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“What did you find out?” Marlinchen said.
“That belongs to him,” I said. “It’s not mine to share.”
“So when he gets out, what’ll you do?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Sharp surprise registered on her features. I’d given the wrong response.
“You think adults always know the answers?” I said.
“Well, no,” she admitted. “It’s just that… you seem so certain about everything.”
“No,” I said. “Cops aren’t really encouraged to second-guess themselves, but I make missteps all the time.” I was thinking about Cicero, and the little.25 now resting in the glove compartment of my car. “You try to help people, and sometimes it seems they don’t really want to be helped.”
Marlinchen nodded as if she knew what I was saying, although I doubted she really could. “Have you ever thought about doing something else for a living?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“It’s the only thing I’m trained for,” I said.
She wasn’t satisfied. “But why?”
“Why what?”
“It wasn’t always the only thing you’re trained for. At some point you made a decision to get trained for it. That’s why you dropped out of college, right? To go into police work?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “When I left school, the last thing on my mind was becoming a cop.”
“What changed your mind?”
Those who go into law enforcement have a list of stock answers; generally, the same ones they give during the interview part of the application process: I want to help people, every day there’s a new challenge, I hate the thought of working at a desk. I didn’t use any of them.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Well, I do, but it’s a long story. A long, boring story.”
I must have made it sound sufficiently boring, because Marlinchen didn’t pursue it any further. After a few more minutes, by some silent agreement, we rose and headed up toward the house.
Much later, after the kids had gone to sleep and the house had quieted, I stood at Hugh He
Catholic by bloodline only, I had no religious training, but as a child I’d been haunted by something that the other kids had taken from their Sunday school teachings: that the world had been perfect, and then sin had entered it in a bolt of lightning. It was a metaphor, but for years I’d believed it literally.
Now I saw the He
Soon Marlinchen would be 18 and the guardian of her younger siblings, and my responsibilities here would be over. The best thing would be for me to ignore my feeling that something had gone very wrong with this family long before I was part of their lives. But I wasn’t sure I could.
Marlinchen had asked me tonight why I chose to become a cop. She was right; it wasn’t something I had drifted into. It was something I had chosen, part of what Genevieve called my headfirst impulse to help people.
Just before I slept that night, I heard the cry of a barred owl out over the lake. It sounded very like a human scream.
27
When I left Mi
It wasn’t. Vegas was sprawling and vivid and exciting, all in ways that couldn’t involve an 18-year-old with little money and no car, who knew no one. Nor, that year, did I see much time in basketball games. I’d expected that, but still it made me restless. I went to my classes, trying and failing to be interested in the general-education, Western-civilization courses that make up a freshman’s schedule. I didn’t feel like a student. I didn’t feel like an athlete. I didn’t have any sense of a life coming together.
That was when I realized something I hadn’t pla
When my aunt Gi
Drinking a cold, sweet Pepsi in a coffee shop across from the bus station in Duluth, I sca
The three-bedroom house I moved into was already occupied by two women in their mid-twenties. Erin and Cheryl A
That’s where we got stuck, at cordiality. The passage of time and the fact that I paid a third of the rent did nothing to lessen the feeling that I’d moved into their long-established home. Sometimes, when the TV’s blue light flickered over the living room, I joined them, but we rarely spoke. I never turned on the TV set on the occasions that I was home alone. So, at the end of my first days on the job, hot Indian-summer days of late September, I’d walk down to the small and thinly stocked city library, to check out paperback thrillers.
When I think about those days, that’s what I remember, the simplicity of it. Shopping for food not in the grocery store but in the drugstore, where the center aisle was full of cheap nonperishables: soft French bread so full of preservatives that it lasted for weeks, strawberry jam, 99-cent spaghetti and macaroni that stuck together no matter how carefully it was prepared. Evenings on the porch, drinking store-brand cola with ice cubes that tasted like the freezer, the last of the day’s light dwindling in the west.
“What are you doing up there, Sadie?” my father asked, over the long-distance wires. “Your aunt is gone, you’ve got no family there anymore.”
“I have friends here,” I said. “I have a job.”
The job part was true, of course, but I had nothing that rose beyond friendly acquaintanceships so far.
“I just don’t understand it. You up and quit school for no reason that I can see, go live in a little town that isn’t even where you grew up,” he said. “You’re not even taking night classes, are you?”
“No,” I said.
“Why would you want to live up there, in the middle of nowhere?”
“It was good enough-” I started to say, then caught myself.
“Good enough for me to send you there when you were 13?” he said, finishing my thought. “Is that what this is all about? You’re angry?”