Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

“I was curious,” she said. “I ran your name through a search engine.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “But you also could have asked me. I would have told you.”

But my reference to Shiloh, that night, had been meant to deceive, I realized, and now I was ashamed of that. Unshaded, unadulterated truth was in short supply in the Hennessy household, and I hadn’t really helped matters by adding half-truths of my own. Maybe somewhere in the moral calculus it had made a difference.

“I should have been up-front with you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she said.

“I guess I don’t talk about him because I don’t talk with him. He hasn’t written to me for several months.”

“That’s awful,” she said. “Why not?”

I picked up the magnolia petal and stroked it with my thumb. Its texture was somewhere between velvet and candle wax. “I remind Shiloh of things he’d rather forget,” I said. “When I was looking for him, I found out something about him he didn’t want me to know, and it opened up an old wound for him.”

“What did you find out?” Marlinchen said.

“That belongs to him,” I said. “It’s not mine to share.”

“So when he gets out, what’ll you do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Sharp surprise registered on her features. I’d given the wrong response.

“You think adults always know the answers?” I said.

“Well, no,” she admitted. “It’s just that… you seem so certain about everything.”

“No,” I said. “Cops aren’t really encouraged to second-guess themselves, but I make missteps all the time.” I was thinking about Cicero, and the little.25 now resting in the glove compartment of my car. “You try to help people, and sometimes it seems they don’t really want to be helped.”

Marlinchen nodded as if she knew what I was saying, although I doubted she really could. “Have you ever thought about doing something else for a living?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“It’s the only thing I’m trained for,” I said.

She wasn’t satisfied. “But why?”

“Why what?”

“It wasn’t always the only thing you’re trained for. At some point you made a decision to get trained for it. That’s why you dropped out of college, right? To go into police work?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “When I left school, the last thing on my mind was becoming a cop.”

“What changed your mind?”

Those who go into law enforcement have a list of stock answers; generally, the same ones they give during the interview part of the application process: I want to help people, every day there’s a new challenge, I hate the thought of working at a desk. I didn’t use any of them.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Well, I do, but it’s a long story. A long, boring story.”

I must have made it sound sufficiently boring, because Marlinchen didn’t pursue it any further. After a few more minutes, by some silent agreement, we rose and headed up toward the house.

Much later, after the kids had gone to sleep and the house had quieted, I stood at Hugh Hennessy’s high window and looked down. I was still thinking about Marlinchen’s sketchy tale of lightning striking the house and Aidan’s inability to remember any such event.

Catholic by bloodline only, I had no religious training, but as a child I’d been haunted by something that the other kids had taken from their Sunday school teachings: that the world had been perfect, and then sin had entered it in a bolt of lightning. It was a metaphor, but for years I’d believed it literally.

Now I saw the Hennessy family in the same terms, unexpectedly and swiftly cursed. They’d been this Edenic little family, then lightning struck the house, then Aidan lost his finger to a brutal dog, then Elisabeth Hennessy drowned in the waters of the lake. Was it all simply bad luck?

Soon Marlinchen would be 18 and the guardian of her younger siblings, and my responsibilities here would be over. The best thing would be for me to ignore my feeling that something had gone very wrong with this family long before I was part of their lives. But I wasn’t sure I could.

Marlinchen had asked me tonight why I chose to become a cop. She was right; it wasn’t something I had drifted into. It was something I had chosen, part of what Genevieve called my headfirst impulse to help people.

Just before I slept that night, I heard the cry of a barred owl out over the lake. It sounded very like a human scream.

When I left Minnesota at 18,to claim a basketball scholarship at UNLV, I hadn’t seen a future as a cop ahead of me. I wasn’t looking too far ahead: just to more basketball and more schooling, in that order of importance. One thing I did feel fairly sure of was that I wouldn’t live in Minnesota again. I’d grown up in New Mexico and thought myself a Westerner; going to school in Las Vegas was like going home, I’d told myself.

It wasn’t. Vegas was sprawling and vivid and exciting, all in ways that couldn’t involve an 18-year-old with little money and no car, who knew no one. Nor, that year, did I see much time in basketball games. I’d expected that, but still it made me restless. I went to my classes, trying and failing to be interested in the general-education, Western-civilization courses that make up a freshman’s schedule. I didn’t feel like a student. I didn’t feel like an athlete. I didn’t have any sense of a life coming together.

That was when I realized something I hadn’t planned on: I was homesick for the Range. The shivering birches and white pines, the green grass and mine-scarred red dirt, the pit lakes as blue-green as semiprecious stones: somehow, when I hadn’t been paying attention, it had gotten into my blood.

When my aunt Ginny had her stroke and died, that summer, it destabilized me more than I realized at the time. In the fall I went back to school as normal, but nothing there made sense to me anymore. Within two weeks of the start of instruction, I wrote a letter to the coach and caught a Greyhound back to Minnesota, earnings from my summer job rolled up as traveler’s checks in my duffel bag. I didn’t know what I needed so badly, but somehow I was certain it lay back in Minnesota.

Drinking a cold, sweet Pepsi in a coffee shop across from the bus station in Duluth, I scanned the want ads. A taconite-mining company based in a small town was looking for a cleaning-and-maintenance trainee in their shop; it was one of the few entry-level positions in that kind of operation. On the opposite page from the job ads were “housing to share” listings.

The three-bedroom house I moved into was already occupied by two women in their mid-twenties. Erin and Cheryl Anne were a nurse and a medical receptionist, respectively, and close friends. They’d lived in the rented house for over a year, losing their previous roommate to “marriage and real life,” Cheryl Anne said. They were cordial and pleasant to me, and I to them, from the start.

That’s where we got stuck, at cordiality. The passage of time and the fact that I paid a third of the rent did nothing to lessen the feeling that I’d moved into their long-established home. Sometimes, when the TV’s blue light flickered over the living room, I joined them, but we rarely spoke. I never turned on the TV set on the occasions that I was home alone. So, at the end of my first days on the job, hot Indian-summer days of late September, I’d walk down to the small and thinly stocked city library, to check out paperback thrillers.

When I think about those days, that’s what I remember, the simplicity of it. Shopping for food not in the grocery store but in the drugstore, where the center aisle was full of cheap nonperishables: soft French bread so full of preservatives that it lasted for weeks, strawberry jam, 99-cent spaghetti and macaroni that stuck together no matter how carefully it was prepared. Evenings on the porch, drinking store-brand cola with ice cubes that tasted like the freezer, the last of the day’s light dwindling in the west.