by Robert Cea
I didn’t look at him; I looked from the sketch to the woman. “It was worth it, Patty, it really was.”
“All right, brother, I’ll see you on the six to two.”
He walked away. I still could not take my eyes off the woman, even though her face was almost beaten off. I could see that she must have been pretty. I also saw in this lifeless body the one person I could always count on and rely on to give me great comfort—I saw my wife, Mia. I saw her lying there, helpless, defiled and dead. I wanted to help her, to pull that pipe from within her, I wanted to hold her and tell her it was all going to be all right, I wanted to feel her skin on mine, I wanted to apologize for everything that I had put her through, I wanted to open up to her, allow her into my world, to be one again. The clouds that were hanging over the Red Hook projects were now crawling northeast; they were almost overhead when a clap of thunder jolted me. It was time for me to get my life back, if it wasn’t too late.
The rain eased up once I drove over the Kosciusko Bridge, on the BQE. The traffic was still bumper to bumper, but that was okay because I needed time to gather my thoughts. I wanted to be crystal clear in what it was I had to say. I wanted her to know that the flaw I had found in myself would be corrected and that I would give up everything to gain her respect and trust once again. I pulled off the Whitestone Expressway onto Twentieth Avenue and slowly made my way through the middle-class neighborhood. The homes were upscale for any borough in the city of New York; the people were a little different as well. They knew what they had, twenty minutes into the city by car, though divided and segregated from other neighborhoods by the Long Island Sound, parts of the Hudson River, LaGuardia Airport, and four superhighways. This part of Queens was one of the gems of New York. Whitestone was safe a hundred years ago and it was going to be safe in another hundred years.
The only spots that were available were a block and a half away, on 147th Street. I walked down the tight one-way street of neatly kept one-family homes. The people of Whitestone took great pride in their homes. There were rose gardens and fragrant shrubs, there were potted plants placed dramatically on the brick steps leading up to colorfully painted front doors. This was the place that should have been in my progression up the geographical ladder. I had skipped this perfectly landscaped little neighborhood; I’d gone from low-end Brooklyn to high-end Kings Point. I’d missed a rung, though I was glad that Mia had not. I knew she was grounded behind all of this comfort and that was why she was going to make the place I called home, Kings Point, work for both of us.
I rang the doorbell and the lights came on in the inner porch. Mia’s mother, a short woman nearing seventy who always wore black, peeked from behind a lace curtain. You could see that at one time she’d been as beautiful as Mia, with smiling eyes. Not tonight though. I could see she was sad. I had always liked this woman even though she spoke very little English and I spoke even less Italian. She opened the door and smiled weakly. I knew she wanted this to work, that if it could be repaired, she was a good ally to have.
“I’m sorry I’m here so late; is she still up?” I asked this quietly; she touched my arm and pulled me into the house. After she closed and locked the door behind me, she took my coat. She was a good woman, and I knew Mia was as good. I only hoped Mia felt the same about me.
“Mia è stanca. Piano, piano, si?”
I smiled at the sad woman. She was loyal to her daughter; she was asking me in simple words that I would understand to go easy, that her daughter was tired. There was something else in her eyes, though I did not know what. I gently kissed her cheek and moved inside.
The house was dark though the kitchen light was on. The house always had an amazing aroma, and tonight it was anisette and coffee. Mia’s mother’s kitchen was the center of their family’s universe. Everything that was of any consequence was discussed in that room. Mia was sitting at a large oak table in the middle of the room; two empty espresso cups were on the table, one for her and one for Mommina. She was wearing a robe, and she looked tired, her face drawn and pale. I wanted to cry the second I saw her. I had never seen her look so worn down, and it was all because of me. I crossed to her slowly. “Mia…” I whispered this half to her, half to myself. I slid a chair next to her and sat very close. “I’m so sorry, honey, I’m so sorry.” I reached out to her, I laid my hand on her shoulder, but she just vacantly stared into that coffee cup on the table. I imagined this was what she’d received from me, day after day, evening after evening. There was a moment of silence. She was guarded, but I truly believed that she had to have known how deeply I loved her, that I did still care in spite of everything I had said.
“Mia, I want you to get your things, and I want you to come home.”
Slowly she brought her eyes to mine. I could see traces of her steely fortitude. “Why…Why am I going back to where you never wanted to be in the first place? Why would I do that?”
I lowered my head. This was not going to be easy. I had dropped too many bombs on her.
“Mia, those things were said out of context and in a fit of rage. You have to know that I didn’t mean that. You have to know you’re my soul mate. We are one, Mia, we always have been. Please don’t hold those terrible things I said against me. There is too much between us.”
“No, Rob, too much has passed between us; so much has passed that it can never be the same. Do you realize that in all the time we have been together I have never really met any of your partners from the job, and you have never met any colleagues of mine from work? You talk about me living in a bubble…” She shook her head slowly and pointed her finger somewhere in my direction. “You are the one living in a bubble.”
“Mia, the men I work with are different, they don’t understand that there is a line that separates work from reality. These guys carry it with them twenty-four/seven, and the last person I wanted to be privy to all that crap was you. They do not know how to leave it at the precinct…”
“So what’s the answer, Rob? Just staying at the precinct longer and longer so you never actually have to leave it? At least they do that …They go home…You and I are roommates on different schedules who do not speak the same language.”
“We do, Mia.”
“We don’t, Rob. As a matter of fact, you don’t even speak. I’d have preferred to have heard all of the horror stories. At least I would know how to help, maybe comfort you, maybe we would have been able to work through some of those issues you felt the need to keep me in the dark about. That’s what I thought marriage was supposed to be, a partnership where two people work out issues for better or for worse. But me, I have nothing, just a man I hear enter the front door at four a.m. The only chance I get to feel his lips on mine is when I have to sneak a kiss while he is asleep on the couch, which is also the only time I get to see him. Yeah, that’s a great life and a perfect marriage. Rob, I tried, but I’m tired and I’m through.”
What she was saying was true, every word of it, but I could not give up on us that easily. I was as strong willed as she was and I would figure out a way to make this work. I would not allow her to raise a baby, my baby, in a broken, loveless home. She was a good woman and was well on her way to being a wonderful mother, but I wanted to be as brilliant a father. I had seen the scars that broken homes indelibly leave on babies; they lose what they need the most in life, trust and faith.
I dropped my head on her shoulder. “Mia, I don’t …I can’t lose you, I can’t. I love you too much and I love this baby too much. If anything, we have to give this one last chance to survive, for this baby. Mia, please, don’t think of me, think of the baby.”
I didn’t want to use that card, but I felt my grip loosening; Mia had a heart, and I know she wanted this baby as much as I did. She dropped her head and quietly sobbed. “You never wanted the baby, Rob, never, and that hurt me the most. I’m giving you your out Rob…Take it, just go.”
“I know where I went wrong, Mia, and I know how to get back to that place. I know how to change all of thi
s.”
“Robert, I see how much hate there is in you. That you can’t change.”
She delivered the line with ice-cold incisiveness, and she was right, and it stung because of its dead-on, pointed clarity. I felt the lump in my throat swell; I needed to hold on, though what the fuck for? This was what it was all about, dropping my guard, allowing myself the comfort that she so freely offered me, and then I cried. I held her close to me and I cried, and for no other reason than that I needed to let it out. All of the pain and hurt and anger I had walled up inside; the crying felt good, and I thought, Why didn’t I do this so long ago? When I looked into her eyes again, she was no longer crying. Her eyes were a mix of confusion and hurt. “I don’t want to be that way any longer, Mia, I don’t.”
“Maybe this job brought out the person you really are deep inside, but you have become the person you have hated the most. Rob, there is no difference between you and them; you yourself said it the other day, and now there is nothing…” She held my face in her hands and made a point of focusing on my eyes. “Nothing left between us. Nothing, Rob. It’s all over.”
“Mia, we’ll start over. I’ll quit the job; Mia, we’re going to have a baby, please.” I felt a hot desperation crawling in my chest.
Another moment passed between us; her eyes were suddenly sad again, and then she said, very quietly, “There is no baby anymore.”
It took a moment for it to find its mark, but it did. I didn’t want to believe what I had heard. I tilted my head at her, unsure.
I felt myself stand. She was sobbing again. That’s when the severity of it all hit me, it felt like a .45 slug had crept up under my vest and gutted me cleanly. I was now a festering, open wound. I slowly stepped back away from that woman sitting in the chair who had just given me a death sentence, that woman who’d handed me a gun with one bullet and set me adrift in an endless sea of loss. I knew that nothing in my life, or what was left of it, would ever be the same again. In that split second, she completely redefined my whole existence.
I moved quickly through the living room. I saw her mother sitting in the dark, crying quietly as I walked past her. I stepped out into the pounding rain, crying as I walked aimlessly in the middle of the street. I had nowhere to go, and no one to go to. I was lost. I had instantaneously become just another victim…of myself.
14
Redemption
I sat in my car and stared out into the rain. I felt it tug at me from under my wet shirt, biting me slightly, nipping at my lower back, trying to get out. I was completely spent of all emotion. There was nothing left. I reached around and felt the wet wood on my palm. I loved the way it felt in my hand. Those Pachmayr grips were for pussies. This is how the Colts were designed, hard and cold in your hand, letting you know they were there and ready to do damage. I opened the bullet chamber and checked the load, though that was an empty gesture. I was always strapped heavy. I swung the chamber shut and raised it up to my mouth; I closed my eyes, felt the cold steel touch my lips, tasted the metal. It was much like the taste of blood, which I’d grown to like. I pulled the hammer back, felt my heart pounding. I should have pulled the trigger instantaneously, but I didn’t. I grabbed the port of the gun to steady it from shaking, but now both hands started to gyrate, and that’s when I started to think. I thought of my brother, Jeff. He would be the one the job would call, he was the one person I’d put on my ten card* to call in case of emergency. I loved him and I didn’t want him to have to identify his cowardly brother with his head blown up on a lonely block somewhere in Queens. He didn’t deserve that; I certainly did, but Jeff didn’t. Then I thought of Cholito and his death. I figured if I pulled the trigger at that moment, this would be a ground ball for all the parties involved to close out the case on me. I would certainly be the one who had murdered him. I squeezed my eyes closed and pulled the gun out of my mouth, dropping it onto the floor of the car. There was a better way to do this. If I was going to go, I was going to take the filth with me. I started up the engine.
Billy met me at the last table of Farrell’s. It was in a section south of the moneyed area known as Park Slope, the bar a neighborhood staple for over 120 years and the second-oldest bar in the city; it has always catered to city workers, mostly firemen and cops; it was a place to go to unwind, where there would be no posturing because there were never any women in the place. As a matter of fact, women were not allowed in the bar until the mid-seventies when the actress Shirley MacLaine had demanded to be served. She was, and that changed the clientele in the bar forever, though not much. Farrell’s was the one place where you could go to sit, sip, and talk quietly.
I had already had three shots of Jack, but tonight I did not feel any of its calming effects. It was just liquid that had no bite and no particular taste to it. Billy was sipping his pint as he leaned in across from me at the table so that we were almost eye to eye. It felt good to be with him again. I knew that if I was going to get something back, it was going to have to start here. I wanted him to know everything that I had felt and what kind of impact he had had on me. I knew I was going to go out of the picture eventually, one way or another, and I wanted him to understand that he was truly my hero. He was the real thing, and he needed to keep on doing what it was that he was doing.
“Things happen for a reason, Rob, she had a reason to do what she did, and there is nothing that you can do to change that, but you can learn from it, man.”
Just his voice was soothing to me. I wondered where I would be if I’d taken his road back in the 6–7, if we’d both gone to the study sessions together and worked our way up the ladder through the civil-service tests. We’d still have been salty behind our time in the Badlands, but we’d be bosses and that much more valuable to the job, to the people of the city of New York. Billy was going to do great things on the job and certainly in life, this I was sure of.
“I miss talking to you, man.”
“Me too, Rob. Remember what I used to say: We don’t know where each other is, we can’t protect each other.”
I nodded. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“We’ll get through this, and everything will be the way it used to be and you’ll be stronger from it.”
“Remember the rape victim from Hamilton Avenue?” I asked this quietly. He nodded. I wanted to take my time with this. “I was watching you that day . . . the way you handled her. We were all afraid to step up to her because of what she’d been through, but you . . . you were there, you put the blanket around her, you spoke to her, you made her feel like it wasn’t her fault and that she was still a person. You cared, Billy . . .” I looked into his eyes. “I wish I had that.”
“You do, Rob, you do, man. You care for these people, I know you do. None of these guys out here know you like I do, none of them.” He tapped his heart. “I know what’s going on in here, brother. You’re here for the same reason I am. We just do things differently, but we’re looking for the same results, give a little comfort back. Don’t beat yourself up over this, Rob. You’ve done a lot of good out there. Guys on the job thirty years have not come close to doing what you did. You should take comfort in knowing that.” I still didn’t look at him. I was embarrassed because I didn’t want his praise, although getting it from him helped close some of the open wounds. He placed his hand on my neck, then tapped my shoulder, saying quietly, “You know, Rob—and this goes for everyone I have worked with since I been on the job—when I know you’re working, I know that if the shit hits the fan, you are not far behind, that everything is going to be all right. We all do, and you know what? As cops, we can’t ask for anything more than that, to feel like there is someone out there who is going to help. So you help, bro, you help all of us get through the tours.”
More than anything else all I’d ever wanted was to be relied upon by the men I was lucky enough to serve with. I felt that even though I’d lost the way, maybe I had helped somehow, maybe I had put another cop killer away before he was able to take one of us out, or maybe
I did stop another senseless murder, maybe it really all wasn’t for nothing. I did, however, know that my time left on the job was limited. I’d seen it all and pretty much done it all; whether I was going to jail or getting bounced from the job or going out by someone else’s hand didn’t matter, this was the instance in my life when it was time to turn a page. If I was going out of the picture, I wanted to at least go out trying to do what I originally came on to do, fight crime.
I stood up, and Billy did the same as he reached out to my shoulder. “Rob, stay at my place tonight, don’t drive all the way back to the island.”
“Nah, Billy, Patty’s doing a six to two. I’m meeting him at the precinct, then we’re going back to his place. I’m gonna stay there for a while… there’s nothing left for me on the island, she’s, you know …gone for good.” No beautiful pregnant wife, no home, no plans for the future, it was just me, and I had to deal with that fact, period.
Billy stepped close to me and we hugged; for some reason I felt that that was the last time we’d ever be that close, I felt like I was saying good-bye; I held him tightly, then broke away and never looked back.
I drove over the Third Street Bridge, going the wrong way, but it was the quickest route to the precinct from the Slope. There were no cars at this time of the evening in that part of town, unless they were bad guys, and that too would have suited me just fine. The waterway underneath was just another section of the Gowanus Canal, which once carried boats with goods to different parts of the city. This was once the Erie Canal of Brooklyn. Now it was a sludge-filled vein in the Badlands. The streets were empty and dark; the streetlights in the area were ancient, though remarkably, still functioning, washing the landscape in a soft, dull bath of white light. I noticed the pictures of the Monster plastered all over the walls of the abandoned factories, on the street poles, on doors, on rotted, dead trees. He was there, just staring back at me in that odd, ugly white light. It was his eyes, so fucking familiar, it was killing me to know that I had met him before, but my mind was blank. The slower I drove the more his face came into focus, like film slowing down, until I stopped. Click, click, click. I had my foot on the brake just as I rolled over the bridge. It was me and him; I must’ve stared at the image for five minutes and that is when I was jolted back into my seat. I felt like someone had reached inside me and flipped the on power switch. I jumped out of the car and charged across the wet street to the poster, screaming, “MOTHERFUCKER!” I tore the picture from the cracked redbrick wall, did a 360, and ran to a phone at the base of the bridge. I dropped in change and dialed quickly. “Put Pirelli on the phone…Patty, it’s me, I made the motherfucker, I made him, Patty, meet me at the Tuff Gong, no lights, no sirens Patty…Hurry!” He knew what I meant. Come quick and stealthy, do not raise anyone up to the fact that we are on our way. That is just the way I wanted it. No lights and no sirens.