Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

“Detective Pribek,” Diaz said, meeting me halfway. “I heard I might be able to find you here.” He looked more closely at me. “What happened to your face?” he asked.

“I fell,” I said. “At the scene of a structure fire.” Now he’d get on with it.

“I just came around to say goodbye,” Diaz said. “I’m going back to Blue Earth.”

“You are?” I said.

“My investigation here is over,” Diaz said. “The Stewart case will remain open, officially, but inactive.”

He looked around at the other officers, our peers, none of whom seemed to be paying any attention to us. Then he turned back to me.

“I know you killed Royce Stewart, Sarah, I just can’t prove it,” Diaz said levelly. “I guess you thought a life like Stewart’s didn’t matter, and in terms of the system, it seems you were right.”

He did not wait for me to respond, nor did he say anything else. That was his leavetaking.

Shadrick chose that moment to put both his soft, slightly cool hands on my face, turning my attention from Diaz’s departing figure. Shad looked into my face, as if to receive instruction or counsel.

“Don’t look at me, kid,” I said.

When you’re sleeping well,the trapdoor at the bottom of your mind opens and you have deep, strange dreams: psychodramas full of symbolic imagery that you rarely remember on waking, and when you do, you tell a friend, Last night I had the weirdest dream. It’s when you’re restless and not sleeping well that you dream close to the surface of your mind, more like thinking in your sleep than dreaming.

In other words, the details of the dream that follows were just speculation, nothing more.

I was back in the courtroom. Hugh Hennessy was on trial, but this time I wasn’t the prosecutor. I was just observing, or that’s what I thought, until Kilander laid his hand on my shoulder.

Hugh can’t speak for himself, he said. Any judge would throw this case out so hard it’d bounce.

You said that already.

But they’ve found someone to speak for him, Kilander said. They want you to do it.

I said, I can’t do that.

Don’t keep the judge waiting, Kilander said.

Empathetic thinking is an important skill for a detective. No matter how much you might dislike a suspect, it’s useful to adopt his viewpoint, understand his motives. I kept this in mind as I settled myself behind the stand.

Whenever you’re ready, the judge said.

I leaned forward and spoke for Hugh. I know how bad it looks, I said.

A little louder, Ms. Pribek, the judge said.

I know how bad it looks, I repeated. But normally my desk was locked. And normally the kids didn’t even go in there; I didn’t keep anything in my study to attract them, no toys or candy. I kept the pistols there because there was no furniture in our bedroom that locked. My desk did. The guns would be just down the hall if I needed them. I kept the pistols loaded because the lake area wasn’t as built up back then as it is now. It was pretty isolated, and I wanted to protect Lis and the kids from break-ins. I don’t know why I forgot to lock the desk that one time. I just did.

How could it happen that the one time I forgot, Aidan went in there and found the gun? And he didn’t just shoot into the air, or his foot, but his chest. His chest!

I wasn’t afraid to call the paramedics and have the shooting on record; that’s not why I drove Aidan to the hospital myself. I know that’s what it looked like, but it’s not. I was afraid to wait for the ambulance. I grabbed him in my arms and ran for the garage. If there had been any speed traps on the road, the police would have had to chase me all the way to the hospital, because I wouldn’t have stopped. I wanted so badly to save him. But no one chased me, no cops saw me. I got all the way to the hospital, and still no one seemed to notice my arrival. And then I looked back at Aidan, and he wasn’t breathing. He was blue. And I knew he was gone.

I sat there in the car and cried, and still no one came over. When I was done crying, I thought about bringing the ER staff over to the car, getting them to take Aidan’s body, but then I didn’t want them to take him away from me and put him in the morgue. So I started the car up again and just drove home. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I wasn’t thinking at all.

When I got home, Lis was sleeping with Marli in the bed, and I didn’t wake them. When the sun came up, the morning was so beautiful, and I decided to bury Aidan under the magnolia tree. Lots of old American families have gravesites on their property. It’s a tradition. So I buried Aidan under the tree, and I said a prayer.

Marli woke up and I told her Mother was sick, and Aidan had gone away for a while. She said, “He’s coming back, isn’t he?” and I couldn’t bear to say no, and so I said something like “Everything’s going to be fine.” Later, I took Lis down to the little grave. I told her this was better than sending Aidan to the hands of some funeral home to be embalmed and sewn up. This way, he’d always be with us. She cried and nodded. After that she was catatonic, almost. She didn’t call anyone. Not a friend, not her sister.

That’s what started me thinking. There were so many coincidences here, that no one saw Aidan in my car at the hospital, that no one had found out yet what had happened… It was almost like it was fate. Maybe there was some way I could cover for Aidan shooting himself. Maybe I could put it off on hunters. What good would it do for Aidan’s death to be splashed all over the papers? For people to point fingers at me and Elisabeth? They would have blamed her, too. What if some social worker called us unfit? What if they took Marli and Liam, too? It would have destroyed Lis. I mean, she was pregnant with Colm then, too. She was so fragile.

That’s when I remembered Brigitte and her little boy, Jacob. It was impossible but perfect. Jacob was almost exactly the same age as the twins. And they were both still so young, there was time. They could both forget the past. Jacob, in time, could be Aidan.

When I told Lis, she got hysterical, called me sick. But I weathered it. I told her that nothing would bring Aidan back, but explained all the reasons. I pointed out what Lis had told me: that since the death of her boyfriend, Brigitte had been a basket case. She was drunk a lot, stoned a lot, and she’d let her son lose his finger to that vicious dog. Jacob was better off with us. I said we could give Jacob a wonderful life here, and we’d never, ever forget Aidan, we could visit his grave every day.

Brigitte was easy. She knew she was a bad mother and that her sister would be good to Jacob. A big check was all it took to push her over the edge. And once she’d cashed the check, she couldn’t go to the authorities. She was implicated.

The day we got Jacob home, too, that was a disaster. I’d told Marli, “Aidan was bitten by a dog and went away to get better,” and she’d believed it. But when I brought Jacob in, she took one look at him and started to cry. She knew he wasn’t Aidan, and I was telling her he was, and she was so confused that it frightened her. I said, “Marli, he looks different, but he’s Aidan, he’s really Aidan inside.” But she kept crying and saying, “I want Aidan, I want Aidan.” And Lis was so fragile then, she sat down in the rocking chair and wept, too. Marli was in the corner, crying, and Lis was in the chair, crying, and Jacob was standing in the middle of the room like he wanted to cry, too. I thought, You’re the monster here, Hugh. How’d that happen? All I ever wanted was to be a good husband and father and now I was a goddamn monster and I couldn’t understand how the hell it had all happened.