Shutter(40)

“Hey, kid, you can’t give me your kidney. What if something happens to you? Who’s gonna take care of me?” She smiled and nudged my elbow.

“I’m old enough to decide for myself.” I couldn’t look at her.

“Happy birthday,” she said. “What a horrible way to spend it. Why don’t you and Grandma go out and get something to eat? And when is graduation? In about three days, right?”

“Yes. But don’t worry about it. I didn’t think you would be up to going.” I could feel myself starting to cry.

“I’m going. There’s nothing you can do about that.” She laughed.

I put my head in her lap. Grandma woke me up an hour later. The machine still whirred.

We left the hospital knowing that Mom’s days were numbered. At home, I stared at her constantly, waiting for her to become faint or weak, but she only smiled at me and endured. I convinced Mom to let me give her my kidney. We were scheduled for the test to make sure that I was a viable donor.

“Stop worrying,” she said, smoothing the frown lines on my forehead. “Pretty soon, I’ll have a sexy new kidney.”

But two days after graduation, Mom didn’t wake up. I walked into her bedroom, and even though she looked like she was sleeping peacefully, I knew she was gone.

I sat and stared at her in her bed for fifteen minutes and waited for her ghost to come to me. She never came. The one person I wanted to see, and she wasn’t coming.

Grandma walked into the bedroom and immediately knew. She just stood in silence with tears coming down her face.

“I can’t see her, Grandma.” I was crying. “I can’t see her. Why can’t I see her?”

Grandma and I sat there for almost an hour before we called the ambulance. When we heard the knock at the door, Grandma stood and hugged me so hard my sides ached.

“I think your mom had made her peace with her body. She was in pain. Now the pain is gone.”

Grandma was right. It was me who wanted her here. I wanted to cut myself open and put my kidney inside her, to bring her back with the electricity of my own flesh. But she was gone. There was nothing I could do.

IT TOOK GRANDMA and me a month to clean out the house. We still owed a lot on the mortgage, so I decided to go back home with Grandma. When all was said and done, my life had been reduced to a few boxes and two suitcases of clothes. Mom’s car was paid off, but we left it in the city, storing it in a friend’s driveway until I came back for school in the fall. I had all my cameras with me, and they rode up front in Grandma’s pickup on the way back home. I took a picture of Grandma in front of our house before we drove away. I used Mom’s Hasselblad and noticed that only three shots remained. I knew I had to save them.

The house looked so lonely when we pulled away. The windows were wet with the condensation of early morning, but they were empty, the glass reflecting the image of whoever was staring in. Houses are just like bodies. When there is no spark, no life force to fill them with warmth, they’re just vessels.





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

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THE DAY AFTER my session with Dr. Cassler, I spent my morning sorting through the work of the last week. I cataloged the photos, filled out forms, and tried to find a way to work my clues into a narrative. It wasn’t easy, but most of the time, the photos could tell the story.

I would be turning in my reports on the rollover and the drive-by soon. I would be turning in Judge Winters’s case and Erma’s file too. But something was still tugging at me; something was still incomplete. It was Erma herself.

Erma’s ghost picked at her fingernails. “I’ve been cheated. I don’t know what happened to me. One minute I’m leaving work, the next minute I can’t breathe because I’m falling.”

“I don’t know what happened to you either, Erma. I only see what you can show me.” I was exhausted. “Now, give me a minute to go save what is left of my job.” I gathered my files and headed for the crime lab.

Dr. Cassler had sent her report over to Samuels almost immediately. By the afternoon, they had me scheduled for a sit-down with Samuels and Angie. I had a feeling that all of it wasn’t going to go over well. As I walked down the hallway to Samuels’s office, I could feel eyes on me. There was probably a pool on how long I had left.

“I heard that you were less than cooperative with Dr. Cassler yesterday,” Samuels boomed.

“I thought I was very cooperative.”

Angie Seivers was standing in Samuels’s office with her hands on her hips. “Apparently you are refuting my statement about your behavior at the scene and at the hospital. I saw what was going on with my own eyes. Now you’re calling me a liar. As far as I’m concerned, you’re not fit for duty.”

“We’re suspending you, Rita.” Samuels laid a page in front of me. “You will be reevaluated in three months.”

My heart raced with the panic of losing my job. “Reevaluated for what? What am I supposed to do for three months?”

“You should have thought of that before you put every case that you’ve ever worked on in jeopardy.” Samuels grabbed his pipe and chewed the tip. “All this talk of ghosts and visions only clouds our path of evidence. People will think we’re having séances to get through case files. And here you are, one of my best investigators, turning into some kind of damn psychic detective.”