Falling Back to One

by Randy Mason

  “No! No, of course not.” And though he didn’t need to, he flicked a few ashes into the ashtray. “Y’know, she’s never even come on to me—not before that night or after. In fact, she’s always been very careful to, y’know, keep herself covered up and stuff. Even when she was sick. It was a real battle to get her to let me put those towels on her. God”—shaking his head, he closed his eyes—“she was so afraid of me.” And in the stillness of the office, he felt the stillness of Micki’s apartment again: the heaviness in the air, the darkness reaching out of the corners …

  “The reason I’m not concerned, Sergeant”—Baker opened his eyes at the sound of Lerner’s voice—“is that, based on what I’ve observed and what you’ve told me, her attraction to you will never be a problem as long as you don’t act on it.”

  “But I did act on it.”

  “Even ignoring that you were high, your relationship to her then was very different from what it is now: you didn’t see yourself as playing the role of a father; you were acting almost exclusively as a parole officer. Yes, it was a despicable abuse of your position of authority, and reprehensible given her youth and the difference in your ages. Let’s be clear: as her legal guardian, what you did was incestuous. Make no mistake, if you were to commit such an act now, I would rip her away from you so fast your head would spin.”

  “I would never …”

  “And it goes without saying that I trust you won’t ever get high like that anymore, either.”

  “I wouldn’t do anything that stupid again. She’s too important to me.”

  “Do you understand how important you are to her?”

  “Now I do.”

  “You’re only just realizing it?”

  He took a rough drag off the cigarette. “Okay, so maybe it’s that I’m finally admitting it—accepting it—now. I want to be there for her.”

  Lerner looked at him pointedly. “Then you have to stop running away.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  MICKI WATCHED BAKER FROM the window—a black figure tramping through dirty winter white. She wondered what he’d said after she’d left.

  She retreated to her room to sleep. It was barely two in the afternoon.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  THAT NIGHT, BAKER UNLOCKED the desk drawer containing his important papers. He pulled out a manila envelope buried all the way underneath and examined one of the documents inside. The first thing that caught his eye was the name on it: Mickey Reilly. A closer look showed it had been altered; someone had used correction fluid, then typed over it. Holding it up to the light, the “i” underneath the “e” in “Mickey” became visible. He snorted, then skimmed through the text. His guardianship remained in effect until she reached her eighteenth birthday or until such time that formal, legal action was taken to terminate it; whichever came first.

  He returned the envelope to its place in the drawer and wondered if all of the other copies he’d signed had been altered, as well. After he’d read the first one, he wouldn’t have looked at the rest very carefully. On some technical level, the deception probably compromised the validity of the documents. But it didn’t really matter. He was the only person likely to contest them. He was also the last person on earth who actually would.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “WHY DID YOU SLAP Sergeant Baker?” Lerner asked the next day.

  Micki gave a lethargic shrug.

  “You must’ve had a reason,” the doctor pressed.

  “He shouldn’t talk to me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that.”

  “Why not?”

  Micki gave her another shrug.

  “If you could, would you sleep with him again?”

  “No!”

  “Why not? It sounds like he was a good lover—”

  “Shut up.”

  “What’s the matter?” Lerner asked.

  “I don’t wanna talk about this.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s wrong.”

  “Did it feel wrong when you were doing it that night?”

  Micki hesitated. “It felt … I don’t know … I … Once the stuff he’d smoked started wearing off, it felt bad.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When he was stoned, it was like he was someone else.”

  “And when he was no longer high?”

  Micki stared at the books on Lerner’s shelves. Practically whispering, she said, “I wanted to hide.” She looked back. “I—I really don’t wanna talk about this anymore.”

  After several seconds had passed, Lerner said, “I heard you’ve been studying, that you’re planning to take your finals at the end of the week.”

  “Two on Friday and three on Saturday. The nurses are gonna give ’em to me. I have to take ’em in one of the padded rooms.” Seeing Lerner’s expression, she added, “Well, if I’m not gonna be dead, I might as well not fuck up the one thing I got goin’ for me.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “HI, MICKI.”

  She’d been staring out the window, watching visitors and hospital personnel navigate the slushy puddles lining the roads below. When she spun around, she saw the owner of the voice she recognized but couldn’t place.

  “Do you feel up to talking for a few minutes?” Captain Malone asked.

  “Are you gonna tell me to talk to Sergeant Baker, too? ’Cause I already told the other cop ta”—she paused—“t’leave me alone.”

  He tensed. “What other cop?”

  “I dunno his name, but he said he’s Sergeant Baker’s partner.”

  Malone relaxed. “That’s Detective Gould. No, Micki, I’m not going to tell you to do anything, although I would like to know why you won’t talk to Sergeant Baker.”

  “’Cause I hate him.”

  Arms in a classic Jack Benny pose, Malone stroked his chin. “Is that why you—is he the reason you’re here?”

  She looked so deeply into his eyes that he drew in his breath.

  After a long pause, she said merely, “I was very depressed.”

  Malone exhaled and dropped his arms. “Y’know, nobody wants you to take your own life, kid.”

  “But no one particularly cares if I live, either.”

  His heart twinged. And he finally saw Micki as a real person, not just some peripheral entity in Baker’s life. Voice quiet, he said, “That’s not true.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “I hope you feel better soon.”

  She shrugged and turned away.

  Malone lightly touched her arm, and she jumped.

  “I meant what I said, okay?” he added.

  Eyebrows pulled together, she responded a little too forcefully, “Okay!”

  “Okay,” he repeated softly, and gave her a sad smile. “Bye, Micki.” And he quickly strode across the dayroom.

  She waited till his navy wool coat had disappeared, then turned back to the window to watch the world go by some more.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “IT WAS ONE OF those weird winter days when it doesn’t feel extremely cold, but you can see your breath, y’know?” Baker lit a cigarette and crossed his right ankle over his left knee. “Gould and I were staking out this suspect’s old neighborhood. We were were sitting in a car and drinking coffee. There were two other detectives where the suspect had been hanging out more recently, but I had a hunch he’d go back to his old digs. With the body count rising, we needed to get this guy, and we needed to get him fast.” Baker filled his lungs with smoke, held it, then exhaled. “And I wanted to be the one to get him. He’d killed four people in three stores in six days—went in to rob a place and didn’t even give the poor slob at the register a chance, just blew his brains out, took the money, and ran. Blew away one customer, too. D
idn’t give a shit who he killed; didn’t give a shit about anything. Not surprisingly, only one witness was willing to take a look at the mug shots. The guy they picked out was a long-time junkie—never violent before, all his priors petty thefts. And while we thought the witness might’ve made a mistake, they insisted it was him. So we started checking him out. And when we learned his girlfriend had recently OD’d on some bad smack, we figured something in him must’ve snapped.”

  Shifting in his seat, Baker recrossed his legs the opposite way. “Anyway, we see the guy turn the corner and start walking toward us. But then he makes us and bolts. We end up chasing him for a few blocks until he runs into this abandoned building. It’s totally disgusting inside and, except for this one beam of light coming through some busted boards over a window, it’s also really dark. Gould and I are both breathing hard from running, and the mist from our breath is kind of glowing in that light—kind of creepy. Anyway, we can hear the guy racing up the steps. Gould goes back out and heads for the fire escape in the rear to cut him off. I find the stairs and start up when my flashlight dies on me. The stairs are almost pitch black, and I don’t hear the guy anymore. But just as I reach the second floor, I hear a crash and Gould cursing. And it sounds like he’s dropped his gun; I can hear it clattering, heavy, down the fire escape. When I go toward the sound, I enter this huge room and see the suspect’s back. He’s standing in front of a window, and I can tell he’s pointing a gun at Gould—who’s telling him not to shoot. But the guy says, ‘You’re a fucking pig, man. You’re dead.’ And then I hear two gunshots. They sound far away, like from some other part of the building. It takes a moment till I realize I’d pulled the trigger. Twice. And I’m watching this guy stagger forward a couple of steps and then crumple to the ground. Slowly. I mean, that’s how it looks ’cause everything seems to be happening in slow motion.

  “As I go past the guy, I kick his gun away. His eyes are closed, his face all sunken and sallow. I can see he’s still breathing, but there’s a lot of blood—and I know he’s not getting up. Meanwhile, Gould, who’s right outside the fire escape window, is in shock. When he heard the gun go off, he thought he’d been shot. He’s okay, actually, except for a twisted ankle and some bruises—he’d slipped on some ice. But when I get back to the perp, he’s dead. Two rounds and I’d taken him out.”

  Baker pulled hard on the cigarette, then exhaled the smoke in a long, steady stream. “It was all so unreal. Over and over in the academy, I heard how most cops never fire their weapon in their entire career, let alone hit someone—or kill them. By the time the shooting happened, I’d drawn my gun so many times, I’d grown comfortable with the idea that I’d never actually have to use it. And then, when I understood I’d killed someone—well—I kept second-guessing myself because I never gave any warning. Just shot him. I mean, no one else was questioning it—”

  “You said yourself,” the doctor interrupted, “that this man had already shown he had no regard for human life; he’d killed without reason or provocation. If you’d taken the time to issue a warning, your partner would probably be dead now. You did what you had to.”

  “That’s easy for you to say; you’re not the one who pulled the trigger.” Baker ground the cigarette into the ashtray. A second later, he lit another. “I’m going to die of lung cancer.”

  “You’re under tremendous stress right now. Let’s first concentrate on alleviating some of that, then we’ll deal with the smoking.”

  Baker grunted and played with his lighter, then tossed it onto the table. “Anyway, that’s when I started drinking so much. It helped block out the images and the sound of the gunshots that kept ringing in my ears. I didn’t want to see anything anymore. I didn’t want to feel anything anymore. But even with the drinking …” His eyes lost focus, and he hung his head. They sat in silence until he said, “I have”—he took a deep, ragged breath—“I have blood on my hands now.” He looked up. “That piece of garbage forced me to take a life—to kill someone. To kill him.”

  Lerner waited, letting the moment fill the room and settle slowly to the ground. Then she said, “That’s a heavy burden to carry.”

  “Yeah, well … I can tell you that that day became the dividing point in my life. After that, everything seemed different. Especially on the job. I started getting more physical, and it didn’t bother me one bit. Quite the opposite: it felt good. Gould never took part, but always looked the other way. He felt he owed me his life. He would do anything for me. Still would.”

  “Did you talk to anyone about what you were going through?”

  “Not really, no. At some point, Captain Malone got concerned and made me talk to the department shrink. But I simply said all the things I had to in order to remain on active duty.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him the truth?”

  “I didn’t want to end up on the rubber-gun squad.”

  “The what?”

  “The rubber-gun squad. That’s what we call it when they take your gun away and assign you to some desk job.”

  “What about your partner?”

  “I didn’t want him worrying that he couldn’t depend on me.”

  “Your girlfriend?”

  “I didn’t want Cynthia to think I was weak.”

  “Is it so terrible to need someone’s help?”

  Baker shrugged. “I’ve always done everything for myself.”

  “That’s because as a child you didn’t have a parent you could count on; you were your own parent. In some ways, you were your mother’s parent. By doing everything yourself, you didn’t have to deal with being let down, and you didn’t have to owe anyone anything. It also distanced you from your mother’s sense of entitlement. But you can’t go through life that way. It’s impossible; people need each other. Tell me something: how did you feel when Micki showed up at your poker game that night?”

  “Furious. I told you how angry I was.”

  “Yes, but that was when she first arrived. After that, when you knew why she was there and how hard it must’ve been for her to be asking you for something …”

  “I felt … touched. Protective.”

  “And why was that?”

  “I felt needed.”

  “You like feeling needed,” Lerner said. “It’s one of the reasons you became a police officer. In general, people like to feel needed because then they know they mean something to someone.”

  Baker grunted.

  Half a minute went by.

  “Sometimes I can’t get the shooting out of my head,” he said. “It’s like I’m back in that moment all over again. I—I still have dreams about it.”

  “Can you tell me one of the—”

  “Can we talk about something else?” Flicking ashes from his cigarette, he shifted in his seat.

  The doctor’s voice was gentle. “When you feel ready, we’ll explore this further. But I want to point out that you appear to feel guilty simply for being at the right place at the right time—for doing your job and wanting to do it well.”

  Baker looked toward the window. A pigeon tried to land on the icy ledge, then flew away. He said, “Just for once, I wish that my hunch had been wrong. Then Gould and I would’ve been waiting there for nothing.”

  “You’ve got women’s intuition.”

  He gave her a lethal look. “Don’t let that get around.”

  Lerner’s jaw dropped. “I—I would never …”

  He started to grin.

  Her face reddened, but then she broke into a wry smile. “My lips are sealed. But that brings us back to something you said during your first session. You’d mentioned that while you’d already made up your mind to dislike Micki before you’d even met her, your feelings intensified significantly as soon as you had.”

  Baker’s grin faded. “I realized I’d been tricked. I hadn’t been expecting—and didn�
��t want—a girl.”

  “I think it was more than that. I think you intuitively knew something about her that was triggering those feelings. I think she reminded you of someone.”

  “You mean like the guy I shot—the one I was just telling you about?”

  “Could be. Does that ring true for you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then what does? You have to be the one to decide.”

  “Maybe the guy whose jaw I broke. That’s when the shit hit the fan. He was a junkie, too—and he’d killed someone.” Stubbing out his cigarette, he said, “I don’t know; I’m not sure.”

  “Then who else?” Seeing Baker’s expression, she added, “It can be more than one person. For that matter, it can be many people. The mind doesn’t limit its associations.”

  “Please don’t tell me it’s my mother …”

  Lerner chuckled. “No, not your mother. We psychiatrists don’t connect everything back to your mother.”

  “So who?”

  “I’d like you to think about that.”

  “Is it really that important?”

  “Very much so.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  CAPPED INSIDE THE BOTTLE, the Jack Daniels—a perfectly smooth, rich amber—seemed to be glowing. For ten minutes, Baker had been staring at it. How many times had he gone through this same little scenario? But tonight the compulsion felt stronger—almost desperate. At first he couldn’t understand the backslide; he’d been doing so well. But talking about the shooting must’ve dredged up the very feelings he couldn’t handle sober in the first place. As soon as he’d gotten home, he’d unlocked the cabinet, ruing his initial decision to keep the bottles: fuck it if the guys had to bring their own. But having the liquor around gave him a sense of power—proof that he, not the alcohol, was the one in control. Of course, at times like this, he was no longer so sure. Jesus, he should just lock the fucking bottle away already. But it would be such a relief to take one tiny sip—

  Something crashed to the floor in the apartment above, and he started. He shoved the bottle back in the cabinet, locked the door, and put his keys on the dresser in the bedroom. But on his way out, he stopped by the night table to stare at the phone. Then he picked up the receiver. Though he was about to call Dr. Lerner, he dialed another number instead. Warner didn’t answer. He dialed again, but reached only Aunt Sylvia, who was babysitting at Gould’s. Taking a deep breath, he dialed the number that he should’ve tried first.