“What was going through your mind?”
“Scared. Confused. I could feel every muscle in my body contract.” He pauses. Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, he says, “I hadn’t even had a chance to search him. I would’ve changed places with him.”
Carson hides his face in his hands, a damp and humid refuge. Carrie walks over to Carson, touches him gently on the shoulder, and offers him a box of tissues.
“When your wife called me to make an appointment, she told me about the night in the garage.”
“I was depressed. I wasn’t going to kill myself. I love my family—I’d never hurt them like that.”
“Wait a minute,” Carrie explodes dismissively. “You had a gun in your mouth—tell me, what did you think you were going to do?”
When Carson refuses to answer, she asks, “Does your wife know everything you’re feeling?”
“She knows about the nightmares. I can’t talk to her about anything else. I don’t want her to know. I’ve put her through enough.”
“When your wife called me she was frantic. Don’t you think your death would’ve put her through even more?”
“I swear, I didn’t want to die.”
“Why do you think you were in your car with your gun?”
“I couldn’t get the cell phone to stop ringing in my head. I couldn’t eat. I kept seeing his face. What kind of father can I be? Can Bunny love me despite what I’ve done? I could go to prison for this. I…didn’t know what else to do.”
“So you didn’t want to die, you just wanted the pain to stop.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Carson, you survived the shooting and even the night in your garage. But you won’t survive the aftermath of either if you don’t change. You’re a closed system, a database of one. This is a cancer inside you, and you’ve got to talk about this or it’ll destroy you.” Carrie Petersen pauses and watches Carson for the effect of her words. “All your nevers have come true,” she says gently, softening her voice. “Most police officers never fire their weapon. You have. The shooting is a part of who you are. I know you want to deny that, but it has to be a part of you that you accept, face up to, and own—that’s the only way you’ll be able to move on. I’m here to help you make a new meaning for your life that includes that night, a meaning that you can live with and grow from.”
Carson leaves Carrie Petersen’s office drained. The pit of his stomach feels hollowed out, and it rumbles noisily. The session has disturbed and dislodged an affliction. Sitting in his car outside Carrie Petersen’s before he drives off, Carson knows this momentary emptiness has merely shifted the malady that tortures him.
On his way back home, he takes an absurdly circuitous route to avoid passing the strip mall where the shooting happened. The barbershop he frequents is in that mall. He needs a haircut, misses the oratorical preening, and jiving, the raucous debate that simmers and boils over in the always-crowded shop. But Carson fears that his entry on a payday Friday would halt all conversation. The regulars and the barbers all know he’s a cop. He’s held forth in their midst about crime in the county and what it takes to do his job. Carson is sure that some of them, the ones who’ve seen his name in the newspaper or the twenty-second report on TV, feel he should be arrested.
The county is in the throes of a development frenzy. So he figures he will never have to go to that mall for anything ever again. The strip malls, the stores, most of which are megasize cathedrals to commerce, are addictive and necessary. Even the new churches resemble warehouses: One Fundamentalist denomination simply bought a decaying, largely empty mall, built an auditorium to seat ten thousand, and renamed the mall, which still featured a busy office supply store and a health food emporium, Kingdom Hall. Carson grew up in the county and feels oppressed and slightly alienated by the rolling expansiveness of the economic and commercial growth that has sparked both prosperity and crime. Prince George’s County seems to him now a bedroom community that’s all function and commerce, with little that’s quirky, beautiful, or surprising.
He promised Bunny he’d pick up her clothes at the dry cleaner’s on his way home and then get several rolls of film. Carson slides the pink receipt across the counter and avoids looking at the pudgy, bespectacled Korean youth who greets him with a cheery, heavily accented “Hi, how you today?”
Carson nods and stares at the clock on the wall and the poster touting the environmental and health benefits of the chemical-free solvent used by the cleaners. He’s been coming here for years. Yet today he stands before the young man, who is handing him several of his shirts and Bunny’s silk blouse and two pairs of her slacks, all nerves and prickly with a sudden desire to flee. He takes the plastic-covered clothing, hands the young man a twenty-dollar bill, and without waiting for change turns to leave, bumping into a woman carrying an armful of shirts. A flicker of annoyance burns in her eyes, and is it his imagination or is there recognition in her glance as well? But Carson has never seen this tall, square-jawed woman before. Recognition, yes, that is what he sees, he’s sure of it. Not of him but of what he’s done, the eyes seeing not just his face but the depth of him, the quagmire roiling inside.
At home Carson goes to the basement and sits at his workbench, sees the small tools hung from the Peg-Board nailed to the wall and his larger tools—the sanding block, various clamps and drills, saws, stacked on three shelves. He leans on the cool white surface of his drawing board. He started making cabinets and wooden objects after Eric’s death. Falling apart, he wanted to work with his hands, to build objects that would ground and steady him. Wood beckoned. Working with wood, his hands, and a single, simple vision of an object, he made a keepsake box for Roseanne, a slender three-legged table with a glass top for Bunny to place a small sculpture from Zimbabwe on, a bookcase for Juwan, a table for no reason at all. He was working on his largest project yet in the days before the shooting, a cabinet in Swedish yellow ash. Woodworking is involved, intricate, straightforward, and in some ways simple. There is the deceptively subtle beauty of the cherrywood keepsake box that left Roseanne bereft of speech when he gave it to her for her birthday. Her hands rubbed the box as though a genie were inside, and then she said, “Oh, I love you, Daddy.”
Wood is alive, and, Carson is convinced, it has a soul. When the work is going well, the tools are an extension of himself, making it possible for the wood to speak its mind, to become what it wants to be. The bookcase he had planned to make for Juwan was going to be a simple shelf, but over the weeks of work the cherrywood called out for union with the fragrant scent and tones of juniper wood and demanded a small drawer and high sides. He had thought his son was worthy of a shelf to place his books on. But the act of creation unleashed the possibility for a holder of the boy’s dreams. Carson sits at the workbench, remembering when it was good down here, a stream of shavings curling from the plane in his hands and drifting onto the floor, forming a carpet around his feet. The swish and slide as he rocks to the motion of the work. There is the smell of the wood, which he often gets freshly cut from a dealer in Crofton, never buying from the big hardware chains. He works here in this corner of the basement, content, surrounded by the smells of the wood itself. What he produces is never what he planned. And with the tools, the small knives and the behemoth drills, Carson rounds edges, sands, traces with fingers that read the wood like a book, the grain, heart, and texture of wood, finding so often its real beauty in what seems at first to be its imperfections. Carson looks at the frame of the cabinet, the sight of it swelling his heart. The cabinet is six feet high and one of the doors leans against the wall. He walks slowly over to the door, reaches out to touch it, feels the grain against his palm, like the handshake of a friend, and leans on the wood, his forehead resting on his arm.
This is how Bunny finds him, and he doesn’t stir when he hears her come down the stairs and walk over to him.
“How was your session?” she asks.
“Just the beginning,” he tells her, standin
g upright and burying his face in her hair, holding her tight around the waist.
When Carson sees Carrie Petersen a week later, she says to him during the session, “Tell me the finest moment for you as an officer.”
“I saved a kid from drowning. I was a minute or two from the house when the dispatcher got the call. I beat Emergency Services. It was a birthday party, and when I got to the house I found all these adults standing around holding their heads, crying, clutching each other, comforting a roomful of kids. There were balloons strung over the patio and a clown, a huge cake, stacks of presents the little girl hadn’t even unwrapped. She was lying on the side of the pool, no sign of life, nothing. I performed CPR on her. I remember she was wearing a lime green bathing suit and her hair was all frizzy and damp. She was as limp as a rag doll. She looked about the same age as my girls, and I kept wondering what I’d do if I couldn’t save her. The mother was crying, wailing like the little girl was already dead, and the man who I guess was the father was holding her, telling her to calm down, that everything would be all right. I couldn’t believe how much water was coming out of the girl’s mouth, while I worked on her, with her eyes still closed, even as she began jerking into consciousness. And then she started choking and coughing and opened her eyes and stared at me as though waking from a nightmare. Then she screamed. It’s weird. That scream, which sounded so horrible, told us she was alive.
“EMS got there right at the moment she started screaming. The girl’s name was Tammy, and she wrote me a letter a couple of weeks later, thanking me for saving her life. I went by her house one day just to check on her and found her outside riding her bike. I gave her a charm bracelet my girls had helped me pick out for her. Saving that kid’s life took me, what, thirty seconds, a minute? Just like with the shooting, I thought those moments would never end. But I can’t think of anything I’ve done that made me feel more valuable. Now I’m pretty sure I’ll never feel that way again.”
5
Cleaning and cooking help Bunny to forget. For a while anyway. My house, this at least is one thing I can make right, she thinks, hurriedly pulling her nightgown over her head and changing into underpants, a sweatshirt, and a pair of baggy jeans in the bathroom.
Bunny knows the trick is to keep moving. To start and not stop. That way she won’t have time to think about anything. She sorts clothes in the laundry room and fills the front-loading washer. In the kitchen, from beneath the sink she grabs a plastic bucket, fills it with hot water and floor cleaner, lifts it from the sink, places it on the floor, and drops an old hand towel in the warm foamy water as she sinks to her knees. The water saturates the cloth and Bunny wrings it out, begins scrubbing the ivory-colored squares of linoleum. On her hands and knees she won’t miss any dirt, and the exertion gives her back muscles a good workout. While the floor dries, she dusts in the living room and cleans the leather sofa and recliner with a creamy liquid conditioner, scrubbing vigorously, using her arms and hands in a way that she feels is purifying, as sweat congeals in her armpits, warms the surface of her skin, cleansing her of the fog that refuses to break its hold on her spirit. Bunny cleans the toilets in the guest and basement bathrooms.
Carson got out of bed at seven, put on his jogging suit, and told her he was going for a run, that he’d get breakfast at Bob Evans and then take his car for an oil change and tune-up. Alone in the house, Bunny cleans in a frenzy for another hour. In the living room, a collection of Black figurines, some no larger than an inch or two, populate a small world inside a ceiling-high, delicately carved wooden armoire with glass windows. Black angels in billowing robes blowing trumpets; a toddler on a tricycle, a mutt at her side barking in delight; a white-haired elderly couple staring with frozen love into each other’s eyes; an African princess draped in gold and kente cloth; three children stuffed into an armchair, all reading the same book. Bunny has collected the figures over the years; some Carson gave her as gifts.
Bunny goes upstairs to tackle the master bedroom, where mourning and defeat hang like a stale stench in the air. It’s a psychic runoff accumulated during the hours Carson spends in the room alone, sleeping, watching television, drinking beer, in self-imposed hibernation and retreat.
Having cleaned every object and surface in the house, Bunny returns to the kitchen, retrieving a leg of lamb from the middle shelf of the refrigerator, unwrapping it, rinsing the meat, and placing it in a roasting pan. While slicing the pods of garlic to embed in the slits she’s made in the thick flesh, Bunny cuts her index finger and draws blood. The wound, when she inspects it closely, is not deep; it’s a gash piercing the top of her finger. Still, there is blood, ruby, thick, and there is pain. All she has to do is apply pressure. If she looks on the top shelf over the stove she’ll find the bandages she needs to stop the flow of blood.
She bandages the finger as the tears dammed up behind her eyes all morning, the pressure from which has given her a headache, finally begin to flow. Utterly exhausted, Bunny covers the leg of lamb in plastic wrap and places it in the refrigerator. She wants to cry. Again. All day. But none of the tears she has shed since the shooting have changed anything, and more tears will only make her headache worse. She stands in the middle of the living room, assessing her now-spotless house, seeing in her mind the rooms upstairs, the kitchen, the air heavy with the lingering scent of the polishes and cleansers. A good morning’s work, she thinks, biting her lip and sinking onto the sofa to weep again.
They have never had a secret like the suicide attempt, a confidence that they both know must be permanently suppressed. She cannot tell her best friend, Pam, dares not speak of it to her mother, can never tell her children. If she had shifted in her half sleep that night and assumed that Carson was in the bathroom when her leg sprawled over the cool, vacant sheet, what would have happened? What would he have done? Bitterness is a bruise on her heart. Love feels like a pretense and a masquerade. She never imagined Carson would kill in the line of duty. Until now, she’d always assumed their marriage was strong enough to see them through anything. It never occurred to her that Carson would think of throwing it all away. They are conjoined in a web of secrecy even with Carrie Petersen, who, bound by doctor/client privilege, could not reveal anything Carson told her to the department. Carson dared not even risk telling Melvin Griffin, his sergeant, that he’d thought of taking his life or that he had sought therapeutic help. The revelation of either could derail his return to work.
Bunny wonders if there will ever come a time when they laugh again. The way they used to laugh about how they met. And the fact that yes, she was waiting for him the day he showed up at her house. She’s extremely intuitive, can feel and sense things and, unlike most people she knows, isn’t afraid to trust what she feels. She trusts what she feels more, in fact, than what she thinks. It’s like when she’s working on a design project. Carson has asked her so many times how she decides what colors to use and what shapes a logo demands. She doesn’t know. She just keeps at it until the colors and shapes take hold of her. She tries to tell him that the worst thing to do is to think her way through a design. She has to stumble into whatever symmetry and beauty the project has to offer. Stumble and feel.
It was that way with Carson on the Saturday night that he stopped her and almost gave her a ticket. And she recalls it as though it happened not then but now, is happening now. He is not particularly handsome, she thinks as she sees his face illuminated in the glow of the flashlight beaming on her face. He’s got freckles across the bridge of his nose. It is a flat, wide, square face. His complexion is a shade, just a whisper, darker than hers. But she doesn’t fall for the face. It’s never the looks with her. It’s a man’s energy. And that night Bunny feels it. While Carson is gently scolding her for speeding, while she is looking at him dead on, directly, right in the eye, Bunny feels some soulful, high-frequency current pass between them. And she knows that Carson feels it too. Once or twice before she has felt this sexual/psychological voltage pass between her and a man, but never li
ke this. Never like this.
When they marry of course she wants to know, and she does not want to know, everything about what Carson calls The Job. She’s not just a wife. She’s a cop’s wife. And that means that every time that Carson comes home from his shift Bunny counts it as a reprieve. He doesn’t like to talk about the streets, what he sees and what he does during his shift, but he doesn’t have to tell her. It’s all revealed in the tension she feels in his shoulders, his neck, his whole body, especially on those nights when Carson comes in and after a shower she gives him a massage. His body tells her everything he won’t. She’s a cop’s wife and a member of a tribe. There are Bring Your Own Bottle cop cabarets and dances and parties and weddings. And most of the cops that Bunny comes to know over the years are like everybody else and yet absolutely unique in their perspective on things. They have to be. There is the sense that they are different. Not like everyone else. Their jobs are in a special category marked life or death.
She should have seen this coming, she thinks. But how could she have seen what she still can’t believe? That Carson would kill an innocent man. Someone who was no threat to him. It was always his life she had feared for. They had been so lucky. Carson was just like most cops on the street, men and women who never once fired their weapons. Now he was someone else. Now he occupied a separate space, a parallel world, a hell of his own making where he had crossed a border and saw no way back to who or what he used to be.
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