April Smith - Good Morning, Killer

“Had a few close calls.” He smiled remorsefully. “But I’ve avoided giving any child the misfortune of having me as his dad.”

“You are so wrong,” I said with conviction. “You’d make a terrific dad.”

“You’re just saying that because you’re trying to get me into bed.”

“I’ve been trying for the past hundred miles.”

He chuckled. “I like you. You’re funny.”

“That’s good, because you’re funny- looking, ” I said, pulling on his ear for no reason. “I don’t know why you don’t think you’d make a good father. I’ve seen you work,” thinking of the bank managers he had comforted so freely. “You’re a natural caregiver.” He made a face. Didn’t like the word.

“What about your mom and dad?”

“My mom and dad?” he echoed as if he had not considered them in years.

Then he seemed to forget all about it, involved with the road which was straight as a ruler, fussing with the radio, searching for a water bottle rolling on the floor.

That’s when he finally said, “I’m adopted,” and I heard the effort in his voice to keep it light, but there was no mistaking the shakiness beneath. He’d thought about it before he told me and now he wasn’t sure.

“So growing up, we were both alone, in a way.”

“My adoptive parents were very loving,” Andrew said quickly. “The most loving people in the world.”

My fingers tightened on his knee.

“I couldn’t do enough for my dad. Could not do enough,” he added bitterly, and I did not yet know the source, that his dad had been a terminal alcoholic for whom it was not possible to do anything. “You had your mom,” he said so wistfully that it moved me deeply.

“She was … I guess today you’d say depressed, but really she was young and brokenhearted because she couldn’t be with my father.”

“Ah, fuck ’em,” Andrew interrupted suddenly. “They did their best, right?”

We drove in silence.

“I’m okay with it,” I said after a while.

“Your family?”

I nodded, tautness in my throat.

“We think that,” Andrew said, “but there’s an animal level to things that we can never change.”

The sun had fallen to the west, level with the road, so that bright orange rays bored at the sides of our faces and the curve of our eyes. Andrew flipped the visor over to the driver’s side window, but it did nothing to block the insistent ginger light that flooded the inside of the car.

“How do you live with it? The animal level?”

“I’ve had some nightmares,” he answered, “that are pretty interesting,” and beside us, endlessly to our left, the green ocean burrowed, turned, and groaned with its own weight, restlessly settling and unsettling, seeking the stillness it constantly destroyed.

The Sandpiper Inn was a perky little motel on Moonstone Beach, scrupulously clean, window boxes jammed with pansies and geraniums. There was a decent heated pool surrounded by pine trees and set far enough from the road so all you heard was the cawing of crows and the hum of the pumps. A cheerful old salt wearing a chewed-up watch cap signed us in, urging coupons for Hearst Castle and whale watching.

“Good to see you again,” he nodded to Andrew.

We carried our bags into the room and each sat on one of the two queen beds and asked the other what we wanted to do, as it was still the afternoon. I was up for running into the village, getting a nice bottle of white wine and some goat cheese and crackers, coming back here and pulling down the shades and scootching under the covers. His idea was to watch the basketball play-offs on TV.

Alone in this determinedly adorable room, with no distractions, the differences between us seemed unbridgeable: he was too old, too closed off, never went to college, divorced too many times; his loyalty was of a soldier to other soldiers, his self-discipline enormously self-absorbed, I decided, as he lay back with a yawn and clicked on the play-offs, while I sat on the edge of the other bed, really grumpy about not having that glass of wine, and began to count the hours until we could, without too much humiliation, leave. If we got back early tomorrow afternoon, there would still be time to do laundry, get on the treadmill, go to sleep and punch the reset button Monday morning. The odds of working another bank robbery case with Santa Monica police detective Andrew Berringer were nil.

I threw off the cheap thin blanket from where I’d attempted to burrow into the second bed.

“I’m going to take a walk on the beach.”

To my surprise Andrew said, “I’ll come with you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Unless you want to be alone.”

“No, of course not. Come along.”

And now I was annoyed because I did want to be alone, since I rarely have a whole afternoon to walk by the water and think about all the wrong choices I have made.

Although the beach was across the highway we had to drive to get there. It was not a beach but a nature preserve, where wooden stairs descended to an outcrop of black rock. It was low tide and white surf rose and spilled over the tide pools. There were wooden signs describing the migration of shorebirds. We followed a trail through a pine forest padded with silence and emerged at a lookout from which you could see unobstructed views of the teal-dark sea.

It was too cold to stand there, but we stood there, fingers stiffening in our pockets, letting the wind roar over our ears and stream our hair, pour down our nostrils and chill our lungs, scouring the cells of our blood with fresh oxygen as the brutal tide brought in and took away new life from the small carved worlds of sea anemones and starfish.

“Look how nature keeps everything clean.”

“Imagine what this coast was like a hundred years ago,” Andrew agreed.

“How do the guys in the tide pools hold on? Tons of water falling on their heads, twenty-four/seven.”

“They have suckers.”

“I know, but still—”

“Hey,” said Andrew, shoulders hunched against the spray, “those guys don’t have a choice.”

“And we do?”

“Sure we do.”

“Here’s the thing, Andy.” I turned so my back was to the ocean and tried to put my elbows on the wooden railing but kept getting nudged off by the wind. “You told me yourself. You come off shift, you take a shower. Two showers, sometimes, you said, to get the cooties off — the TB bacillus from the homeless person, the dog shit from the backyard of a methamphetamine laboratory—” “So?” He ducked his head to wipe a tearing eye.

“My question is, how do you cleanse the soul?”

“The soul?”

“The stuff we were talking about coming up here. Your dad. My grandfather. How do we ever get past it?”

“You’re out of my realm of expertise.”

“No, I’m not.”

I squinted up at him although hair was whipping across my sight. My heels were planted and I really wanted to know how much he knew. Had twenty-plus years of being a cop washed through him, or had it put meat on his bones? Why was I attracted to this unconventional, craggy face and husky fighter’s build that overwhelmed me in ways I did not always like? What was he made of? I could get past the petty disconnects if I knew. We were standing on a platform at the end of the world, and I wanted to know if the trip had been worthwhile.

“You see it every day on the street,” I prompted. “Good and bad. Hell and redemption—”

“It’s not that simple,” Andrew replied. “Black-and-white.”

“What is it, then?”

He shook his head. “It’s a job, stop analyzing. I’m freezing. Let’s get something to eat.”

He took me to dinner in a nicely restored brick building on the main drag. Part restaurant and part retail store, it sold hand-knit sweaters and local jellies and jams, and served up one hell of an olallieberry cobbler, which we shared from a steaming crock, melting with vanilla ice cream. Andrew knew the waitress, a middle-aged teacher who worked two other jobs in order to live in Cambria. She asked when he was going to retire and move up. “It’s just a shot away,” he joked, quoting the Rolling Stones.