House of Smoke

by JF Freedman

  As soon as check-in is over Kate claims the floor. Her last time here she had to be dragged into opening up her soul. This time she’s eager to, almost impatient.

  “When I was in the shelter,” she begins, “I got into therapy—it was mandatory. I resisted like crazy, partly because of the fact that it was mandatory—that’s my MO, if someone tells me I have to do something I’ll do everything in my power not to. I’m a champ at cutting off my nose to spite my face. Even though the police psychologist had been helpful when all the shit came down, I was still suspicious, paranoid. But anyway, even someone as obstinate as me has to figure out that finding out why you’re fucked up might have some benefit. So then I started working things out a little.

  “One psychologist there got to me to the point where I decided I could trust him, and from then on things went better. I didn’t live there very long but I went back twice a week for therapy. One time he said something that was really important to me. I wrote it down, so I’d never forget it.”

  She fishes a four-by-six card out of her purse, reads from it:

  Most of us come from the past, and we re-create the present. Those who excel come from the future, their vision, their mission, and it pulls them forward.

  She puts the card back into her wallet. “I’m still bogged down in my past,” she explains. “It becomes my present, so I don’t have a future, I can’t. And that’s what I’ve got to get to: my future, my vision. It’s why I’m here. And to do that I’ve got to get the past out of the way.”

  She thinks of the events of the past weeks: sleeping with Juan, a married man and a cop to boot; the frightening and humiliating encounter with the men from the Mexican Mafia; leaving a case without having it come to a conclusion—all which she knows she’s responsible for, there are no accidents in life.

  “Otherwise,” she goes on, “I’ll always be a prisoner. I’ll always be held captive. It’ll be like living with Eric all over again, except I’ll be my own warden.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Maxine interjects. “You’re doing great. These are big changes you’re going through, they take time, they don’t want to be rushed.”

  Kate shakes her head.

  “If I don’t push myself through this,” Kate tells her, tells all of them, looking them all in the eye, “I won’t get through it. I’ve got to be hard on myself, much harder than I have been up to now.”

  The first thing the people at the Women’s Shelter did was take her to the hospital. They wanted to call the police—her own force—and press charges against Eric. He’d beaten her up bad, she looked a mess, although her training had saved her from being hurt much worse.

  She wouldn’t let them make the call—she didn’t have the strength to go through another departmental ordeal so soon after the previous one. Besides, even though she had been cleared, she knew there was residual resentment towards her from some members of the force, and this would be like throwing gasoline on a dying fire.

  Miraculously, she looked worse than she was. Two ribs were broken, some teeth were knocked out, swollen eyes, a fair amount of internal bleeding. About as much damage as a boxer might endure in a tough fight, except she didn’t get to do any punching back: her biggest regret.

  No one knew where she was except Julie and Captain Albright. She didn’t want the kids to know because she was afraid Eric might wheedle it out of them, and she didn’t want them to see her until the initial swelling and bruises had gone down. She’d had to tell Captain Albright that she couldn’t come back to work like she was supposed to, and why. He took it okay, but she could tell he was pretty worried and maybe suspicious, too. Like none of it was her fault but was she one of those cops who somehow drew problems? A jinx?

  She stayed in the shelter two weeks, until she was presentable enough to go out into the world. Then she went back to work. Captain Albright put her right back into the swim, assigned her a new partner and a car, and she was back on the job. She moved in with Julie and Walt. They were happy to have her.

  Her daughters’ attitudes were more ambivalent. Their lives were totally screwed up and she was part of the reason, even though it hadn’t been her fault. Except that she’d brought Eric into their lives, so some of it really was her fault, in their minds. Wanda’s acne flared up fiercely, and Sophia turned inward, barely communicating even the simplest requests. She tried to be there for them, but her own problems were so overwhelming she didn’t do very well at it; they were young, she rationalized to herself, they could bounce back. That part of her life would have to wait—it would be over pretty soon, and then they’d have her full attention. It was selfish, thinking that way, she knew that; but she couldn’t do anything about it, not right in the moment.

  The girls withdrew from her and turned to her sister for affection and attention.

  She got a restraining order against Eric. He couldn’t come within a hundred yards of her, and he couldn’t see the kids at all. She felt better after that was handed down, safer, not only for herself but for Julie and Walt and the girls, too.

  So on the outside things were getting better; but on the inside they were turning to shit. She was under a lot of stress. The therapy sessions were helping, but it was all too much. People were talking about her at work behind her back. Not only Eric’s buddies, of which in this situation there were plenty, but other male officers, too. Like if there was this much smoke around her, there must be something burning somewhere.

  With every passing day her anger built. She started taking it out on the people who were closest to her: her kids. Everything they did was wrong. Their schoolwork, their friends, the way they put on their socks, whatever. Yelling at them like crazy, really ragging on them. She was crazy, impossible. Wild mood swings. And she could see herself doing this shit while she was doing it and she knew it was fucked and crazy and she couldn’t stop herself. Which had to be some kind of definition of some kind of insanity.

  The girls started going to therapy with her. That helped. Not them, but her. She started seeing what demons were driving her. When the truth about you comes out of your daughters’ mouths and the truth is ugly … you don’t want to hear it, but you’d better. She was in total denial most of the time around it, but she heard it.

  After a while the girls started resisting therapy. She had the problems, not them. They stopped going with her. She didn’t push it. They were right—it was her problem, not theirs.

  It got claustrophobic living with her sister, who couldn’t help but disapprove of her behavior, so she gave them all a break, she moved out and got her own place nearby, a small efficiency. Technically she was supposed to reside in Oakland, but no one ever checked. The little place was all she needed, because the girls stayed with Julie and Walt. She saw them almost every day. It was better for them there, more stable. Until things worked out. Not for long.

  After three months she hired a lawyer and filed for divorce. Eric had been expecting the papers.

  “What took you so long?” he sneered at the marshal when he was formally served, right in the middle of the squad room, one morning after the daily briefing.

  He laughed about it—big fucking joke. Some of the other cops laughed about it, too. Not the women, just some of the men.

  “Looking good, Kate,” Eric taunted her. Checking her out: “Your ass is getting kind of big, though, isn’t it?”

  She ignored him.

  They were in the corridor outside the courtroom, waiting to go in. Her with her lawyer, him with his. The first time they’d laid eyes on each other since that night. Normally, before a divorce can proceed, the participants have to go to meditation, to try to work things out by themselves. She and Eric had filed waivers for that, because of their special circumstances.

  Most divorces are basically settled by the time the participants get to the courtroom. Not in this case. A third party, a judge who didn’t know them, would have to decide. There was no middle ground between them, no way they could work anything out. They we
re both in it for blood, especially her—Eric had had his ration, she wanted retribution.

  The proceedings started off badly. The judge wasn’t on her side. It was subtle but unmistakable, at least to her. Eric’s lawyer was better than hers. She was the cop with the negative publicity, and now she was the one filing for divorce.

  “He is not the father of the girls—my children,” she told the judge when she took the stand. They were in the custody phase, the most important part to her. She didn’t want Eric to be able to ever see them again. She wanted him washed from their lives, as if he never had existed in it. “He only adopted them because I bugged him until he agreed. He’s been a stepfather in name only. He means nothing to them, and they mean less to him.”

  “And you’re capable of raising them in a proper manner,” the judge asked her, leaning over from the bench.

  “Of course I am. I’m their mother. I have a job that pays well, and I love them. I already have raised them, all their lives. What more would you expect from me?”

  He made some notes on his legal pad. There might be more testimony on this subject later.

  The emergency-room doctor who had fixed her up testified for her. He was young, in his first year of residency, and he looked even younger.

  “She was beaten severely. Some ribs were broken, teeth knocked out. She was fortunate her jaw wasn’t permanently damaged, or her liver, spleen, kidneys.”

  “Why wasn’t this reported to the police?” Eric’s lawyer, an oily prick in a good suit, asked the ER doc. Her own lawyer’s suit was blue, two shades too bright. And he wore brown shoes instead of black ones. He had been recommended by the people at the shelter, who only knew good price, not good quality. She had been too discombobulated to notice his shortcomings; by the time she did, they were too far along in the process for her to get a better one.

  “She didn’t want to,” the young doctor answered. He looked like Huck Finn up there.

  “Isn’t it obligatory? By law?”

  “She was a cop herself, man. She said she’d handle it. We figured she knew what she was doing.”

  “So it was only on her say-so.” Eric’s lawyer was examining the head of the shelter now, who had taken Kate to the hospital.

  “I’m not blind,” the woman responded, as if insulted. “She was beaten to a pulp.”

  “I’ve seen the pictures,” he said. “That it was her husband, I’m asking. No one else.”

  “There was no reason for her to lie,” the woman countered. “I’ve seen lots of these cases. It’s always the husband or boyfriend.”

  “But you didn’t check to verify that. And you didn’t call the police to verify it, either. Not then or later.”

  “I was worried about keeping her alive. She didn’t want to get into that right then, and I didn’t press her. It’s common not to want to sic the cops on your husband. You’re scared he’ll come back and do you worse. All you want is to get away from him, and keep away from him.”

  Eric took the stand. He looked sharp. A poster boy for the police recruiters.

  He’d been on the stand a hundred times in a hundred trials. He knew how to talk the right way.

  “Yes, I hit her,” he admitted. His lawyer was eliciting his testimony. “I had to do something. She was pointing her gun at me.”

  Kate got halfway out of her chair before her lawyer managed to restrain her.

  “That’s a goddamn lie!” she hissed.

  “Calm down,” her lawyer warned her. “This judge won’t tolerate a ruckus. We’ll nail him on cross, don’t worry.”

  She was worried. This wasn’t the way she had been told it would go.

  “Why was she pointing her gun at you?”

  “She wanted to leave the house. Leave me. I didn’t want her to leave, especially then, the stress she was under. I wanted to talk to her. She didn’t want to. She pulled her gun and told me to get out of her way. So I took the gun away, and I had to fight her to do it. What else could I do?”

  “Had she been under a lot of stress?” Eric’s lawyer asked, leaning heavily on the word “stress.”

  “Tremendous stress. She was going back to work the next day after being on administrative leave for a month. She’d been this close to getting kicked off the force.” He held up thumb and forefinger, an inch apart. “If I hadn’t gone to the board beforehand and pleaded for her she would have been.”

  “He’s lying,” Kate hissed. She wanted to scream. “If anyone almost got me kicked off it would have been him. He was totally unsupportive of me. Ask Captain Albright. Put him up on the stand.”

  Her lawyer had made a note about that. He seemed to be making a lot of notes, about everything.

  “Why did she want to leave you?” Eric’s lawyer asked him.

  Eric turned in his chair, looked at her from across the room.

  “She can tell you better than I can,” he answered cryptically.

  She did answer.

  “Because he was scum. A liar, a bastard. The gun—that’s a complete lie. He pulled his gun on me, on his own wife, he held it to my head, he threatened my life. He told me I should have gotten what that poor woman and girl had gotten back in that house. And he told me—promised me—that the next time he would pull the trigger. He’s crazy, psychotic. Check his evaluations. Why hasn’t he been promoted, all his years in service? Check that out, too.”

  Then she did the one thing she’d sworn she wouldn’t do. She began to cry.

  “I don’t deserve this. No woman deserves this. I’m a peace officer, I see terrible things all the time, I was witness to the worst thing I hope ever to see, that man murdering his wife and daughter in cold blood, for no reason. No reason!”

  “Would you like to take a break?” the judge asked sympathetically.

  “No, thank you. I want to finish here.” Maybe he wasn’t against her after all, not completely. She composed herself.

  “Except for killing me, when he had his gun against my head, my husband—this is the last time I will ever call that bastard ‘my husband’—except for that, I was no better off than those women were. And it has to be stopped.”

  She could see the look in Eric’s lawyer’s eyes. He made a mistake, taking this client. Not taking him—everyone is entitled to a proper defense—but in attacking her character so viciously.

  But witnesses had already been subpoenaed. They came forward.

  “Do you know this woman?” Eric’s lawyer asked Cal Collins. Collins owned a bar and grill in Berkeley that Kate used to frequent.

  “Yes.”

  He looked miserable, sitting up there. She slouched in her chair, wanting to disappear.

  “Did you have sexual relations with her while she was married?”

  He looked at Kate as if to say “I’d do anything to lie, but I can’t, I’m under oath.” She signaled him with body language—tell the truth.

  “Yes.”

  “How many times?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t keep a scorecard.”

  “More than once?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than a dozen times?”

  “Yes.”

  Kate’s lawyer cross-examined.

  “While you and Mrs. Blanchard were seeing each other, was she estranged from her husband?”

  “Yes, she was. Most definitely.”

  “Did she tell you they were separated?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know if she was living separately from him at the time?”

  “Yes. He had moved out of the house. She had kicked him out. She was living there by herself, with her daughters.”

  “And then she reconciled with him.”

  With sorrow: “Yes.”

  “And told you she couldn’t see you anymore.”

  “We never saw each other after that, except if she was in my restaurant as a customer.”

  “So when she was living with her husband, not separated, or contemplating divorce, she was faithful to him.”

>   “Objection! This witness does not know what else she might have been doing, or with whom.”

  “Sustained.”

  “She never slept with you again once she got back together with him?”

  “Not once.”

  “Did she ever tell you why she went back to him, a man who was brutal to her, who she didn’t love?”

  “He kept at her. She felt guilty. She had one failed marriage, she said, she was willing to do almost anything to make this one work.”

  “Even take the chance of getting killed.”

  “Objection!”

  “Sustained.”

  “Did you sleep with anyone during the various times you and your soon-to-be divorced wife were physically and emotionally separated from each other?” Kate’s lawyer questioned Eric on redirect.

  “I was never ‘emotionally separated’ from her. Whenever we split up it was her decision. I had to go along with what she wanted, but I never wanted to leave her.”

  He could sell ice to Eskimos, she thought, watching him up there on the stand. Lying or telling the truth, to him there was no difference.

  “You just wanted to beat her senseless.” Before the objection was voiced: “I retract that, Your Honor.”

  “Don’t do it again,” he was warned.

  The judge took over the questioning when her daughters, one after the other, were on the stand.

  “Do you love your mother?”

  “Yes,” both had answered.

  “Is she a good mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you love your stepfather?”

  The answer from both of them was “No.” They both hated him and were afraid of him.

  “Did your mother ever provoke him, or was it always his fault?”

  “She never provoked him,” the younger one said. She was fiercely loyal to Kate; she was too young to have any rebellious ideas.

  “She would get in his face sometimes,” the older one admitted. “Mom doesn’t back down to anyone.”

  Eric’s lawyer questioned her after the judge was finished.

  “Was your mother ever angry at you when it wasn’t your fault?”