Sympathy Between Humans

by Jodi Compton

  “Where is Marlinchen?” I asked.

  Colm, hair dripping, straightened up to look around. Liam had his hands on Donal’s shoulders, and he too looked mystified.

  “No! Fuck!” I was so angry, Colm flinched at the sound of my voice, even under the circumstances. Marlinchen had gone in for Hugh. Her words by the graveside-I won’t lift a finger to help him- were just words. When push came to shove, she’d fallen back into the old patterns. Sacrificing her welfare for his.

  I faced the three boys. “Okay, you guys get back,” I ordered them. “Way, way back, down the driveway, where it’s safe. And stay there. If Marlinchen or I don’t come out, do not come in after us. Understood?”

  They nodded.

  Moving as quickly as I could, I dropped to my knees and turned the spigot back on. I put my head under, soaking my hair, the water like ice as it scrawled along my scalp. I pulled off my shirt, soaked that, put it back on. Then I went back in.

  As soon as I looked into the house again, I knew I couldn’t get up to the second floor. The stairs were aflame; to try to run up them would be suicide. The only way up to the second floor was blocked off.

  I went back out the front door, circled the house to stand under the high window, Hugh’s window facing the lake. The grape blossoms on the trellis were tightly closed, puckered and grayish. The trellis. It had held Jacob’s weight. It would hold mine.

  The wooden framework groaned and pulled forward as I put my whole weight on it, but it stayed standing, and I started to climb. The leaves brushed against my face as I did, and even through the smoke I could smell a faint, sweet odor from the closed blooms.

  Hugh’s sliding window was open as wide as possible behind the screen. Marlinchen’s work, I thought, getting fresh air in the room. Hugh was on the bed, chest quivering irregularly with what might be little coughs, from the smoke. I remembered the sleeping pill Marlinchen had given him, and wondered how aware he really was.

  Light spilled from the master bathroom, and then Marlinchen’s silhouette appeared in the doorway. She held a bunched sheet in her hands. She’d filled the bathtub with water, I realized, and was soaking sheets and towels to fight the flames that had already spread into Hugh’s room.

  “Marlinchen!” I yelled, again.

  “Sarah!” she called back, and there was relief in her voice. Authority was here. “Help me!”

  She didn’t want me to get her out; that wasn’t what she meant by help. She wanted me to come in and fight the fire with her.

  “Come to me!” I yelled back. “You’re going to-” I’d been about to say die if you stay here, but cut myself off, afraid Hugh was awake and lucid enough to hear me. If he was, there was little more terrible to imagine than his situation: aware but not mobile, at the mercy of circumstances, wholly dependent on someone else to save him.

  I changed tactics. “The firefighters are almost here!” I called to Marlinchen. “They’ll get him down safe! But you have to come out now!”

  “I can’t!” she told me, shaking her head again, then swinging a wet sheet at the flames closest to the bed. “Come in and help me!”

  Then something happened that nearly made my heart stop: she dropped to her knees, coughing, blinded by smoke. I thought this was it; she was overcome.

  “Marlinchen, come to me!” I yelled. But even in her coughing fit, she shook her head.

  I glanced up at the bed again. Water was streaming from Hugh’s nearly closed eyes. I knew it was the smoke that was causing it, but it looked to me like tears. A mental image of my own father, dead now, flashed across my mind like a spark of static electricity, and a grief as strong as nausea made my stomach roll over.

  I made a decision. I wasn’t going to look at Hugh again. I couldn’t look at him and tell the truth, and if I didn’t tell the truth, Marlinchen might not live.

  “Listen to me!” I yelled to her. “Three things can happen here! Three people can die in here tonight. That’s what’ll happen if I go in and try to help you. Or two people can die. That’s what’ll happen if I leave you here. Or just one person can die, and two will be saved.”

  Marlinchen probably couldn’t see me through the smoke and her streaming eyes, but her face turned in my direction. She got to her feet. Blinded, she stumbled forward.

  As she did, I pried a thumbnail under the bottom edge of the window screen, trying to keep a one-handed balance on the trellis. I forced the screen upward and loose from its track along the windowsill. It gave way, and the bottom corner of its metal frame sliced sideways across my forehead, a quick scratch like that of a fingernail, and then it was bouncing down the bowed-out trellis frame, the leaves shivering wherever it hit.

  “Okay, we’re cool,” I assured Marlinchen, who was wedged in the now-open window. “I’m going to ease down a little to make room for you, but I’ll keep my hand here”- I had one hand on her lower leg-“so you’ll always know where I am.”

  I hoped I sounded confident. The truth was, I had the beginnings of a Chihuahua shake in my legs from holding my place on the trellis.

  “Just put one leg down and find a foothold,” I said, “and we’ll just climb down easy, one step at a time.”

  A fine plan, totally worthless. When Marlinchen put her weight on the trellis, the whole thing gave way. I saw a flying white moon, smoke, the lake, and then the whole planet hit my back, then the back of my head. Marlinchen was more fortunate. I broke her fall.

  34

  The familiar smell of cyanoacrylate glue brought me to my senses, but this wasn’t the lingering scent of old fumes. It was sharp and fresh. My eyes were closed, but I felt someone touching my forehead with gentle fingers.

  “I should own stock in the superglue business,” I said, eyes still closed.

  “Shh,” a low, familiar voice said. “You’re shaking my hand.”

  I opened my eyes and wasn’t surprised to see Cicero. I’d recognized his voice a second earlier. What I was a little less clear on were the events leading up to being on Cicero ’s exam table once again.

  I remembered the fire at the Hennessy place, and scattered events after that. I remembered Colm by my side. He’d led me to a safe distance from the burning house, and encouraged me to lean on him, and I did, grateful for his young strength and his disobedience in coming back for me. I remember emergency vehicles at the fireground, and trying to help because I couldn’t grasp the idea that I was at the scene as a patient, not a first responder. A crowded ER waiting room, then a quiet place, someone speaking to me in a low, calm voice. Cicero ’s voice.

  “I can’t believe you’re gluing me back together,” I said.

  “A doctor’s trick, not to be tried at home,” he said, sitting back.

  “I didn’t think I was hurt,” I said. I remembered the sharp corner of the window screen scraping across my forehead, but it had seemed like nothing, a scratch from a kitten’s claw.

  “Oh, it’s a pretty bad cut. Don’t touch it,” he reprimanded as I lifted my hand toward my forehead. “I’ll show you.”

  He rolled away in his chair, came back with a hand mirror, and held it up in front of me.

  “Holy shit,” I said. Only now did I remember blinking blood out of my eyes, more than once. Blood that had dried now on my nose, cheekbones, even my chin.

  “It looks worse than it is.” Cicero was rolling away again. “You’ve got a little swelling on the back of your head, also, but nothing too serious,” he said. “You were holding some ice on it for me, do you remember that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Otherwise you’re fine. I’m going to get you a little more ice. Can you throw me that cloth?”

  I looked around and saw a wet, pale-green washcloth on the exam table next to me. I picked it up and started to rise, but Cicero, at the edge of his kitchen, merely held up his hand. My throw was a little off, but Cicero adjusted and caught it backhanded.

  When he came back, he had the ice, as well as a clean cloth in a small, stainless-steel bowl of s
oapy water. I took the ice pack from him and held it to my head. It wasn’t hard to locate the injury by the dull ache I felt there, as well as the dampness of the hair around it. Cicero set the bowl down and wrung out the rag.

  I saw what he was going to do. “I can wash my own face, in the bathroom,” I said.

  “I know you can,” Cicero said. “But I want you to sit still and keep applying that ice pack, and in the meantime, I’m tired of feeling sorry for you unnecessarily because you look like you just went ten rounds with Lennox Lewis when it’s nowhere near that bad.”

  I submitted to his ministrations, like a child, closing my eyes as he gently scrubbed dried blood from my skin.

  “I need to tell you something,” Cicero said. “The last time you were here, you mentioned my brother’s death.”

  “We don’t have to talk about that,” I said, opening my eyes.

  “Yes, we do,” he said. “You were afraid that I equated you with the officers who shot Ulises.” His voice was soft and level, like always. “I don’t. You’re nothing like them.”

  “You’ve never seen me on the job,” I said.

  “I never spoke to those men,” Cicero told me. “They never came to me, to explain what happened. You would have come. Am I wrong about that?”

  “No,” I said honestly. “I would have.”

  Cicero nodded and went on with his work. The sensation on my skin was hypnotic, as was the sound of the soaking of the cloth, the splatter of water falling back into the bowl as he rinsed and wrung the cloth, a second time and then a third.

  “You weren’t too clear on how this happened,” he said. “Something about a house fire and falling from a window during a rescue, is that about right?”

  “Basically,” I said. “Why?”

  Cicero let the cloth float in the bowl and handed me a towel to dry my face with. “You put yourself in dangerous situations a lot, Sarah,” he said. “Pulling kids from a drainage canal, and now this.”

  “That’s only twice,” I said.

  “Twice in the time I’ve known you,” he corrected. “Which is a little over a month.”

  “It’s part of the job,” I said.

  “No,” Cicero said, shaking his head like a teacher hearing an unacceptable excuse for incomplete homework. “I know enough about police work to know the things you’re doing are not typical.”

  “Who wants to be typical?” I said lightly.

  “Sometimes,” Cicero said, “when people consistently get themselves injured or hurt, there’s a reason. Sometimes they’re trying to draw attention to something else that’s hurting them, something they can’t show people directly.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sarah,” he said carefully, “when you and your husband were living together, did he ever hit you?”

  “God, no,” I said. “ Shiloh was a cop, too.”

  “That doesn’t disqualify him,” Cicero said. “It’s a very physical profession, and it draws aggressive people who-”

  “I know all that,” I said. “But Shiloh never hit me.”

  “I just get the feeling,” Cicero said, “that someone hurt you.” He paused cautiously. “Was it sex?”

  Blame it on the late hour, blame it on the head injury… I was about to deny it, and instead I heard myself say, “It was a long time ago.”

  “Your father?” Cicero ’s dark eyes were very intent on mine.

  “Brother,” I said. Then, “I never tell anyone that. I never even told Shiloh.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cicero said.

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean ever.”

  “All right.”

  “Do you feel sorry for me?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  I realized I was holding a wet rag with nothing in it anymore. Taking it away from the back of my head, I unfolded it and saw a tooth-size chip of ice inside, all that was left of a cube.

  “The thing is,” I said, “if I do extreme things on the job, it’s just because I want… I want to…”

  I started over. “I met this kid recently, a paramedic.” In my mind’s eye, I saw Nate Shigawa. “I envied him,” I went on. “In his job, he gets to stop the bleeding. My job is different. By the time I’m there, the bleeding is over. Sometimes long over.”

  I was thinking of the real Aidan Hennessy, so young when he died, and of his mother, pulled from the waters of the lake.

  “Just because the bleeding’s stopped doesn’t mean the pain is gone,” Cicero said. “I expect you help with that.”

  “When people let me,” I said. “Sometimes- more often than you’d think- people say they want help, but really they don’t.”

  The day that had started outside Kilander’s office had finally caught up with me. I felt tired in ways that were more than physical. I didn’t know how Marlinchen was. I didn’t even know where she and her brothers were. I thought I should find out, make sure they were all right, that someone was with them. But I just couldn’t do any more. Not tonight.

  “What time is it?” I said, and turned to look at the clock. It was 1:58 A.M.

  “God, I’m sorry,” I said, sliding off the table. “You need to be in bed. I’ll leave.”

  Cicero started to speak, but I didn’t let him. “I feel fine, I’m okay to drive-” I stopped, realizing something. “I didn’t drive here, did I?”

  Cicero shook his head. “You don’t remember?”

  I closed my eyes, accessed dim mental images, but nothing would come into focus. Then I was struck by an impossible idea. “You brought me?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “But-”

  “I told you I can do the elevator when I have no other choice,” he said. “I’m not so much surprised that I went down that damn elevator as I am that my van started.”

  I must have looked very surprised, because Cicero was watching me with amusement.

  “You called me from a pay phone near the ER. You were a little fuzzy on the details, but apparently you’d just bolted from the waiting room. I told you to stay where you were. I was going to take you back to the hospital, if need be, but you were ambulatory and not seriously injured, so I respected your wishes and brought you here.”

  He went outside to find me. I wanted to say that I was proud of him, but realized immediately how much it would diminish him, like a pat on the head. “I owe you,” I said.

  “You owe me $120, to be exact,” Cicero said. “Eighty for the doctoring, and forty for making me go down in that damn elevator.”

  I almost smiled, relieved at the deft way he brought us back down to earth. “You know what?” I said.

  “You don’t have that much on you,” Cicero finished for me.

  “I’ll bring it tomorrow,” I promised.

  “No hurry,” Cicero said. “Just try to be more careful out there, all right? There are limits to what even I can fix.”

  35

  At home, I slept for five hours and woke to the ringing of my cell phone; I was needed to come in and help with the matter of Hugh Hennessy’s untimely death by fire. I went downtown and gave a lengthy statement, explaining my involvement with the Hennessys and describing the events of the night before.

  I learned a few details, too. What Colm had told me last night had been correct, if sketchy: Donal had been smoking in the basement. Under sensitive questioning by a veteran fire investigator, the youngest Hennessy explained that he couldn’t sleep and had gotten up in the night to sneak one of his oldest brother’s cigarettes. He had seen Aidan smoking when upset about Colm’s blowup at the dinner table, and thought that cigarettes must help in times of stress. While hidden in the basement, Donal heard movement upstairs and thought someone was looking for him. In his haste, he threw his half-finished cigarette into a trash can and slipped back upstairs. He hadn’t realized the danger of what he’d done, nor that the basement was filled with
flammable materials: old furniture, a foam mattress. The fire investigator told me that he was only surprised the old wooden house hadn’t gone up faster than it did.

  After giving my statement, I ran into Marlinchen, who hugged me like a long-lost sister in the hallway. Campion was there as well, having heard the news on WCCO. Later that evening, one of the fire department officials let me ride with him out to the Hennessy property. There I found my car covered in soot, but otherwise driveable. I hosed it down as an interim measure, and drove it directly to a car wash.

  It was only as I was falling asleep that night that I realized I’d forgotten to bring Cicero the money I owed him.

  ***

  The next day, around noon, I drove to the towers. On the 26th floor, I stepped out of the elevator and into a scene I’d been a part of too often.

  Soleil was standing in the hall, leaning against the wall, her face a mask of grief. She was crying openly outside Cicero ’s apartment. Nearby, at the door to Cicero ’s apartment, a young uniformed officer was standing guard, trying to look impervious to the shock and dismay around him. From inside the apartment, a radio crackled. And I felt a fine tremor begin in my legs. The last time I’d felt that sensation was in the county morgue, where I’d gone to view a body a forensic assistant told me might be my husband.

  I wished I didn’t know the things I knew, wished that like a civilian I could kid myself that a scene like this could signal a burglary or a simple assault. But it didn’t. It didn’t mean anything less than a homicide. I could have turned around and walked away, gone someplace private to internalize it. But I didn’t.

  No one questioned my presence there. The neighbors knew me as Cicero ’s girlfriend; and the cops on the scene knew me as a Sheriff’s detective. The uniformed officer outside the open door had me sign in on the scene log, and then I went inside.