Justin realized he’d finished the second beer. He decided he could definitely use a third, so went back to the fridge. In fact, he pretty much decided at least one of the two six-packs on the refrigerator shelf was a goner, but halfway back to his living room, his doorbell rang.
Justin glanced at his watch. Ten o’clock at night. He wasn’t used to unexpected visitors at this hour. He wasn’t used to any visitors, he realized. In the nearly seven years he’d lived in East End Harbor, not more than a dozen people-including the exterminator and the kid who cut his grass-had been inside his house.
He headed for the door. Through the shaded glass panel he saw a woman’s figure. He pulled the door open, cocked his head in surprise.
“I’m sorry,” Reggie Bokkenheuser said. He saw that she’d been crying. He must have been staring because she wiped at her cheek with her fingers, brushing away the moisture. “I just couldn’t stand being alone anymore and I don’t really know anybody else.” She waved in the direction of his television, which was still tuned to CNN. “I can’t stand watching it, but I can’t stop. I’m sorry, I just needed some company. If you want me to-”
“No, no,” he said. “Come on in.”
She hesitated, standing on the scraggly straw welcome mat on his screened-in porch. He gently took her by the elbow and guided her inside.
“It just got to me,” she said. “The images, all the blood, the goddamn talk about war and-”
He handed her his untouched bottle of beer. She looked surprised, but when he nodded, she raised it to her lips and took a long swallow.
“I didn’t want to drink alone,” she said. “I didn’t know if I should drink at all. I didn’t know what the hell to do. Every time I thought of something that’d take my mind off all this, I felt like such a coward. Do you know what I mean?”
“No idea,” he told her. “I was just about to get blind drunk.”
She did her best to smile, almost succeeded, wiped at her cheek again and sniffled back a potential tear.
“You moved in already?” he asked.
“This morning. I didn’t have much. And I rented it furnished. All I really had to do was unpack.” They were still standing near the front door. “Look,” she said, “I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to come barging in here.”
“It’s okay. It got to me, too. I’m sure it’s getting to everybody.” He did his best to look reassuring, realized that wasn’t one of his best things. “Did you eat dinner?”
“No. I couldn’t bring myself to eat.”
“How about now? A cheese omelet goes extremely well with beer. And I hope that appeals to you, because the only things I’ve got in the house are eggs and cheese and maybe a frozen steak that’ll take half a day to defrost.”
She used her shirtsleeve to dab at her eyes and nodded. “I’m starving all of a sudden. Craving a cheese omelet.”
So he went inside and made a six-egg omelet, mixed in some strong Epoisse cheese, cooked it until it was firm and nicely browned. She watched him cook, didn’t say a word. Occasionally he would glance up at her. Once, her eyes were unfocused and she was drifting off into her own thoughts. He noticed that she was wearing low-cut jeans, and scuffed black boots that added a couple of inches to her height. And a shirt that was too small, fashionably so, revealing some skin around her midriff. She was not a small girl, he realized. She was a little bit fleshy but it was sensual and sexy. She did not look very much like a cop at the moment, he thought, but then their eyes met, and she was jarred back into the present, so he stopped looking at her and concentrated on the omelet, which was almost ready.
He got them each another bottle of beer and they went into the living room to eat. She gobbled her eggs down in what seemed like three bites. He liked the way she ate. There was no pretense to it, no attempt at being dainty. She was hungry and she attacked the food. After her last bite, she ran a finger around the rim of the plate, soaking up the olive oil, then put the finger in her mouth. When she was finished she said, “I guess eating was a good idea.”
“I can make you another one if you want. You practically inhaled that.”
“No, no, that was perfect. But yeah, I kind of like to eat. I’m not exactly the Gwyneth Paltrow/Calista Flockhart type.”
“That’s probably a good thing. I don’t think they’d make such good cops.”
She managed a real smile this time, like something had just loosened up inside of her, and she offered to go to the fridge to get this round of beer. When she returned they sipped slowly from their bottles, in no rush to finish. She talked a little bit more about the bombing, kept trying to change the subject, kept returning to the violence and the shock. Her legs and feet were tucked under her as she sat on the couch. Her boots were still on and for some reason he liked the fact that she knew he wouldn’t care if the leather rested on the couch. At some point, she pointed over to Chuck Billings’s notebook, asked what it was, but he just shook his head and said, “Work.” She asked if it was anything she should know about and he said no. He waited a few moments, then went over and closed the book. He couldn’t help himself. She didn’t seem to mind.
It got to be midnight and they were still talking and the talk had not gotten any less gruesome. She was asking him about the violent things he’d seen and experienced. He told her about one case in Providence. Over a period of six months they’d found the bodies of three women whose eyes had been gouged from their sockets. The ME said that the gouging had come when each woman was still alive. When they caught the guy who did it, they found him living with his blind eighty-year-old mother. He was fifty-six years old, a CPA with a good job, well-liked at the office, but he’d never left home. He couldn’t break away. All he could do instead was leave work at the end of the day and go blind other women, torture them the way he wanted to torture his dear old mom.
Reggie was interested, kept asking questions, so then he told her about a domestic disturbance call. A woman had swung a meat cleaver at her husband and it lodged in his neck. Justin answered the call, said he’d never seen so much blood. The neck was practically severed, but the guy was alive and talking. Kept talking about how his wife thought he’d been cheating on her but he wasn’t. Kept saying how much he loved his wife. Justin called for an ambulance. They took the guy to the hospital while Justin took the wife to the station. The guy died before they reached the hospital. The EMW said that the guy was talking up until the moment he died, still saying how much he loved his wife and how he was sorry he made her so jealous.
Reggie asked him how he dealt with that kind of thing-didn’t it turn his stomach, didn’t it make him hard and insensitive? Justin said that yes, it turned his stomach, but you deal with it. You ignore the horror and do what you have to do until it’s all over. Then the horror returns, inside your own head, and you have to deal with that. And yes, he said, it does make you hard. It makes it difficult to feel anyone else’s pain because you spend your whole life having to put that pain out of your head so you can do your job.
Then she asked him about his own pain.
He knew that she knew. She’d said at lunch that she’d Googled him, had seen the stories about his past. They’d been in the Providence papers when it had all happened, and was rehashed in the media after the Aphrodite thing broke. So he told her about Alicia and Lili, about their deaths, about his helplessness and guilt. He hadn’t talked about it with many people, no more than a handful, didn’t know why he was talking about it now except that the bombings seemed to have turned the whole world upside down and, for the first time, his own loss seemed connected to a greater loss, even seemed connected to the woman sitting on his couch with her scuffed black boots tucked under her.