After the Fire: The ‘Shorts’

by Forrester, Nia

  Dozens of peaceful protestors had been walking under an underpass, obstructing traffic but otherwise causing no destruction or mayhem. From the footage, they were hardly the anarchists we’d been told were tearing America’s cities apart. Still, a tactical team intercepted and cornered them. Tear gas canisters flew, and when some tried to get away, they were pelleted with rubber bullets. Even while scrambling up an embankment to escape, they were met with another barrage of chemicals and propellants. It was clearly disproportionate force.

  Gideon called me right away though he knew I was working at home and hadn’t been part of the protests for several days.

  “You okay?” he asked. “You want me to come over?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, my voice taut with rage. “And no. I don’t want you to come over.”

  He came anyway.

  He brought food.

  I didn’t want to speak to him, and he didn’t try to make me. We ate silently together and later, in bed when the lights were off, I felt his arms creep around my waist. He pulled me back against him and held me close.

  * * *

  “Dom,” I said.

  I couldn’t get the rest of my question out.

  Gideon ran both his hands over his face and sat up, shaking his head a little as though to clear it.

  “He’s …” His voice was hoarse, legitimately hoarse, not just because he was waking up. I imagined he had been yelling all the previous night or was suffering from the effects of the chemical agents they used to repel marchers. “He’s in the ICU. But they think he’s going to be fine.”

  He shrugged as if he didn’t quite believe it, like he was wondering whether he had been lied to.

  I heaved a deep, silent sigh.

  “And you … were you … Did you …”

  “I wasn’t with him when it happened, no.”

  I knew better than to ask for details.

  I smelled Gideon then, an acrid, sour scent like perspiration and smoke. But I hugged him anyway. He was rigid in my arms so I released him, knowing what it was like to not want tenderness, to almost dread it because it might be the last straw that caused you to break.

  “But you weren’t …”

  “I wasn’t hurt. Nothing happened to me.” He sounded detached and dismissive. He stood. “I need a shower. So …”

  “Yes. Of course. Okay.” I stood as well. “I’ll go make us something to …”

  I didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t say ‘eat’ because I remembered how ridiculous, how irrelevant hunger felt to me the night before when I thought Gideon might be one of the officers shot. I could only imagine how stupid it might sound to him since he knew that Dom actually had been. But making a meal gave me something to do, and a way to feel useful.

  He walked around me, almost like he wanted to avoid me. But maybe that was all in my head. He would hardly have chosen to come to my place if what he wanted was to avoid me.

  “Yeah. Thanks,” Gideon said, heading for the bathroom.

  I was still standing there when I heard the door shut with a firm and decisive click.

  I found two lonely eggs in a carton and scrambled them tossing in some scallions with the salt and pepper, and cooked three sausage links that had been living on the door of my freezer for God only knew how long. When I heard Gideon coming out of the shower, I toasted the ends that were all that was left of a loaf of bread and put everything on a plate for him.

  By the time the coffee brewed, he was walking into the kitchen, barefoot and wearing a plain white t-shirt and sweatpants, left-behind items of his own clothing that I laundered and kept in the bottom drawer of my dresser for unplanned sleepovers just like this.

  He sat at the kitchen table and I slid the plate in front of him with a knife and fork, turning to busy myself with the coffee.

  I felt something I couldn’t identify, something that was a close cousin to guilt. I thought about Demetrius and the others at the protests, about their laissez-faire attitude about the news of the shooting. I thought about the fiery rhetoric I had always mindlessly parroted about police officers.

  “Why’re you buzzing around like that?” Gideon asked, glancing up at me as he dug into his food. “Come sit with me.”

  I brought over two mugs of coffee, his with sweetener and cream, mine black, and sat opposite him.

  Gideon ate a couple of bites then looked up at me. He had recently shaved his hair low after expressing anxiety that it was thinning on top like his father’s and eldest brother’s had. I told him he was being vain and that his hair wasn’t thinning. I lied. It was a little, but that was no longer visible since he had cut it.

  He looked more handsome with it lower anyway. It focused his features more—the lips and thick eyebrows, the almond-shaped dark-brown eyes, the long, lush lashes. In the light beard he was growing, there were a few, barely visible threads of gray. In a decade or so, he would look distinguished. He would have handsome sons, beautiful daughters.

  I looked down into my coffee mug, asking myself where that thought had come from. I was pregnant but didn’t feel it yet. Didn’t yet look it. If this pregnancy were to disappear, if I were to make it disappear, they would be nothing to say it had ever happened.

  “Why you so quiet?” Gideon asked.

  I looked up at him again. I shook my head and shrugged.

  “Nothing. Just worried about Dom, that’s all.”

  Gideon sighed. “After this I’m go back over there. To the hospital. You can come if you want. But they probably won’t let us in his room. His mom and Asia …” He broke off and exhaled. “They haven’t left his side and they only let two people …”

  Domingo’s girlfriend Asia was kind of like me, holding herself somewhat on the outside of the circle of “the girls.” I think she went to more things than I did, though. Occasionally, the other women threw her name out there as an inducement to get me to join them: ‘Asia’s coming too!’ Maybe they thought my constant refusal was a race thing, rather than a cop thing. It was probably very little of either. It was more of a ‘I’m-not-a-people-person’ thing.

  I remembered Gideon telling me that Dom was planning to propose to Asia at Christmas. He was going to make a big thing out of it, recruiting her brother and parents to participate in a huge staged scene in front of the tree. I remembered trying to reconcile that syrupy sentimental plan with the image in my head of macho, he-man Dom who could only bring himself to smile on one side of his mouth. Now I wondered whether he would ever get the chance to follow through on his proposal plan.

  “Hey,” Gideon said, noticing my eyes getting a little misty. “They said he’s probably going to be okay.”

  Probably.

  “What about … Did you know the other guy?” I asked.

  “Nah. Not really. Saw him around. On the job like eight months they’re sayin’.”

  He stared off into space for a few moments then started eating again. Finally, he shoved the plate aside and pushed back from the table a couple of feet.

  “C’mere,” he said, patting his lap.

  I went to him and sat balanced on the edge of his knees until he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me closer and tighter against him. He moved my loose braids aside and pressed his face into the nape of my neck.

  “I’m sorry about the other night,” he said, his voice partly muffled by the fabric of my shirt.

  “No, Gideon … don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Apologize. It’s not …”

  “Why not? We had a fight, I’m apologizing,” he said.

  “But it …”

  “Kendra. Look at me.”

  Holding my shoulders, he spun me around so that I knew he wanted me to straddle and face him. I did.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I just … don’t like hearing you apologize right now. It just …”

  Gideon narrowed his eyes in confusion. “You mean because of Dom? You don’t want me to say I’m sorry we fough
t because someone shot Dom?”

  I shook my head. “No. I mean … yes. Not just Dom but because … I just … I’ve been such a bitch to you sometimes because of your work, and right now …”

  “We didn’t fight because of my work. We fought because …” He stopped himself. “Look. Let’s not talk about that right now. I don’t want to … I came over here because with all the shit … I just wanted to see you, okay? And have you see me, and know that I’m okay.”

  I said nothing.

  “I saw how many times you called but I didn’t want to have to say the words, about Dom … I just wanted to …”

  “I know. And I’m glad you came to me. I’m glad.” I cupped his face in my hands and kissed him.

  “Yeah, and Dom’s going to pull through, so …”

  “Of course he will, love. I’m sure of it.”

  “Kendra,” Gideon said, looking me in the eye. “You’re … being really weird right now.”

  “How am I being weird? I’m trying to be supportive.”

  Gideon gave me a small smile. “That’s what’s weird.”

  “Thanks a lot.” I tried to get up but Gideon’s hands on my hips held me in place.

  “I mean, you’re always supportive. But this, how you’re acting right now with that super-sweet voice … And since when have you ever called me ‘love’?” He smirked.

  Rolling my eyes, I pried his hands from my hips and unstraddled him, standing up.

  “I’m just trying to be …”

  “Don’t try anything!” Gideon said. “Just … be! Okay? Can you do that? Especially right now, can you just …”

  I froze, stunned by the sudden change in tone and mood.

  “I can’t do this with you right now,” he said. “My head’s all over the place and I gotta get back to the hospital and then to work. I don’t have time for this shit.”

  “What shit? Gideon, all I’m trying to say is …”

  “I know precisely what you’re getting ready to say, Kendra. I know you. I can hear it in your voice that you’re working up to … more of your self-important bullshit. And right now I’m just …”

  “My self-important bullshit?” I repeated, eyes opening wide.

  “Yes. It’s written all over your face right now that you’re trying to figure out how to act, how to … navigate your empathy for Dom along with your antipathy for police officers in general. Like it’s some kind of fucking … intellectual, ideological problem-solving challenge and you don’t want to get the answer wrong!”

  “That is not …”

  “I came here instead of going home because you … you’re my resting place. When I’m with you, I lay down my arms. But you can’t do that for me, can you?”

  “Gideon, I’m not …”

  He pushed himself up, standing as though doing so took extraordinary effort.

  “I’m gonna go,” he said, heading for the kitchen door.

  He paused before crossing the threshold and looked back at me. Just once.

  * * *

  “I had turn around and come back here today right after getting to work,” Gideon said, collapsing on my couch. “Barely missed getting written up.”

  “Written up?” I asked. “For what?”

  “Left my equipment by mistake.”

  “Your …” I squinted.

  “My equipment,” he said again, more pointedly this time.

  “What equipment do you even use?” I pulled back as realization dawned, narrowing my eyes even more. “You mean your … your service weapon? Your gun? You left it here? At my place?”

  He nodded slowly. “Yeah. This morning.”

  “Wow. So,” I shook my head, less preoccupied by his forgetfulness than by the strangely vague nomenclature. “That’s what you guys call it? The thing that blows enormous holes into other human beings, usually civilians? Your equipment? Like it’s a wrench or something?”

  Gideon looked at me with flat, expressionless eyes and I knew I had stumbled across one of those things that I just didn’t understand about his work and the culture that went along with it. Apparently, his “equipment” was not fertile territory for humor.

  “I mean, people forget things all the time …” I tried, seeing that he hadn’t been appeased by my joke.

  “No, Kendra. Police officers don’t get to forget their weapon like a kid occasionally gets away with forgetting their homework.”

  “No, of course,” I said. I sat next to him on the couch and reached for his hand. “I’m sorry you had a terrible day.”

  “My day was fine,” Gideon said. “I just don’t like to make mistakes. In my line of work, when you make those kinds of mistakes, sometimes people wind up dead. I just … Sometimes when I’m with you, I get too comfortable.”

  “If I’m supposed to get mad at that, at you being ‘too comfortable’ with me, I’m just not,” I said, shrugging. “Sorry.”

  Gideon turned and looked at me, and I saw that I had finally teased a smile loose.

  “How ‘bout you?” he asked. “You getting too comfortable with me?”

  I crawled onto his lap, got on my knees so they were on either side of him. He cupped my ass in his large hands.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “And it scares the shit out of me.”

  He thought I was kidding, but there was some truth to that.

  Chapter Ten

  “You’ve seen him then,” Maya said. “Like, actually seen him?”

  “Yes. I’ve actually seen him. He was here when I got home this morning.”

  “This morning? Where were you when I called you last night then? Did you go out? I thought …”

  “I was at the Center, then at his place. It was a … It’s a long story.”

  “But he’s fine?”

  I thought of Gideon’s face as he left, and how un-fine he looked.

  “Yes, he’s fine.”

  “But his partner. Is he the one who …”

  “Dom’s in the ICU. But Gideon said they think he’s going to be okay. He’s still worried, but the outlook, it’s optimistic.”

  “Thank god,” Maya breathed. “I felt awful for thinking it, but I saw the other guy and I thought …”

  “Let it be him who’s dead, right? I thought the same thing,” I admitted.

  “We’re awful people,” Maya said.

  “No, Maya. We’re not. We’re just human. We have to leave room for ourselves to … come up short sometimes.”

  There was a prolonged silence.

  “Okay, what is this?” my sister asked. Her tone was suspicious, like I might be an impostor and the real Kendra was tied up and gagged in a closet somewhere. “You’re sounding creepily philosophical. Tell me what’s going on.”

  “You mean besides the city burning, and Gideon’s partner being shot three times?”

  “Three times? It was three times? Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh my god. His poor family.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And you’re sure he’s okay? Gideon, I mean.”

  “I mean, he’s uninjured, but no, he’s not okay. And I’m not okay either.”

  “Because of Dom, or …?”

  “Yes, because of Dom. And no, not entirely because of Dom.”

  “You’re speaking in code, so I’m coming over,” Maya said. “Are you home now at least?”

  “Yeah, I’m home now,” I said tiredly.

  “And Gideon. Where is he?”

  “Hospital and then work, he said.”

  “Okay, so I’m on my way. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out.”

  “I’m going to take a shower so let yourself in with the hide-a-key. And bring food, okay?”

  “Of course I’ll bring food. What am I? A savage?”

  Just fifteen minutes after I emerged from the shower, while I was still in my bathrobe, the ends of my braids damp from the long, hot shower, Maya was there, and carrying a bag of what smelled like Indian food.

  “How did you
manage to get …?”

  “The wait was like nothing,” she said smugly. “I think people are still kind of afraid of doing takeout.”

  “Definitely not me,” I said following her, and the food, into my kitchen. “Without takeout I’d starve.”

  “Sit down,” Maya ordered when it looked like I was about to hover over her shoulder. “I’ll take care of this.”

  I watched her move around my kitchen, taking charge like it was her own.

  When we were growing up, my sister had been the popular one, with a tribe of girlfriends always around, and later, what seemed like dozens of eager boys. But Maya never let any of that go to her head. She met David in college, and after a drama-free courtship, they married immediately after senior year. It was as though they met and said, ‘there you are! You’re my person,’ and never looked back. Then Maya settled into married and home life. Now she was more than halfway into mom-bod territory, but still more beautiful and content than I could ever hope to be.

  Early acceptance and popularity have a way of breeding confidence in a person, so Maya never seemed less than completely self-assured. If there was one thing about her I envied, it was that. Things seemed to always go as planned and intended in her life—friendships, marriage, motherhood—while by contrast I had struggled with self-doubt for as long I could remember having a consciousness.

  I often wondered if that accounted for her ability to take life as it came while I was always the one looking at the world and agonizing about all the things I wanted to change about it.

  “I’m pregnant,” I said, while her back was turned.

  There was just the tiniest hitch in her movement—she was tearing a piece of naan in half—but Maya didn’t turn to look at me.

  “Okay. So, how do we feel about that?” she asked.

  I smiled at her use of the collective ‘we’. It was her way of telling me that whatever I told her I was feeling, that was the way she would feel as well. She wouldn’t try to talk me out of my emotions or change them.

  “We’re … we’re happy,” I said. The words came out choked behind what I didn’t want to admit to myself might have been a sob.