I’m not a good writer. I’m good at listing facts and observations. I can pick apart a crime scene better than anyone I know, but when it comes to telling people why I think a thing, or why I did what I did, I’m at a loss for words. I’m the type of cop who acts on instincts, for better or for worse. Most of the time it does me good. Sometimes it ends up with me passed out solo at the Arroyo in the dead of night. What can I say? I’ve had more than my fair share of misreads, but it’s the only way I know how to work. Maybe this is the reason I’ve essentially been running the same beat route for years. Danny passed on the chance to become a detective. He hates the desk. Says the beat is in his blood. They never even asked me, and I don’t think they intend to, all things considered. I’m reminded of that every now and then when the kitchen quiets.
I have a picture of Ana on my half of the desk. Two pictures, actually. One is a five-by-nine of her sitting on Gam’s lap when she was seven. Dad took it. I can see Mom smiling at them just in the corner. Ana is just about to start wriggling free, but Gam’s holding her close with just a hint of a smile on her face that says she knows Ana’s about to make a run for it. Ana has this gleam in her eye. She was always wanting to run. But I suppose all kids are like that.
The other picture is her fourth-grade school photo. Wallet sized. The last one she ever took. It was the picture we gave the cops. It sits in the corner of the same frame. She fooled Gam that day and convinced her to let her dress herself. She’s wearing a shiny purple windbreaker with three bows in her hair, and her smile runs ear to ear.
I turn back to the blinking cursor. I start with dates. That’s easy enough. I could be dead asleep and if you told me to name a date, any date, I’d say Tuesday, August 1, 2006. When I’m dead and gone you can ask my grave the same thing, and the wind’ll whip the desert dust up and you’ll hear it speak: Tuesday, August 1, 2006.
I start writing a bullet point list of the worst series of events in my life.
3 p.m., I come home for a late lunch and find Ana on the floor of the living room. Grandmother is asleep in her room. Mother and Father are out. Ana does not move when I walk into the house. I know something is wrong because Ana has a congenital heart defect.
Had. Ana had a congenital heart defect. I could write how all of her life I had half an eye on her. Worried sick about that tiny cough and about the breathless way she would come in from playing out back, wondering if she might be dying where she stood. We’d been in and out of the hospital countless times. Each time she cried, and each time another dime’s worth of dread of the place dropped into my pocket as well. But I don’t know how to write these things. So I don’t.
Ana was non-responsive when I shook her, but she was breathing.
Barely. I had to lick the back of my hand and put it on her lips to make sure it wasn’t just wishful thinking. But we had prepared for this. We had plans. We ran practice drills. I called 911. First responders took Ana to the CHC, where she was admitted in critical condition. The doctors were able to stabilize her, and after eight hours she was upgraded to stable condition. Eight hours in which I sat in a tiny waiting room with Mom, Dad, and Gam, convinced that the last time I would ever see Ana alive was when she was shooting away on a rolling bed surrounded by medical staff, the double doors swinging shut behind her, in and out of phase. I didn’t know then that later on I would actually wish it had worked out that way. Opened and closed. Like those doors. I don’t know how the doctors saved her. Shocked her or shot her full of something that got her heart back in sync and going again. I didn’t care. All I cared about was that she was okay.
We moved Ana to ABQ General as soon as she was able to be moved. There they ran her through a battery of tests, again and again while we waited and watched from behind glass. An eternity later, an old, fat white man who we were told was head of pediatric medicine came out into the waiting room, stood with his hands behind his back, and told us that she needed a heart transplant. Like we could pick it up at the supermarket. Without a transplant, she would not survive the year. Until a transplant became available, she would need to stay at the hospital.
And so we waited.
Ana was a high profile candidate. Young. All of her life in front of her. Otherwise perfectly healthy. She had the whole dwindling Navajo Nation angle too, and the government likes to trumpet how much they care about us. We were told there was a very good chance she’d find a donor.
Ana was weak and slept a lot, but she understood what was happening. She was willing to climb any mountain if it meant she could have her run of the backyard again. What she didn’t understand was why it was taking so long, and why she couldn’t leave her bed. It was tough on all of us. At first all four of us stayed at her side, all day and all night. But when days dragged to weeks, dragged to months, we started doing shifts. One at a time. People did a lot for us. For the Navajo, blood runs deep. Gam’s friends, the real old school Navajo, came to pray and perform a modified Blessingway. Our neighbors cleaned our house and took care of some of the bills. IHS insurance covered everything at the hospital, thank God, but we weren’t working as much, so people organized fundraisers to help us cover daily costs. The hardware store paid Dad time and a half for every hour he worked. We were inundated with food. And throughout all of it, Joey Flatwood was there for me. He cooked me food (which was not good) and snuck in beer (which was delicious). He brought me books for when he couldn’t be there, and conversation and games for Ana when he could be there.
And then, eventually, he offered to sit with Ana when one of us needed a break. For any time at all. Thirty minutes to go smoke a cigarette. An hour to go take a drive. Even a whole night if we just wanted to take a breather. He was happy to.
Ana knew Joey. He was my best friend. He’d been around her since before she could remember. She trusted him as much as any of us did. And the hospital drags on you after a while. It’s like the fluorescent lights suck the moisture from your skin. So we let him in.
Joey sat in Ana’s room while Dad went outside for air. And there it was. That’s all I know. I wasn’t there that night. I was at home applying for jobs. Thinking about if I should go to college. Thinking what it would mean if I did go to college, off the rez. How I wouldn’t be looked at the same way again around here. Just like my mother. It’s strange to think of now, on this side of things. I chose not to go to college, and I was still cast out anyway.
How do I put this in a police report? I can’t, so the next gap in the report is about a mile wide.
Father returned from his shift at Chaco Hardware to find Ana gone, and Joseph Flatwood non-responsive on a chair near her empty bed.
But he wasn’t non-responsive like Ana was non-responsive when I found her. He looked like the floor had shifted under him. His eyes were open and staring at the wall across Ana’s empty bed. Dad shook the hell out of him. Said he slapped him. Joey wouldn’t be brought back from wherever he was. He just kept staring. Never blinking. When I got there, after Dad called me out-of-his-mind with panic, I slapped Joey too. More than a slap, to be honest. It was a full-bore knockout-button uppercut, straight to that shutdown switch to the right of the chin. When he dropped to the floor, it was the first time he shut his eyes in over an hour. Before then the nurses had been giving him drops.
He was never the same after that day. He sat in the Chaco jail for a month without speaking a word. As the chances we’d find Ana grew slimmer by the day, he sat. The police told me all he did was stare at the wall during the day and sleep at night. If you could call it sleep. They said he did a lot of screaming at night. They said if you didn’t put his food in front of his face, he wouldn’t eat it. It took them nearly four days to figure that out. In those first four days he didn’t eat anything.
Subsequent examination of the security camera footage over the time frame in which Ana went missing showed nothing out of the ordinary.
There was no recording of what happened in the room, but there didn’t need to be. Her room was on the ninth floor of
ABQ General, and it had one window and one door. The window was intact. The camera in the hallway showed that the door never opened. Yet Ana was gone.
An anomaly in the footage provided us with the only plausible explanation.
It was weak. I knew that much, even then. It was basically what they call a “break line.” It’s when the camera misses some frames. It looks like a stutter step. Like the camera blinked. The Chaco detectives told me that there was a chance that Ana was snatched in that blink. I know. I didn’t believe it either.
They dusted the room. They talked to every single worker on the floor at that time. They pored over every piece of camera footage, from that hallway on floor nine to every other floor in the place. Elevators too. They questioned state police outside of the Chaco border about crossings that day. They did everything. All we had was that stutter step. Either she’d been taken in that second, or she’d disappeared into thin air. ‘Disappeared into thin air’ doesn’t look good on a police report.
It was determined that Ana had been abducted from her hospital room at 3:28 in the afternoon.
The nowhere hour. The forgotten slice of the day. Nobody ever asks what you’re doing at three in the afternoon.
Subsequent analysis of her monitoring systems showed a malfunction in the machinery.
Malfunction is a bad word for it. The machine didn’t work at all. According to the beeping box, she was stable, then erratic, then gone. It seemed to have reset itself. Nobody reported any bed alarm or crash alarm. It was as if at 3:28 in the afternoon the machine had never been attached to Ana in the first place. Her IV line hung limply from a saline bag, the needle and tape still attached.
Nobody reported seeing anyone other than Joseph Flatwood enter the room, and once he was there, he never left.
When I got to the room and found Joey blank, there was no trace of my sister. It was so undisturbed, without even a scent of her, that I was convinced they’d moved Joey into another room. Maybe if I’d sat with him right afterwards. Worked with him somehow instead of snapping and popping him in the face. Maybe if I’d convinced him to tell me what he’d done while it was still fresh, maybe I could have gotten something out of him. It’s Triage 101. Every Chaco cop takes the course. The quicker you stitch a wound up, the less chance there is of a scar. I think the Chaco cops left everything split open too long. It’s part of the reason I joined up afterwards. I didn’t want it happening to anyone else. I’m not one to puff myself up, but I guarantee you if I had been behind a badge that day, I would know exactly what had happened to Ana.
Instead I was a terrified eighteen-year-old boy. I remember I kept running places. Up and down the halls. In and out of the front door. Around the parking lot. I yelled for her like she was a lost puppy. I screamed her name until my voice was hoarse and the police threw a blanket over me in in the dead heat of August and sat me in the back of a cruiser. I didn’t have a chance to look clearly at anything. And even if I’d had the sanity, I didn’t have the ability. I wouldn’t have known what to look for. But knowing that doesn’t make it any easier. I felt like a kid who can’t reach the phone when his mom is choking. When time is of the essence.
That day I start to see crows.
I actually write this. I write this in the report before I know what I’m doing, and after I write it I stare at the letters for a moment as if they’d been spelled out on a Ouija board. I sniff. There’s a tingling in the back of my throat. Like a drip. It smells like sulfur. My head throbs once, expands and then compresses back. I look out of the skylights above, and it’s almost like I’m expecting to see the crow. The big crow with the red shine to him. The one on the car. The one in the sky on the drive back from the hospital. The one that lives in the corner of my sight. But there’s nothing but broken blue sky. I can’t look away. It’s like I can feel the big thing, right out of sight, perched on a branch and staring at me through the wall with unblinking eyes. There’s a pressure in my head, a slow-building whistling. I grip the edge of my desk as I delete the words. Nobody needs to know that.
“Hey.” Danny Ninepoint kicks me under the desk. “What’s wrong with you these days?”
I blink. The bubble pops. Only the soft throb of a headache remains, but I’ve lived with that for months now.
“It’s just this report.” I flick my hand at the computer. “I don’t like going back to this.”
“Well, pull it together. It looks like you’re the hot buck at the dance this week,” he says, nodding his head to the door.
Two white people are at the front desk, and I recognize both of them. It’s the doctor from the hospital and Caroline, and they’re looking right at me. It takes all I’ve got not to swear under my breath or flinch like a spooked dog. Last thing I need is to give any one of the fifteen bored cops within earshot more ammo to use against me.
“You want me to go talk to ‘em?” Danny mutters.
“Nah,” I say. “Maybe…” Maybe what? Maybe they’re here on business? The doctor has been round before. He’s conferred with the detectives once or twice on hard cases where a Navajo ended up in the hospital. But Caroline? It’s funny how her name comes to me like a letter dropping through a mail slot and plunking on the floor. Her name, and her hand on my shoulder. I remember them both quite clearly.
Like it or not, the doctor is coming towards me, walking like a stork. Out of the corner of my eye I see Danny shake his head in exasperation. I think he’s tired of the parade too.
“Officer Dejooli?” the doctor asks, all business. Five or six cops turn to watch.
“Yeah,” I say, defeated.
“I found a nurse who’s willing to make a statement,” he says, evenly.
“What?”
“The drunk driver. He came in to the ER a little over a week ago under police escort. Sorry it took so long. I want to nail that bastard as much as anybody, but it’s been crazy at the hospital all week.”
It takes me way longer than it should to realize that he’s making all of this up to get me to talk to Caroline. He’s so steady that for a good five seconds I actually think I may have processed a drunk driving case and forgotten about it.
“Right,” I say.
“She’s right over there. I have some other business with Sani, and I thought I’d bring her down. You know. Two birds and all that.”
The cops all go back to their work. This guy is good.
“All right. Thanks.”
And just like that he turns and lopes off towards the big offices. I clear my throat, smooth my uniform, and take a step towards reception before Danny hands me a notepad.
“Might want this. If you’re taking a statement and all.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
He nods, his head already back to the reports.
Caroline smiles at me as I walk up to her, and it’s not the smile of a girl who is supposed to be meeting someone for the first time.
“Hi,” I say, glancing at the front desk. “I’m Ben Dejooli. I’ll take your statement, if you’re ready.”
“I am,” she says, and she clasps her hands demurely behind her back, but not before she brushes them on her pants. That’s a telltale sign of clammy palms. She’s nervous as hell.
“Right this way,” I say, and I lead her to one of the empty conference rooms on the main level. She follows a half step behind. I flick on the lights and shut the door behind us, then I turn and just watch her.
At first she tries to be nonchalant, but she can only meet my eyes for about five seconds at a time. Then she screws up one side of her face, and for a horrible moment I think she’s about to cry. When she looks up at me again I can see that she is almost as surprised as I am to find herself where she is. She looks around the room like she’s lost.
“Is this about me?” I ask, quietly.
“No,” she says, shaking her head vigorously. “Doctor Bennet had some files to give one of your people.” She pauses and her eyes widen, as if she’s insulted me. “I just thought I’d come with him to…�
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“To…”
She looks up at the ceiling, giving up.
“To see if you’d ever gone to get that scan, except I know that you haven’t because I could see that the order was never fulfilled. So what I really came to ask was why the hell you didn’t go. There. There it is.”
She’s trying to stare bullets at me now. Her hands are on her hips. She’s still wearing scrubs from work. Black pants that fit her like a tarp and a blue top that looks like it was cut from paper. I think she’s wearing clogs, too, and I know that sounds bad, but it’s not like that. If anything it was sort of cute. Maybe more than cute.
“You came all this way to tell me to do what the doctor said?”
“Yes,” she says, point blank. And that’s when it finally hits me: maybe there’s really something wrong with me. My whole life nobody has done anything like this on my behalf. Something as good as a girl like her coming out here to see me has to have a flipside. Everything has a balance.
“You think I’m really sick? I…I’ve been fine. I haven’t passed out or anything since.”
But as soon as the words come out of my mouth I know I haven’t been fine. My head has been hurting. Now that I think about it, I don’t think it ever stopped hurting. I can’t remember when it didn’t hurt, even just a little. It’s become background noise, that’s all.
“Yes,” she says, softly this time, and her eyes sweep over me, over my head and arms and the skin of my hands. “I do think you’re sick,” she says.
Follow the Crow Page 8
