The Searcher(97)
For a second he thinks she’s going to go for the desk again, or maybe for him. He’s fine with either one. She can take the desk to splinters if that’s what she needs. He even moves back to give her a clear shot. Instead she spits, swift and vicious as a rattlesnake striking, at his feet. It lands on his boot with a splat. Then she whips around and strides off, fast and hard, towards the road.
Cal waits a minute and goes to the gate. Trey is already far away, moving fast through the blotches of light and shadow that pattern the road, with her head down and her hands jammed deep in her pockets. He watches till she reaches the upwards slant in the road and is received into the bright muddle of sun and hedge-branches at the top, and a long time after. Nothing follows her.
He carries his tools inside, and his table, and finally the desk. He puts the desk in the spare bedroom, where it won’t be always catching his eye. He would have liked to finish that desk together with Trey, before he had to send her away.
Probably he should make the rest of yesterday’s perch into dinner, but instead he gets himself a beer and takes it out to the back step. In the east the sky is deepening towards lavender; beneath it the red tractor stands still, abandoned in mid-furrow. The plowing has added a new layer to the air’s smell, something richer and darker, thick with hidden things.
See? he tells Donna, in his head. I can walk away from a case, if it’s the right thing to do. Donna, refusing to be obliging even in his imagination, rolls her eyes and makes a ferocious noise at the heavens.
Cal told Trey the truth: he does not, in fact, know why he and Donna split up. As far as he can tell, what happened was that in Alyssa’s junior year of college she got mugged and beat up pretty bad, and two years later Donna walked out, and apparently there was some mysterious connection that Cal is too dumb to understand.
At the time, there was no indication that the first of these events would lead to the second. He and Donna flew out to Seattle so fast that they got there while Alyssa was still in recovery from surgery for a smashed shoulder bone. Once Cal was sure she was going to be OK, he left Donna to sit with her and headed down to the precinct. He knew exactly what priority would be assigned to a random mugging, but the mugging of a cop’s daughter was a different matter, and the daughter of a cop who was all up in the precinct’s grille was another thing again. Over the next couple of weeks Cal harried that precinct, politely and relentlessly, till they pulled CCTV footage from every camera in a block radius. That got them a couple of grainy shots of the mugger, which Cal and the precinct guys worked—some days Cal put in twenty hours—till they dragged up a runty, redheaded junkie called Lyle, who still had Alyssa’s credit card in his jacket pocket.
When Cal told Alyssa, she was still too shaken up even to show relief; she just looked at him and then turned her head away. Cal understood: he had hoped she would be pleased, but he had seen enough victims to understand that trauma shapes feelings into forms you would never expect.
Over the next while, he and Donna were mostly taken up by worrying about Alyssa. She wouldn’t let them stay with her, after the first couple of weeks, and she wouldn’t come home, so they had to do their worrying long-distance. The attack had cracked her mind all over, like a dropped mirror where the pieces are still in place but the whole doesn’t function right any more. Cal never did figure out whether it was the physical harm or the things Lyle had threatened to do to her—Alyssa had tried to talk him down, connect with him like one human being to another, and Lyle hadn’t taken well to that. Either way, she would barely get out of bed, let alone go to class and hang out with her friends and whatever else she should have been doing.
Gradually, though, her mind healed over. She started going to classes again. One night she laughed on the phone. A few weeks later, when Cal phoned to tell her that Lyle was pleading guilty, she was at a bar with Ben. Cal knew the cracks were still there and still fragile, but he also knew how strong the drive towards life is in healthy young creatures. He put his trust in that, as far as he was capable of doing.
When Donna started giving him shit, at first Cal put that down to the same thing: delayed trauma, coming out now that she had room for it. The shit in question was initially a generalized buckshot spatter of anger, but gradually, as Donna talked her thoughts into clarity, it focused in on their time in Seattle: specifically, the fact that Cal had spent most of that time tracking down Lyle. Donna felt, apparently, that he should have spent it in Alyssa’s apartment, with her and her roommates and Donna and Ben and whatever other friends had shown up to offer moral support and gossip and crap with chia seeds in it.
“What was I gonna do there?”
“Talk to her. Hug her. Just fucking sit there. Anything would’ve been better than nothing.”
“I did something. I went out and got the guy. Without me, they would have—”
“She didn’t need you out somewhere being a cop. She needed you right in that room being her father.”
“She didn’t want me there,” Cal said, baffled. “She had you.”
“Did you ask her?” Donna snapped, hands and eyebrows flying up. “Did you ever ask?”
Cal hadn’t. It had seemed obvious to him that at a time like that, a kid needed her mama with her, and that Donna would do the talking and hugging part a lot better than he would. He had gone out and brought Alyssa the best he had to offer, which was Lyle’s louse-ridden scalp. That didn’t seem like nothing to him. Without his work, Lyle would still have been on the streets; every time she went out her door, Alyssa would have been watching for him on every corner. Now, at least for the next seven to ten years, she could go out without being afraid.