peace. It didn’t hurt that she was dressed up for a date. Long white dress. Her gleaming dark hair in an up-do. Wineglasses beside a half-filled decanter on a nearby table. A cassette in the tape player, with the player turned on, and the song—“Fear Loves This Place”—playing over and over. And candles burned down to puddles of wax.
I had wished this woman dead a dozen times, though not lately. It was about three years earlier when things heated up between Robert and me. He was still married, and he’d just buried his infant daughter. He took Liza’s death in silence at first, pretending that nothing was different, that nothing of any significance had happened.
He was back beside me in the cruiser the day of the funeral, just a few hours after Liza was put to rest. He showed up for roll call that night just like always, and when we were alone, doing our first tour through the combat zone, he started talking about a missing fourteen-year-old we were looking for. His own daughter was dead, but all he could talk about was someone else’s kid—how we had to find her before some pervert or pimp did.
It went like that for weeks, then, gradually, he opened up, telling me about Liza. He talked about going into her room just before dawn, intending to check on her and maybe touch her head or kiss her, but finding her lifeless instead, already gone, without even a tear on her cheek. He said she was just lying there in her crib, looking like maybe she was dreaming. But there was something about the stillness of her eyelids that alerted him and made him check her vitals.
I was surprised when Robert began offering those unsolicited peeks into his personal life, especially since they alsoinvolved his inner life. He had an aversion to intimacy, a need to always appear macho. I had never liked him much until he began talking to me, trusting me, telling me about Liza.
Once he got used to saying sweet things about his daughter, he started bad-mouthing his wife. Until then he had hardly ever mentioned Sarah. Most people meeting him for the first time assumed that he was single. It was as if his wife had no role in his life, no connection to anything he considered essential—although, to tell the truth, there wasn’t much besides police work that mattered to him.
But when Liza died, Robert became obsessed with finding a place to lay the blame—and it was Sarah’s misfortune to be the most convenient shelf.
I didn’t discourage him from lashing out at Sarah. I thought sometimes that I should have. But as soon as Robert started opening up, showing me that softer side of him, the side that spoke so tenderly about his daughter, her tiny fingers and intelligent eyes, all my thoughts of him as a boorish, sexist oaf were transformed into desire. A kind of attraction that required me to act, to make some kind of move in his direction, to find out if he was feeling the same thing I was.
“So what are we going to do about this?” I asked him one night as we neared the end of our shift.
“About what?”
“The chemistry. This need to touch.”
“It isn’t going to happen,” he said, and then he was silent.
I felt like a fool, like maybe I had only imagined his interest in me. But even while I was thinking that, I knew it wasn’t so. I couldn’t be that wrong about a signal as strong as the one he had been sending.
After we clocked out, he tried hurrying to his car, walking fast, several feet ahead of me. But I caught up with him and said, “Look, I’m not stopping off for a beer with you guys tonight. I’m going home.”
By then I had gotten ahead of him and managed to block his path, forcing him to look at me. “I’m going to take ashower and go to bed,” I told him. “You can join me or you can go home.”
He tried to get around me, but I stayed right in his face. “But if you do go home,” I told him, “I don’t ever want to hear another word about your wife.”
He maneuvered around me as if I were an
I had wished this woman dead a dozen times, though not lately. It was about three years earlier when things heated up between Robert and me. He was still married, and he’d just buried his infant daughter. He took Liza’s death in silence at first, pretending that nothing was different, that nothing of any significance had happened.
He was back beside me in the cruiser the day of the funeral, just a few hours after Liza was put to rest. He showed up for roll call that night just like always, and when we were alone, doing our first tour through the combat zone, he started talking about a missing fourteen-year-old we were looking for. His own daughter was dead, but all he could talk about was someone else’s kid—how we had to find her before some pervert or pimp did.
It went like that for weeks, then, gradually, he opened up, telling me about Liza. He talked about going into her room just before dawn, intending to check on her and maybe touch her head or kiss her, but finding her lifeless instead, already gone, without even a tear on her cheek. He said she was just lying there in her crib, looking like maybe she was dreaming. But there was something about the stillness of her eyelids that alerted him and made him check her vitals.
I was surprised when Robert began offering those unsolicited peeks into his personal life, especially since they alsoinvolved his inner life. He had an aversion to intimacy, a need to always appear macho. I had never liked him much until he began talking to me, trusting me, telling me about Liza.
Once he got used to saying sweet things about his daughter, he started bad-mouthing his wife. Until then he had hardly ever mentioned Sarah. Most people meeting him for the first time assumed that he was single. It was as if his wife had no role in his life, no connection to anything he considered essential—although, to tell the truth, there wasn’t much besides police work that mattered to him.
But when Liza died, Robert became obsessed with finding a place to lay the blame—and it was Sarah’s misfortune to be the most convenient shelf.
I didn’t discourage him from lashing out at Sarah. I thought sometimes that I should have. But as soon as Robert started opening up, showing me that softer side of him, the side that spoke so tenderly about his daughter, her tiny fingers and intelligent eyes, all my thoughts of him as a boorish, sexist oaf were transformed into desire. A kind of attraction that required me to act, to make some kind of move in his direction, to find out if he was feeling the same thing I was.
“So what are we going to do about this?” I asked him one night as we neared the end of our shift.
“About what?”
“The chemistry. This need to touch.”
“It isn’t going to happen,” he said, and then he was silent.
I felt like a fool, like maybe I had only imagined his interest in me. But even while I was thinking that, I knew it wasn’t so. I couldn’t be that wrong about a signal as strong as the one he had been sending.
After we clocked out, he tried hurrying to his car, walking fast, several feet ahead of me. But I caught up with him and said, “Look, I’m not stopping off for a beer with you guys tonight. I’m going home.”
By then I had gotten ahead of him and managed to block his path, forcing him to look at me. “I’m going to take ashower and go to bed,” I told him. “You can join me or you can go home.”
He tried to get around me, but I stayed right in his face. “But if you do go home,” I told him, “I don’t ever want to hear another word about your wife.”
He maneuvered around me as if I were an
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