“Loving Eli made me feel like I wasn’t just fighting for my life but that I could get it back. When I met Eli I was a married woman. I still wasn’t ready to give nothing up. I was parched and dry inside. Jimmy’s love had turned me into a desert. But I was determined to find a way to bloom. I started hating everything about Jimmy, everything that I had once respected. His steadiness, his job, this house that he wanted to buy for us to raise a family in. Eli and I weren’t even together that long. Six, seven months. It doesn’t take long for a storm to rise and drench and soak you and set you shivering. In six, seven months I met your father and left Jimmy, went to live with my mother. Eli lived in a boardinghouse across the street from my mother. Oh, it was a scandal. But I didn’t care. You know, your father would wash my hair? He’d touch me even when we weren’t behind closed doors. Just reach for my hand like it was a precious thing. He’d kiss me in public, for everybody to see. And we’d talk like talking was medicine. I’d never told anybody so much about what I felt or what I wanted.”
Alma stopped as though astonished at the rhapsodic tone of her words, but then forged ahead. “I know that may not sound like much to you, Carson. But those things, those little things, they save a woman’s life. I’d walked away from my husband and I hadn’t looked back. Eli was working construction, making good money, but he didn’t want to work for anybody, wanted to work for himself. Then he said he was gonna go to Brooklyn and get settled, set up a contracting business, and he’d send for me. I waited but he never called. The phone number he gave me was disconnected. I took the Greyhound bus to New York and found the address was a vacant lot. I didn’t want to go back to Jimmy, but he begged me, said he needed me like I’d needed Eli. When I found out I was pregnant, Jimmy and I both knew it was Eli’s child, but he swore he’d love you like his own. I think he did. Until you were born. He didn’t forgive me until Richard was born. A couple of years later Eli came back to D.C. and got in touch with me through my mother. Said he knew about you. Said he was sorry, but what he did was for the best. All he asked was to just see you sometimes. He didn’t want to disrupt our family, but he did want to see you.”
Walking toward Carson, Alma said with a wistful gentleness, “When you were little, sometimes I’d take you places where he could see you. I’d tell him what park I was taking you to play. Once we sat in the waiting room at Union Station and he sat across from us, just looking at you. When you graduated from elementary school and junior high school he was in the auditorium.” Her palm cupped her son’s cheek, and her voice offered Carson not just her love but the love of the father he never knew.
Carson strained to remember a stranger’s eyes on him at a school Christmas pageant or as he squirmed in his seat on stage in the sixth grade. “He lives in Brookland, in D.C. He’s a subway conductor for Metro. You look just like him. I can give you his address. His phone number.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little late for that?”
“No. No I don’t,” she insisted.
“Did you ever forgive him?”
“If I hadn’t he never would’ve laid eyes on you.”
Alma thought she had given her son a gift. But all Carson heard and remembered was that his father, a man named Eli Bailey, had run out on his mother. Abandoned her. Deserted her. And him. Why would he exchange Jimmy Blake for a father like that?
The next day Alma gave Carson a slip of paper with his father’s name and address and phone number on it. It was years before he used it. It was years before he refuted the sense of himself as nobody’s child. Not the child of the father he did not know. Not Jimmy Blake’s. Not the son of the mother who could not shield him from the abandonment of one, the rejection of the other.
Jimmy Blake died of liver problems while Carson was in the army. Now Alma goes on cruises to Alaska, the Bahamas, is a member of a bridge club, and works as a part-time receptionist in a doctor’s office. Jimmy Blake is dead. But Carson still hears the words “Naw, you ain’t mine” every time he enters his mother’s house.
He has not intended to reveal so much. Talk so long. Each word seeding a harvest of other words and memories rendered as much with his body as with his tongue. A tongue untied, spilling forth a babble of whispers and secrets. And by the time Carson tells Carrie Petersen that Jimmy Blake is dead, he is hoarse, unaccustomed to the strain of such relentless revelation.
She listens to him as she always does, her eyes focused on him, gentle eyes that he still feels unable to meet steadily for very long. She sits, legs crossed, an ankle-length black skirt billowing, filling the chair, her hands folded in her lap. Carson had asked at the end of one session how she could stand hearing the stories her clients told.
“I choose to hear them and to listen,” she assured him. “They are difficult stories to hear, but they aren’t all terrible. People reveal to me moments of rebirth and redemption as well as struggle and loss.”
“Who listens to you when you need to talk?” he pressed her.
“A good friend and fellow therapist who is a mentor to me. When my mother died last year I talked to him quite a lot.”
“You asked me why I became a police officer,” he says now. “I don’t know why I told you all that. I’m surprised I remember so much. Especially so much I wanted to forget.”
“There’s actually very little that we forget, Carson. There’s a lot, however, that we deny, or bury.” Carrie rises from her chair and goes to a small refrigerator on the floor in the corner of the office and retrieves a bottle of water for Carson.
“This is hard, you know,” he tells her, taking the bottle and opening it, then drinking the water, which saps so much more than just his thirst.
“What?”
“This.”
“It’s supposed to be.”
“I’ve never looked at my life. Not like this. It feels like punishment.”
“Not every officer could have submitted himself to this. Give yourself credit for that. Can you tell me the worst thing you think your stepfather did to you?”
Carson sets the empty bottle of water on the floor beside his chair. He closes his eyes. Carrie Petersen allows him to choose silence in response to some of her questions. Lets him pass on the occasional inquiry. They have sat for half an hour in this room, Carrie patiently waiting for Carson to blink.
Opening his eyes, he tells her, “He drove me to the streets.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I found out for sure that he wasn’t my father. When I finally knew for sure, I couldn’t stand living in that house. I didn’t feel I owed him or my mother anything. I’d been spending a lot of time at the rec center and at Keith’s and Damion’s houses, but after that night I remember the only place I wanted to be was in the streets. We’d haunt the dark, empty roads and streets of Bowie, Lanham, Capital Heights, in Keith’s Crown Vic, on the weekends and now and then even on school nights. I’d lie and tell my mom I was studying at the library with Keith. We spent the evening smoking herb. Or we’d stand outside a liquor store and ask somebody to buy us a six-pack of beer or maybe some cheap wine. Park on some strip mall lot and watch the stores closing down. Then one night we wanted to go to a club and between us we had a dollar. Damion said, ‘Gimme five minutes,’ and before me and Keith could say a word he was out of the car, striding up to an elderly White man putting a bag of groceries in the backseat of his van. It was maybe nine or ten o’clock. Damion walked up to the man, stood behind him, and we saw him put his hand in his jacket like he had a gun. It took less than a minute before he was walking back to the car. When Damion did that we crossed a border that each one of us, for different reasons, was ready to cross. The first time I did it I got seventy-eight dollars and twenty-three cents from a woman who, when I looked at her closely, reminded me of my mother.”
“How’d you feel when you robbed people?”
“In control.”
“Of what?”
Carson has never dared to think about why he became a thief, not even when
he confessed the transgression to Eric, yet he says with absolute certainty, “My life. I felt in control of my life. It only lasted a few minutes, the time it took to strong-arm them and take their wallet. But the look on their faces. That look always eventually shot my high. Watching them fumble in their pockets, sweat, plead with me not to do anything to hurt them, all that cut right through the alcohol or the weed. But for those first brief moments when those people looked at me, when I caught them by surprise, they saw me. I had their attention.”
“The way you could never get the attention of Jimmy Blake?”
“It wasn’t about him. I was drunk. High. Stupid. Young.”
“Yes, but you were also everything your stepfather said you’d end up being.”
“It wasn’t about him,” Carson insists, refuting his conclusion that Jimmy Blake inspired his crime spree, so angry that the specter of Jimmy Blake looms over this moment, that he feels as though there is an apocalyptic tremor shattering his vision of his world.
“I think you know it was about him, Carson.”
“I could take him on. I didn’t need those people to stand in for him. He was a punk. A bully.”
“Weren’t you?” she asks, leaning forward, sliding a few inches closer to Carson when he turns in retreat from her gaze. Carson looks at his watch, hoping the session is over, and Carrie tells him, “You’re my last client of the day—we can go longer if we have to. How long did all this go on?”
“A couple months. We musta done thirteen, fourteen robberies, all three of us together like that. Each of us taking a turn.” Carson reveals this reluctantly, fully aware that he cannot untell the story he has begun. “Usually it was women, old people, White people, who we figured would be scared of us without us having to use a weapon. We’d toss the credit cards and spend the money. It even got in the papers. We did so many that I guess the cops figured all the reports pointed to a pattern, a serial robber or a gang. I guess that’s what we were. A gang. They wanted to warn the public. It wasn’t even about the money after a while. We couldn’t stop doing it. I knew we’d get caught, and part of me didn’t care. Because I was usually stoned when we did it, I’d wake up the next morning and I’d feel dead. And I could only vaguely recall why I felt so bad.”
“How did you manage at home and with your parents?”
“I stayed in my room behind a locked door, looking at the things I collected from the people I robbed. A wallet, a driver’s license, store receipts. I didn’t want to be around my mother at all. I felt so guilty. And I was sure that Jimmy knew I was involved, that when he looked at me he could see what I’d done. It was my senior year. One night over dinner Jimmy started talking about the robberies, saying what he’d do if somebody tried to rob him, how he’d beat the crap out of them. ‘Don’t you think a man or woman’s got a right to defend themselves, Carson?’ he asked me.
“He damn near gave a sermon, telling me that whoever was robbing those people wasn’t just stealing money but their peace of mind. Told me the victims would have flashbacks, would be afraid to go out of their houses or go to the store. ‘I’m just giving you something to think about, that’s all. You been staying out awful late recently. You sure you ain’t got something you want to tell me, your mama? The police?’ he asked me. My mother was sitting at the dinner table between us and she kept looking at me and looking at him. Each time she looked at me after looking at him there was more surprise and more questions in her eyes. I wondered if he’d been in my room, looking through my drawers. Maybe he found those things I’d kept. I figured he’d call the police. I was sure it was just a matter of time. I got up from the table. I couldn’t stand them staring at me like that. Both of them. Jimmy stood up and bounded over to me and held me in place so I couldn’t move. I was struggling to break free of his grip. The next thing I knew we were on the floor and my fingers were around his neck. My mother’s scream made me try to choke him even harder. Then I felt his steak knife against my groin. It drew blood. And I’ll never forget, there wasn’t an ounce of fear in his eyes. But I was scared. Of what I was pretty sure by then he suspected. That knife cut through the fog I’d been living in. I’d been bleeding inside for a long time anyway.
“After that night I stopped robbing people, and so did Keith and Damion. We never got caught, but I never felt like I got away with anything. I never forgot the things I’d done. And before today I never told anyone but my friend Eric.”
“But Jimmy Blake got you off the streets. You owe him that much. You said when you robbed those people you felt in control. You said the night of the shooting you wanted to take control of the stop. You couldn’t control what your mother did. Who your father was. What Jimmy Blake denied you. You’ve been trying to control things for a long time, haven’t you? Isn’t that why you joined the force? So you could take control, be in control, and so nobody could ever hurt you?”
Carson sits awash in a split second of living death and resurrection, this moment and every moment he’s lived suddenly clear through the fog of denial and shame. He sits across from Carrie, wondering why he’s not on the floor howling. Her words have sparked a cataclysm that rumbles and roils in his stomach and his groin and that breaks the seal on his heart.
“Yeah,” he whispers, gruffly, the word lodged like a pebble in his throat, offered up so unwillingly that Carrie Petersen has to read his lips.
“I always figured one day I’d have to pay for all the bad things I did. I’m paying now. That man I killed was doing good things with his life. He’s dead. I was a thief. I was illegitimate and hated the man who gave me his name. I’m a murderer and I’m alive. Tell me what sense that makes?”
They talk mostly when they meet about where they find rare moments of balance: for Carson, working with his hands; for Matthew Frey, writing a novel based on several cases he’s handled. When Carson comes to see him, Frey ushers him into his office, watches Carson sit in the chair across from him, and leans back in his swivel chair, his shock of prematurely white hair thick and tousled, wearing what Carson now knows is his uniform—white tie-less shirt and khakis—and asks him, “How’s work?” When Carson first told Matthew that he built furniture in his spare time, Matthew urged him to develop the hobby into a livelihood, suggested he take pictures of his pieces and put them in an album, urged him to get business cards, have an open house one weekend afternoon to display his furniture for invited friends and potential clients. And he has jovially monitored Carson’s progress, his willingness to turn a hobby into a business.
“I get lost down there sometimes,” Carson tells him this day. “Lose track of time, and even though I often have a blueprint for a cabinet, or a shelf, there’ll always come this moment when all those lines dissolve and I’m sawing and cutting and shaving from pure instinct.”
“I finished the chapter I told you about last time,” Frey announces, raising his arms and threading his fingers behind his head. “And the motive was totally different from what I thought it was.”
He’s written five novels, which various literary agents have rejected, and talks about the novel he’s writing now as a kind of mental Olympics that keeps him up until 2:00 a.m. some nights.
“You said you were going to a writers’ conference in Tennessee?”
“Oh yeah, I was the only man in the class. I’m convinced, women are the superior species.” Frey laughs. “The workshop leader liked what I’d written and we’ve been in touch by e-mail. She said to get back to her when I’m finished.”
“Good luck,” Carson tells him.
“I wanted to see you today to let you know that the grand jury will be impaneled next week. I wanted to talk to you about this even though you won’t testify.”
He’s been waiting for months for this to happen, and now that it has, Carson is unsure what he feels. “I still don’t understand why I can’t tell them what happened.”
“You can’t tell them what happened because I can’t be in the room with you during your testimony. You’d be asked w
hy you didn’t wait for backup, what the procedures are for a stop like the one that night, why you pulled your weapon on Paul Houston.”
Those are the questions he has asked himself two, three thousand times a day. They are the questions he’ll be asked if there is a trial, the questions Internal Affairs will ask. The questions for which, despite the routine prep he undergoes with Matthew for the inevitable Internal Affairs inquiry, he still feels he has no answers. “What do you think will happen?”
“I’m not going to promise or predict,” Matthew tells him with a shrug, as though insulted by the inquiry.
“I could be indicted on murder, manslaughter, voluntary manslaughter, right?”
“Murder would be highly unlikely. If there was an indictment, it would most likely be involuntary manslaughter. Let’s go over again the basics of what happened that night. You knew backup was on the way, correct?” Matthew isn’t even looking at Carson, his eyes are cast out the window, staring at a small plane thousands of feet in the air yet passing his window with an eerie illusion of closeness.
“Yes.” Matthew has told him not to elaborate on yes or no unless asked.
“The movement of his hand reaching into his groin, that’s what made you afraid for your life?”
“Yes.”
“He kept walking toward you and even though you told him, ordered him to drop what he was holding and to halt, the movement of his arm toward you seemed an aggressive move—is that how you interpreted it?”
“Yes.”
Matthew turns from the window to look at Carson, who says, “I feel like you’re putting words in my mouth.”
“I’m trying to save your career. Carson, all stories are true. It’s true that Paul Houston could not have shot you with his cell phone. It is true that you thought his cell phone was a gun. It’s true that even with only a cell phone in his hand he could have posed a threat to you. It’s true that you knew that.”
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