I start past Kerrigan. Ahead through the crowd of officers I will make a right turn, and another right, and I will be there. A fifteen second trip at most from here. But I hardly make it a single step when Kerrigan stops me. His firm hand around my upper arm. I look to him expecting to be told there is no hurry. That I am too late.
But I am, thankfully, very wrong in that supposition.
“He’s going to be okay,” Kerrigan says. “It looked worse at the shooting scene.”
Clichés flow true and free from me right then. I let out a relieved breath. My eyes close briefly as I offer a silent prayer of gratitude. It is an unavoidably selfish response to what Kerrigan has shared with me. But I know that there is still reason for me to be here. Reason for me to make those two right turns.
“Family is still shook up,” Kerrigan explains. “Dave Benz is with Celia—that’s Luke’s wife.”
“And the boys?”
“They’re there,” Kerrigan answers. In the instant of silence that follows a hint of harsh embarrassment seems to wash over him. As if pained by some sudden failing. “I don’t remember their names.”
I put a hand on his shoulder and need to say no more. This moment will pass for him. So many this night are wanting to do the right thing that perfection in
all
things seems the only acceptable outcome. It is the nature of those who find themselves powerless in a situation. An impossible standard that will be met by none. Myself included.
I finally leave Kerrigan and weave through the crush of police. After the first right turn the way ahead seems to clear, two sergeants being given the unenviable task of keeping their fellow officers back. They are the line in the sand. The gate keepers. And when I approach they each step aside.
A hallway relatively clear stretches out before me. A nurse rushes into a room on the left. A doctor stands where the hall splits right, penning notes in a folder. Oblivious as I approach and twist myself between him and the wall to slip past and turn down the connecting corridor.
The trauma ward opens before me. Four treatment rooms to one side, each missing a fourth wall. Their interior open to the nurse’s station opposite them. There is activity at only the far one. Doctors moving in and out. Hurried but not frantic. Confirmation to me of Kerrigan’s update on Luke’s condition. Haste infers life on the precipice. Slowness that all has been done. That life has already passed.
Luke Benz lies on the stout gurney in the far treatment room, eyes clamped shut in a grimace against the pain as a doctor and nurse suture a wound on the right side of his neck. He has been stripped from the waist up. Splotches of blood cover his face. His right arm. The whole of his chest. Some has spilled as far as his dark uniform pants. I say nothing as I slip into the room, stepping over a thick splatter of red on the floor to stand to Luke’s left. His hand on this side tremoring where it rests on the gurney, an IV line snaking from the arm above it to a trio of clear bags hung from the wall. I ease my hand onto his and it stills instantly. Not because I am blessed with any manner of ability to calm, but because I am simply here. His hand would still at his wife’s touch. His father’s touch. A stranger’s touch. But when he opens his eyes he sees none of those. He sees me. And he smiles.
“Father Mike.” His voice scratches. A dry rasp seeming to anchor the words in his throat. His head angles slightly toward me and the nurse immediately places her hand on his brow. Stopping the motion.
“Gotta be still, officer,” she says, flashing a look to me. It is tinged with distance. Indifference. A tiredness, perhaps, of having those she treats look to those of my calling for comfort at the very moment when those of
her
calling are wrist deep in blood, not promising salvation in some life to be, but actually delivering exactly that in a ten by ten space upwards of twelve hours a day. “Father.”
Luke squeezes my hand, his grip tightening with each stitch the doctor places in his damaged flesh. He winces. He struggles to speak, the words trapped in his parched mouth.
“You’re going to be fine,” I tell him. He cannot nod against the nurse’s firm hand on his forehead, but his eyes seem to affirm my words.
“Through and through,” he gasps with effort. He swallows dryly and smiles. “Lucky.”
The doctor tending his wound glances up at me. “Quarter inch left, quarter inch right, and he’s under a sheet.”
The statement to me is cold, but Luke snickers at it. Perhaps he finds comfort in the doctor’s clinical certainty. Comfort in realizing that as close as he came to death, death was cheated this night.
“Celia…worried,” he says. The words are parched. Mostly whisper. “Wife.”
I nod. “I’ll tell her you’re flirting with the nurses.” His chest trembles with a soft laugh. “And I’ll make sure your boys know daddy’s one tough cop.”
His eyes well at that, the smile beneath them a mix of joy and sadness. An expression of what is, and what could have been.
A quarter inch right
, I think.
A quarter inch left
.
“Dylan and Thomas,” Luke says tiredly, a glint in his glistening eyes as he speaks his boys’ names. I smile at the combination. It is possible, I suppose, that there was no influence of a drunken Welsh poet on the choice of names. Possible.
“Poetic license?” I ask, and despite the hand on his brow Luke manages a slight shake of the head. I bring my right hand up and in the air between us I trace a cross. Father, Son, and Holy spirit. A blessing for him to which I add a silent prayer as I release his hand and slip out of the treatment room.
Chapter Two
Victims
I look past the nurse’s station to a door whose upper half is transparent. A small break room beyond. A place where doctors and nurses can take a moment and remain in proximity to the often chaotic trauma ward. This night, though, it has been co-opted. The bear of a man I see beyond the glass tells me this.
Dave Benz catches sight of me as I approach the door. He does not smile. Does not express relief of any sort. I could ascribe this immediate response to my presence to a myriad of things. He has been roused from sleep to learn his only child was shot. The stoic facade of thirty plus years as a cop does not peel away when the uniform is taken off for the last time. At this hour I am just another of a thousand faces he has seen this night and he does not recognize me.
Or it could be my sister. I do not wish to dredge that thought from its hiding place, but it comes nonetheless. His last year as a police officer was spent hunting the killer of his first partner’s daughter. I vividly recall the pall that seemed to settle over my father that year as spring turned to summer with no resolution. No justice for my sister. For Dave Benz, I imagine the dark frustration at being unable to give my father and mother just that ached in ways he did not show.
Before I reach the door he opens it. I enter and he puts a hand gently on my shoulder. There is a delicate weight to the meaty appendage. It is both instrument of comfort and violence. In his years on the thin blue line it is well within reason that some, maybe many, on the wrong side of the law felt this very same hand, either clamped on their wrist as it was twisted behind their back or fisted into a cudgel as they were pummeled into submission after making the mistake of resisting arrest.
But it seems more likely to me that Dave Benz, in his most recent years, has used those hands to cradle the two boys who sit on the couch a few feet from me, tiny heads of tousled red hair lolling on their mother’s lap. Dozing.
“Mike, how are you?” Dave says to me as he closes the door. His concern is genuine. Almost familial. A connection borne of countless barbecues, and ball games, and swimming parties stretching back four decades. My father never tried to explain the bond that cops share, possibly because he thought it an apparent reality. In truth, it is not far from the cliché seen on screens big and small, where viewers learn that wearing the badge brings one into a brotherhood no less important than a family bound by blood. Because, as is the case tonight, blood is the thing that binds. That brings brother and sister officers together for the sake of their own.
Or their families.
“Dave, I’m good.” It is odd, still, after a lifetime of
Mr. Benzing
him, to address him so informally. It is a habit of respect that our mother drilled into my sister and me. A rule so inviolable that when a close family friend urged me to call him Uncle Henry instead of Mr. Gaines, my mother thumped the back of my nine year old head the first time I followed his suggestion. ‘Family is
only
family’, she would say. She was warm and friendly and accepting of all who we knew and socialized with, so her insistence on this insular reservation of familiarity puzzled me as a child. As an adult I simply set it aside as a quirk. The protective flourish of a mother.
“I just saw Luke,” I tell Dave. He nods without emoting one way or the other. A gesture of cold confirmation. “He was giving the nurse a hard time.”
Again Dave nods coldly. He looks to me. A prelude to speaking, it seems, but nothing comes, and at that instant I realize what it is muting both expression and words—rage. He is a father. A witness to his child’s suffering. To his daughter in law’s fear. His grandchildren’s confused worry. It is more pronounced than what I witnessed in my own father following Katie’s death, but he was reserved by nature. In the years since then, his tendency to hold thoughts and feelings close has grown.
The same can not be said of Dave Benz. He was gregarious. Prone to telling jokes that, when children were out of earshot, were off color at best. When work did not require a stern countenance it was uncommon to
not
see a huge grin stretched across his jowly face. Being witness to his manner and expression at this very instant I can imagine what cold, cruel desire spins behind his eyes, and I am glad for him that he is nowhere near the person who brought hurt to his son this night.
“You remember Celia,” Dave says as he ushers me toward Luke’s wife.
“Of course.” It has been many years. Since their wedding, actually. Eight years. Beyond the troubled weariness reddening her eyes, I can see the way she has aged. The innocent brightness that seemed all about her on the day she said
‘I do’
has been replaced by the tepid strength of a policeman’s wife. The false veneer of surety that the spouses of those in uniform wear every waking moment until events such as this smash it to pieces. She has denied Luke’s mortality, convinced herself of his invincibility for the last time. From this moment on, every day that he leaves their home and kisses her and their sons goodbye, she will not simply worry that it is the last time they will see him—she will be convinced of it. “Celia,” I crouch before her and take one of her hands in both of mine. “Luke is going to be fine.”
She nods, the gesture without certainty. He will be fine tonight. And tomorrow. But after that? The reality of her place in her marriage, her family, her world has just been given her in a dose almost too much to accept.
“Can you still pray for him?” she asks, one of her boys stirring. The older one. Dylan, I assume by his place in the naming order.
“I haven’t stopped all night,” I tell her. “And I won’t.”
My response moves her in some way that tears flow quietly. Spilling down her cheeks without a hint of sobbing. She is a statue weeping. After a moment she brings her arm up and dries the tears with the sleeve of her sweater. Dylan watches her intently. His gaze sampling her face in profile without reaction. He is numbed by the hour. The confusion. The terrible possibilities that ‘
daddy’s hurt
’ might hold. I ease my grip from Celia and turn my attention to Dylan, glancing at his little brother. Eyes closed. Chest rising and falling. His dreams hopefully a million miles from this place and time.
“Does Thomas always sleep like a rock?” I ask Dylan.
He nods. “He slept through mom backing into a pole after my school play.”
I smile at his recollection and reach into the pocket of my windbreaker. “Dylan, can you do me a favor?” He puzzles at my question for a moment, his gaze angling up past me to find not his mother, but his grandfather.
“Father Mike’s a priest,” Dave tells his first grandchild, blessing me in the eyes of the young boy. “He’s a good friend.”
Dylan looks back to me and answers with a silent nod. I take my hand out of my pocket and open it before him. Four pieces of candy lay in the palm. “In the morning, when Thomas is awake, will you give him two pieces for me?”
He eyes the treats intently for a moment. Appraising them as a diamond merchant might a sampling of fine stones. His focus takes me back to my own childhood. Returning from costumed sweeps through the neighborhood on Halloween, planned by my friends and me with tactical precision after identifying targets known to stock the choicest offerings of the day—Baby Ruths, Tootsie Rolls, Pop Rocks. Upending the pillow case my mother had given me to collect and haul my take. Sorting through the pile of colorfully wrapped confections. Arranging a hierarchy of smaller mounds, from most desirable to least. Dylan, even at this hour, is doing in his head what I did on my parent’s kitchen table as a boy. Sorting. Choosing. Deciding. He reaches to my hand. I lean just a bit closer.
“Give your brother at least one good one,” I say. He nods, the slimmest smile rising, and he draws the candy into his grip with tiny fingers. I am flushed with sadness at the sight. He is small. But not small enough that he will not remember this night. In the future while his mother may wear her worry about her husband on her sleeve, Dylan will bury the same fears. He will lie in bed as his daddy works the streets that have already come close to taking him away. He may cry. He may not. But when he wakes in the morning he will not first dress himself, or hurry to turn the TV on to his favorite cartoon, or do any of the things a child does without thinking. No, his first waking moments will consist of a mad dash from his room to his parents’, a slow opening of their door, a squint through the din to see if there is a shape beneath the covers on daddy’s side of the bed.