Long Bright River: A Novel (4 page)

Homicide doesn’t contact us the next day, or the next day, or the next.

Two weeks go by. Ahearn keeps partnering me with Eddie Lafferty. I miss Truman. I even miss the solo duty that succeeded his leave. It’s unusual, these days, to be partnered long-term—the budget is tight, and one-man cars are becoming increasingly common—but Truman and I made a compelling case as a pair. We worked so well together that our responses were practically choreographed, and our productivity was unmatched in the district. I doubt very much that Eddie Lafferty and I will be able to duplicate that rapport. Every day, now, I listen to him tell me about his food preferences, his music preferences, his political affiliations. I listen to him rant about ex-wife number three, and then about millennials, and then about the elderly. I am, if it is possible, even quieter than I was to begin with.

We switch over to B-shift, working four p.m. to midnight, tired all the time.

I miss my son.

Several times—possibly too many—I ask Sergeant Ahearn about the woman we found on the Tracks. Has she been IDed, I want to know. Has a cause of death been declared? Does Homicide want to speak to us further?

Again and again, he shakes me off.

One Monday, mid-November—it’s been nearly a month since we discovered the body—I walk up to Ahearn at the start of my shift. He’s
inserting paper into the copy machine. Before I can say anything, he whirls on me and says, No.

—I’m sorry? I say.

—No news.

I pause. No autopsy results? I say. Nothing?

—Why are you so interested? he says.

He is looking at me with an odd expression, almost a smile. As if he’s teasing me, as if he has something on me. It’s very unsettling. Except with Truman, I never talk about Kacey at work, and I have no intention of starting today.

—I just think it’s strange, I say. It’s been so long since we found the body. Just very strange that there’s nothing on her, don’t you think?

Ahearn lets out a long breath. He places his hand on the copy machine.

—Look, Mickey, he says. This is Homicide’s territory, not mine. But I did hear that the autopsy results came back inconclusive. And since the vic is still unidentified, I imagine it’s probably not top of their list.

—You’re joking, I say, before I can stop myself.

—Serious as a heart attack, says Ahearn. A saying he likes and uses often.

He turns back to the copy machine.

—She was strangled, I say. I saw it with my own eyes.

Ahearn goes quiet. I know I’m pushing him. He doesn’t like to be pushed. He stands there for a while with his back to me, hands on hips, waiting for his copies to finish. He says nothing.

Truman would tell me, in this moment, to walk away. Politics, he used to tell me. It’s all politics, Mick. Find the right person and buddy up to them. Buddy up to Ahearn if you have to. Just protect yourself.

But I have never been able to do this, though several times I have tried, in my way: I know that Ahearn very much likes coffee, and so once or twice I’ve brought coffee for him, for example, and once, for Christmas, even a bag of beans from a local shop next door to Thomas’s old nursery school.

—What is this, Ahearn said.

—Coffee beans, I said.

—They make you grind them yourself these days? Ahearn said.

—Yes, I said.

—I don’t have one of those, said Ahearn.

—Ah, I said. Well, maybe for next Christmas.

He had smiled, stiffly, and said not to worry about it, and thanked me politely.

Unfortunately, those efforts did not seem to thaw relations between us. And Ahearn is the leader of my platoon, and as such he rotates with me from A-shift to B-shift and back again, and is generally the sergeant I report to nine times out of ten. The officers he favors are people who buddy up to him, mostly men, people who ask for his opinion or advice and then listen carefully, nodding while he dispenses it. I have seen Eddie Lafferty doing this very thing, actually. I can picture them both on their high school baseball team: Ahearn the leader, Lafferty the follower. At work, this is a dynamic that seems to suit them both. So maybe Lafferty, actually, is smarter than he seems.

When the copies are done, Ahearn takes them out and drops the edge of the stack against the copier a few times, evening the pile.

I’m still standing there, silent, waiting for a response.
Walk away, Mick,
I hear Truman saying in my ear.

Ahearn turns, abruptly, toward me. His face is not happy.

—Talk to Homicide if you have any more questions, he says, and strides past me.

But I know what will happen if I do. No concerned telefriendly parents means no media coverage. No media coverage means no case. Just another dead junkie hooker on Kensington Ave. Nothing to worry about too much for the folks on Rittenhouse Square.

All shift, I’m upset, and quieter than ever.

Even Lafferty notices something is off. He’s drinking a coffee in the passenger’s seat. He keeps glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.

—You okay? he says to me, eventually.

I look straight ahead. I don’t want to speak badly about Sergeant Ahearn to him. I’m still not certain how close they are, but their history together makes me tight-lipped when it comes to my feelings. I decide, instead, to frame things more generally.

—Just frustrated, I say.

—What’s up? says Lafferty.

—That woman we found on the Tracks last month, I say.

—Yeah?

—The autopsy results came back for her.

Lafferty sips from his coffee. His lip curls at the heat.

—I heard that, he says.

—Inconclusive, I say.

He says nothing.

—Can you believe that? I say.

Lafferty shrugs.

—That’s above my pay grade, I guess, he says.

I look at him.

—You saw her too, I say. You saw what I saw.

Lafferty goes quiet for once, looking out the window. Two minutes go by in silence.

Then he says, Maybe it’s not a bad thing.

I pause. I want to make sure I understand him correctly.

—Don’t get me wrong, he says. It’s a shame when anyone dies. But what kind of life.

I freeze. I don’t trust myself to respond yet. I focus on the road ahead of me for a while.

I consider, briefly, telling him about Kacey. Embarrassing him, perhaps. Making him feel bad. But before I can, he begins shaking his head slowly from side to side.

—These girls, he says. He looks at me and puts one finger to his right temple, taps it twice.
Stupid,
is what he means.
No sense.

I set my jaw.

—What do you mean by that, I say quietly.

Lafferty looks at me, eyebrows raised. I look back at him. I can feel my face getting hot. It’s been a problem of mine my whole life. My face turns bright red when I’m angry or embarrassed or sometimes even pleased. It’s an unhappy trait in a police officer.

—What do you mean by that? I say again. You said,
These girls.
What does that mean?

—I don’t know, says Lafferty. Just.

He gestures around with his hands, surveying the landscape. I just feel bad for them, that’s all.

—I don’t think that’s what you meant, I say. But all right.

—Hey, says Lafferty. Hey. I didn’t mean to offend anybody.

When we were small, there was a field trip for certain fourth- and fifth-graders to see
The Nutcracker
in Center City. I was eleven then, old for my grade, and Kacey was nine.

In those years, I was almost silent in school. When I did speak, it was at a very low volume, such that Gee used to tell me, with frequency, to talk louder, as did most of my teachers. I had few friends. At recess, I read. I rejoiced when inclement weather forced us to stay indoors.

Kacey, conversely, made friends every place she went. She was little and fierce then, light-haired, with strong limbs and a brow she mainly kept lowered. She had buckteeth that she often strained to cover with an upper lip. Around friends, she was affable and funny. Generally, our peers were drawn to her. But she also made enemies: mainly those who targeted the weak, who swapped cruelty to others for social cachet, a bargain that, from a young age, Kacey disdained. She had a habit, therefore, of pointing out these injustices where they occurred, and then rising ardently and often violently to the defense of those in her class who were lowest in the pecking order—even, her teachers argued, when it wasn’t warranted, or when those classmates didn’t want or need Kacey’s protection. It was for this reason that Kacey had recently gotten kicked out of Holy Redeemer (the irony of the name was not, even then, lost on me), which meant that both of us were kicked out, because Gee didn’t want us in two separate schools.

This was, for me, a misfortune. I had liked Holy Redeemer. I had advocates there: two teachers, one a layperson and one a nun, who had
taken a particular interest in me and my abilities, who had cut through my shyness and seen something in me that they had painstakingly drawn out over the course of several years. And who had, separately, of their own volition, told Gee that they thought I was gifted. Though I was gratified by this—though it justified for me the mild vanity I have always possessed about my own intelligence—there was also a part of me, at that time, that wished they hadn’t. Because to Gee, gifted meant
uppity
, and if I wasn’t punished for it, well, I was certainly looked at askance for a while.

When Kacey got into her final fight, the one that got us expelled, Gee had stood in front of us, glowering, as we sat on the couch.

—
You,
she said, nodding toward me, need to keep an eye on
her,
she said, nodding toward Kacey. So we both went to the local public school on Frankford instead, with all the children whose parents were too poor or dysfunctional to keep them in parish schools. Maybe, I supposed, this meant that Gee was, too.

In our new grade school, Hanover, Kacey was immediately and unsurprisingly adopted by a group of other outgoing students, and I was immediately forgotten about. There, shy children went through their days unexamined. Any student who didn’t make the life of her teacher more complicated was generally praised once or twice for good behavior and then allowed to fade quietly to the back of the classroom. It was, no doubt, not entirely our teachers’ fault. Our classrooms were full to capacity, thirty generally rowdy students in a small space. It was all they could do to survive.

Still: being at Hanover was the only reason we were going to see
The Nutcracker.
Sometimes Philadelphia’s public school students had things given to them in a way that parish school children did not. The city bestowed upon its public schools charity of various kinds: coats, meant to keep us warm in winter; school supplies, meant to keep us engaged in our classwork; cultural outings, meant to allow us a few hours to ponder
the large questions of life that are usually reserved for the idle rich. In this case, the outing was a prize awarded to students who sold the most wrapping paper in an annual fund-raiser—a challenge Kacey and I had taken very seriously, going door to door every weekend all fall. In fact, we had come in first and second place.

I, for one, was delighted.

I had worn a dress that day, my only dress, which Gee had brought home from Village Thrift in a rare moment of frivolity. The dress was beautiful, I thought: a blue cotton summer dress with white flowers on the bodice. But it was two years old by then and far too small, and over it, Gee had forced me to wear a boy’s blue parka that had belonged to Bobby, a cousin of ours on our mother’s side. It hadn’t ever been washed, this jacket. It was salt-stained and slightly acrid-smelling, like Bobby himself. Beneath it, the dress looked stupid: I knew this even then. But I had never been to a ballet before, and I don’t know why, but I wanted to demonstrate my respect, to acknowledge in some way the gravity of the occasion. So I wore it, and I wore the blue parka on top of it, and after lunch I waited in a long school hallway for the buses to arrive, standing in line with everyone else, reading my book.

Kacey, just ahead of me, was as usual surrounded by friends.

When it was time to board, I followed my sister up the steps of the vehicle, and then followed her toward the back of the bus, and sat down one seat behind her. It was a choice meant to assure my peers of my independence and myself of Kacey’s proximity. Her presence in any situation, familial or educational, tended to reassure me.

There was a bright and funny music teacher that year, Mr. Johns, who had orchestrated the whole thing. He was young—probably younger than I am today—and the next year he was snatched up by a better school in the suburbs. As the buses approached City Hall, he stood up at the front of ours and clapped his hands twice and then held his right hand up in the air, two fingers extended, the sign that was supposed to mean
quiet.
Everyone was then obliged to return the salute. As usual, I waited until someone else did it first, and then raised my hand into the air, relieved.

—Listen up, said Mr. Johns. What are the rules we talked about in class?

—Don’t talk! someone shouted.

—One, said Mr. Johns, holding up a thumb.

—Don’t kick the seat in front of you! said the same person.

—Okay, said Mr. Johns. Not one of the ones we mentioned, but true.

Tentatively, he held up a second finger.

—Anyone else? he said.

I knew an answer. It was
Wait to clap until you hear others clapping.
I didn’t say it.

—Wait to clap until you hear others clapping, said Mr. Johns.

—Number four, sit still, said Mr. Johns.

—Number five, no whispering with your friends, said Mr. Johns. No giggling. No squirming around in your seat like a kindergartner.

He had told us all the story of the ballet in music class the week before. In it, a little girl lives in a mansion, he said. This is in the olden days, he said, so everyone onstage will be wearing old-fashioned clothes.

He paused to think.

—Also, the men wear tights, he said, so get over it in advance. The little girl’s parents have a Christmas party and invite her spooky uncle, who’s actually a good guy, and he gives her a doll. It’s called a nutcracker, and you can go ahead and get over that too. That night she falls asleep and has a long dream and that’s the rest of the ballet, he said. The nutcracker doll comes to life and becomes a prince and he fights off giant mice, takes her to a land of snowflakes, and then takes her to a place I forget the name of. It’s like Candy Land. The little girl and the prince watch while a few different dances are performed. The end, said Mr. Johns.

—Does she go back to real life after that? asked a boy in my class.

—I forget, said Mr. Johns. I think so.

We had grown up less than three miles from the center of Philadelphia, but we only went there once a year, on New Year’s Day, to watch a dozen of our cousins and uncles and uncles’ bosses and uncles’ friends march in the Mummers Parade. It is possible, therefore, that I had laid eyes on the Academy of Music before—it’s right on Broad Street, part of the parade route—but I had certainly never been inside it. It’s a pretty brick building with high, arched windows and old-fashioned lanterns that burn unflaggingly near its front doors.

As we filed off the bus, our teachers lined up along the edge of the sidewalk, inserting themselves between the students and the traffic, ushering us with mittened or gloved hands into the lobby.

Again, I trailed Kacey, who, I noticed, was scuffing her feet: I could hear it on the sidewalk. Gee would be mad at her later. Kacey was like this, always: doing what she shouldn’t do, demanding a rebuke, daring the adults in her life to come down harder and harder on her, testing the limits of their anger. Whenever I could, I tried to distract her from this pursuit, hating to watch the punishment she inevitably received.

We entered the lobby and were stopped by the crowd. Today, what I remember most is the number of little girls who were there with their mothers, right in the middle of a school day. They were the same age as us, or a little younger. Every one of them was white. In comparison, our school group looked like the United Nations. They’d come in from the Main Line: I knew this even then. They were wearing beautiful knee-length coats in bright colors and, beneath them, dresses that looked like they were made for dolls: frilled, satin, silk, velvet, lace-trimmed and puff-sleeved. In them, they looked like jewels or flowers or stars. They wore white tights and black, polished, patent-leather Mary Janes, all of them, as if they were following some rule that only they knew about. Many of them had their hair pulled back tightly into buns, the kind I would later see the ballerinas wearing.

There were sixty or eighty Hanover grade school students in the lobby. We were clogging it. We didn’t know where to go.

—Go on ahead, said Mr. Johns, but he, too, looked uncertain. Finally an usher came over to him, smiling, and asked if he was from the Hanover grade school, and he looked relieved and said yes.

—Right this way, said the usher.

We filed by those girls and their mothers, who stared back at us, openmouthed, even the grown-ups. They stared at our puffy down jackets, our sneakers, our hair. It occurred to me that the mothers, too, must have taken the day off from their jobs. What did not cross my mind then was the possibility that they did not work at all. Every grown woman I knew had a job—or, more often, multiple jobs. About half of the men did.

I will never forget the moment the curtain rose. From the start, I was transfixed. There was snow—real snow, it seemed to me—falling onto the stage. Nothing could have prepared me for this. The exterior, and then the interior, of a large and beautiful house was shown, and inside that house were well-dressed children who were tended to by well-dressed adults. The children were given beautiful presents and then entertained by a series of life-sized doll-dancers. When the children fought, they were lovingly and carefully separated by parents more bemused than angry. There was a real orchestra playing in the pit. I felt in my own body the beautiful alien movements of the dancers on the stage, and in the music I heard strains of melody that revealed to me secrets I had never known about the world. I was, in fact, so moved that I began to cry: a fact I tried to keep hidden from the children around me. I let my tears fall silently down my face in the darkened theater. I tried not to sniff.

Soon, though, it became difficult to concentrate, for in the rows full of Hanover students, a mutiny was beginning.

To be fair, none of us had ever been taught to sit still for so long. Even at school there were breaks, many of them, from all this stillness. The other Hanover students knew they were supposed to be grateful, and they wanted to be good for Mr. Johns, but they didn’t know how to be. They fidgeted and whispered and broke every rule. Mr. Johns and the seven other teachers there leaned forward, often, to turn and glare. They
pointed to their eyes and then at their students.
I’m watching you.
All of us had been taught many things in our lives: to do as we were told, to entertain ourselves, to shut up, to be absent. But never to sit in one place and watch something slow and abstract for three hours. It wasn’t a skill that most of us had.

Kacey, next to me, was losing it. She was squirming. One moment she hugged her knees, and the next she dropped her legs down against the chair with a thump. She lolled her head from side to side. She poked my shoulder, idly, and I elbowed her.
Ow,
Kacey whispered. She yawned with vigor. She pretended to fall asleep and wake up several times in a row.

There was a girl our age in front of Kacey, one of the ones we had seen in the lobby, her hair in a neat bun, her red dress coat folded tidily over the back of her seat. Her mother’s perfume had wafted back toward us when we first sat down. After a particularly violent motion from Kacey, the little girl glanced back at her, just once, and then whipped her head toward the stage once more.

Kacey leaned forward.

—
What are you looking at,
she whispered, right into the girl’s ear. I froze, watching as the girl edged nervously toward her mother, pretending not to have heard; then watching as Kacey, behind her, formed a fist and raised it. And for a strange and perfect moment, I thought that she would strike: I could see it happening, my sister’s hand colliding with the tense muscles at the back of the girl’s neck. Quickly, I reached out my hand to stop her. But the girl’s mother turned around at that moment, and—upon seeing Kacey’s pose—her mouth opened into a horrified O; and then Kacey, ashamed, lowered her hand. Then she settled back into her seat, tired, helpless. Resigned to something that neither of us, before that day, had understood.

Today, I’m not certain whether it was that girl’s mother who got us kicked out, or whether our teachers collectively decided to remove us. All I know is that, at intermission, we were herded back through a
crowded lobby, back past those girls and their mothers, who were now waiting in long lines for sweets, back to our yellow buses, our furious teachers beckoning us along.

I had been wearing my cousin Bobby’s jacket the whole time, but at the last minute I removed it. As an adult, I am able to understand that this didn’t make sense: we were exiting into the cold. But I think, as a child, I wanted to signal to the other balletgoers in the lobby that I understood, that I had dressed up for the occasion, that I belonged there. That I was one of them. I’ll be back, I was saying, with my too-small cotton dress. Someday I’ll be back.