The Blue Hour

Forty-Five

In the spring, Merci bundled up the infant and drove to the Wedge. It was late, a cool and blustery night following an unseasonable May storm.

The baby bawled almost the whole way there, but this was no surprise. It was an inconsolable thing, always hungry, miserable or asleep. It wasn’t much to look at, either: big and lean, hardly any fat, a head of wispy black hair. Its lungs and voice box seemed unnaturally, unbelievably, strong. It suckled greedily and cried for hours without a comma. All this, delivered in twelve hours of agony she had never imagined possible. When she saw the thing all she could do was weep.

For Merci, the last nine months had been the most miserable of her life. Burying Hess was like losing half of herself, the half she liked. Burying her mother six months later was worse. She hadn’t expected it to make her feel so bad, but it made her think of a million things she’d wanted to say but hadn’t. Trying to console her father was impossible because he clung to Merci with a desperation she never knew was in him. Had her mother put up with that for forty years? Well, now it was all hers. He was all hers. He was asking to move in.

Then came her request for the maternity leave. As she talked about it with Brighton she felt like she was handing over her career. No more head of detail by forty, no more sheriff by fifty-eight. No more sixty-hour weeks for a while, maybe not ever. He had nodded, leaned forward on his elbows and tried to look glum. She could read his thoughts. She knew her ovaries had accomplished what no amount of political maneuvering on the part of Chuck Brighton could accomplish: she was soon to be a single mom and her career was shot. Maybe not fatally wounded, but shot just the same. Nature had put the little woman in her place.

Merci parked and gathered up the baby and walked down to the sand. The moon was three-quarters and she could see the jetty rocks jutting out into the ocean in a straight line. The waves were no longer high from the storm but she could still see them building along the rocks until they got in close, then rising in the moonlight and breaking on the beach.

The ocean at night could be a frightening thing. Not as frightening as Colesceau hiding in the bamboo with her H&K in his hands and murder in his eyes.

As she climbed onto the jetty Merci could feel the power of the waves vibrating into her legs. Good thing she’d worn the trekking shoes, she thought, the ones with the lug soles and solid grip.

She looked out at the black, horizonless night and forced herself to think of all the good things that had happened these last few months, the worst of her life: the Deputy’s Valorous Conduct award back in January, all sorts of PR about courageously chasing down the Purse Snatcher, getting bumped up a pay grade in the tank. A series of private talks with Chuck Brighton, who wanted to leave her in Homicide. No problem there.

She knew that some of these good things came in return for dropping the suit. The trade was understood and unspoken, though clearly engineered by Brighton. It was a time for healing. For forgetting and moving on. And most of all, for the saving of face. She was glad to have the lawsuit gone. It wasn’t her battle anymore. The other five plaintiffs were holding tough and Kemp wasn’t out of the woods yet. Fine with her.

There was no mention in the media of what was for Merci the worst of all that had happened: that her gun had killed Hess. No mention whose life was laid down to save whose. No mention that the suspect Sergeant Rayborn had earlier rejected was the very one who had three corpses stashed in the apartment behind his own, was the very one who had shot her partner. No. The Grand Jury’s criminal justice committee, investigating the shooting of Colesceau, had gone easy on her.

There was plenty of public ignorance, but Merci knew how it had gone down, and so did most people in the department.

She would carry that knowledge to her grave.

It had not occurred to her that she had done pretty much the right thing, given the circumstances. Given the fact that nobody was always right, always smart, always fast. She felt too bad about Hess to entertain such a notion.

He wouldn’t let her.

She walked further out on the rocks. She could feel the breeze sharp against her face. It didn’t seem that strong back on shore. She could see the jetty out in front of her, the moon and its silver wobble of moonlight beyond the rocks, the waves growing higher as they approached, the infinite black Pacific all around her. Hess’s ocean, she thought.

“Here it is, Tim,” she said. “What your father loved.”

Odd. Odd to say that name now, privately, just to herself and her baby. There was something truthful and unbreakable and sacred in it. It meant something different now, but what it had meant before was still true.

She stood there and looked at the dark water. The swells heaved and shifted. She was surprised how big they were, given that the storm was over. The horizon was impossible to see, as impossible to see as tomorrow. She looked to her right just as an advancing mountain of water clipped along the rocks toward her. The big wave passed in front of the moon, the moonlight caught the water as it lumbered past, then rode the back of the swell as it went by. It was like nothing she had ever seen before on earth.

The tears exploded out of her. For Hess, for herself, for the baby. For Jerry Kirby. For Colesceau’s dead, the Rose Garden Home patients, even for weird, misused LaLonde. For everybody who was touched by it.

Most of all for Hess, because she’d felt like he was accusing her from the other side of death’s river every waking moment of every day: you, you, you.

“Let me go, Hess.”

The waves didn’t answer. Tim had gone quiet and she could see the twinkle in his eyes, a galaxy of two, deep down in the blanket.

“Just let me go. I loved you and I lost you and I killed you. I’ll never forget I killed you. That what you want? Want me to say it, Hess? I’m so fucking sorry I killed you.”

She sobbed and looked at the water right below her.

I could just step off the rock and get lost in it, she thought: let Hess’s ocean take care of everything.

No, I’m better than that.

I couldn’t save your dad, Tim, she thought. I tried so hard to do everything right. Everything I knew.

And with this thought something inside her broke away — Hess, perhaps, or what she believed about Hess — separated and moved from her, out over the water and into the night. There was sadness in watching it go, and more tears. Then even those were gone.

She started back, choosing her steps carefully, hugging Tim tightly to her body. She could feel his grip on the collar of her coat.

She wanted to look again at the waves, Hess’s beloved waves, the waves over which something inside her had just glided away forever.

But the spray turned her face away so she never saw the thing that pulled her in.

It was like being grabbed. For the second time in her life, she was taken from behind by a monster she had not known was there. Merci could think of only one thing: keep Tim alive.

She knew she had to reach the surface or he would die quick, but the wave had taken her upside down and headfirst and with the roar of the water around her and the ocean pounding her down and down and down and then dragging her one way then another she couldn’t know where she was. No up. No down. And when she willed her eyes open all she saw was a shapeless dull black world and she realized she was almost out of breath. She thought if she could just be still, she would rise to the surface, back to air, back to life.

So she called on all her powers to do this. And in the great calm of will, she rose. She broke the surface, holding Tim high in both hands. She kicked for their lives. Tim bellowed for his.

Then Merci felt herself being picked up from behind, felt her body lifting. Higher. Higher again. Higher still. Her stomach dropped. The world withdrew. She looked down at the terrible trough of blackness and she held Tim tight and surrendered.

She closed her eyes in the fall but she held her son tight. That much she could do, and she could do it well and she would do it forever. She apologized for letting him die like this, her fault entirely, stupid and cowardly and self-obsessed. But she did not let go. Nothing was strong enough, not even this wave and this ocean, to make her let go of him now.

When she hit the bottom the wave crushed them down and pounded them forward. Over once. Over twice. Direction gone now, ears roaring, a scream of red inside her eyeballs.

Then she was sliding on her back up the slick wet beach and her eyes were burning and Tim was tight in her arms screaming with his fists still locked on her coat.

She looked up at the stars. She heard the rush of water receding around her, sliding back down the beach to join the sea.