Blood Men

chapter six

I’m given a lift home. The sun is past its peak and the city seems darker now. The shadows cast by the tired buildings are small but ominous, the people on the streets appear defeated, those caught in half shadows are dazed, the trees and plants and flowers that make up the garden city have all lost their vibrancy-the life is draining out of the world. We pass rundown fruit stalls on the side of the road, FOR SALE signs in front of houses that people want to leave. The blood on my clothes is drying, the color fading from bright red to deep maroon, my body itchy where the stains are stiff and scratchy. With every passing second the distance between me and Jodie stretches, and the hope of getting her back finally turns into the despair it was the moment I saw her gunned down. This is my city, my home, the place I loved but love no more. Now I don’t know what it is. Certainly not my home. Not now. Now it’s the place that killed my wife and took my daughter’s mother away. Now it’s a hellhole and I don’t see any future here.

The officer driving doesn’t say anything. He’s never gotten around to preparing any rhetorical conversation for this exact situation. It’s a thirty-minute drive in busy traffic in which the world goes by and I wonder how I can change it. He’s relieved when he lets me out in my driveway. I’ve taken a car ride away from one reality to a new one. There aren’t any neighbors walking about or working in their gardens. The houses are all dirty, the plants and trees all too dry, the cars old and the sidewalks cracked, the colors everywhere seem so diluted. There are brief moments-less than a second-where I’m distracted and Jodie is still alive, small lifetime moments like putting my key in the door-bang! A distraction-and the world is okay. Then that split second passes and reality floods back in, crushing me.

It’s almost four o’clock and Sam has been picked up from school by Jodie’s parents. One of the detectives arranged it. One of them made the call so I didn’t have to, and I don’t know who broke the news to them first, the detective or the media. From a stranger they learned their daughter had the misfortune of getting herself gunned down this afternoon, had the misfortune of being married to a man who couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and they’d need to pick their granddaughter up from school.

My house has become a museum, everything inside a relic of my past, happy memories all turning to dust. The air-conditioning was switched off this morning so the house is stuffy. Jodie has been dead for three hours and I’m stepping into a different place, the ghost of the house that it was this morning. I wander through it, not really knowing what to do. Jodie’s stuff is everywhere and I can’t see myself ever packing any of it away. Her coffee cup is still on the bench, the bottom 10 percent still there, cold and manky. Toast crumbs form a trail across the kitchen floor. Makeup on the bathroom vanity, her towel, still damp, hanging on the rail. Jodie is missing and she’s here all at the same time, the house waiting for her to walk in, her husband waiting for the same thing. There’s an outfit lying on the bed; she must have been ready to wear one thing, then changed her mind. Jodie is always like that, she’s always one minute deciding to. .

Was. It’s “was” now.

“Jesus,” I whisper, and sit down on the edge of the bed. I pick up her top and hold it against my face and cry into it. What do I do with her clothes? Keep them? Give them away?

I don’t know when I’m supposed to think those kind of things, what kind of person it makes me for realizing it now. Do I do the washing and hang her clothes back up? Do I go to work next week? Do I leave Jodie’s clothes lying about the floor until after the funeral, then pack them up? My bosses at work don’t even know what’s happened. They know I went for lunch and haven’t come back.

I walk up and down the hallway-I just need somebody to tell me what to do.

I take off my clothes and lay them on the bed next to Jodie’s. A more creative man might study the bloodstains and find patterns in them, shapes of animals or boats, but all I see is my wife as she lay on the ground bleeding. They’re ruined. I roll them into a ball, then find myself coming to a complete standstill. I stare at them for a while. The cuffs are the bloodiest, then the arms, then the front. One of the buttons is missing. There isn’t any blood on the back at all. I straighten them out and hang them up.

I take a long shower, blood streaking off my skin, the penguin shower radio quiet as it watches me. I stare in the mirror at the large bruise on my face from the blow I took. The skin is slightly torn up, and one of my eyes doesn’t open fully-which I hadn’t even noticed until now. I don’t want to know this man anymore because this man got his wife killed. I picture it all happening over and over. I think about the bank teller, the way the shooter leveled his gun at her. Then I think about the 4 percent chance I came up with earlier when figuring the odds of Jodie being the volunteer, and realize it’s a false statistic since there wasn’t any probability involved. There would have been, if I hadn’t shouted out. If I’d kept quiet then Jodie would have had as much chance as anybody of living or dying-but I took that chance and turned it into a certainty. And why? Why the hell did I shout out? Schroder said it was to save somebody. Maybe that was it. Maybe I thought I could make a difference. Only thing I know is I was as surprised as everybody else-it didn’t sound like me and wasn’t the kind of thing I thought I’d ever do. Probably not the kind of thing anybody thought I’d ever do-the son of a serial killer trying to save a life. Well, Mission Accomplished. That woman is alive and Jodie is dead-I traded one life for another. This is what it’s like to play God, I suppose-but without the ability to do any good.

When the phone rings it turns out to be a reporter. So does the second call. And the third. Before taking it off the hook I phone Nathaniel and Diana-Jodie’s parents. Nat answers and he’s already crying before I can say much.

“I don’t really know what to say, Eddie,” he says, his voice close to breaking. I’ve never heard him cry before. Nat, this solid, near-retirement-age man who could break a man in half, is weeping into the phone, he sounds like a child. “But we’ve been talking, and we think, we think that both you and Sam might, um, might be best staying with us tonight. Then she can stay with us tomorrow to give you a chance to. . to get things organized.”

“I don’t know. I think I need her here. All I know is that I have to hold her and tell her everything is going to be okay.”

“It’s not going to be okay.”

“What the hell would you have me tell her?” I ask, the emotion on its way, pissed off at Nat now-but of course he doesn’t know what to say or do either, he’s just trying his best. “That our lives are going to fall apart?”

He doesn’t answer.

Five seconds go by. “Shit, I’m sorry, Nat,” I say, and I exhale loudly. “I didn’t mean. . I. . hell, I don’t know.”

“None of us know.”

“I’m going to come and get her.”

“Are you in any state to look after her? Think about what’s best for her, Eddie. Come and stay with us tonight. It’s for the best. Then, then tomorrow you can. . we can, together, we can. .” He doesn’t finish.

“She doesn’t know yet, does she,” I say, my heart sinking even more.

“We wanted to tell her. And we were going to, but. . I don’t know. It’s not that it was too hard, it’s. . well, we thought you’d be the one who’d want to tell her. Diana and me, we thought it was best that way, if we were all together when we told her. For everybody.”

“You did the right thing,” I say, and I can hardly breathe now, it feels like a golf ball is lodged down my throat. “I’m on my way,” I say, and I hang up then take the phone off the hook.

My car isn’t here. Jodie’s isn’t either. I phone a taxi company and a woman with no patience answers the phone and snaps at me, asking where I am and where I want to go.

I can’t seem to get any words out.

“Yes? Yes? You want to go somewhere, don’t you?” she says. “Or are you wasting my time?”

“Umm, I, I. . I don’t know,” I say.

“Weirdo,” she says, then hangs up. I take a moment to gather my thoughts before calling another company, and this time I’m able to put sounds to the names of the places.

“Somebody will be there in ten minutes,” the woman says. “Have a nice day,” she adds, and I almost burst into tears.

The taxi takes me into the city. The traffic is heavy; people are all following each other too closely and trying to change lanes. The driver gives me a funny stare, and I know the one, it’s the one where he’s thinking, Is that the little boy, the one whose dad preyed on this city twenty and thirty and forty years earlier before and during and after he was born? Henry the homeless guy is still outside the parking building, a sandwich instead of a vodka bottle in his hand, the Bible still in the other hand.

“Spare change?” he asks. He’s dressed in clothes made twenty years ago, with a baseball cap made from recycled cardboard, and there’s something about him that suddenly disgusts me even though he never has before. I have the urge to kick him. I look away and move quickly past before I can give in to the temptation. I run up the stairs all the way to where my car is.

I make my way out of the building, almost crippling a couple of other cars, almost clipping a couple of walls, driving perhaps too fast, perhaps even almost clipping a couple of people. I get onto the street and I’m two blocks away from the bank. I head in the opposite direction. Traffic is thick. I don’t see a single police car anywhere. I drive alongside the Avon where the grassy banks are heavy with food wrappers and empty drink cans, broken up by the occasional homeless person sniffing glue in the sun while working on his tan. The breeze is coming from that direction, picking up some cool air off the dark water. Traffic lights have broken down at a few of the bigger intersections, the orange lights flashing, drivers fending for themselves as they don’t know whether to give way or drive through.

It takes me forty minutes to get to my in-laws. They look awful. They look like some creature came around and reached inside of them and ripped out every happy memory they’ve ever had. They give me tight hugs and tell me that we’ll all get through this. I hug them back and tell them nothing.

Jodie’s parents have never approved of me. It’s not that I ever did anything wrong, or treated Jodie badly. It’s because of my father’s past. Her parents have always seen me as a loaded gun. They’ve always feared for their daughter. They tried to be pleasant, but they could never hide the fear that I’ve seen on other faces growing up-the one of suspicion. It’s been twenty years since my father was arrested for murder-that’s twenty years of having people around me always wondering, wondering, when’s Eddie going to become his father’s son? What is Eddie capable of? Jodie’s parents thought I was capable of slicing their daughter and granddaughter into a hundred pieces. Sum it all up, put a bottom line on it, and their fear their daughter would die at my hands came true.

Sam is asleep on the couch in the living room. I’ve seen plenty of photos of Jodie when she was a small girl, and right now Sam looks exactly the same. Her favorite teddy bear is clutched under her chin, her arm folded over it, holding it tight. I stand in the doorway and stare at her and my in-laws stand next to me and stare at her too. Nat has a key to my house-they must have swung by there first to pick up the teddy bear and probably some clothes. The plan all along had been for Sam to stay here anyway, so Jodie and I could go to my work Christmas party tonight.

“Let me make some dinner,” Diana says, and the words seem out of place and she knows it. I have no intention of eating. Probably none of us do. She has to do something, anything but stand still and let the terror get hold of her.

Sam wakes up. It’s slow at first, and then she sees me, and her face lights up. “Daddy!” she says, and she jumps up and has halved the distance between us. She’s six years old and that’s all she needs to be to immediately know something is horribly wrong. She can see it in our faces. “Where’s Mummy?” she asks, and her approach is cautious now.

I break down in tears and we do our best to explain.