“I would like to see Terry McTigue.” Except for the market, I had not been out of the house in three weeks since the funeral. “Would you drive me to Jacobi Hospital?”
Paul was quiet. Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx was where they took Brian after the explosion and where he died. I watched him put a plate in the dishwasher.
“Sure,” he finally said. “Roseanne would be happy to take the boys.” He found the soap under the sink. “But don’t you want to give it a little more time?”
“I want to talk to him.” Terry McTigue ran the bomb squad. I didn’t know him well, but I had met him a few times. He was still alive, and the least he could do was talk to me. He would know what happened to Brian and why that bomb exploded.
“Okay,” Paul said, but he didn’t look at me.
As we drove to his house, I saw the strain of losing his friend had been etched in Paul’s face, and I longed to see the old Paul again, the one whose eyes misted with tears of joy when Roseanne told me I was pregnant with Chris after I had missed the clues. It seemed like yesterday the four of us went to see The Godfather and had four different opinions about the movie. We had two boys, who often played with their two girls. The idea was they would grow up together, be best friends.
When we pulled up in front of their house Roseanne was waiting, and she crushed me in a bear hug that knocked the air out of me. I could smell the hairspray in her lacquered bouffant. It reminded me of the day a few years ago when two cops were gunned down, and I had driven over to her house so we could be together, two police wives crying over the loss of a young cop and the possibility one of us could be next. Now that it was my husband, I wasn’t sure I could pretend our friendship was the same. She still had her husband.
While the boys dodged around to get big wheels from her garage, Roseanne rocked me back and forth. “I’m going to cook dinner for you.” She leaned back and looked at me, snapping her gum with her super white teeth. “Some of my famous homemade pasta.” It was a statement. You couldn’t say no to Roseanne.
Paul picked up Suzanne, a few months younger than Chris. Watching him, I wondered for the hundredth time how the boys would fare without Brian, what mark they would make on the world with me as their sole parent. Keith was bright, startling me at four years old with his ability to read and his penchant for books. And Chris was a child unafraid of danger, athletic and agile at two, quick to answer math problems.
Back in Paul’s car I held onto the door handle. The hot metal stung my palm, but somehow it felt good, and as we crossed the Throgg’s Neck Bridge, I looked down at the turning water and had the odd thought I might just open the door and fall out.
He kept the car windows open and Elton John and Kiki Dee were singing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” on his radio. The song made me think about Brian singing those words, his hand over his heart, so I would take pity on him after he made me late for work, and I held tight to the burning metal.
When we passed Pelham Bay Park I tried not to look, and thought about how I could never escape the Bronx. Helicopters and police boats were housed at Rodman’s Neck, the world’s largest machine shop for weapon development, the NYPD firing range, and riot control equipment. It also held the pit, where the bomb squad destroyed unexploded devices. This pit was where the bomb truck had gone after it left Grand Central the night of the hijacking. During a detonation, the men could climb out of the pit and take cover behind a wall of sandbags.
My thoughts turned to Terry McTigue and what he might be able to tell me. I knew he sustained serious injuries from the bomb blast, but I hoped he would be able to talk to me. Although Inspector Behr commanded the Technical Services Bureau, he was more a figurehead; it was Terry who ran the bomb squad. Officially he was a sergeant, but realistically he was the boss, the most decorated, and one of the world’s foremost bomb technicians. Brian had admired Terry, talked about him all the time, how brilliant a technician he was, how lucky he was to be under his command. The whole squad thought so. They were a tight bunch, depending on each other for their lives. If one man made a mistake, he could blow them all up.
“You all right?” Paul asked.
“I’m okay,” I told him. I looked out at Pelham Bay Park at a little boy roller-skating with a red balloon. I had played in that park as a little girl, made sand castles on that beach. Brian and I had married in a church just a few miles away. Now I couldn’t stand to look at it.
A police officer was standing in front of McTigue’s room when we walked down the hallway, and Paul showed him his badge. The door was open, but the officer didn’t move.
“We’re here to see Terry,” Paul said.
I could see past him to McTigue, lying in bed. He seemed to be asleep, his bandaged head lopsided. A chain suspended from the ceiling held up his wrapped hand.
McTigue opened one eye, the other was hidden under the bandage. He looked right at me but didn’t seem to recognize me. I tried to walk in, but the officer blocked my way. “Wait outside please.” He turned, went into the room and said a few words to McTigue. When he came out again, he closed the door behind him. “Sergeant McTigue does not wish to see you.”
“But did you tell him who it was?” I asked. “I’m Kathleen Murray.”
“I know who you are, Mrs. Murray.” The officer looked at the wall behind me. “And I am very sorry for your loss, but Sergeant McTigue does not wish to see you.”
I watched his mouth twitch slightly and felt myself go cold.
“Mrs. Murray would just like a minute with him,” Paul said.
The police officer was still looking straight ahead. “Sergeant McTigue does not wish to see her.”
“I don’t understand.” I looked up at Paul. “Why won’t he see me?”
“This was a mistake.” Paul put his arm around me. “You’re not ready for this. Let me take you back home.”
But I couldn’t just walk away, not when I was so close to talking to the one person who could tell me the truth about how the bomb exploded, how Brian died.
“If I write a note,” I asked the police officer, “would you give it to him?”
He nodded slightly.
At the nurse’s station, I scribbled on a pad of paper the RN slid over, writing about my concern for him, how I wished him well. Then I handed it to the officer, and we waited outside the closed door while he went in to deliver it. The officer came back out and shook his head.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Murray. He does not want you to come back.”
“Why?” I kept asking Paul on the ride home. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know.” Paul shook his head. “Usually when there’s a line of duty death everyone tries to help out the widow.”
As we were going back over the Throgg’s Neck Bridge, it dawned on me: Not one member of the bomb squad, except for Charlie, had called me since the funeral. In the days after Brian’s death, the department had been a constant presence, except for the men on the bomb squad, who had been like brothers to him. Why weren’t they talking?
At dinner, I pushed the food around on my plate.
“Eat more, honey.” Roseanne was already finished and smoking an after-dinner cigarette. “You need more meat on those bones.”
“Come on,” Paul said finally. “I’ll take you home.”
__________
“Bomb Squad,” Jerry Kelleher said later that evening when he answered the phone.
“It’s Kathleen Murray,” I squeezed the phone in my hand. “I just wanted to know if you have any information for me about how Brian died.” Jerry managed the office, and was one of the oldest members of the bomb squad. He had rotated jobs with Brian. “Any more specifics?”
“Not yet,” he stammered. “Do you want to talk to Charlie?” He couldn’t hand the phone over fast enough.
There was a time when I j
oked with Jerry, asked about his kids, a time when he told me stories about the antics of Brian and Charlie, the youngest men on the squad, who shot blank bullets into the forensic water tank to see who could get off the most shots in a minute, or set a trash-can fire to see how long it would take to fill the room with smoke. Scientific research, Brian said with a smile when I asked if he had gotten into trouble.
Jerry had sided with Brian on what station to play on the old FM radio, so that it was big band music, Dizzy Gillespie or Gene Krupa, that played in the background when I called. And he named Brian best dressed. They worked in plain clothes, and Brian wore plaid jackets with wide lapels and ties, slacks that flared over spit-shined shoes, his hair combed carefully across his brow, sideburns slightly curved toward his lips, auburn mustache. He coordinated every outfit, his closet militarily ordered, complete with a shoeshine box left over from his Air Force days.
“Can you come over tonight?” I asked Charlie when he came on the line. “I need to talk to you.”
“How’s eight?”
“Do you have any information about the hijacking?”
“I saved it all for you,” he said quietly.
I had two hours to wait. Keith and Chris ran around, taking out one toy after another while I became more convinced something was very wrong, something the bomb squad and the department were keeping from me. My nerves were on fire.
I sat Chris on my lap to keep him from running through the house. He was approaching his third birthday. Too young to understand, his sometimes hopeful voice asked, “will Daddy come home today?” Brian and I often discussed what a tough kid Chris was, and marveled that he could get back up after a fall without a tear, jump into the cold ocean, run barefoot on hot sand. I was afraid he would grow into a young man so strong that I would not be able to hold him down. I hugged him against me to keep him still, to hear his little heart beat.
In contrast, Keith was a quiet child, pensive and already doubtful. I watched him fit together magnet letters on his slate: stop, no, sno. The other day he insisted on new underwear without cartoons. Daddy pants, he said.
When he was nine months old, I left Keith playing on the living room rug while I went to the bathroom. Somehow he managed the screen door, crawled down the three steps, and was halfway to the curb by the time I noticed his absence. When I scooped him up he looked at me with eyes that seemed too wise, as though he knew where he was going and how he was going to get there, and I had spoiled his plan.
“I’ll read you a book,” I finally told the boys. “And then it’s bedtime, okay?”
In the last weeks, they slept with me most nights, and I loved their warmth, loved listening to their breathing, watching them sleep. But tonight I needed to be alone. I had to think. We sat on Keith’s bed and read Swimmy, and, even though it was still light outside, I tucked them in. Chris began to cry. “I want to sleep in Daddy’s bed.”
“Me too,” Keith told me. “I’m scared to sleep in here.”
Daddy’s bed. Something they needed as much as I did. “Okay, but only if you go right to sleep.”
“We will,” they both said in solemn voices. They were so good, their voices low, their arguments settled without coming to me.
I looked at my little boys side by side in our bed as they began to doze off and thought about Brian when he was a little boy. It was likely his mom didn’t sit on the side of his bed until he fell asleep. She had died from liver failure three years after we were married, but he told me about her, how she spent most of her time in bed, drunk, how he wanted to give his boys something far different than that.
“And we will,” he told me, kissing my forehead.
Downstairs, I watched out the window for Charlie’s car and kept thinking about that morning I opened the door to find him on our porch. I have to get out of here, I thought. Move away. Start a new life where not every single thing was a reminder of the life I no longer had.
Finally, because the waiting was torture, I walked to the liquor cabinet we had inherited from Brian’s parents, took out a bottle of scotch, and poured some into one of the fancy glasses we never used. I had not had a Dewar’s in years, and it tasted awful, but felt good going down, so I poured another one and sat on the couch to wait. I wished Gracie were here, her soothing voice telling me I was strong, that I could face anything, but Gracie had her own life, and the hollow space she left behind only made me miss Brian even more.
__________
“Would you like a drink?” I asked when Charlie came through the door. Wearing brown low-rise bell bottoms and a sweater vest, he reminded me of Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore show.
He was carrying two boxes. “No thanks.” He set them on the floor. “You go ahead.” I watched him settle into the brown velour chair across from me, where Brian used to sit.
“I heard you went to the hospital to see McTigue.” He drummed his fingers on the armrest.
“I thought he would tell me what happened.” I sounded pathetic, even to myself.
“He won’t talk to you.” Charlie looked down at the boxes. “Had you asked, I could have saved you the trip.” He sounded sarcastic, biting. Had you asked.
I stared at the amber liquid and thought, if I drink enough of this I won’t feel anything. “Who will talk to me, Charlie?”
I expected some platitude: they are just giving you time, or they don’t want to intrude. Instead, an awkward silence ensued. The silence didn’t feel like Charlie. It felt more like I was sitting across from a strange authority from whom I desperately needed something.
Finally, I asked the question that had kept me awake nights. “Was the bomb booby-trapped?”
“It didn’t seem to be.” Again, a vague answer. They would have known the first day, when they examined every grain of sand at the explosion site.
We waited together in the living room that had become part of the nightmare. It was somehow still filled with ghosts of the NYPD who stood in stiff uniforms with gold braids, here to inform the widow.
Charlie didn’t try to fill in the uncomfortable silence with small talk, and he wasn’t going to volunteer any information either. This wasn’t the Charlie who made working at the bomb squad an adventure for Brian. That Charlie was funny, livened up the tedium of waiting for a call with pranks that kept the squad on their toes. This also wasn’t the Charlie whose little girls walked on their daddy’s shoes, climbed on his back, and plastered stickers to his forehead.
A few minutes passed before I got up the nerve and voiced my deepest fear, the one I had not been able to speak aloud.
“Was it Brian’s fault?” I felt so dizzy after I said it that I had to focus on a spot on the carpet to make sure I didn’t pass out. Or throw up.
“No.” Charlie’s voice was steady, sure. “Brian was standing back, to the left of the device. We don’t know how the bomb exploded.” He emphasized each word as though he were trying to make me trust them.
I tried to let his answer settle without it turning into a sharp-edged sword that threatened to cut me open. I couldn’t believe they didn’t know. It was their job to know, to fit together the pieces and come to a determination. It was what Brian loved about the job, coming up with evidence. I thought about asking whether McTigue was responsible, if he thought it was obvious because McTigue’s fingers had been blown off, but an accusation like that would surely alienate me from the only person on the bomb squad who would talk to me.
Instead, I asked, “Why don’t you have bomb suits?”
He didn’t seem surprised. This was something Brian had complained about, that other, less prestigious departments had better equipment than the City of New York.
“The suits aren’t required equipment.”
That dizzy feeling came back. “Could a bomb suit have saved Brian’s life?”
“They’re still in the development stage. We’re looking into them.” I wai
ted before asking my next question to let him continue to steer, and watched to see where he would go, but he stopped talking and let the air hang with his clipped words. The silence itself spoke volumes.
“What do I do now, Charlie?” My words were more forceful then I intended. “How do I tell my sons the bomb squad doesn’t know how the bomb exploded that killed their father, or why he wasn’t given protective gear?” I looked at him hoping he would remember what Brian meant to him, what his answers meant to me now.
Charlie rose. I watched him go into the kitchen. He knew his way around, and I heard him brewing coffee. When he came back, he was holding two steaming cups.
I took one of them. “I need to know what happened.”
Charlie sat back down. “There’s no way to find out.” He sipped his coffee. And then, almost as an afterthought, he said. “Unless you sue the department.”
“Sue the police department? Make an enemy of the NYPD?” The idea of it made me feel all shivery inside.
“It’s probably the only way you’ll find out exactly what happened,” Charlie said.
I looked at the neatly stacked boxes of files and newspapers on the floor. Hijacked! The top headline read. “If McTigue would just tell me what happened, I won’t take this any further.”
Charlie shook his head. “No one will talk to you.” His words were so cold they frightened me. He picked up the boxes and walked over to the dining room table where he began unpacking newspapers and then files with the navy and gold NYPD patch. He seemed to have a system, and I let him organize them across the table. “I’ll leave these for you to read when you want to.”
News of the hijacking had taken up the front pages of every major newspaper in the nation, but it would be usurped by the Supreme Court ruling for the death penalty, the election of a peanut farmer, and Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“Can I ask you something?”
Charlie looked at me. “Sure.”
“Did Brian know he was going to die?”
The blood seemed to drain from his face, and he stood still for a few seconds. Charlie was a marine and had seen combat in Vietnam. I was sure he knew the answer.
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