Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

He said nothing.

“For God’s sake, I didn’t seek you out last winter. It was you who came to me, to tell me I was a suspect.”

“Yes, I did.” Kilander’s eyes, so often amused and ironic, were serious. “And I expected you to deny being the person responsible for Stewart’s death. You never did.” He turned away.

“I didn’t think I had to,” I said, to his retreating form.

Back in my car,I sat for a moment, looking out at the post-sunset sky. I’d been trying to ask Kilander how he knew Diaz, that was all. I wouldn’t have asked for inside information. Would I?

I realized that I couldn’t say for sure. I was more afraid of Gray Diaz than I had been letting on, even to myself.

How could Kilander think I was guilty of Royce Stewart’s murder? Jason Stone was one thing, but Kilander’s words had hurt.

Go home, Sarah. Have a glass of wine, go to sleep early.

Instead I rummaged in my bag for my cell phone, dialed 411.

“What listing, please?”

“ Cicero Ruiz.”

Get real. He’s a reclusive guy deeply involved in a highly illegal activity. He’s not going to have a listed phone number.

“I have a C. Ruiz,” the operator said.

Unlikely. “Go ahead, give it to me,” I said.

I would call and stumble through a conversation with a stranger in my rusty Spanish. Lo siento. Sorry to bother you.

Cicero picked up on the third ring.

“It’s me,” I said.

“Sarah,” he said. “How are you?”

“I’m all right,” I said. “I’m not sick. My ear is fine.”

“That’s good,” he said.

“And I… I can’t sleep with you again,” I said. “Because of my husband.”

“You called to tell me that?” Cicero asked.

“No,” I said.

“What, then?”

“Can I come see you anyway?” I said.

Through the open window I could see Venus just starting to pierce the fading light of the sky.

“I can’t think why not,” Cicero said.

An hour laterI was standing on the roof of Cicero ’s building, looking up at the light-bleached sky over Minneapolis; only a few constellations were distinguishable. The real astronomy lay twenty-six stories below: the industrial-tangerine grid of city streets, the ascension and declination of the world most of us knew.

Behind me, Cicero lay on his back on a blanket we’d brought up, arms crossed behind his head in the traditional stargazer’s position, wine in a chipped eight-ounce glass within arm’s reach. His wheelchair nowhere in sight, he looked very much able-bodied, like a hiker at rest.

He was a very discreet person, Cicero. After our brief exchange on the phone, he hadn’t asked me anything more about why I wouldn’t sleep with him again. Which was good, because I wasn’t sure I could explain it. I’d crossed a line, both in personal morals and professional ethics, and that couldn’t just be erased. But I think my desire to go back over to the right side of that line was rooted in my unease with how easily I’d crossed it in the first place. Sometimes I wondered if there were a hidden moral flaw inside me, one that had driven me into the line of work I did, where right and wrong were so clearly delineated.

But when I’d arrived, Cicero had merely looked over the Australian wine I’d brought and asked me how I was. I’d said I was fine, and he’d said he was fine, and then a small discomfort had descended on the conversation. Cicero broke the silence by asking me if I wanted to go up on the roof.

I’d thought it was a joke, but he’d explained how it was possible. We’d parked his wheelchair and set the brake at the foot of the emergency stairwell that led to the roof. When Cicero was seated on the lowest stair, I’d taken his lower legs just under the knee, and Cicero had raised his upper body off the stairs, weight on the heels of his hands. His method wasn’t, I saw, unlike the triceps exercise I sometimes did at the gym, lowering myself from a weight bench. But Cicero was ascending, going up the stairs literally on his arms. Supporting his legs and following, I was still assuming less than a third of his body weight. It couldn’t have been easy, and I understood then the importance of the hand weights I’d seen under his bed.

“That wasn’t pretty, and it was slow,” Cicero had said when we were up, “but it got the job done.”

I’d poured wine into the mismatched glasses I’d carried up in advance, along with the blanket.

“You know what the most difficult part was?” he asked.

“What?” I said.

“Letting a woman help me with it,” he said. “With the guys down the hall, it’s different.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“Several times,” he said, accepting the wine. “I need fresh air every once in a while.”

Now, standing at the rooftop’s edge, cupping my wine in my hands, I thought about that. Wouldn’t it simply be easier for Cicero to get in the elevator and go downstairs and outside for air? “ Cicero,” I began, “I know what you said the other night, but are you agoraphobic? It’s no big deal to me if you are.”

He laughed. “No, I’m really not agoraphobic.”

“Then why don’t you ever go out?” As soon as I’d said them, I regretted the words. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me-”

“No, it’s okay. I have no secrets.” Cicero unfolded one arm to indicate the unoccupied part of the blanket. “Come sit down. It’s a story that’s going to take me a little time to tell.”

I walked over and sat cross-legged on the edge of the blanket.

“It has to do with how I became paralyzed,” Cicero said. “I was injured in a mine collapse.”

“You went down as part of a rescue crew?” I asked. It seemed odd to me that medical personnel- not EMTs or paramedics but actual doctors- would be sent into harm’s way.

But Cicero shook his head. “I was working down there,” he said.

“As a miner ?” I said.

Cicero nodded. “It was after I lost my license to practice medicine.”

Every time I thought I had a handle on this man’s situation, I learned something new. The idea of Cicero being in a mine disaster was so unexpected that I set aside my curiosity about how he’d lost his medical license, which so far he’d only alluded to. That could wait. “Tell me,” I said.

“This is going to take me a minute to explain,” he said, and lifted himself up onto his elbows, to drink a little wine. “I grew up in Colorado, in a mining area. My father had worked in the mines, this five-foot-seven-inch guy, covered in coal dust, reading a paperback copy of the Iliad on his lunch break. I was getting back to my roots, you could call it.”

“You worked with your old man?” I interrupted.

Cicero shook his head. “My parents were both gone by then. When I came back, I got hired at a small, family-owned, nonunion operation, working the very last of a played-out coal seam. I wasn’t real popular for my first couple of months.” Cicero seemed amused by the memory. “On my first day, the crew foreman, Silas, asked me what I’d been doing before getting hired there. I told him the truth, that I was a doctor. Looking back, I don’t think he believed me. I’m pretty sure he thought I was giving him a hard time. He just said, ‘Well, it’s my job to keep you from killing yourself or anyone else until you get tired of banging your head on the ceiling and go looking for some other work.’ ”

“Nice guy,” I said.

“He was a good guy,” Cicero corrected me. “Silas was younger than a lot of his crew, but he’d been down in the mines since he was 18, and he knew his shit. I paid attention to him, and after a couple of months, I pretty much knew what I was doing. Silas started talking to me other than to say things like ‘Don’t stand there.’ We’d eat lunch together and talk.” Cicero paused, drank some wine. “We were both kind of nervous about the safety situation. To put it mildly, small nonunion mines tend not to be the safety leaders in the field. But when it actually happened, it surprised me, how quietly it started.”