Long Bright River(12)

—Just frustrated, I say.

—What’s up? says Lafferty.

—That woman we found on the Tracks last month, I say.

—Yeah?

—The autopsy results came back for her.

Lafferty sips from his coffee. His lip curls at the heat.

—I heard that, he says.

—Inconclusive, I say.

He says nothing.

—Can you believe that? I say.

Lafferty shrugs.

—That’s above my pay grade, I guess, he says.

I look at him.

—You saw her too, I say. You saw what I saw.

Lafferty goes quiet for once, looking out the window. Two minutes go by in silence.

Then he says, Maybe it’s not a bad thing.

I pause. I want to make sure I understand him correctly.

—Don’t get me wrong, he says. It’s a shame when anyone dies. But what kind of life.

I freeze. I don’t trust myself to respond yet. I focus on the road ahead of me for a while.

I consider, briefly, telling him about Kacey. Embarrassing him, perhaps. Making him feel bad. But before I can, he begins shaking his head slowly from side to side.

—These girls, he says. He looks at me and puts one finger to his right temple, taps it twice. Stupid, is what he means. No sense.

I set my jaw.

—What do you mean by that, I say quietly.

Lafferty looks at me, eyebrows raised. I look back at him. I can feel my face getting hot. It’s been a problem of mine my whole life. My face turns bright red when I’m angry or embarrassed or sometimes even pleased. It’s an unhappy trait in a police officer.

—What do you mean by that? I say again. You said, These girls. What does that mean?

—I don’t know, says Lafferty. Just.

He gestures around with his hands, surveying the landscape. I just feel bad for them, that’s all.

—I don’t think that’s what you meant, I say. But all right.

—Hey, says Lafferty. Hey. I didn’t mean to offend anybody.





THEN





When we were small, there was a field trip for certain fourth-and fifth-graders to see The Nutcracker in Center City. I was eleven then, old for my grade, and Kacey was nine.

In those years, I was almost silent in school. When I did speak, it was at a very low volume, such that Gee used to tell me, with frequency, to talk louder, as did most of my teachers. I had few friends. At recess, I read. I rejoiced when inclement weather forced us to stay indoors.

Kacey, conversely, made friends every place she went. She was little and fierce then, light-haired, with strong limbs and a brow she mainly kept lowered. She had buckteeth that she often strained to cover with an upper lip. Around friends, she was affable and funny. Generally, our peers were drawn to her. But she also made enemies: mainly those who targeted the weak, who swapped cruelty to others for social cachet, a bargain that, from a young age, Kacey disdained. She had a habit, therefore, of pointing out these injustices where they occurred, and then rising ardently and often violently to the defense of those in her class who were lowest in the pecking order—even, her teachers argued, when it wasn’t warranted, or when those classmates didn’t want or need Kacey’s protection. It was for this reason that Kacey had recently gotten kicked out of Holy Redeemer (the irony of the name was not, even then, lost on me), which meant that both of us were kicked out, because Gee didn’t want us in two separate schools.

This was, for me, a misfortune. I had liked Holy Redeemer. I had advocates there: two teachers, one a layperson and one a nun, who had taken a particular interest in me and my abilities, who had cut through my shyness and seen something in me that they had painstakingly drawn out over the course of several years. And who had, separately, of their own volition, told Gee that they thought I was gifted. Though I was gratified by this—though it justified for me the mild vanity I have always possessed about my own intelligence—there was also a part of me, at that time, that wished they hadn’t. Because to Gee, gifted meant uppity, and if I wasn’t punished for it, well, I was certainly looked at askance for a while.

When Kacey got into her final fight, the one that got us expelled, Gee had stood in front of us, glowering, as we sat on the couch.

—You, she said, nodding toward me, need to keep an eye on her, she said, nodding toward Kacey. So we both went to the local public school on Frankford instead, with all the children whose parents were too poor or dysfunctional to keep them in parish schools. Maybe, I supposed, this meant that Gee was, too.

In our new grade school, Hanover, Kacey was immediately and unsurprisingly adopted by a group of other outgoing students, and I was immediately forgotten about. There, shy children went through their days unexamined. Any student who didn’t make the life of her teacher more complicated was generally praised once or twice for good behavior and then allowed to fade quietly to the back of the classroom. It was, no doubt, not entirely our teachers’ fault. Our classrooms were full to capacity, thirty generally rowdy students in a small space. It was all they could do to survive.



* * *



—

Still: being at Hanover was the only reason we were going to see The Nutcracker. Sometimes Philadelphia’s public school students had things given to them in a way that parish school children did not. The city bestowed upon its public schools charity of various kinds: coats, meant to keep us warm in winter; school supplies, meant to keep us engaged in our classwork; cultural outings, meant to allow us a few hours to ponder the large questions of life that are usually reserved for the idle rich. In this case, the outing was a prize awarded to students who sold the most wrapping paper in an annual fund-raiser—a challenge Kacey and I had taken very seriously, going door to door every weekend all fall. In fact, we had come in first and second place.