“Marcus . . .”
“The sex was sort of . . . friendly. It started off friendly and cute and only in the middle did the need kick in, but that felt life-affirming because it seemed to prove that even people who liked each other could grow intense sometimes rather than needing to start that way, and I felt so completed . . . assured . . . from that. And she was so damn pretty.”
Sigrid thinks she hears something in the woods. A quick scan reveals nothing but she does not take this as proof. Would she have heard Norway’s Beredskapstroppen? This is an American special weapons and tactics team. Even with Irv stumbling along beside them, there is every likelihood she and Marcus are surrounded already. There is no way to know.
“I heard Mom and Dad talking,” he says. “You were sleeping. I went downstairs because I wanted a piece of chocolate and they said I couldn’t have one because I’d already had an ice cream earlier, but I was feeling defiant so I went to get some anyway. The Freia kokesjokolade. I think that’s what I miss most about Norway. That and the brunost.”
“Marcus. They’re coming.”
“Mom only let me have a single square of it each time, but this time I broke off four squares . . . a whole row. I felt like I was making off with the Crown Jewels. No one had ever been so bold. I went into the bathroom to eat it so I wouldn’t get caught. And that’s when I heard them talking.”
“About what?”
“Mom killed herself, Sigrid. And Dad helped. Or let her. Either way. I don’t know.”
“Marcus, you’re imagining this. This was thirty-five years ago. You are distraught now, and you were a little kid then.”
“Mom had come home from the doctor. She found out the results of her biopsy. This was the early seventies. No chemotherapy. No realistic surgery that wouldn’t have been devastating. The chances of survival now are only forty percent at stage three and that’s for five miserable years. I don’t even know what they would have been then. The doctor told her she was going to die. It was a matter of when. Mom and Dad decided that if she died sooner, you and I wouldn’t have to watch her suffer and we’d get through it all better. That’s what really happened, Sigrid. You were five and I was eleven. And you did get through it better. That’s what you never knew. And you still don’t understand. She sacrificed her life for yours and it worked. Look at you. Chief of police at forty years old. But not for me. Because I heard that conversation. For five months between that moment and her actual death, I sat there knowing what was going to happen and I couldn’t stop it. Every day I woke up wondering if she was dead. Because it had to happen at night. I felt like I was being crushed to death inside a paper bag and no one could hear me suffocating. But I didn’t say anything. I was too afraid.
“I felt like I’d swallowed poison and all I could do was wait for the effects. I would look at her every day and think, Maybe tonight. Maybe this will be the night she dies. And when I woke up the next morning and I found her there, I wasn’t happy. I was shaking. I wouldn’t let her near me. I stopped eating. I barely made it through school. And then, months later. It did happen. The moment I learned it, I understood I should have said something. I should have run to her and screamed and told her not to. I should have told her how much I loved her. I should have used every single moment of time with her to express that, and I should have traced her face with my fingers and memorized every curve and every line from every emotion—in her eyes and the corners of her mouth. This knowledge came like a wind through my soul the moment she died.
“I blamed Dad, of course. He must have given her the drugs or at least condoned it. I blamed him because I couldn’t blame her. I couldn’t mix the anguish with the hate. I needed to separate them. But it wasn’t until I was older—when I’d moved away—when I realized the worst part of all. The real truth, Sigrid, is that I actually made her do it. It wasn’t their fault. It was mine. Do you see it? She was going to take the morphine at night to save us from the pain, but she was on the fence about it and that’s why it took so long. What happened was that I pushed her into it. Every day she must have woken up and seen my own pain getting worse and worse and she must have thought to herself that she needed to do it now. Do it faster. To save her son from suffering even longer. Of course, it was the opposite that was true. I needed to know she wouldn’t do it. I needed her to tell me she’d stay with us as long as she possibly could and fight to the end, and be there to say goodbye. She didn’t know that I knew her plans, though. And she never said goodbye.
“All I had to do was say I knew. I’m certain of it. They couldn’t have gone ahead with it if we’d known. It would have been too cruel. It would have undermined the point of it. She wouldn’t have lasted long, but she would have lasted longer. But I said nothing. I killed her. So that was the first woman I killed.”
Sigrid had not noticed before that Marcus’s feet were in the water. He was still wearing shoes, now submerged to the ankle. Above those, a faded pair of jeans, a blue and white striped button-down shirt that seemed too big for him or else was an “American cut,” wide across the back for what they euphemistically call an athletic build. His arms look thinner than she’d remembered. He seems gaunt, physically withdrawn even from himself. He is sweating terribly.
Sigrid stands in the shadows, where it is cooler.
“Even if you heard that, Marcus,” she says, “even if they considered it, there is no reason to believe they went through with it. Five months later? It makes no sense. She might have been despondent,” Sigrid says, “on hearing the prognosis. I can imagine that. I can imagine a couple of Norwegians in a farmhouse drinking too much and discussing cancer and suicide. Anyone who’s been to Norway can imagine that. But actually doing it? No. That isn’t how the world works. It is, however, how a little kid makes sense of it.”
“She died,” Marcus says, emphatically, “because I kept my mouth shut out of cowardice. But this time—with Lydia—I tried talking. My failures with Mom were at the forefront of my mind. So I did the opposite. I pleaded. Argued. I used intellectual words, emotional words, appeals, admissions. I begged her not to leave me. This time I stood too close and said too much. That’s how I killed my second woman.”
“You didn’t kill anyone, Marcus. Lydia killed herself.”
“What? That’s what you think happened?”
There is a sharp snap behind Sigrid and she turns to see Irving making his way across the forest floor with his eyes to the ground to avoid a misstep. Glancing up he notices her and smiles before wiping his head.
“I should arrest you immediately for what you did back there. I realize we don’t have exactly the same legal systems, but I’m pretty sure that arson and destruction of government property is just as illegal in Norway as it is in New York. Am I right or am I right?”
“Yeah. Listen, Irv . . .”
“Did you manage to find . . . hey! There he is. The man of the hour himself! Marcus Odegard, you have put us through quite a bit of trouble ever since . . . Drop that fucking gun right now!”
The Edge
Irv plasters himself behind an oak, unbuttons his collar, and breathes. The wool and polyester sheriff’s duds aren’t helping with the flop sweat. Sticky, grumpy, and in slow pursuit, he’d spent twenty minutes imagining a nice dip in the lake after finding Marcus and the joy of drip-drying in the sun while waiting for Alfonzo and the rest of their team to join them.
Now, though, Marcus has ruined all of that; ruined a chance to cool off, to bring him in easy, to make Irv’s life the straightforward and linear affair he deserves. Irv rips the sheriff’s hat from his head, chucks it to the ground, and stomps on it—up and down—grinding it into the black earth while shouting, “You said he wouldn’t have a gun! You promised me! You said it was all in my head. All in my deranged American mind, that I was making things up, that you know better because you come from some perfect little Utopia, and now here I’m behind a goddamn tree with my dick in my . . .”
“Irv, please, calm down,” Sigrid says,
but he doesn’t calm down, because he feels not only rage but a burning and righteous indignation. She might have raised her voice, but she can’t deny that he’s justified in feeling this way. The only consolation, as she listens to his diatribe, is that he probably won’t shoot Marcus while he’s yelling. Americans have always preferred separating their talking from their violence; it seems to be a sequential thing with them.
Eventually Irv regains a measure of control. The calm is not necessarily comforting. He may not want to shoot Marcus, but he’s unlikely to risk his own life to prevent it. What he says next she believes:
“Marcus,” Irv says from behind the tree. “I will not let you point that at me. So help me God, if you do, I will draw on you. When I became sheriff I spent hours in front of the mirror learning to quick-draw. So know two things. First, I am very, very fast on the draw. And second, I am a terrible shot because I never pulled the trigger. So if you think I’m going to shoot the gun out of your hand or put one in your knee, you’re wrong. You point that at me, I will go for center of mass and let the chips fall where they may. And if by some chance I don’t hit you, there are six guys behind me who will pepper you until you are dead, and all they do is shoot things. They will not miss. Do you understand me?”
Sigrid has been standing at the edge of the water, and from her angle she can see most of Irv behind the tree. She can also see Marcus on his rock, his feet still in the water, the pistol between his legs hanging in his right hand as limply as a sandwich that has lost its appeal but has nowhere to go.
“I understand you,” Marcus answers quietly.
“So throw the gun into the water and throw it far so I can see it fly and watch the splash. If you are very, very lucky and very, very convincing, I might—and I mean might—pretend I didn’t see it.”
“No,” Marcus says. “I don’t think I will.”
Irv momentarily emerges from behind the tree and he hurls something into the air. As it arcs toward Marcus she hears him yell, “I even brought you a goddamned muffin!”
Irv’s toss belies his claims about not being a good shot, because it smacks Marcus in the side of the face and bounces off into the water, where it is immediately devoured by a dozen quacking, snapping, and flapping ducks. Marcus doesn’t flinch.
Irv removes his radio from his belt and calls Alfonzo. He explains how there is now a “situation” and he and his men should surround them at a distance and make sure they have a clear shot at Marcus in case events go pear-shaped.
From his angle behind the tree, Irv cannot see Marcus. But he can watch Sigrid. He studies her face the way an infant watches a parent to know what to feel. What he sees is a woman who does not know what to do. He has known her for less than a week, but even so he sees it as an expression that rests uncomfortably on her face. Her eyes and body seem purposeless. She stands there, disassembled.
As all three wait for something to change, the sunlight continues to shift through the canopy. The wind arrives as heat against their necks. It pushes away the breathable air.
Irv looks at the water, as pure and cold as runoff from a glacier.
Hatless and annoyed that he doesn’t have any new ideas, Irv decides to repeat the old one: “Throw the gun in the water, Marcus, for the love of God. If for no other reason than to let me have a drink,” yells Irv. “How do you think this is going to end?”
“I think we all know how it’s going to end,” Marcus says.
“What does that mean?” Sigrid says in Norwegian.
“You know what needs to happen,” he answers.
“What are you two going on about?” Irv yells.
“He wants you to shoot him,” Sigrid says.
“You had better think of something fast, Sigrid. Because while I don’t want to shoot him, I might be the last person who doesn’t and I’m feeling mighty lonely about it.”
Melinda pulls up to First Baptist in her squad car, parks by a lamppost, and dodges puddles in the parking lot, sizzling in the midday sun like tidal pools. There is a rank smell floating up from the parking lot from last night’s rain.
Twenty feet away, out of the pitch-black entrance of the church’s open door marches Reverend Green. He approaches and shakes her hand. He wears a cordial smile and smells like an amber cologne.
“Why are we meeting again, Deputy?” the reverend asks her.
“Sir, Sheriff Wylie has a few questions he wanted me to ask you as a follow-up to your meeting the other night, and he also wondered if you might accompany me to the crime scene, where we might have a chance to talk about what happened. He’s really hoping that the facts of the case might do something to break through the problems we’re all facing.”
“What do you mean by ‘what happened’?” he says, his voice flat.
“To Dr. Jones, sir.”
“And you think the facts are going to help us break through the problems, huh?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
“No,” he murmurs.
They ride in the patrol car with the reverend in the front seat, the lights off, and the windows open from First Baptist to 86 Brookmeyer Road. It takes nearly fifteen minutes, during which the reverend says nothing. The silence is more than Melinda can stand:
“You watching the elections, reverend?”
“Of course,” he says, looking out the window.
“I know most cops vote Republican, and I know Irv’s one so maybe we can keep this between us, but I’ve decided to vote for Obama.”
“I see,” he says.
“How do people at your congregation feel about it?”
“You mean how do they feel about a brother being elected president for the first time in a country where people like him were once slaves?”
“Feels like maybe America’s going to take a big step forward, don’t you think?”
“Maybe.”
“You think he can win?”
Melinda doesn’t hear Green’s answer. If he said anything it was no louder than the wind battering their clothing through the open windows, his black blazer flapping at the collar.
Eventually and long after the moment had passed, she hears him say—but not to her—“Maybe.”
“This is probably none of my business or anything,” Melinda says, “but . . . you don’t sound very enthusiastic about the prospect.”
“That’s because if he’s elected president of the United States,” Reverend Green says, “they’re gonna shoot him.”
Melinda parks in the no parking zone in front of 86 Brookmeyer Road. They both exit the car and look up before going in.
Eighty-Six Brookmeyer is a steel and glass office building that is still in the making but is no longer being made. It rises from a street corner in a depressed and depressing neighborhood with lowering property values; the kind of structure permanently locked in litigation, bankruptcy filings, and battles for money that leave the physical structure open to the social and natural world to atrophy and rot.
Whatever hope for urban renewal and employment its erection might have once promised, 86 Brookmeyer is a setting for a dream that no one has or wants. And yet despite its irrelevance, there it is: as shiny, as bright, as unfulfilled and overconfident as the people who planned it.
It rises twelve stories and has no organic lines. To Melinda it looks like it was designed on a budget or with a kit; it seems identical, to her untrained eye, to every other glass and steel building she’s ever seen. Irv once told her that the population boom, the gas crisis of the 1970s, and bad taste had all collided to create the ugliness of America’s “upward expansion,” he called it. He told her it was a pity America hadn’t decided—after conquering the West—to burrow downward rather than reach upward. “Would have made more sense,” Irv had said, “considering that underground buildings retain heat better and are more likely to survive a Soviet missile. And on top, we could have built parks!”
“Have you been here before?” Melinda asks the reverend once they are out of the car, eyes trained
on the spot where Lydia died. It is no longer roped off. It is no longer a crime scene, and nothing of its past remains visible. Melinda looks at it; she stares because it has a life force of its own and she wants to scrape her foot over the surface and see whether it is indented or not. It seems crazy to her that a person can be killed and vanish forever without leaving a trace of any kind.
“No,” he answers. “I don’t understand why we’re here, Deputy.”
“Irv said we needed to talk and this seemed like a good place.”
“Have you been here?” Fred Green asks her.
“I drove by once when the tape was still up. Irv didn’t put me on this case until after that.”
“Where are we going?”
“Up. To the crime scene. Which . . . now that you mention it . . . I need more information about. Can you hold on a second? I need to ask Irv something.”
Alone, Fred Green removes a white and green packet of Newport Kings from his pocket and lights up with an orange Bic. Melinda leaves him to his ritual as she waits for the sheriff to pick up.
Irv is leaning back against the oak trying to convince himself that he isn’t cowering, per se, but rather taking a reasonable and defensive position, at least for one with the military training and instincts of a theology student.
As he rests there dreaming of bodysurfing in Maui, the phone rings. He answers it, keeping his eyes on Sigrid as his proxy for Marcus, who doesn’t seem intent on going anywhere but heaven.
“Hello?”
“Sheriff? It’s Melinda. How’s it going?”
American by Day Page 28