Long Bright River: A Novel (2 page)

Thirteen years ago, when I first started, it happened a few times a year: we’d get a report that someone had fatally overdosed, had been deceased so long that medical intervention was unnecessary. More common were calls about overdoses in progress, and typically those individuals could be revived. These days, it happens frequently. This year alone the city is on track for 1,200, and the vast majority of those are in our district. Most are relatively recent ODs. Others are bodies that have already started to decay. Sometimes they’re inexpertly hidden by friends or lovers who witnessed the death but don’t want to jump through the hoops of reporting it, don’t want to answer to anyone about how it happened. More often they’re just out in the open, having nodded off forever in a secluded place. Sometimes their family finds them first. Sometimes their children. Sometimes, we do: out on patrol we simply see them there, sprawled out or slumped over, and when we check their vital signs they have no pulse. They’re cold to the touch. Even in summer.

From the opening in the fence, Lafferty and I walk downhill into a little gulch. I’ve entered this way dozens or maybe hundreds of times in my years on the force. It’s part of our patrol, in theory, this overgrown area. We find someone or something every time we go in. When I was partnered with Truman, he was always the one to go in first. He was senior. Today, I go in first, ducking my head uselessly, as if this will somehow keep me drier. But the rain isn’t letting up. The splattering sound it
makes on my hat is so loud that I can barely hear myself speak. My shoes slip in the mud.

Like many parts of Kensington, the Lehigh Viaduct—mainly called the Tracks now—is a stretch of land that’s lost its purpose. It was once busy with cargo trains that served an essential purpose in Kensington’s industrial heyday, but now it’s underused and overgrown. Weeds and leaves and branches cover needles and baggies scattered on the ground. Stands of small trees conceal activity. Lately there’s been talk, from the city and Conrail, of paving it over, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m skeptical: I can’t imagine it being anything other than what it is, a hiding place for people in need of a fix, for the women who work the Ave and their customers. If it gets paved over, new enclaves will sprout up all over the neighborhood. I’ve seen it happen before.

A little rustle to our left: a man emerges from the weeds. He looks spectral and strange. He stands still, his hands down by his sides, small rivulets of water trickling down his face. In fact, it would be impossible to tell if he was crying.

—Sir, I say to him, have you seen anything around here that we should know about?

He says nothing. Stares some more. Licks his lips. He has the faraway, hungry look of someone in need of a fix. His eyes are an unnaturally light blue. Perhaps, I think, he’s meeting a friend here, or a dealer: someone who will help him out. At last he shakes his head, slowly.

—You’re not supposed to be down here, you know, I tell him.

There are certain officers who wouldn’t bother with this formality, deeming it futile. Weed whacking, some say: they sprout right back up, in other words. But I always do.

—Sorry, the man says, but he doesn’t look as if he’s about to leave anytime soon, and I don’t take the time to haggle with him.

We keep walking. Large puddles have formed on either side of us. The dispatcher indicated that the body was a hundred yards straight back from the entrance we used, slightly off to the right. Behind a log, she had said. The RP, she added, had left a newspaper on the log to help
us find the body. This is what we’re looking for as we walk farther and farther from the fence.

It’s Lafferty who spots the log first, veers off the path—which isn’t a path, really, just the place on the Tracks where people have tended to walk the most over the years. I follow. I wonder, as always, whether I’ll know the woman: whether she’ll be someone I recognize from picking her up, or from driving past her, over and over, on the street. And then, before I can stop it, the familiar chant returns:
Or Kacey. Or Kacey. Or Kacey.

Lafferty, ten steps ahead of me, peers over the log to inspect the far side. He says nothing: just keeps leaning over, his head cocked at an angle, taking it in.

When I arrive I do the same.

She’s not Kacey.

That’s my first thought: Thank God, I don’t know her. Her death was recent: that’s my second. She hasn’t been lying here long. There’s nothing soft about her, nothing slack. Instead she’s stiff, lying on her back, one arm contracted upward so that her hand has become a claw. Her face is contorted and sharp; her eyes are unpleasantly open. Usually, in overdoses, they’re closed—which always gives me some measure of comfort. At least, I think, they died in peace. But this woman looks astonished, unable to believe the fate that has befallen her. She’s lying on a bed of leaves. Except for her right arm, she’s straight as a tin soldier. She’s young. In her twenties. Her hair is—was—pulled back into a tight ponytail, but it’s been mussed. Strands of it have been pulled out of the elastic that holds it in place. She’s wearing a tank top and a denim skirt. It’s too cold to be dressed this way. The rain is falling directly on her body and face. This is bad, too, for the preservation of evidence. Instinctively, I want to cover her, to bundle her up in something warm. Where is her jacket? Maybe someone took it off her after she died. Unsurprisingly, a syringe and a makeshift tourniquet are on the ground next to her. Was she alone when she died? They usually aren’t, the women: usually they’re with boyfriends or clients who leave them when they die, afraid of being
implicated, afraid of being caught up in some business that they want no part of.

We’re supposed to take vital signs upon arrival. Normally I wouldn’t, not in a case as obvious as this one, but Lafferty’s watching me, so I do things by the book. I steel myself, climb over the log, and reach toward her. I’m about to take her pulse when I hear footsteps and voices nearby.
Damn,
the voices are saying.
Damn. Damn.
The rain is falling even harder.

The medical unit has found us. They are two young men. They’re in no rush. They know already that they can’t save this one. She’s gone; she has been. They need no coroner to tell them this.

—Fresh one? calls one of them. I nod, slowly. I don’t like the way they—we—talk about the dead sometimes.

The two young men saunter toward the log, peer over it nonchalantly.

—Jeez, says one—Saab is his last name, there on his name tag—to the other, to Jackson.

—She’ll be light, at least, says Jackson, which feels like a hit to my stomach. Then collectively they climb over the log, skirt the body, kneel down beside her.

Jackson reaches out to place his fingers on her. He tries a few times, obligingly, to find something, then stands up. He checks his watch.

—As of 11:21, Jane Doe pronounced, he says.

—Record that, I say to Lafferty. One nice thing about having a partner again: someone else to fill in the activity log. Lafferty’s been keeping his inside his jacket to preserve it from the rain, and he takes it out now, hovering over it, trying to keep it dry.

—Hang on a second, I say.

Eddie Lafferty looks at me and then the body.

I bend down between Jackson and Saab, looking carefully at the victim’s face, the open eyes cloudy now, nearly opaque, the jaws clenched painfully.

There, just beneath her eyebrows and sprinkled over the tops of her cheekbones, is a splattering of little pink dots. From far away they just made her look flushed; up close, they are distinct, like small freckles, or the marks of a pen on a page.

Saab and Jackson bend down too.

—Oh yeah, says Saab.

—What, says Lafferty.

I raise my radio to my mouth.

—Possible homicide, I say.

—Why, says Lafferty.

Jackson and Saab ignore him. They’re still bent down, studying the body.

I lower the radio. Turn to Lafferty. His training, his training.

—Petechiae, I say, pointing to the dots.

—Which are, says Lafferty.

—Burst blood vessels. One sign of strangulation.

The Crime Scene Unit, Homicide, and Sergeant Ahearn arrive not long after
that.

The first time I found my sister dead, she was sixteen. It was the summer of 2002. Forty-eight hours earlier, on a Friday afternoon, she’d left school with her friends, telling me she’d be back by evening.

She wasn’t.

By Saturday, I was frightened, telephoning Kacey’s friends, asking them if they knew where she was. But nobody did, or no one would tell me, at least. I was seventeen then, very shy, already cast in the role I’ve played my entire life: the responsible one.
A little old lady,
said my grandmother, Gee.
Too serious for her own good.
Kacey’s friends no doubt thought of me as parental in some way, an authority figure, a person from whom to withhold information. Over and over again, they apologized dully and denied knowing anything.

Kacey, in those days, was boisterous and loud. When she was home, which she had been with less and less frequency, life was better, the house warmer and happier. Her unusual laugh—a silent, open-mouthed trembling, followed by a series of sharp, high, vocal inhalations, doubling her over as if they caused her pain—echoed off the walls. Without it, her absence was noticeable, the silence in the house ominous and strange. Her sounds were gone, and so was her smell, some terrible perfume that she and her friends had begun using—probably to mask what they were smoking—called
Patchouli Musk
.

It took a whole weekend for me to convince Gee to call the police. She was always reluctant to involve outsiders: afraid, I believe, that they would take a hard look at her parenting and deem it unfit in some way.

When, at last, she agreed to, she fumbled the number and had to call twice on her olive-green rotary phone. I had seen her neither so frightened nor so mad before. She was trembling with something when she hung up—anger or sorrow or shame. Her long ruddy face moved in unsettling and novel ways. She spoke softly to herself, indiscernible phrases that sounded something like a curse or a prayer.

It both was and was not surprising, Kacey’s disappearing like that. She’d always been social, and had recently fallen in with a ragtag group of friends who were benevolent but lazy, well liked but never taken seriously. She had a brief hippie phase in eighth grade, followed by several years of dressing like a punk, dying her hair with Manic Panic and getting a nose ring and an unfortunate tattoo of a lady spider in a web. She had boyfriends. I never did. She was popular, but generally used her popularity for good: in middle school she effectively adopted a sorrowful girl named Gina Brickhouse, a girl so badly teased for her weight, her hygiene, her poverty, the misfortune of her name, that she’d gone silent at age eleven. That’s when Kacey took an interest in her; and under Kacey’s protection, she blossomed. By the end of high school, Gina Brickhouse was named Most Unique, an award reserved for quirky but respected iconoclasts.

Lately, though, Kacey’s social life had taken a turn. She had regularly been getting into the kind of serious trouble that threatened to get her expelled. She was drinking a lot, even at school, and using various prescription drugs that, in those days, nobody knew to be scared of. This was the first part of her life that Kacey ever tried to keep hidden from me. Prior to that year, she had confided everything to me, often with an urgent and pleading note in her voice, as if she were seeking absolution. But her new attempts at secrecy were ineffective. I could sense it—of course I could sense it. I calculated a change in her demeanor, her physicality, her gaze. Kacey and I shared a room, and a bed, for the duration of our childhood. At one time we knew each other so well that we could predict the next thing the other would say before she said it. Our conversations
were rapid and indecipherable to others, sentences begun and abandoned, lengthy negotiations conducted exclusively in glances and gestures. So when my sister began sleeping over at friends’ houses more and more, or coming home in the small hours of the morning, smelling of things I couldn’t, then, identify, it is safe to say that I was alarmed.

And when two days went by without my hearing from her, it wasn’t her disappearance that was surprising, or even the idea that something was going terribly wrong with her. The only thing that surprised me was the idea that Kacey could leave me so completely out of her life. That she could hide, in this way—even from me—her most important secrets.

Shortly after Gee phoned the police, Paula Mulroney paged me, and I called her back. Paula was a great friend of Kacey’s in high school, and the only one, in fact, who deferred to me, who understood and respected the precedence of our familial bond. She said she had heard about Kacey, and she thought that she knew where she was.

—Don’t tell your grandmom, though, said Paula, in case I’m wrong.

Paula was a pretty girl, strong and tall and tough. She reminded me in certain ways of an Amazon—a tribe I first encountered when I read the
Aeneid
in ninth-grade English, and next in the DC comic books I fell in love with at fifteen—though the one time I mentioned the resemblance to Kacey, meaning it to be complimentary to Paula, she said, Mick. Don’t ever tell anyone that. In any case, although I liked Paula—like her still—I also realized even then that she was probably a bad influence on Kacey. Her brother Fran was a dealer, and Paula worked for him, and everyone knew it.

That day, I met Paula at the corner of Kensington and Allegheny.

—Follow me, said Paula.

As we walked, she told me that she and Kacey had gone together two days ago to a house in this neighborhood that had belonged to a friend of Paula’s brother. I knew what this meant.

—I had to leave, Paula said, but Kacey wanted to stay for a little longer.

Paula led me up Kensington Ave to a little side street that I can’t, now, remember the name of, and then to a tumbledown rowhome with a white storm door. On the door was a black metal silhouette of a horse and carriage, only the horse’s front legs were missing: I got a good look at it, because it took five minutes of knocking for anyone to open up.

—Trust me, they’re home, said Paula. They’re always home.

When, at last, the door opened, on the other side of it was a ghost of a woman, as thin as anyone I’d ever seen, with black hair and the flushed face and heavy eyes I would later come to associate with Kacey. I didn’t know then what they meant.

—Fran’s not here, said the woman. She was talking about Paula’s brother. She was maybe a decade older than we were, though it was difficult to tell.

—Who’s she, said the woman, before Paula could reply.

—My friend. She’s looking for her sister, said Paula.

—No sisters here, said the woman.

—Can I see Jim, said Paula, changing the subject.

July is often brutal in Philadelphia, and the house was incubating the heat, baking beneath its black tar roof. Inside, it reeked of cigarettes and something sweeter. It was very sad to me to think of that house as it had been when it was first built: home to a functioning family, maybe, a factory worker and his wife and children. Someone who went to work each day in one of the colossal brick buildings, abandoned now, that still line Kensington’s streets. Someone who came home at the end of each workday and said grace before supper. We were standing at that moment in what was maybe once a dining room. Now it was empty of all furniture except some metal folding chairs, leaning against a wall. Out of respect for the house, I tried to picture it as it might have been a generation ago: an oval table covered in a lace tablecloth. Plush carpet on the floor. Upholstered chairs. In the windows, curtains that somebody’s grandmother made. On the wall, a picture of fruit in a bowl.

Jim, the house’s owner, I supposed, came into the room in black T-shirt and jean shorts and stood looking at us. His arms hung loosely by his sides.

—You looking for Kacey? he said to me. At the time, I wondered how he knew. Probably I looked innocent, like a rescuer, like a guardian, like somebody who searched, rather than fled. I have had this look my whole life. In fact it took me quite a while, after I joined the force, to develop certain habits and mannerisms that successfully convinced those I detained that I was someone to be taken seriously.

I nodded.

—Upstairs, said Jim. She hasn’t been feeling good, is what I thought he was saying, though I didn’t hear exactly, and he could have said any number of things. I was already gone.

Every door on the upstairs hallway was closed, and behind them, I thought, might lie unknown horrors. I was, I admit it, afraid. For a little while I stood still. Later I would wish that I hadn’t.

—Kacey, I said, quietly, hoping she would simply emerge.

—Kacey, I said again, and someone’s head appeared from behind a door, then disappeared again.

The hallway was dim. Downstairs, I could hear Paula making small talk: about her brother, about the neighbors, about the police who’d lately been working the Ave in great numbers, to everyone’s dismay.

Finally, summoning my courage, I knocked lightly on the door closest to me and, after a pause, opened it.

There was my sister. I knew it first by her hair, which Kacey had recently dyed fluorescent pink, and which was now spread out behind her on a bare mattress. She was on her side, her back to me, and in the absence of any pillow her head was tilted at an odd angle.

She wasn’t wearing enough clothing.

I knew she was dead before I reached her. Her pose was familiar to me, after a childhood spent sleeping next to her in the same bed, but that day there was a different kind of limpness to her body. Her limbs looked too heavy.

I pulled her onto her back by her shoulder. Her left arm flopped over onto the bed. A strip of cotton T-shirt hung, loosened now, around her lower biceps. Below this makeshift tourniquet: the long bright river of her vein. Her face was slack and blue, her mouth open, her eyes closed but for a sliver of white that showed beneath the lashes.

I shook her. I shouted her name. The syringe lay beside Kacey on the bed. I shouted her name again. She smelled like excrement. I slapped her across her face, hard. At the time, I had never seen heroin. I had never seen anyone on heroin.

—CALL 911, I shouted—which, in retrospect, is quite funny. There was no possibility, ever, of authorities of any stripe being called to that home. But I was still shouting it when Paula arrived in the room and clamped a hand over my mouth.

—Oh, fuck, said Paula, looking at Kacey, and then—I marvel now at her bravery, her levelheadedness, the swiftness and sureness of her movements—she put an arm under Kacey’s knees and an arm under her shoulders and brought her up off the bed. Kacey was plump in high school, but Paula seemed unfazed. She scooped her athletically and trotted down the stairs with her, her back to the wall, careful not to trip, and then out the front door. I followed.

—Don’t you call from nearby, said the woman who’d opened the door.

She’s dead, I thought, she’s dead, my sister is dead. I had seen Kacey’s dead face before me on that bed. Though neither Paula nor I had checked to see if Kacey was breathing, I was convinced that I had lost her, and my mind cut forward quickly through a future without my sister: my graduation, without Kacey. My wedding. The birth of my children. Gee’s death. And it was out of self-pity that I began to cry. To have lost the only other person capable of shouldering all the weight that had been assigned to us at birth. The weight of our dead parents. The weight of Gee, whose occasional kindnesses we clung to dearly, but whose cruelties were routine. The weight of our poorness. My eyes filled. I lost sight of the ground. I tripped over a piece of sidewalk that had been forced upward by a searching root.

Within seconds we were spotted by a young policeman, newly on that beat: part of the influx of officers that Jim and Paula had been complaining about. Within minutes an ambulance arrived, and I rode with my sister in the back of it, and watched as she was Narcanned, raised from the dead, violently, miraculously, crying out in pain and nausea and despair, begging us to let her go back.

This was the secret I learned that day: None of them want to be saved. They all want to sink backward toward the earth again, to be swallowed by the ground, to keep sleeping. There is hatred on their faces when they are roused from the dead. It’s a look I’ve seen dozens of times, now, on the job: standing over the shoulder of some poor EMT whose job it is to reel them back in from the other side. It was the look on Kacey’s face that day as her eyes opened, as she cursed, as she wept. It was directed at
me.