Finally, a few heads turned his way, sides were poked with elbows, and they busied themselves. A uniformed officer strode up to Pickle’s car, shaking his head with a grim expression on his face. “We just got here. It’s a mess, Pickle.”
Pickle stared over the rim of the steering wheel and then glanced up into the officer’s expectant eyes. He wanted to hear about the jumper from his crew because the scanner hadn’t leaked that information. With a jab of his chin, he prodded the cop to continue. “And? What’s so messy? I heard the scanner—it’s a simple accident.”
“Well, sure, that’s what we thought, too. But the woman in the car told us that somebody went off the bridge. We just called the Coast Guard. Fat chance of living through that—the Hudson is high and rough as hell tonight …” The cop lingered on the potency of the river’s tide status, then looked both ways and leaned in closer. He brought his voice down to a whisper. “But, Pickle. It’s your brother. In the car, I mean. That’s why we waited for you.”
Pickle widened his eyes for maximum effect and snorted. “My brother? Okay. Let me get in there and talk to him.”
The officer shuffled away and Pickle began to toy with how to approach this. For a nanosecond, he considered the glee he’d feel by a future filled with schadenfreude, as he considered throwing Stan and Karen, metaphorically, under the Volvo. He’d expose them as the drunkards they were and it would serve them right, but good. He’d already fixed a bunch of their DUIs and was damned weary of bailing them out of serial drunken fracases. Then again, he thought … they were family. Resigned, Pickle sucked air in through his teeth and picked a strand of saag from between two back molars. He wiped it against the windshield, crawled out of the car, and sauntered over to the Volvo.
Bending down at the driver’s-side window, Pickle’s eyes silently commanded Stan and Karen to not utter one word. Not yet. They looked back at him, dumb and smug, like a couple of cows getting a last-minute reprieve from the slaughter. He then gave himself three full seconds to sniff the booze and determine the damage. Not too bad, actually—he’d smelled worse from them. This was a rare moment when he could claim dominance, and he relished the feeling, lingering just long enough to notice someone else in the backseat: a small woman, slumped to Karen’s right. The detail lodged in his brain but he had to get on with business. Pickle made a quick about-face to his crew and stated only what was necessary.
“Back off, guys. It’s family.”
Now the cone of silence descended—for cops and victims and perps—before the timeline began and circumstances were recorded. When stories got straight and tight. Where people took the room to breathe and assess and consider. And get sober. It might take three minutes or thirty minutes, but that invisible buffer was always there to aid and abet. And it was needed. Pickle understood too well that most people, even cops and their families, were just bottom-of-the-barrel human.
Karen watched Pickle deal with the logistics of the jumper, pointing here and there, getting his crew in order. While they’d waited for him to arrive, she and Stan had tried to pose as the sober people they wished they were. They barely took a breath. But now that Pickle was here, she felt untethered from the knots of tension inside the car. She slowly exhaled and relaxed a bit.
Junie finally lifted her head and scooted her body closer to the open window. She looked out toward the Hudson and pushed her hair back from her face. With this new perspective, even in the pitch of night, Karen saw Junie’s red hair crackle with dappled refraction as strobes from the cop cars bounced off the curls. Stunning. Junie must have been embarrassed by Karen’s scrutiny because her body dropped back down and she draped her arms up and over her head with fingers twitching, hiding herself—if I can’t see you, you can’t see me. She rocked her body and moaned the jumper’s name, “Jacob.”
Stan turned around. “Karen. Jesus. Keep her quiet. I can’t have this woman going surreal and nutty on me,” he implored.
“She’s not nutty. She’s practically a child. Where’s your compassion? Don’t be such a self-centered monster.” Karen rubbed Junie’s back with one hand and poked the back of Stan’s head with the other.
“Ow! Dear God, what I wouldn’t give for a belt right now.”
“Right. Your solution for everything.”
“And yours as well—”
Their voices had picked up volume, and Pickle’s head popped back into the open window. “Shut up. No arguments. Nothing. Think Helen Keller. We’re almost done.”
The young woman stopped rocking and slowly lifted her head to meet the new voice. She narrowed her eyes to examine Pickle—then turned to see Stan’s profile. Back and forth. The oddness of seeing identical twins seemed to draw her out.
“I don’t want to go home,” Junie whispered.
“What do you mean?” Karen asked.
“I can’t. I’m all alone. I don’t think I can handle it.”
“Don’t worry, Junie,” Karen reassured her. “You’ll come to our house.”
Stan stiffened. “Jesus, what are you saying?”
Karen rubbed Junie’s hands as she reasoned with Stan. “How can we expect her to go home, Stan? Look at what’s just happened.” She turned to Pickle, who was unusually silent, staring at Junie with an odd expression on his face. “Pickle, tell him. Tell him it’s okay for her to come to our place. You’ll fix it, right?”
Pickle thought about what to do and he lingered on the fact that the girl’s fate was in his hands. He began to inspect her more closely—this Junie someone, who was now staring him down, clearly afraid that he might decide to ruin her life. Her eyes were not the predictable green to complement her hair, which he imagined would turn a brilliant orange in daylight. No, they were the swimmiest blue possible, firing off shards of sapphire as light shot past her face. And those eyes were the shape of overgrown almonds, presenting a soft and somewhat surprised expression. And then June—his favorite month, of all things.
Now, on the bridge, in the rain, with the musty odor of Junie’s wet wool coat enshrouding them inside the car, Pickle sensed that something utterly beautiful and possibly life-altering was close at hand. His breath quickened. He would pull this woman out of the abyss of a dreadful night and a jumper’s death, and deliver her into the breaking light of day.
Pickle nodded at Junie, then turned to Karen. “Yeah, sure. She should stay at the brownstone. I’ll fix it.”
Junie squeezed her eyes shut. Stan groaned. Karen smiled imperceptibly. Pickle felt a rustle of motion behind him as the cops crowded in, having given him all the time he and the cone were due. One cop stepped forward and tapped him on the back. “Pickle? What’s it gonna be?”
Pickle pulled out of the car window and faced his men. “Okay, the woman says the guy ran from her and went over on his own. I need to get her to the station for a statement. You guys stay here and take it up with the Coast Guard police. I’m gonna drive her in. My brother and sister-in-law will come with me. Get the Volvo towed. Let’s move it.”
The orders were given, yet no one moved and a few yawned.
“Let’s go, for fuck’s sake! There are no mysteries here. This is not a happy story.”
The cops dispersed to a million corners. Karen helped Junie into the backseat of Pickle’s car and Pickle directed Stan to the front seat. Pickle revved the engine and took off toward Manhattan as the rising sun, cresting over the top of the Bridge Apartments, blinded him.
4
DURING THE DRIVE TO THE PRECINCT, PICKLE had called in his partner, Lance Burke, to assist with Junie’s interview. Now, as he ushered her into the room, Lance was prepared with coffee and had already set up a recording device in the middle of a table. He and Lance had been an effective duo for a decade now, with an easy give-and-take. While Pickle was known to bend rules, Lance, for the most part, played straight, which somehow leveled everything out. They were known as Frick and Frack at the precinct, because Lance was as memorable as Pickle. His ruddy face, tracked with premature wrinkles, w
as topped off with an unruly mop of greying red hair which seemed in perpetual need of a barber. He wasn’t exactly a bad-looking guy, Pickle conceded, but Lance’s glow was not the brighter of the duo. Additionally, their differing statures gave them a comedic Laurel-and-Hardy appearance. Pickle stood over six feet and Lance barely reached five foot five. Because they presented as opposites, people often expected them to think and behave differently, as well; tall-handsome cop vs. short-average cop somehow translated to good cop/bad cop. Or maybe it was the other way around. Pickle wasn’t sure how it all worked—he didn’t particularly care. All that mattered was that he trusted Lance in the most sensitive of arenas: criminals and women.
They seated themselves so that Junie could see them both, and Pickle and Lance could make eye contact without moving their heads. Lance shoved inkless pens and stubby pencils to one side. He pressed “record” and, after the preliminaries of date, time, and place, he prompted Junie to begin. “Ms. Malifatano, please tell us in your own words what led to this incident on the George Washington Bridge—and the subsequent death of Jacob Kalisaart.”
Junie shifted uncomfortably in her chair, rubbed her eyes, then gathered up her hair. She plucked a longish pencil off the table and dug the tip through her hair and against her scalp to position a messy bun at the top of her head. Pickle, poised to just listen, watched her preparation. He’d be the witness to her recounting of the facts, or what she believed to be the truth, which he knew could be mutually exclusive. He sipped lukewarm coffee and tipped his chair onto its rear legs, with the back splat resting into a corner of the small room. And he thought about the blunt tip of that pencil making a dull grey mark on the skin of Junie’s skull.
She began with a sigh, sad and resigned. “We were both going to do it. Kill ourselves, I mean.” She closed her eyes, as if to remember, or forget. Or maybe to lie. Pickle pushed these usual notions away because in his fantasy, Junie was on the earthly side of angelic.
After several seconds, Lance nudged her. “You wanted to kill yourself.”
Her eyes remained shut, perhaps in embarrassment, Pickle assumed.
“Yes, I have the note and we signed it. I have it—here.”
Lance leaned in. “You have the suicide note with you?”
“Yes. And the blue tape.”
“Blue tape? For what?”
Disclosure of a note and the tape seemed to open a floodgate. Junie’s eyes popped open, wild and frantic. She straightened up in her chair and wrapped her arms around her midsection in self-protection. “I really can’t talk about it. It’s private. You wouldn’t understand. When can I go?”
Lance reached over and slid a beat-up box of tissues toward her. Junie grabbed a few in quick succession, blew her nose, and then wadded them in her fist.
“I know we won’t understand … of course,” Lance reassured her. “But we have to get a statement from you. Someone has died, so this is now a police matter. We want to get you out of here as quickly as possible. So, the sooner you tell us what happened, the sooner you’ll be able to leave. Okay? You were saying something about a note and blue tape?”
“Okay. Right. I’ll just tell you, I guess.” She blotted the corners of her eyes with the tissue ball. “I was going to tape the note to the bridge to let everyone know what had happened. That we’d done it. But it was raining and the tape didn’t stick, and we got into an argument about it. Jacob said I hadn’t planned well enough. And of course, he was right …”
Lance cocked his head as a subtle signal to Pickle: listen up—be vigilant. Junie’s recounting seemed to cause her to forget herself and where she was, so her recitation tripped along like a wife relaying the mundane details of her day to a disinterested husband. But Pickle knew that under duress, people often said things that sounded odd, mixed up or facile. Too pat. He rubbed his nose as an indication to Lance that he’d understood the cue.
Junie pulled a damp, folded piece of lined notebook paper out of her pocket, along with a small roll of blue construction tape, and placed them on the table.
Lance leaned toward the microphone. “Let the record reflect that Ms. Malifatano has produced a piece of paper with writing on it and a roll of blue tape. Go on.”
“Well, we hadn’t planned on the rain. Or I hadn’t, anyway. And that’s when we started to fight. About the blue tape.”
Now she became animated—very different from the collapsed girl Pickle had met on the bridge. She paused to put her finger to her lips. Her eyes widened with a fresh memory and then her finger wagged in midair. A correction. “No. Wait. It was more like he was mad at me for not checking the weather report. But it never occurred to me that rain would be a problem for the blue tape. I mean, it’s an obscure thing to prepare for, you know? I’d checked for everything else. I knew when to walk onto the bridge—which day was best and what time. Drivers aren’t as alert in the middle of the night, and particularly a late Saturday night. So, I hoped they wouldn’t notice us.” As she talked, Junie’s voice continued to notch up in pitch.
“How do you know all that?” Lance grunted.
She smiled, as if happy to finally have an interested listener. “I researched it—on Google. And Wiki. Plus, I knew that the barrier on the South Sidewalk is only waist high, so it’d be easier to jump. The Brooklyn Bridge has much higher barriers. Did you know that? The George Washington is the best, even though everyone thinks most suicides happen on the Brooklyn Bridge. Like in the movies. But that’s not true. Anyway, there’s lots of terrific information on Google, and … ohhhh.”
Pickle leaned forward. The front legs of his chair smacked down on the linoleum floor, causing both Lance and Junie to jump. She let her head drop, with her chin to her chest, and then slowly rolled down and set her forehead at her knees. The pencil in her hair slipped out, fell to the floor, and inched toward Pickle’s chair. Her bun gradually uncoiled itself from a tight twist and spilled forward over her head. Clusters of orange snakes fighting each other. He leaned down, tweezed the pencil with his fingers like an undetonated grenade, and gently deposited it into his jacket pocket.
Lance rolled his eyes at Pickle and then broke in. “Okay, Ms. Malifatano. Take a break for a moment. Is it all right with you if we read the note?”
She rocked her body forward as a sign of consent.
Lance nodded to Pickle. The room was only about ten by ten, so any movement would feel intrusive and Pickle didn’t want to slice into the potent mood. He silently lifted the paper off the table, nudged the note open and read the words he knew she had written:
Dearest World,
We are not sorry. No, we mean what we’ve done. We’re not sure who we loved or who will love us after we jump. But you all did matter, if only for a bright second or two when we were able to know our minds.
Goodbye.
Junie and Jacob
Handing the note to Lance, Pickle spoke for the first time during the interview. “You wrote that.” He stated it as a fact.
She grunted a confirmation.
“It’s beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Junie mumbled into her knees.
Lance’s head snapped toward Pickle’s as he motioned a silent “what-the-fuck?” gesture with his hands.
Pickle ignored Lance. “But I’m—we’re—very glad you’re alive. I understand that this must be difficult. But without going into the reason why you both wanted to kill yourselves, can you tell us how Jacob happened to jump without you?”
He’d just floated the money question. Simultaneously, the feeling in the room shifted as rays of the early morning sun broke through the windows—high on the walls, skirting the ceiling. Pickle knew this particular light as a perceived indication of progress by the unfortunate individuals who found themselves here. He had witnessed this phenomenon over the years. The emergence of sunlight, for some reason, prompted the assumed guilty to fold and throw their chips on the table. They were weary and ground down, not to mention hungry and possibly amped up from multiple cups of co
ffee. So, after a very long night, it made sense that sunlight equaled hope, and suspects could then reasonably deduce that a bunch of sunlit words might get them out of this room and into another, perhaps bigger and better room. Or maybe even out of the fucking building. Fat chance. Sunshine, Pickle thought, was one clever son of a bitch.
“Please go on, Ms. Malifatano,” Lance encouraged.
Junie straightened up, shoved her sweater sleeves to her elbows and rubbed her hands up and down her face—smudging mascara, or what was left of it. Taking in a slow breath, she raised her eyes to the ceiling and squinted from the sunlight.
“We fought. About the tape and some other things. Jacob was out of sorts and kind of nasty. And that hurt, because on the subway ride up to the bridge we’d held hands and were close. The subway car was empty, so it felt private. Then, on the bridge, things started to change, mostly with Jacob’s mood. I remember thinking it was all so irritating but also strangely typical—like we were standing in the kitchen, bickering like any old couple. But Jacob was unpredictable, generally. He began to run around in small circles and shake his hands, and I realized then that he might have taken a speed pill. He did that on occasion—the speed—to cut into his depression. Anyway, I tried to get him to stop. I pulled on his arm and then both my hands slipped down to his hand. I held on really tight—like playing that game where you have teams pulling on a rope. What’s that called?”
“Tug of war,” Pickle said as he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands cupping his chin—really fascinated now—like watching the endless last ten seconds of the Super Bowl. Lance’s foot poked him in the shin under the table and Pickle shot back up, regaining a pretense of appropriate decorum.
“Right. That game. Then I noticed that my feet were on an area of the pavement that for some reason wasn’t too wet. The rain had been coming, off and on, but mostly a drizzle. I noticed this because I had very good traction. And then I remembered that I’d worn my new sneakers. I bought them just the other day and the soles were still rough—you know—good for gripping? Anyway, I set my legs apart and pulled, and managed to stabilize Jacob so that he stopped twirling.”
Pickle’s Progress Page 3