Sympathy Between Humans

34

The familiar smell of cyanoacrylate glue brought me to my senses, but this wasn’t the lingering scent of old fumes. It was sharp and fresh. My eyes were closed, but I felt someone touching my forehead with gentle fingers.

“I should own stock in the superglue business,” I said, eyes still closed.

“Shh,” a low, familiar voice said. “You’re shaking my hand.”

I opened my eyes and wasn’t surprised to see Cicero. I’d recognized his voice a second earlier. What I was a little less clear on were the events leading up to being on Cicero ’s exam table once again.

I remembered the fire at the Hennessy place, and scattered events after that. I remembered Colm by my side. He’d led me to a safe distance from the burning house, and encouraged me to lean on him, and I did, grateful for his young strength and his disobedience in coming back for me. I remember emergency vehicles at the fireground, and trying to help because I couldn’t grasp the idea that I was at the scene as a patient, not a first responder. A crowded ER waiting room, then a quiet place, someone speaking to me in a low, calm voice. Cicero ’s voice.

“I can’t believe you’re gluing me back together,” I said.

“A doctor’s trick, not to be tried at home,” he said, sitting back.

“I didn’t think I was hurt,” I said. I remembered the sharp corner of the window screen scraping across my forehead, but it had seemed like nothing, a scratch from a kitten’s claw.

“Oh, it’s a pretty bad cut. Don’t touch it,” he reprimanded as I lifted my hand toward my forehead. “I’ll show you.”

He rolled away in his chair, came back with a hand mirror, and held it up in front of me.

“Holy shit,” I said. Only now did I remember blinking blood out of my eyes, more than once. Blood that had dried now on my nose, cheekbones, even my chin.

“It looks worse than it is.” Cicero was rolling away again. “You’ve got a little swelling on the back of your head, also, but nothing too serious,” he said. “You were holding some ice on it for me, do you remember that?”

“No,” I said.

“Otherwise you’re fine. I’m going to get you a little more ice. Can you throw me that cloth?”

I looked around and saw a wet, pale-green washcloth on the exam table next to me. I picked it up and started to rise, but Cicero, at the edge of his kitchen, merely held up his hand. My throw was a little off, but Cicero adjusted and caught it backhanded.

When he came back, he had the ice, as well as a clean cloth in a small, stainless-steel bowl of soapy water. I took the ice pack from him and held it to my head. It wasn’t hard to locate the injury by the dull ache I felt there, as well as the dampness of the hair around it. Cicero set the bowl down and wrung out the rag.

I saw what he was going to do. “I can wash my own face, in the bathroom,” I said.

“I know you can,” Cicero said. “But I want you to sit still and keep applying that ice pack, and in the meantime, I’m tired of feeling sorry for you unnecessarily because you look like you just went ten rounds with Lennox Lewis when it’s nowhere near that bad.”

I submitted to his ministrations, like a child, closing my eyes as he gently scrubbed dried blood from my skin.

“I need to tell you something,” Cicero said. “The last time you were here, you mentioned my brother’s death.”

“We don’t have to talk about that,” I said, opening my eyes.

“Yes, we do,” he said. “You were afraid that I equated you with the officers who shot Ulises.” His voice was soft and level, like always. “I don’t. You’re nothing like them.”

“You’ve never seen me on the job,” I said.

“I never spoke to those men,” Cicero told me. “They never came to me, to explain what happened. You would have come. Am I wrong about that?”

“No,” I said honestly. “I would have.”

Cicero nodded and went on with his work. The sensation on my skin was hypnotic, as was the sound of the soaking of the cloth, the splatter of water falling back into the bowl as he rinsed and wrung the cloth, a second time and then a third.

“You weren’t too clear on how this happened,” he said. “Something about a house fire and falling from a window during a rescue, is that about right?”

“Basically,” I said. “Why?”

Cicero let the cloth float in the bowl and handed me a towel to dry my face with. “You put yourself in dangerous situations a lot, Sarah,” he said. “Pulling kids from a drainage canal, and now this.”

“That’s only twice,” I said.

“Twice in the time I’ve known you,” he corrected. “Which is a little over a month.”

“It’s part of the job,” I said.

“No,” Cicero said, shaking his head like a teacher hearing an unacceptable excuse for incomplete homework. “I know enough about police work to know the things you’re doing are not typical.”

“Who wants to be typical?” I said lightly.

“Sometimes,” Cicero said, “when people consistently get themselves injured or hurt, there’s a reason. Sometimes they’re trying to draw attention to something else that’s hurting them, something they can’t show people directly.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Sarah,” he said carefully, “when you and your husband were living together, did he ever hit you?”

“God, no,” I said. “ Shiloh was a cop, too.”

“That doesn’t disqualify him,” Cicero said. “It’s a very physical profession, and it draws aggressive people who-”

“I know all that,” I said. “But Shiloh never hit me.”

“I just get the feeling,” Cicero said, “that someone hurt you.” He paused cautiously. “Was it sex?”

Blame it on the late hour, blame it on the head injury… I was about to deny it, and instead I heard myself say, “It was a long time ago.”

“Your father?” Cicero ’s dark eyes were very intent on mine.

“Brother,” I said. Then, “I never tell anyone that. I never even told Shiloh.”

“I’m sorry,” Cicero said.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“Okay.”

“I mean ever.”

“All right.”

“Do you feel sorry for me?”

“No.”

“Okay. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

I realized I was holding a wet rag with nothing in it anymore. Taking it away from the back of my head, I unfolded it and saw a tooth-size chip of ice inside, all that was left of a cube.

“The thing is,” I said, “if I do extreme things on the job, it’s just because I want… I want to…”

I started over. “I met this kid recently, a paramedic.” In my mind’s eye, I saw Nate Shigawa. “I envied him,” I went on. “In his job, he gets to stop the bleeding. My job is different. By the time I’m there, the bleeding is over. Sometimes long over.”

I was thinking of the real Aidan Hennessy, so young when he died, and of his mother, pulled from the waters of the lake.

“Just because the bleeding’s stopped doesn’t mean the pain is gone,” Cicero said. “I expect you help with that.”

“When people let me,” I said. “Sometimes- more often than you’d think- people say they want help, but really they don’t.”

The day that had started outside Kilander’s office had finally caught up with me. I felt tired in ways that were more than physical. I didn’t know how Marlinchen was. I didn’t even know where she and her brothers were. I thought I should find out, make sure they were all right, that someone was with them. But I just couldn’t do any more. Not tonight.

“What time is it?” I said, and turned to look at the clock. It was 1:58 A.M.

“God, I’m sorry,” I said, sliding off the table. “You need to be in bed. I’ll leave.”

Cicero started to speak, but I didn’t let him. “I feel fine, I’m okay to drive-” I stopped, realizing something. “I didn’t drive here, did I?”

Cicero shook his head. “You don’t remember?”

I closed my eyes, accessed dim mental images, but nothing would come into focus. Then I was struck by an impossible idea. “You brought me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“But-”

“I told you I can do the elevator when I have no other choice,” he said. “I’m not so much surprised that I went down that damn elevator as I am that my van started.”

I must have looked very surprised, because Cicero was watching me with amusement.

“You called me from a pay phone near the ER. You were a little fuzzy on the details, but apparently you’d just bolted from the waiting room. I told you to stay where you were. I was going to take you back to the hospital, if need be, but you were ambulatory and not seriously injured, so I respected your wishes and brought you here.”

He went outside to find me. I wanted to say that I was proud of him, but realized immediately how much it would diminish him, like a pat on the head. “I owe you,” I said.

“You owe me $120, to be exact,” Cicero said. “Eighty for the doctoring, and forty for making me go down in that damn elevator.”

I almost smiled, relieved at the deft way he brought us back down to earth. “You know what?” I said.

“You don’t have that much on you,” Cicero finished for me.

“I’ll bring it tomorrow,” I promised.

“No hurry,” Cicero said. “Just try to be more careful out there, all right? There are limits to what even I can fix.”