The Detective's Garden (10 page)

“I guess so,” she said. “The kids are missing school, aren’t
they?”

“Is your husband inside?” Dominick said.

“He passed away four years ago,” she said.

“Sorry to hear it, Roseanne.” He turned toward his children,
gestured toward the Ford with his thumb and index finger.

“What are you doing up this way?” she said.

“The kids wanted to see the ocean.” He did not turn back to
ward her. He pulled the handle of the door and began to usher
the kids inside.

“You might have picked a warmer month,” Roseanne said.

“Sure,” he said. “You might have picked a friendlier mouth.”

In the afternoon when they got back from the grocery store,
Dominick had his children do exercises on the back lawn while
Clarisse Parish watched. She brought them a tray of sandwich
es. “Anyone for salami and avocado?” She perched a pitcher of
water on the patio and filled blue-lipped glasses.

His kids stood side by side. Syrupy light lit one-half of each
of them. Dominick positioned their feet by pushing them with
his own. He taught them to tighten their stomachs and roll in
their hips. He pushed on their shoulders, quickly, knocking
them over. “Again,” he said, “again,” until the kids’ palms and
knees were green, and their muscles shook, and they were two
child-shaped pools of molasses sucking off the ground.

“Now it’s your turn, Clarke,” Dominick said. “Use my
strength against me. Come at me and get me on the ground.
On the ground, we’re closer to equal. Learn to take me down.”
Dominick spread his legs to shoulder width and tightened his
stomach and rolled his hips inward so that his spine straight
ened. “Go on,” he said, “come after me.”

Clarke felt the twinned impulses, the impossibility of hit
ting his father and the desire to shove him hard enough to hurt.
Clarke thought about his sister in the room at night, asleep and
shaking under the influence of some dream. He reached out
hard. Hard enough that his father ought to have gone over, but
he was like a rock beneath Clarke’s hands. Then Clarke struck
again, harder, but when his hands reached his father, Dominick
folded backward, pulling Clarke with him. Clarke’s toes ripped
the grass out by the roots, but he had gotten strong, and he dug
his shoes in and steeled his arms and held out, pulling back.
He watched his father’s brow wrinkle in surprise but before he
could begin to feel any sense of pride or triumph he was lifted
up and slammed back into the ground and his father had some
how swiveled around on top of him, his forearm pushed against
the back of Clarke’s neck. Then King launched herself at her
father like a rag doll and draped herself over his chest and neck
and wormed her thin white arms into her father’s armpits and
tickled. When Dominick smiled, King began to laugh.

Dominick took hold of his daughter and positioned her el
bow around Clarke’s neck in a blood hold. He prodded Clarke
in the side. “Doesn’t matter that you’re big,” he said. “If King
squeezed you’d be unconscious in seconds.” He took Clarke’s
elbow and wrapped it around his own neck. Clarke squeezed
and Dominick’s face reddened. “It doesn’t matter how big I am,
either,” Dominick said.

He lined them up and had his kids strike out at him, their
slow fists caught and twisted until a whole child lofted forward
and over his outstretched leg and into the air. Dominick caught
them and lowered them to the flat grass where they stood rub
bing their arms. He did not stop until his children’s bodies
began to shake violently.

“Sit down,” Dominick said.

Clarke said, “I’m gonna keep going.”

“I don’t want you to keep going.”

“How else am I going to know what to do?” spat Clarke.

“Okay,” his father said. “The next thing you need to learn to
do is run.” He pointed to the end of the line of houses along the
shoreline and to the wooden staircase. He had Clarke sprint up
and down the beach while he timed his son with a wristwatch.

AS HE DROVE
the D.C. beltway, Charlie Basin called
Dominick’s sister Annie Sawyer in Rockford, Illinois. She had a
sweet voice, calm and self-assured. Charlie liked talking to her
and stayed on the line longer than he needed to. She said she
hadn’t heard from her brother. She asked what Dom might have
done. She sounded concerned and protective. Charlie believed
her and he liked that he believed her. He liked the person he
was when he chose to believe people.

Traffic on the beltway moved haltingly. When Charlie got
off the phone with Annie Sawyer, he dialed the number for
Duke University Hospital. Why hadn’t anyone told him that
Charlene had been seeing a therapist? Would he have wanted
to know? Why didn’t she want to speak with him now? Charlie
had never understood what a father ought to say to his daugh
ter. She had always been so angry. Was it his fault? What of his
life was he supposed to share? What was he supposed to live
with alone?

The phone rang at his ear until someone picked up the line.
Charlie asked to speak with Charlene Basin, a patient on the
psychiatric unit.

“Hello, Dad,” she said. She spoke too quietly. She dropped
the ends of her words. “What’s going on?”

“Just driving the beltway,” he said. The gray-green station
wagon in front of him had left its right turn signal on for the
last twenty miles.

She didn’t say anything. He could hear a slight mucusy catch
in her breathing. “I can’t do this,” she said. He waited until she
spoke again. “I don’t want it, Dad.”

“Don’t want what?”

“Whatever you have to say.”

“I’m not okay with that, Charlene,” Charlie said. “I talked to
Oswell the other day. He tell you I called?”

“He did.”

Brake lights glowed red before him. Traffic began to slow.
She wasn’t going to tell him anything. “He said you’re seeing
somebody new. Dating. It might be serious.”

“I don’t know,” Charlene said.

“What’s his name? Tell me what he’s like.”

“He’s okay. His name is Kurt.”

“Charlene,” said Charlie, “I might drive down this weekend.
Would that be okay?”

“It’s a long way from D.C. to Durham.”

“I know it’s a long way,” Charlie said.

“I’m pretty busy. I’m trying to pull my life together in here.”

“I’m pretty busy, too.”

“Dad,” Charlene said, “I’m trying to find a nice way to say
that I don’t want you to come.”

A MIST FELL
outside the windows of the garage apart
ment. The kids stood inside the glass. They could see nothing
clearly. Behind them Dominick walked shirtless to the single
closet. His skin was the tan of desert. The floor creaked beneath
his weight. He was banded with muscle. He had the body of
a man who’d run miles with a weighted rucksack and crawled
under fences on his stomach and sweat and bled and carried
heavy weaponry. He stopped in the middle of the floor and be
gan to shake. He dropped to his knees as though someone had
pushed him. The floor shook hard and the kids turned from
the window and Dominick pushed back at whatever pushed at
him until his body calmed and his knees unbent. He swept his
hair back. He smiled at the kids until they turned back to the
window.

Clarke and King watched two old women argue in the rain.
Clarisse wore a patterned scarf knotted around her neck. The
old neighbor wore her dark bathrobe. The neighbor gestured
toward the garage with the burning point of her cigarette. The
old women’s mouths opened into small dark holes. King’s hand
crept over toward Clarke and latched on to his arm and Clarke
felt his sister’s need of him spider across his skin.

Their father pulled a shirt off a hanger and pulled it on.
“Dad,” Clarke said, “you better look at this.”

“I don’t need to look at it.” Dominick pulled his socks on
hard enough that the kids could hear the heels tear.

“Yes, you do,” Clarke said.

“We were never going to stay here forever.”

The fog thickened until they could no longer see out the
windows. Wet chilly air worked its way through the cracks
around the door, along the windowsills, and, more slowly,
through the walls. They played Chinese checkers. Dominick
went out and came back with fried chicken and coleslaw. He
put his kids to bed and lay on the sofa and listened to the grad
ual evening of their breath. When they were asleep, he went
out. The cold wind on the beach chapped his face. He walked
the beach and the water ran under the soles of his boots. He
retreated. Lights winked out along the line of houses. The air
blew and his pants and shirt began to whip around him. Short
trees bent landward. The surf began to crash. He looked out
over the ocean and couldn’t see what pushed the wind. A great
black mass stretched over the water. He pulled up the hood of
his sweatshirt. His heart pounded. He counted the beats. He
knelt in the sand and water welled in the shallow depressions.

Dominick couldn’t see very much after the dark set upon
him. Clouds rushed in and covered what was left of the sky.
He wet a finger and held it up to test the direction of the wind
but it came toward him from all sides. Everything before him
was indistinct but loud. The gathering waves. The water rising
up into some huge form, leaning over him like a great tower
waiting to fall.

WHEN KING HAD
swelled like a soft tick inside Sarah’s
belly, Dominick was on a two-month leave. He’d been sent to
a twenty-week training course in military free-fall operations:
survival, evasion, resistance and escape, marksmanship, and ad
vanced navigation. Then he’d been promoted to sergeant in the
Regimental Reconnaissance Detachment, Seventy-Fifth Rang
er Regiment, and sent to Kosovo. By the time he got back, he’d
forgotten what it was like to be stuck inside a cabin.

At home, Dominick and Sarah argued about his going back
to the army, and they argued about King coming. He said he
wanted to serve his country, that he loved what he did. He said
the A-frame cabin felt too small for four. She said he’d barely
been home enough to know Clarke. His hands were more com
fortable holding a rifle than a child.

Dominick sat at the kitchen table while Sarah washed dish
es. Her hands dipping into the water and out again, covered in
soap bubbles. Her yellow apron wrapped around her. Her voice
reasonable as he argued for abortion.

“No,” she said. She stood in front of the sink. Water beaded
on the silver lip of the faucet. Heat blew in the open window
and the curtains lifted like long white arms. He lost himself
then. The desert heat rose in his face. His heart pounded hard
as gunfire. He reached out and picked her up by the neck and
slung her across the room. A bar stool skittered away. Utensils
scattered across the floor. She caught herself and held one hand
over her belly and looked up at him with graceful cheekbones
and fair skin. Her head cocked to one side as though she was lis
tening. She wasn’t afraid as he was afraid. Sometimes he felt like
he was always afraid. This pissed him off. She reached up her
hand to him. Her fingers were long and slender, the nail beds
little perfect half-moons. He reached out for her, and picked
her up, and spun his body clockwise, and threw her again, and
she was spinning blindly through the air above the countertop
in the way that their whole lives were spinning, and when it all
stopped for a moment, he looked down at her and months had
passed. She had landed in the hospital bed, holding the child
he hadn’t wanted, free of the bruises he’d left. A fat healthy
child. So quietly regal. Kingsley. Her tiny eyes roved the room,
moving across the great stretch of her father again and again,
and Dominick wanted her so bad, wanted to lift her up, and
hold her above his head, and take her out of the room, and show
her to each nurse so that every one of them could marvel at
her healthy rolls of fat, and her alertness, and her mess of wild
dark hair, and the grip, my God!, that hurt when she latched
her hand around your finger and squeezed. Dominick looked
into those wet blue eyes and knew that certain mistakes were
unpardonable, that certain errors would echo forever inside the
four chambers of his life.