We Are Not Like Them(12)
“Nothing, Kev.”
“You can’t talk to her about this, you know,” he says.
“What are you talking about? Why not?”
“Come on, Jen. She’s media. Our names haven’t even been released yet. The department is going to handle PR and stuff. Until then.”
“But Riley is not ‘media,’ Kevin. She’s my best friend.”
She was my first friend. And best still feels true even though we’ve lived in different cities longer than we’ve ever lived in the same one. Over the past sixteen years, ever since Riley left for college, there have been moments when she didn’t even seem real, more like the main character in a favorite movie that’s always on TV. I got used to the distance—we had FaceTime, texts, visits a couple of times a year—but now she lives right across town. It stings a little that we haven’t seen each other as much as I’d hoped we would. It’s one thing to feel distant from your best friend when you live in different states; it’s another when you’re a few miles apart. But she’s only been back a few months; we have time to reconnect. Besides, she’s always, always been there for me when it mattered. Like when I was fired from Fat Tuesday for refusing to sleep with my married boss and Riley banged out a fiery two-page, single-spaced email to him demanding that he pay me severance. The first time I miscarried, she flew home and held me on the cold linoleum of my bathroom floor as I sobbed until dawn. And, of course, there was the money for the IVF, for our miracle baby that’s flipping over in my stomach right now.
Kevin sits down heavily on the bed; the springs in the cheap mattress groan. “Look, Jen, I know, okay? But the union rep, the captain, everyone made it clear that we can’t talk to anyone right now until they decide the story we’re gonna tell. That’s what they said. They need to figure out the best way to ‘present’ this to the public. I don’t totally know what that means. But you know how these things blow up. We can’t risk it. We need to see what happens today after my meetings. This is my life, Jenny. Promise me.”
Our life, I want to scream. Our life, Kevin. But my husband, my sweet husband, looks so scared and broken that I bite my tongue and promise. Satisfied, Kevin lumbers around our bedroom, getting dressed, slamming drawers, yanking clothes off hangers, all the while talking me—and himself—through what’s going to happen today, the meetings with his union rep and officials from OIS. I struggle to recall what that is… the Officer Involved Shooting department, I think, one more of the many acronyms to keep track of in the police world. Being a cop, or a cop’s wife, is like living in your own country, a parallel nation to the US, one with its own language, own rules, own secrets.
Kevin grabs at things on the dresser—his wallet and keys, which he drops, twice—and then crosses over to the bed.
“I’ll call you later, okay?” His lips rest on my forehead for the briefest of moments.
I grab his arm and make him stop and look at me. “I love you, Kev.” It’s different from the breezy “I love yous” I usually send him off with, and I can see in his eyes that he knows it. I watch him walk out the bedroom door, listen to his feet pound down the stairs, and then the front door slams.
I should get up and get something in my stomach, not for me but for Little Bird, even though I have zero appetite. I force myself out of bed and down to the kitchen to make some toast and more disgusting tea.
Even though I burn the bread, I sit at the table and choke it down. Little black crumbs fall onto the workbook for the Realtor’s license exam I’m taking in a few weeks. I haven’t told a soul except Kevin that I’m taking it, because if I don’t pass, I don’t need anyone feeling sorry for me. I should try to study or catch up on the mountain of laundry or cut my raggedy toenails, but I can’t seem to move. Then again, the alternative—sitting here all day, waiting and listening as the silence of the house grows louder and louder—is also unbearable. I scream at the top of my lungs just to fill the void, to have something to do.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!”
It helps—a little, even if Mrs. Jackowski next door hears and wonders if I’ve gone insane.
I want to call Riley again but remember my promise. Instead, I go to the fridge and grab my favorite picture of the two of us, held to the door by a magnet shaped like a cheesesteak. I blew it up and framed it for Riley for her fancy new loft. I never got around to framing mine. There we are in those cute little bikinis. I’d blown a huge raspberry into Riley’s ticklish ear seconds before Mrs. Wilson took the photo, which is how the camera caught Riley—usually so serious—laughing out loud, her grin wide enough to reveal two missing bottom teeth. This has always been the best thing: making Riley laugh.
It’s funny to me how our friendship, so obvious to us, has always confused other people. They see a tall, elegant Black woman and a short, scrawny blonde and think, These two? If it hadn’t been for Lou’s desperation to hand me off, we probably wouldn’t have become friends. I can credit a flyer in a Laundromat for one of the most important relationships of my life. Lou, barely twenty-two at the time, was tending bar in Center City at McGlinty’s for the lunch shift and happy hour and working the ticket counter at the Trocadero at night, when the old lady who lived upstairs and usually watched me up and died. That’s how Lou always described it, all bitter, “She up and died on me,” as if Ms. Landis did it on purpose to screw with her, and it did, since Lou didn’t have any other child care options. It’s not like she could drop me with my dad. I’d never met the guy who knocked up my mom her junior year of high school. “You were an immaculate conception. I’m essentially the Virgin Mary,” Lou said whenever I asked about him, satisfied that this was a sufficient explanation. Which it wasn’t, obviously. I had a right to know who my father was. No matter how many times I demanded an answer, she never budged. “You’re all mine. That’s it.” End of conversation. Finally, I gave up. Her stubborn possessiveness made me feel loved, in a screwed-up kind of way, and burned my fury away.