We Are Not Like Them

by Christine Pride

  How bad? A question forms. I can’t make my mouth produce the words though; something about the look on my husband’s face stops me. Was there even a gun? This opens the door to other questions I’m also too scared to ask. Was the guy Black? Did you shoot an unarmed Black guy? Is this going to be the headline? In my gut, I already know the answer. I also know what that will mean for Kevin, for us. Maybe that’s why I don’t ask. Maybe that’s why my heart won’t stop pounding.

  “I need to sleep, Jay,” Kevin says when he finally looks at me. “I keep seeing him.” His voice wobbles. “I keep seeing him there on the ground. I don’t want to see him anymore tonight.”

  I don’t say another word. I grab Kevin’s hand, lead him upstairs, and give him two Tylenol PMs. He lies down in our bed, and I crawl under the sheets beside him, listening as his breathing slows. He’s almost asleep when I decide I have to ask after all; the need to know for sure is a weight on my chest.

  Turning on my side to face him, I scoot close enough for my lips to graze the back of his neck and speak softly into his musky skin. “There wasn’t a gun, was there? The guy didn’t have a gun?”

  Kevin barely shakes his head by way of answering, but it’s enough.

  We don’t speak again. I breathe into the back of his neck, matching my breaths to his until he slips into jerky snores, and then I flip onto my back, an act which takes a shocking amount of effort these days, and watch the electric blue numbers on the cable box tick forward minute by minute.

  “Kevin is a good cop.” I whisper this out loud, trying to reassure myself. I remind myself of his commendations. Two of them so far—a medal of valor and one for bravery. And that time he was called in to arrest a woman for shoplifting in the Walmart. At the hearing she struggled through broken English and hiccupping sobs to explain to the judge that she was stealing food because she was desperate to feed her kids. When the woman was let off on a misdemeanor, Kevin bought her a pantry full of groceries and quietly left them on her stoop.

  People know his name in the neighborhoods where he does his foot patrols. He carries treats for their dogs, for Christ’s sake. And talk about dogs. What about smelly, snaggletoothed Fred, who Kevin rescued from Philly Salvage last winter, where she had been left padlocked to a chain-link fence in below-zero temperatures. I reach for her now, curled up as usual in the tangle of our feet, and remind myself: My husband is a good man.

  But I’m not getting any calmer; instead, I’m sweaty and clammy in a knot of sheets. I rip them off and head to the kitchen. Maybe more tea will help. When I get downstairs, I see my phone, forgotten on the kitchen table. The screen is filled with missed-call alerts from hours ago—all Riley. Without thinking about it, I call her back. By the fourth ring, I don’t think she’ll answer and then she’s there, on the line, sounding winded: “Are you okay?”

  She knows. “You know, don’t you.”

  “Yeah, I’m… I came into work.”

  Of course she’s there. She’s always there.

  “Scotty called me in. The shooting tonight… Kevin was… involved.” Riley is measuring her words, like she’s finding one at a time and slowly stringing them together.

  I don’t know much about what’s happening, but I know enough to be careful with my words too. Still, I can’t help it. “I’m scared, Rye.”

  “Do you know what… what happened?”

  From upstairs, I hear Kevin cough. Or it could be a sob. I should be with him.

  “I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Okay, I love you, Pony.” I already have my finger on the button ready to hang up when Riley says it, the nickname from back when we were kids, one she hasn’t used in years. Pony for me, for my long blond ponytail I wore every single day in elementary school—the only style Lou could manage no matter how much I begged for French braids. And Puff for Riley, for the trademark Afro puffs she wore atop her head from grades one through five. Riley’s mom wasn’t much more creative.

  I love you, Pony.

  I love you, Puff.

  I love you, Pony.

  I love you, Puff.

  The end of a million sign-offs until one day we’d just stopped.

  “I love you, Puff,” I say now. It reassures me better than any stupid tea, and I try to hold on to that comfort as I trudge up the stairs and climb back into bed with my husband.

  * * *

  Lines of light shine through the venetian blinds covering our bedroom window to form shadowy stripes across our navy bedspread. I throw my arm over my eyes to shield them from the light, and pat the bed beside me. It’s still warm, but Kevin is gone. That’s when I hear the loud retching from the bathroom. Fred leaps off the bed, nails scratching across the tile, as if heading to Kevin’s rescue. My own stomach roils in solidarity, and I swallow a gag.

  I need to call into work, before anyone gets in this morning. It’s crazy to even think I could give two shits about confirming that Steven Frye’s X-rays are covered by insurance or calling Maureen Wyatt to remind her about her cleaning. As the phone rings, I frantically debate what the hell to say. Do I go with the flu, or fake a few pathetic coughs? When the answering service picks up, I settle on a quick “Something came up, and I’ll be in on Monday.”

  By the time I hang up, Kevin’s returning from the bathroom, his face the color of wet concrete. My phone vibrates against the bedside table, the glow of the screen bright in the dim room. I don’t move to answer it.

  “It’s probably Riley. I’ll call her back after you leave.” I don’t tell him I talked to her last night. It’s not a lie. I just don’t say it. “She’s worried after I ran out of the restaurant so fast.”

  “What did you tell her when you left?” Kevin snaps, his sharp tone catching me off guard.

  “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 hanger
s, 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.

  I wouldn’t have put it past Lou to leave me alone with some dry cereal and a tightly locked door, but a few days after Ms. Landis died, she came across the ad for Gigi’s day care, Sunshine Kids, a place that specialized in taking the scrubs, the kids whose parents worked odd hours or late nights.

  “I got such a kick out of it when we showed up at the Wilsons’ and I saw all these little Black kids,” Lou told me, years later. “You were like a snowflake in a coal mine! I thought maybe you’d all form a little rap group.”

  I don’t remember noticing that I was the only white kid at Gigi’s, at least not at first; I was too focused on Riley, though then she was Leroya and I thought her name sounded so fancy, like a perfume. She was sitting at the kitchen table biting her lip in concentration as she practiced writing her name. Her hair was braided into intricate cornrows that I wanted badly to touch. When I did, Riley swatted at my hand, and I knew I had done something wrong even if I didn’t know what it was. I tried everything I could think of to convince her to play with me that day. She kept blowing me off until the other kids started holding relay races in the backyard and, out of nowhere, Riley walked over and challenged me to one. She might have had longer legs, but I knew I was faster. I took off across the yard, pumping my skinny legs as fast as I could. Then, at the last second, I slowed down and Riley won, but she wasn’t happy about it. She accused me of letting her win. I only did it because I wanted her to like me. We argued about it, faces red, little fists balled at our sides, until Gigi marched across the yard and turned the ice-cold hose on us. “That’ll keep you from fussin’.” We fell to the ground, sopping wet, in shock, and then looked at each other and started laughing. That was when we knew we’d be friends. Even with that rocky start we became inseparable, the sisters we’d always wanted.

  I only went to Sunshine Kids for a few years, until Lou decided I was old enough to stay home alone after school and at night. “That’s what I did,” she said. “And see how I turned out.” Then she laughed, and I did too, because it was always better to be in on the joke. But by then I’d already laid a ferocious claim to the Wilsons as my adopted family and Riley as my best friend. The Wilsons seemed like an ideal family, with their nightly dinners together at a real dining room table and calendars on the fridge with dentist appointments and soccer games and a mom who read fairy tales to you at bedtime instead of Rolling Stone alone in the bathtub. Even as young as I was, I understood they were one of the best things to ever happen to me. I’ve said as much to Lou over the years. Like that time in high school when she accused Mrs. Wilson of having a stick up her ass. I had a primal flash of rage then, like How dare you insult my family, which was confusing, considering who was doing the insulting here. I’d screamed at her. “If it weren’t for the Wilsons, I’d probably be a stripper or a drug addict.”

  Lou was unfazed. “There’s still time, baby girl.”

  Lou should have been as grateful for the Wilsons as I was, since she always had a place to park me for her getaways, work concerts in New York or Atlantic City, or when she needed some “grown-up time” with a new man.

  Like the summer before fifth grade, when she disappeared for more than two weeks to follow her roadie boyfriend, Blazer, to Summerfest in Milwaukee. It was the longest stretch I’d ever been away from her, and my feelings when she knocked on the Wilsons’ door to pick me up afterward were as confusing as ever. With her golden tan, sun-streaked long hair, and new tattoo of a mermaid running the length of her forearm, Lou was as wild and beautiful as ever. She never looked more beautiful than when she was returning after time away from me.

  I gathered my things and climbed into the back seat of Blazer’s Ford Escape, a stomachache already beginning to form. Blazer glared out the window at Mrs. Wilson and Riley waving goodbye from the porch and turned to Lou with a look of disgust. “I can’t believe you let your kid stay with them niggers.”

  Riley and her mom continued smiling and waving from the doorstep, oblivious, and this made it all the worse.

  Blazer winked at me in the rearview mirror, mouth open just enough so I could see the pink flesh of his tongue. I wanted to spit in his greasy hair, say something to make him slam on the brakes and toss me into the street. White-trash bum.

  Lou just smirked. “Why do you shave your balls, B
lazer? You ask me a stupid question, I ask you a stupid question. Mind your business. They’re nice people.”

  I slunk down in the ripped vinyl back seat, burning with shame that I hadn’t spoken up. It was the first but it wouldn’t be the last time someone would spit out the N-word or some other awful joke or comment over the years while I said nothing, the same shame rearing its ugly head, knowing I was betraying Riley with my silence.

  The shock of my phone buzzing against the table makes me jump, sending my mug to the floor, where it shatters into pieces.

  It’s too soon for Kevin to be calling with news. I know who it is without looking—and I promised I wouldn’t talk to her, so I let it go to voice mail. When I pick up the phone to listen to the message, I see it wasn’t Riley after all, and I don’t know if I’m relieved or disappointed. The voice on the other end is my sister-in-law, Annie, speaking in a fast whisper. “Hey, Jen, it’s me. Matt told me. I’m thinking about you and praying for everyone. Call me. Let us know what’s going on. I’m working an overnight, but call anytime.”

  Annie probably knows more than I do at this point about what happens now. Even with her crazy job as an ER nurse, she makes time to be involved in all the LEO groups. Yet another acronym—LEO, for law enforcement officer—and LEOW when it came to the wives. A close-knit group who organized volunteer committees, prayer circles, and gathered to drink margaritas and bitch about their husbands’ crazy schedules on a Tuesday night. They’re a club, a kind of sorority. I don’t know why I’ve held them at arm’s length—too much pressure to be a joiner, maybe. But now I wish I hadn’t because I’m sure there’s someone from the LEOW Facebook group I could reach out to for insight and support. But I’m not ready yet. Instead, I text Kevin:

  What’s happening?

  I know he won’t respond anytime soon—he warned me these meetings could take hours—but that doesn’t stop me from staring at the screen, willing it to light up until I can’t stand it a second longer. I should avoid the news, but I move to the living room anyway and turn to Channel Five out of loyalty, half expecting to see Riley’s face even though she isn’t on in the mornings. If it weren’t for Riley, I wouldn’t watch the news, period. None of the officers’ wives do. It’s impossible to listen to the crime reports when you have a man on the streets.