Blessed Are Those Who Weep (5 page)

 

Chapter 9

T
HE
STACK
OF
police scanners is crackling with radio traffic when I settle in at my desk the next day. The normally monotone voices have something about them this morning that makes me lean over and turn up the volume, catching details in snippets.

“Motorcycle vs. center median.”

“Highway 10.”

So far nothing newsworthy. Then I hear it.

“Severed foot.”

And to seal the deal: “Cannot locate extremity.”

I grab my bag and dial Lopez in photo.

“Yo,” he answers.

“Motorcyclist. Severed foot. Highway 10. Meet you in the parking lot.” I reel it off staccato.

“I'm on it,” he says.

Even though it's Saturday, I came in to work because Donovan is working that homicide all day. Nicole is in our Martinez bureau, scrounging for anything new on the Mission Massacre.

On the way out of the newsroom, I holler to the copy desk. “Motorcyclist vs. median. C-­Lo and I are on it. There's a severed foot involved.”

Someone nearby snickers. As I head for the back door, I hear someone in sports mutter, “Only in a newsroom would someone giggle hearing about a severed foot.”

A
S
WE
COME
up on the highway-­patrol vehicle, I can't decide whether to pull in behind it or in front of the tow truck parked in front of him. With the cars whizzing by at sixty-­five miles an hour, I decide we're safest in front of the tow truck.

In my passenger seat, Lopez screws the telephoto lens on his camera and adjusts the ubiquitous earbud cord trailing down to the police scanner clipped to his belt. He is a true newspaperman from a bygone era. He's also ex–Green Beret, wiry and small and usually packing a gun or two. He pulls the earbuds out of his ears for a second and turns to me as I pull over. “Dude is on way to hospital. Can't figure out if they found his foot or not.”

The tow truck is parked so close to the cables separating the freeway from the median that we can't squeeze by. Lopez doesn't hesitate and army-­crawls under the cables into the weeds. Within seconds, he's upright, snapping photos of the wrecked bike being hoisted onto the back of the tow truck. I see a highway-­patrol officer walking toward his vehicle.

Worried he'll leave before I get the details of the accident, I scurry under the cable, knowing I look less than graceful and worried I'll be the one to find the foot.

I stand and attempt to brush all the stickers and weeds off my dress while holding my phone, notebook, and a pen. I rush over to the officer, who is now in his vehicle. I hold out my CHP Press Pass dangling on a chain around my neck. “Gabriella Giovanni with the
Bay Herald
. Do you have a second?”

“I know who you are,” he says and smirks.

My heart skips a beat. He either knows who I am and hates me, or he knows who I am and likes me. He must see the confusion on my face, because he continues.

“I was there when they yanked Sebastian Laurent out of the ditch last year.”

Oh yeah. They let me in for the close-­up because at first they thought it was a fatal accident, but it ended up being a homicide, the first in a string of them that led to me killing the killer. I feel heat flush across my cheeks. He knows exactly who I am and what I've done.

He's started his car, but his window is down. The cool air from his air-­conditioning blows on my sweaty face as I lean down. This part of the Bay Area is having a heat wave, and I'm not sure if I hate it or like it. Sometimes the temperature where I work and where I live varies by thirty degrees.

The sound of a helicopter overhead drowns out my voice as I speak to the officer. He peers through his windshield with a creased brow. I squint and try to see any markings on the small dark helicopter, but it's too far away.

“One of yours?” I ask.

He frowns and shakes his head. A second later, he opens the door, but as soon as he gets out, the helicopter zooms off.

“What can you tell me?” I ask as soon as it is quiet.

“Don't have a whole lot. You should talk to the PIO about it.”

The public information officer for the CHP is a good guy, but he's sometimes hard to get hold of before deadline.

“Can you just give me the bare basics?” I ask. “I don't even need to use your name.”

I wait as he thinks about it. He sighs, and I know he'll spill it.

“About fourteen hundred hours, motorcyclist hit some gravel and swerved into the cable median. No other vehicles involved. Driver was transported via ambulance with non-­life-­threatening injuries.”

Looking up from the scribbles in my notebook, I wipe my brow and meet his eyes. “Heard something about a severed foot . . .”

“Not allowed to talk about injuries.”

“Come on!” He's leaving out the most interesting part of the crash.

“That's all I got,” he says.

“I heard the whole thing on the scanner, I just need you to verify it.”

“Sorry.” He smiles in a maddening way. This is fun for him. It's all a big game.

Lopez is in the median, gesturing at me, for some reason. He paces and beckons.

With the cop watching me, I get down on my knees and crawl under the cables. I'm concentrating on watching the weeds in front of me, hoping that I'm not the one who finds the severed foot somewhere. Finally, I'm through and leap to my feet, brushing the grass and sticky weeds off my dress. I'm making a face as I gingerly step through the weeds in the median. When I turn to look around, I catch the cop watching from his window. He's snickering.

“Don't you dare say a word,” I say.

He laughs. Right before he pulls away, he says, “Don't worry, they found the foot.”

Bingo. Confirmation.

In the car on the drive back, Lopez is frowning. “What was up with that helicopter?”

I shrug. “No clue.” He's chewing at his lip and looks worried.

“Why do you ask?” I say.

“Helicopters like that are what we saw in 'Nam. Black helicopters. Called ‘The Quiet Ones.' Used for some covert shit. The military uses copters like that for stealth missions, inserting and extracting personnel. No reason for a chopper like that to be out here in East County.”

Lopez is the best, but sometimes I worry that what he saw in Vietnam might make him a little more paranoid than the average person. Instead of answering, I look out the window and decide not to tell him I saw the same kind of helicopter at the scene of the Mission Massacre.

B
ACK
IN
THE
newsroom, I ignore the night cops reporter, May, as I sit down.

She wears crisp, pressed slacks, a starched blouse, and fat pearl earrings, and she smells overpoweringly like Chanel. Doesn't she ever have to cover wildfires or crawl under freeway medians like I do?

We are only civil to each other when we absolutely have to be. I tolerate her—­barely—­because she's good at her job and I don't have to worry about her missing any big stories on the cop beat overnight.

She owes me for her beat. I intervened to get her off covering education. But that doesn't mean we need to be best friends. As if she is reading my mind, she proves why we can never be pals by sneering slightly at me, eyes pointedly fixating on the big grass stain on my dress.

Note to self: never, ever, ever wear a dress to work again. Even as I say it, I know I'm lying. It's too hot here in the summer to wear pants every day.

Digging through my purse, I can't find the reporter's notebook I took out to the crash. I try to remember if I threw it in my bag when I got back into the car. I was so busy talking to Lopez about how stupid it was for me to wear a dress to work that I'm not sure what I did with the notebook. Rushing out to the newspaper parking lot, I check inside my car. No dice. Damn it. It's somewhere in the center median of the highway. It isn't the ideal way to write an article, but I write my severed-­foot story based on memory.

Before I pack up, I get online and search “Iraq War,” “samurai swords,” “black helicopters,” and “soldiers with PTSD.” I print out about fifty pages of information and tuck them into my bag. Some light reading for bedtime.

Donovan is working the homicide again, so I'm on my own for dinner. Back in North Beach, I eat some sourdough toast and slice a tomato, but my heart isn't into it. I grab the sheaf of papers I printed out, hop in bed, and vow to stay awake reading until Donovan gets home so I can ravish him. We should be spending every second tonight making love in case there is still a chance I can get pregnant. Instead, here I am reading about the Iraq War in bed. Alone.

 

Chapter 10

I
WAKE
I
N
the night, screaming. It takes me a few seconds to realize Donovan is back home and holding me in his arms, rocking me back and forth and whispering soothingly in my ear that it is just a bad dream and everything is okay. I fell asleep reading the papers I'd printed out.

I flick on the light by my bed, hoping it will dispel the memory of my dream. In it, I was in the Martin apartment again, nudging the door open. This time, the girl has her head turned away. I make a soft, cooing sound to get her attention. Her head snaps in a 360-­degree arc like the girl in
The Exorcist,
and her eye sockets are black holes. Her pointy vampire teeth are still chewing on chunks of flesh she's ripped from her dead mother's breast.

I'm afraid to tell Donovan about the dream. He'll think I'm even more in need of therapy than I really am.

He holds me as I calm down, allowing my breathing to get normal again. Sweat is trickling down my brow, and my body is trembling. But Donovan's presence calms me. He breathes into my hair and rubs my back until I'm not panting for air.

After a while, I pad over to the kitchen sink and fill a large glass with water, drinking it all in several gulps. Donovan is sitting up in bed, leaning against some pillows propped on my headboard. “You okay?” His eyes are soft, squinting in the bright light. He's been asking me this a lot lately. The question itself makes me feel high-­maintenance and guilty.

“How long have you been home?” I say.

“A few minutes ago. Have to be back in two hours.”

I walk back over to him, and we lie down with his arms wrapped around me and my face pressed against his chest. I kiss him, lifting his shirt up as my lips make their way downward. But then I hear it. Snoring. He's asleep.

I'm tempted to wake him up. I shake him a little, but he rolls over on his side. Anger, disappointment, and frustration shoot through me as I stand. I also feel guilty for being so angry with him. He has to go back to work in two hours. And he just got home. No wonder he fell asleep. But it still feels like rejection. If he wants a baby as much as I do, wouldn't he have tried to stay awake just in case there was still a chance?

Wide awake, I grab a blanket and head out the sliding-­glass door to the balcony. Pulling out a metal bistro chair, I sit, putting my bare feet up on the balcony railing. The smell of jasmine and basil from the pots in one corner combines with a whiff of ocean carried on the breeze.

Leaning back, ignoring the way the metal digs into my back through the blanket, I exhale slowly up into the crisp night air above me. The clouds part and reveal a slice of moon and stars. In front of me, the fog blows away, revealing the spires of Saints Peter and Paul Church across the park.

The distant bellow of a foghorn is comforting, but it fades as I'm back inside the church, as if it were yesterday. On tiptoe, I peer into my sister's coffin, staring at her in the white communion dress she never had a chance to wear. I'm yanked back from the coffin by my aunt, who rushes me back down the aisle, where I'm forced to sit with my two brothers in their too-­tight black suits. I can almost feel the scratchy crinoline of my dress, the one we picked out for me to wear to Caterina's first Eucharist.

Every time I see the church spires, I'm taken back in time. They aren't always bad times. Sometimes they are happy memories of playing in Washington Square Park, across from the church. My mother sitting with the other moms and laughing. My brothers playing bocce, imitating the old guys at one end of the park. Caterina sitting with the older girls, giggling and ignoring me when I try to get her to play with me. She's too cool for her younger sister, even though we are only a year apart. Over the past few months, memories of my dark past have been pushed down as I deal with my new, private grief, but they always linger there under the surface.

A gust of wind sends a chill through me, and the night grows darker as clouds cover the moon and stars.

 

Chapter 11

W
HEN
I
WAKE
,
the sunlight streaming through the windows helps me momentarily forget my nightmare from last night, and my anger at Donovan has lessened some.

Donovan left hours ago, even though it's Sunday. That's the thing about dating a cop—­there is no such thing as a weekend for him. Ever since we met, he's angled to get Sundays off, because he can't pass up the after-­party at my nana's house, when everyone gathers to eat after Mass. But this weekend, the first forty-­eight hours of a homicide take precedence.

Before my moka pot percolates, I speak to Kellogg and Mrs. Castillo, Maria Martin's mother.

After I pour my coffee, I open the breadbox to fish out the remains of a sourdough loaf. Along with the bread, I spot a tiny white box with a red ribbon on it. It's signed with a D.

Inside is a religious medal. St. Gerard, it says. I finger the miraculous medal of the Virgin Mary on my neck as I turn over the newer, shinier medal in my hands, looking for some clue as to why Donovan gave me this. I know a lot of saints, but this one escapes me. On my bookshelf, I take down the bright yellow spine of my
Book of Saints for Children
and flip through the pages.

St. Gerard is the patron saint of expectant mothers.

The realization makes me slump onto the couch.

I read on. When I get to the prayer to St. Gerard, it makes more sense. Donovan wants me to wear this when I get pregnant again.

This one line says it all: “ . . . shield the child which I now carry, that it may see the light of day and receive the lustral waters of baptism.”

Reading this makes my arms feel so empty. Donovan is so confident that I will get pregnant again. Me? I'm convinced something is wrong and I'll never be able to have children. If only I had his faith.

When I strip for my shower and see my flat stomach in the mirror, it sends me spiraling back in time to another day I can't forget, when the doctor told me there was no heartbeat.

“I've been doing this for twenty-­five years,” she said. “In that time, I've told hundreds of women the same thing, and within a year, I've delivered their baby.”

Although I never told Donovan what the doctor said, I clung to those words like a lifeline:
Within a year, I've delivered their baby
.

Later, I asked my regular obstetrician when we could start trying again. He must have heard the desperation in my voice.

“It's safest to wait until you've had at least three more regular cycles again.”

Three months.

It has now been four.

The chart I have taped to my bathroom cabinet marks every day. Last month, the first month we could “try,” I read every book on conception I could find and began taking my temperature and charting my cycle. I quit drinking and smoking. The night I told Donovan “it was time,” I was so excited. That disappeared two weeks later when my period came.

Last night would have been another chance to try. I swallow back the disappointment and anger. The last thing I need is to resent Donovan and his job. But deep down inside, I know it's too late.