Several hours later, at home, when the unwieldy screen door refused to open wide enough to let me in, I ripped it off its hinges. Until that moment, I would have told you I was over the death of Cicero Ruiz.
The true locus of my anger surprised me. I wasn’t angry at Ghislaine, or at myself, though I had reasons to be. The truth was that I was angry at Cicero. It was he who had put me in an unwinnable situation: either turn him in to my lieutenant, or let him pursue the course that led to his violent, untimely death.
I’d said compassion was Cicero ’s fatal flaw, but it was pride. I would have seen it earlier, had I not needed so badly a figure in my life whose wisdom and incorruptibility I believed in implicitly. So badly had I wanted to believe Cicero simply as a good man destroyed by circumstance that I hadn’t seen that his life, since the loss of his license, had been one of self-sacrifice in the most literal sense. Surely, even after his professional disgrace, there had been better options open to Cicero than the mines, but he hadn’t taken them. The underside of pride is shame, and after his ethical lapse, Cicero had punished himself more thoroughly than the system ever could have. It was that, and also his need to carry on with his life’s work even from a housing project, that had set his death in motion.
Of course, it couldn’t have happened if I’d arrested him, as my job had required, or if Ghislaine hadn’t been desperate to hold on to a venal, brutal young man she inexplicably wanted… Who can ever say with certainty why one person meets an early death and another is spared? If Cicero had been down the hall with his friends when Marc came to his door, would Marc simply have returned another day? Or would he have gone, frustrated, to another job, and been shotgunned by the liquor store owner, leaving Cicero forever unaware of how close he’d come to the county morgue? The single factors were as unpredictable as currents in open water, and my own guilt was like a small amount of blood poured into that water. The individual atoms of that blood would never be gone, but they would be diffused, like my responsibility was diminished by the realization of how many small circumstances go into any one death.
A cool peace followed in the wake of the realization. I didn’t move to pick up the fallen screen door. Nor did I go inside, instead sitting down on the back step. A freight train thundered past, and the quiet that it left behind was nearly as stark as silence.
Here was the solitude I’d run from all summer long, filling my hours with the Hennessys, with Cicero, even with strangers like Special K. I’d sought a hundred problems to distract myself from the ones I’d been living with since Shiloh went to Blue Earth. I hadn’t been picky. Anyone’s troubles would do. So long as they weren’t my own. So long as they allowed me to keep my own feelings chained and unexamined.
If I had been blind to the pride and guilt that had motivated Cicero Ruiz, it was probably because I’d had a lot of practice at refusing to see it. They were the same feelings that motivated my husband. It was pride that had led Shiloh to try to balance the scales for Kamareia’s death when the courts hadn’t been able to. Not only that, but Shiloh believed he could do it while shielding me from complicity, or even from any knowledge of his actions. When he had failed, Shiloh had refused to plead extenuating circumstances and seek a lighter sentence; he had gone to prison. I thought I understood better now why he had fallen silent from behind those prison walls: it was shame. Shiloh saw his actions as a dirty handprint on the life I was trying to keep upright here in Minneapolis.
I was not guiltless here, either. I hadn’t reached out to Shiloh, afraid of being the first to break our mutual silence and to possibly be brushed aside. I had been unable to admit to myself how much I was angered by the effective loss of my husband, a loss I’d been so, so careful to frame in my mind not as abandonment or betrayal but simply as circumstance.
I slept early that night, and it was about two in the morning when I woke up, alert and clear-minded and knowing I wouldn’t sleep any more. Instead I got up, washed my face and dressed, and threw a few items of clothing and some money in my duffel bag. Last of all, I put on my copper wedding ring, retrieved from the drawer of the night table.
On the road east, to Wisconsin, the air was warm like summer, sweet with chlorophyll. I didn’t feel tired at all. I’d be at the prison by dawn. Ahead, low in the southeast and preternaturally large and pale from its proximity to the horizon, Orion sprawled like a patron saint over my destination.
about the author
JODI COMPTON lives in California. She is the author of the acclaimed novel The 37th Hour, which also features Detective Sarah Pribek, and which is available in paperback from Dell.
