Chapter 4
Across the Street
In the morning, he decided it had been a tired man and a bad light.
That was the sensible thing to decide, and he decided it at the kitchen counter, with a cup of coffee, while Anna put bread in the toaster and Emma looked for her other shoe. He told himself that he had been through three weeks of stress, which was what a psychologist would call it. He had not been sleeping properly, although in fact he had been sleeping very well. He had stood too long in the cold. A streetlight had made a shape on the sidewalk, and his mind, which was tired and tender and had been looking at one gray hooded sweatshirt for nineteen days, had put a boy in it.
It was not a mystery. It happened to people. He had seen it in other men, after other bad nights: a retired officer who saw his old partner at the end of the aisle in a supermarket, a paramedic who kept hearing a baby cry in an empty room. The mind did not like an empty space. It filled it.
"You're quiet," said Anna.
"Just thinking."
"About?"
"The cat," he said. "I think she's too fat."
"She's not fat. She's pregnant."
"What?"
"I'm joking." Anna buttered a slice of toast. She was in her scrubs again, her hair clipped back, and she had a bruise on her wrist from a patient who did not want to be turned. "You are staring at the window, Tom. Is something out there?"
"No."
"You're sure?"
"There's nothing there."
She looked at him a moment longer. Then she put the toast on a plate, and put the plate in front of him, and kissed him on the top of the head, a quick hard kiss, like a nurse checking a temperature.
The department sent him to see a psychologist.
It was not optional. After any shooting, an officer was required to attend three sessions with a licensed counselor, and to be certified, by the third, as fit to return to full duty. Her name was Dr. Ruth Evans. Her office was on the ground floor of a medical building across the river, a small room with a green sofa, a box of tissues, a framed print of a lighthouse, and a clock turned so that only the doctor could see it.
She was sixty, small, with white hair in a bob and bright black eyes. She wore a lot of rings. She had worked for the department for twenty-four years, and she looked at Tom the way a good mechanic looks at an engine that is making no noise at all.
"How are you sleeping?" she said.
"Fine."
"Really?"
"Eight hours, most nights. My wife says I snore."
"And how do you feel about that?"
"About the snoring?"
"About the eight hours."
He considered. "Lucky."
"Lucky." She wrote something down. "Some men in your position don't sleep for a month. Some sleep fourteen hours a day. It's all within the range. What matters is whether it's a change."
"I've always been a good sleeper."
"Have you had any unwelcome thoughts about the incident?"
"Not really."
"Any images? Flashbacks? A feeling of it happening again?"
"No."
"Any bad dreams?"
"No."
She looked at him over her glasses.
"Mr. Walker. I'm not going to pretend I don't know what you're doing. You're giving me the right answers. That's fine. You've been trained to. I'd do the same, in your seat. But I want you to know, in case it ever becomes useful, that the answer yes is perfectly acceptable in this room. It doesn't go in your file. It goes in mine."
"I understand."
"I'm only telling you in case."
"Thank you."
"You can go."
He stood. At the door, with his hand on the knob, he stopped. He did not turn round.
"Doctor," he said. "Is it normal? If a person. If a person were to think they saw something."
"What kind of something?"
"I don't know. Something. Someone. Just briefly. When they were tired."
"Yes," said Dr. Evans. "It's very common."
"And it doesn't mean."
"It means you have a brain."
He nodded. He thought of everything he might ask, and did not ask it. He stood there with his back to her, looking at the wood grain of the door, and felt her watching him, kindly, patiently, with all her rings.
"See you next week," he said.
On the sixth of November, in Records, he smelled paint.
It was a quarter to three on a Thursday. He was at his desk with a stack of old accident reports, a red pen, and a rapidly cooling sandwich. The room was warm and dim and smelled the way it always smelled, of toner and old paper and Lorraine's lavender hand cream. The fluorescent light buzzed. Somewhere down the hall a printer was jamming.
It came all at once. A sharp, clean, chemical odor. The smell of a hardware store, or a garage, or a school art room after the doors have been shut over the weekend. It rose through the room like a mist and settled on the back of his tongue. He knew it before he knew he knew it.
Spray paint.
He sat very still.
Lorraine was at her own desk, ten feet away, eating crackers and doing a crossword. He said, "Do you smell that?"
"Smell what?"
"Paint."
She sniffed. "No, dear."
"Like solvent. Like, like a can."
"I don't smell anything." She frowned at him over her half-glasses. "They did repaint the third floor on Monday. Maybe it's come through the vents?"
"Maybe."
He stood up. He did not decide to. He walked across the room, past the filing cabinets and the water cooler, to the door that opened on the long corridor. The corridor was empty. It ran forty yards to the stairwell, a straight tunnel of cream walls and gray linoleum and fluorescent tubes, with a bulletin board halfway down, and a fire extinguisher in a red box. At the far end there was a window, a tall one, and the afternoon light came through it in a dusty white block.
Someone was standing in the light.
He was too far to see clearly. A narrow figure, framed against the glare, with his shoulders a little hunched and his weight on one foot. The right hand hung loose at his side. And the hand was dark. Not the whole hand. Only the fingers, as if they had been dipped in ink.
Tom put out a hand to the door frame.
He did not say anything. He did not call. He stood at the door of the records room in a pressed uniform with a ballpoint pen in his pocket, and felt his heart go slow and thick and huge, so that he could feel each beat in the bones of his face. The smell was stronger. It was a taste now. The light in the window trembled.
The figure lifted its hand.
It did it slowly, like a child answering a question in class. It did not wave. It held the dark hand open in front of him, palm out, fingers spread, as if to show him that there was nothing in it. Then it let the hand fall.
"Tom?"
He jumped.
Lorraine had come up behind him. She stood at his elbow with her crossword and her glasses pushed up on her white hair, and looked up into his face with an expression of enormous gentleness.
"You've gone white, dear," she said.
"I'm fine."
"Sit down."
"I'm fine." He looked back down the corridor. The window was empty. The block of light lay on the floor, thick with floating dust, and nothing moved in it. "I thought I saw somebody."
"There's no one there."
"No."
"Sometimes the light plays tricks in that window." She patted his arm. "I've seen all sorts of things in there, in twenty years. A man in a hat. A woman with a pram. It's just the glass."
"A woman with a pram."
"Oh yes. She used to frighten the new girls." Lorraine smiled. "Come and sit. I'll make you tea."
She led him back to his desk as one leads a tall child. He sat down. She put a mug in front of him, hot and sweet and full of milk, and he drank it, because it was there. His hand shook so badly that tea slopped over his wrist.
"Thank you," he said.
"It's nothing."
"No. I mean, thank you, for not."
"Not what?"
"Making it a thing."
She looked at him over her half-moon glasses for a long moment. She was a small, plump, silver-haired woman of seventy, in a green cardigan, with a cross on a chain. She had worked in this building since before he was born. He saw that she knew exactly what she had not said.
"Dear," said Lorraine. "In my experience, everybody in this building sees somebody. It's what the place is for."
She went back to her crossword.
He sat there with his tea going cold, and the paint smell fading from the room, a little at a time, like a tide going out.
He stopped going down Dock Street.
It was easy enough. He told Anna it was construction. He took the long way home, the ring road, past the retail park, the gas station, the car wash, the garden center. It added eleven minutes. He told himself it was a matter of traffic.
He stopped looking at hooded sweatshirts, which was harder, because everybody under thirty seemed to own one. They were in the coffee shop. They were on the bus. They crossed the road with their hands in their pockets and their heads down, bright gray, navy, black, green, and every time one of them turned toward him he felt something go tight at the base of his skull, a small cold fist.
On the ninth of November he went into a gas station on Marsh Road for a bottle of water, and a boy was standing by the register.
He was seventeen, perhaps. A tall one, in a green jacket. He was buying a pack of chewing gum and arguing with the clerk about a coupon. Tom was behind him in line, in jeans and a sweater, off duty, with a small pistol on his belt under the hem. It was a thing he had done for sixteen years. It had never once felt like anything.
The boy said, "Hold on, it's in my pocket."
"Sir, I can't."
"It's right here. Hold on."
The boy's right hand went down into the pocket of his green jacket.
Tom's right hand went down to his own hip.
He did not decide. He did not think. He was in the middle of a sentence in his head, something about the water, and then his fingers were on the checkered grip, and his thumb had found the snap, and a bright cold voice said inside his skull, Hand. Hand. HAND.
The boy's hand came out.
It held a coupon. A small yellow slip of paper, folded in four. He smoothed it on the counter with the flat of his thumb and said, "See? Two for one."
The clerk looked at it. The clerk looked past the boy. His eyes were wide and brown, and they were fixed on Tom's right arm.
Tom took his hand off his belt.
He did it slowly. He brought it up in front of his chest and opened the fingers, one at a time, to show that it was empty. He heard himself say, in a steady, pleasant, ridiculous voice, "Sorry. Cramp."
"Are you okay, man?" said the boy.
"Fine."
"You look sick."
"I'm fine." He put the water on the counter. He put down a five. He did not wait for the change. "Keep it."
He walked out into the parking lot, and went round the side of the building, behind the dumpster, and was sick on the gravel.
He stood bent over with his hands on his knees. It was cold. A truck went by on Marsh Road with a long hiss. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked down at the little spattered stones between his boots, and a thought came to him, so small and plain that he almost did not notice it.
He was reaching for a coupon.
A coupon.
And I was going to.
He straightened up.
No, said the voice in his head. It was his own voice. It was calm. It was the one he had used for sixteen years. No. You weren't. You had your hand on your belt. That's all. That's training. That's what training is for.
You didn't draw.
You'd have been right to.
"Right," he said aloud. He stood with his back against the cold wall of the gas station and said it again. "Right."
That night, at ten past three, he woke up.
It was not a nightmare. He had not been dreaming. He lay on his side in the dark bedroom, with Anna's slow breathing beside him, and his eyes were open before he knew he was awake. The clock on the table said 3:10 in red. The house was quiet.
Then he heard it.
It was a very small sound. A thin metallic tick, repeated, light and quick, from somewhere below. Tink. Tink-tink. It was the sound a key makes when it hangs on a string, and swings, and strikes against something hard. A zipper. A button. A belt buckle.
He lay still.
It's the pipes, he thought.
Tink.
It's the radiator.
Tink-tink.
He got up.
He went down the stairs in his bare feet, in the dark, one hand on the rail. He knew every step of that staircase. The fourth one creaked, and the seventh, and the one at the bottom had a nail that stuck up. He stepped over them. The hall was cold. A line of moonlight lay across the floor from the window by the front door, and in it, on the mat, was a small curled shape.
The cat looked at him.
Pepper was sitting on the mat with her ears flat and her yellow eyes huge. She was staring at the front door. Her tail, thick as a bottle brush, swept the floor slowly from side to side. She did not move when he came near. She made a low long sound in her throat, a sound he had never heard from her in eight months.
"Hey," he said. "Hey. What is it?"
He bent and picked her up. She was rigid. Her heart beat like a fist inside her ribs.
Tink.
It came from the other side of the door.
He stood in the dark hall with a cat clamped in his arms, and his own pulse in his teeth. He knew what he would see if he opened it. He knew with perfect plainness, as one knows the end of a sentence. He would see a porch, and a lawn, and a gray street under the moon. And at the end of the path, standing at the gate with one hand on the post, a thin tall boy in a hooded sweatshirt, with his eyes on the house.
Open it, said something in him. Open it. Look.
He put his hand on the lock.
It was cold under his fingers. He turned it. The door swung inward on its chain with a small dry clack, and a blade of freezing air came in at the crack, with the smell of wet leaves, and nothing else.
He looked out through the gap.
The porch light was off. The lawn was silver. The gate was shut, and the street beyond was empty from end to end, and across the road, in the window of the Ramirez house, the blue light of a television was flickering on and off.
Nobody was there.
The cat gave a long shudder in his arms and went limp.
Tink.
He turned his head.
The sound came from behind him. From inside the house. From the kitchen.
He stood very still. The hall clock ticked, very loud. He felt the hair rise along his arms.
Then, from the top of the stairs, a small voice said, "Dad?"
He spun round.
Emma stood on the landing in her long white nightshirt with her drawing pad hugged to her chest. Her hair was in her eyes. She was looking down at him with a sleepy, puzzled, trusting face.
"Why are you standing in the dark?"
"I heard something."
"Me too." She yawned. "It's the cat. She plays with the dog tag."
"What dog tag?"
"The one on the shelf. From Grandpa Walt's old dog." She came down two steps and pointed, with a bare toe, toward the kitchen. "It's on a string. It hangs on the hook by the fridge. Whenever someone opens the back door, it goes tink."
He closed his eyes.
He remembered. A tarnished brass tag on a leather thong, from a retriever named Duke, who had been dead for twenty-two years. His father had kept it. After the funeral Tom had hung it on a hook by the refrigerator, and had never thought of it again.
"Go to bed, kiddo," he said, and his voice came out ragged.
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. It was the dog tag."
"Told you." She turned and padded back up the stairs, in the dark, with her pad against her chest. At the top she stopped. "Dad?"
"Yes?"
"I think there was a boy outside, earlier."
His blood stopped.
"What?"
"In the afternoon. When I came back from Maya's. He was standing by the fence. I thought he was lost." She scratched her ankle with her other foot. "I said hi. He didn't say anything. He just looked at the house."
"What did he look like?"
"I don't know. Regular. A big kid. Like in high school." She yawned again. "I think he had a gray hoodie."
The cat began to struggle. Tom let her go. She dropped to the floor with a thump and ran, in a silent gray streak, across the hall and into the dark, and he stood there with his empty arms hanging.
"Em," he said. "Was he really there? Are you sure?"
"I guess." She shrugged, with the weary patience of a girl of eleven. "I was, like, pretty tired. It might've been somebody's brother."
"Okay."
"Okay. Night."
"Night, Em."
He listened to her door close. He stood at the bottom of the stairs with his hand on the rail, and a long time passed. Then he went into the kitchen, and turned on the light, and looked at the back door, and the dog tag on its hook by the fridge, perfectly still, and the cold black window over the sink.
In it, very faintly, he saw his own face.
Behind it, farther off, on the dark lawn, there was nothing at all.
On Sunday afternoon, because he could not help it, he drove to Ferris Street.
He told himself he was only going for a loaf of bread. There was a bakery on the corner, a good one, with a green awning. He parked across from it, and turned off the engine, and sat with his hands in his lap.
It was a bright cold day. Sun on the brick. The street was full of weekend: a boy with a basketball, two girls sharing earphones, an old man with a cane. A woman in a gray coat was coming up from the bus stop with a single paper bag in her arms.
He knew her at once.
He had never seen her. He had seen a picture, once, in a news article that he had not meant to read: a thin woman at a podium, with her hair pulled back and her eyes on the floor. She was smaller than he had expected. She walked slowly, with her shoulders drawn up, as if the bag were heavy, though it was not. She had a small, neat, tired face. She stopped at the foot of number thirty-eight, and took out a key, and began to climb the stairs to the second floor, one step at a time.
He watched her.
He did not know what he wanted. To say something. To make it stop. To tell her, I did what I had to do, and have her say, I know.
She reached the top step and fitted the key into the lock. She did not open the door. She stood there with her forehead against it. Her hand was still on the key, and the paper bag was crushed against her chest, and her shoulders moved. She was standing very quietly, in the thin November sun, crying without a sound.
And behind her, on the landing, two steps down, a boy was sitting.
He sat with his knees drawn up and his arms across them, in a gray sweatshirt with the hood down. He was looking at the back of her head. His face was in profile: a long jaw, a straight nose, a faint dark smear along one cheekbone, as of a hand that has been wiped there in a hurry. He did not touch her. He did not speak. He sat on the stairs behind his mother, close enough to reach, as a child sits on the bottom step outside a door when he has been sent out of the room, and cannot go away, and cannot go in.
Tom put his hand over his mouth.
The woman opened the door. She went in. The boy rose to his feet, and stood, a moment, on the landing, looking after her. Then he turned his head.
He looked straight down the length of the street, over the bakery and the bus stop and the heads of the passers-by, through the glass of a parked car, into Tom's face.
It was a long look. It was not angry. It did not ask for anything. It was only very steady, and very clear, and very tired, as one looks at a thing that has been standing in the same place all day.
Then the door closed, and the landing was empty, and the sun lay flat and pale on the stair.