I waited for the police first in the kitchen, but the acrid smell of the
burnt teakettle was curling up in the back of my throat, underscoring
my need to retch, so I drifted out on the front porch, sat on the top
stair, and willed myself to be calm. I kept trying Amy's cell, and it
kept going to voice mail, that quick-clip cadence swearing she'd phone
right back. Amy always phoned right back. It had been three hours, and
I'd left five messages, and Amy had not phoned back.
I didn'd expect her to. I'd tell the police: Amy would never have left
the house with the teakettle on. Or the door open. Or anything waiting
to be ironed. The woman got shit done, and she was not one to abandon a
project (say, her fixer-upper husband, for instance), even if she
decided she didn'd like it. She'd made a grim figure on the Fiji beach
during our two-week honeymoon, battling her way through a million
mystical pages of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, casting pissy glances at
me as I devoured thriller after thriller. Since our move back to
Missouri, the loss of her job, her life had revolved (devolved?) around
the completion of endless tiny, inconsequential projects. The dress
would have been ironed.
And there was the living room, signs pointing to a struggle. I already
knew Amy wasn'd phoning back. I wanted the next part to start.
It was the best time of day, the July sky cloudless, the slowly setting
sun a spotlight on the east, turning everything golden and lush, a
Flemish painting. The police rolled up. It felt casual, me sitting on
the steps, an evening bird singing in the tree, these two cops getting
out of their car at a leisurely pace, as if they were dropping by a
neighborhood picnic. Kid cops, mid-twenties, confident and uninspired,
accustomed to soothing worried parents of curfew-busting teens. A
Hispanic girl, her hair in a long dark braid, and a black guy with a
marine's stance. Carthage had become a bit (a very tiny bit) less
Caucasian while I was away, but it was still so severely segregated that
the only people of color I saw in my daily routine tended to be
occupational roamers: delivery men, medics, postal workers. Cops. ("This
place is so white, it's disturbing," said Amy, who, back in the melting
pot of Manhattan, counted a single African-American among her friends. I
accused her of craving ethnic window dressing, minorities as backdrops.
It did not go well.)
"Mr Dunne? I'm Officer Velásquez," said the woman, "and this is Officer
Riordan. We understand you"re concerned about your wife?"
Riordan looked down the road, sucking on a piece of candy. I could see
his eyes follow a darting bird out over the river. Then he snapped his
gaze back toward me, his curled lips telling me he saw what everyone
else did. I have a face you want to punch: I'm a working-class Irish kid
trapped in the body of a total trust-fund douchebag. I smile a lot to
make up for my face, but this only sometimes works. In college, I even
wore glasses for a bit, fake spectacles with clear lenses that I thought
would lend me an affable, unthreatening vibe. "You do realize that
makes you even more of a dick?" Go reasoned. I threw them out and smiled
harder.
I waved in the cops: "Come inside the house and see."
The two climbed the steps, accompanied by the squeaking and shuffling
noises of their belts and guns. I stood in the entry to the living room
and pointed at the destruction.
"Oh," said Officer Riordan, and gave a brisk crack of his knuckles. He suddenly looked less bored.
Riordan and Velásquez leaned forward in their seats at the dining room
table as they asked me all the initial questions: who, where, how long.
Their ears were literally pricked. A call had been made out of my
hearing, and Riordan informed me that detectives were being dispatched. I
had the grave pride of being taken seriously.
Riordan was asking me for the second time if I'd seen any strangers in
the neighborhood lately, was reminding me for the third time about
Carthage's roving bands of homeless men, when the phone rang. I launched
myself across the room and grabbed it.
A surly woman's voice: "Mr Dunne, this is Comfort Hill Assisted Living."
It was where Go and I boarded our Alzheimer's-riddled father.
