Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

“That’s crazy!”

“Did something happen to you that night that you’re afraid to talk about?”

“No!” She shook her head emphatically. “No, no, no! Eeew, Dad, that’s disgusting! No, nobody ever… yuck! Gross! Absolutely not. I’d have screamed and screamed and screamed. They’d have had to kill me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!”

“You know you can tell me and your mom anything, right? Anything at all? No matter what?”

She rolled her eyes again. “Yes, Dad, I know. Tell you what, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll swear on a Bible that those guys didn’t rape me.” Her eyes came back to center and fixed on me. “And you know why they didn’t rape me? Because you shot them dead.”

She reached out and stole another French fry. To Hell with Pinnix, to Hell with Ramseur, she was hungry.

“And now you have a Facebook fan page.” She smiled and added, “Tell your shrink he’s stupid.”

Her words made me feel better. Her smile made me feel better. I’d watched her reaction to Dr. Koenig’s suggestion and saw nothing hiding underneath it. I looked at the healthy glow on her face—a combination of winning her soccer game, seeing her father worshipped like a god and then getting to tell that same god he was being silly—and I thought, nope. Didn’t happen.

It didn’t happen because I’d been ready. And I’d shot those two pieces of shit like a pair of landfill rats. Whatever remained of Pinnix and Ramseur lay now in a pauper’s grave in Burlington or Durham or wherever the coroner had sent the carcasses. And I sat in McDonald’s, eating free food with my daughter.

And suddenly, I felt hungry again.

“When you’re done,” Abby said, “go up there and see if you can score us some free ice cream.”

That evening, I got on the internet and did a search on how to tell if your kid had been sexually abused. Her eating habits hadn’t changed, her grades hadn’t fallen, she hadn’t started sleeping more or sleeping less, she hadn’t suddenly become any more sullen or cantankerous than usual—nothing to indicate she’d suffered any sort of trauma. As far as I knew, she hadn’t suddenly become sexually promiscuous, either. I finished my web investigation satisfied that as to my daughter, at least, Dr. Koenig was barking up the wrong tree.

But my wife had changed—she’d gotten interested in having sex with me again—and so before bed that night, I asked her.

“Let’s say that I got knocked out longer than I think I did and when I shot those guys, they’d already come up here and… you know. Would you tell me?”

She set down her book, a library hardback with a blurry picture of a girl riding a bicycle down a country road on the cover. She removed her reading glasses and put them on top of it. “Of course I would. Where did this come from?”

“Dr. Koenig,” I said. “He remarked that the timing seems a little messed up with the shooting—he doesn’t think I could get hit, recover and get the gun in time to intercept Pinnix and Ramseur on their way upstairs. So he asked if there was a possibility that maybe I got them on their way down instead of up. Which would mean…”

“I see.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry about it, because it didn’t happen. Okay?”

I rolled over on my back and stared up at the ceiling.

“Are you worried?” She asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s just… that caller said a bunch of bullshit, and he rattled my cage. But then my therapist goes and brings up some of the same things, like the asshole might have been right or something, and so that really rattled my cage. Because it’s a good question. When you have so many coincidences and the outcome could change with any one, you do wonder. Sometimes.”

She picked up her book and glasses and placed them on the nightstand. Then she rolled over and propped herself up beside me, her brown hair spilling down over the hand on which she rested her head. I thought then that with a woman so beautiful, it was a miracle she didn’t have crazies following her home every week.

“You know what I think?”

“What’s that?”

“I think that you’re nervous about this whole thing and your therapist threw that out there to make you confront the idea. Bring it up, make you face it, let you put it away. It’s actually a pretty good tactic, I’d say. Do you feel any better after asking me about it?”

“Yes.”

There came a silence then, my mind working through what she’d just said and trying to decide whether or not to tell her that Dr. Koenig wanted her to come to treatment with me. I had agonized over that, because I didn’t want her there. I wouldn’t do that, man, Bobby had said when I asked him about it. You’re supposed to be her hero, which means you’re supposed to be strong. Not breaking down and crying in a shrink’s office. I agreed. My wife now understood better than most women the importance of a strong mate. Sniveling, crying sissies have ways of getting people killed.

“What are you thinking?” She asked.

“I’m just thinking that you’re right,” I replied.

She smiled and turned off the light. “You should be getting used to that by now.”

At our next session, Dr. Koenig was running behind and so I had to cool my heels without him for several minutes. When he came in, he found me standing at the window looking out over that little courtyard, my hands behind my back. Today, an old woman sat on the bench eating popcorn from a small red-and-white striped bag. White-haired and hunchbacked, the she chewed with the slow deliberation of one with few teeth and nothing but time—although, from the looks of her, she didn’t have much of either. A stainless steel walker frame stood parked beside the bench. Her eyes stared into space.

Alzheimer’s , I thought. Dr. Koenig’s office occupied the first floor of a large building; she was probably an outpatient in somebody’s eldercare practice. Right now, a man or woman in his or her fifties or sixties was watching her from another office window I couldn’t see, talking with an entirely different doctor from mine about Mother’s options.

“Who’s that lady out there?” I asked.

“I have no idea.”

He joined me at the window. He had eschewed the informal attire this morning, and now his skinny neck poked out of a white collared shirt, the inverted noose of a necktie falling down towards his beltline. He had important obligations today, people to do, things to see. Drive over to the university in Chapel Hill, maybe, give a lecture to the next generation of psychotherapists so that they could adequately counsel the next generation of neurotic lawyers. Dr. Koenig had a life. When I wasn’t in his office, he probably didn’t even think about me. He ran marathons. He made organic salads.

“She’s got Alzheimer’s,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” I replied. “It’s a guess. More than a third of the population has dementia by her age. Maybe it’s not Alzheimer’s, but it’s something. Pick’s disease, Lewy Body disease, vascular dementia, could be anything, I guess. Look at her. Did I ever tell you I have a little experience in the mental health field?”

“You didn’t.”

“I do. When I first started at Carwood Allison, they really hadn’t figured out what to do with me yet, so they had me running around doing all this random shit for this partner or that. I used to tell people at the courthouse I was like a hooker, only I had seven pimps. One of the things they had me do was Guardian Ad Litem work, where you get appointed by the Clerk of Court to represent the respondent in an incompetency proceeding. You know, make sure nobody’s trying to take advantage of them or anything, look out for their best interests.”