Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

In rehab now—

—again.

Detective Willow Millard Wylde.

Fifty-seven years old: shitty health and shaky spirits.

Kind of a fattie…

Which is usually what happens to him at the end of a run.

He was drinking around the clock. Burning his fingers, his mattress, his couch, and his car seat with those bullshit alkie Marlboro Blacks. Burning down his anxieties and dreams. Chugalugging pain pills with Diet Dr Pepper from the moment he awakened to the moment he passed out—and even in the middle of the night, after being startled to wakefulness by his own stertorous snores and otherworldly screams.

No diabetes—yet.

No prostate cancer—yet. (Though tests showed peskily chronic microscopic amounts of blood in the urine, etiology unknown.)

Just some scabby, top of the head, sun-induced cancer, but no melanoma.

Yet.

Still no tangible signs of early-onset dementia…

Cialis seemed to work most of the time for those few and far-between afternoon delights. Sometimes he had little romantic dates with himself when chemical enhancement wasn’t required and performance wasn’t the issue. But generally he’s lost the urge.

Generally lost all urge.

Willow—that haunted half-oddity of an eccentric name that his grandmother bestowed on him, a name he love-hated, a name he’d always been forced to explain (women were enthralled, men were suspect)—Willow Wylde, that complicated, beautiful, ruined American mythic thing: Washed-Up Cop. That luminous travesty of premium cable, movies and fiction, high and low: retired alcoholic homicide cop (one of his exes called him a “functional assaholic”), bruised and battered three-years-into-forced-retirement cop, unlucky in love, depressed, once flamboyant, once heroic cop, decorated then dirty then borderline absolved, now demolished, a revolving door AA member too played out to be a suicide threat. Friends used to arrive en masse to take his weapon away but after the first few interventions bailed in the ensuing months then years of relapses. In time, “Dubya”—he had the nickname long before George Walker Bush but didn’t mind sharing it (sometimes he just wasn’t in the mood to be Willow)—alienated even his die-hard boosters. Their patience and goodwill expired, and they were dispatched or dispatched themselves from his life one by one.

On this day, late June, in the Year of Our Damaged, Dysfunctional Lord:

He walks from building to building in the absurd, nearly intolerable blast furnace of Sonoran Desert heat. It gives him solace to singsong-whisper under his breath the mantra, “I’m broken. Broken. Broken…” The tidy personal prayer seemed to go well with the rehab’s favorite motto, “Hurt people hurt people.”

Oh, true dat.

His daughter Pace went online and found a place called the Meadows. She read that famous people went there. Well maybe they did but all Dubya knows of famous are a European automobile heir who looked like a comic book prince and a jovial, forgotten, once sitcom actor who resembled a spooked and bloated farm animal—mixed in with the usual head cases, drunks, dope fiends and sex addicts.

Willow’s wrist is in a cast, the bones having been broken in the collision with a barroom wall. A long pin crucifies the hand to secure the fracture. A tiny red button caps the pin and sits below the pinkie like a ladybug.

Still limps from an old gunshot wound to the leg, when he worked narcotics in Manhattan…

It’s 118 degrees—he can’t figure out if that’s in the sun or the shade, as if it the fuck matters! The only place hotter in the world is Death Valley. Once a week, the two shit kilns have an apocalyptic do-si-do, competing for Hell’s honors. He could never wrap his head around the fact that the hottest place on Earth was in the U.S. of A., not the Sahara or Bum Crack, Syria, and now, courtesy of his beloved codependent daughter, he’s in rehab in literally the hottest place on Earth—more or less—and shakes his head, muttering, “Broken! Broken! Broken!”

His only real family is the rehab tribe: counselors, doctors, RNs, kitchen workers, fellow inmate-travelers. They detoxed him for a week in a room next to the nursing station. Rx: Seroquel for sleep and anxiety, trazodone for sleep and anxiety, donuts and Hershey bars and four packets of sugar/four of stevia in black coffee for sleep and anxiety. Jacking off in bed and cigarettes ’round the smoke pit for sleep and anxiety… His besties are a Rimbaud dead ringer—a crazy-handsome seventeen-year-old poet whose arm is also in a sling, due to deep tendon wounds from a suicide attempt that put him in Bellevue for three weeks, and a black fire chief from Fort Worth who peaked at sixty Percocet a day. (Willow marveled at that. The most he could ever manage was ten.) And a wry gal, a gay Buddhist from Fort Lauderdale who refuses to call him Dubya (“Willow is such a beautiful name. And Willow Wylde is wildly beautiful”). She’s droll and way broken too and he feels better when Renata’s around. She used to be pretty—everyone used to, even ol’ Dub. He tries feeling sexy about himself and people in general (hey, anything to pass the time), but sexiness corroded a long while back, along with everything else.

It’s tough to feel sexy when you’re wheezing, broiling and broken, sharing a room with three men, two of whom have sleep apnea and use angry-sounding, portable CPAPs at night. It’s tough with a long ladybug pin stuck impaling your walloped writing hand…

Yet still somehow he possesses that irrational, mandatory—yes, sexy —certainty that somehow all will be solved, all will be made right… tomorrow! That knowledge, a reflexive fallback, that a victim’s family will be assuaged and justice will be served. Justice! Because contrary to popular opinion, there was such a thing as closure and screw anyone who said otherwise. Hell, he lived for closure. As a homicide detective, he’d always had a different interpretation of the word. Trouble was, people had the idea that closure was about feeling good—feeling good was the bottom line, the secret of life, everyone always just wanted to feel good , but nothing ever felt good about murder and its aftermath. No: closure wasn’t relief or release, it was a balancing of scales, that’s all. When the scales were balanced, order and some kind of serenity returned to the world, in spite of oneself. A detective’s job was to restore balance. That’s why he became a Cold Case guy, even though he fucked that up like everything else. The natural order of the universe was balance and symmetry, not justice, but balance was justice; give him a ninth-century mummy with a dagger in its chest and Willow Wylde would get his ordered, just results. It was nothing but a crossword puzzle designed by the Creator and he was good at what he did because he saw that, knew that and was never blinded by the personal.