Ask Again, Yes (37 page)

“Okay,” Kate said after a while. “You’ll come for lunch. But I need
time. I need to warn him, get him used to the idea. He’s dealing with this thing at work and it’s just too much right now. I can’t tell him while all of this is happening. I don’t think he could process it yet.”

“When?”

“Two weeks from Saturday? What’s that date?” Kate counted in her head. “July sixteenth.” She took a breath.

“Did you ever tell him . . . that I’ve been around?”

“No.”

“I wondered about that.”

“It would have been too confusing for him.”

Anne looked over at her son’s wife, the mother of his children, and had a similar thought to the one she’d had so many years ago, after their confrontation outside the bakery on Lexington. He doesn’t want to see you, she’d said to Anne that day. She loves him, Anne thought, and like most people, she thinks the things she’s saying are true.

“Say one o’clock,” Kate said as she opened the car door. It would be just the one time, she told herself. There was no reason to tell her father, her mother, her sisters. It had nothing to do with them; it only had to do with Peter. And they’d make too much of it. They wouldn’t understand. Somewhere, fireworks were going off. Practice before the Fourth. She realized she was shivering despite the muggy night. Anne Stanhope would be standing inside her home, eating a sandwich, in just two weeks’ time. It was incomprehensible. And yet, in those minutes alone together in Anne’s car, she hadn’t felt unfamiliar to Kate. Her profile. Her jaw set upon her long neck. Anne’s was a name she’d been hearing since she was in her mother’s womb. Even the way she clutched the wheel seemed familiar, almost like being with a long lost relative. And then, Kate realized with a jolt, that’s actually what she was.

seventeen

T
HE MEDICAL BOARD SCHEDULED
a hearing for September. In the meantime, Peter was ordered to see the shrink twice a week.

“Twice?” Kate said when he told her. “Jeez.”

He should have told her they’d ordered him once a week, and then he could just go the second time without her knowing. But he didn’t like lying to her.

He had his two weeks sick, then his two weeks vacation, and then when he had to go back they’d send him to a different precinct for an inside job. And then it would be just a matter of weeks before the hearing.

“But I don’t understand,” Kate kept saying. “What’s the hearing for? What’s the issue? If the duty chief signed off at the scene and no one got hurt, I don’t see why there needs to be a hearing.”

Day and night, he could see by the expression on her face that she was trying to figure it out. And she was right to be confused. Only Peter knew what she did not: that it was those hours at the hospital that changed things. And he already had an old CD in his file for showing up at Central with liquor on his breath. A Legal Aid attorney had made the complaint to the deputy chief, and Peter got called in the next day.
He told the deputy chief that he’d gone to the Old Town for lunch, had run into a friend, it was just the once, and the deputy chief had said it absolutely could not happen again. He also said that he himself thought he smelled booze off Peter once but he figured it was his imagination, now he wasn’t so sure. He could have fought it, maybe, but he just accepted the CD and gave up the vacation days they docked and never told anyone a thing about it. What really happened was that he’d stopped into the Old Town for one because he liked the Old Town, and he’d been passing by. The bartender had given him a second. But two drinks in a two-hundred-pound man was nothing, had no more bearing on his day than having ginger ales.

Leaving that meeting with the deputy chief was one of the first times Peter wondered if he was liked on the job. He’d been promoted, he was respected, but was he liked? He had a reputation for being by the book. He went to the parties and he bought rounds but he kept to himself. He assumed that was a thing they said about him: that he didn’t call anybody up on days off, that he didn’t have other cops over for barbeques or help organize baseball games. Sometimes, at muster, before everyone settled down, he’d stand at the front of the room and shuffle papers for an extra few seconds so that they’d continue talking. It reminded him of stretching before practice at Dutch Kills, the rise and fall of their voices—then and now—passing around him like a river passes around a shoal. Officer Vargas had helped Officer Fischer put in a new master bathroom, and it wasn’t the help that shook Peter but the fact that they so easily let each other into the most intimate parts of each other’s homes. Some of them went on vacation together every year, weekends at Lake George or LBI. Their kids knew each other. Their wives spoke on the phone. It was all too close, Peter thought. He went to work and came home. He was a good cop in that he looked after his guys and they would look after him, but that was just being a cop. In a closed room, where no outsiders could hear or see, what would they say about him? He’d never wondered before, but now he did.

His father used to say that the only real difference between Francis Gleeson and him was that for some reason people loved an Irish brogue so they just couldn’t get enough of the guy. Even after, when Francis was in a rehab hospital and Brian was directing traffic, he stuck to his story: people just loved Francis Gleeson. And then he’d throw up his hands as if to ask why they didn’t love him, too.

Peter told Kate only that he went to the hospital to get checked out as any cop would after firing his weapon. What he didn’t mention was that during the ear exam, when the nurse looked to see whether his eardrums were still intact, he could barely bring himself to stop pacing long enough for her to insert her instrument. His whole body was shaking. It was ludicrous that his gun had fired and he couldn’t even understand how it had happened. When the nurse stepped out he asked his union rep, a guy named Benny, to go out to First Avenue to a liquor store he knew and pick him up a few of those little fifty milliliter bottles before the doctor came in. They both knew they’d be there for hours. He needed to calm down.

And when Benny kept refusing—actually, he thought Peter was joking—Peter crossed the room and pushed the tips of his fingers hard into the man’s chest. He was in a hospital gown, black dress socks, but Peter was a big man, broad, six foot three, and Benny was a slight five foot nine. The doctor came in and saw it happen, and when his face snapped closed like he would not even be willing to hear Peter’s explanation, Peter felt his body hum like an engine switching into a higher gear. He picked up the computer keyboard that was on the counter and whipped it across the room like a Frisbee. His eyes felt so dry that every time he blinked they burned.

The doctor stepped backward into the hallway as quickly as he’d stepped in. Next thing there were six people in the room. Benny, loyal no matter what, was telling him not to say a single word.

“Okay, Officer, uh, Stanhope,” the doctor said, double-checking his chart. “We don’t want to have to restrain you. We appreciate your work
for the city and I know you’ve been through a lot today.” Peter saw then that the large young man at the back of the room was holding a pair of padded cuffs in each hand.

He calmed down immediately, like a bucket of cold water had been dashed over his head. Yet another doctor arrived for a psych consult, and all the others left the room. It took so long that a tiny part of Peter hoped that Benny had taken pity and gotten the little bottles for him after all.

At first, when he was home, he tinkered in the garage all day long. He decided if he had to be home he’d at least make himself useful. He’d make a set of chairs or something and by the end maybe he would figure out why he’d behaved that way, why he couldn’t stop himself. But he only got as far as the braces when he quit, drove over to the liquor store, returned, went down to the basement, and turned on the television. He felt Kate’s eyes on him everywhere he went.

The problem started so long before Kate said anything about it that he felt sorry for her, in a way, because he knew she prided herself on being quick, on being observant, the daughter of a cop and all that. She didn’t drink much but she was used to drinkers. As far as Peter could tell, Francis Gleeson had no fewer than three whiskeys every night of his life. She liked a glass of wine now and then but a second glass put her straight to sleep. And since the kids were born she couldn’t be sleepy unless she was sure they were out for the night, which they never were. “Water!” they cried out long after lights-out, as if they believed she was crouched in the hallway, waiting to tend to their every need. “Light! Blankie! Book!” Every request was a ruse to get her in there to chat with them for ten more minutes.

One night before everything happened, a whole year before, maybe, just after they’d finished up dinner, she’d told the kids to go to the living
room and turn on a show, and then she stopped him from heading down to the basement to say that she didn’t like it, him holing up down there to drink by himself. For a second, for half a second, just before she spoke, he thought she’d sent them away so that she could kiss him, and his surprised heart skipped with pleasure. She’d been reaching out to him in her sleep lately, clutching him. She’d leaned against the wall of the bathroom that very morning and watched him brush his teeth. Under her gaze he’d stood up taller. Maybe, all day long, all she’d wanted was to get him alone, and the thought made him feel alive, giddy. Once, back when they still had a baby gate blocking the playroom exit, she’d put down the plate she was drying and removed his hands from the sudsy dishwater and placed them on her hips. The tops of her collarbones were just peeking over her blouse, and when he drew his finger along one of them he could see her gooseflesh rise. “Come on,” she’d said, no longer grinning but serious, urgent, and leaving the dishes in a heap, they descended just a few steps down into the basement and shut the door. When she cried out he paused, the timbre of her voice sounded different, but she told him to keep going, and only later, when they returned to the kitchen, the kids unmoved from their trance in front of the TV, did she lift the back of her shirt—differently now—to ask if the skin was broken where the wood step had driven into her back.

As soon as he understood her purpose, he felt stupid for thinking she wanted privacy for any other reason. “Kate, please. I’m going down there to watch TV in peace.” And it was mostly the truth. They’d banned TV for most hours of the day, but when it was on in the living room it was always a kid’s show. If he dared turn it to CNN or ESPN, the kids whined and raged and threw themselves on the ground so that he gave up and turned the channel.

“That’s the problem,” she always said. “You’re the father here. Would I have ever dreamed of telling my father to change the channel?”

But why bother when he could just go downstairs where no one would climb on him, no one would jump on the cushion right next to
him, where she wouldn’t see him sitting there and poke her head out to ask if he’d gotten a chance to submit those gas receipts, like he promised. Sometimes, from the very instant he turned off the car in their driveway, he felt hemmed in. Sometimes, he could hear the kids fighting before he even opened the door, and he’d stand there on the walkway just listening to them. The hedges needed trimming. Frankie might need glasses. Did they have coverage? The credit card statement listed a bunch of charges Kate couldn’t identify, could he? Weeds had taken over the grass. Their taxes were going up. She was after him to take a look at the roof gutter, and the more she offered to simply call someone to come look at it the more he felt accused of something.

“It doesn’t bother you? That this is all life is?” he asked her once, years before. She had Molly in her arms and was swaying back and forth, trying to soothe her. “What?” she shouted over the mind-bending pitch of Molly’s cries. “Say that again?” He knew better than to say it again. Whenever their sitter canceled in those years, she’d spend a whole day at the lab with Molly strapped to her chest.

But this was different, he saw right away. It felt formal. Like an intervention of one. She’d been rehearsing what she’d say since that morning. “Well, if you want a drink, why not have it here, at the table? Why not with me? I’ll have a glass of wine. Why go off by yourself? You stay down there all night sometimes. Why?”

There was no way to answer any of these questions. The truth was that he didn’t know why, but she’d never accept that answer, and if he engaged at all, she’d only keep pushing, as if logic were at the center of everything. He could tell all evening there was something on her mind, and that it ended up being this made him want to put on his coat and walk out the door for a few hours. And when she saw that he was annoyed anyway—he knew the way she thought, in for a penny, in for a pound—she decided to go for broke.

“And also, where are those two wine club cases that came last month? It was a bonus month. I hadn’t even opened the boxes yet.”

“If you already know the answer, why are you asking me?”

“I want you to tell me that you drank two cases of wine in two weeks. I want you to hear yourself say it out loud.” And then added, “In addition to whatever else.”

“Fuck you, Kate,” he said instead, and the blood drained from her face as if he’d slapped her. She dropped to a chair and stared at the wall with a bewildered expression. From the living room came the sounds of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He’d never, ever spoken to her that way before. He regretted it immediately. He didn’t ever speak that way. Not to women. Not to his wife. Not to Kate, the person he’d loved his entire life.

And as always in the first moments after a fight, he cycled through the same facts: He’d been in charge of himself since he was fourteen years old. He’d gotten himself through school, through academy. He’d flown up the ranks. He’d never done a single thing wrong. He’d never even been late with paperwork. He made a good salary. He took overtime whenever he could. Had she ever taken overtime? Not that he could recall. The kids, she claimed. She had to get the kids, be home for them, drive them to games and birthday parties and the pediatrician and get to class and get her master’s degree, which would get her a raise of maybe two percent, all of which had already been spent on the extra childcare they needed for her to attend those classes in the first place.