After

by Marita Golden

  Three days later Carson sits in a snug Jamaican café a block away from headquarters on his lunch break, reading through the printout from the National Crime Information Center. He pushes his half-finished jerk chicken aside and thumbs through the sheaf of papers a second time. The printout tells him that Temple Houston has gotten a couple of speeding tickets, where Temple and Natalie Houston live and work, the company that insures their home, their car, and more information than he knows what to do with.

  It’s all data. All facts. And yet the outline of the life that he can compose from these bits of information comforts Carson. He can guess their politics, what their house looks like and what’s inside, what they talk about. He can speculate on how they raised their son, even what kinds of clothes he wore as a child.

  Carson has read about the Stockholm syndrome, in which kidnap victims begin to identify with and form bonds with their captors, and as he folds the printout and stuffs it in his jacket pocket he realizes that he is held hostage to not just the memory but the lived and unlived life of the man he killed. He has even dared to think that one day he would meet the young man’s family. To explain. To apologize. Just the other day he read a story in the newspaper that profiled a group of women in D.C., mothers who had forged bonds with the mothers of the incarcerated men and women who had killed their children. He’d begun collecting similar Ripley’s Believe It or Not–type articles about what he viewed as incredible acts of forgiveness—like the young White college student in Corpus Christi, Texas, a born-again Christian, who testified in court, asking leniency for the Black woman who, while driving one night, high on a nearly lethal cocktail of hallucinogens, struck and killed his father, a homeless man crossing the street pushing a shopping cart stuffed with newspapers and clothes. Carson has collected dozens of stories like that, and he keeps them in a scrapbook only he’s seen. These stories amaze him, and he is drawn to them for what they inform him about what men and women as ordinary as he are capable of. He doesn’t even know how he’d initiate such a miracle in his own life. But he has to believe such a thing is possible. That belief, he knows, is the first step. Alone at home, he thumbs through the scrapbook, pores over the stories, has read them so many times he knows them word for word, by heart. These people found miracles, made them happen. He hasn’t told anyone, not Bunny, not Carrie Petersen, but he’s had other dreams too. Dreams in which he made a miracle out of all that now remains.

  Carson reluctantly agrees to go out for a drink one night with Vince Proctor. When he walks through the door of the Blue Diamond and feels the dim, low-ceilinged bar bearing down on him, Carson trembles as memories flash through his mind like a wrenching prophetic vision. Memories of himself sitting at 1 a.m. in the corner where he had a clear view of the television elevated over the bar, nursing a beer or two, huddled at the table that had one too-short leg, with Davis, Quarles, and Jeeter, swapping complaints and you won’t believe what happened on my shift stories that on some nights sounded like tall tales or outright lies. The man arrested for walking nude down 193 at 5:00 a.m., armed with a machete and quoting from the book of Revelation. The woman who called to report a robbery and came to the door in a sheer nightgown and tried to seduce Jeeter. The fifteen-year-old who blew her brains out on her front lawn before Davis could stop her. He sat there with the others, all of them bound by a desire to protect and serve, bravado, courage, and an addiction to risk as insatiable as any junkie’s jones.

  “Come on, I see a table.” Proctor nudges Carson. It’s 9:00 p.m. The place is half full. Raleigh Stevenson, the 350-pound owner, waves at Carson from behind the bar as he and Proctor walk past.

  “It’s about time, man, how you doing?” he calls out to Carson, who stops at the bar and extends his hand. Raleigh is a heart attack just waiting to happen, so large that he wobbles unsteadily, lumbering toward Carson.

  Carson looks around, trying to delay sitting down with Proctor, who has found a booth, but he sees no one he recognizes.

  “What’re you having?” he calls over to Proctor.

  “Gimme a Heineken.”

  Raleigh hands Carson two bottles and he walks slowly, reluctantly, over to Proctor. He sets the beers on the table and slides into the booth.

  “You look like you held up okay,” Proctor says.

  “Yeah, well, looks can be deceiving.”

  “You know, I been on my share of administrative leaves. They call it leave but it’s really punishment, the way they isolate you. It’s really about breaking you,” Proctor says moodily.

  Proctor has shot five suspects in the last four years. Been disciplined for excessive force in three of those cases. Most cops never fire their weapons. Ever. Proctor can’t stop unloading his. His pale skin is chalky white, a plaster cast shattering at the seams. Crow’s-feet pinch the space around his eyes, pucker the skin above his lips. A crazy quilt of crinkled veins scars his craggy, aged face. Carson has seen the faces of cops who should have quit the force, who simply couldn’t handle the streets, the stress, but the ruin that stares back at him is a decay that has spread from within.

  The thought that one day he could look like that forces him to turn away from Proctor, to look at the nearby wall with the dartboard, the television set airing the news, at Raleigh pouring a shot of scotch for a U.S. marshal whose face Carson vaguely remembers. He turns away from Proctor just so he can breathe.

  “So what’d you do all that time?” Proctor asks.

  “Why you askin’ now? You coulda called if you’d really wanted to know.”

  “Ouch.” Proctor laughs. “C’mon, you know how it is. Life goes on.”

  “So they say.”

  “Know what I did when they’d put me on leave? Spent the day at a shooting range out in Prince William County. Worked out a couple of hours at the gym. You know, so I’d be mentally and physically sharp when I came back. You can’t let them break you, Carson. Not the brass on the force or the punks we arrest.”

  “Can’t remember what I did. How the hours, the days passed. I just remember feeling like shit. I still do.”

  “You gotta move on, man. I know being on desk duty is the last thing you want, but they’ll ease you back on the streets.”

  “That’s kinda what I’m afraid of.”

  “Whatcha mean?”

  “They say if you shoot one person, you’re likely to shoot somebody again. You feel more paranoid, you’ve got a different perception of danger.”

  “Hell, it’s the same streets as far as I’m concerned.”

  “You ever dream about the guy you shot?”

  “The one I paralyzed in that drug bust?”

  “Yeah, the one you shot in the back.”

  “Come on, man, you make it sound so cold, make me sound like a hit man.”

  Proctor stares at Carson through hazel eyes turned wary and cold.

  “No. I never dreamed about him. What the fuck would I wanna do that for? I don’t have trouble sleeping. Never have.”

  It’s a lie that he offers up without a hint of defensiveness or shame. The stilted tenor of his voice, the word never, inform Carson that Proctor’s torture has indeed been immense.

  “Well, I dreamed about the man I shot. I still do.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “You know that sumbitch Griffin tried to get me transferred,” Proctor says, steering the conversation onto rocky but less threatening shoals. “I been on the force eighteen years—shit, I can retire, get the hell outta Dodge in two. What you wanna bet I outlast him? I went straight to the union reps. Told them he was harassing me.”

  Before he realizes it, Carson has been sitting in the booth an hour and a half listening to Proctor, his complaints about the new recruits, the pay raise the legislature voted against, the civilian review board. The three beers Proctor drinks turn him loud and nasty, and when two detectives at a nearby table ask him to keep it down, Carson has to push him back in the booth to keep him from bolting across the small room to nail t
hem.

  When Proctor calms down he rises to go to the john, assuring Carson that he won’t stop at the table of the two who told him to be quiet. His seat is empty, but Carson still feels the booth charged, crackling with the sound of Proctor’s voice and his anger and fear. Carson wonders if he will burst into flames or, even worse, end up like Proctor. Imprisoned by The Job. A danger to civilians. A stranger to himself. These thoughts inspire Carson to throw a ten-dollar bill on the table and head for the door, and make him ignore Proctor calling out to him when he comes out of the john, “Hey, Blake, where you going?”

  He is in the parking lot, opening the car door, and Proctor is all over him, pulling on his arm.

  “Where you going?” he demands again.

  “I gotta go.”

  “You were gonna leave just like that? What’d I do? What’d I say?”

  “Why did you ask me to meet you? Just tell me that,” Carson shouts, inching so close to Proctor that he steps back.

  “I thought you could use a friend.”

  “I’m not like you, Proctor. I want you to know that. I’m not like you. So how could we be friends?”

  “You’re more like me than you know.”

  “Everything you said back there was a lie or a cover-up. I can drink alone. I can lie to myself without your help.”

  “What do you want from me? A confession? Yeah, I lied. I’ve thought about the perp I shot.”

  Carson shrugs and gets into his car. Proctor leans on the door, his face close to Carson’s through the window. “I lied about another thing too. It was me who needed a friend. Come on, Blake, you know how that feels.”

  “Yeah, Proctor,” Carson tells him, placing his key in the ignition, “I do.”

  10

  She wanted to name him Prince. But Temple insisted on Paul. For the great Black athlete, actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson. Temple was convinced their son would grow, like Robeson, into a man defying categorization. That he’d carry his own world with him. She too possessed grand dreams for the long-limbed, husky baby delivered after an agonizing eighteen-hour labor, a birthing that defeated Temple’s promise to last at her side in the delivery room, to be the one to place their child in her arms.

  Natalie had decided on Princess for a girl. Like Prince, it was an affirmation and an anointing. She yearned for a daughter radiant with a sense of her own worth, or a son of whom it would be said, “He has a good heart.” As always, Temple wanted much more. His son (and Temple knew absolutely that Natalie carried a boy, even as they decided against the ultrasound exam that would have confirmed his intuition), his child, must roar through his life, not merely live it. And so Temple named their child for a man who beat all the odds. He named their child Paul.

  But Paul had always been her prince. And because of that they had done everything right. Still, Temple warned her, back when Paul was five and enrolled in a Montessori school, when he was eight and joined the Cub Scouts, when Temple and Paul accompanied Natalie to Senegal for a weeklong conference on African diaspora literature, with side trips to Ivory Coast and Ghana, “Doing everything right might still not be enough.”

  In the tremulous, secret-code-filled conversations instigated by Temple’s admonition, they never completed the thought. Never said it out loud. Doing everything right might not be enough to save him. For if they lost Paul, then they too were doomed. Their construction of a psychic space beyond White folks’ reach. Their massive love for their son. None of it, in the end, perhaps even at the beginning, was guaranteed to be enough.

  Two pregnancies before Paul had ended in death. A cyst on the back of the baby’s neck killed the first; a cord bunched around the neck of the second prevented the baby from breathing. Natalie might have had her Princess, for both babies were girls. So Paul bore the weight. He had lived most intensely in their imagination, suspended between what he was and what he was to become. Always, it seemed, Paul was most real in their dreams for him. Dreams that encompassed all the good they could imagine and some that they could not even name. A child is a whispered prophecy. Hope is the middle name of every child ever born.

  Once, the instant the door closed after Paul’s departure from the house, Natalie felt the fear. The turning of the lock, such a minute, momentary sound, summoned the demons. When Paul got his license and went with friends to weekend parties, Natalie lay in bed restless and fitful, until she heard the lock on the door once again and Paul ascending the stairs with a purposeful stealth designed not to wake them. On those nights, Temple slept beside her, his snores and stolid, heavy slumber signaling a trust of the night that she could never call forth. Her dread was mighty, the imagined calamities numerous—a traffic accident, a fight, a shooting at a club, a stop by the police, a robbery. She harbored the unspeakable, shameful thought that if the early-morning call must come, let the phone jar some other couple awake—God help her, she would pass this cup on to another.

  Before he moved into his own apartment in D.C., some nights Natalie stood at the wide front window, pulled back the curtains, and watched Paul’s Nissan coast down the driveway, turn the corner, leaving Glory Road and turning onto Pleasant Prospect Lane, the taillights, the car, disappearing with that sharp left turn, as though the darkness, the night itself, had quickly and ravenously feasted on the vehicle and Paul. Gone. Out of her reach. Beyond the sound of her voice, her admonition, her protection. Her love.

  But that night, Paul’s last night, she had not felt the fear, deep, abiding, terrible. Even when she called out to Paul before he bounded out the door on his way to the supermarket at the nearby mall to get her a bottle of aspirin, Natalie brushed aside the eerie ache of doubt that shot through her like an echo of the old familiar fear. She had not felt the fear. Not at first, anyway. It was the headache, she told herself as she embraced Paul, her hands wet, her body arched backward to give herself up and over to his height. It was a headache that made her feel so odd, so uneasy. Nothing more.

  When an hour and a half passed and Paul had not returned, Natalie thought to call him on his cell phone. It was a Tuesday night. How crowded could the supermarket be? Then she recalled the surprisingly long lines that greeted her sometimes at night when she dashed in to pick up an item or two. No, she wouldn’t call him on his cell phone. It might not even be on. To suppress the distress bubbling inside her, she turned on the stereo in the living room, heard on the jazz station an early-fifties ballad by Miles Davis pouring through the speakers, the sounds unfurling as lazy as the shy, coiled petals of a rosebud, but not calming her, not for a second. She willed herself to think of something else. Anything else. Her mind drifted to Lisa, carrying Paul’s baby. Carrying. How apt was the term. Wasn’t she carrying Paul right now? Wasn’t he at twenty-five still a blessed burden that she had wanted more than anything? Even more than Temple or his love. To be a mother. And soon she would have a grandchild.

  The knock on the door was firm and Natalie would think in the aftermath of that night, That’s when I knew. I could hear it in the sound of their knuckles pounding my front door. A sound that was heavy, yet strangely hesitant, that would not be denied, yet that pushed me deeper into the chair in which I sat beside the front window (where I had sat down finally after pacing I don’t know how long). Waiting to see the lights of Paul’s car swing back onto Glory Road.

  In remembrance, and she sometimes heard it even now, the knocking seemed to go on forever. She would not respond to it. Because she knew. Maybe if she simply did not answer the door…Maybe if the lights were out. But the house, their stately three-story brick Georgian colonial with the wide white columns, was ablaze with light. So whoever was knocking, and she knew it was the police (who else knocked like that), knew someone was home.

  Temple’s voice broke the spell of her resistance. Her determined denial. He’d been in the basement practicing his golf swing and come upstairs, shouting, “For Christ’s sake, Natalie, answer the front door.” No, don’t answer it. That’s what she wanted to scream. But before her li
ps could part, lips raw and bleeding—she’d bitten into them so deeply, in her fear—the door was open. And now she could hear everything. The door was open. Open and evil, and disaster entered like a tidal wave in the form of the two policemen in plain clothes who stood on the porch and asked if Paul Houston lived here. Paul hadn’t gotten a D.C. license yet, still carried his Maryland license with their address.

  Temple’s impatience gave way to wary anxiety, which Natalie heard throbbing in the simple “Yes.” And after the yes, she was drowning and everything was swept away.

  “Are you his parents?”

  “Your son’s been involved in a shooting. We need you to come to the hospital with us.”

  Natalie rose from the chair, sprang from its confines. Standing at the door beside Temple, she could not have said what the policemen looked like. Who really gazes deep, fearlessly, into the face of the angel of death?

  “What happened? What happened?” Temple asked. “We can only tell you that your son is at the County Hospital and we’ve been told to take you there, one of the men said.”

  “Is he alive?” Temple asked.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Houston. I can’t tell you anything more.”

  From that night she remembers few sounds, except the thud of Temple’s fist breaking through the wall in the small family counseling room when the doctor told them that Paul was dead. And the chairs and tables he scattered as the security guard pulled him away from the wall and tried to calm him. She remembers her scream; it was a howl, really, a sound that echoes still behind every thought. It felt as if her lungs were on fire. How did the building withstand all that her voice unleashed? How did the hospital not crumble around her feet, shaken to the core by their grief? When she thinks of it now, she can’t remember any of the faces, not the counselor who met them at the main entrance, the doctor who told them Paul was dead, the nurse who accompanied them to the room to look at Paul’s body. But the face of her son she would never forget. The bleeding was massive. The bottoms of his feet and the palms of his hands were as white as chalk. The nurses had placed Paul’s hands on top of the sheet. Natalie wanted to see with her own eyes how Paul had died. When she reached to pull the sheet back, just to see his body, she didn’t care what she’d see. She almost longed for the blood, wanted to see the wounds. How else could she believe her child was dead? But she wasn’t allowed to pull back the sheet. The trauma nurse pulled her arms away from Paul’s body, saying, “This is a coroner’s case now. Everything in this room, including your son’s body, is evidence we can’t tamper with.”