American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

  Irv nods.

  “He was central to galvanizing the community for Jeffrey. Before the verdict, anyway. And now . . . Lydia’s dead at the side of a building and there’s nothing. Complete silence. Her parents aren’t talking to the media. Reverend Green is nowhere to be seen, and no one’s looking for her killer.” Gloria looks up at Irv. “Why aren’t you looking for her killer, Sheriff? What are you doing? What happened to her? Why are you here?”

  “We are looking for answers,” Irving says. His voice is authoritative, deep, and tranquil. In those five words Sigrid does not hear the man-boy and the prankster. She hears an adult who feels and is able to convey the gravity of the matter and is prepared to shoulder it.

  “Was she murdered by a black man?” Gloria asks. Her voice is almost a whisper. “Is that why you’re not telling me what happened?” She presses herself farther back into the chair as if distancing herself from the answer.

  Sigrid looks out the window. It is unfairly bright for such a discussion.

  “Was she? Was she killed by a black man?” she asks, whispering again.

  “What makes you ask that?” Melinda says.

  “If she was killed by a black man, it would turn the whole conversation away from Jeffrey. It would undermine our moral argument. It would explain why the black community has stopped talking. The police would say, ‘Told you so’ and Jeffrey’s death would be forgotten.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Sigrid says.

  “It would,” Gloria says. “People are looking for any reason to justify a police shooting and to vilify and negate anyone calling a shooting into question. Oh, sorry. I meant to say, a police shooting of a black person. A white person is shot and everyone’s in an uproar. But someone black? They must have had it coming, people say, or else the police must have had a reasonable fear. So if a black man murdered Lydia in a run-down urban area near a crack house shortly after Jeffrey was gunned down? Well . . . they’d say, sad about Jeffrey, but it’s people who look like him who are the cause of the problem. Just look at his dead aunt. And it would all . . . vanish. Like all the others. Is that why Mr. and Mrs. Jones don’t want to find the killer? Why Reverend Green is keeping silent on this?”

  “We can’t discuss the state of the investigation, Professor. I’m sorry,” says Irv.

  Sigrid expects Gloria to cry at this, but instead she absorbs the emotion and her face becomes strangely calm and devoid of expression.

  “Is there anything else you can tell us about Lydia that we might not know?” Irv asks. “Or Marcus?”

  “I think Lydia felt that Jeffrey was the son she’d never have,” Gloria adds. “She was forty. She was smart. She knew that kids probably weren’t coming her way. Jeffrey was much more than a nephew. And he wasn’t just a substitute for a son. He was such a nice person! So curious. So empathetic. So interested in the world. There was this . . . expansive sense of possibility with him. He wanted to know so much. Bugs. Dinosaurs. Star Trek. Video games. How you grind glasses. What makes something beautiful or not. It was enriching watching him grow up, watching how one excitement led to another. I think I kept judging my own boys against that. Unfairly, I guess. When the grand jury let that man go and didn’t even make him stand trial, she was . . .”

  “Depressed?” Melinda says.

  Irv and Sigrid both give Melinda a look that silences her immediately.

  “I was going to say despondent. I explained this already to . . . Cory.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” says Irv.

  “She spent most of her time alone after Jeffrey died. With the grand jury decision, though . . . she was simply done. We didn’t talk much after that. Everything that started to build and swell . . . all that momentum that we could have turned into something, something that would have given Jeffrey’s death a legacy if not a meaning. All that stopped when Lydia died. Now you’re saying Marcus is missing?”

  “Yes,” says Sigrid.

  “I’m not surprised he left. There’s nothing here for him anymore.”

  It Is Only a Paper Moon

  An amber moon hangs like a plate over the black hills of Hedmark, Norway, during the few hours of night, but Morten Ødegård is uninterested in the glories of the cosmos; he has photographs to find. They are in here somewhere. They have to be.

  He sits in his kitchen with his eyes closed, roaming the house in his mind to find them.

  He definitely put them in a box of some kind.

  Probably.

  Not a shoebox. It was something larger. The color gray comes to mind. Not a neutral gray. More an administrative green. This was probably an unwise choice for a box of memorabilia. That is a color for camouflage, a color to aid forgetting. He should have chosen a nice safety green—the kind that decorates every baby carriage and kindergarten class in the winter months here, a color that the brain is unable to ignore. That’s how to store something meant to be protected and retrieved.

  And there were rivets.

  Not in the basement. It wouldn’t be there. The basement is an unfinished place. Damp, too. And Dank. And Dark. Not a place for paper, let alone photos of a dead wife.

  He’s had to do this before—this forensic process of introspection. Call it remembering, but in fact he’s studying himself. It’s all that works now. Memory as a device doesn’t deliver results when you’ve lived someplace too long as Morten has lived in the farmhouse. Each object, over the years, has been placed in every possible or available spot. And his memory is fine so he can remember them all. It’s ordering the memories that creates the confusion. The mind, after all, rebels at chronology. Ours is a pattern-seeking machine, always forming connections and creating webs of associations. It lives. It moves. It morphs. It creates and changes and invents.

  This is not what you want your files doing.

  So in the end the only solution involves consulting his former self and hoping that he was a reasonable and logical man. If the present you can trust the former you, and anticipate the future you, it becomes possible for all three to engage in a little intertemporal teamwork and select the right place for objects. No, it isn’t remembering per se, but the collaboration brings the body to the same place, in this case being . . .

  “. . . i soverommet,” he says aloud.

  The bedroom. The wife in the bedroom. Of course the wife in the bedroom. “What a stupid conversation this has been,” he mutters to himself. See how you can trust your former self more than the current one? That can’t be good. And there’s the problem, he thinks as he trudges up the stairs. If you start losing your capacity for reason, then the dance comes to an end because it doesn’t matter how helpful the former you was, or whatever you plan on doing for the future you, because it’s the current you—now and always—who has to do the legwork.

  On entering, Morten tries to estrange himself from his bedroom. It is quite familiar, so it is not an easy task. The bed. The windows. The dresser. The end tables and lamps. The rug. The closet. All where he’d left them and planned for them to remain.

  The closet.

  He opens the closet.

  He closes the closet. He knows exactly what is and is not in the closet, and his wife is not in there.

  He turns to the bed.

  Their bed. The one in which she died.

  Morten works himself downward to his knees, takes to all fours, and lowers himself into the dust like the other humble creatures. There it is, somewhat as he’d remembered it: rivetless and more beige than gray but . . . there.

  That amber moon, though, is not as done with him as he’d hoped. It is looking in, lurking about. When he opens the box, alone and on the bed, it casts an unwanted patina of gold across Astrid’s pillow and his memory of the face she wore on the night of their wedding. She had been in a rented white gown that had draped itself around her and looked as radiant as her happiness, a radiance that burned out the shadows and struck up the band.

  They were married in the 1960s but there was no early rock-’n’-roll for them. They da
nced their first dance to Ella Fitzgerald singing “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” And Ella was right; it didn’t matter whether that moon was sailing over a cardboard sea or not. Because they had each other.

  His right hand was aflame in the small of her back as his thumb found the valley that led to and from everything he would ever want. That hand held the entirety of her as she slid and stepped around the floor, creating a gravity of her own.

  He would have followed her anywhere. And he did until he no long­er could.

  Morten shuffles the wedding photos to the back of the pile and looks over others that have already faded to yellow and bronze on their own. They are the usual fare and surprising only for the amount of plaid worn over the years. There, Marcus. There, Sigrid. The cat, black with a white chest. Astrid had named him Roman. He and his mate produced a litter. Astrid called them Roman’s Legions. They dug into everything.

  Morten recalls sitting down with the kittens once and explaining how, in Norway, there are seven legal ways to kill cats. He described each one as they mutilated the edges of their sofa. They called his bluff.

  More flipping of photos. He looks at the faces of his wife, his children.

  Sigrid had said “depression.”

  No, it wasn’t depression they had faced together. It was the other thing.

  Morten had told his children that their mother’s death wasn’t their fault because it wasn’t. Marcus had started to blame him, and after that, he started to blame himself. Morten tried to dispel both notions, but children will blame themselves for the rising and setting of the moon, such is their certainty of their own power and centrality. And they will blame their parents for the same, such is their confusion about the difference between power and authority.

  What could Marcus have meant by “It happened again”?

  Morten replaces the photos and seals the lid. Seeing the faces of his family brings a tempest of emotions but no insights. This is little surprise, as few storms are productive; best to keep a lid on all of it. He slides the box back to its own spot beneath the bed, realigning the dusty edges.

  Most Acts of Violence

  Outside Gloria Dillane’s house, the three police officers sit in the patrol car. The bulletproof partition is open. The black vinyl seats bake their thighs and the warm air stifles their lungs until Irv starts the engine and the cold air begins to flow through the vents.

  “What kind of contact have you had with Mr. and Mrs. Jones until now?” Sigrid asks. “It is strange that Lydia’s death—the second death in a single family that has not resulted in justice—has not made matters worse. And it is very strange that pressure to solve her death has slowed down.”

  “The momentum for justice has not slowed down,” says Irv. “The commissioner wants us to find Marcus and lock him up. It will help calm down the situation caused by Jeffrey.”

  “Jeffrey didn’t cause anything,” Sigrid says. “Roy caused it.”

  “I meant what Jeffrey’s death caused.”

  “What you’re describing is pressure from the top. From politicians. I’m talking about pressure from below. From citizens. I don’t understand why there’s less pressure from below. We have to see Mr. and Mrs. Jones,” Sigrid says. “They’re Lydia’s parents. Jeffrey’s grandparents. They should be central to this.”

  “I’ve already spoken to them,” Irv says. His voice is barely audible over the air conditioner.

  “You two ask the wrong questions,” Sigrid says. “I’ve heard you. I need to speak to them myself. Nothing about this case makes sense. Lydia’s death does not make sense to me. Marcus’s sense of responsibility and disappearance does not make sense. The politics around all this don’t make sense. Call them, Melinda. Please?” Sigrid removes an old napkin from her pocket and wipes her forehead.

  Melinda turns to Irv for guidance but he looks out the window. Sigrid repeats herself, and without Irv’s explicit objection, Melinda places the call.

  Sigrid isn’t done with Irv, though:

  “Is the police commissioner white?” Sigrid asks.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Was he elected like you?”

  “He’s a civilian political appointee. So he wasn’t elected, but he’s part of the executive office.”

  “So he’s political, like you, rather than a career professional, like me.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Our situation, as I now understand it, is that the white politicians want to lock up Marcus for Lydia’s death. But the black community does not.”

  “Not exactly. They don’t know about Marcus. He’s still a missing person to the general public assuming they have any thoughts about him at all. We haven’t charged Marcus. We haven’t implicated him publicly in any way,” Irv says. “There’s no reason anyone—outside the police system—would suspect Marcus or want us to arrest him. Unless Chuck has started blathering, but I haven’t heard that happening yet and I already put the fear of God into him. So the pressure is all from the inside at the moment.”

  “Who exactly is Fred Green?” Sigrid asks. “Gloria mentioned him.”

  Melinda’s call has been answered and she’s speaking quietly into the phone. Sigrid catches the phrase “yes, ma’am.”

  “Reverend Fred Green,” says Irv, “is the pastor at First Baptist. It’s a mostly black church. He buried Jeffrey. And Lydia. He’s very close to the Jones and Simmons families.”

  “You know him?”

  “Not well. I met him during my campaigns. Handshake, quick chat. I don’t think he voted for me.”

  “You didn’t talk to him after Jeffrey’s death?”

  “I’ve told you. That was a different county. We didn’t do it. I wasn’t going to start making rounds and confusing the matter.”

  “You should have gone there. You made a big mistake.”

  “All right. Fine. Thank you.”

  Melinda has removed the phone from her ear and pressed the red image on the screen. She places her face closer to the vent and breathes in.

  “Why would they not want justice for Lydia? Even if Lydia was a suicide—”

  “We have no proof of that,” Irv says.

  “. . . the black community could reasonably say it was indirectly caused by Roy’s killing of Jeffrey.”

  “You can argue anything,” Irv says.

  “Not convincingly, you can’t. And I would absolutely find that convincing. Wouldn’t you?”

  Irv says nothing.

  “I think any decent person would see that, whatever the law says. It would make sense for the black community to keep pressing for justice because she was, in effect, another victim of Roy Carman and everything that created him.”

  Melinda makes a small cough. Both Irv and Sigrid look at her.

  “I don’t mean to . . . well . . . I don’t see why this is a black thing,” says Melinda. “I mean . . . if cops killed a white kid everyone would be going nuts. If that white kid’s aunt ended up dead on a street corner it would be headline news. So why if they shoot a black kid, is it only the black people who are going nuts? I get why it’s a black thing also, but not why it’s a black thing only.”

  “She’s right,” Sigrid says. “That’s a good question.”

  “OK, look, people: This is not American Culture 101. You”—he points to Melinda with a rigid finger—“are in the doghouse for providing a leading question to an interviewee. It’s like Tourette’s with you. And you,” he says to Sigrid as he starts the car. “You are not Alexis de fucking Tocqueville here to study America’s prison and justice system. I’m not blithely accepting this suicide theory you’re pushing in the hopes that I won’t notice and it’ll soak into my brain. We still have every reason to suspect Marcus aside from the fact that he seems so gosh-darn nice. Well . . . nice people do bad things. This should not be news for grownups,” he says. His phone buzzes again and he looks down to see the name of the caller on the screen. “Goddamn journalist parasites.”

  “My copy of Democracy in America was
stolen.”

  “Are you being a smart-ass?”

  “My father gave me a copy. I didn’t realize that’s what the book was about.”

  “There’s no safe place to stand around here,” Irv says to himself.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking,” says Sigrid. “Lydia Jones had a nephew who was gunned down by a police officer and denied justice from his country. Lydia was broken. Marcus tried to help her and couldn’t, for which he blames himself. She killed herself using an open window. Ashamed and hurt, he runs away to the woods.”

  “Good story. All neat and tied up. Here’s the thing, though. It’s complete speculation,” says Irv.

  Irv flicks the car into gear and rolls them out of Gloria’s neighborhood as if pushed by a tailwind. Ten wordless minutes later he turns off at Exit 12 onto a road with franchise restaurants, chain stores, pawn shops, and stores that promise—in neon—to give advances on paychecks.

  They turn right onto Allard Road, where they pass wooden houses in various states of disrepair. The lawns are weathered here, and chainlink fences separate properties, not ferns and flowers. It is mid-afternoon and two Latino men sit on lawn chairs studying the police car for intention as it glides down the wide street. No child waves as Irv squints at the mailboxes for the numbers.

  Irv flicks the transmission into park behind a baby blue Delta 88 and sits for a moment, the air blowing, before turning off the engine. The house is painted brown with beige trimming on the windows. There is a faded plastic swing hanging at a slant from frayed yellow ropes in the front yard.

  Irv rotates his body to speak with Sigrid and smacks his elbow against the bulletproof glass he forgot was there. He winces, draws breath, and tries again.