American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

  She doesn’t need whiskey, though. She first needs the clear stuff. Aisle two has that, and she finds four bottles that she’s going to need later and places them in her basket. They have a fake Russian name and are bottled in New Jersey, but they are one hundred proof, and that’s value for money.

  What she wants for herself, though, is rum.

  Rum is not so popular in Oslo. Ron Zacapa 23, which is good, has more or less completed its world domination and now colonizes the upper shelves of all the Vinmonopolets, leaving the lower shelves for Bacardi, which is less for drinking than spilling on the floors of bad clubs. Here, though, is a bottle she once bought at a duty-free in Brussels. The El Dorado 21. And it is only a hundred dollars.

  That same bottle would have been over three hundred in Oslo.

  “Excuse me,” Sigrid says to the man at the counter, who resembles a leather-clad bear. “I’d like that bottle of El Dorado Twenty-One, please. It’s in the locked cabinet.”

  It is ten o’clock at night. There is no music in the store. A quartz clock ticks behind the man.

  “That’s a hundred bucks plus tax. You know that, right?”

  “It’s a bargain, believe me. You should try it.”

  The man snorts through his fur. “I can’t afford that,” he says, collecting a cabinet key attached to a giant plank of driftwood so that, she assumes, it won’t be lost or stolen or carried off by someone smaller than himself.

  When he returns with the rum and starts ringing up the sale, he looks down at the vodka she’s stockpiled like artillery rounds.

  “You know these other bottles are garbage, right? Even the Royal Gate is better than those.”

  “It’s what I need.”

  As she waits for the man to charge her credit card she watches the silent television playing above his head. A portly middle-aged woman is standing on a ledge in front of four enormous red balls mounted over a pool of water. As Sigrid stares, trying to figure out the purpose of this game show, a massive wall swings into view, slapping her from behind and sending her hurtling over the top of the first ball before she falls headfirst into the gap with the second ball and then sort of ricochets between the two until dropping face-first into the pool below.

  “What is that?” she asks as he hands back the card.

  “Wipeout.”

  “Why would people put themselves through that?”

  “For your viewing pleasure. And money.”

  “What channel’s it on?”

  Back at the motel, on the bed, the television tuned, Sigrid pours a generous portion of rum into her bathroom’s tumbler. Shoes off, toes out, she closes her eyes and sniffs, allowing it to transport her to places where the colors are primary and rich, the sea is turquoise and white, and the sunset creates a new kind of evening warmth in the company of people who could talk for hours and hours about forensics, criminal investigation, and comparative methods of violence reduction. With some great music playing, of course.

  She touches her lips to the rum and draws the tiniest of sips.

  The phone rings and she ignores it.

  She takes another, longer, and more languorous pull, allowing it to roll across and around her tongue for the duration of two, three, and finally four rings before swallowing. The warmth of the Caribbean glows inside her and for a brief moment she is young and hopeful and possibly someone else.

  She answers the phone.

  “Hello?”

  From the phone comes a cold bitter wind that blows from the lips of Sheriff Irving Wylie.

  His tone is the message, so she holds the phone away from her ear. Whatever he’s ranting about, an arm’s length away, now sounds like a couple of bumblebees in divorce court.

  During a pause, when Irv stops ranting to inhale, Sigrid places the receiver against her face and says, “Everyone knows where I am, Irving. I wanted to get an early start when we look for Marcus tomorrow. Have a few moments alone with Frank Allman. What else did you think I was going to do, Irv? Really. I flew here from Norway. I’m not going to sit around in your jail cell until your schedule clears up.”

  Irv grumbles in what might have been Hebrew, Latin, or Greek.

  “How’d it go tonight?” Sigrid asks, pouring more.

  Irv says something about no one getting shot.

  “Come on,” she urges. “How did you deal with the protesters?”

  “It was a mob with pitchforks going after innocent monsters, but monsters all the same.”

  “Is that how you treated them?”

  “No. I treated them like legitimately angry citizens and members of my constituency who deserved to be understood, in the hopes it might calm things down.”

  “You talked to them?”

  “No. I sent the local reverend. Or, more to the point, I asked for his help and he begrudgingly obliged.”

  “That was either very cowardly or very wise,” Sigrid says.

  “It might have been both.”

  “So why do you sound like your puppy died?”

  “You alone?” he wants to know.

  Sigrid isn’t sure why he is asking. “Yes.”

  “I’ve come around to the idea that maybe Lydia committed suicide and Marcus . . . I don’t know, failed to stop her or something. The thing is, Fred Green doesn’t want me to arrest Marcus.”

  “Why doesn’t Green want you to arrest Marcus?”

  “Because we might let him go.”

  “Perhaps because it’s late, and I’m drinking, Irv, but I’m not following you.”

  “I’ve been rolling it around in my head and the best I can land on is this: It would be worse to arrest Marcus and then let him go than to not arrest him at all.”

  “But the alternative to murder would be suicide, and that would be a bad conclusion too.”

  “Yes. But an unsolved crime is better than a solved one where justice is denied. In the first instance the police are simply uncaring or incompetent. In the second, we’re actively racist. Which is what releasing Marcus would look like. Assuming he gets released. Which he might not. This is all making my head spin.”

  “Are things that bad out there?”

  “Clearly, some people think so.”

  “Maybe there was no crime, Irv. As you said.”

  “In which case . . . Lydia’s parents live in torment forever thinking of their daughter in hell.”

  “Religion is cruel.”

  “Procedure says I have to bring Marcus in, Sigrid. You know that. The 9-1-1 call, the eyewitness, the disappearance, the golden triangle of motive, means, and opportunity . . .”

  “We don’t have a motive.”

  “There’s love involved, Sigrid. You can always impute a motive. And this happened blocks from Marcus’s house. And he was there. So something happened and it was something emotional. Clearly. But . . . let me finish.”

  Sigrid can hear him adjust the phone and she uses the moment to take a sip and reconnect with the Caribbean.

  Irv continues: “Here’s my worry. If you’re right about Lydia’s suicide, it means that Marcus was a nice guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. He runs away from guilt and grief. We bring him in, but then we let him go. That’s the law. But not the optics. Because from outside, all we see is a black professional woman who was the aunt of Jeffrey Simmons murdered by a white man with supremacist connections who is soon released without charges by a police department a town over from where Roy Carman was exonerated by a grand jury. You’ll notice how the inside voices don’t sound the same as the outside voices, and the same facts sound very different depending on what you emphasize.”

  “The facts of the case remain the facts of the case,” Sigrid says, “whatever they sound like, and whatever language you use. I accept that you have a communication problem, and a race problem, and a political problem. But you don’t have an evidentiary one. I’m not going to let you lock up Marcus because your country can’t get a grip on itself. Your job is to solve the case,” says Sigrid. “Not fix America.” />
  “Maybe not, but I don’t want to burn it down, either. I live here.”

  Sigrid pours herself another and, thanks to a highly attuned ear for that particular sound, Irv asks what she’s drinking.

  “It’s a twenty-one-year-old rum. I haven’t seen this bottle in four years.”

  “How much have you got left?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “For the same reason I want to know how many clean glasses you have left.”

  “There’s one wrapped in paper in the bathroom.”

  “You have plans for it?”

  “I usually just use one,” Sigrid says.

  “I’m coming over.”

  “I didn’t invite you.”

  “I’ll knock.”

  By the time Irv arrives, Sigrid is asleep. As promised he knocks gently on the door and she, groggily, walks barefoot across the threadbare carpet near the door. She opens it and he stands outside with his hat in his hands, looking more boyish than she remembers him.

  “You actually drove all the way here?” she mutters. “At this time of night?”

  “We need an early start, like you said. And I can’t drink in the morning.”

  “It’s easier than it looks,” she says.

  “I have some strong stuff in the car. Should I bring it in?”

  “Why did you get divorced?” she asks him, hand on the door and pinching sleep from her eyes.

  “We didn’t have any questions left for each other. Why aren’t you married?”

  “When I was young I thought it was me. When I grew up I started thinking it was them. And then I stopped thinking about it entirely.”

  “How about that drink?” Irv asks.

  “You’re sleeping on the sofa, Irv.”

  “There’s a sofa?”

  “Not all of your plans work out either, huh?” she says.

  Sigrid flattens her palm against the door. Irv lowers his head and slips inside the room, placing his hat on the dresser to his right, below the mirror that faces the bed. Sigrid releases the door and allows the natural forces of the spring to do the rest.

  Falling

  It was an epithelial ovarian carcinoma. Sigrid’s mother, Astrid, was under thirty-five years old and otherwise in excellent health, so it was caught late, during stage three, when her chances of surviving five more years were twenty-nine percent. There was no familial link. No genetic predisposition that might have warned her. Cancer cells had spread from the ovaries to the lining of the abdomen. Morten was the first to know, and so the first to hold the secret. They ordered themselves along two fronts—managing the cancer, and managing her decline in front of the children.

  She told her husband everything. They only spoke about it in their bedroom so as to keep the plague contained and so that the place where life was created—where the children were conceived—could counter the forces of death. They did not say this. Words were immaterial. And yet, together and with a shared understanding, they cordoned off the topic from the wider world and locked it in a private place.

  Astrid’s doctor was named Gunnar Nilsen. He was calm and precise. In his early fifties, he had no talent for putting her, or anyone else, at ease. Astrid would later learn, through discussions with Dr. Nilsen’s secretary, Hilde, that he was tired of his job spent with suffering innocents. His own father had suggested he take up architecture as it was more suited to Gunnar’s disposition. To his father’s mind, such a job would be creative, solitary, and less socially or emotionally demanding. And so Gunnar went into oncology to spite his father while secretly resenting his own success. Astrid asked Hilde if she should see someone else. “No,” she explained. “He’s very good. His spite runs very deep.”

  Astrid met him in a rotation of examination rooms. She peed into cups and submitted to blood tests and waited for human contact that never arrived.

  She sat on the crunchy rolling paper on the elevated table with her feet dangling childishly when Nilsen came in on a Tuesday. He smiled weakly and sat down. They did not shake hands. He opened a brown folder. He explained what stage three meant, what stage four looks like, and, to some extent, would feel like.

  Morten later learned that there had been a great many studies and debates and codes of conduct written to control the information and tone of conversation between doctors and patients in response to the question of longevity. The professional consensus favored a stance of managed ignorance. Oh, there are many factors at play, they would often say, and a lot we still don’t know. There’s diet, weight, attitude, prior history, age, support systems, and dumb luck that you may label miracle. All these factors factor in, one might say, and there are many possible outcomes. For your case . . . we can’t really know, so let’s focus on the treatment. That is a common approach. It was not Dr. Nilsen’s.

  “Mrs. Ødegård,” he had said, “you have a twenty-nine percent chance of surviving five years. Those five years will be declining years, and they will be hard for you and those around you.”

  And then—because his son was taking drugs and he and his wife were strained to the emotional breaking point and couldn’t believe that all their education and experience gave them no edge over common folk, and because their failure seemed to prove that his own father might have been right—he continued beyond the point of necessity or even utility. If he had stayed with convention he would have told Astrid’s husband first. But he strayed: “Your family will likely react in one of two ways. They will either start to distance themselves from you now, imperceptibly at first and not at all consciously, but genuinely and significantly to protect themselves from their eventual loss, or else they will redouble their love and commitment to you, making your death that much more unbearable and excruciating. If you love your family, I suggest you think about this.”

  This is what Astrid conveyed to Morten later that night in their bedroom when the children were asleep. They drank a white wine that was dry and cold. He now has no memory of its taste.

  It was not a twenty-nine percent chance of a cure. Or surviving for a full life. It was twenty-nine percent of lasting five years.

  “You’re suffering from perspective,” he said to her.

  “That’s what we say about Marcus,” she said. Her voice was weak.

  “He asks very big questions,” Morten said.

  “All children do,” she told him.

  “Yes,” Morten replied, “but they don’t all lose sleep over it. He does.”

  “I’m dying, Morten.”

  “I know,” he said. They did not lie about this.

  “I think I know what it’s going to be like,” she said in the dark. That night she wore a flannel robe of blues and blacks. Crosshatched and boxy. She often slept in a scarf. He bought her one of fine cashmere. It held the heat she produced that much longer.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She turned her head and looked out the window. A waxing moon. A sliver on the edge of a black ball.

  “Where was I before I was born?” she said. “That’s what they all ask.”

  “Who?”

  “Children. Adults. All of us. Where was I? Before there was a where. Before there was an I. It is inconceivable,” she’d said, “for there to be no self and no place to put it. That’s what it will be like. Like falling backwards into a pocket of space that constricts and then pops out of existence.”

  He said nothing.

  “Where am I now, Morten?”

  “Here with me.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Between something and nothing? Quite a lot.”

  “It’s not enough, though, is it?” she’d said.

  “Actually, it is.” He raised himself higher onto his elbow. “You know what the secret to death is?” Morten said.

  She smiled at that. He had made her smile. He remembers that.

  “Tell me the secret to death,” she answered, mocking him.

  “You have to back into it,” he’d told her.

  �
��What does that mean?”

  “You stop staring ahead into the void. There’s nothing to see. You need to turn around. Watch life. Watch it like a rabbit about to come out of a hat. Keep your eye on it the whole time until—like that—the seeing is no more. That’s the trick.”

  “What made you such an expert?” she asked.

  “I’ve never once taken my eyes off of you,” he told her.

  She remained still.

  “Do you remember our song?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. But she didn’t name it. Instead she looked at the moon through the frosted window. “The children,” she finally said. “Marcus won’t be able to do this. My death,” she said to Morten, “will change him. But my dying . . . my prolonged act of dying . . . that will destroy him. We need to do something about that. We need to make the prolonged part go away. Can you do that for me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he’d said.

  Astrid nodded as though the conversation was over.

  From the vent above their bed came a scuffing sound—the sound of an animal trapped inside. A mouse, a bird, a squirrel. Everything that could fit had been lodged in the chimney at some point, and this sound was usually the first indication. They looked at each other and before Morten could comment there was a loud crash from inside the house.

  Morten swung himself off the bed and ran into the children’s room—found Sigrid fast asleep with a stuffed camel—but he didn’t see Marcus.

  “Marcus?” he called out.

  “Here,” came a weak voice, a voice that was fighting back tears.

  In the downstairs bathroom Morten found Marcus curled up in the fetal position, clutching his left arm tightly against his body. He wore mismatching pajamas of red bottoms and a blue T-shirt top, and both were too small for him. His face was awash in tears from pain, but he held back his screams. Morten heard his son biting for air as he rocked back and forth on the gray-slate floor, pressing his forehead into the stone and starting to wail over what would prove to be a broken arm.