Long Bright River(22)
Slowly, he righted my capsized king, and then he knelt down next to the long cafeteria table at which I was still sitting.
—Have you played before, Michaela? he asked me quietly. He always called me this: another thing I appreciated about him. My nickname, Mickey, was given to me by Gee, and it has always seemed to me a little undignified, but somehow it stuck. In the memories I have of my mother, she, too, always called me by my real name.
I shook my head. No. I couldn’t speak.
He nodded, once. Impressive, he said.
* * *
—
He began to teach me. Every afternoon, he spent twenty minutes with me separately, coaching me on opening gambits and then game-length strategies.
—You’re very smart, he said, appraisingly. How do you do in school?
I shrugged. Reddened again. Around Officer Cleare, I was perpetually flushed, my blood beating through my body in a way that reminded me I was alive.
—All right, I said.
—Do better, then, he said.
He told me his father, who had also been a police officer, was the one who first taught him chess. He died young, though, said Officer Cleare.
—I was eight, he said, moving a pawn out and back again.
At this, I glanced up at him quickly, and then back down at the board. So he knows, I thought.
He began to bring me books to read. True crime and detective fiction, at first. All the books his own father had loved. In Cold Blood. Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett. He told me about films: Serpico was his favorite, but he also liked the Godfather trilogy (everyone says the second is the best, he informed me, but actually the first is) and Goodfellas and older ones, too. The Maltese Falcon (even better than the book, he said), and Casablanca, and all of Hitchcock’s thrillers.
I read every book and watched every movie he recommended. I took the El down to Tower Records on Broad Street and, using my hard-earned babysitting money, bought two CDs by the bands he loved, Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys. He had described them as Irish bands, which made me imagine songs full of fiddles and drums, but when I put them on I was surprised to hear men shouting at me over aggressive guitars. Still, I stayed up late into the night, listening to these songs on my Discman, or shining a flashlight on the pages of the books he had named, or sitting on the sofa in the living room, watching classic movies on TV.
—What did you think? Officer Cleare asked me, about every recommendation that he made. And I told him that I loved them, always, even when I didn’t.
* * *
—
He wanted to be a detective. He’d be one someday, he said, but while his son was young he had requested a PAL assignment so that he could have more regular hours. Several times, he brought the boy in. His name was Gabriel, and he was four or five years old then, a small reflection of his father, dark-haired and lanky, his ankles showing beneath his too-short pants. His father picked him up and carried him around, introducing him, proud of him. Perversely, against my will, I looked at the father and the son and felt a pang of jealousy. I was not certain what I wanted, but I knew it to be connected, somehow, to the two of them.
Then Officer Cleare put the boy down next to me.
—This is my friend Michaela, he said to his son. And I looked up at the boy’s father slowly, awestruck, the phrase echoing in my mind for days afterward. My friend. My friend. My friend.
It was around this time, unfortunately, that Kacey was beginning to get into serious trouble. Today, I am disturbed by the possibility that this was linked, directly or indirectly, to my distractedness. For before Officer Cleare entered my life, I was devoted entirely to my sister: helping her with her homework; counseling her on her behavioral issues—the ones that I knew about, at least—and on how to better communicate with Gee; combing and arranging her hair in the morning; packing our lunches each night. In turn, Kacey revealed to me the parts of herself that she did not share with others: the small injustices that befell her each day at school, the deep sadness that sometimes came over her with such power that she felt certain it would never recede. But as I became closer to Officer Cleare, I became, I imagine, wistful and remote, my thoughts and my gaze turned away from my sister.
Kacey, in turn, withdrew. At thirteen, she began regularly skipping out on the PAL’s after-school program. Gee received a phone call anytime she did, and for a while she tried unsuccessfully to punish Kacey, but soon her groundings piled up on one another, and eventually Gee gave up the chase. She’s old enough to watch herself, I guess, said Gee, dubiously. I was already fifteen then, and years before she had given me the same option that Kacey now had, which was to entertain myself after school each day—or, better yet, to get a steady job. Instead, I elected to participate in a PAL teen group that was meant to provide mentorship and oversight to the younger students.
My choice—though I wouldn’t have admitted this to anyone—was largely motivated by wanting to remain close to Officer Cleare.
By ninth grade, Kacey was generally spending her afternoons with a group of friends headed by Paula Mulroney.
Already, they were distracting her from her schoolwork. They wore mainly black, and smoked cigarettes, and dyed their hair, and listened to bands like Green Day and Something Corporate—music that, though I couldn’t abide it, though it prevented me from studying, Kacey began playing loudly in our house whenever Gee wasn’t home to stop her. She began smoking, too, both cigarettes and marijuana, and she kept a small supply of each in the hollow spot beneath the floorboards of our room—the place we had formerly used for more innocent purposes.