Dust

3

A heavy rain splashes the driveway, flooding granite pavers and thrashing trees, the summer storm beating up an angry sky over a city I’m leaving.

I cut off a strip of packing tape, sweating inside my garage, slightly disinhibited, a little weird from alcohol. Richmond Police Detective Pete Marino is trying to get me drunk, to defeat me when I’m weak.

Maybe I should have sex with you and get it over with.

Marking boxes with a Sharpie, I designate areas of my Richmond home, the one I built of reclaimed wood and stone, what was supposed to be a dream meant to last: “living room, master bath, guestroom, kitchen, pantry, laundry room, office…” Anything to make it easier on the other side, having no idea what the other side will be ultimately.

“God I hate moving.” I run the tape dispenser over a box and it sounds like cloth ripping.

“Then why the hell do it all the time?” Marino flirts aggressively, and right now I let him.

“All the time?” I laugh out loud at his ridiculousness.

“And in the same damn city. One neighborhood to the next.” He shrugs, oblivious to what’s really going on with both of us. “Who can keep track?”

“I don’t move without good reason.” I sound like a lawyer.

I am a lawyer. A doctor. A chief.

“Run, run as fast as you can.” Marino’s bloodshot eyes pin me to his emotional board.

I’m a butterfly. A red spotted purple. A tiger swallowtail. A luna moth.

If I let you, you’ll knock the color off my wings. I’ll be a trophy you no longer want. Be my friend. Why isn’t that enough?

I secure another lid to another box, comforted by the downpour outside my open garage door, a mist blowing in, one hundred percent humidity, steamy, dripping. Like a deep hot bath. Like being in the womb. Like a warm body folded into mine, an exchange of warm fluids over skin and deep inside sad lonely places. I need heat and moisture to hug me, to hold me close like my damp clothes clinging as Marino stares from his folding chair, in cut-off sweatpants and a tank top, his big face flushed from lust, wantonness, and beer.

I wonder about the next overbearing detective I’ll have to deal with and I don’t want whoever it is. Someone I have to train and put up with, and respect and loathe and get tired of and lonely for and love in my own way. It could be a woman, I remind myself. Some tough female investigator who assumes she’ll be partners in crime with the new chief medical examiner, assumes who knows what.

I imagine a wolfish woman detective showing up at every death scene and autopsy, appearing in my office and roaring up in her truck or on her motorcycle the way Marino does. A big tattooed suntanned woman in sleeveless denim and a do-rag who wants to eat me to the bone.

I’m being irrational and unfair, bigoted and ignorant. Lucy isn’t competitive and controlling with the women she wants. She doesn’t have tattoos or a do-rag. She isn’t like that. She doesn’t need to be a predator to get what she wants.

I can’t stand these obsessive, intrusive thoughts. What has happened?

Grief grabs the hollow organs of my belly and chest until I almost can’t breathe. I’m overwhelmed by what I’m about to leave, which isn’t really this house or Richmond or Virginia. Benton is gone, murdered five years ago. But as long as I stay right here I feel him in these rooms, on the roads I drive, on stultifying summer days and the raw, bleak ones of winter, as if he’s watching me, is aware of me and every nuance of my being.

I sense him in shifts of air and scents and feel him in shadows that become my moods as a voice from somewhere out of reach says he isn’t dead. Is returning. A nightmare that isn’t real. I’ll wake up and he’ll be right here, his hazel eyes locked on mine, his long tapered fingers touching me. I’ll feel his warmth, his skin, and the perfect shape of his muscles and bones, so recognizable as he holds me, and I’ll be as alive as I’ve ever been.

Then I won’t have to move to some existential dead place where more pieces of me will wither inch by inch, cell by cell, and I envision dense woods beyond my property and the canal and railroad tracks. Down the embankment is a rocky stretch of the James River, a timeless part of the city at the back of Lockgreen, a gated enclave of contemporary homes lived in by those with money who covet privacy and security.

Neighbors I almost never see. Privileged people who never question me about the latest tragedies on my stainless-steel tables. I’m an Italian from Miami, an outsider. The old guard of Richmond’s West End doesn’t know what to make of me. They don’t wave. They don’t stop to say hello. They eye my house as if it’s haunted.

I have walked my streets alone, emerging from the woods at the canal and rusty railroad tracks and wide shallow rocky water, imagining the Civil War and centuries before that the colony farther downriver in Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement. Surrounded by death, I’ve been soothed by the past being present, by beginnings that never end, by my belief that there are reasons and purposes for whatever happens and all of it turns out for the best.

How could everything come to this?

I tape up another box and feel Benton’s death, a clammy breath at the back of my neck as humid air stirs. I’m empty, unbearably bereft by the void. I’m grateful for the rain, for the heavy full sound of it.

“You look like you’re about to cry.” Marino stares at me. “Why are you crying?”

“Sweat’s stinging my eyes. It’s hot as hell in here.”

“You could shut the damn door and turn on the air.”

“I want to hear the rain.”

“What for?”

“I’ll never hear it again in this place like it is right now.”

“Jesus. Rain is rain.” He looks out the open garage door as if the rain might be unusual, a type of rain he’s not seen before. He frowns the way he does when he’s thinking hard, his tan forehead furrowed as he sucks in his lower lip and rubs his heavy jaw.

He’s rugged and formidable, huge and exudes aggression, almost handsome before his bad habits got the best of him early in his hard-bitten life. His dark hair is graying and slicked to one side in a comb-over he won’t acknowledge any more than he’ll admit he’s balding prematurely. He’s over six feet tall, broad and big-boned, and when his arms and legs are bare like they are right now I’m reminded he’s a former Golden Gloves boxer who doesn’t need a gun to kill someone.

“I don’t know why the hell you had to offer to resign.” He stares boldly at me without blinking. “Only to hang around for the better part of a year to buy the assholes time to find your replacement. That was stupid. You shouldn’t have offered a damn thing. Fuck ’em.”

“Let’s be honest, I was fired. That’s how it translates when you volunteer to step down because you’ve embarrassed the governor.” I’m calmer now, reciting the same old lines.

“It’s not the first time you’ve pissed off the governor.”

“It probably won’t be the last.”

“Because you don’t know when to quit.”

“I believe I just did.”

He watches my every move as if I’m a suspect who might go for a weapon and I continue labeling boxes as if they’re evidence: “Scarpetta,” today’s date, belongings destined for the “master closet” in a South Florida rental house where I don’t want to be, what feels like an apocalyptic defeat returning me to the land of my birth.

To go back to where I’m from is the ultimate failure, a judgment proving I’m no better than my upbringing, no better than my self-absorbed mother and narcissistic male-addicted only sibling Dorothy, who’s guilty of criminally neglecting her only child Lucy.

“What’s the longest you ever stayed anywhere?” Marino relentlessly interrogates me, his attention trespassing in places he’s never been allowed to touch or enter.

He feels encouraged and it’s my fault, drinking with him, saying good-bye in a way that sounds like “Hello, don’t leave me.” He senses what I’m considering.

If I let you maybe it won’t be so important anymore.

“Miami, I suppose,” I answer him. “Until I was sixteen and left for Cornell.”

“Sixteen. One of these genius types, you and Lucy cut out of the same cloth.” His bloodshot eyes are fastened to me, nothing subtle about it. “I’ve been in Richmond that long and it’s time to move on.”

I tape up another box, this one marked Confidential, packed with autopsy reports, case studies, secrets I need to keep as his imagination undresses me. Or maybe he’s simply assessing because he worries I’m slightly crazy, have been made a little unhinged by what’s happened to my stellar career.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the first woman to be appointed chief medical examiner of Virginia, now has the distinction of being the first one forced out of office…If I hear that one more goddamned time on the goddamned news…

“I’m quitting the police department,” he says.

I don’t act surprised. I don’t act like anything at all.

“You know why, Doc. You’re expecting it. This is exactly what you want. Why are you crying? It’s not sweat. You’re crying. What’s the matter, huh? You’d be pissed if I didn’t quit and head out of Dodge with you, admit it. Hey. It’s okay,” he says kindly, sweetly, misinterpreting as usual, and the effect on me is a dangerous comfort. “You’re stuck with me.” He says what I want to be true but not the way he means it, and we continue our languages, neither of us speaking the same one.

He shakes two cigarettes from a pack and gets up from his chair to give me one, his arm touching me as he holds the lighter close. A spurt of flame and he moves the lighter away, the back of his hand touching me. I don’t move. I take a deep drag.

“So much for quitting.” I mean smoking.

I don’t mean so much for quitting the Richmond Police Department. He’ll quit and I shouldn’t want him to and I don’t have to be a psychic to predict the outcome, the aftermath. It’s only a matter of time before he’s angry, depressed, emasculated. He’ll get increasingly frustrated, jealous, and out of control. One day he’ll pay me back. He’ll hurt me. There’s a price for everything.

The ripping sound as I tape another box, building my white walls of cardboard that smell like stale air and dust.

“Living in Florida. Fishing, riding my Harley, no more snow. You know me and cold, crappy weather.” He blows out a stream of smoke, returning to his chair, leaning back, and the strong scent of him goes away. “I won’t miss a damn thing about this one-horse town.” He flicks an ash on the concrete floor, tucking the pack of cigarettes and lighter in the breast pocket of his sweat-stained tank top.

“You’ll be unhappy if you give up policing,” I tell him the truth.

But I’m not going to stop him.

“Being a cop isn’t what you do, it’s who you are,” I add.

I’m honest with him.

“You need to arrest people. To kick in doors. To make good on whatever you threaten. To stare down scumbags in court and send them to jail. That’s your raison d’être, Marino. Your reason for existing.”

“I know what raison d’être means. I don’t need you to translate.”

“You need the power to punish people. That’s what you live for.”

“Merde de bull. All the huge cases I’ve worked?” He shrugs in his chair as the noise of the rain changes, smacking, then splattering, now drumming, his powerful shape backlit by the eerie gray light of the volatile afternoon. “I can write my own ticket.”

“And what would that be exactly?” I sit down on a box, tapping an ash.

“You.”

“One person can’t be your ticket and we’re never getting married.” I’m that honest but it’s not the whole truth.

“I didn’t ask you. Did anybody hear me ask?” he announces as if there are other people inside the garage with us. “I’ve never even asked you on a date.”

“It wouldn’t work.”

“No shit. Who could live with you?”

I drop the cigarette into an empty beer bottle and it hisses out.

“The only thing I’m talking about is having a job with you.” He won’t look at me now. “Being your lead investigator, building a good team of them, creating a training program. The best anywhere in the world.”

“You won’t respect yourself.” I’m right but he won’t see it.

He smokes and drinks as rain pummels gray granite pavers beyond the wide square opening, and in the distance agitated trees, churning dark clouds, and farther off the railroad tracks, the canal, the river that runs through the city I’m leaving.

“And then you won’t respect me, Marino. That’s the way it will happen.”

“It’s already decided.” Another swallow of beer, the green bottle sweating, dripping condensation as he refuses to look at me. “I got it all figured out. Lucy and me both do.”

“Remember what I just said. Every word,” I reply from the taped-up box I’m sitting on, this one labeled Do Not Touch.