I lay back in the sand and cried, suddenly picturing my mother standing on our porch, wondering where I was. "Here I am!" I yelled, and the salty tears boiled in my mangled eye. Then I just started yelling and crying, scratching around in the sand, panicking, I guess. I don't know how long I yelled and cried but finally I felt a hand on my chest, patting me, reassuring me, and at first I thought it was my mom, but then I realized that Everson had come back. Of course he had.
"It's okay," Everson said.
I opened my right eye and stared into the black-rimmed glasses of Eli Boyle.
"It's okay," Eli said again. "I called for help." And he held my hand.
The lady smiled; for the gallantries of a one-eyed man are still gallantries.
– Voltaire, "The One-Eyed Porter"
III
1
Caroline, go home." Her sergeant interrupts her midstream, although she wasn't getting any closer to explaining why she's let some loon waste the last five hours confessing, or how, at three o'clock Saturday morning, he's still at it, hunched over his second legal pad and his fourth cup of coffee, no end in sight.
"Just go home," her sergeant, Chris Spivey, says again from the other side of the phone. "Get your nut a bed somewhere. We'll roust him Monday morning and he can tell us all about how the aliens probed his ass." Spivey is the first sergeant she's worked for who is younger than she is; at first she found this merely disconcerting, but now he seems like any other boss, officious and rigid, and apparently none too thrilled about getting a phone call at three in the morning. "Caroline, I won't authorize overtime for this."
"I didn't call for overtime," she says. "But what if there's something here?"
"Lock him up. Commit him. Shoot him. I don't care. Just go home."
She sighs and looks back through the window at the Loon. He turns the legal pad over and begins writing on the back of the page, in a small and controlled cursive, the way she's seen delusional people write in the margins of phone books and on countertops. "Okay," she says into the phone.
"What's the matter with you, anyway?" he asks. "Where's your head these days?"
A fair question, that.
She's been checked out, barely functioning, coming to work and sitting at her desk, taking hours to fill out the simplest reports, forgetting phone numbers and names. It's no better at home, where she sits down on the couch and forgets to take off her coat, or sits at the kitchen table, or surfs the Internet until dawn, bidding on things she doesn't need in online auctions: parasols and turntable needles, laser printers and fishing lures. Two nights ago she played chess in a chat room. She hates chess.
Where's your head?
The last few months have felt like someone else's life: surprised at her own behavior, watching silently over her own shoulder, wondering when she started liking bourbon, why she doesn't shower on the weekends anymore, when she started playing chess. It's a symptom of depression, maybe, this feeling of detachment from oneself. Sometimes she retraces her steps, examines the last five months for the moment she began drifting – her mother's death, her boyfriend moving out, the retirement of her best friend and the man she quietly pined away for, her former sergeant, Alan Dupree.
But she came through all of those things. No, this started later, after Caroline interrupted a guy who was about to murder a young hooker – a whisper of a girl named Rae-Lynn Pierce. At some point it dawned on Caroline that in fifteen years as a police officer, this girl, Rae-Lynn, was the only person she'd ever really saved. Maybe there were potential victims of criminals that she arrested, people whose lives were better off because of Caroline's actions, but those were abstractions, shadows. They were certainly not real people that she could point to and name. Rae-Lynn Pierce was real, and she was alive because of Caroline.
That's why, if she had to pick the moment when everything finally went to shit, when she lost focus and found herself dreaming of giving up, it would have to be the day three months ago when she heard that Rae-Lynn was dead, from an untreated case of hepatitis. Six weeks. That's how much time Caroline had given Rae-Lynn Pierce.
After that, Caroline began to lose interest. But it was more than a professional crisis; it was as if she had walked for fifteen years, only to find herself at the gorge of middle age, alone. She began to think of it as exactly that sort of transaction – fifteen years of her life for six weeks of an addict's fuck-ups. She fell asleep in meetings, stared out from her desk, let cases stagnate. Spivey moved her to nights, and her depression got worse, more isolated, darker.
And now this Loon, and she's being what… a psychiatrist? A confessor? Certainly not a cop. What did the Loon ask? Had she ever been responsible for someone's death? Maybe that's why she has let him sit in there for the last five hours, because she knows exactly how he feels, desperate to confess but uncertain what for.
She checks her watch. Ten minutes past three. She stalks across the office, unlocks the door to Interview Two, and steps inside.
"That's it," she says.
He looks up at her and smiles. "I'm finished, Caroline," he says, and she is deflated, as much by the smile and the way her name sounds as by the announcement she's been waiting for all night. His right eye is red, as if he's been crying again.
"Done?" She catches the whiff of letdown in her own voice.
The Loon flexes and unflexes the fingers on his right hand. "Well, not completely, no. But the preliminary part, the setup, you know – the key people. The hard part is done. The context and explanation." He pats the legal pad. "It's all here. All that's left is the details. The recent stuff."
Caroline doesn't quite know what to say. She sits across from him. "Look, I'm sorry, but I can't just sit here all weekend while you work through…" She flips the yellow pages of the legal pad. "… whatever you're working through here. I know this is important to you, but I'm not even supposed to be at work right now."
When he doesn't say anything, she keeps talking. "My sergeant said I've got to send you home. They won't even pay me for this. I'm supposed to be at home. Sleeping."
He just stares.
"See, this isn't how it works."
"I'm sorry, Caroline. I'll get right to it, now. I promise. Thirty minutes."
"No," she says. "You're going to just have to tell me what all this is about."
"I am," he says, and he pats the legal pad. "I am trying to tell you what all this is about." He pulls the patch away and rubs his left eye, but the movement is so fast she can't quite see what the patch is hiding. "It's in here. I'm coming clean."
"I think maybe you need a doctor."
"No," he says. "I'm not crazy. Please. You'll see. Just stay with me here a little bit longer. We've gone this far. Look, if you go home now, I might just drop the whole thing. I know I will. And no one will never know what happened."
He scratches his head and thick waves of hair fall forward, covering the strap to his eye patch for a moment, until he pulls his hand away and the hair falls back, more or less into place. "Please," he whispers. "Help me get this one thing right. I've made a mess of everything else, but this one thing… Please."
"I can't."
"Please."
"No."
"Please."
She looks around the room. "You have to give me something in return."