Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

“And that’s significant… why?”

“Because they stood here for a solid minute. At the least. They were carrying a rape kit, man, they weren’t interested in stealing any of my property; they wouldn’t have looked around for any goodies. The goodies they wanted were upstairs. They knew that. But they stood here for a solid minute.”

We stood in silence as I tried to imagine standing still in a strange house for that long. Funny; a minute had never seemed like a long time before. The seconds ticked by in our heads with the speed of molasses running down frost-covered iron. With each passing moment, the absurdity of what Pinnix and Ramseur had done only grew.

When a minute had passed, Bobby rolled his eyes again. He retreated into the kitchen and returned with our beers, which we had laid on the counter on our way to the basement. “They stood there for a while and listened,” he said. “Trying to hear if there was anybody else in the house other than the dumbass in the basement and the girls they were after. A little recon would have made sense.”

He handed me my beer. I accepted it but did not drink; I studied his expression and saw the discomfort there, the thoughts beneath his words. One minute doesn’t sound like much, but in the context of an assault it becomes an eternity. They wouldn’t have stood there for a full minute. Bobby understood this. I could read this in the tension set in his jaw, born of the effort it took to hold the corners of his mouth up in that wry, this-is-all-a-bunch-of-bullshit smile.

And he understood, too, that this exercise assumed I had lain on the floor for only a half a minute. It was entirely possible—and likely—that I had been out for far longer than that.

“Are you still obsessed with that stupid idea that you caught them on their way out? Do you still honestly believe it’s possible that your wife and maybe your daughter got raped by two strangers and don’t remember a second of it?”

No, I didn’t honestly believe that. Not anymore. What possessed me now—what quickened my heartbeat and narrowed my eyes and brought a sheen of sweat to my skin even though it was only sixty-eight degrees in here—was that the results of our experiment didn’t jibe with my theory of this attack. I had concluded that they hadn’t hit me that hard because the Bald Man had wanted my brains unscrambled and my faculties intact enough to send me running out the back door to get help—whereupon I would have to live the rest of my life with the knowledge that I had run while these men raped and then killed my family. But then, once they’d knocked me down, they should have proceeded upstairs post-haste. Not stood there in the hallway waiting for me. Why would they have waited for me?

Because the Bald Man knew you were coming up.

Not possible.

Yes, it is. Because he not only makes , but he also sees.

Bobby clapped me on the shoulder and spun me around to face the foyer. “You know what, man? I want you to take a look at something. Don’t say anything; just shut up and look .”

He propelled me into the foyer and then jerked me to a stop. We stood in the dark, the lights off. The only illumination in the foyer came from the lamps and the Christmas lights in the living room. The two beautiful women and one beautiful girl seemed oblivious to our presence. Sundry boxes of ornaments, basking in the warmth of their yearly furlough from the attic, stood open all around them. Allie pulled a little porcelain Barbie doll out and smiled as she showed it to Abby, her lips moving to the tune of the story that came with it. All of Allie’s ornaments had a story—Abby had heard each one every Christmas since she was old enough to hold her head up. But she listened anyway. Mama’s little stories were as much a part of her Christmas as beer was of mine and Bobby’s.

“Look at their faces,” he whispered.

I did. The contours of my wife’s already lovely face seemed highlighted, made somehow finer, in the warmth of the Christmas lights. My daughter, the best of this woman’s essence mixed with the best of my own, could have been an ornament herself—even thought she stood now, I realized, as tall as her mother. She laughed.

“They look happy, don’t they?” Bobby asked.

Santa Claus peddling an ice cream cart, the front wheel immobilized. Your uncle Steve broke it when he was four, Allie’s lips moved. Crimson and full in the soft glow of the lamps, they drew my eyes. He blamed it on his Superman doll.

“Yes,” I whispered back.

A little train. My grandfather made this for me when I was your age, Abby. He was good with his hands.

My daughter took the train and examined it with a curiosity that made her look four again.

“So leave it alone,” Bobby said. I turned away from the Norman Rockwell painting forming up in my living room and faced my brother. Beneath his shock of blond hair cut close to the skull in the typical Marine fashion, his face glowed with a tan bestowed by hours spent outside in the winter sun. Beer and good health ruddied his cheeks. But his eyes were serious. “Stop seeing this therapist; he’s not doing you any favors. Quit calling people and riding around and poring through files—quit investigating . If you see the edges, don’t pick at them. Because you know what? If these guys really did come in here and fuck Allie and Abby’s brains out and they simply don’t remember it? Then good.”

He leaned forward. I smelled the beer on his breath.

“Reality is overrated,” he said. “And if you can hide deeply enough, it really doesn’t matter.”

The furnace kicked on with a click and a whoosh. Outside the door to my right, freezing wind tore down Highway 62 and wrapped winter’s shroud around everything it touched. It buffeted under the eaves and rattled the screens, scratched at my doors and windows with a blind desire to get inside and do its work here just as it had out there. Winter, I thought, the dying season. The great Darwinian colander of nature that separated the old, the sick and the weak from everything else. Winter was cold and hard because nature itself was cold and hard; it had no soul, knew no mercy. In winter, God went to sleep.

Kate laughed behind me.

But in here , that laugh said, He is wide awake .

Bobby slapped me on the back and pointed at my beer glass.

“Chug that so that I can pour you another. Then let’s go in there and help these ladies finish decorating the tree so that we can go downstairs, watch a movie and get drunk. Can you stop thinking long enough to do all that?”

I sighed.

“Yes,” I lied, bringing the glass to my lips. I drank now not out of thirst but from the need to drown the counterpoint to everything Bobby had just said; reality did matter. Because if you didn’t confront it, if you ignored it, you couldn’t see it. And when it bore down on you again, it would find you on your back.

Right now, my reality was busy in its dark room. Conjuring. Creating.

Making .

I finished the beer and spoke another lie.

“I can.”

Christmas went well. Nobody broke into my house, nobody accosted me in any parking lots and nobody called me on the telephone to call me a sniveling little bitch and swear that they’d show me, oh yes they would. I ate and drank like any normal man and during this time, I experienced no nightmares. I woke up feeling refreshed—if not one hundred percent at ease, at least relaxed enough to confront the things that I felt certain Fate held in store for me.

December can be a slow time for divorce lawyers—existing clients go on vacation and new ones wait until after New Year’s—and so in the days after Christmas I found myself with space in my schedule to go visit my GAL client, Brandon Cross, again. I got him out of his room, where his slackjawed roommate stared mindlessly at Dr. Oz, and led him into the lounge. We sat across from each other and Brandon told me what he’d eaten for lunch. Chicken a la king, he said. A biscuit and green beans on the side. Chocolate milk for a drink. Not bad.