The Zero Night

5

For almost a year after he was shot, Stride didn’t miss his job.

The shooting had happened in late July, when a bullet tore open one chamber of his heart. The surgeons had performed an emergency thoracotomy to save him, which meant cutting open his entire chest cavity. The odds of his surviving the surgery at all had been no better than one in four. He’d actually died on the operating table during the procedure, and they’d had to shock his heart back to life.

The doctors had warned him that it wouldn’t be an easy or fast recovery, and it wasn’t. It was well into the fall months before he felt strong enough to take daily walks on the beach again. Even then, a few minutes of effort would wipe him out for hours. The slow pace of his rehabilitation left him depressed, and the doctors had warned him about that, too.

The scars of trauma are emotional, not just physical.

You’ll need to accept the reality that your life will never be exactly the same as it was before.

They were right.

Sometimes he would sit by the lake and question how the events of his life had led him to that moment. He dwelled on the mistakes he’d made, the people he’d lost. He felt like a stranger to himself, as if he were inhabiting someone else’s body. He hadn’t died, but he hadn’t started living again, either.

So as fall bled into the frigid winter, he finally embraced his new normal. He went to physical therapy twice a week, and he bought a treadmill, and when the temperatures climbed above zero outside, he went and jogged up and down the Point, which was the narrow spit of land between the lake and the harbor, where he and Serena lived. By the time spring arrived in Duluth (late, as usual), he was feeling physically more like the man he’d been before the shooting. Older, still in pain, but in some ways stronger than he’d been in years.

But he still found himself reluctant to go back to the police.

There was a darkness in his job, and he didn’t want to confront darkness, not after what he’d been through. He didn’t want to deal with death, evil, lies, and betrayal anymore. Facing his own mortality had changed him forever, just as the doctors had predicted. And yet the only thing Stride had ever known, the only thing he’d ever wanted to do with his life, was be a cop. If he didn’t want that anymore, he didn’t know who he was.

He’d already put in more than thirty years on the force and was eligible for his pension. So he’d spent the summer thinking about retiring and wondering if there was a second act for men like him. Meanwhile, the other people around him were getting on with their lives. Maggie was dealing with his old job, Serena was working as Maggie’s partner, Cat was getting ready for college. Each of them knew where they were going. Each of them had a direction, a place to be, a reason for living.

Then there was Stride, feeling restless, doing nothing more than treading water on a dark sea.

He knew it hadn’t made him a good husband. His relationship with Serena had been difficult for months, including their sex life, which was nonexistent. He was so frustrated by his own lack of direction that he’d drifted into old habits, shutting her out of his life and ignoring everything she was dealing with. It had never even occurred to him how hard it would be for her to have Cat leave for college. He’d only realized it when she spent four nights in a row sleeping in Cat’s empty bed. When she’d come back to their room in the mornings, he could see loneliness written on her face.

And now, on the heels of that loss, Samantha was gone, too. An old deep wound had been ripped open.

He could feel a crisis building for her, like an ocean wave pulling back before the tsunami comes in, but he felt utterly unprepared to deal with Serena when he’d lost touch with himself. He knew that his time had come. He couldn’t put off his decision any longer. He had to make a choice, and then he could move on. There was no middle ground, no in-between, just yes or no.

Was he still a cop?

Or was he done with that life?

Maggie had left him a voice mail a week ago. He’d played it a hundred times since he received it. It was as if she knew that he’d reached a crossroads. Stride sat at the breakfast table in the cottage and played the message again.

“Hey. It’s me. Big news. Abel Teitscher finally retired. He’s on his way to New Mexico, can you believe it? Abel Teitscher sipping margaritas by some desert pool. No way. I think he’d had enough of reporting to me, even though we both know I’m a total frickin’ delight to work for. Anyway, it’s crazy here, because now we’re shorthanded, and the chief’s getting the budget blues from the city council, so it’s not like we’re going to hire anyone soon. I need to go through Abel’s desk and sort through the open cases, but I don’t know who I’d give them to.”

He heard a long, long pause on the message. Maggie, who could dish it out better than anyone he knew, was having trouble getting out what she wanted to say.

“So, no pressure or anything. You want to say no, say no, and we’ll forget all about it. But I mean, with Abel gone, it occurred to me that maybe... I don’t know... maybe you’re finally in a place where...”

Her voice drifted off again. Then she just said it. She shot out the words.

“Oh for fuck’s sake, boss. It’s been over a year. Are you ready to come back here and do your job?”

With the rain still coming down, Stride sat near the windows of Kirby Student Center at UMD and waited for Cat. When he saw her approaching with a group of students, coffee in hand, backpack over her shoulder, he almost didn’t recognize her. It wasn’t that she looked different; she was still exactly the same, with a waterfall of chestnut hair, golden skin, a little upturned nose, and bright, teasing brown eyes. But there was a new grace about her, a confidence that hadn’t been there before. He could see it in her walk, her expressions, her gestures. When he’d met her four years earlier, she’d been a broken, homeless teenager in need of rescue. Now she was a young woman, at ease in her surroundings. Seeing her that way, he felt a warmth in his chest that had to be what all fathers felt when they saw their daughters succeed.

When she saw him, she broke from her group and ran to hug him, nearly spilling her coffee with excitement. Her girlish voice reminded him that she was still young. “Stride! Hey, this is a surprise. What are you doing here?”

“I can’t just come for a visit?” he said.

“You can, but you don’t. It’s been a month. I assumed you’d be over here every other day making sure I didn’t burn the place down.”

“I figured I’d embarrass you if I showed up,” Stride told her.

She gave him a sly little smile. “Oh, you’d definitely embarrass me, but I still want to see you.”

“Well, Serena and I wanted to give you time to settle in. How’s that going?”

Cat got a crinkle in her forehead. She had the surprised look of someone who’d parachuted out of a plane and wasn’t really sure where she’d landed. “I don’t know. Scary? Weird? Great? I mean, I kind of fit in around here. That’s a strange feeling for me. Most people know about my past, and they treat me like I’m some sort of badass. I like it.”

“You are sort of a badass,” he told her. “How are classes going?”

She bumped her head in mock confusion. “Oh, shit, classes? Am I supposed to be going to classes, too?”

“Ha.”

Cat giggled and sat down across from him. She put her phone on the table. She looked every bit the college student, with a UMD sweatshirt, black jeans, fluorescent sneakers, and her backpack stuffed fatter than a Thanksgiving turkey. She was hiding her right wrist and obviously hoping he hadn’t noticed the black cat tattoo she’d put there, like a rite of passage. “Seriously. I love it. Thank you.”

“Good.”

“But your timing is bad. I only have a couple of minutes before calculus. Can you hang out a while and we can have lunch later?”

“I can’t, but how about you come over for dinner tonight?”

Cat’s eyes narrowed as she read his face. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”

“It’s just an invitation.”

“Yeah, sure. Come on, something’s up. What is it?”

Stride hesitated before answering. “Serena’s mother died last night.”

Cat made a quiet, unhappy little hiss. “Samantha? The Wicked Witch of the West? Ouch. How’s Serena taking it?”

“Not well.”

“In other words, she’s pretending it’s no big deal and she’s tough and everybody should quit trying to baby her.”

“You’re too smart for your own good, you know that?” Stride said. “And yes, exactly. Plus, she misses you more than she lets on. Having you leave the house has been hard on her. I think she needs some Cat time.”

“Whereas I suppose you don’t miss me at all.”

“Not true,” he replied with a grin. “I cry myself to sleep every night.”

“Well, I am pretty missable. Anyway, sure, dinner tonight sounds great.”

“Good.”

Her phone rang, and Cat’s eyes flicked to the screen before she pushed a button to ignore the call. He thought he detected a guilty shadow cross her face, and he waited to see if she would tell him who it was. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t like the answer, and he was right.

“That was Curt,” she explained, rolling her eyes.

Stride frowned. Curt Dickes was part of Cat’s bad old days on the street, a con artist addicted to get-rich-quick schemes. Even Stride, who’d arrested him a dozen times over a dozen years, had to admit that Curt’s exuberant personality was difficult to dislike. But that didn’t mean he wanted him in Cat’s life.

“He still calls you?”

“Yeah, every day. I guess he misses me, too.”

“Curt will get over it.”

“Oh, he’s not so bad,” Cat replied breezily. “He’s funny. He makes me laugh.”

“If you want to laugh, watch Jimmy Kimmel.”

Cat stuck out her tongue at him in mock exasperation. They’d had this argument many times before, and they both knew they would never see eye to eye about Curt. Then she leaned forward, changing the subject. “Anyway, how are you? You going back to work yet?”

Stride didn’t have an answer for her. Instead, he took out his phone and played Maggie’s voice mail. Cat arched her dark eyebrows at him as she listened.

“Looks like she wants you in your old chair.”

“Looks that way.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“Yeah, right,” Cat snorted.

“What does that mean?”

“I see that glint in your eyes,” she told him.

“The glint?”

“You miss it. You miss that life. You miss the police, and you’re lying if you say you don’t.”

“I really don’t,” Stride said.

Cat gave an exaggerated sigh. “Fine. Be stubborn.”

“I don’t miss it,” he insisted.

“Uh-huh. Okay. Well, one of us is right, and the other one of us is you.”

He smiled. “All right, maybe I miss it a little. But only a little.”

“Yeah, keep telling yourself that,” Cat said. “You’re going back. I know you. But keep fooling yourself if you want. I have to get to class.”

“Go.”

She got up from the table, then leaned down and kissed his cheek. “I’ll see you guys for dinner tonight. Late, as usual? Nine o’clock?”

“Sounds good.”

“We’ll order Sammy’s?”

“What else?”

“Thanks for letting me know about Samantha,” she added.

“Sure.”

Before she walked away, Cat whispered in his ear. “Hey, Stride? I’m glad to hear Serena misses me. I miss her, too. If she needs me, I’ll always be there for her. You know I will. But you know what? She needs you more.”