Shards (2 page)

Things changed between my father and me when I was twelve or thirteen.
I
changed—adolescence and all that—but my father did too. He started pulling away from the family, traveling constantly, only coming home a day or two each month. He stopped inviting me to work out with him, stopped coming to my soccer games. I thought work was the reason for his distance, but when I was fourteen I found out that he had begun an affair with his secretary. Soon afterward he left us for her, and they moved into a house across town. He had moved out of our house but also out of our lives. My sister and I saw him only on rare occasions—and even then we had to arrange everything through this secretary, whom I couldn't help but hate. It was then that I threw myself into my doomed relationship with a high school boy named Josh.

The sliding glass doors that led from my bedroom into the front yard made it easy for a despondent teenager to escape from the house. I spent nights sneaking out to smoke pot and go joyriding with Josh. I gave up my other friends, my grades slipped, and I got kicked off the soccer team. My whole life telescoped down to Josh and me.

Josh was controlling and abusive.
You don't call me enough. You're not thin enough. You don't have sex with me enough.
He got into fistfights with my friends and sometimes with me.

We tortured each other.

I loved him.

Despite the fact that we were both miserable, we stayed together all through high school. I had never had a lot of girlfriends—I just wasn't good at those kinds of friendships—and now that my father was gone, I was trying to replace him with Josh.

It was only after high school ended and Josh joined the Marines that we stopped tormenting each other and I moved on to Vin and then Hal, who I eventually dumped for Maui. Now, twenty-three years old, in love with the island, I was ready to put down roots, ready to make Maui my home for the rest of my life.

•  •  •

I had applied to the police department on an impulse, but as I started to go through the interview process I got excited about the questions they were asking me—questions about my past, about ethics, about the way I thought. They dug way down to figure out if I would be a good candidate, and suddenly I wanted to be. It started to be important to me to be more than a waitress with a great body and a great boyfriend. I wanted to be a cop.

After each step in the process, I assumed I would get cut. But that didn't happen. Written exam: passed. Psychological test: passed. Background check: passed. The department had to go back and find a child psychiatrist my mom had taken me to see when I was fourteen and depressed because my dad had moved out. The guy had retired, but they tracked him down and got him to sign a statement saying I was mentally sound. After that, there was a polygraph test, which I also passed.

“Darling, you have to be kidding me,” Dalton would say every time I advanced to the next level. It got to be a joke between us. I
finally promised him I would move to Miami with him if I failed to get in.

Around this time, I was buying a soda in a 7-Eleven when a girl ran in screaming that her boyfriend was chasing her with a knife. Before anyone else had time to react, I barricaded the doors and called 911. The guy stood outside yelling and pounding on the doors until the cops came and arrested him. I loved the rush I got from taking action in such a heated situation.

At last I had only one step left: the final interview. When I walked into the room, six men in uniform stared at me—the chief, the deputy chief, three assistant chiefs, and an internal affairs detective. I could tell they thought I was a spaz. I was sure I had blown it.

It was only after the interview that I told my mom I had applied. I figured she would be happy to hear that I had tried to be something more than a waitress.

I broke it to her casually. “Do you remember when I was a kid and we saw that burglar breaking into the Andersons' house?” I asked her over the phone.

“How could I forget,” she said. “I called the cops, but you went chasing after the guy before they even got there. And then I had to chase after
you
. I've never been so frightened in my life. I could have killed you.”

“It seems like I have this certain instinct—”

“You were eleven!” She laughed and I could hear the ice cubes clink as her glass shook.

“But there was that time in high school too, remember?” I said. “When those kids put a dry ice bomb in the yard? I called the cops and they sent the ATF, but instead of waiting for them I went running outside to catch whoever left it.”

“Yes! You went hauling out there in your pajamas and bare feet. Good thing it was just a dry ice bomb.”

I hadn't even told my mom about what had happened most recently, at the 7-Eleven here on Maui.

“So,” I said. “I was thinking about the way I'm . . . attracted to crime. And—I decided to apply for a job in the police department.”

“What? Alli! You're kidding, right?”

“No. I'm not.”

“I'm sorry, but that's way too dangerous,” she said, as if that was the last word on the subject. I was touched by her concern. What mother wants her daughter to be a cop?

“It's my decision,” I said. “I probably won't even get in.”

News travels fast in my family. An hour later my sister called. “How are you going to yell loud enough to arrest somebody?” she asked. “How will they hear you with that little Minnie Mouse voice?” Carol put on a breathy, high-pitched voice and said, “
PLEASE MISTER, PUT DOWN THAT GUN
,” bursting into laughter at her imitation of me. Even I had to laugh.

My grandmother, Mimi, called the next day. “Now sweetheart, your granddad and I are worried about you,” she said. “You're not going to be carrying a gun, are you?” She was dead serious.

My family was sure there was no way I would get in, and I suppose I thought so too.

But a week later, a letter came from the department saying that I had been accepted into the 63rd recruit class. I was ordered to report to the Plans and Training division for prerecruit work until the class began.

Heart in my throat, I called Dalton. “I got in,” I said.

“What?”

“I got into the department. Recruit school begins in October, and I've got a job in Plans and Training until then.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“It's MPD's way of paying us until the training session begins. So we don't take another job.”

“So, wait. You're really going to be a cop?”

“Yes, I am,” I said. “I'm going to be a cop.”

When he didn't say anything, I asked, “What do you think?”

“I guess this means you're not coming to Miami with me?”

“No,” I said, surprised at my lack of hesitation. I had made my choice, and it wasn't him.

For once in my life, I hadn't sacrificed myself for a man.

The Maui Police Department bet
money that I wouldn't make it through recruit school. Only about fifty percent of recruits end up graduating from the academy, and here I was, this thin
haole
girl with pipe-cleaner arms and a squeaky voice.

On our first day, as we sat in the department's huge lecture hall, Sergeant Kainoa told us that out of all the applicants—I assumed it was hundreds, but later understood it to be more like one hundred—ours were the only twenty-four applications accepted. There were so few of us compared to the size of the room. On the back wall, there was a photo of each recruit class, and I was surprised to see how small all the graduating classes were. We would only graduate eleven out of that original twenty-four.

I sat with my friend Kevin, who I met while we worked as prehires in Plans and Training. Kevin and I had become workout buddies, getting up at five every morning to go to the MPD gym before work.

That first day of recruit school, I felt proud. I was one of the elite. I was also a little distracted by thoughts of Dalton. Our relationship had already been strained by my joining the police force, and he was moving back to Miami in a matter of weeks. We were going to try the long-distance thing, and I had no idea how that would go.

Looking down at my notebook, I realized with horror that, like a high schooler, I had doodled his name in the margin. Some of the male recruits seemed to be checking me out, but I was thinking only of Dalton. I barely noticed them.

There had been one guy who caught my eye, an officer I met briefly in Plans and Training. This officer—Officer Davis, tall, handsome, Hawaiian, built—had come into Plans and Training with a smile that captivated me. We locked eyes and had an instant connection.
This is what love at first sight must feel like
, I thought briefly, dramatically, but realized I was just attracted to his good looks. I was still dating Dalton, so the moment passed and life went on. I hadn't seen him since then, but I remembered how he had made me feel.

Kainoa introduced us to our other instructors, who seemed cold. Cruel even. Reagan went over the schedule and told us when we would have an emergency vehicle operator course (EVOC), firearms training, arrest defense tactics (ADT), and physical training (PT). I felt a surge of excitement as he described all the maneuvers we would learn to do, but then he said, “I don't know why I'm bothering to go over this. Most of you won't even make it past the academics, and the rest of you will fail physical training.”

I felt my muscles tighten when he said this. I had been around cops long enough in Plans and Training to know they liked to show up on the first day of class with badass attitudes. Still, I was intimidated.
I was concerned about the PT and my lack of upper-body strength.

Next to me, Kevin nudged me and said, “Don't worry, Alli, you're a beast!”

I gave him a smile. We had been working out like crazy, running, lifting, and circuit training every single day. I was stronger than I looked. When the instructors looked at me, I was sure they underestimated me. The odds were against me, but I knew something they didn't know—I had a determination like they'd never seen, and I couldn't wait to show them.

At break, they handed out granola bars, and we stood around awkwardly trying to meet each other. A chubby guy came up to me, chewing one granola bar and holding two more. “You're going out for the force?” he asked.

I nodded, wondering why else he thought I would be there.

“You don't look much like a cop,” he said.

You don't either, Fatso
, I wanted to say, surprised he had passed the weight requirement, but I held it in. It was our first day, and I was going to be spending nine solid months in training with him.

“You look like the most popular cheerleader in high school,” Fatso continued.

“I wasn't a cheerleader,” I said. “I was a soccer player, so watch your ass.”

“Sorry,” he said. “You just don't look like the cop type.”

•  •  •

The next morning, I was so excited to start training that I was the first to arrive. Recruits aren't allowed to wear their uniforms outside the department, so I had to get dressed in the locker room prior to class. I loved putting on my gun belt for the first time. It was heavy
and hurt my hip bones, but it gave me confidence I had never had before.

I sized up the other two female recruits in the locker room and concluded I might be able to hold my own against them. Penny Drinan had been in the military and was just like a man. A hardass. She would turn out to be our sergeant at arms, but she would struggle academically. Julia Loza was a pretty Filipina and more girlie, and she made a point of telling me that she had done some modeling in the past.

The men in recruit school were a mixed assortment, from meatheads to nerds. I loved all the local boys—they were funny, humble, encouraging. But the white male recruits from the mainland were typical meatheads. Chauvinistic. Most were physically fit. Others were a little soft. The heavy guy from the day before was named Tom Pika. It turned out his father worked in the department, and I assumed that was why he was accepted. His connections made him arrogant even though he was far from qualified for the department.

I loved the training we did in recruit school—a long training in aikido, a great deal with the martial arts, lots of hand locks and learning how to control people you normally couldn't control. Sergeant Mankell taught us how to do hand-to-hand combat. We spent plenty of time getting hit and learning what it felt like to get hit without being stunned. My high school boyfriend, Josh, and I used to get into a lot of fights, some of them physical, but before joining the department, I had never been cracked in the face and I had never hit anyone in the face either. I came home one day and told Dalton we had practiced getting hit in the jaw all day and he just rolled his eyes. He was having a hard time watching his girlfriend become a cop.

During some parts of training, we had to keep a red band on our firearm hand. They taught us not to do anything with our firearm
hand, because if you have something in that hand, how the hell are you going to draw a gun?

We also spent time on perspective training, training our eyes to look all around to avoid getting tunnel vision in a high-adrenaline situation.

“You'll need this for domestic violence calls,” our instructor said. “You'll be fighting with the male to get him cuffed. Meanwhile, the female is coming at you with a frying pan.”

My first day in ADT the instructor said, “Trust me, you're going to need to use everything I teach you in arrest defense tactics. You know why? Because criminals don't like to get arrested, and they'll do anything they can to get away from you.” He looked around the room, appraising us. “Okay,” he said. “We're going to start with some highly technical training. It's called ‘Oh shit' training.”

We all laughed, but he shook his head to indicate he was serious. “For example,” he said, “what do you do if someone's on top of you pounding your face? That's an ‘Oh shit' moment. A volunteer?”