Ernie said, “You become a cop, get to be a detective, and you will have access to criminal databases. You will be able to see FBI and NSA files, and you can check other police department files. You are looking for a name, a person who probably lives in New York State, ex-military, someone who knew how to shoot, maybe even a cop himself, but smart enough to stay clear of the law.”
“I’ll find him, Ernie. I will.”
Once, my boyfriend, Bobby, said, “You are a revenge-seeking bitch of mayhem.”
“Apologize,” I demanded. “But just for the bitch part; the rest is accurate.”
Sammy and I got grief counseling. I don’t know how he could have been counseled for anything, much less grief. He fell into a catatonic stupor that lasted three months. When I came into his room, he’d sit upright on the edge of his bed, purse his lips, and stare into my face until I looked away. Sammy would twist his body and fall backward on to the mattress. Lying motionless on the bed, fists clenched at his waist, he’d stare at the ceiling. The meds, mostly benzodiazepines, got him moving again. He returned to middle school, where he was treated with extreme kindness, with the exception of Paul Singer, a bully who liked to whisper in his ear that Sammy’s father had been a baby killer who’d deserved to die. Paul’s own father was an alcoholic who beat him regularly and taught Paul the virtue of cruelty. The principal of the school intervened aggressively without the need of a threatening lawsuit from my mother. He got Paul into a mentorship program at his church and his father into AA. Paul came to see the error of his ways, and the bullying stopped.
Sammy refused to go to school, even after Paul Singer found religion and his father made amends. Sammy simply said, like Bartleby, that he would prefer not to. Mom got him into Jericho Pines, a private mental health facility in the Berkshires. Jericho charged seven thousand dollars a week, with a minimum six-week stay; if my mother’s cousin, Dr. James Andrews, hadn’t been the director of Jericho, my mother’s health insurance hadn’t reluctantly paid most of it, and a board of directors hadn’t forgiven the balance, Sammy would not have been there with other suicidal teenagers, some of whom had experimented disastrously with Schedule 1 psychedelics, most of them just rich and crazy—pardon my nonmedical terminology.
Sammy began to violate Jericho rules by walking away and occasionally trying to kill himself by overdosing on his meds.
His doctor said, “These are gestures, not serious attempts. He just needs time to heal.”
Unfortunately, Mom’s cousin Dr. Andrews said Jericho couldn’t keep him indefinitely, so we had to start thinking about alternatives. There weren’t any. That’s the thing about murder. You don’t just kill one person; you spread death in little ripples like a pebble tossed in a pond.
Of the three of us, Sammy suffered the most; he was the youngest, and we knew his pain would last the longest. It ended when Sammy was eleven, on one of his runaways from Jericho. A woman saw him standing in the road, just below the crest of a hill, but by the time she pulled over, an oncoming cement truck driver, not seeing him until it was too late, had crushed him beneath the wheels of his truck. My mother survived Sammy’s death, but not by much. Her heart stopped silently in her sleep, halted by grief and the belief that her love had failed her sweet Sammy.
I am bound to avenge my own losses—my father, my mother, but especially the misery inflicted on my little brother. The one who did this, the cowardly bastard, he will die at my hands when I find him.
I used to live in Eaton’s Neck, an arthritic finger on the north shore of Long Island. If I leaned over the balcony, I could see Connecticut across the Long Island Sound. Jay Gatsby and I had the same view; his balcony was bigger. The beach below was accessible by negotiating a weathered wood staircase. In the winter, on my days off, I would pry knots of black mussels from the rocks at low tide. The kitchen sink overlooked the water. There was no place for an assassin to hide and shoot me.
I bought the condo with my fiancé, Darren. He bought his half from me after I didn’t show up for our wedding. I tried, I really did, but at the last minute I realized I would be marrying a doctor. I couldn’t do it; I had already lost one.
Darren was finishing his surgery residency at Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center. I was just out of the Police Academy. We met cute; he was speeding, I was on training patrol—after he talked his way out of a ticket, he asked if we could have dinner. We each liked the idea of what we each did for a living. He liked that I carried a gun in my purse, and I liked having a doctor around when I wasn’t feeling well. The trouble was we had impossible, opposing hours, Darren in his surgery residency and I as a rookie cop in the Long Island City Police Department with an obsession to find the man who killed my father.
Darren knew my tragic history. He was sympathetic, but he owned the soul of a surgeon: Diagnose the problem. If it’s a tumor, a torn meniscus, a bum hip, remove it, repair it, and heal.
“Move on,” Darren would say.
“From what?” I always replied.
“This idea of revenge.” Because Darren, a reasonable man, had a proper civilized aversion to revenge—except in movies—Go Arnold, go Denzel. He viewed my desire to find and punish the cowardly bastard as verging on mental instability. He was right. I am damaged goods. Darren was patient in weathering my depression, my mood swings, my crying, and my rages. I alternately loved/hated him for his understanding, his calm, steady bedside manner. He finally diagnosed me: I had post-traumatic stress disorder. He prescribed Zoloft. I told him what I really wanted was a box of hollow-point bullets, but I would try the meds.
“I just don’t get the revenge part,” he said.
“You don’t have to. It’s mine. I own it, and I’m keeping it. I appreciate the pills, but they don’t make anything go away.”
Our dependence became a theme, until the one time when we weren’t there for each other. He was mugged at an ATM, and I flushed the Zoloft. Things went downhill from there. In a crazy attempt to repair the relationship, he proposed marriage. Equally crazy, I accepted. Neither of us meant it. So when I didn’t show up at the Queens County Clerk’s Office on our wedding day, it was merely embarrassing, and not quite unexpected.
We didn’t own much together. He took the TV, and I kept the Escher prints. Afterward, we advanced on the board game of life; Darren became a sought-after orthopedic surgeon while I got Detective of the Year twice. I saw his name in New York Magazine as one of the best hip replacement doctors in Manhattan. I wonder if he saw my awards in Newsday.
At the end of my senior year Wren Ballard, a social worker, drove over from Poughkeepsie and took me to a diner.
“I don’t do Starbucks,” she said.
Wren was thin and spindly, with a narrow, pinched face, hair in a reddish-blond bun. She walked in an ungainly tiptoe step that resembled her name—a nervous wren pecking at the ground. Later, Wren revealed it was early Parkinson’s. She ordered chocolate milkshakes for us and said, “I’m a grief counselor. How can I help?”
“I don’t have grief. I have rage,” I said. “And I don’t want it to go away.”
“That’s normal, but you will still have to deal with the grief.”
We drank our milkshakes and she gave me a referral to Dr. Feldman, who was just out of analytic training at Albany Medical College.