If the Ice Had Held
Page 14
He hurried to his cruiser to follow. Though the winter sun had not been down all that long, the dark was already deep. He turned on the patrol lights and raced toward the hospital, his siren calling across the broken ice.
He wondered if he had just experienced his first time really touching a dead person. Police training had prepared him, in a way, for certain realities, but it had not prepared him for what it would mean to him, fishing a slight boy’s frame from the water, putting his own breath to the boy’s mouth. From an angle, he thought he could see how the river ice might have looked crossable. Simon was sure someone would ask why the boy had not used the bridge, and though he was still young himself, he could imagine his even younger self taking a shortcut despite the risk. It could have been the boy was angry, or in a hurry, or not being careful, though it seemed more like plain bad luck.
At the hospital, the boy was the only person in the single bed of the emergency room. The doctor had tried defibrillation to start his heart by electric shock. His wet clothes had been stripped. It had been over thirty minutes now, maybe, Simon thought. He had meant to check the time on the dash of the cruiser but he had lost track. They kept trying. Simon counted with them silently. The boy looked better, he thought, but it was only the heat and the lights of the hospital—the sense of safety, the feeling of not being alone. Finally the frantic wheeze of the respirator stopped, and they pulled a blanket up over the boy’s head, his damp hair soaking the edge of the hem.
* * *
Simon was not the first Officer Stevens in his family. His father, Frank, had been another small-town patrolman, and as a child Simon had waited up nights, when he was supposed to be sleeping, for the scratch of the key in the lock and his father’s boots thudding up the hallway. He often thought of the man and how, on those long nights when he had only wanted him to come home, he worried for him, even in their little, safe town. His mother waited too, and she must have known Simon was not asleep, but she never fought him on it, not even when he dozed, exhausted, through his school alarm. Though he did not like that his father was gone in the night, he understood it was important work. He made things safe. Sometimes people had problems with themselves or one another, and his father solved these problems, he knew, or at least he thought he knew. That had unraveled when he’d joined the force.
Simon checked the dead boy’s pockets for identification, and he made his calls from the payphone in the lobby as he picked through the sodden wallet. The driver’s license not even two years old, the picture lit too brightly but still hopeful looking. The name was familiar: Samuel Henderson. He knew some Hendersons, but he could not place this one. There were also four dollars and a picture of a girl with dark hair, waterlogged and colors running. He noted the address on the ID and put the wallet in the bag with the boy’s clothes. He would have to go to the house, he knew, and tell them. It was 7:30 p.m. and he imagined this boy’s family cleaning up their dinner dishes and wondering about their son. He did not want to knock at their door and take off his hat. They would know before the words were even out of his mouth.
He had his own boy, Brian. The child was just a toddler. The pregnancy had been hard on his wife, Bonnie, and her doctor had cautioned against having more children. For now, Simon was happy they had a son, though it felt selfish to him. They had tried so hard for a baby. Never had he been so focused on a woman’s cycle as in those early days of his marriage. It was something he’d not given much thought to. Bonnie had been his first girlfriend, and he did not have sisters or any girl cousins who were close. Their mothers knew each other from school, and it felt natural to Simon when he started to think of Bonnie as the woman he would be with for life. There was a photo of them as children, covered in mud, while their mothers drank beer from the can at an outdoor table in the background. It used to hang in Bonnie’s childhood home, and now it sat on their mantel. A neighbor, long dead, had taken it by accident. She had gotten a camera as a gift and was crossing the yard to ask one of them to show her how to use it when the flash went off.
It was not until later, when they were a year into their marriage and wrestling to conceive, that he learned how his own mother had struggled—he did not know she had held on to the pregnancy that had become him only barely, and that even after months of bed rest, he was still premature. It was out of necessity that he was an only child, like his own son might turn out to be. Bonnie said he should have told her all this before they took vows.
“I would’ve still been with you, but I might have wanted to start sooner,” she said. “In case it would’ve made a difference.”
He hung his head then, because he would have told her if he had known, but he had not, and he was not sure they really could have started trying much sooner than they had. After he proposed they had married quickly in his parents’ backyard, on the last warm day of autumn before her senior classes started again for the fall. They used paper plates leftover from his own graduation party in early summer to serve the cake his mother had made, a pretty sheet of white ringed by the last chrysanthemums of the season.
The doctors always said it was on the woman, pregnancy troubles. He’d heard enough from them to keep his mouth shut, but he couldn’t deny his own experience, the experience of his father. He’d never been that interested in science, but one day, Simon thought, the science would catch up. People could believe it was the woman or it was God making a baby, but he knew it took two people, a man and a woman.
They lived with his parents the first year, and he started his police training, while she finished up her final year of high school.
Bonnie’s own folks had been gone since she was girl, and he regretted he did not have the chance to ask her father for her hand. As much as she was a woman who lived her own life and knew her own mind, she would have liked that. Her older brother had given permission. She was the youngest of three, and she and her other brother had lived with the eldest, who had just left home when the accident happened. It was not long before the middle brother quit school and moved to the mountains, where he worked sometimes in the mines and sometimes in a mobile sawmill. Simon knew him by sight but little more.
He hoped it was a comfort to his wife, knowing that her parents had gone together, hit by a poultry farmer who made a bad turn. Even though it was early afternoon and fully light, the driver’s rig—an eighteen-wheel truck that belonged to his son-in-law, and that he should not have been operating at all, much less driving on the highway packed with cages of fowl headed to the processing plant—swiped the rear of their sedan with one of the front tires and then barreled over the passenger and driver with the rear wheels. When Bonnie told it, there were feathers like hail across the asphalt, the broken glass shining like crystal. She was eleven, in the backseat, and when the paramedics came with a halligan bar, they found her father reaching to her mother, their arms crushed in place, and a girl curled into a ball in the one corner of the car that had not crumpled, with only the lightest touch of bruising.
She hadn’t seen it, but she had heard there was another car, carrying an older couple, had swerved off the road to avoid the car Bonnie was in, and they had died too.
Every day Simon saw how Bonnie was right for him. She made his mother coffee in the morning before homeroom, and she cooked their evening meal as well. If his father was on shift, she saved a plate for him, covering it with waxed paper in the refrigerator.
It was not his expectation that she would do these tasks, and he spoke to her, quietly, in the room they shared, his childhood room, about how happy it made him that she looked after his parents so well, but that he had not brought her to his family home so she could wait on them. It was only that he could not afford their own place yet.
“I’ve been looking for a job,” Bonnie said, “but there’s nothing that fits around school.”
“I know,” Simon said. Their town was small, and sometimes, when things had been tight, his mother, and Bonnie’s mother as wel
l, had taken part-time jobs at the processing plant again, driving an hour through the dry plains to sit on hard stools with the smell of wet bird. Simon would not have his wife there, after the accident with the chicken truck, when even a tuft of down would smell like death to her. Also she did not drive and did not want to learn, and he did not want to have to drive her.
She said being with his parents was better than at her brother’s, that his parents were kind, that his mother was too old to do so many chores, that the work was less than living with her sister-in-law’s four children, all girls, the youngest two still in diapers.
“I’ve been living on other people’s kindness for a while,” Bonnie had said. And, “Your folks are easy. Your momma always thanks me, and that’s a hard thing to say to a woman who’s in your kitchen.”
He was proud to have been offered a job by the time she matriculated. It was his father’s job—his back was finally bad enough that driving the cruiser pained him enough to admit it—but Simon applied for it just like anyone else. Going to the interview was the single most nerve-wracking day of his life. It meant everything. After he got the offer, they found a rental in town, with bad carpet and dented paneling, and they made their home there. It had a wood stove, and after his shifts he’d go to the shed and split log after log, working the muscles in his shoulders and thanking the world to have a strong body.
He loved his married life. They had his parents over on Sundays, and Bonnie’s brother’s family came once a month or so, or they visited them in their home. The children tumbled into his wife’s lap, and she would braid their hair and slip them chocolates.
When he had thought about it, which was not often, he had always thought he was an only child because his parents were older when they had him. He had never wished for a sister or a brother; he was happy being a single to their couple. As a child, some of his friends got beat up by their siblings and then had to bunk with them. It did not seem so great. Also, he thought his parents were too tired for more children. They were always worn out.
It was after Simon got his father’s job and his father moved to a desk at the station that they started trying for a baby. He knew that he knew hardly anything about sex; he understood all the mechanics, like anyone who lived so close to livestock ranches would, but the act of being so close to Bonnie was thrilling. He wondered if she might be more experienced than he, though he could not think of any boyfriends she might have had before him, and he did not ask. It did not matter, because they were married now and she was his.
Those were long months in their first house. Simon on the night shift, Bonnie bored with no one to look after, her studies finished, and every cranny of the house already scraped clean, curtains sewn for the windows, her summer canning long done. She went to her brother’s and helped with the children, and she went to his parents’ and made casseroles to freeze, ironed the sheets, and sat with his mother.
Only once did she bring up the processing plant, that maybe she could try for a job there.
“No,” Simon said. “We don’t need the money.”
“It’s not about the money,” she said. “It’s quiet here all day. I don’t know what people do.”
* * *
It was autumn when they had their year anniversary, and still no baby. His mother had packed a piece of their wedding cake in powdered sugar and had frozen it, and they thawed it out and ate it for breakfast. To celebrate, they went to Denver, where they stayed overnight in a hotel. Bonnie said she felt like a bumpkin, she’d never seen a bed so huge or felt sheets so soft. They had dinner in a downtown restaurant and then came back for cocktails in the lounge. It was his first time in a taxi, but he did not say so. He felt very sophisticated and very proud. He was an officer of the law. He had a beautiful wife, and he loved her, and he pulled her chair out for her when she sat down and stood when she went to the restroom. He had been raised right, and he was a gentleman.
Toasting one another with a glass of sparkling wine, she was even prettier seen through the effervescence and amber.
* * *
Simon went to his patrol car. The lights had been on, but it started just fine. He took a deep breath and felt cold. His boots were wet and his sleeves still damp; he could not feel anything but the boy. Slowly, carefully, he drove to the address on the ID. When he pulled up to the house, he realized he’d been there before. He’d dropped off one of the older girls—Darlene, he thought her name was—once, when they were in high school. He remembered her being very drunk, and he’d just happened to see her walking. She was a year ahead of him in school, and she had several sisters. He always got them confused.
The porch was dark, and he heard footfalls coming to his knock. The father answered.
Simon had not practiced the words, but he wished he would have.
When he took off his hat, the father’s face blanched.
“What is it?” the father said forcefully. “What’s wrong?”
Simon asked if the man was Samuel Henderson’s father, and the man said he was, and Simon could barely remember what happened next. He knew he stuttered and stumbled over the words—the river, the attempt at CPR, the cold. He was so cold when I found him—but the man understood, and he collapsed to the floor, still holding the handle of the door, one arm stretched out.
Another of the boys passed by the entryway, and Simon searched for his name. His face was familiar, but he was not sure if it was because it was the same face as the father. The boy called to his father, and his father let go of the door handle. Simon heard the man’s sobbing, deep and throaty.
Simon said he needed one of them to come to the hospital, to identify. He felt his stomach turn over. What if the wallet was stolen, what if it was not this man’s son? He’d have to do this over again.
The man took a deep breath. The other boy, younger, a shag of brown hair, was helping him off the floor. Goddammit, Sammy, Simon thought he heard the man say, and he blushed. Who was he, to deliver this news? People expected his father. His father would have known how to talk to the man, who had half closed the door to open the adjacent closet. He was putting on his coat, his boots. The other boy was putting on his coat as well and calling into the house. Another boy appeared, the same face, the same shade of auburn hair, but cropped short.
“I should drive you,” Simon said.
“Goddammit,” the father said again, but one of the boys told him to get in the cruiser, and so he got in the passenger side while the boys climbed into the back, where they were separated by thick glass encased with mesh.
Simon drove to the hospital, wishing his own father were with them. He was not sure which entrance to go to, so he took the man and the boys to the emergency department, where the single bed was now empty and the puddles from Samuel Henderson’s dripping clothes had been mopped clean.
* * *
He had not really known the story of his birth until he had a late-night conversation with his father about how much Bonnie’s condition was weighing on them, the stress of it. His father had snorted at this word, condition.
“It’s life, son.” And then, “Simon, I got to think it might be you, not her, from your mother’s side.”
Simon remembered touching his gun then. He had just gotten off his shift, and there was a note on the pad by the kitchen phone telling him that his father had called. The hours were getting on, but his father had kept the habits of a man who had worked nights nearly his whole grown life. Simon’s grandfather had done graveyards at the refinery and his great-grandfather had been in the dark of the mines. He guessed they had all learned to be happier when the sun was not pushing into them, and Simon was proud to be following them, so he rang his father when most folks would be settling into bed, but when the Stevens men were just waking up.
Before the conversation, he had never thought it might be him, and after, he thought of little else.
Simon made an appointment
with the doctor, asked if there was some test he could take. The old doctor shook his head.
“My dad—he had this problem, too,” Simon said.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” the doctor said, “This is not something that comes from the father.”
But Simon was sure. He didn’t have so much education, but his police training had taught him to look for patterns, in both expected and unexpected placed. What he saw seemed clear: despite what the doctor said, it wasn’t the women, who had married into his family, it was the biology of the men.
A few weeks later, his father had come over and had too much beer, and that was when he told him everything about the others. We got used to the ones who left quick, his father said, but I can’t forget the children who were more. Their faces. Your brothers, and a sister. We buried them by the lilac that marks the property line to the Phinney’s orchard. We had our number, of how many times we would try. We almost got there.
Simon only nodded through this story. His parents had always seemed so old, and now he thought he knew why. He and Bonnie were not getting any younger either.
When he went to bed that night, he was resolved to stop trying, to not put his wife through any more. The unfairness of it struck him like a blow, and he was terrified of the idea of multiple miscarriages and buried babies.
He got into the sheets next to Bonnie, and she was naked, her ponytail matted at the pillow. He tried to wake her from her deep sleep, and she smelled like she had been drinking as well, sitting alone at the kitchen table, while he and his father paced the yard.
“We don’t have to have a child,” he whispered. “And I’m sorry.”
When he was younger, when he had told his father he was planning on going into the police academy, his father took him to the same spot on the riverbank and passed the light from bank to bank. His father told him sometimes he came here to think and watch the water and the halogen shine. Together they listened to the scanner.