Burning Time

7

It didn’t look so terrific, this college dormitory. More like a run-down apartment building. April parked the car quite far from the curb, kind of on an angle, and left it there. One thing was good about being a cop. You could leave your car anywhere and never get a ticket. She always locked it, though. April adjusted the gun at her waist. Never go into a situation alone was the rule. But this wasn’t a situation. It was an investigation. You could do that alone.

Abandoned buildings were April’s personal terror. When she was on the beat in Bedford-Stuyvesant for a few months, she got adjusted to a lot of things. Addicts. They used to call them junkies. Heroin was the thing, and free-basing. The addicts cooked the stuff and sometimes caught on fire when they were too high to be careful. Lot of abandoned buildings there.

“Mei Mei’s daughter is an accountant,” April’s mother told her. “Why don’t you do something up like that?” She thought a cop was a low thing to be. Not as high as Mei Mei’s daughter. Another friend of hers had a son who was a doctor. She was always trying to get them to meet. Neither one wanted to.

It wasn’t only that the job was not as high as maybe working at Merrill Lynch in computer programming. It was the fact that cops got infected through the eyes. They saw too many things.

Well, you got used to it. Seeing people shot up pretty bad. Stomach wounds, head wounds. April was first on the scene once when a Korean was shot in the neck in the middle of a robbery. The guy with him was already dead, and this guy was lying there in a lake of blood. It was pumping out of a hole in his neck with every heartbeat. Five months in the Academy didn’t exactly train anybody to deal with neck wounds of this severity, but April didn’t panic. She tried to plug up the hole, applied as much pressure as she could, and stayed with him until they got him out.

He was one of the lucky ones. Somehow the bullet missed the carotid artery. He lost his voice box, and was six months in the hospital, but he didn’t die. She did the follow-up on him, so she knew how he had to learn to talk by holding the hole closed with a flap of skin.

Being a cop wasn’t as high maybe as being a doctor, but April knew the Korean wouldn’t have lived if she hadn’t been there to get help and keep his blood from escaping out the hole in his neck while they waited for the ambulance.

She wasn’t afraid of getting hit like that. She’d pulled her gun, but she’d never used it except at the range every month, and no one had ever shot at her. What scared her was the empty, falling-down buildings, with the windows boarded up, and what happened in them. There were ghosts in the buildings, living and dead. Sometimes the windows weren’t boarded up. They were just holes. She could see the pigeons flying in and out.

What scared April was getting a call about a dead body in one of those buildings and having to go in and find it. Down an elevator shaft, or just lying on the floor in a room upstairs. She used to dream about it every night. Getting that call and having to climb the stairs looking for it, having no idea which room it was in. Or what else she might find. On the night shift when she was a rookie she confessed this to one person, and then everybody knew.

Long-ago advice from her mother: Never tell your weak place. People can break you from there. After she told about her weak place, April worried that they would get her there when that body turned up.

They didn’t, though. When she finally got the call she had known would come because she dreamed it too many times for it not to happen, her supervisor told her she didn’t have to go in. He didn’t break her in her weak place after all. He told her to wait for backup. It was on the third floor of a walk-up. Boarded up except for the front door.

April stood downstairs that day, thinking they would make her go in when they got there because you weren’t supposed to have any weak places in NYPD. If she didn’t go in when they asked her to, she wouldn’t get promoted. She’d have to stay on foot patrol in Bed-Stuy all her life. That was another scary prospect.

April knew whenever she was really frightened from deep inside it always came from something her mother told her, something Chinese that didn’t make sense in America. Her mother talked constantly, and couldn’t seem to stop. Her father hardly spoke at all. Sai Woo said she had to fill the silences her husband made or else ghosts would come in and fill them with wickedness. April said there weren’t any ghosts in America, and her father might have something to say if Sai Woo gave him a place to let his thoughts out.

This was when her mother looked at her with the greatest scorn and dropped another one of her priceless pearls that had nothing to do with anything.

“Sun rises in the East, goes down in the West,” like April was supposed to know what that meant.

Still, April did know what it meant. It meant there were ghosts in America, and you were supposed to eat the ones that plagued you just like in China. If you devoured them, they healed you. In China they would devour anything at all. If it was hairy or bony or truly awful, they ground it up into powder, put it in boiling water, and drank it.

As April stood outside the Bed-Stuy building waiting for backup that day, she felt old China crowding all around her. If she were a true American cop, she’d have no trouble climbing those stairs and looking at the body. So what? How bad could it be? But if she were truly Chinese under everything, she’d have to consume some little something, a hair or a piece of dust, something from the scene. If she didn’t do that, the weak place would always be there inside of her.

But something magical happened when her supervisor showed up and said, “All right, April, you stay down here and secure the area.”

“No, it’s okay. I can do it,” she had assured him.

She climbed up the three flights of stairs, not first maybe. But she was there when they found it. It had been there for months. There wasn’t even any smell anymore, nothing like a dead animal decaying behind a wall. There was just a pile of rags and hair and bone with some dried skin that looked like leather covering it. Was this what I was afraid of, she asked herself. She decided she was all American and didn’t have to consume it.

So this was what I wanted, she thought now, going up the stairs into the dorm where Ellen Roane lived. The place was gloomy and looked almost deserted. The girl would have been better off living at home. Better address downtown. But not the freedom to do as she pleased. April went inside. There was a fat guard sitting at a small table that didn’t look like it was always there.

“I’m looking for Ellen Roane,” she said.

“Well, you won’t find her here,” the guard said. He was Hispanic, not very friendly.

“How about Connie Shagan?” April said. Connie Shagan, the Roanes had told her, was Ellen’s roommate.

“Won’t find her either. Or any of them.”

“Is there a teacher, uh, a professor, who lives here I could talk to?” She hadn’t wanted to, but now she flashed her shield.

The guard looked at it and shrugged. “There’s still nobody here. It’s spring break.”

April Woo cursed herself five hundred times as she walked back to where she left the car. See what happens when you leave out one tiny question. One detail that changes the whole story. The parents didn’t bother to tell her everybody disappeared. All the students, and even the professors disappeared. And she didn’t think to ask. It wasn’t very smart.

She would talk to the parents in the morning when they came in with the girl’s picture and ask them if they really wanted to put their daughter in the system when she was probably skiing in Vermont. With the Barstollers, who had a Chinese maid. She smiled at the thought, as she took the car back.