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“Everyone’s heart is a living room wall with awkwardly placed photographs hiding fist-sized holes.”
-Andrea Gibson, who is my favorite.
As A Practice of Listening
She will spend this day and her life raising a single disdainful eyebrow at anyone who asks how she’s doing, proving herself to the department and the mirror, fighting because she understands that a single ribbon of weakness will be pulled upon and tugged until her innards spill out on the floor. Reese will cuff any cops who are too nice in the shoulder just a little too hard to be playful and flip off the stray heartless wiseass that asks aloud whether time spent in a dog cage makes her more or less a bitch. She will ignore Tidwell’s objectively moving offers of going away for a while, just the two of them, like so much bird chatter.
Today, right now, she eases out of the car. She laces her fingers into his hand and presses her face into his shoulder, listens to the oddly slow heartbeat. He checks her spine for vertebrae and buries his nose in her hair for all that it’s greasy and smells like perfume and sweat. He feels her breath and her breathe and they stand together and she will probably never let him touch her like this again.
Dani pulls away; though if she were anyone else she would still be standing too close. “My father is dead.” She blinks a couple times, too fast. She resolutely does not turn away her head.
Crews goes still in a way she’s come to associate with imminent and devastating violence. He asks the question, “How?” Is it open season on Reeses, is it into the breach once more, was it Rayborn for all the loyalty he swore.
“Roman.” She answers and all of the tension seeps from his body to hers.
“Reese. I’m sorry.” He doesn’t say anything about how everyone you’ve ever missed never went anywhere, how we are universes within and between ourselves the same.
“Yeah.” She agrees, scuffs her foot against the dirt.
“Are you hungry?”
She’s just realized that she’s the closest to starving she’s ever actually come and nods.
“I’ll buy you a burrito on the way to the hospital.”
This and she does not thank him. The greatest or perhaps only compliments she has ever given.
“He saved you life.” Bodner glances back at the pair of them, then swivels his eyes back to the road.
“I guess so.” She tries saying the words inside her own head and they feel false, overly dramatic, too sentimental and not even true. He didn’t ask for gratitude and it never occurred to her to give it. “You tried to take his.” Charlie looks up from the window at her, not surprised, just aware.
“Oh, no.” He says, batting the very thought away. “If I’d wanted to kill him.”
“I’d be dead.” Charlie agrees through a mouthful of tortilla and slides a few inches closer to her, just shy of touching.
“You think this makes up for that?” Dani murmurs but she’s not really asking a question, gesturing around the car interior. “If you-”
“I know.” Bodner interrupts her, lowering his head and thinking of his wife. “I would do the same.”
They arrive and the suits holding clipboards are waiting. Nurses wrap blood pressure cuffs around biceps and recording microphones seems to nudge themselves just a little closer to his face.
After, Charlie folds himself up in the grey chair like a too-long letter into a too-small envelope. He sleeps with slitted eyes. Dani knows, knows, that most cops will never bleed or break in the line of duty and wonders how, that being so, the pair of them spend so much fucking time in hospitals.
He leads her up to his bedroom, but not like that. He speaks at the closet door. “It still matters. Even with Roman-” They both neatly dodge her flinch, not looking at it. “I think it still matters.”
Crews starts to open his door and once she can see more than red paper and thick, ugly black marks this will no longer be possible today. She wonders if Ted is home somewhere and uses his absence as the excuse, the trigger. Her index finger twitches as though she’s firing a gun.
She drags him to the bed instead. It’s like dragging someone towards something they want.
She winces in slight pain and he freezes against her, eyes searching her face by quadrant. She sits up a little and gathers her hair to the side so he won’t pull it again.
She kisses the tendons in his neck and the shudder begins from the ribcage.
This is something freely offered, something he’d wanted on immediate reflection, obviously, badly but never considered possible. It’s like the day they told him he was going to be a cop again, like comparisons aren’t an anathema to zen. .
She still leaves in the morning, but brings him a cup of coffee on her way out. Hope and its opposite.
“What are you looking at?” She snaps at him like the minority sidekick in an old movie for all that he was probably just checking for bruises or a nameless tension in her neck.
He inhales to say something that will keep that look off of her face, forever, but instead it freezes him. “Nothing,” He says softly, hating the sound of the word, the small lie. He was looking at nothing’s opposite.
She winces. “Crews...” Dani begins, unsure of what to say, of what exactly she’d be apologizing for.
“I heard on the radio this morning,” He begins.
She interrupts, hopelessly, “A song?”
“Oh. Some of those, too. But that the more you observe something the farther away it gets. If you watch it too closely it can just disappear all together. Scientists can’t explain why.”
“Huh,” Dani says, for a moment so fond of him she wants to gag.
“I think a lot of truths are like that.” And if he were someone else he would be wanting to impress her with his insight, his depth but he’s him so he’s just saying the words that come to him, to her because that’s who he wants to share them with.
She slumps against the seat, suddenly unbelievably tired. “Yeah.” She doesn’t know what one sentence she’d say about truth but also understands that even if she did she wouldn’t be able to say it.
It occurs to her that after all that maybe this is the one difference between them that matters: He changed from the bones out and she pretended so hard she became her script.
They are taken off of administrative leave; officially he is charged with nothing but self-defense and minor insubordination. Unofficially, poor decision making and destruction of several careers. He thanks Tidwell and the shorter man replies “No problem,” through the shadow of a snarl across his lips. Tidwell watching Dani; under other circumstances it could have been a hobby Charlie and he share.
He reaches out for the bagged bloody paperweight, tests its weight in his hand. For one moment her heart rattles like a sooty dove in a chimney and she blinks three times to clear it away. “It was the oldest daughter,” She says, convinced with her femur instead of her heart.
Dani doesn’t do well in basements anymore. He offers her a skinned slice of dragonfruit and pretends not to notice while she chews it.
“Why?” Charlie asks, apparently addressing the paperweight.
Dani’s eyebrows go up and she runs her finger down a portrait of three sisters whose smiles are all just slightly tense around the eyes. “To protect someone she loved. It isn’t always about the drugs or the money.” She shifts, noticing that their mother is always wearing sunglasses in every picture.
His smile turns brittle and she fights the urge to cast her eyes down.
“I didn’t mean--” She starts.
“Would you like breakfast?” He asks in a murmur that pretends to notice nothing.
“It’s--” She starts to tell him that it’s four hours past noon and then stops. “Pancakes.” She says with a finality usually reserved for life sentences.
“My treat.” He murmurs and then wraiths away in that silent way he has that’s probably extended his lifespan by decades.
Dani sleeps on a sleeping bag and then later on the couch he has delivered for her, since buying her a bed would imply a level of attachment that is both life-affirming and devastating. She doesn’t make a move again and he doesn’t ask her why not. He spends more time pondering this essential if mutable fact than is holy or healthy.
“I thought about it, sometimes.” They stand over the crumpled form of a crone who turns out to be no one’s grandmother. It’s not always a murder. Not even usually.
“Suicide?” Dani responds, incredulous.Even in her darkest pit she wanted to live, even a tiny bit more than she wanted her next fix. Twenty years ago Charlie may have said, “No, macrame,” but he is matured and sharper and broken along every axis. He knows the value of silence.
Dani continues, forcing her tone into neutral. “How would you have done it? Dug yourself a hole and then climbed in?”
Charlie smiles at that, unexpectedly. “It never felt like the right time.”
She socks him in the shoulder, for making a stupid joke or for considering erasing himself, but lets her hand linger longer than anyone else’s. He notices. He always does.
He summons Rachel back, lest she think he wanted her gone instead of un-shattered. She eyes the couch that is littered with Dani’s neat detritus and raises a single questioning eyebrow.
She inhales and begins, “So am I here until--
“Until you aren’t.” Says Charlie.
Her smile is brief but blinding and just this once he’s managed to say precisely the right thing.
“So that Russian guy.” She starts, stretching out the first syllable in a clear invitation to speak.
“Dead,” Dani says flatly, all the input she would offer for a solid minute of her police debriefing.
Rachel nods, shoulders slumping for once in relaxation and not despair. She reaches slowly and touches Dani’s forearm, just for a second. The two women stare at each other like avalanche survivors, like they’ve taken a walk in each other’s nightmares.
It’s Rachel, so uncomfortable with being the direct object in any sentence, that ends it. “I want falafel now.” She announces. “And a shower later.”
Charlie thinks it’s okay to consider this a family dinner. He’s allowed that much, probably.
It’s a Wednesday.
He lays there for a moment, neck flushed and breath warm against her neck. She makes a little grunt of discomfort. He leans off but not away.
“Reese.” He murmurs, the loudest he ever really talks and she knew this was coming the same way she hears gunshots without knowing the target.
Here it is, the absolute unvarnished truth you don’t dare to waste on a stranger. “I want that to have meant something.”
Her shoulders grow slack and her mouth curves just slightly upward. He lays his head back on the pillow, sighing with something between relief and the conviction that it’s just a matter of when she changes her mind.