Some of the retired cops knew he was on the job, and when they heard he was a captain, they said immediately how lucky Peter was to have come up at Francis Gleeson’s feet. They were happy for him, Kate always pointed out. They didn’t mean anything by it. “I know that,” Peter always said, and denied that it bothered him, though for hours after he didn’t pay much attention to anything anyone said. He and Francis were often in the same room together, but rarely alone. They would either sit in silence or else talk about the mayor, or football, or whether composite decking was worth the money. What was wrong with real wood?
Most visits, Peter avoided leaving the Gleesons’ house at all. Lena once asked him to run up to Food King for something she forgot for their dinner—Kate and her sisters were occupied chopping and stirring and basting—and he went pale, stock-still. “I’ll go,” Kate said, grabbing the keys off the counter and giving him a quick kiss on the cheek. After leaving Gillam, he’d be near silent for days. Gradually, she began visiting on her own. On holidays they either hosted in Floral Park or went to one of Kate’s sisters’ houses.
“Your father and I—we don’t think you seem that happy lately,” Lena said to Kate.
“Of course I’m happy,” Kate had snapped.
* * *
The first time he came home drunk in the middle of the day, a Saturday, she was so surprised that she’d laughed, despite her growing worry. Later, she was haunted by that laugh, what it said about her. Molly was around four years old, Frankie was six. He’d walked to the hardware store, claiming he needed something for the Christmas lights, and he stayed out for four hours. When he came home he was chatty, smiley, said he’d run into someone there. He’d grabbed her around the waist and pressed his face to her neck.
“Are you drunk?” she blurted. What harm? He’d run into someone. It was almost Christmas. It felt at least a little healthier that he’d gone out, that he’d been with people. Any setting was better than their dark house in the middle of the night.
It didn’t happen again for several weeks. But then it started happening more often, and she began heading him off at the door when he came home from errands just so she could check him, see if he would be strange around the kids. One time she made him go up to bed and stay there though it was only five o’clock in the afternoon because her sisters were coming, and she wouldn’t know how to explain it to them, so instead she told them he was sick. He once told her a cop could spot the drunk drivers not by how reckless they were but by how careful. Both hands on the wheel, never breaking the speed limit, until—oops—the car strayed over the double yellow for just an instant. She thought of that on the nights when he set out plates for supper—how careful, how deliberate. Or when he asked about her day, the way he neatly lined one word after another and made the right shapes with his mouth.
* * *
And then, on a random Thursday, Peter was a full ten hours late getting home, and Kate figured that he’d taken a double and forgotten to call. He usually ate his dinner at breakfast when he came home in the morning, so after feeding the kids she’d taken a pork chop out of the freezer. He still wasn’t home by the time she had to leave for work, so she left and forgot about him, but when she got home in the late afternoon and saw the meat still sitting on a plate on the counter, long defrosted, she worried. When he finally came home, his shirt untucked, his face haggard and older than it was twenty-four hours earlier, she knew something had happened.
“Katie,” he said, nearly stumbling into the house. He clutched his hair with both hands and then reached for her.
“What happened?” she said. “Tell me quick.”
* * *
Her father showed up that night without invitation. Kate was on the love seat with the kids, looking at an animal encyclopedia Frankie had brought home from school, pretending that the three of them were home alone, that Daddy was still at work. Kate kept her voice light so that they wouldn’t know how violently her heart was beating, that her hands were clammy, that she felt short of breath. She looked up from the book and saw her father’s crooked stance silhouetted in the doorway. She must have sighed or made some other kind of sound because both kids looked at her, curious, and she had to clench her whole body to stop from crying when he opened her door. What meddlesome old-timer had given his former lieutenant a call, knowing the connection? Or maybe they were always calling him, giving him weekly reports. She could imagine the fight at home when he told Lena he’d be taking the car and driving all the way to Long Island. And in the dark, no less. When he stepped inside her house, he looked around so calmly that Kate wondered for a split second whether he’d come for some other reason.
“This is a surprise,” she said, working hard to make her voice steady. He couldn’t solve this problem any more than she could, and yet she felt all the blood inside her body heave with relief when he went down on one knee, held his arms out for the children.
“Pop Pop!” Frankie and Molly cried out, running to him.
* * *
Later, once she was sure the kids were asleep, she made him a cup of tea, but he refused to sit.
“We’ll figure it out,” she said, sipping her tea as if it were any evening of her life.
“Where is he, anyway?”
“I don’t understand why you came all this way. It was a rough day. He’s exhausted. Yes, he discharged his weapon in the line of duty. He’s a wreck about it, but no one got hurt.”
“By the grace of God. Or by dumb luck. One or the other.”
Kate agreed, but silently. All evening long she’d been picturing the alternate universe where he’d injured someone, or worse.
“What’s going on with him, Kate?”
“Nothing.” Kate busied herself by brushing crumbs from the table into her cupped hand. “I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss about.”
Francis looked stricken. “What if he’d killed someone? What the hell was he doing? Do you know if he’d hit someone, his name would be on the front page of every paper tomorrow morning? There’d be protests at city hall. They’d crucify him. And they’d be right. They’d be absolutely right.”
“I know that, Dad. But he didn’t.” Kate sat on her hands so he wouldn’t see them trembling.
“Where is he? I want to talk to him.” Francis had looked into the bedroom upstairs when he went up to kiss the kids good night. He’d looked into the little den off the living room, where they had a small couch. He’d opened the door to the garage and flipped on the light. Finally, all his glancing around stopped when he considered the basement door.
“Just leave him alone,” Kate said. She made a half-hearted attempt to block the door, but Francis pushed by her and leaned heavily on the railing as he made his way down the long, dark staircase.
“Peter,” Francis said, standing over him. The air was stale down there, and the television was tuned to the channel that seemed to always be playing the 1986 World Series, the series that, Peter had once told Kate, taught him that anything was possible. He was sound asleep with his mouth open. There was an open bottle tucked between the couch and the chair.
Francis glanced all around the room. “How long has this been going on?”
Kate refused to answer.
“Bobby Gilmartin’s son says they’ve been covering for him.”
Peter shifted and kept snoring.
“That’s not true. Don’t make it worse.”
“It is true, Kate.” Francis peered at her with his one good eye. “Believe it.”
They were like old-time telephone operators, these old cops. They knew everything and discussed everything and never for a moment imagined they weren’t still cops, even if, like Francis Gleeson, they’d turned in their shields decades ago. She was furious at her father, at all of them, but a part of her knew that the longer she stayed furious the longer it would take for the shame to set in.
“He’d never drink on the job,” Kate said. “It was an accident. He drew his gun, just as they all did, and he th
inks he tripped.”
Francis pressed the heel of his hand to the closed lid of his prosthetic eye. “What was he like when he left for his tour yesterday?”
Tired, Kate almost said. It was an afternoon tour, and every afternoon that week she’d thought: Today is the day he’ll have to call in. But then, just like every day, he got into the shower at the very last minute. He shaved, pulled a fresh shirt out of a dry cleaning bag. He poured twenty ounces of black coffee into his travel mug and headed out. He was annoyed when she asked if he was sure he should go in, and brushed by her to the front door, to the sleek black Explorer that came with his rank, and it was true that he seemed fine. But when she stepped into the steam that lingered after his shower, she lifted her nose like a bloodhound and smelled gin.
“He was fine,” Kate said.
“Peter,” Francis said sharply. He leaned down, clutched the younger man by the shoulder, and shook hard. It was arrogance, Francis decided. Criminal arrogance. Just like his father. The father more than the mother, even. At least the mother had something wrong with her. A disease, maybe. But this was a crime of the ego, a person believing he could get away with things other people can’t.
“I vouched for him,” Francis said, looking down. “I said he was trustworthy.”
“He is.”
“There’s more to this. I know it.”
The phone rang just then and Kate took the basement steps two at a time to catch it, to get away from the rest of his thought. Lena. She’d figured out where Francis had gone, and begged Kate to make him stay the night. “His vision,” she said. “He’ll never make it all the way home. The oncoming headlights leave him seeing halos. He admits that himself. I can’t believe he could be so reckless.”
But when Kate hung up and looked at her father, who had followed her up the stairs, he seemed capable of driving all the way to the moon.
“You didn’t tell Mom you were coming here. You didn’t tell her what happened.”
“No,” Francis said. “I’ll leave that for you. I’m just so angry. These fucking people.”
“What people?”
“Peter. All of them.”
“All who? The people on the job? Or his family? The people he was born into through no fault of his own. Are we back on this subject again? Or maybe we never left.”
Francis stopped shifting and turned to her. “You see that, Kate? You see what you always do?”
Clutching his keys and glancing over at the basement door one last time, he told her that she and the kids could come back to Gillam anytime. They could come with him that night, if they wanted to. He looked down at the floor, again pressed the heel of his hand to his eye. How easy it would be to gather the kids, Kate thought, to walk out the door with him, to belt them in and sail to Gillam, tuck them into beds there—the sheets always clean and cool, the house always warm and open—and wake up and have Lena make them a pot of oatmeal in the morning. Later, Lena would peel potatoes into a bowl of cold water and have them help her, she’d show them where to place their knuckle on the blade, Francis would read aloud from the paper, and all of this mess could be left exactly where it was. She could take each child by the hand to the place where she began and forget all of this. The kids. Her father loved them and had doted on them from the moment Kate’s belly began to stretch the limits of her T-shirts, but he also, clearly, didn’t really think of them as being Peter’s. It was as if he pretended Kate had hatched them entirely on her own. When Lena said, sometimes, that Frankie was like Peter had been as a boy, Francis would study the child as if to ask how in the world that had happened, and what else might be in store.
She knew that if she asked him to stay, he would. He’d settle right in on the couch and stay the night, the whole week. He wouldn’t ask for a blanket. He wouldn’t ask for a shower. He’d stay exactly where she needed him to be until she told him it was okay to go. Just imagining him there made her feel easier, made her feel as if she’d been thrown a rope, made her feel as if the very room they were standing in was more solidly constructed. She wanted him to stay so badly that she had to sit down, turn away from him a little or else he’d know.
“You’re exhausted,” he said.
“No, I’m not.”
“He’ll meet with his union rep tomorrow, I’m sure.”
“They met today.”
“Do you want me to stay?” he asked.
She felt a thousand pinpricks behind her nose.
“No,” she said. “We’re fine.”
“I could leave before he wakes up. If you want me to.”
“No. You go home to Mom.” She told him to be careful. To let the phone ring once when he got home so she’d know he’d gotten there safely.
But he didn’t move. “Kate,” he said.
“Go,” she said. “Please. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
She didn’t move a muscle until she heard his car door slam, the sound of the engine fading down the block.
Once he left, she locked the house, turned off all the lights, glanced outside for no reason at all. And that’s when she saw the little black sedan parked in its usual spot, where the Harrisons’ weeping elm drooped over the sidewalk and into the road. It had been a while since she spotted the car, and seeing it there on that night of all nights seemed to mean something. She watched the car from inside the darkened house for a few minutes, peering through the slats of the blinds like a spy in a novel. When she grew tired of standing, she drew up a chair and sat.
She couldn’t go through her routine as usual, not on that night. She couldn’t just climb the stairs as if all were well, wash her face, brush her teeth, tell herself it would be better in the morning. He’d explained it to her several times but there was something missing, some crucial thing he wasn’t saying. They’d been watching this particular ring for months. They had everything they needed to move in on them, and so they had. It was all planned, organized. Tours had been moved around so that the right people could be in the right positions. They’d already overpowered the room, were making arrests. The drama was over, and yet that’s when Peter had fired his gun.
“What else do you want me to say?” he’d said when she asked him to go through it all one more time. “No one got hurt.”
The chief had signed off at the scene, yes, but Peter was put on restricted duty within a matter of hours. Things happened. Kate knew that as well as any cop. But why restricted duty instead of modified, implying that they feared for his safety and, Kate realized only after a few hours, the safety of the people around him? What had he said or done in those hours after the shooting that raised an alarm?
“I’m going to ask you this one time,” she’d said to him calmly, and when she asked the question, she braced with all her might for the answer. “Were you drunk?”
“No,” he said, offended. Disgusted. And that’s when he’d gone off to the basement.
I could leave him, she thought now. If they couldn’t solve this problem together, then she could solve it alone. She could pack a bag for each child, and go. Or better yet, she could hand him a suitcase and tell him to fill it and be off. She had a good job. The kids were in school. She had a family who would help her if she needed help.
Kate continued to stare out the window at Anne Stanhope’s car. Internal affairs had interviewed everyone at the scene, and according to Peter they’d all described what happened exactly as Peter had. The room was chaos. He’d tripped on something on the floor. He headed to NYU medical center and his union rep met him there, but that was just routine procedure after discharging a weapon. At the hospital, Kate knew, they would have tested Peter’s ears, checked him for trauma. Maybe something that happened there—something he’d said or done—got him flagged.
It had felt for a long time like she was waiting for something, and now something had happened. She looked out the window at the black sedan and knew that across the dark Anne Stanhope might be looking back at her.
* * *
She never told an
yone that Anne was tracking them, watching them all these years. She never even felt tempted to tell. Her mother had once asked her if she felt scared when she thought about Anne, wherever she was now, and Kate realized that her whole family still thought of Anne as a person on the verge of violence, as if until the day she died she’d remain capable of reaching into her bag and withdrawing a gun. Kate wasn’t scared anymore, not in that way. She felt angry sometimes, but mostly she felt nervous, like she should apologize for something, like she, too, had done something wrong, though what, exactly, she wouldn’t have been able to say. It was illogical. She hadn’t done anything wrong—she loved Peter, and so she’d married him. It was George who mentioned to her, not long after she and Peter got married, that Anne Stanhope had lost a baby. She’d lost a baby so far along that he was nearly ready to be born. George told her that she delivered it stillborn, and Kate imagined the eerie silence of that room as other babies roared down the hallway.
Yes, Peter knew, George confirmed. He’d never told her.
Once, seeing the car out there, not long after Molly started walking, Kate sent the kids out front to play. They were at an age when they never played out front, at least not alone, but she’d sent them around front and watched from the garage that Molly didn’t run into the road. Let her see them, she thought that day, they were her grandchildren after all. Later, she couldn’t decide if she’d done it to be cruel or to be kind.
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