Thomas Cook - Sacrificial Ground

“I expected you a little earlier,” she said crisply as she opened the door.

“I have a new case,” Frank told her.

“So Alvin said. A young girl.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how it happened yet?”

“A little. Not much.”

She nodded quickly, then stepped out of the door. “Well, come in,” she said.

Frank walked directly into the living room, but he did not sit down. It did not feel like his house anymore.

Sheila walked to the fireplace and pressed her back up against it. She wore a plain blue dress, slightly wrinkled, and her hair hung in a disheveled tangle at her shoulders. She looked drawn, as if she’d been sleeping badly.

“I’ve decided to leave Atlanta,” she said.

“All right.”

“I’m going to sell the house.”

Frank said nothing.

“I thought I’d give you the first chance to buy it.”

“I don’t want it.”

Sheila’s eyes darted away, as if in rejecting the house they shared together, he was once again rejecting her. “All right, then,” she said stiffly, “I’ll sell the house and give you half the money.”

“I don’t want the money,” Frank said.

Sheila looked at him disapprovingly. “You look like you could use a new suit.”

“I don’t want the money, Sheila,” Frank repeated.

“You could buy yourself a new place,” Sheila said.

“I like where I am.”

“Renting that place on Waldo? You like that? Frank, it’s a slum.”

“You’ve never been there.”

“Alvin’s described it.”

“Alvin has his own way of looking at things,” Frank said. “It may not always be the best one.”

“Well, he told me about it,” Sheila said. “And when I think that we could still be living …”

“No,” Frank said flatly, and watched as she turned away to face the hearth.

“I didn’t mean to get into that again,” she said softly. “I always promise myself that I won’t get into that, and then I do.”

Frank struggled to smile.; “So, where are you moving to, Sheila?”

She eased herself around to face him. “Back home.”

“Fort Payne?”

“You seem surprised.”

“I am … a little.”

“I don’t see why,” Sheila said. “I never liked Atlanta, Frank. I never wanted to come here.” There was a fatal accusation in her voice. He had taken her where she didn’t want to go, and after that, one disaster had led to another, until there was nothing left between them but the memory of disaster.

“You going to buy a place of your own?” Frank asked.

“Not right away,” Sheila said. “At first, I’m going to stay with Papa. He needs looking after, you know.”

He tried to smile again. “I wish you luck, Sheila. I really do.”

She glared at him with a sudden fierceness. “You son of a bitch,” she hissed.

Frank walked to the door. “I’ll spread the word about the house. Somebody in the department might want it.”

Sheila marched to the sofa and slumped down on it. “Save yourself the trouble,” she said bitterly.

Frank opened the door and glanced back at her. For a moment he wanted to find some way to ease the bitterness between them, to draw her softly back—not as a wife, for that was gone forever—but as someone he had loved more deeply and for a longer time than he would ever love again. But it was useless, and he knew it. In the end, there was nothing left but to close the door.

It was after midnight before he got back to the house. Hours of driving through the streets had not helped much. He slumped down on the sofa and turned on the light beside it. He could see his unmade bed in the adjoining room, and its disarray echoed the accusation he’d heard all his life, that he couldn’t finish things, that he drifted along with the flood, with no direction of his own.

The accusation didn’t always seem fair. After all, he’d moved to Atlanta at Alvin’s urging, and for years they’d walked a beat together, two brothers in blue on the gritty, noisy streets. He remembered the pride he’d once had in his uniform, the shining buttons and brilliant silver badge. It had taken him many years to exchange it for the gold shield of a detective, and although Alvin was older, and had been with the department longer, they’d done it the same year. The two brothers in uniform became the two brothers in Homicide, and for several years after that, they’d even worked a few cases together. Then Sarah had died at sixteen, and two years later, Sheila had dropped away. More and more since then, Alvin had worked his own beat, both at work and in his life, and now, as he thought of it, Frank found that he couldn’t blame him in the least.

He stood up and walked out onto the small porch. It was barely large enough to hold a single wrought-iron chair, but it sometimes felt like the only place in the city he still enjoyed. From its high perch, he felt that he could look down and take it all in with just enough distance and perspective to see it with more clarity. He’d spent hours in the little chair, thinking of his father, his daughter, his wife. The old man was always there, preaching to high Heaven about goodness and salvation. But where had the old man’s wife gone to? Why had she left him with two boys and a clapboard church with a congregation so poor they often put bags of peas or berries in the collection box? At times, as Frank thought about it, he felt that he could grasp it. He could remember his mother’s drawn, dark, infinitely unhappy face, stripped by his father’s rigid saintliness, withered away so completely by it, that she’d sometimes seemed little more than a naked carcass, something the birds had picked to death. “Well away, Mother,” he thought now. “Well away from him.”

But he and Alvin had had to stay, and he remembered how, after his mother’s departure, the old man had grown more and more intemperate in his sermons, more and more frantic, desperate, frenzied. Sunday after Sunday, he’d whipped the dusty congregation into a rage for glory. Even Alvin had taken up the trumpet by then. And so it was only himself, shifting on the bench, silent among the howling host of believers who swayed and wept and cried out for redemption.

Sheila had been his redemption, and he could remember the touch of her long brown legs as if they were still wrapped around him. Her warm breath had redeemed him, and the feel of her fingers as they pulled at his hair. During those long, twining nights, he had not been able to imagine that he would ever lie down next to her without desire. And yet, as the years had passed, so had their passion, until, in the end, it was only the house they shared, little square rooms with pictures of seascapes hanging from the walls. Only their house, and their daughter.

She’d been born only a few years after their marriage, and he had named her Sarah as a last concession to his father: Sarah, after Abraham’s faithful and long-suffering wife. Her birth had transformed him, or had at least made him feel transformed. He’d discovered something hidden in himself, an immense and primitive capacity for love. It was as if she possessed a density which nothing else possessed, not his wife or his work, or anything else imaginable. He came to realize how small women lifted huge trucks off the shattered legs of their children. There was something primordial in the bond between a father and his daughter, and he had felt it more powerfully than he had ever felt anything before, and when, year by year, it began to slip away, he felt as if he were slowly being drained of some essential force.

And yet, it had, in fact, slipped away. Slowly, her moodiness had overwhelmed her, and he could not change it. By the time she was nine, she played almost entirely alone. By eleven her eyes had taken on a strange, unfathomable vacancy. By thirteen he had lost her. And three years later she was dead.