Sympathy Between Humans

by Jodi Compton

  “She told me about her childhood, ballet, and England. In the middle of this reminiscing, she said it was ironic that she’d married her husband in order to stay in America after her visa expired. Now all she wanted was to be in London again, and she was afraid that was never going to happen. She said she felt like her life was over at age 22.”

  The building’s air-conditioning kicked in, noisy in the silence between his words.

  “It seemed very, very natural,” Cicero said, “to put my arms around her and hold her.”

  He said no more, bringing the curtain down on the first act of a two-act story.

  “She could have been HIV positive,” I reminded him, as if the danger hadn’t long passed, one way or another.

  “I knew that,” Cicero said. “Did you ever read Hamlet?”

  “Once,” I said.

  “Did you notice the oddly sexual imagery in Ophelia’s burial, how the queen compares a bridal bed to a grave?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That sometimes proximity to death can be erotic. She was Ophelia to me. I wanted to lie down in her grave and bring her back to life.”

  “So I was right the first time,” I said. “It was compassion.”

  “If you can be compassionate and selfish at the same time,” Cicero said. “If she needed to feel alive, I needed that, too. In those days, sometimes I’d leave work so numb from what I’d been doing all night that I felt like a walking dead man. That was before I realized how lucky I was just to be walking.” He said this very simply, without self-pity. “I was 34 then. I told myself the same lie a lot of ER staff tell themselves: I didn’t have time for a relationship, that no woman would tolerate the crazy hours or understand the stress I was under. Other women in the ER did, and I hooked up with a few of them, but those were just friendly trysts. Relief sex, we called it sometimes. And I had some one-night stands with women I met in bars. Underneath it all, I was probably pretty goddamned lonely, although I couldn’t have seen it back then.”

  I was sitting on the floor; now I slid closer to him so that I could take his hand. Cicero let me, but he said, “Don’t feel sorry for me. I deserved everything that happened next. Her sister came over from Manchester and helped her file a lawsuit against the hospital. In the hearings, a lot of things came out that I hadn’t known. Since her suicide attempt, this woman had been seeing a psychiatrist, and had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She had a terrible time with men, couldn’t trust them, but at the same time had been known to fixate on men she barely knew, as potential lovers and saviors. She’d been transferred to a female psychiatrist after transference had caused problems with a male therapist.”

  “You didn’t know any of that,” I said.

  Cicero ’s expression told me I should have known better. “The mentally ill cannot be expected to identify themselves as ill.”

  “I just meant, it seems like an awfully harsh punishment for what you did.”

  “ ‘Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick,’ ” Cicero said. “It’s part of the Oath.”

  I looked down into my empty coffee cup. “Is it guilt, then, that makes you keep seeing patients under these circumstances?” I indicated the small and underequipped exam room that lay beyond his bedroom door.

  Cicero considered that. “Not really,” he said. “It’s selfishness, almost. You know how some dogs- herding dogs, rescue dogs- are bred to work? Even when they’re raised as house pets, they wake up in the morning and look at a human to say, How can I help? It’s bred into them. Some people are that way, too. I have to do what I’m trained for. I’m a working breed.” He lifted a shoulder in something that wasn’t quite a shrug. “I can’t change now. I am what I am.”

  ***

  I caught the last bus home, sometime after midnight. As I got on, a young woman got off at the back exit. Just as she did, our eyes met. Ghislaine, for once without Shadrick, eyed me quite curiously for a long moment before she dropped down the back steps and through the doors.

  19

  It’s a detective’s prerogative to use a car from the motor pool, and it didn’t raise any eyebrows at work when I began using one. If word had spread that the BCA had my car for testing, no one referred to it, even implicitly, in my presence. Meanwhile, I used the motor pool car not only for work but to drive out in the evenings and visit the Hennessys.

  Kids adapt to the whims and dictates of adults the way the rest of us adapt to changes in the weather. The Hennessy boys accepted my new role in their lives with a shrug. I checked the details that Lorraine had mentioned; it was clear that the laundry was getting done, and the house was as clean as anyone could reasonably expect with four young people living in it. The Hennessy home wasn’t meant to look aseptically neat, anyway; that was part of its charm. It was an old house, and everywhere were testaments that this was a longtime family home. There were nicks in the shabby-elegant pine furniture, and along an upstairs hallway, there were dots and dashes of bleach, a Morse-code tale of someone’s haphazard attempt to scrub out stains. From the length of the pattern, I didn’t think it was Kool-Aid. Blood, maybe, from a nosebleed or some childhood mishap.

  But on a day-to-day basis, the kids kept the house fairly tidy. It was soon plain to me that these kids had been self-directed from an early age; Hugh hadn’t been a micromanager as a parent for a long time, perhaps never. Other kids might have fallen apart after what had happened to Hugh; the Hennessy kids had taken the reins of their lives also automatically.

  The absent Aidan was still on my mind. But by now I was familiar with Marlinchen’s ready defenses. If I was going to make any more progress on the subject of her brother, I’d have to approach the issue a lot more carefully than I had last time. For now, I was letting it lie.

  I did speak to her around ten o’clock one evening, when I’d stayed later than usual, because she was standing alone on the back porch, her slight figure a dispirited silhouette. She was looking out into the darkness of her nearest neighbor’s land. There was absolutely nothing of interest out there, but she seemed troubled.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked, slipping through the French doors from the family room out onto the deck.

  Marlinchen turned. “No, not really. It’s Snowball,” she said.

  “Your cat?”

  “She’s never out this late,” Marlinchen said. “She always comes in around eight-thirty or nine. Like clockwork.”

  “I wouldn’t assume the worst,” I said. “A friend once told me about a cat she’d owned that liked to ramble. Turns out the cat had a double life. Another family was feeding it and giving it water; they had pictures of the cat in their home.”

  Marlinchen smiled but said nothing.

  “Snowball might have gone into someone’s home or garage and got locked in,” I went on. “She’ll turn up tomorrow.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she said.

  “Are you really feeling okay?” I said. “You seem a little down.”

  “Just tired, I guess,” she said, and a muscle twitched in her cheek as if she were trying to suppress a yawn.

  I nodded. “What do you hear about your father?”

  A strand of hair slipped loose from her high ponytail, and Marlinchen wiped it away from her face. “He’s in physical therapy,” she said. “He’s walking with a quad cane now. That’s a cane with four little feet on it, for greater stability.”

  “Like training wheels that don’t roll?”

  “Right,” she said. “After that, he moves on to a regular cane, and then walking on his own.”

  “That sounds like good progress,” I said.

  “It is,” she said, “physically.”

  “Physically?” I asked, thinking that she meant Hugh’s spirits were low.

  “His verbal skills aren’t getting much better,” she said. “They think he understands a lot of what’s going on around him- which is good for chances of getting the conservatorship- but he
can’t really speak or write. It’s all garbled. He confuses me with you, or he with she,” Marlinchen explained. She looked over at me as if expecting some kind of response. Then she said, “Aphasia is the worst thing that can happen to a writer.” Hearing her own words, Marlinchen quickly clarified them. “It’s not about the money. We’ll get by, even if he never writes again. But writing is the core of who Dad is,” she said. “If he gets everything else back, but can’t write again… it’s the worst thing the stroke could have taken.”

  There wasn’t much that I could say that wouldn’t be false comfort. “Give it time,” I said.

  ***

  You never get a car back from the crime lab quite how you turned it over. I’d heard this before, but hadn’t understood it until I picked up the Nova at the Hennepin County impound facility, which was where the BCA sent it after testing. A chemical odor clung to the car’s interior. When the early-evening light hit the Nova’s windows, revealing a faint purple-white haze, I realized what it was. Superglue. They’d fumed for prints with it.

  Diaz had to know that hoping for fingerprints after more than six months- in a vehicle that had been in use all that time- was an investigator’s version of a Hail Mary pass. But he’d been damned thorough. That faint purple-white haze on the glass never came off.

  Sarah, don’t whine. Not even to yourself.

  And then I looked down, and saw something that wiped petty concerns about the condition of my car from my mind. A square of carpet had been cut out of the floor.

  They’d found blood. To inspect the carpeting was one thing, but to remove some for further testing meant they’d found something they were fairly sure was blood.

  While I drove home, I engaged in a mostly pointless exercise, trying to estimate how long it might take the BCA to do the lab work. More often than not, the testing process took weeks. Then again, it was possible that Diaz had some stroke with the BCA, and they’d expedite these tests. I couldn’t count on having all that long.

  ***

  Even though I would have preferred to go straight home, I stopped by the Hennessys’ instead. I arrived to find Liam apparently digging under the willow tree, leaning into his work with a spade. Yet his clothes, a white shirt and gray pants, were clearly what he’d worn to school, not consistent with gardening. There was a sealed plastic trash bag near his feet.

  I walked across the grass to Liam’s side. It was warm enough out that I felt the five-degree drop in temperature as the shadow of the willow tree fell across my face, then my body. “What is that?” I asked him. There was something in the trash bag; it was rounded but shapeless, as though it held an unbaked loaf of bread. Color wasn’t discernible through the pellucid green plastic.

  Liam stopped working, raised a shoulder diffidently as if trying to decide how to phrase something. “It used to be Snowball,” he said finally.

  “Oh, hell,” I said. “What happened?” Now that I knew what I was looking at, I could see that the color the bag masked was red: a murky, greenish red, like blood in a parking-lot oil puddle.

  “Something got to her,” Liam said. “We don’t know what. She was ripped up pretty badly.”

  “Where did you find her?”

  Liam pointed. “Down at the end of the driveway, off to the side.” He leaned into the spade handle again and forced more upturned black soil out of the hole he was making. “I said I’d bury her. I didn’t want Marlinchen looking at it anymore. I thought she was going to be sick this morning.”

  I felt a small sting of guilt; it was me who’d glibly told Marlinchen that Snowball would be home safe in the morning.

  “It bothers me, too,” Liam said. “I can’t think of any animal around here that would do this.”

  He was looking at me as if for comment, and I realized that he was calling on me as an expert in violent death, even that of pets.

  “There are some natural predators around here,” I said, thinking. “Coyote, fox, black bear.”

  Liam was skeptical. “I never see anything like that. We don’t even see the tracks.”

  “Generally, animals like that stay away from humans,” I said. “But as rural areas get more built up, they do come into human settlements to look for food. People have spotted them around here.”

  “I suppose,” Liam said.

  20

  My next trip to the gym was more successful. I didn’t run into Diaz, or my unwanted supporter, Jason Stone, either. I bought groceries after and, on the way home, was stopped at a traffic light when something caught my attention. A lone figure was climbing up a concrete staircase that led to a pedestrian-and-bike overpass over the freeway. Except he wasn’t really climbing.

  Popular culture writes off drinking to excess as a rite of passage among the young, but there’s something painful to watch about someone who has drunk himself into complete incapacitation. The boy- he looked underage in his hoodie, loose jeans, and running shoes- was literally crawling up the stairs toward the bridge on his hands and knees. At the halfway landing, he stopped and lay down to rest. Or he’d passed out.

  A horn sounded behind me. The light had turned green, and I was holding everybody up. I pulled away, into the intersection.

  The last I saw of the young man was that, as if galvanized by the sound of the horn, he had started crawling again.

  A rectangular pattern, across the interstate and back along a side road, brought me to the corresponding staircase on the other side of the pedestrian walkway. I didn’t go up to intercept the kid. He’d be safe crossing the highway; the overpass was bounded on each side by a high chain-link fence. Even if he rose to his feet and walked, there was no way he could topple over into traffic.

  In time he appeared at the top of the stairs, staggering, but nonetheless on his legs. He looked down at the steps as though they were an obstacle course, then wisely decided to descend on hands and knees, just like he’d gone up. I got out of the car and climbed up the stairs to meet him.

  His body, viewed from above, was even more slender up close, and his hair looked a little too blond to be true. When he looked up from my running shoes to my face, that suspicion was confirmed: his features were clearly Asian. Hmong possibly, or Vietnamese.

  I saw something else, too. He wasn’t just under 21; he was clearly under 18.

  “Are you all right?” I said. “Can you hear me?”

  His eyes focused in on my face. “Oh no,” he said in a tone of resigned dread. “Oh no. Police.”

  How do they always know? I thought. I was wearing nothing remotely official: mid-calf-length leggings, a T-shirt, and a hooded jacket.

  “Can you stand up?” I asked.

  “I don’ want to go to juvie,” he said in the same tone. There was no accent in his voice, marking him clearly as second-generation American.

  “I’m not arresting you,” I said.

  “I hate it at juvie,” he moaned.

  “One, I doubt you’ve ever been,” I said, hooking a hand around his upper arm and pulling. “Two, you’re not under arrest. Stand up.”

  “No, no, no,” he said, refusing to yield to my pressure. He wasn’t heavy, but I couldn’t get him up without his cooperation.

  “Kid,” I told him, “you’ve got something in your sleeve that might someday be a bicep. There’s got to be enough muscle in your quadriceps to get you on your feet.”

  “I don’ want to go to juvie,” he said, still droning lifelessly.

  “Up,” I said.

  When we got to my car, I put him in the backseat. He was only five-eight or so, and thin, but it’d still be safer there in case he got squirrelly on the ride to wherever we were going. Sometimes drunks who couldn’t even get coordinated enough to walk properly suddenly recovered enough to become violent. I fastened the seat belt around him.

  As I got behind the wheel, he said once again, “I don’t want to go in, I don’t want to go to juvie,” and fell bonelessly sideways to lie down, head to hipbone, on the backseat.

  “Kid,” I
said, “how many police officers have you seen that patrol while wearing workout clothes and driving an old car that smells like superglue fumes?”

  His lips dropped slightly apart. Too many concepts at once; I’d blown his mind.

  “Let me ask you something easier,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Special K.”

  Of course. “No, your government name,” I said.

  “Kelvin,” he said.

  “Okay, Kelvin, where do you live?”

  The address he slurred was becoming very familiar. I started the car, pulled away from the curb.

  “It smells funny in here,” he said, ending with a slushy word that could have been Officer.

  “Yeah, that’s the superglue I mentioned.”

  “Is making me sick,” he said, and he didn’t sound good.

  “Do you think alcohol might have something to do with that?”

  “Real sick,” he said.

  “Kelvin,” I said, glancing in the rearview mirror, “if you throw up in my car, I’m going to ask the prosecutor for special circumstances.”

  ***

  Special K, cowed by the thought of a vomiting-in-an-official-vehicle enhancement to whatever charge he believed he was facing, kept it together until we arrived at the towers.

  I helped him out of the car, but as soon as I let go, he stumbled and nearly fell, sinking to his knees. He looked up, squinting, at the south tower.

  “Home?” he asked, blinking.

  “I told you that I wasn’t arresting you,” I reminded him.

  “Oh good,” Kelvin said. Then his gaze clouded, his attention focused inward like a newscaster receiving breaking news through his earpiece, and he doubled over to vomit on my running shoes.

  “You broke my streak,” I said.

  An older sister, almost heartbreakingly beautiful in a cheap sateen robe, took in the sight of Kelvin with a disapproving thinning of the lips that told me this wasn’t the first time he’d been delivered home in such a state. “Thank you,” she whispered, and then, looking at my shoes, “Sorry.”