“I’d rather not say. What’s up?”
“What floor did she fall from?”
“Huh?”
“What floor? I’m with Mr. Green now at the building. The file says it was at least the third because of the injuries, but I didn’t see a floor number.”
“Yeah. We looked for evidence. We don’t know.”
“So we’ve never been to the crime scene, technically,” Melinda clarifies.
“We’ve been to all the floors. So we have, technically, but not knowingly. Hold on a sec,” Irv says, and holding the phone away from his face, yells out to Marcus, “Which floor were you on when you killed Lydia?”
“Sixth,” says Marcus.
“Thanks.”
Sigrid starts to object, but Irv sticks his finger into his ear to hear Melinda better and Sigrid worse.
“Sixth,” Irv says to Melinda.
“How do you suddenly know that?” she asks.
“I asked Marcus.”
“Is he in custody?”
“He’s . . . with me. Is there anything else, Melinda?”
“I know I’m supposed to ask Mr. Green about his relationship with Lydia and his thoughts on our latest theory about her committing—”
“. . . diplomatically . . .”
“. . . but is there anything else?”
“Well, yes, Melinda. If Marcus really and actually did it, we’ll all be fine. But if he didn’t, and it’s suicide, you and Green need to work out a way to keep her and her parents from living in eternal hell.” Irv switches the phone to his other ear and looks at Sigrid, who is sitting on the ground, hapless. “Roy Carman. The grand jury. Jeffrey. Lydia. The parents. The race issues. This stuff is real, Melinda. And the only thing I’m absolutely sure about is that I’m out of my depth. You two need to come up with a way forward to keep the sky from falling. OK, that was a poor choice of words, but you know what I mean.”
“There really is a lot to this job, Sheriff.”
“Would you just get on with it? I’ve got problems of my own.”
Melinda watches the reverend drop the remains of his cigarette to the ground and twist off its cherry with his black cap-toe shoe. When he’s ready, she leads him through the aluminum scaffolding outside the building, through the remains of green canvas sheeting that once served as a door, and into the skeleton of a lobby. They proceed up a steel staircase covered in dust and wood chips, splinters and trash.
The reverend is in no kind of shape to walk up six flights. They stop on the fourth floor landing so he can catch his breath. Melinda waits for him a few stairs up.
The sixth floor is partly encased in glass and partly exposed to the elements. The day is listless in the heat and the open floor feels like an abandoned stage. Melinda walks through plastic sheeting and across exposed wires that lead both to and from nothing, to a spot that overlooks the corner where Dr. Lydia Jones was found contorted and broken.
She is not acrophobic, but there is a pull from the void beyond the edge and it scares her. She had always imagined a window, but there was no window when Lydia fell because there was no window frame because there was no wall. If Lydia leapt to her death, it was easily done here, and if she was pushed that would have been just as simple. Not wanting to look fearful in front of Reverend Green, Melinda walks closer to the edge. But it isn’t really the embarrassment that drives her forward. The pull reaches further into her gut and for a moment Melinda thinks she can feel what Lydia felt. Seeing the edge. Almost wanting to stand there. Down below, the street, is what took her life. But here—this was the beginning. The place where it might not have happened. Melinda starts to breathe faster only a meter from the edge. She cannot step backwards, not yet, but she needs to hold something. To do that she needs to stand even closer—to brace herself against the steel strut and anchor herself.
Melinda turns her head and looks at Reverend Green. He is stationary and expressionless and as she looks at him—at his height, at his weight, at his long arms and patent leather shoes, his dark skin and white eyes, his crisp white shirt stained yellow at the collar—she becomes terrified. If he wanted to, with an outstretched hand, he could send her over the edge.
“Are you all right?” he asks her from the middle of the room.
“What?”
“You appear ashen.”
“It scares me to be up here,” she admits.
“Why are we here, Deputy?” he asks.
Melinda cannot remember Irv’s instructions. She cannot contain the enormity of the problems in her mind right now, and all she can think about is Lydia. Of actually being Lydia. Standing here.
“Did Lydia come to see you?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Did she take her own life? Did she . . .” Melinda tries to turn and face the reverend, but that will leave the edge behind her. He could push her. But the edge could pull.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“But you suspect. You must suspect something.”
Reverend Green walks closer to Melinda. He stops a few feet away and looks down at her feet. There are footprints everywhere. She looks down briefly but her eyes fix on his face. He looks passive and calm, but this only scares her more.
“What does all this tell you?” he asks her, delicately moving a cheeseburger wrapper three inches to the left.
“Nothing,” she says.
This limbo—this space between Green and the edge—is too unstable, and if she does nothing she’ll have to collapse to the floor and crawl out, but she doesn’t want to do that. Taking a sharp breath, she backs up another step and grabs ahold of the girder that separates her from an almost seventy-foot drop. When her hand touches the cold metal she becomes Lydia. She can see through her eyes. As in a vivid morning dream she is fifteen years older, and black, and accomplished. She is dressed in elegant clothing and she’s wearing heels, not a beige deputy’s uniform and boots. She’s lighter and not weighed down by a gun.
Does the world look different to her this way, or does she simply look different in the world? There is a difference, but what is it?
She cannot release the girder. She is stuck there. To calm herself she looks up. Away from the ground, out into the city as though there is a window; something protecting her from the world, not exposing her to it.
“Isn’t that Jeffrey’s home?” Melinda says.
“What?” says Green.
“Over there,” she says, hugging the beam tighter. She doesn’t lean out but with her remaining courage she points to a white church steeple with a broken cross at the top. Below is the rooftop that is the same color as the house they visited.
“Yes,” says the reverend. “It is.”
“Do you think that means something?” she says to him.
“I can’t imagine what,” he says.
Melinda hears Fred Green’s feet shuffle toward her. She turns her head and sees him extending his hand to her. His palm is open. “You’re too close to the edge, Deputy. Take my hand, please. Come on back. It’s dangerous.”
Reborn. Again
Last month, in the small town of Glåmlia near the Swedish border, Sigrid’s own team of Beredskapstroppen took a similar position around their target. They were under her command, and her order was to attack. These men—around her now in a crescent—can end Marcus’s life instantaneously and with a twitch of a finger. She will see him die before she hears it. They are out there. They must be. She can feel them.
She steps toward Marcus.
“Back!” he yells. He doesn’t raise the gun. He only raises his voice, but it is effective. She holds her ground and before she can speak, Irv—the talking tree—lays it out plainly:
“Option one, Marcus. You raise that gun and we kill you. Option two, you toss it far into the water and we arrest you for this specifically and then we see what we think of the Lydia Jones situation separately. Because at this point, you are threatening the lives of police officers and I have cause to lock you up. In fact, I
have cause to do whatever I want. Option three is you sit there too long and we all start getting ants in our pants and start making bad decisions and this whole thing becomes subject to human nature, which is not a pretty thing. So what’s it going to be?”
Marcus reaches down to the lake water between his feet, cups his hand, and pulls up the water to wet his face and neck. “Option three.”
“Fuck you, Marcus.”
“Yeah,” he replies.
“How about,” says Sigrid, sitting down on the dry floor of the forest, “you tell us about Lydia. Tell us what happened.”
“It was me. I did it.”
“I’ve heard all that,” Sigrid says. “I want the details. What were you doing at Eighty-Six Brookmeyer Road? What is that place, anyway?”
“It’s an unfinished office building a few blocks from my house. It’s supposed to be boarded up but the neighborhood kids broke into it years ago.”
“How is that place connected to your life or Lydia’s?”
“It isn’t.”
“What were you doing there?”
“She was trying to make a point.”
“What point was she trying to make?”
“Something about perspective,” he says. “I don’t know.”
“Tell us all about it.”
“I told you that Mom committed suicide and you still want to talk about this?”
“I don’t think Mom did commit suicide. I think the men with the guns are here and they don’t want to hear our family history. I’d like to stay on topic.”
Sigrid runs her hand over her face and wipes away the first beads of sweat. Irv looks like he’s suffering from the heat. His uniform doesn’t look like cotton. That kind of discomfort can affect a person’s judgment.
Irv wishes he hadn’t ruined his hat already. It would feel great to use it as a fan or for slapping Marcus. “Hey, Al!” Irv yells. “I’m parched. Throw me some water.”
From a cloud, from a shadow, from a wormhole straight from Maine, comes a flying bottle of Poland Spring that bumps between Irv’s feet, somersaults, and lands upright.
“Thanks.”
He picks it up and drinks it all.
“Marcus,” Irv says, wiping his face and flicking the sweat from his head to the ground, “this is that moment when you tell us what happened. And I’ll tell you why. It’s not because every bad guy has to confess his sins. It’s not because we need some deep sense of resolution. Personally, I’m just as happy not knowing and going back to my dozen other cases. It isn’t even because you owe it to Lydia, though I think you do. You want to know the real reason, Marcus?”
“No.”
“Because talking about it feels good. Talking, Marcus, is the American way. Talking is how you become reborn. Are you ready to be reborn, Marcus? Are you ready to be spiritually renewed?”
“No.”
“Of course you are, who wouldn’t be. Sigrid was reborn last night, weren’t you?”
“Who, me?”
“Yes, you. Sigrid was over at my place last night—”
“No. We were at—”
“. . . and we talked and emoted and shared war stories and cried to Bob Seger songs and wondered where the years had gone. She told me all about putting two slugs from a semiautomatic into a semi-innocent kid and how she feels like she did something wrong, something painful, something unnecessary, maybe even sinful, but her higher authority, the institutions she believes in, said she did not. And as a result she does not feel better but feels worse, because the hearts and heads of this world are not aligned. Your poor sister felt like she was being torn apart by horses like poor Saint Hippolytus. You remember that story?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t matter. And while we talked, Marcus, a mighty weight was lifted from her. Have you taken Jesus Christ as your personal savior, Marcus?”
“No.”
“That doesn’t matter either, because here’s what I learned by studying theology. I learned that we were not studying God. I learned that we were studying the study of God. And now I am a master of that, according to Loyola. So while I still know nothing about God per se, I know a few things about the people who tried to come to terms with God before me. Want to know what I learned, Marcus?”
“No.”
“I learned that when faced with the maker of the universe, when faced with the bringer of the moral order, when faced with a force beyond the wildest reckoning of the human imagination, which is itself barely a whisper in the symphony of the cosmos, we are—at some very fundamental level, Marcus—out of our depth. We, in our puny and meek state of sweaty bipedalism, are in no way equipped to understand the mind of our maker. I, Sheriff Irving Wylie, am a very smart man. I’m even smarter than your sister, who’s pretty damned smart—”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am, and I have concluded that if Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas couldn’t crack the nut on some of the divine comedies that had Dante giggling in his highchair, then I sure as shit can’t do it from my seat of power here in upstate New York. So has it all simply been an orgasmic waste of time? No. Because what I learned from the Jesuits—which is not exactly what they intended for me to learn, but so be it—is one big ironic conclusion. Want to know what that irony is?”
Marcus does not answer.
“The irony, Marcus, is that we came to know nothing about God but a great deal about ourselves, which is precisely what God told us to do all along, but we got too distracted by the messenger to hear the message. Attend to one another, Marcus. We have to be good to one another. You need to be good to Lydia Jones. You need to be good to your sister, and also not shoot anyone here with that thirty-eight of yours. So tell us your story, Marcus. And be reborn in the way that God meant it most—not by finding Christ, but by recovering your spirit and your place among us; not there in heaven but here in the dirt of upstate New York, where everything that was once in motion finally comes to rest. So speak, Marcus. Speak your piece, and then baptize that gun in the lake and let’s go the fuck home.”
What Happened
Lydia arrived, unexpected, at his front door. She had not been there since before their trip to Montreal. They had not slept together since then. They had barely spoken since she explained how she felt after hours at her office on campus. And yet, there she was. Her face was stone.
He invited her in. She stood in the living room looking at the abject decay of Marcus and his home in the intervening two months. It was disgusting in there.
The grand jury had not found grounds for concern about Roy Carman’s actions. There was not enough reasonable doubt, they had decided, to advance the matter to trial, let alone convict him. He had done nothing wrong, they said, and there was nothing else to discuss. Sad, so sad, that the boy was dead. But the specific details of the actual case were all they had been instructed to consider by the judge, and the facts were all there, and the law was the law. He was indeed tall for a child. And that cap gun looked real. And those white children looked scared of him. And blacks commit more crimes around here. What else would a reasonable police officer have done? As a point of fact, Roy Carman had acted very bravely facing down an armed thug like that.
The city apologized to Roy for the hardship that the grand jury process had inflicted on him and his family, and after concluding their affairs, the city sent Lydia’s sister Karen a bill for $420 for the ambulance ride that took their dead child to the hospital.
Marcus did not see Lydia often after Jeffrey was shot, but he did see her. A café off-campus. The stone edge of a fountain with a sandwich from Subway. They mostly sat together. She didn’t have the strength to grieve and break up with him simultaneously. It was easier for her to accept his presence. This was before the grand jury.
That woman—that Lydia Jones who had lost a nephew—was a person bereft by the loss of love and the universe that constituted a person she knew. But after the grand jury: that was something else. That was a woman who wasn’t str
uck only by an emotion but by an understanding. What had once been theory, had been words, had been conclusions, was now Truth. She had encountered the edge of what her life could be in a way that she had never actually experienced before.
Lydia Jones had been smart and she’d studied hard, and earned her degrees and finally published enough—been lucky enough, focused enough—to have landed a solid academic position in a time, and in a subject area, where competition was fierce. She had studied race, she had experienced race, she had taught race. But until that moment she had not been entirely consumed and nullified by it.
She came to Marcus’s house—by then a dump—to collect her few items and create, for herself, a proof of finality. She stuffed them into a brightly colored duffle bag, forcing the items into the bottom as if she were a piston. T-shirts, nightgowns, three dresses, undergarments, and a pair of jeans. Two pairs of shoes. She entered the bathroom. Marcus heard the sounds of perfume jars and beauty implements being tossed in with them.
It was a beautiful day for leaving his house behind. The sunlight glinted off the windows of the passing cars from the off-ramp, and each time it did the bedroom burst into Technicolor. The palette of the bedspread—green and yellow and red, colors he’d been attracted to in the shop and later forgot existed in the oppressive dark of the house—roared into view with each passing car.
The staccato strobes from the bus windows were blinding. In the light, Lydia appeared and disappeared—there and gone. There and gone. There and gone.
Marcus told Irv and Sigrid about their discussion while she packed. What he said at the top of the stairs. How he became aware of the color of himself—not what he looked like, but what it meant to be “white” in relation to her “black.” How there, then, his whiteness drowned out his unique and personal voice and in being so negated, he finally had some basis for imagining what Lydia must have been feeling every day. What she must have been feeling then. Negated, not by a person she loved, but by her entire country. And with that new knowledge, that new insight, there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
American by Day Page 29