before speaking.

—Isn’t that what you should be telling me? Paula says levelly.

Again, I grasp for words. This time, none come to me.

—You’re the cop, right? says Paula.

—We’re working on it, I say again.

—Sure, says Paula. She squints down the Ave. Judging by the quickness of her movements, the chattering of her teeth, she’s dopesick. She’s stooped over slightly, her arms folded across her middle. She’s nauseated.

—Sure you are, Mickey, Paula says. Well, work harder.

I know enough to know that I should leave her now, let her find her fix.

Before I do, though, I say to her, Can you watch one more time? The important part’s at the end.

Paula rolls her eyes, agitated, but she bends her head toward the screen, squinting. She watches as the man crosses the screen, then grabs the phone out of my hand. She looks up, eyes wide.

—Do you recognize him? I ask.

I notice suddenly that her hands are shaking.

—You’re kidding me, she says.

—You know him? I ask.

Paula begins to laugh, but there is an angry edge to her laughter.

—Don’t bullshit me, she says. That’s all I want in life, is not to be bullshitted.

I shake my head. I don’t understand, I say.

She closes her eyes, just briefly. Takes one last drag, then throws her cigarette on the ground. She stubs it out with the toe of her sneaker.

Finally, she looks at me appraisingly.

—That’s one of your guys, Mick, she says. That’s a
cop.

Just as I’d hoped, Kacey’s yearlong incarceration at Riverside changed her.

Ask anyone who’s ever detoxed in prison what it’s like, and then watch her face as she recalls it: eyes closed, brow furrowed, mouth turned down, summoning the nausea and despair, summoning the feeling that this version of life might not be worth living. This, Kacey told me, was her conviction during the lowest moment of her withdrawal: that she should take her life. With her teeth, she tore her sheets into long strips. She twisted them together. She fastened this makeshift noose to a light fixture on the ceiling and then, standing on the sink, prepared to jump—but something stopped her; some force, she said, that told her something good was waiting for her if she’d only stay alive.

Shakily, she stepped down from the sink and decided, at last, to write a letter to me.

In it, she apologized for the first time: for breaking promise after promise, for lying, for failing us all, for betraying herself. She told me she missed me. She told me that I was the only person in the world whose opinion she cared about. And she couldn’t stand having let me down so badly.

I responded. For a month, we wrote back and forth: an exchange that reminded me of our childhood, when we would write notes to one another to leave in the space beneath the floorboard of our room.

Soon, I decided to pay her a visit. When I saw Kacey, I barely recognized her. She was clear-eyed and sober. Her face was pale in a way it had not been in years. She lacked the flushed cheeks, described in children’s
books as a sign of good health, that now signify addiction to me. I began to see her regularly. Each time I went, a new version of my sister greeted me. A year is long enough for the body to begin to readjust to sobriety, for the broken brain to shakily begin to go to work, for the production lines therein to rustily churn into action, manufacturing small doses of the natural chemicals that, for years, have been artificially imported through the veins.

And so I watched as Kacey transitioned from despondent to depressed to tired to angry to, by my last visit, very tentatively optimistic. She looked determined. She knew she had work to do, and she wanted to do it.

At my home in Port Richmond, I was planning. I had weighed all my options carefully: the pros and cons of offering Kacey a place to live when she emerged. On this point, I vacillated wildly. I made capricious reversals, based largely on superstition, each time I visited her: I
will
offer her a place to stay if she’s found a sponsor; I
won’t
offer her a place to stay if she doesn’t spontaneously express her determination to attend meetings upon her release, without my asking.

Just in case, I told myself, I would ready the house for her arrival. And then I would wait and see.

There was a small concrete patio behind the house, cracked and parched and barren when I moved in. The year of Kacey’s incarceration, I restored it to glory. I built wooden planters and in them I grew herbs and tomatoes and peppers. I bought, secondhand, an outdoor dining set, and strung lights above it, and planted ivy that grew up the fence in the back.

That year, too, I made up the back bedroom in a way I knew would please Kacey. I painted the walls a soothing blue, Kacey’s favorite color, and bought a dark blue bedspread for the bed, and found a pretty vanity at a secondhand store, and adorned the walls with prints that were vaguely related to Kacey’s interest in the tarot. As a young teenager, she had acquired a deck and had taught herself to read them. The pictures I
selected for that room included an image of the High Priestess—I was no doubt hoping, on some level, that the figure’s kind, determined gaze would remind Kacey of her own dignity and wisdom and self-worth—and one of the World, and the Sun, and the Moon. I never would have chosen these pictures for myself. I do not believe in the tarot, or in astrology, or in anything of that kind. But I imagined Kacey living in that room, and as I readied it I took a sort of secret delight in the thought of presenting it all to her.

On my last visit to Riverside, Kacey was peaceful and upbeat. She was happy to be leaving but appropriately apprehensive, I thought, and reflective about the trials she would face in the outside world. Of her own volition, she vowed to stay sober, to seek out daily meetings, to find a sponsor. To leave behind, for the time being, friends of hers who were still actively using.

I determined on that day to ask her formally if she would like to stay with me, following the end of her incarceration, and, happily, she agreed.

I cannot speak for my sister, but as for me: the months following her release were the best months of my life.

The two of us were adults, finally, out from under the wary gaze of Gee. And able, therefore, to do as we pleased. I was twenty-six, and Kacey was twenty-five. In my memories of this time, it is perpetually late spring, and the air is warm and damp, and we are in the first tentative days of venturing outside without our jackets. I cannot number the evenings Kacey and I spent on the back patio, dissecting our childhood, discussing our plans. She was doing well; she stayed sober; she didn’t even drink. She gained weight; she grew her hair long; on her face, old pockmarks disappeared; her complexion evened. The scars that marred the skin on her arms and neck, remnants of abscesses, lightened and faded. She found work at a nearby independent movie theater, and even started dating another ticket-taker there, a shy and somewhat awkward young man named Timothy Carey, who never went by Tim, and had no idea about Kacey’s past. (If he wants to know, said Kacey, he can ask me.)
Her job at the theater suited us both: after I got off my shifts, I often went and found her there, and saw whatever film was playing at that time.

Sometimes, Simon joined me.

It was around this time that he and Kacey settled into an uneasy truce with one another.

They had little choice: it was my house, clearly, and I was the one paying the bills, and the two of them were my guests.

We had a couple of heart-to-hearts about it, Kacey and I.

—I don’t trust him, she said once, and I’ll never like him, but I can live with him.

Another time, she said, Mickey, you’re the best person I know. I just don’t want to see you get hurt.

And a third time: Mickey, I know you’re a grown-up. Just be careful.

She inquired, often, about why I never went to his place.

—His son drops by unannounced sometimes, I said. I think Simon just doesn’t want me to meet him until we’re engaged.

She looked at me sideways.

—Are you sure that’s it? she said.

But she never said any more than that. And I never answered.

Of course I sensed, even then, that Simon’s behavior was unusual. But I was so happy in this moment of my life, so blissful and so calm. Several times a week, Simon knocked at my door—usually unannounced—and entered the house, and took my face in his hands, and kissed it. And sometimes we would eat dinner, and sometimes we would go instead directly to the bedroom, where he would remove whatever I was wearing, which at first made me feel deeply exposed and then became exciting to me in a way I have never since experienced, my skin all alight with being looked at, my eyes on Simon’s eyes, imagining myself as he saw me. I thought of the young girl who spent so many hours daydreaming of being loved by someone, and I wished I could pay her a visit and tell her, Look, look, everything will be all right.

I tried hard to ignore the low noise that thrummed throughout my day, some tolling, cautionary bell. I wouldn’t listen. I wanted everything to stay as it was. I was more afraid of the truth than the lie. The truth would change the circumstances of my life. The lie was static. The lie was peaceful. I was happy with the lie.