by Cameron Cain
I’m a good-looking guy. I’m easygoing, even when intoxicated, and I’ve got plenty of whatever it is that facilitates the process of making friends, meeting women, and fitting comfortably into any career. I picked law enforcement pretty much at random. I liked The X-Files as a kid, thought it looked like a cool job. But once I was in, I was in it to win it. I started out wanting the corner office, the nameplate, the dinners in my honor. That’s what I was taught: go, fight, win; come, see, conquer. It applies everywhere, boardroom and bedroom. It’s not even a philosophy so much as a part of my DNA, swimming alongside my gene for blond hair and an allergy to strawberries.
So you take a guy like that, like me, and you put him side-by-side with a woman like Beth. A woman who, if you tried a braindead pick-up line, would look at you like you’ve shit your pants and she’s smelling it something powerful. A woman whose idea of fun is trying a new martial arts style so she’ll get knocked on her ass. A woman with all the patience of the Roadrunner, and a mind that seems fueled by something so high-octane it’s got to be alien. A woman who teaches any man who spends any amount of time with her, that she is twice the man he is.
Of course I fell for her. Of course I did.
But denial is potent stuff, especially when your relationship comes with a never-ending supply of distraction. Beth rallied hard to get us specialized as a missing persons team. I greased the wheels by having a few beers with a few big bosses, and it was done. Our solve rate did more than go through the roof. It became legendary. It still is.
As is the story of my cuffing her in a car to wait on a search warrant, and her fracturing a bone in her own hand to get free.
I’ve thought about it a lot. Of course I have — seven years is a long time to think about losing someone — and what I’ve decided is, my actions that night didn’t have nearly as much to do with protocol or probable cause or the chain of command as I initially told myself they did. They had to do with this person, this person who was unlike anyone I’d ever met or would ever meet again, and how she didn’t seem to give a damn about herself. How she ran into danger without blinking an eye, how being in the line of fire meant only that the kid wasn’t, and so it was fine. It was dandy, even. I’ve watched her get shot twice, right in front of me. Actually, three times, counting the other night with Jones. Body armor took the rounds two times out of three (and I haven’t yet wrapped my mind around how Beth lined a leather jacket in Kevlar and still looks like Angelina Jolie in the damn thing), but that other time, she didn’t have a vest. I screamed myself hoarse when I called for the ambulance. The bullet went through clean, she healed fast, she was back on the job in two weeks — but I spent eight nights on that crummy couch they put in hospital rooms for visitors who are too stubborn to leave, watching her heart monitor like it was my own pulse it was measuring, like if it flatlined there was no question that mine would, too. And I’d be thankful, because to go on without her wasn’t a painful or even an excruciating idea. It was death itself.
Afterward, I wasn’t the same. I was angry. I was a hair trigger. I was in denial up to my eyeballs, and I was in denial about being in denial. So that night, when she showed up and said she knew where to go, I pictured us going and Beth running into that byzantine lake house with her gun in perfect position, save for the fact that her finger never went near the trigger.
I know why she hates guns. I understand why she hates guns. She was ready to murder me with the Death of a Thousand Cuts when she found out I went digging in her past, but it was such a relief, to finally get it.
Neither the relief nor the understanding could quite extend, that night, to letting her risk herself one more time. I was so sure. I knew for a fact it was the right thing to do when I cuffed her to the wheel. What I’ve come to realize is, facts are tricky when you’re burying what you feel. You can make up stories inside that sound so damn good, but they’re stories. They’re the speeches you’ve buried alive trying to scream.
I lost her for fear of losing her, and then I was treated to years of second- and thirdhand tall tales about Beth running all over the world, pulling kids out of war zones and worse, making the kind of money that could build a hundred mansions and spending the vast majority on more rescue missions, more hopeless searches, more children who fell through a hole in the earth and came out the other side clinging to her. Imagine my surprise when I glad-handed the official reports out of Interpol or the UN or police departments in bayou backwaters and I found out that, far from being tall tales, the rumors of what Beth had done didn’t come close to the full scale of it.
And she’d done it all alone, with no one to watch her back.
I could have transferred out of missing persons a long time ago. I could have taken on a new partner, but I’ve said again and again that I prefer to fly solo. I doubt they suspect I’m doing these things because of Beth, but I can’t fool myself. Not anymore. I suppose that’s what growing up is.
I suppose, also, that I knew it would end with me finding her in the dark, bleeding, wrapped around a child who would barely survive the septicemia that had set in from a gunshot wound to the shoulder. But Polly did survive. I just saw her. Her hearing has been permanently damaged from that fucking bell, she’s doing physical therapy to see how much mobility her arm will have, and her shrink says she needs all the lights on when she sleeps.
But she’s alive. And she’ll be eighty-million dollars richer come her eighteenth birthday.
I’m driving up Highway 1, with a special passenger in the seat beside me. It doesn’t take up much space, but it’s heavy nonetheless.
How many times have I imagined myself scattering Beth’s ashes in the ocean?
How many times did I tell myself: at least it’s not today?
There was never any question of where I’d do it. Coming back from a trial up north once, we stopped in Monterey for dinner. I wanted a sit-down place but, as ever, Beth had to eat on the move. We hit up a taco shack on the beach and walked in the sand, lacing our shoes over our shoulders first and taking off the professional layers we’d needed for court. Gulls kept swooping for me, trying to steal my shrimp. Beth laughed; they didn’t want her pulled pork. We wound up on a crop of rocks, sipping sodas and watching the surfers coast through a neon sunset. It would be another year yet before we parted ways, but my denial was wearing thin even then. She had on a blue blouse with the sleeves rolled up, top few buttons undone; she never liked constriction around her neck. Her hair was loose, as it rarely was — she kept it braided back so it wasn’t in her way. We’d run out of things to talk about, as happens when you’re together all the time, but it wasn’t a bad thing. It wasn’t a silence I had to fill. I could just look at her as she stared out at the water, and I could see the sadness that lived under all her frantic hunting, all her chasing, all that exhausting herself so she didn’t have to feel where it really came from, so she could be afraid or enraged or unable to sit still and pretend it was about a missing child who needed her.
“I’ll always be here for you,” I said. “You know that, right?”
“No,” she said, “you won’t. You’ll get sick of my shit eventually. Everybody does.”
Nothing hurts worse than hearing someone you love admit that they hate themselves. Nothing. Not even them saying they hate you — which she did, a year later, when I cuffed her in that car. She meant it, too.
“What if I don’t?” I said. “What if I’m in it for the haul?”
She smiled, not at me but at the water. “Then this is as good as it gets. Right here, this is the best I have to offer. Because I’m not stopping. I’ll never stop. I can’t.”
I make a left. I park in a lot speckled with a half-dozen cars. It’s always bizarre to come up for air after a case that takes you over like this one did. Stepping out into the sun feels impossible. It feels extra-surreal to be carrying what I’m carrying.
I have to tell her goodbye, and I don’t know how.
As I trudge up the pier toward her plane, I see sh
e’s not alone. Laughlin is with her, all six-foot-five of him. He’s handing her a slip of paper from his notebook with the stiff movements of a man showing weakness. He leaves her smiling, and notices me when he looks up from his crutches. We don’t say anything. We nod. Men have a reputation for being insensitive, for not appreciating the nuances of situations, but it’s not true: we just don’t need to verbalize them. We trust our impressions, especially of each other. And it’s my distinct impression that Laughlin just gave Fell his phone number.
It throws me. Fell sees me coming and frowns, and that throws me again. I had a great opener, plus one hell of a closer, but when my mouth opens I hear myself say, “Coat check.” And I hold up her jacket.
Her eyes spark. It’s brief, but it’s there. The bandage on her temple is thick; it goes most of the way up the right side of her forehead. The bullet traced an almost perfect half-sphere around her skull and exited above her eyebrow. It caused a subdural hematoma that would have killed her if she’d gone into surgery even an hour later. She was in an induced coma for four days. My back’s still killing me from the chair in her recovery room.
“I thought the cops must have lost it.” She walks to me, takes the jacket, and goes back to the pilot’s seat, where she begins pulling zippers open and loading things in: a Kindle into a clever compartment in the back, waterproof matches in a tiny square up front. She pulls out a stack of photos, setting Polly’s school picture on top, and zips them low, by the hip, where a normal pocket would be.
“I meant to come by the hospital, but I’ve been busy wrapping everything up.” That’s not what I meant to say, either. It seems that old habits really do die hard.
She threads her arms into the sleeves despite it being eighty degrees out here. “Paperwork patrol.”
“Yeah.” I dig in my own pocket. “Saved this, too.” I throw it so she doesn’t have to walk to me again. I could go closer, but in a very important way, I can’t.
Beth catches the medal. Her thumb runs over the face as hesitation crosses hers. She slings the chain around her neck and stuffs the saint down her shirt. “Thanks.”
“Laughlin, huh?”
“Oh, please. I’m sure you and Bambi are on for brunch tomorrow.”
“Her name’s Hailey,” I say, waiting for Beth’s old punch line of Sure it is.
But she continues her pocket inventory, checking the slide on her knife and the batteries in her flashlight. She shines a set of brass knuckles on her shirt, some sunglasses next, and then she checks to see that the cap on a bottle of hot sauce is screwed on tight. I wonder how many people she’s allowed to observe this process. I feel weirdly honored.
“I stayed out of there,” I tell her.
“Good.”
“They still haven’t found a body in the wreckage of Polly’s building. The fire marshal thinks it’s a matter of time. There’s no way Jones got out.”
“Sure there’s not.”
“Beth.”
“What?”
“Would you look at me?” She does. I remember a part of my speech. Finally. “If I could go back . . . if I could go back to that night and make a different choice, I’d do it.”
If she sneered at me, or laughed, or did anything but the nothing that her expression is doing right now, I might believe there’s a chance. But she just says, “It’s easy to show up on a beautiful day when absolutely nothing is on the line and tell me that. It’s easy to talk about yesterday and say what you’d do differently. You like easy. And listen, that’s fine. But that’s our line in the sand, okay? That’s where you and me divide.”
“If I liked easy, would I have stuck with you for four years?”
She doesn’t answer. She zips up her jacket.
“Please. Please, Beth.”
“Please what?”
“Forgive me.”
“I did,” she says. “A long time ago. Forgive yourself, Dane. And move on.”
It’s great advice. I know I’m not going to follow it. “Lacy said she’d feel better if you didn’t fly for a few more days. Stick around. We can catch a ball game.”
“If you need a consult in the future, you’ve got my number.”
I stand there and stare at The Great Wall of Beth. It’s stopped invaders all her life. And that’s what she really thinks of me; that’s what I made myself the night I betrayed her. I’m one more of the hordes to be repelled.
I walk away quickly, waving once my back is turned. I imagine her watching me go, and I wish I could know if she feels anything, anything at all.
I’m so afraid that farewell shop talk will be the last words I ever hear her say.
Epilogue: After
I watch Dane get smaller and smaller. He ducks in his car, then I’m watching that instead. Soon it’s gone on Highway 1.
I’m still standing where he left me, though I don’t know why. I’d blame the pain meds Lacy put me on, but I didn’t take them this morning. I’d blame Jones for not being a corpse in that homemade barbecue pit I fashioned for him, but I console myself that wherever he is, he’s extra crispy. I’d blame a lot of things for my standing here, like the mental movie of Dane and me at the stadium, slurping Cokes and eating Dodger dogs, making jokes and doing The Wave. As if forgiveness is a magical delete button instead of a fresh, clean page where the treasonous person can hurt you all over again.
I take out my phone. I could call him. He’d turn around and come back and we could talk. We could find a diner that’s open twenty-four hours and talk ’til the sun came up tomorrow.
It rings in my hand. I know the number. And I know that there won’t be time to think about Dane or anything else besides a kid who needs a miracle as soon as I answer.
So I answer. “This is Fell.”
Postscript
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And thanks for reading. I hope it passed the time.