Ask Again, Yes (35 page)

As she blotted and scrubbed the stain on the carpet, as she blocked out the pitch of Molly’s impatient howls, as Peter snored on the couch and the television blared, she wondered if, in fact, she had no idea what a problem looked like.

The next morning, at breakfast, she found she couldn’t think of a way to begin. As he waited at the counter for the coffee to brew, she asked lightly if he was feeling hung over. She told him about coming downstairs to find that stain, that for a second she thought it was blood.

“Hung over?” he repeated, folding his arms across his chest. She could sense his hackles rising.

“You had kind of a lot to drink.”

Again, he looked puzzled. And privately, she understood. He’d not had any more than any other night, really, and so, for him, this conversation was coming out of the blue. It was only for her that something had
changed. It happened while she was scrubbing the carpet, her heart racing like something terrible had happened. It was as if some blurry thing that had been hovering in the margins before finally stepped into view.

“Did the stain come out?” he asked. “I’ll get at it with vinegar later.” It was the sort of practical information he knew: for red wine try warm water and vinegar, plus a little dish soap.

“Might be too late for vinegar,” Kate said. “But, Peter—”

He looked at her as if he already knew what she was going to say.

“You’ve been going pretty hard lately. Did you really have to open that second bottle of wine? The kids need to get to the sitter early this morning. I have to be at the lab by eight.”

“And I’m up, right? I said I’d drop them and I’ll drop them.” He moved his broad body around her as he reached for his favorite mug, as he grabbed the handle of the coffeepot. And it was true: She knew she’d never have to worry. He’d get them where they were supposed to be exactly on time.

After that, Kate watched more closely, and all that did was make him cagier. He drank less when she was awake, and more after she went to bed. The number of drinks he’d had in a given day was always hanging over them, a tally kept by Kate. She never used to look in their recycling bin, but she started looking, and every Thursday morning when she peeked under the lid, it was full to the brim.

He saw her doing it once. He watched from the garage, probably curious why she’d gotten out of her car.

She gestured toward the bin and from the end of the driveway she called to him. “It’s too much, Peter. I know you know that it’s too much.”

There’d been a simple arithmetic to life, two and two equaled four. But slowly, as years went by and the kids got older, started school, she often couldn’t make things compute. He was still sleeping beside her at night,
unless he was on a midnight tour. They were still doing steak on Sundays, pizza on Fridays. They still walked the same routes around the house, doing the same things they’d always done, more or less, but lately she felt a poverty of something—happiness, she supposed—deep inside her ribs, the place were she used to feel her joy spill over. What they’d told each other when they got married was still true, at least for her. She wanted to work, come home to him, discuss their days, eat meals together, go to bed. She wanted to watch a movie on the weekend, maybe go for a long walk, maybe go out to dinner, maybe see friends. She wanted to be able to tell him anything and have him tell her everything. And there were some weeks, still, when they did just that. If they could do all those things and pay their bills and not dread going to work each morning, coming home each night, then that was a life. That was a great life, in Kate’s view. What else could there be? If they reminded themselves that these small things were enough, she believed, then they’d always be okay. So that was part of their vows, all those years ago when they climbed the steps of city hall on a Tuesday morning, the first appointment of the day. They vowed to live simply and honestly and to always be kind to each other. To be partners.

But ever since the math stopped adding up, Kate was constantly puzzling over a problem that was so abstract that it was like trying to pin down a fog.

If she were at work and having this much trouble knowing the right thing to do, she would simply hand all the data to a colleague and ask for another opinion. But asking for an opinion on his particular problem meant betraying Peter, telling people things about him, about them. She couldn’t tell her sisters, her mother. She certainly couldn’t tell her father. Whenever she seemed even vaguely critical of Peter, he reminded her that she could always leave him, come back home, her bedroom was there waiting for her. The kids could sleep in Nat and Sara’s old room.

“Are you happy?” her mother had asked her just a few months ago. Kate had taken the kids to Gillam for a visit. Peter tried not to go to
Gillam if he could help it, and that morning said what he always said, that he wanted to get things done around their house. He insisted it didn’t bother him to be there, didn’t bother him to see his old house decked out in beige when it used to be blue. Didn’t bother him that the cement steps his father had poured had been replaced with flagstones. And Kate could believe that it didn’t bother him because everything he said made sense: The house looked so different he felt no attachment to it. And it was all such a long time ago. Yet it took something out of him, each time they went, whether he realized it or not. People recognized him there. They stopped him on the street and said it was so good to see him, asked how he’d been, said what a great kid he was and how nice it was now to see him grown, happy, a family man. Kate would think about how lovely it was to be welcomed home despite everything, that a native son is always a native son, but she’d turn to Peter and see that he was struggling to nod and smile and accept their greetings. No one ever asked for his mother or his father, and one time, when he pointed that out to Kate as the reason he found the encounters so exhausting, everyone dancing around what was there in front of them, Kate said that was out of respect for him, that they didn’t want Peter to think they’d lumped him with those people.

Some of the retired cops knew he was on the job, and when they heard he was a captain, they said immediately how lucky Peter was to have come up at Francis Gleeson’s feet. They were happy for him, Kate always pointed out. They didn’t mean anything by it. “I know that,” Peter always said, and denied that it bothered him, though for hours after he didn’t pay much attention to anything anyone said. He and Francis were often in the same room together, but rarely alone. They would either sit in silence or else talk about the mayor, or football, or whether composite decking was worth the money. What was wrong with real wood?

Most visits, Peter avoided leaving the Gleesons’ house at all. Lena once asked him to run up to Food King for something she forgot for their dinner—Kate and her sisters were occupied chopping and stirring
and basting—and he went pale, stock-still. “I’ll go,” Kate said, grabbing the keys off the counter and giving him a quick kiss on the cheek. After leaving Gillam, he’d be near silent for days. Gradually, she began visiting on her own. On holidays they either hosted in Floral Park or went to one of Kate’s sisters’ houses.

“Your father and I—we don’t think you seem that happy lately,” Lena said to Kate.

“Of course I’m happy,” Kate had snapped.

The first time he came home drunk in the middle of the day, a Saturday, she was so surprised that she’d laughed, despite her growing worry. Later, she was haunted by that laugh, what it said about her. Molly was around four years old, Frankie was six. He’d walked to the hardware store, claiming he needed something for the Christmas lights, and he stayed out for four hours. When he came home he was chatty, smiley, said he’d run into someone there. He’d grabbed her around the waist and pressed his face to her neck.

“Are you drunk?” she blurted. What harm? He’d run into someone. It was almost Christmas. It felt at least a little healthier that he’d gone out, that he’d been with people. Any setting was better than their dark house in the middle of the night.

It didn’t happen again for several weeks. But then it started happening more often, and she began heading him off at the door when he came home from errands just so she could check him, see if he would be strange around the kids. One time she made him go up to bed and stay there though it was only five o’clock in the afternoon because her sisters were coming, and she wouldn’t know how to explain it to them, so instead she told them he was sick. He once told her a cop could spot the drunk drivers not by how reckless they were but by how careful. Both hands on the wheel, never breaking the speed limit, until—oops—the
car strayed over the double yellow for just an instant. She thought of that on the nights when he set out plates for supper—how careful, how deliberate. Or when he asked about her day, the way he neatly lined one word after another and made the right shapes with his mouth.

And then, on a random Thursday, Peter was a full ten hours late getting home, and Kate figured that he’d taken a double and forgotten to call. He usually ate his dinner at breakfast when he came home in the morning, so after feeding the kids she’d taken a pork chop out of the freezer. He still wasn’t home by the time she had to leave for work, so she left and forgot about him, but when she got home in the late afternoon and saw the meat still sitting on a plate on the counter, long defrosted, she worried. When he finally came home, his shirt untucked, his face haggard and older than it was twenty-four hours earlier, she knew something had happened.

“Katie,” he said, nearly stumbling into the house. He clutched his hair with both hands and then reached for her.

“What happened?” she said. “Tell me quick.”

Her father showed up that night without invitation. Kate was on the love seat with the kids, looking at an animal encyclopedia Frankie had brought home from school, pretending that the three of them were home alone, that Daddy was still at work. Kate kept her voice light so that they wouldn’t know how violently her heart was beating, that her hands were clammy, that she felt short of breath. She looked up from the book and saw her father’s crooked stance silhouetted in the doorway. She must have sighed or made some other kind of sound because both kids looked at her, curious, and she had to clench her whole body to stop from
crying when he opened her door. What meddlesome old-timer had given his former lieutenant a call, knowing the connection? Or maybe they were always calling him, giving him weekly reports. She could imagine the fight at home when he told Lena he’d be taking the car and driving all the way to Long Island. And in the dark, no less. When he stepped inside her house, he looked around so calmly that Kate wondered for a split second whether he’d come for some other reason.

“This is a surprise,” she said, working hard to make her voice steady. He couldn’t solve this problem any more than she could, and yet she felt all the blood inside her body heave with relief when he went down on one knee, held his arms out for the children.

“Pop Pop!” Frankie and Molly cried out, running to him.

Later, once she was sure the kids were asleep, she made him a cup of tea, but he refused to sit.

“We’ll figure it out,” she said, sipping her tea as if it were any evening of her life.

“Where is he, anyway?”

“I don’t understand why you came all this way. It was a rough day. He’s exhausted. Yes, he discharged his weapon in the line of duty. He’s a wreck about it, but no one got hurt.”

“By the grace of God. Or by dumb luck. One or the other.”

Kate agreed, but silently. All evening long she’d been picturing the alternate universe where he’d injured someone, or worse.

“What’s going on with him, Kate?”

“Nothing.” Kate busied herself by brushing crumbs from the table into her cupped hand. “I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss about.”

Francis looked stricken. “What if he’d killed someone? What the hell was he doing? Do you know if he’d hit someone, his name would be on
the front page of every paper tomorrow morning? There’d be protests at city hall. They’d crucify him. And they’d be right. They’d be absolutely right.”

“I know that, Dad. But he didn’t.” Kate sat on her hands so he wouldn’t see them trembling.

“Where is he? I want to talk to him.” Francis had looked into the bedroom upstairs when he went up to kiss the kids good night. He’d looked into the little den off the living room, where they had a small couch. He’d opened the door to the garage and flipped on the light. Finally, all his glancing around stopped when he considered the basement door.

“Just leave him alone,” Kate said. She made a half-hearted attempt to block the door, but Francis pushed by her and leaned heavily on the railing as he made his way down the long, dark staircase.

“Peter,” Francis said, standing over him. The air was stale down there, and the television was tuned to the channel that seemed to always be playing the 1986 World Series, the series that, Peter had once told Kate, taught him that anything was possible. He was sound asleep with his mouth open. There was an open bottle tucked between the couch and the chair.

Francis glanced all around the room. “How long has this been going on?”

Kate refused to answer.

“Bobby Gilmartin’s son says they’ve been covering for him.”

Peter shifted and kept snoring.

“That’s not true. Don’t make it worse.”

“It is true, Kate.” Francis peered at her with his one good eye. “Believe it.”

They were like old-time telephone operators, these old cops. They knew everything and discussed everything and never for a moment imagined they weren’t still cops, even if, like Francis Gleeson, they’d turned in their shields decades ago. She was furious at her father, at all of them, but a part of her knew that the longer she stayed furious the longer it would take for the shame to set in.

“He’d never drink on the job,” Kate said. “It was an accident. He drew his gun, just as they all did, and he thinks he tripped.”

Francis pressed the heel of his hand to the closed lid of his prosthetic eye. “What was he like when he left for his tour yesterday?”