After (18 page)

Carson counts Alan Powell, who lives across the street in a Cape Cod, as a friend. He hadn’t seen Alan since they graduated from high school together in 1983. Alan would solve seemingly inscrutable algebra problems on the board in front of the class and then pimp-walk back to his seat and slouch his gangly frame in its confines as though what he’d just done had no significance at all. He was a track star, but he wasn’t a jock. Carson didn’t know him well back then, but Alan had a reputation as everybody’s friend, from the dudes headed nowhere fast to those everybody figured would one day make the school proud.

“You’re Carson Blake, right?” Alan asked the day they moved in, striding with that same offbeat pimp walk to where Carson stood outside the house, extending his hand and shaking Carson’s, pumping it eagerly. He was still in good shape, trim, muscular, in a fleece jogging suit that early September day. As the movers streamed past, in five minutes Carson learned that Alan was a widower raising his son, who was a year older than Juwan, and that his wife had been killed by a speeding driver running a red light as she crossed Georgia Avenue in Washington.

Over beers on the second level of Franklin’s Brewery a week later, Carson and Alan talked about Largo: Principal Jackson’s “Mickey Mouse” ears, and how students joned on him behind his back; the suicide of Seymour Arliss, the chemistry teacher, when they were juniors; the big fight after school one afternoon between two Black guys on the football team over Holly Calhoun, the Swedish/Black cheerleader half the boys in school wanted to nail.

Alan told Carson about his wife, how they had met at Morgan State and got married because she was pregnant. “Nobody thought it would work. Hell, I didn’t even think we would last. But we did,” he said wistfully. “I didn’t even know what I wanted or who I was when we got together. Olivia made it possible for me to be my
best
self. You get my drift?”

“I hear you, believe me I do,” Carson told him. “Bunny and I, a few years back, we went through a bad patch. I don’t know what I would have done if we hadn’t worked it out.”

“Life goes on,” Alan said. “I got a son to raise. One of my sisters told me there’d come a time when Olivia would be such a deep part of me, I wouldn’t feel like she was gone, I’d know she was still here, you know, like in a spiritual sense. Well, that day hasn’t come yet. Hell, I don’t even know how to get there—that place sounds like it’s in another dimension.” He laughed quietly.

“Maybe you don’t have to know.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Alan has a small but busy contracting company, and Carson hires him for renovation and repair jobs on the two rental properties he owns. He and Alan talk frequently, trading anecdotes about buying, selling, contracting, tenants, owners, contracts. For all this camaraderie, these binding rites of friendship, Carson has never told Alan about the shooting. He feels it is an unexpected blessing that Alan appears uninterested in Carson’s years on the police force.

Carson walks past the profusion of brash, hardy sunflowers planted below the front porch, which hover protectively over the pale pink antique roses planted in their midst. The two flowers, one so sedate, the other a bolt of botanical lightning, stand tall in the heat. Below the other side of the porch, the coppery spikes of purple leaf fountain grass whisper into the ears of the white plumes of feathertop stems. On the porch beside the glider, several pots of begonias sparkle radiant and red.

Entering the house, the cool openness of the space envelops him. The air conditioning is on low and the windows are shuttered with bamboo shades. It’s a big, spacious, sprawling house of high ceilings and windows. Juwan’s pictures grace the living room walls. He now works mostly in pencil and charcoal, creating scrupulously detailed images, two of which won prizes in his arts class at the Y. The twelve-by-twelve framed drawings on the wall capture faces—light, dark, shadowed, the pencil and charcoal a veritable rainbow of feeling and color. Juwan turns black into a color not mournful or despairing but filled with depth and surprise. There is the sketch of a Black clown from the UniverSoul circus, his face distorted by layers of makeup yet the man beneath the mask fully revealed; a toddler asleep on a mother’s shoulder, and his sister Roslyn, her hair a mass of twisted braids, her face lit by a bodacious smile. Carson and Bunny’s friends regularly offer to purchase the prints. Juwan always tells them, “Right now it’s still fun. One day I’ll make it a business. But not now.” Carson changes into a pair of cutoff jeans, a sleeveless T-shirt, and sandals, and thinks that maybe he’ll take Bunny out to dinner this weekend to celebrate her pregnancy and today’s sale. Last night Bunny told him she was pregnant.

“It’ll mean starting over again. Are you ready for that?” she asked.

“I can’t say no to a child of mine.”

“I don’t know how this happened. If I skipped a pill I can’t remember.”

“How do you feel about it?” he asked.

“Scared. Unsure. Excited.”

“I want what you want,” he assured her.

“I want this baby.”

“Then I do too.”

Carson assured her of this despite the ambivalence he sat struggling not to reveal. Then he allowed himself to look for a long, eternal moment at Bunny, and he saw all that she had been to him. He saw the face that looked at him the day he showed up at her house the first time, a face so calm, betraying just a flicker of surprise. The face primal and determined and afraid, giving birth to Juwan. The face that challenged him when he was wrong. The face that has shone a constellation of love on him in the midst of a darkness he was sure would never yield. Bunny cut her hair and now wears it short, curly, almost boyish. She rarely wears makeup anymore, just a practiced smear of color to highlight her lips. These changes have made of her face a declaration. Carson responded to what he saw in her eyes, “We’ll have this baby. Everything will be fine.”

Carson pours a glass of lemonade and goes into his office. Bunny is at work and the twins are at summer camp; Juwan, at fourteen, too young to work, is volunteering at a nearby animal shelter. Carson turns on the computer and begins work on the one-page newsletter he mails to prospective buyers and sellers in the county, then calls his contacts at several mortgage-lending institutions and checks on the progress of contracts for several clients. He’s an agent with Century Realty and has had more success in real estate in a year than anyone could have predicted, working long hours, making hundreds of cold calls, networking. He’s not just selling houses. He is selling himself.

As a police officer, he could let his uniform speak for him. Now he’s had to learn to speak for himself, to convince clients that he is the agent above all others who can make them happy. On duty as a cop, he was prepared for anything to happen on his shift. As a cop he possessed unparalleled authority. Now when he ushers a client into a new home for a walk-through, he literally opens the door to the possibility for them to change their lives. The process of purchasing a home reveals not just the state of a person’s bank account but the psychic terrain of their lives.

Carson had been off the force two months and taking real estate classes when he found out that he and the county were named in a wrongful death suit filed by the Houstons. Matthew Frey recommended a lawyer who handled the case for him, and it was dropped just six months ago, when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that as a police officer Carson had “qualified immunity” from prosecution. He was a police officer doing his job. The job was dangerous. He thought Paul Houston had a gun and he feared for his life. So he could not be sued. The judgment brought no relief from the wearying sense of dissatisfaction that seeps into his feelings about everything he holds dear. He felt no vindication then, feels none now, but only shameful relief for having been spared a judgment that he still feels he deserved.

Justifiable
,
qualified
,
immunity
, the words that have shielded him from sanction, have taken permanent residence in his mind, are a silent, accumulated sentence he has to serve despite the judgments of the courts or Internal Affairs. The words that should have freed him merely incarcerate his spirit. He has so much. But everything he should feel confident of strikes him as counterfeit, unearned, stolen from the gods.

He has confounding parallel lives, one in which the past seems to be past and the other in which he knows it is not and never will be. He still dreams about the shooting and about Paul Houston. And he assumes that he always will. How to live with a dream of such malevolent, threatening proportions and prevent it from making everything that dares to follow in its wake a fraud? There have been no more attempts to take his own life, despite sinking without warning into days-long bouts of unflinching remorse and depression, a cycle that he has come to expect to be as reliable as his most basic bodily functions. No, he—foolishly, perhaps, with more stubbornness than wisdom—holds on to his life. Maybe he can’t make the dreams stop, dissolve the dark hand of perennial, persistent despair. But he has to do something. The judgment of the appeals court informed Carson that he owed the Houstons nothing, but that verdict has ironically filled him with a sense of obligation to the Houstons that is a torment and a damnation and, Carson feels, the only possibility for salvation. He had secretly hoped the Houstons would win the case, for then the county would pay a monetary judgment that, while settling little, would at least fill the black hole that he imagines every day as an ocean between him and these people, this couple, these parents he does not know but to whom he is so terribly and intimately connected.

Carson opens the bottom drawer of his desk and retrieves the folder that contains the letter, takes it out of the now-wrinkled, almost grubby envelope, and reads it. It’s only one paragraph and yet it’s taken him all the months since the appeals court judgment to compose, in jittery fits and starts: on a flight to San Diego for a Century agents convention, after he’d downed two tiny bottles of scotch purchased from the flight attendant hawking drinks forty-five minutes after they left BWI; sitting at 3:00 a.m. at this desk, when he could not sleep and the house was quiet, and he was afraid, and the mere soundless presence of his sleeping wife and children buoyed him with momentary courage; in his head while jogging around Allen Pond, the stunted, shamefaced epistle overflowing like lava, singeing and embedding his resolve to actually do this amazing thing that he had shared with no one.

He has written to Natalie Houston, the mother of the young man he killed. If he is to be forgiven, Carson dares to imagine it springing from her heart. Whenever he thought of writing to the young man’s father, or even to both parents, it is only the mother that he envisions crafting a space in her life for the miracle he wants to make. He wrote Natalie Houston, convincing himself that she is cut from the same cloth as those D.C. mothers who found and gave absolution and by that act made God and love more than a conjecture or a hope, made them real.

He’ll mail it tomorrow, Carson decides. Mail it first and then tell Bunny. Another breach of trust, faith, love—that’s how she will see it, he’s sure. But if he doesn’t mail it first, he fears he never will. As he places the letter in a new clean envelope and addresses it, he allows himself to think gratefully of how humble his expectations are. He is asking for nothing. And yet his heart stops, stammers for a flickering second at the thought of what could rain down on him once the letter is mailed.

Carson hears the front door open and Juwan shouting, “It’s me, Dad.” Hearing a pair of footsteps, Carson goes downstairs and finds Juwan and his friend Will standing in the kitchen.

“Where’ve you two been?”

“Riding our bikes. We got thirsty and wanted to hang out here for a while.”

At fourteen Juwan stands an inch taller than Carson. Tufts of hair darken the skin above his top lip. His voice has shed its light, bubbly lilt and is deep, nearly smoky. To Carson’s relief, the boy’s gangly growth spurt has muted and altered the too-feminine rhythmic gait.

Will’s shoulder-length dreads are an almost reddish brown, pulled back from his face and held by a rubber band, revealing a high forehead that wrinkles when he flashes a smile that dazzles like a burst of sunlight. The boy’s face is open and inviting, and he’s the color of caramel; his oversize shirt and baggy jeans are neat and crisp. Reflexively, Carson measures and assesses Juwan and his friends, searching always for the telltale signs. Will attends Juwan’s art class at the Y. They are friends, just friends, Carson tells himself, nothing more. Still, he has walked past Juwan’s room late at night and heard the sweet groan of a muffled sex dream. Juwan is fourteen, so there’s no surprise in that. But Carson finds himself wondering if Juwan dreams of Will. There is the way Will’s hand lingers on Juwan’s arm, rests on his shoulder, too long, too gently, Carson notices, and how Will’s fingers absently caress Juwan’s neck as the boys sit in the family room, huddled over their sketch pads, talking, laughing about their drawings as though they are alone. Are their feelings, he wonders, hidden in plain sight?

Of all the things
she thought he might tell her, these words are the most unexpected, and once she hears them, dreaded. Dreaded because of their power to unsettle and disturb the hard-won veneer of normalcy she has worked so hard to impose over the thudding heartbeat of their lives—a hard, shiny glaze that tells the world that happy endings are possible after all. She sits beside his desk, on which lies a copy of the letter he wrote to Natalie Houston, and the computer printout he’s had since before he left the police force, detailing the sterile, dry facts and figures of the life of this couple she had hoped to forget and that Carson now wants to invite into their lives. Carson showed her a photocopy of the letter almost proudly, holding it out for her to take, watching her sit passive, angry, resisting, until he reached into her lap, lifted her hand, and placed the letter in her palm. Bunny is less surprised by the letter than that Carson wrote it, and when she completes it she hands it back to him, wondering how he has come to be this brave, this foolhardy, and, she fears, this dangerous. In the letter he wrote, “There’s been no immunity for me. I’ve suffered. My remorse is continuous and it’s real.” He tells Natalie Houston how the desire to make amends is now as strong as the guilt, how some days it overtakes the guilt and he sees it in his mind, like a tiny distant star.