After

by Marita Golden

  After Eric’s death, Carson felt literally broken. He hadn’t just lost his best friend. He now had to live without the only person in his life who understood The Job, and who knew who he had once been and forgave him. If he passed a motorist in distress, with a flat tire or a dead battery, it would all come back to him, what Eric’s last moments must have been like on that rainy night. And he’d wonder why he wasn’t there to save him. Soon, what he had been able for years to let go of began to build up, and he could feel the weight of the accumulated calamities he’d witnessed congeal in his bones. Driving down Route 193 at night, he’d spot roadkill, a dead raccoon or once a deer, and when he looked out his window closely the dead carcasses looked back at him with eyes on a human face. He and Eric had been stop valves for each other. Now he was alone. An archive of misery filled and rent his soul, always with him. It was with him in the mall parking lot.

  After breakfast, Carson calls the school and informs the secretary in the main office that he’ll pick up Juwan, Roslyn, and Roseanne at three o’clock. He spends the hours before leaving home by rummaging through the debris of his mind for words that will accomplish the impending task. When he leaves the house he has no idea what he will say and wonders if the words will hijack the moment, come out spastic and floundering, much like the emotions he feels. But how can he calmly tell his children what he has done? He doesn’t want to tell them inside the house. It was enough to tell Bunny in the kitchen. Where in the house would Juwan and Roslyn and Roseanne ever feel safe again if their home was the place he told them he killed a man? He has told the story once inside the walls of the house he and Bunny have turned into what feels to Carson like the only home he has ever had. He won’t do it again.

  “If Daddy is picking us up, then he’s got a surprise for us,” Roslyn tells her shy older brother and her sister as they walk together to their father’s car, parked across the street from the school.

  “But let’s act like we don’t suspect a thing, okay?” she orders Juwan and Roseanne.

  “Hi, Daddy,” Roslyn says as she hugs Carson, settling into the front seat beside him, her knowing, confident smile breaking Carson’s heart. The car is flooded with childish energy, hot and intense. In the backseat Roseanne and Juwan throw their backpacks on the floor and greet him as well.

  “Can we go to McDonald’s, Daddy?” Roslyn asks, settling back in her seat after locking her seat belt. That would be a perfect way to stall, to use up time, to delay, Carson thinks, pulling up behind a school bus exiting the parking lot. But not now.

  “Some other day, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Where will he take them, he wonders, driving away from the school and heading who knows where. Carson drives past the in-progress housing developments along Church Road, cranes and bulldozers hollowing out acres of trees and foliage to make way for what a sign says will be Harmony Estates. He’s oblivious to the snickering and laughter of Roseanne and Juwan in the backseat. Beside him Roslyn is moving her head to a tune on the radio, her high-pitched, quavering voice singing along with a now-dead young singer named Aaliyah, who, Carson vaguely recalls, married a much older singer when she was fifteen. Didn’t he hear something about that singer, R. Kelly, being sued for taking videos of himself having sex with another underage girl? Aaliyah is sultry and bristling with a throaty sensuality, singing about rocking the boat, working the middle and changing positions. Eyes closed, fingers snapping, Roslyn is transported, and Carson wonders if his daughter knows she is singing about sex.

  The children are not impatient, not asking where they are going, not until Carson has driven past Wal-Mart and Ruby Tuesday’s and the BaySox Baseball Stadium where he and Bunny take them to see Minor League games in the summer, and they seem to have been riding in circles. Not until the children recognize the streets passed ten or fifteen minutes earlier do they begin to fidget with concern.

  Carson is unaware of the uneasiness in the car, of Roslyn’s turning to look at Juwan and Roseanne, her brown eyes big and bulging with uncertainty. It is finally Roseanne, so quiet but as strong-willed as her sister, who asks, “Daddy, where are we going?”

  The question jolts Carson back to the present, and he turns and drives into the parking lot of a mall that’s all restaurants and a twelve-theater cinema. “This is the surprise, I told you,” Roslyn shouts triumphantly, “I told you.” They all begin to clap.

  Carson parks several rows from the entrance to the theater, in a corner of the parking lot, and the children smile at him expectantly as he unbuckles his seat belt. They unbuckle their belts and Roslyn reaches for the door.

  “No, we’re not going to the movies. Not today.”

  “But…” Roslyn begins, the sight of the sorrow in her father’s eyes plunging her into silence.

  Carson will not remember exactly how he tells them when Bunny asks later that evening. Just as he can’t remember exactly how many bullets he fired (he thinks it is four or five, although he clearly saw three and that’s how many shell casings Evidence found), he won’t recall all of the words partly because in the end there were so few words. So few words to talk about the end of the world as he has known it. The end of someone’s life.

  Carson drinks in the faces of his children. There’s no escape from Juwan’s gaze, the lashes as thick and lush as fur. Not once he turns those eyes on you. Carson studies the shapely head and the frail, almost feminine face of his twelve-year-old son that lives behind a veil of something secret and unreachable. As if at any moment, with the slightest pressure, the boy will break. The girls are olive-skinned like Bunny, their hair a mass of tiny twists, their toothy grins and dimpled, open faces gazing at him with so much trust. As a cop he is all too aware of the world’s darkness.

  He wanted more than anything to keep that darkness from his door. From his wife and his children. He had thought if the darkness ever entered, it would surely not be because of him.

  “You know how on my job I carry a gun?” he asks. “Well, last night I was in a situation that required me to use it. I had to shoot a man. And he’s dead.”

  “Like Uncle Eric?” Roseanne asks.

  “Yeah, like Uncle Eric.”

  “Did he shoot you, Daddy?” Roseanne asks meekly.

  “Does it look like he was shot?” Roslyn says harshly.

  “Don’t talk to your sister like that.”

  “But Daddy, what a stupid question. He shot him because he was a bad man,” Roslyn pronounces, glaring at Roseanne.

  “Maybe Daddy was hurt where we can’t see,” Juwan says firmly.

  There were none of the questions he had expected or feared, questions they would have not known how to ask: Was he carrying a gun? Did he threaten you? Was shooting your only option?

  “I have to be off my job for a while. It’s a serious thing when a police officer fires his weapon. Even when the person isn’t killed. So they have to do some things relating to the case. And then when they’re through I can go back and be a police officer again.”

  Carson is astonished at the precision and confidence he’s mustered. It’s all false. His hands are shaking slightly and he’s sweating again, all signs of the hellish state that has descended upon him, which he hopes his children don’t see.

  “Were you scared, Daddy?” Roslyn asks, gazing at Carson with that unflinching stare.

  “Yeah, yeah, I was scared.”

  “I’d be scared too,” Roseanne says, rising from her seat and laying her head on Carson’s shoulder.

  He would remember but he would not tell Bunny that Roslyn asked, as she watched her sister comfort him, “Daddy, why are you crying? Are you still afraid?”

  3

  The immense gun. The man’s quizzical expression. The object he holds in his hand. The thunderclap of bullets. Carson wakes, clutching his chest, convinced it’s his own blood, streaming from his chest, that’s filling the bedroom with a reeking, heavy odor.

  “Calm down, calm down. Breathe. Hold on to me,” Bunny whispers in Cars
on’s ear, her arms bracing him against her body. She comforts. She submits when Carson frees himself from her embrace only to push her beneath him, his tongue hungering for hers, his hands roughly shoving her gown above her thighs, his sex a shattering blow inside her. And when he is done, he still clings to her, Bunny on her side, curled tight to hide her wounds, Carson gripping her around the waist, skin to skin, body to body.

  In the morning when he is alone in the house, Carson remembers what he dreamed. And what he did. How he used his wife as a sexual punching bag. All to forget. But he didn’t forget. In the morning paper, filled with accounts of the prelude to war in Iraq, yesterday’s brief synopsis has become “Officer Shoots Unarmed Man” on the front page of the Metro section. The twelve-paragraph story reveals the name of the man he shot, Paul Houston, a twenty-five-year-old third-grade teacher in southeast Washington, who was a graduate of Morehouse College and the School of Education at Columbia University. The article quoted one neighbor of the family who said, “He was a young man who had everything to live for. He was setting an example of the good things it was possible for a young man to do with his life.”

  Carson is identified as the officer who shot and fatally wounded Paul Houston in an incident under investigation. There it is. Everything. In black-and-white, the time Carson called in to the dispatcher, saying he was in pursuit of someone driving with no lights and speeding, the name of the mall where he faced Paul Houston in the parking lot. The fact that Houston was unarmed was stated several times in the story. There was no mention of the cell phone.

  He didn’t shoot a gangbanger, a drug dealer, or a suspect who had preyed on others and so in the eyes of most cops had cheapened the value of his own life, Carson thinks as he folds the paper.

  Moments later he calls Matthew Frey.

  “Did you see the article?”

  “I did. But I don’t want you to worry about this. Eventually I’m gonna get a call from the state’s attorney and they’ll invite you to testify before the grand jury. Carson, I’m not recommending this. You wouldn’t have immunity and I can’t be in the room with you. You have a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and I don’t want you to violate that.”

  “But I have nothing to hide,” Carson shouts into the phone.

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I was afraid for my life. Why can’t I testify before the grand jury and make my case?”

  “There’ll be a prosecutor whose job it is to make his case, and from what I know of the evidence so far and because of your state of mind, I don’t want you to testify.”

  “If I could just tell someone my side. What happened.”

  Frey hears the panic in Carson’s voice and tells him, “Carson, it’ll be weeks and maybe months before the grand jury meets and decides anything, whether you testify or not. We need to take one step at a time. After the grand jury makes a decision we’ll know what to do next. I’m confident you’ll come out of this all right, Carson. I know it doesn’t seem now like that’s possible, but I’ve been defending honorable men like you caught in terrible situations for more than twenty years. Right now, Carson, the next best person after me for you to talk to is a mental health professional.”

  “I don’t need that now. I need to know I won’t go to prison for this. Can you tell me that?”

  “Carson, you know I can’t make that kind of statement.”

  Now Frey knows what he could not fathom the night of the shooting. Carson Blake is crumbling. He hears this in the gruff insistence that he needs no help and in the prickly, panicked argument over Carson’s testimony. Frey waits a full minute before he speaks again, hoping Carson will dive into that blank space with a courageous reconsideration of Frey’s advice that he seek help. When he does not, Frey says, “When you’re ready to talk to someone, Carson, let me know. I’ll call you in a few days.”

  When he hangs up the phone, Carson remembers Bunny’s warning this morning when she sat on the side of the bed before leaving for work. “Carson, you can’t go through this alone. We can’t go through this alone. I’m here for you, you know that, but we need help with this. Carson, this is a place we’ve never been before.”

  “I’ll think about it, Bunny, that’s all I can say,” he mumbled, rolling over, responding to her plea with the sight of his back.

  How could he seek counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder? Carson wonders, staring at the phone. Other officers would think he was crazy. He was sure then to lose his job, already in jeopardy. He’d never needed help before. Why couldn’t Bunny’s love be enough? It had been enough before.

  He almost gave her a ticket. That’s how they met. A Saturday night, and Carson was parked off a stretch of Annapolis Road. There was a club called Ecstasy not far from the VFW headquarters, and every weekend he racked up a pile of tickets, stopping speeders headed to the club. Parked in a strip mall, Carson saw a blue Corolla roar past, going almost seventy-five in a fifty-five-mile zone. He turned on his lights and followed the car as it crossed the intersection on a yellow light and then pulled over to the side of the road. When Carson scanned the interior of the car he saw five women, all in their early twenties. The car vibrated with nervous giggling and reeked of perfume, cigarettes, chewing gum, and marijuana. The sight of so many young women jolted and excited him. Bunny was behind the wheel. His flashlight illuminated her face, and he liked what he saw. She was wearing more makeup than he preferred on a woman, the mascara thick and hard on her lashes, but she was nervously, coyly licking her lips, and that turned Carson on. She was twenty-one, no more than twenty-two, he guessed, with a mature face that did not hide her youth. Bunny was staring dead at him. Carson liked that as much as the way she looked, as much as wondering how it would feel to kiss her. The other girls were looking away from him, out the window, sitting up straight; the one in the front with Bunny turned down the sound of Michael Jackson. But Bunny was looking straight at Carson.

  He told her how fast she was going and that there were a lot of drunks out behind the wheel on a Saturday night.

  “I’ve got no excuse, officer. We’re on our way to Ecstasy to meet some friends. It’s Saturday night. I know I was wrong.”

  “The club’ll be there,” Carson scolded her gently. To scare her he asked for her license and walked slowly back to his cruiser, where he called in to headquarters over the mike and asked for a check on her. He had no intention of writing a ticket or checking the car for drugs. He just wanted to delay her, send her a message. And so he dragged the stop out so he could look at her a little longer. Carson copied her address on a piece of paper and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he walked slowly back to the car.

  Leaning through the driver-side window he said, “I’m just gonna warn you this time. But I’ll probably be out here when you’re on your way home. I don’t want to stop you again.”

  Bunny smiled at Carson broadly, and he said, “Have a good night, ladies.”

  On his day off a week later, Carson knocked on Bunny’s door.

  “Hello, my name is Carson Blake,” he began, figuring that the woman who opened the door must be Bunny’s mother. Her suspicious, uncharitable gaze was so penetrating, Carson feared she knew about the sex dreams her daughter had inspired. He was a cop, and this squat, brown-skinned little woman who opened the door had him squirming. “I’m a friend of Belinda’s.” The lie relaxed him.

  “Bunny,” she called, stepping back, and to Carson’s surprise and relief, moving from the entrance and ushering him into the hallway of the small, tight house. She didn’t invite Carson to sit down on the plastic-covered furniture in the living room. The house smelled of cigarette smoke and fried chicken. Carson knew even then that he was standing in the home of the woman he would marry, and he wondered who smoked, the woman staring at him (he could not bring himself to think mother-in-law) or “Bunny.” Carson liked the nickname. Carson heard someone coming down the stairs, and then there she was, in tight cutoff jeans and a halter top. Her hair was in
rollers. But to Carson she looked beautiful. There was a moment, a brief flicker of surprise that bloomed in her eyes and that she quickly blinked away because her mother was looking from Carson to Bunny, back and forth, trying to figure out what was going on and who he was.

  “Hi,” Carson said softly.

  “Hi.”

  “I know this is unexpected, but…”

  “Come on, let’s go outside.”

  “Outside?” her mother asked.

  “Yeah, outside,” Bunny cooed, sweeping past her mother and opening the front door.

  The front porch was small, but there were two wrought-iron chairs on it. Flowered cushions shielded them from the chair’s heat on the eighty-five-degree day. Carson sat down beside Bunny. Never before had he met a woman this young so comfortable in her body. She was an inch or two taller than Carson. But he forgave her for that.

  “I wanted to make sure that you got home all right.”

  “I did.”

  Bunny crossed her legs. Her olive-toned skin was burnished by a slight tan. A mole lay just above her lip. She said nothing about how he had just shown up at her door; she just sat beside Carson as if they already knew everything of importance about each other.

  “Did you have a good time at the club?”

  “It was all right.” She shrugged. “It’s never as good as you think it will be.”

  “You go there every week?”

  “Not every week.” She laughed as though the idea was ridiculous.

  “I didn’t see your boyfriend in the car.”

  “That’s right, you didn’t,” she told him, her eyes wide with a slow, sly assessment of him that silenced them both. Then she asked, “How long you been a police officer?”

  “Two years.”

  “You like it?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I do. Especially sometimes on Saturday nights,” he joked, surprised at the subtlety of the humor. This didn’t sound like Carson, but he liked what he heard.