David Jackson: The Helper

When her heart has almost nothing left to pump and her brain has decided the fight is over, she collapses in a corner of the room. The blood leaks more slowly now from the gaping mouths in her flesh.

He walks over to her, looks down at her twitching figure.

Paper cuts , he thinks. It was a hint.

Sit at a typewriter and open up a vein . Another hint.

Hell, I practically told you why I came here.

He knows the precise moment when life leaves her. He’s witnessed it before. It’s as if every cell of the body sighs with the lifting of its burden of coping with the world.

For a couple of minutes he absorbs the peace of it all, allows the calm to percolate through his system.

He surveys the scene. Messy, very messy. But it had to be this way.

He’s drenched in her blood. It’s on his face, his hands, all down his nice white shirt. A drop of it trickles down his cheek and onto his lips. He licks it away.

He walks over to the front of the store, his shoes squelching on the carpet. He turns the lock on the door, flips the sign to ‘Closed’, then moves back to the counter and retrieves his bag. Carrying it into the small office at the rear, he strips, washes himself down at the sink, then changes into the clean clothes he brought with him. He puts the blood-soaked garments into the bag and retraces his path to the front door.

When the street seems momentarily clear, he unlocks the door, steps outside and walks without hurry to his car.

As he fires up the engine he takes a last look at the bookstore. It looks so small, so dull, so lacking in energy and adventure. So absent of life.

God knows how they stay in business, he thinks.

Detective Second Grade Callum Doyle tilts his face an inch toward the grimy window of the squadroom, allowing the slender fingers of sunlight to caress his face. Spring is calling him. He could so easily follow that call right now. It wouldn’t have to be a long trip — we’re not talking a vacation in New England here. Maybe just a short stroll along the street to Tompkins Square Park. Somewhere where there are flowers and trees and kids playing and young couples enjoying the sap rising. On a day like today he feels certain he could ignore the occasional drunken bum sleeping it off on a bench, the drifting odor of canine and human feces, the mentally imbalanced having heated arguments with themselves, the clattering of skateboards, the junkies looking to score, the childless women talking to their dogs as though they were babies. Sure he could overlook all those things, on a day like today. Anything has to be better than continuing to listen to the interminable life story of Mrs Sachs.

She has told him about how she came to New York at the age of three, her father wanting to put his tailoring skills to good use in the garment district. Naturally enough she became a dressmaker herself, but gave it up to go to drama school. It was one night after singing her heart out despite a strained throat that she met and fell in love with Bernard, a jeweler by profession and doing very well for himself, thank you very much. They married, he continued to prosper. Twenty years ago they had amassed enough riches to buy a townhouse on Stuyvesant Street. Six months later Bernard died when he stepped out in front of a car. Doyle is not sure whether he is supposed to laugh or not when she tells him that, ironically, the car that killed him was an Opel.

‘You have beautiful eyes,’ Mrs Sachs croaks at Doyle. ‘In the sunlight they’re like jewels. Emeralds. Did anybody ever tell you that before?’

He looks across the desk. Mrs Sachs’s own eyes are milky. It’s hard to tell what color they are behind the film. She has to be ninety if she’s a day. And now she’s hitting on him?

‘My wife ,’ he says with emphasis. ‘Sometimes I think it’s the only reason she married me.’

Mrs Sachs sneaks out a hint of a smile. ‘Is she what brought you to America?’

Doyle feels the hurt, although he knows he shouldn’t. When he was whisked across the Atlantic at the age of eight, he made it one of his most urgent tasks to shed the Irish accent that most of the natives here found impenetrable and some used as an excuse for beating the crap out of him. It comes as a shock to discover he hasn’t been as successful as he has always believed, and he finds his tone suddenly becoming less accommodating.

‘Mrs Sachs-’

‘Olivia,’ she interrupts. ‘Please, call me Olivia.’

‘Olivia,’ he says, although he intends it to be the last time he gets so familiar, ‘you mind if we cut to the chase here? I’m still not sure why exactly you felt the need to speak with a detective.’

‘My daughter has eyes like yours,’ she says, and now Doyle wants to pick up his stapler and fire its contents into those orbs of his that she finds so remarkable. For Christ’s sake, he thinks, what did I do to deserve this, on a beautiful spring day like today?

‘Not green,’ continues the old lady — and she is certainly old: a hundred if she’s a day. ‘Blue, actually. But stunning to look at. Like a wolf’s eyes. Or a husky. Have you ever seen a husky’s eyes?’

Doyle suppresses a sigh and tries again. He has patience — he has been trained to have patience — but sometimes. .

‘Mrs Sachs-’

‘She worked in the South Tower.’

And now the spell is cast. She has him. Doyle is a cop, and like every other cop in this city, anything connected with the World Trade Center has a direct line to his very core. 9/11. Nine-One-One. The mother of all emergency calls. The mere mention of that day is enough to bring a lump to his throat. He can almost taste the dust.

He looks more intently at the woman opposite, and she suddenly seems so frail, so in need of human support. Her beige coat — an expensive one with a fur trim — seems baggy on her now, as if she has shrunk. She has to be a hundred and twenty years old if she’s a day.

‘Her name is Patricia,’ she says, and Doyle notices her use of the present tense. ‘She worked for Hadlow-Jones. You know it? The insurance company? She was doing so well there.’

Doyle remains silent. Spring is put aside while he awaits her story.

‘She called me that day. On her cellphone. Twice, actually. The first time to tell me she was planning to come see me after work. The second time to tell me she thought she was about to die.’

She pauses for a moment while she turns her own gaze toward the window. Doyle guesses that she is traveling back in time, that she is hearing her daughter’s words all over again. Moments like that, they never leave you.

‘She told me she didn’t think she would be able to make it to my house after all. A slight change of plan, she called it. She kept apologizing, because she felt she was letting me down. But the fire. . She didn’t think she would be able to make it through the flames.’

Mrs Sachs faces Doyle again. ‘In the background I could hear people screaming. Have you ever heard the sound of a roomful of people all screaming for their lives? You don’t want to, believe me. It’s the worst sound on earth. A sound like that tears your heart out. It made me say a prayer. You want to know what I prayed for at that moment? I said to God, let it be me in that building. I’m old, I’ve had a good life, let it be me who has to walk into that wall of fire. Anything to save my baby.’

Doyle has been here before. Many times, with the relatives of many victims. Usually he will toss them a crumb of condolence: ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ or some equally pat phrase that has been robbed of all sincerity through overuse. But Mrs Sachs has stepped over a threshold and touched him. She deserves more. And so he offers her his patience and his silence.