Ask Again, Yes (36 page)

Tired, Kate almost said. It was an afternoon tour, and every afternoon that week she’d thought: Today is the day he’ll have to call in. But then, just like every day, he got into the shower at the very last minute. He shaved, pulled a fresh shirt out of a dry cleaning bag. He poured twenty ounces of black coffee into his travel mug and headed out. He was annoyed when she asked if he was sure he should go in, and brushed by her to the front door, to the sleek black Explorer that came with his rank, and it was true that he seemed fine. But when she stepped into the steam that lingered after his shower, she lifted her nose like a bloodhound and smelled gin.

“He was fine,” Kate said.

“Peter,” Francis said sharply. He leaned down, clutched the younger man by the shoulder, and shook hard. It was arrogance, Francis decided. Criminal arrogance. Just like his father. The father more than the mother, even. At least the mother had something wrong with her. A disease, maybe. But this was a crime of the ego, a person believing he could get away with things other people can’t.

“I vouched for him,” Francis said, looking down. “I said he was trustworthy.”

“He is.”

“There’s more to this. I know it.”

The phone rang just then and Kate took the basement steps two at a time to catch it, to get away from the rest of his thought. Lena. She’d figured out where Francis had gone, and begged Kate to make him stay the night. “His vision,” she said. “He’ll never make it all the way home. The oncoming headlights leave him seeing halos. He admits that himself. I can’t believe he could be so reckless.”

But when Kate hung up and looked at her father, who had
followed her up the stairs, he seemed capable of driving all the way to the moon.

“You didn’t tell Mom you were coming here. You didn’t tell her what happened.”

“No,” Francis said. “I’ll leave that for you. I’m just so angry. These fucking people.”

“What people?”

“Peter. All of them.”

“All who? The people on the job? Or his family? The people he was born into through no fault of his own. Are we back on this subject again? Or maybe we never left.”

Francis stopped shifting and turned to her. “You see that, Kate? You see what you always do?”

Clutching his keys and glancing over at the basement door one last time, he told her that she and the kids could come back to Gillam anytime. They could come with him that night, if they wanted to. He looked down at the floor, again pressed the heel of his hand to his eye. How easy it would be to gather the kids, Kate thought, to walk out the door with him, to belt them in and sail to Gillam, tuck them into beds there—the sheets always clean and cool, the house always warm and open—and wake up and have Lena make them a pot of oatmeal in the morning. Later, Lena would peel potatoes into a bowl of cold water and have them help her, she’d show them where to place their knuckle on the blade, Francis would read aloud from the paper, and all of this mess could be left exactly where it was. She could take each child by the hand to the place where she began and forget all of this.
The kids
. Her father loved them and had doted on them from the moment Kate’s belly began to stretch the limits of her T-shirts, but he also, clearly, didn’t really think of them as being Peter’s. It was as if he pretended Kate had hatched them entirely on her own. When Lena said, sometimes, that Frankie was like Peter had been as a boy, Francis would study the child as if to ask how in the world that had happened, and what else might be in store.

She knew that if she asked him to stay, he would. He’d settle right in on the couch and stay the night, the whole week. He wouldn’t ask for a blanket. He wouldn’t ask for a shower. He’d stay exactly where she needed him to be until she told him it was okay to go. Just imagining him there made her feel easier, made her feel as if she’d been thrown a rope, made her feel as if the very room they were standing in was more solidly constructed. She wanted him to stay so badly that she had to sit down, turn away from him a little or else he’d know.

“You’re exhausted,” he said.

“No, I’m not.”

“He’ll meet with his union rep tomorrow, I’m sure.”

“They met today.”

“Do you want me to stay?” he asked.

She felt a thousand pinpricks behind her nose.

“No,” she said. “We’re fine.”

“I could leave before he wakes up. If you want me to.”

“No. You go home to Mom.” She told him to be careful. To let the phone ring once when he got home so she’d know he’d gotten there safely.

But he didn’t move. “Kate,” he said.

“Go,” she said. “Please. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

She didn’t move a muscle until she heard his car door slam, the sound of the engine fading down the block.

Once he left, she locked the house, turned off all the lights, glanced outside for no reason at all. And that’s when she saw the little black sedan parked in its usual spot, where the Harrisons’ weeping elm drooped over the sidewalk and into the road. It had been a while since she spotted the car, and seeing it there on that night of all nights seemed to mean something. She watched the car from inside the darkened house for a few minutes, peering through the slats of the blinds like a spy in a novel. When she grew tired of standing, she drew up a chair and sat.

She couldn’t go through her routine as usual, not on that night. She couldn’t just climb the stairs as if all were well, wash her face, brush her
teeth, tell herself it would be better in the morning. He’d explained it to her several times but there was something missing, some crucial thing he wasn’t saying. They’d been watching this particular ring for months. They had everything they needed to move in on them, and so they had. It was all planned, organized. Tours had been moved around so that the right people could be in the right positions. They’d already overpowered the room, were making arrests. The drama was over, and yet that’s when Peter had fired his gun.

“What else do you want me to say?” he’d said when she asked him to go through it all one more time. “No one got hurt.”

The chief had signed off at the scene, yes, but Peter was put on restricted duty within a matter of hours. Things happened. Kate knew that as well as any cop. But why restricted duty instead of modified, implying that they feared for his safety and, Kate realized only after a few hours, the safety of the people around him? What had he said or done in those hours after the shooting that raised an alarm?

“I’m going to ask you this one time,” she’d said to him calmly, and when she asked the question, she braced with all her might for the answer. “Were you drunk?”

“No,” he said, offended. Disgusted. And that’s when he’d gone off to the basement.

I could leave him, she thought now. If they couldn’t solve this problem together, then she could solve it alone. She could pack a bag for each child, and go. Or better yet, she could hand him a suitcase and tell him to fill it and be off. She had a good job. The kids were in school. She had a family who would help her if she needed help.

Kate continued to stare out the window at Anne Stanhope’s car. Internal affairs had interviewed everyone at the scene, and according to Peter they’d all described what happened exactly as Peter had. The room was chaos. He’d tripped on something on the floor. He headed to NYU medical center and his union rep met him there, but that was just routine procedure after discharging a weapon. At the hospital, Kate knew,
they would have tested Peter’s ears, checked him for trauma. Maybe something that happened there—something he’d said or done—got him flagged.

It had felt for a long time like she was waiting for something, and now something had happened. She looked out the window at the black sedan and knew that across the dark Anne Stanhope might be looking back at her.

She never told anyone that Anne was tracking them, watching them all these years. She never even felt tempted to tell. Her mother had once asked her if she felt scared when she thought about Anne, wherever she was now, and Kate realized that her whole family still thought of Anne as a person on the verge of violence, as if until the day she died she’d remain capable of reaching into her bag and withdrawing a gun. Kate wasn’t scared anymore, not in that way. She felt angry sometimes, but mostly she felt nervous, like she should apologize for something, like she, too, had done something wrong, though what, exactly, she wouldn’t have been able to say. It was illogical. She hadn’t done anything wrong—she loved Peter, and so she’d married him. It was George who mentioned to her, not long after she and Peter got married, that Anne Stanhope had lost a baby. She’d lost a baby so far along that he was nearly ready to be born. George told her that she delivered it stillborn, and Kate imagined the eerie silence of that room as other babies roared down the hallway.

Yes, Peter knew, George confirmed. He’d never told her.

Once, seeing the car out there, not long after Molly started walking, Kate sent the kids out front to play. They were at an age when they never played out front, at least not alone, but she’d sent them around front and watched from the garage that Molly didn’t run into the road. Let her see them, she thought that day, they were her grandchildren after all. Later, she couldn’t decide if she’d done it to be cruel or to be kind.

She was already outside, walking quickly along the front path with her heart pounding in her throat before she understood what she was doing. If what Peter was struggling with now was anyone’s fault, it was his mother’s. So then let her know about it, Kate thought. Let her carry some of the blame. Let her know that the consequences of her actions were still reverberating. Why should she, the person who’d damaged him most, be allowed to sit in her quiet car, watching without participating? Kate circled around the driver’s side of the car and there she was, Anne Stanhope, twisted around in her seat and sound asleep. The car was littered with peanut shells and gas station receipts and empty coffee cups.

Kate knocked twice on the roof of the car, to wake her, then walked around to the passenger side and opened the door before Anne could object. She swept everything that was on the seat onto the car floor while Anne watched. The night was hot and the car smelled like old banana peels.

“Your son,” Kate said. She didn’t go out there for small talk or to catch up. She looked off at the neighbors’ darkened windows and pretended she was talking to herself. Now that she was out there, sitting next to the woman, elbow to elbow, she had no idea what to say. Not a single part of her life was any of Anne’s business. But maybe Anne could shed some light.

“Did something happen?”

“He had a hard day at work.”

Anne waited.

“He discharged his weapon. No one got hurt, but still.”

Anne rested her hands on the wheel at ten and two. “You talk like a cop. Are you a cop?”

Kate stared into the side-view mirror. “No.”

Kate could feel Anne watching her.

“I think . . .”

“Yes?”

“He’s been hitting it pretty hard. I think that has something to do with what happened today.”

Any normal person would have known what she was saying, but one glance at the look on Anne’s face told Kate she’d have to spell it out. She’d have to say to this woman, this stranger, what she’d not said to her own mother or father, her sisters, her friends.

But first: “He’s doing great, you know. He’s a captain. We have two kids.”

“I know.”

“He’s a great father. He’s so good with them. They adore him. It’s remarkable.” Considering his model, was the thing she wanted to add, but it was there anyway, unspoken.

Kate rested her forehead in her hot hand. “This is insane,” she whispered.

“Did something else happen?”

“He’s drinking a lot.”

“No. Peter looks like Brian, but in that way he’s more like me. He doesn’t drink.”

Kate looked over at the older woman, and when she saw that Anne was serious, she felt a laugh gurgling up from her belly. So she let it come and laughed until she was sobbing, her head hanging between her knees. Anne kept her hands on the steering wheel, white knuckling it, as if she were driving through a storm. Kate didn’t care. The moment she’d approached the car, she decided she’d say whatever damn thing she felt like saying.

“I really don’t know what to do.” It was the thing she hadn’t said aloud to anyone. Not to her father. Not to Peter. Not even to herself.

Anne released her grip on the wheel, sank back into her seat.

“Where is he now?”

“Inside. Sleeping.”

After a few minutes of silence, Anne asked, “What are the children’s names?”

“Frankie. As in Francis,” Kate said. “And Molly.”

“How old are they?”

“Frankie is ten. Molly is eight.”

“Molly is a nickname for Mary?”

“No. She’s Molly.”

“Is there a Saint Molly?”

Kate looked at her.

“It doesn’t matter,” Anne said. “It just wouldn’t have occurred to me to give a child a name like that. Did your mother mind? That there’s no Saint Molly?”

Lena had not liked it, but Kate decided Anne didn’t need to know that.

“I don’t dislike it. The name Molly.”

Kate made a sound that said she didn’t care whether Anne liked it or not. The instant she didn’t want to be in that car anymore she’d simply open the door and leave. But then what? Peter hadn’t seen his mother since he was fifteen, but Kate had to believe that knowing one’s child as a child meant always knowing what was most essential about them. Kate knew Peter better than anyone else in the world, but there was one person who knew him first.

Anne fiddled with something on her lap. An old booklet of CDs.

“I don’t know how I can help Peter,” Anne said. “But I would like to. I’d like to talk with him.”

Kate tapped a song on the car door with her fingertips. A pop song that was on the radio every minute that summer. What did she imagine? That she’d march out there and Anne would be able to tell her the words to a magic spell, and then they could part ways again?

She thought of Peter, passed out in the basement, how he cringed lately whenever she tried to talk to him about what worried her.