After (7 page)

“Daddy,” Bunny scolded him from the sofa.

“Aw, he can take it. You go on and watch TV. I’m talking to your man. This is between him and me.”

Your man
. Carson liked the sound of that.

“Honestly, I didn’t have a plan. I was just hoping she’d give me a break and maybe a chance.”

“Looks like she did. I don’t know where you two are headed. I don’t know if you even know. Even though her mama and me been divorced a while now and I’m remarried, it’s important for you to know that I didn’t go AWOL. You know what I mean, don’t you?” Eddie looked at Carson steadily, his gaze holding its breath. “I pay my taxes, my bills, and I paid child support.”

He was telling Carson that he was no statistic. No deadbeat dad. No trifling Black man who dropped his seed and didn’t stick around to watch it grow.

“I know exactly what you mean.”

“That’s my baby girl. She’ll always be that. They always make it seem like the mama’s love is the deepest. The most important. But I’m more proud of staying in Bunny’s life than anything else I ever did. I wasn’t just a monthly paycheck. I was a father. And believe me, Doris didn’t always make that an easy thing to do. I want you to handle my daughter with care. She says she loves you, so that means she’s yours. But I gave her life, so she’ll always be mine.”

Eddie Palmer moved closer to Carson as he said all this, each word propelling his chair forward. He had given Carson an assignment, not a warning. He was the kind of man who could’ve whispered in Carson’s ear, even as Bunny sat unsuspecting across the room, “Get out of my daughter’s life,” and said it with a blinding smile that dared Carson not to do as he’d been told.

“Do we have your blessing?” Carson asked.

“I’m not religious. I’m a businessman, Carson. I don’t know the first thing about you. But I trust Bunny’s judgment, and she wants me to trust you with her. All I’m saying is, I will.”

Now he is entrusted with Bunny. Entrusted with his children. He has done more than let them down. He has revealed why he did not deserve them in the first place.

When he’s in
the shower like now, a week after the shooting, he can almost block out the sound of the cell phone ringing in his ears. Standing in the shower stall beneath the pounding watery baptism, Carson hears only a faint echo, a brief musical staccato. He turns his head to allow the onslaught of water to pour into his ears and drown out the pandemonium only he can hear. The water masks the ringing momentarily. But he knows the sound is still there beneath the steady pulse of the water. It’s the imaginary ringing of Paul Houston’s cell phone, the ringing he didn’t hear that night. Did the phone ring? Was it on vibrate? Is that why he reached for the phone?

There are times when he can muffle the sound by focusing all his thoughts on a task. Like now, as he dresses, devoting all his senses to a discovery of the jeans and sweatshirt, socks, and slippers, all to deny the sound of the cell phone the oxygen of his attention. The durable strength of the jeans, their weight and surprising thickness, remind him that he bought them nearly a decade ago. Stepping into the pants ceremoniously, he allows himself to feel them slide snugly against his legs. Durable. Reassuring. Real. Not like the sound of the cell phone, which he doesn’t trust even as he filters every conversation through its harrowing reverberation.

He’s about to sit down and eat a breakfast of eggs and ham when the phone rings.

“May I speak to Officer Carson Blake?”

“Who’s calling?”

“My name is Randy Albright. I’m a reporter for…”

“You know I can’t talk to you.”

“I’m calling because I’m doing a follow-up story on the shooting you were involved in.”

“Why don’t you leave me alone? I don’t even have to talk to my commanding officer now. Why the fuck would I talk to you?”

“To give your side of the story,” he says as though offering Carson the deal of a lifetime. “I got a call from a community group out in the county that’s staging a protest against police brutality at the county executive’s office today. Yours is the fifth fatal shooting of a suspect by the county police since December, and…”

Carson hangs up the phone.
Fuck it,
he thinks,
I’m not gonna let some asshole ruin my breakfast.
But the eggs and ham taste like paste and land heavily in his resisting stomach. Halfway through the meal, the spasm in his abdomen forces him up from the table only moments before he expels the ham, the toast, jelly, and coffee in a seizure of retching, exploding them all over the kitchen floor and table. The sight of the food, still undigested, and the acrid odor of gastric juices sickens him even more as he slumps against the kitchen counter. And he can hear it again, the phantom cell phone, its ringing. If it’s not the sound of the phone, what fills his mind is the image of him going to prison. A former cop in jail. What inmates would try to do to him. What he would have to do to survive. His wife and children visiting him, incarcerated at the facility over in Jessup, talking to him via phone, the only connection allowed through inches of Plexiglas.

It takes the rest of the morning to recover from the call and the botched attempt to eat. The reporter has reminded him that he’s now a prisoner of the bureaucratic hell of the police department. Even after the grand jury decides whether or not to indict him for the shooting, there is the Internal Affairs investigation. His case will be one of the thousands IAD investigates every year, everything from complaints of police officer rudeness to brutality to charges of wrongful death. And the protesters?
Let them march
, Carson thinks bitterly,
let them shout, let them give interviews for the six o’clock news.
None of them could do his job or live the life he’s got now, not for one single day.

In the afternoon Carson goes outside to retrieve the mail. His neighbor Earl Mattheson is walking down his driveway. The day is chilly, too cold for casual banter, Carson thinks as he plots a quick retreat back into his house after getting his mail. Earl waves politely, and Carson feels immediately the wariness in his glance. There are the odd days when he and Earl will talk for a while, clutching hands full of junk mail, bills, and magazines. When Earl discovered that Carson was a police officer he told Carson he had wanted to be a fireman when he was in high school but as he got older realized he wanted money more than he wanted to be a hero, so he went into accounting. Carson and Bunny have been to dinner a couple of times with Earl and his wife, Sheila, a flamboyant, buxom woman who’s made a small fortune selling cosmetics out of her home. They’re good neighbors, friendly but not intrusive. Carson enjoys Earl’s gruff but warm greeting when he sees Carson drive up to his house some mornings after a late shift. Earl, behind the wheel of his BMW, will pull close to Carson’s cruiser and lean out the window and ask, “Man, when you gonna stop all this crime out here?” jocular and teasing.

“I can’t do it all by myself,” Carson would say through a grin, throwing his hands in the air in mock confusion as both men laughed.

Today Carson just wants to get the mail and go back inside his house. He’s got an armful of magazines,
Essence
,
Jet
,
Popular Science
,
Woodworking
, and a stack of bills when Earl turns around clutching three envelopes and walking toward Carson, saying, “I been reading about you in the paper.”

“Yeah, everybody has.” Carson is intentionally rude, pretending intense interest in the envelopes and magazines, riffling through them to avoid looking at Earl.

“In the paper it said that young man you shot didn’t have a gun.”

This is just like Earl,
Carson thinks,
blunt as a hammer.
Carson turns to look at his neighbor standing before him, his body trim, his stance rigid, arms behind his back. As usual Earl is impeccably dressed, today in brown slacks and a white turtleneck sweater. He’s a tall man, coal black. His mustache is flecked with gray and behind his bifocal glasses his small eyes squint impatiently, looking at him, Carson thinks today, as though he’s seeing him for the very first time.

“That’s right. He didn’t,” Carson says defensively.

“But you thought…?”

“Obviously, Earl, I thought he was armed.”

Bringing his arms from behind his back and folding them across his chest in a grand, sweeping gesture, Earl tells Carson, “A friend of mine knows the family real well. Says he was a good kid.”

Before Carson can say anything Earl goes on, “You know, I never understood how you all decide to shoot to kill.” He’s drawn out the last words, articulated them slowly, carefully—
shoot to kill
—so that they hang like an incontrovertible judgment between them.

“Earl, trust me, you have to be there, in the moment,” Carson says, forcing a reasonableness he does not feel.

“But if he had no gun…I don’t understand. How was he a threat to you?” Earl shifts his weight from his left leg to his right and is clearly prepared, Carson sees, to stand outside for as long as it takes to interrogate him about the worst moment of his life.

“It’s a tragedy, Earl, that’s what it is.”

“Maybe it’s a tragedy for you. But it’s over for that young man.”

Carson turns away and walks up his driveway, the weight of Earl’s disdain nearly grinding him into the blacktop with each step. Earl stands proud and censorious at the base of Carson’s lawn, watching him, Carson thinks, as though he is a formerly tame animal who has committed an unprecedented act of violence. Earl watches him, Carson thinks as he closes the front door as though he is deciding whether he should be destroyed for his own good.

He doesn’t make
a move until he’s sure Bunny is asleep. Then he risks waking her with a kiss on the cheek and the lingering of his fingers on her arm resting on the comforter. He turns away from the sight of his wife, for if he looks at her too long he will lose his nerve. Sliding off the bed, he decides to leave his pajamas on. Why get dressed? What difference would that make? Walking out of the bedroom into the hallway, he’s chilled by the vacant quietude of the 3:00 a.m. darkness. So still. Outside, morning shrouded in tones of night. His house plunged as well into listless gloom. He pads quickly past the rooms of his children, forcing himself not to think of their faces in the aftermath. But what good is he to them now? How can he teach his children to be honorable, honest? Rest assured in the orbit of his wife’s love? Juwan locked each evening in his room, shunning him. Roslyn and Roseanne strangely hesitant to kiss him good night like before. And Bunny’s lies enrage him, that Juwan’s simply studying for the standardized tests, that the girls are worried about him, not afraid of him. No, he’s seen it: more fear of him in their eyes than he saw in the eyes of Paul Houston. He’s seen it, or has he imagined it? But imagining makes it real.

In the garage he turns on the light and gets in his car, out of habit, behind the steering wheel. Leaving them behind feels harder, more impossible than what he is about to do. He has written no note. He could not imagine any words that he could use to explain. Or say good-bye. He feels selfish and generous. Selfish because it’s all about him, what’s in his head, the dreams, the sounds, the face, relentless, constant, more reliable now than his heartbeat. It’s about what everyone knows about him now. Even if they haven’t read the papers, seen the TV news reports, he is marked. Indelible. Transparent. Only the blind could not see what he has done, who he has become.

He’s been planning, deciding to commit the final act while the world as he knew it has already crumbled at his feet, while he walks through the skeletal remains of what he has done. This is generous, because everyone he leaves behind can go on, free of the agonizing sight of his meltdown.

In his hands the Beretta is merely an extension of his fingers, his arm. He’s carried a gun so long, worn one every day for twelve years, that it feels perfectly normal. As an officer of the law he carries an instrument of death, annihilation, as a matter of course. He never talked about it with anyone, not even Eric, how easy it is for them as cops to blow their brains out. End it all. Anywhere. Anytime. In their cruiser. On the toilet in the bathroom. No need to buy pills, rope, rifle through the kitchen drawer for the sharpest blade. Everything they need is always on them. Within reach. Strapped on their ankle. In their holster. In a lockbox in the basement. Under the driver’s seat of the cruiser. Always there. Friend. Protector. Crutch. Answer. Question. Even now.

There is a savage certainty about placing the gun in his mouth, the metal cool and passive against his tongue. He closes his eyes and feels a tense and terrible strain of tears against his lids, tears that well up in his throat. There is no replay of his life behind his trembling lids, as he had expected. There is only, immediately, the face of the woman he loves, the children whose lives he made. And in this moment, stripped, he is sure of hope, and even of love; it is their faces and no others, not Paul Houston’s, not his own, that he sees. Tears glut his throat and he coughs, loudly, harshly, expelling the gun from his mouth. It slides onto the floor of the car.

At four-thirty Bunny frantically opens the door to the garage and sees Carson behind the steering wheel of his car. Running from the bedroom, barefoot, she refuses to think what she fears. When she opens the passenger-side door, she stops breathing at the sight of the gun on the floor. But Carson is asleep, snoring gently. She eases into the car beside him, places her hand on her chest to still her heart. She closes her eyes, leans back in the seat, and reaches for her husband’s hand, and she holds it until dawn.

4

Carrie Petersen’s office
looks nothing like Carson expected. A cocker spaniel sleeps on the floor beside her desk in the basement office of her Columbia, Maryland, home. Among the rows of framed photos on her walls are articles about police officers killed in the line of duty and decorated for acts of valor. She has a wide, flat face that seems some mixture of Caucasian and Indian or Asian, and she wears a short brown pageboy. Despite the spike of crow’s-feet in the corners of her eyes, her age is indeterminate. She’s a former cop turned private therapist, with a client base that includes many police officers and emergency service workers. She’s plump in a black pantsuit, patient as a suburban Buddha as she sits waiting for Carson to answer her question.

“How has it been for you since the night of the shooting?”

No one has asked him this question. He’s been offered sympathy, pity, judgment. But until today he has not been asked this question:
How has it been for you?
This inquiry is so stunning and unexpected, Carson lets the words roll across the floor of his mind like marbles at play. He still feels like shit, still hears the echo of the imaginary cell phone as a backdrop to every waking thought.

It was the touch of Bunny’s fingers on his that woke him, stranded and shamed in his car beside the wife who now knew the unforgivable about him. There was only their hands entwined and the sound of their breathing for the longest time, his heavy, deep, hers shallow and stunned. Then, sitting in the car in the garage with him, letting her hand in his signal everything that was possible for him and for them, the Beretta retrieved stealthily from the car floor and hidden in the pocket of her robe, Bunny told him, “I won’t let you do this to us. Carson, I’m going to get the name of a therapist from Matthew Frey, and you have to go. If you don’t…”

“If I don’t what?”

“I won’t be a witness to this.”

“Bunny, come on…” he pleaded, turning in his seat to look at her, replenished by her presence, ready to forget the gun if he could forget nothing else. “You know…” he began, but she flinched, drew away from him, her back a thud against the passenger side door.

“Don’t touch me.”

“What?”

“Don’t touch me until you’re ready to fight for what we have, fight for our future. Fight for our life.”

“I wouldn’t have…”

“Stop lying,” she screamed, moving even farther away from him. “I could’ve woke up a widow. My children, orphans.”

“Bunny, I just feel…”

“I know what you feel. Don’t you think I see it?” she shouted.

Leaning back in his seat, he told her firmly, “I can figure this out by myself. I just need some time.”

“Like you figured it out after Eric died?”

“Eric’s been dead three years.”

“And for you it’s like it was yesterday. You keep it all to yourself, but I know what you feel. I know how you feel it. I’m your
wife
, Carson.” It was a bitter, urgent harangue delivered in a voice he had never heard, a voice at once edgy and resolute. “We don’t have time—we’ve only got our life, and ten minutes ago you wanted to destroy it.”

“Just give me a few days, a week, to think about it.”

Bunny opened the door and slid out of the car, then took a last look at him, saying, “You’ve run out of time.”

“How has it been for you since the shooting?” Carrie Petersen asks again.

“I can’t sleep. The shooting’s like a tape stuck on Play in my mind all the time.”

“Can you tell me about the shooting, frame by frame as it unfolded, as you saw it in your mind’s eye?”

“If he just hadn’t touched that damn phone,” Carson says, gazing at his hands, taut, gripping his knees as if to stall the possibility of flight. He hasn’t had to tell the story of the shooting in a while, although he’s relived it every moment of every day. He doesn’t know where to begin, but when he finally speaks the words come torrential and fevered. “He’d been speeding with no lights. By the time I caught up with him, by the time he stopped, I was all revved up. You know how it is. You used to be out there. You’re in the cruiser, chasing someone, with no idea who’s in the car. Your body just goes on overload. Everything you feel, whether it’s suspicion or anger or impatience or just ‘What the fuck is going on?’ you feel it so intensely. So by the time he pulled into the strip mall parking lot, I’m wired…He did everything I told him to do at first. But then he starts talking to me like I’m his homey, about his girlfriend and an argument they had and how he was so fucked up about the argument he didn’t even know he was driving with no lights and he didn’t stop because he didn’t think I was following him…And I don’t want to hear this—I want to go home. I want to ticket him and let him go. And then while he’s on the ground with his hands behind his head, he reaches in his waistband for something and then before I can do anything he’s up on his feet. Up on his feet, facing me. I told him to drop whatever it was, and he’s moving toward me. Pointing the object at me. I’m yelling at him and he’s yelling at me and I don’t know how the fuck this has happened. By all rights I coulda shot him the minute he reached in his waistband. But now he’s standing up! He’s facing me! And it’s like he made one step too many. He moved his arm one time too many and I shot him…And it was all in slow motion…So slow, God, it was so slow. I thought surely maybe the bullets could turn around and reenter my gun when I saw him fall back from the force of the first bullet. Time stopped, everything stopped even as it was going forward. Even as the other bullets were being fired. I was suspended and frozen and firing all at the same time. Everything was so big—him, his body as he fell, my gun, my hands. And when I saw the cell phone, God damn, when I saw that he’d had a cell phone I would’ve changed places with him. I would’ve changed places with him.” Carson wipes the tears that have puddled on the bridge of his nose.

“What was going through your mind?”

“Scared. Confused. I could feel every muscle in my body contract.” He pauses. Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, he says, “I hadn’t even had a chance to search him.
I would’ve changed places with him
.”

Carson hides his face in his hands, a damp and humid refuge. Carrie walks over to Carson, touches him gently on the shoulder, and offers him a box of tissues.

“When your wife called me to make an appointment, she told me about the night in the garage.”

“I was depressed. I wasn’t going to kill myself. I love my family—I’d never hurt them like that.”

“Wait a minute,” Carrie explodes dismissively. “You had a gun in your mouth—tell me, what did you think you were going to do?”

When Carson refuses to answer, she asks, “Does your wife know everything you’re feeling?”

“She knows about the nightmares. I can’t talk to her about anything else. I don’t want her to know. I’ve put her through enough.”

“When your wife called me she was frantic. Don’t you think your death would’ve put her through even more?”

“I swear, I
didn’t
want to die.”

“Why do you think you were in your car with your gun?”

“I couldn’t get the cell phone to stop ringing in my head. I couldn’t eat. I kept seeing his face. What kind of father can I be? Can Bunny love me despite what I’ve done? I could go to prison for this. I…didn’t know what else to do.”

“So you didn’t want to die, you just wanted the pain to stop.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Carson, you survived the shooting and even the night in your garage. But you won’t survive the aftermath of either if you don’t change. You’re a closed system, a database of one. This is a cancer inside you, and you’ve got to talk about this or it’ll destroy you.” Carrie Petersen pauses and watches Carson for the effect of her words. “All your nevers have come true,” she says gently, softening her voice. “Most police officers
never
fire their weapon. You have. The shooting is a part of who you are. I know you want to deny that, but it has to be a part of you that you accept, face up to, and own—that’s the only way you’ll be able to move on. I’m here to help you make a new meaning for your life that includes that night, a meaning that you can live with and grow from.”

Carson leaves
Carrie Petersen’s office drained. The pit of his stomach feels hollowed out, and it rumbles noisily. The session has disturbed and dislodged an affliction. Sitting in his car outside Carrie Petersen’s before he drives off, Carson knows this momentary emptiness has merely shifted the malady that tortures him.

On his way back home, he takes an absurdly circuitous route to avoid passing the strip mall where the shooting happened. The barbershop he frequents is in that mall. He needs a haircut, misses the oratorical preening, and jiving, the raucous debate that simmers and boils over in the always-crowded shop. But Carson fears that his entry on a payday Friday would halt all conversation. The regulars and the barbers all know he’s a cop. He’s held forth in their midst about crime in the county and what it takes to do his job. Carson is sure that some of them, the ones who’ve seen his name in the newspaper or the twenty-second report on TV, feel he should be arrested.

The county is in the throes of a development frenzy. So he figures he will never have to go to
that
mall for anything ever again. The strip malls, the stores, most of which are megasize cathedrals to commerce, are addictive and necessary. Even the new churches resemble warehouses: One Fundamentalist denomination simply bought a decaying, largely empty mall, built an auditorium to seat ten thousand, and renamed the mall, which still featured a busy office supply store and a health food emporium, Kingdom Hall. Carson grew up in the county and feels oppressed and slightly alienated by the rolling expansiveness of the economic and commercial growth that has sparked both prosperity and crime. Prince George’s County seems to him now a bedroom community that’s all function and commerce, with little that’s quirky, beautiful, or surprising.

He promised Bunny he’d pick up her clothes at the dry cleaner’s on his way home and then get several rolls of film. Carson slides the pink receipt across the counter and avoids looking at the pudgy, bespectacled Korean youth who greets him with a cheery, heavily accented “Hi, how you today?”

Carson nods and stares at the clock on the wall and the poster touting the environmental and health benefits of the chemical-free solvent used by the cleaners. He’s been coming here for years. Yet today he stands before the young man, who is handing him several of his shirts and Bunny’s silk blouse and two pairs of her slacks, all nerves and prickly with a sudden desire to flee. He takes the plastic-covered clothing, hands the young man a twenty-dollar bill, and without waiting for change turns to leave, bumping into a woman carrying an armful of shirts. A flicker of annoyance burns in her eyes, and is it his imagination or is there recognition in her glance as well? But Carson has never seen this tall, square-jawed woman before. Recognition, yes, that is what he sees, he’s sure of it. Not of him but of what he’s done, the eyes seeing not just his face but the depth of him, the quagmire roiling inside.

At home Carson goes to the basement and sits at his workbench, sees the small tools hung from the Peg-Board nailed to the wall and his larger tools—the sanding block, various clamps and drills, saws, stacked on three shelves. He leans on the cool white surface of his drawing board. He started making cabinets and wooden objects after Eric’s death. Falling apart, he wanted to work with his hands, to build objects that would ground and steady him. Wood beckoned. Working with wood, his hands, and a single, simple vision of an object, he made a keepsake box for Roseanne, a slender three-legged table with a glass top for Bunny to place a small sculpture from Zimbabwe on, a bookcase for Juwan, a table for no reason at all. He was working on his largest project yet in the days before the shooting, a cabinet in Swedish yellow ash. Woodworking is involved, intricate, straightforward, and in some ways simple. There is the deceptively subtle beauty of the cherrywood keepsake box that left Roseanne bereft of speech when he gave it to her for her birthday. Her hands rubbed the box as though a genie were inside, and then she said, “Oh, I love you, Daddy.”

Wood is alive, and, Carson is convinced, it has a soul. When the work is going well, the tools are an extension of himself, making it possible for the wood to speak its mind, to become what it wants to be. The bookcase he had planned to make for Juwan was going to be a simple shelf, but over the weeks of work the cherrywood called out for union with the fragrant scent and tones of juniper wood and demanded a small drawer and high sides. He had thought his son was worthy of a shelf to place his books on. But the act of creation unleashed the possibility for a holder of the boy’s dreams. Carson sits at the workbench, remembering when it was good down here, a stream of shavings curling from the plane in his hands and drifting onto the floor, forming a carpet around his feet. The swish and slide as he rocks to the motion of the work. There is the smell of the wood, which he often gets freshly cut from a dealer in Crofton, never buying from the big hardware chains. He works here in this corner of the basement, content, surrounded by the smells of the wood itself. What he produces is never what he planned. And with the tools, the small knives and the behemoth drills, Carson rounds edges, sands, traces with fingers that read the wood like a book, the grain, heart, and texture of wood, finding so often its real beauty in what seems at first to be its imperfections. Carson looks at the frame of the cabinet, the sight of it swelling his heart. The cabinet is six feet high and one of the doors leans against the wall. He walks slowly over to the door, reaches out to touch it, feels the grain against his palm, like the handshake of a friend, and leans on the wood, his forehead resting on his arm.