The Good Wife

by Stewart O'Nan

  It’s him, in the same scrubs, except his are far too small, stretched across the chest, tight at the biceps. Two cops hold his elbows like he might break free, and she wonders if they chose the shortest ones to make him look bigger. His hair’s better than Gary’s, but as she searches his face she sees they’ve hurt him. His left eye is nearly closed, a gash running up his cheek and ending on his forehead.

  He signals her, palms down at his waist: Be cool, everything’s okay. The cops lead him in front of the judge, then stand with their backs to her.

  The judge fixes him with the same damning look.

  “Mr. Dickerson,” she announces, “you are charged by the State of New York with one count of murder in the second degree—”

  She goes on but Patty hears none of it. She needs to get out of here and looks to the aisle, the quickest escape route, takes one step and crumples backward onto the bench, pulling Donna down on top of her.

  “She’s fine,” Eileen tells a cop who comes over.

  Patty sees the lawyer look back and then turn away again. Donna’s rubbing the back of her hand. The judge is saying something. Patty’s surprised the hearing is going on without her, as if it might stop for a pregnant woman fainting.

  “Do you understand, Mr. Dickerson?”

  “I do, your honor,” Tommy says. “I’m going to use my own lawyer.”

  “All right, please have them with you for arraignment tomorrow,” the judge says, and goes on before Patty can jump up and interrupt. What is he doing? They can’t afford a lawyer. But he doesn’t know that, she thinks; she hasn’t told him. It’s all her fault.

  There’s no bail—everything’s a copy of Gary’s, like they’re the same person. The judge bangs the gavel and the cops hustle Tommy away. He watches her over his shoulder the whole time. She waves weakly, still sitting, then stops when he’s gone.

  Is that it? She doesn’t know why, but she thought she’d get to say something.

  Murder. She can’t imagine telling her mother.

  Eileen pats her on the back and leaves her hand there. Donna digs in her purse for her cigs. The rest of the court is noisily packing up. The judge has already disappeared through her secret passage, and the cops. Only the two reporters have nowhere to go. It’s only when Donna stands and pulls on her jacket that both men slide toward the aisle and Patty realizes they’ve been waiting for them.

  HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD

  THEY TAKE SEPARATE CARS. BY THE SECOND LIGHT DONNA’S FIREBIRD is right behind them, following them north through the rundown side of town. It’s still snowing and overcast. Patty watches the gray scenery pass, darkened pizza places, empty storefronts plastered with month-old election posters, bare trees and shabby blocks of rowhouses, a torn couch on someone’s porch. There’s no snow beneath the crumbling railroad underpass, and their tires whine, then go silent again.

  It’s Wednesday; in all the confusion she’d almost lost what day it was, and holds on to that fact now, though nothing sticks to it. She’ll call in sick the rest of the week as if she’s come down with something—and it’s true: all morning she’s felt sick.

  It’s not far out of town, a low brown box with a guy-wired antenna set off in a field like a radio station. The road leading to it’s been cleared and salted down to the asphalt. The windows in front are mirrored so you can’t see inside; as the Bronco ripples across the silvered glass, Patty feels watched. They park away from the line of sheriff’s department cars and regroup, a team. She’s actually glad Donna’s with her; it’s like having another person on her side.

  As they near the doors, they both slow, and Eileen takes the lead. She’s been here before, for Blaine and then again for Cy—misdemeanors. She even knows the lady cop at the front desk with the blond bun, and Patty and Donna let her get the forms they need to fill out.

  They sit in a row of connected chairs like in an emergency room, pressing hard through the carbons. A scanner blasts static above the chatter of electric typewriters. On the table there’s today’s Binghamton paper, the sections shuffled, sports on top. Patty tries not to write the headline. It’s hot inside, and every cop that crosses the lobby looks them over. She wonders which one hit Tommy, and if his hands were cuffed.

  Where it says previous convictions, she writes: Speeding tickets.

  “She needs to see your license,” Eileen says, and together the three of them take the forms up to the desk.

  “Who wants to go first?” the lady cop asks.

  Donna lets her.

  “Leave your purse here,” the lady cop instructs, and Patty has to retrieve the paper with the names of the lawyers right in front of Donna.

  A heavy cop with a Wild West mustache arrives to guide her. He has to sign off on her paperwork before he leads her deeper into the building, opening locked doors as they go.

  “You’re not carrying any weapons or contraband of any kind, are you?” he asks casually—you don’t want coffee, do you?

  “No,” Patty says.

  The long hall he walks her down is normal and neat, yellow linoleum and a drop-paneled ceiling, overhead fluorescents, doors with officers’ names on them. She expected something more dramatic—dank and dripping, cracks in the plaster. He opens a steel door at the end of the hall and the smell changes, the air sweaty and sharp, the vinegary, old-sock stink of a boys’ locker room. Somewhere a radio plays a bouncy oldie. For the first time in her life she has to go through a metal detector. Patty worries that it might hurt the baby, but the cop says it’s okay. She ducks as she passes through the frame. It goes off with a ping.

  “Remove any metallic objects,” the cop mumbles, and has her do it again without her rings.

  Ping!

  The cop takes a black plastic device like a sawed-off paddle and waves it over her like a magician until it makes a fuzzy noise just under her boobs.

  “It’s probably my bra.”

  The guy sighs. “We’re going to have to get a female officer to verify that.”

  “What, are you going to strip-search me?”

  “You want to see your loved one, you’re going to have to submit to a routine check—simple as that.”

  He has her stand there while he makes a call. Finally the lady cop from the front desk takes her into a bathroom in the hallway. The woman treats her like an extra job she doesn’t want. She asks Patty to lift her shirt and waves the paddle over her, leans down to inspect under her breasts and gestures for her to get dressed again, then hands her off to the guy cop outside—like a prisoner, Patty thinks.

  The cop steers her past the metal detector to a windowless of fice with a big steel desk like the kind her teachers ruled from in grade school, a plain chair on either side, a foil ashtray. From TV she’s been conditioned to expect a sheet of plexiglas between them, and a phone. The cop has her sit at the desk, her legs boxed in, then leaves, closing the door behind him.

  She inspects the walls and ceiling for anything that might hide a camera. Maybe inside the light. They’ve probably got the room bugged.

  She hangs her jacket on the back of the chair and smooths her front, combs her bangs with her fingers. She takes the piece of paper with the lawyers’ names from her pocket and unfolds it on the desk.

  The door opens. It’s a different cop, and then Tommy, in scrubs and slippers, his eye puffed and purple. She pushes her chair back to stand and the cop shoots out an arm—“Sit down, ma’am.” The heavy cop follows, a hand on Tommy’s shoulder, making him sit, then clears off to the side, the four of them spread around the desk like a bridge game.

  “Hey,” Tommy says, trying to smile.

  “Is it okay if we hold hands?” Patty asks.

  The heavy cop nods. “As long as you’re in your seat.”

  She reaches across the desk and takes Tommy’s rough hands. His thumb brushes her palm, and she holds it still, finds his eyes to see if he’s hiding anything from her—to see if he’s the same Tommy she loves, the one who forgets what color his toothbrush is and uses her
s.

  “Pats,” he says, shrugging, “come on,” like the whole thing’s a joke.

  “I waited up for you.”

  “I’m sorry, you know? I didn’t think I’d be that late.”

  “I guess not,” she says, but then turns away. She doesn’t want to fight.

  His scrubs are short-sleeved and his arms look cold.

  “Are you warm enough in that?” she asks.

  “I’m all right. How are you doing?”

  “I’m okay. What happened to your eye?”

  “I ran into a tree. Seriously, it was my own fault. Listen, did you call Russ? He might call to borrow my tile saw. I told him he could.”

  She tells him about the lawyer.

  “What about your family?” he asks, meaning her mother and Shannon. Besides Patty, he has no family of his own—another reason her mother doesn’t like him. He was raised by his grandmother. She died his senior year. When her estate didn’t cover the taxes on her house, he got an apartment downtown and supported himself by working at Longo’s Carpet and selling weed on the side. It seems insane that anyone could think that that was the height of cool, but Patty remembers other kids pointing him out to her in the halls, envious of his independence. She was a freshman, and it had only been two years since her father had died. Even then, before she’d ever met him, she thought they had something in common.

  “The guy said some of the public defenders are really good. He gave me some names.” She takes one hand away to push the piece of paper toward him.

  “You asked her,” he asks, and in the silence that follows she’s aware of the two cops listening in.

  “Pats,” he says. “I swear I didn’t do it.”

  “I know,” she says, and squeezes.

  “I don’t want one of their lawyers. I want one who’s going to be working for me.”

  “I’ll ask her again.”

  “I’m sorry, I was drunk. 1 know that’s no excuse.”

  “I’ll try,” she says.

  He reminds her to get the truck, but doesn’t say anything about bail or Gary or Donna. They’re not going to talk about last night, though it floats around them like a cloud. She deserves to know what happened before the rest of the world, but there’s no chance here. He’s eating, he’s been running in place, he’s trying to be positive. She must look awful, because he tells her she needs to get her rest. She needs to take care of Casey first, before anything.

  “I love you, Pats,” he says when their time’s up. “I’m sorry I got us into this.”

  “We’ll get through it,” she says.

  She doesn’t get to hold him. After he’s gone, the heavy cop walks her back up front.

  Eileen quietly grills her while they wait for Donna. It seems she’s gone a long time, and when she comes back she hardly says anything, just walks with them across the freezing parking lot, gets in the Firebird and drives.

  “I wonder what Gary told her,” Patty says as Eileen lets the Bronco warm.

  “What did Tommy tell you?”

  “He said he didn’t do it.”

  “That’s probably what Gary told her. The question is, what are you going to tell Mom?”

  It’s lunchtime and downtown is busy, the streets wet, brown slush in the gutters. They have to circle the courthouse.

  The impound yard is across the river, off of Montrose Turnpike. Half the cars behind the razor wire are smashed, windshields missing, snow capping the dashboards. The cop behind the chickenwire glass is Eileen’s age, and good-looking; Patty’s seen him directing traffic at the Speedway. She slides the title to the truck through the slot and he checks a ledger.

  They’ve got it, but he’s sorry, the state police have put a hold on it.

  “It’s here though,” she says.

  “It’s here,” he says. He’ll call when it’s ready—just like a regular garage. He takes her name and number and gives her his card, apologizing again.

  “He was helpful,” Eileen says on the bridge, meaning he was cute.

  “You want the card?” Patty asks.

  They circle the courthouse and head back home. Spinning past the cemetery, Patty can’t shake the feeling that she’s abandoning Tommy, leaving him behind. She needs to call the lawyer again, call her mother. The river runs beside them, black as oil. She watches the snow sift down and disappear into it.

  “I read the paper,” Eileen confesses.

  “What did it say?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I’m going to find out anyway.”

  Eileen waits, as if this is a bad idea. “It said she had a fractured skull.”

  “Because it was an accident,” Patty says, even more sure now. “He’d never hurt anyone.”

  “Not on purpose.”

  “Not not-on-purpose either,” Patty insists, and tries to remember him ever hitting anyone. Hockey fights, but he hasn’t had one in years, the guys are always ragging on him about it. He wasn’t a good fighter either. Every time he got locked up with someone she had to cover her eyes. Once when they were dating, a guy from IBM broke his nose and she had to help him pack it with gauze.

  “He’s a big guy,” Eileen says.

  “Cy’s just as big.”

  “I’m just saying people are going to see him that way.”

  “Jesus Christ, what is he supposed to do—shrink?”

  The silence that follows takes them into the hills. The fields are white and a caul of falling snow softens the trees in the distance. The plows have bulldozed a row of mailboxes. The houses with their empty driveways and blank windows remind Patty that she’s playing hooky from work. It’s not even one o’clock. She feels like pulling the covers over her head and sleeping.

  “Thank you for doing all this with me,” she tells Eileen as they make the turn onto Spaulding Hill—still not plowed, rutted with a dozen tracks.

  “Pats, come on,” Eileen says. “I’m not going to just drop you off.”

  Patty thanks her again, and Eileen chucks her in the shoulder. “Stop being a wiener.”

  As they round the curve, they both check out the sheriff’s department car parked beside the Myersons’ dog run.

  “They’ll say nice things about him. He helped put up the fence around their pool.”

  “That’s good,” Eileen says.

  Who else besides her can testify that he’s a good man?

  Russ, but he’d have to do the same for Gary. Perry, but he’s been in trouble, the same with Shawn, and the guys on the team aren’t those kinds of friends.

  She wonders what her mother would say on his behalf.

  She’s trying to think back to who his boss was on the road crew before Russ when they crest the hill and she sees her driveway lined with cop cars—some from the sheriff’s department, some of them town cops, some dark blue state police cruisers—and way up by the porch, right by the open front door that people are going in and out of, her landlord’s piece-of-shit van.

  MENNEN

  THEY TAKE HIS ROLLAWAY, THE TIERS OF FIRE-ENGINE-RED TOOLBOXES still locked—confiscated. They take the brand-new chainsaw and the Skil saw and the electric hedge trimmers, copying down the serial numbers. They take a dirtbike and a spiderwebbed ten-speed from under a green tarp; they take his new deer rifle and his compound bow and his grandmother’s old shotgun—all stolen, according to the warrant.

  She’s never seen the dirtbike or the ten-speed before, and she’s not sure of some of the power tools, but she was with him at Ben’s Den when he bought the bow. His grandfather’s initials are carved into the stock of the shotgun, all they have to do is look.

  It doesn’t matter; the warrant lets them take anything. They have pages of property claims, long lists of descriptions.

  They take his weight bench and his dumbbells. They take the eight-track player and the quad speakers he wired up in the corners of the garage so he could listen to Little Feat and Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers while he lifted. They have to back up a truck wi
th a hydraulic gate to take the tile saw, and she can’t stop them, can’t say that Russ needs it for a job.

  Eileen deals with the police, makes sure to get a receipt while Patty guards the bedroom, glaring at the invaders with their cotton gloves searching her dresser drawers, pawing through her bras. While she’s busy shadowing them, Mr. McChesney climbs in his van and takes off without a word to her.

  The house is occupied, a dozen cops tromping snow through the rooms, blackening the yellow bathmat. The head detective assures her they won’t be much longer. There’s nothing they can do but wait, so Eileen makes lunch for her. Patty sits at the kitchen table slathering their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and imagines splashing the detective with the potful of hot chicken noodle soup.

  It’s impossible to talk with all the cops around. She and Eileen huddle at the table, spooning up noodles, taking patient bites of their sandwiches. The soup tastes good; it used to be her favorite when she was little. She used to keep a kind of food diary, a faithful record of what they ate for every meal. The cops would probably think her shorthand was some kind of code.

  What the stolen property means about Tommy—if it’s actually stolen and they’re not just hassling them—she doesn’t want to contemplate. That he was lying to her the whole time. That he thought she was too stupid to notice.

  The detective comes through and says they’re finished with the back of the house. Eileen does the dishes while she fixes the bedroom, digging under the corners of the waterbed to fit the sheets on—tough, since she can’t bend at the waist. The cops have knocked over her perfumes and haven’t bothered to set them upright. She’s surprised they didn’t take her jewelry box just on principle.

  She’s going to have to wash the bathroom rugs, there’s no way around it. As she’s straightening the shelves by the sink, she stops, his deodorant in hand. She pulls the cap off and rubs the lime stick on her wrist, sniffs it with her eyes closed. The scent is nothing at all like him. She caps the stick and puts it back, glad no one saw her.

  The detective says they’re all done. She has to sign a list of everything they’ve taken, Eileen double-checking it over her shoulder. The detective turns his clipboard sideways and carefully tears off a copy for her.