Living in Quiet Rage

by Michael English Bierwiler

  Amelia abdicated her deck chair and joined him at the rail leaving a safe emotional distance between their bodies. Doc leaned on his forearms with his hands hanging over the rail with thumbs and fingertips touching as his back slightly arched over to compensate for the height of the rail. Amelia leaned into the rail with both hands clasped around the teak to steady herself.

  The froth of the ship’s bow spread out in the rough waters several decks below. Doc yielded to the temptation to just clear his mind of all thoughts and worries rather than launch into the discussion they had been putting off. Amelia held back, afraid of what she already knew and had known since the early years. In the back of her mind she was already planning the move back to Spokane with the kids.

  He knew it was over, she knew it was over, but neither moved the first pawn in the game. Gar’s dad was right: love is like ethics - we all know it when we see it, but none of us can really put it into words, and most of the time a cheap imitation can pass for the real thing. She would tell him her plans after they arrived home in Fort Worth at the end of the week before Ben and the girls flew back from Spokane.

  It was over for Doc and Amelia. It had been over for a long time, but they had become accustomed to the discomfort. The longer they put it off the harder it became to separate their lives. She never left Spokane emotionally while he let himself get lost in his career. Doc loved his three kids, but he hadn‘t taken time to get to know them over twenty years of marriage. When they were small they seemed so fragile, and now as teenagers they thought themselves self-sufficient. Next year Ben would be in his last year of college, soon to be set loose to make his own way in a world that could turn cold and harsh.

  Amelia’s job was to raise them as God-fearing, decent human beings while Doc’s job was to bring in the financial security to make it possible. He was envious of Beth back in Spokane with his child and her husband, yet Doc knew that she could not have weathered unscathed the storm that had been his life. At least his loss became her happiness.

  Doc and Amelia spent the next port stops avoiding any serious discussion of what was to become of their lives after the trip. Toward the end of the week there was a day at sea when no more food could be ingested, second-rate lectures and lounge music were exhausted, and even dropping quarters into the onboard casino slot machines seemed pointless.

  Friday was a perfect day in Cancun. Doc and Amelia took a shore excursion to Tulum, a Mayan fortress high on a bluff looking out to the Caribbean. They took a couple hours to explore the ancient walls and steps. The view to the east was an incomparable expanse of sea and sky while the gentle waves far below scratched at the white sand.

  Doc scaled the rocky path down to the beach for a quick swim with the more intrepid visitors. He loved the crunch of the packed sand below his bare feet. The salty water was as clear as glass revealing the submerged, rippled sand alternating with patches of dark vegetation swaying in the gentle current. After a short while the tourists started the climb back up the craggy path to the Tulum ruins where the buses were idling to take them back to their ships.

  Amelia watched the villages, the tropical vegetation, and the hustle of everyday life passing by her window perch while Doc drifted off to a quick nap. She was changing her mind about letting Doc in on her plans to leave. It would make more sense to string him along until the kids were out of school for the summer and she had her ducks in a row for the move back to Spokane.

  She would leave him with the furniture, his old red SUV and the new sports coupe with payments, and take the van they just finished paying off with her. She would access the small savings account and the mutual funds to hold her over until child support, her share of the equity in the Fort Worth house, and her cut of his retirement fund was available. Her parents were on board by allowing her the use of one of their small rental houses starting in June. Her mother was already shopping for new living room and bedroom furniture to replace what Amelia would be taking.

  She was watching Doc when he awoke as the bus drove into the dockyard.

  “Are we back already?”

  “It’s been a couple hours.”

  “Did I miss anything?” Doc asked looking around as the bus jerked to a stop.

  For hours Amelia had been mentally reviewing the plans that would turn their lives upside down in a few months while he rested unaware of the approaching emotional storm. She wondered if he had any idea how little time they had left together. “No, nothing important. Just watching the scenery go by.”

  “Okay, let’s go eat,” he replied hopping up to get in the line to disembark the bus. She followed without comment.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Doc was glad to be back at work. Although he was under the impression that the wonderful week in the Caribbean was a hiatus from their personal problems, he was aware of the overwhelming effort to keep serious discussion at bay during the trip. He knew that it solved none of the major problems, but he hoped that the highest priorities could be put off indefinitely.

  Doc didn’t understand why Amelia was so determined to take the kids to visit her parents immediately after school was out in June. She hated to drive any distance, yet she planned to stuff three teenagers in her van for two thousand miles of whining. He insisted that she wait until he could take them all north on his annual vacation weeks, but her plans were etched in stone.

  On the morning before she left for Spokane, she was waiting for Doc to come home in the morning after work to confess.

  “We’re not coming back, Bill. I’m not waiting another month because this isn’t a vacation. I don’t want you to come with us.” Doc suspected that the final blow would come someday, but he always assumed it would arrive after the kids were out of the house. “We’ll need to sell the house, Bill, and take your name off the title to the van. It’s too expensive to move the furniture home, so I’ve made a list of the things I’ll need shipped home. The rest you can move to an apartment or sell or give away. I don’t care.”

  She pulled out some hand-written pages from her purse with lists of accounts to change or close, a real estate agent’s card, and financial score sheets to close out their marriage. He reached out to accept them without a word. He sat down at the kitchen table and ran his finger left to right as he scanned the papers.

  He noticed that Ben and the girls were sitting in the back den with their backpacks and suitcases ready to go. They had been told the night before that it was a move, not a vacation while Doc was at work and they spent the intervening hours deciding what they could take with them in the van and boxing up their most important possessions for their father to ship to them later.

  “Okay, kids, let’s get your stuff in the van. We need to be getting on the road,” she said calmly. They dutifully got up and followed her to the door. Their confused emotions raged silently while their trusted world collapsed. When the front door closed, Doc got up and went to the living room windows to watch them drive away. Somewhere in the midst of the hurt and anger he felt a relief that there was finally a resolution. A few days later the formal papers arrived to begin the dissolution of the marriage.

  Back at work life went on. James the Younger seemed to be getting his life in order, James the Elder made no progress, and the frequent fliers continued down their respective destructive paths. Men like James the Younger were survivors who eventually triumphed over adversity while men like James the Elder spent their lives in futility fighting rogue windmills. Frank Pierce was doing a stretch in Huntsville after a simple shoplifting offense went south and became a robbery when he struggled with a clerk. Ruth Madson had turned into a young woman in her mid-twenties hooked on methamphetamines. The pretty teenage face was ravaged from the chemicals of the drugs to the point that she could pass for Doc’s age. Her quick wit and devil-may-care attitude was reduced to the solitary quest for her next hit. It was becoming difficult to believe that good triumphed over evil.

  At least Gar’s life was in the black again since he met Barni at the alarm ca
ll at St. James Academy. Doc was on his cell phone talking to Spokane on one of the many quasi-emergencies that could never wait until the next day when Gar tried to call. Doc heard the sound of the incoming call and valiantly tried to extricate himself from the current caller.

  Gar left a message on Doc’s cell phone to let him know that he needed to saunter out to a rundown motel on Highway 10: the war of the Garners had taken a nasty turn. Doc read the text message as soon as he finished the other call. Doc figured that Dolly Garner had been badly beaten by her husband again and was refusing both medical assistance and help from the officers. Her husband Aaron would probably win another round by default Doc thought as he shuffled out to his Crown Vic and headed off to arbitrate another bloody disagreement.

  Doc seethed with anger at the old man who seemed to always escape with a night in jail at the most. What on God’s green earth was the hold he had over this woman that would keep her subjugated from year to unending year in pain and terror? She claimed to love him, but Doc could not understand how that could possibly be true unless perceptions counted more than reality. Could that life possibly be an improvement over the one she was living before she met him?

  When Doc pulled into the aging motel, his headlights flashed on Dolly who was sitting in a rusty green lawn chair near the first floor office surrounded by Gar and two ambulance attendants. It was a familiar scene for Doc over the years. He imagined that James the Younger was in their motel room upstairs trying to trip up Aaron on his well-rehearsed story.

  What would it be tonight? Maybe a fall down the stairs or walking into a door? Maybe Aaron would have just come home to find her bleeding and simply have no idea how she got hurt. The crucial element was whether Aaron had enough time to feed Dolly the story line before the cops arrived. Gar walked over to meet Doc as Doc’s Crown Victoria crunched to a stop on the gravel that evened out the holes in the parking lot.

  Sympathy had been the order of the day for Doc when he first met Dolly years ago, but sympathy was a victim of repeated attempts to rescue her from her own demons. Dozens of young police officers from Doc to James the Younger and James the Elder had their best efforts to save this poor soul crushed by her lack of enthusiasm for change.

  Gar gave Doc the rundown on the final call to Dolly and Aaron’s motel room. When he and James the Younger arrived, they saw and heard a bulky female in a large pink and white flowered robe as she paced back and forth screaming, “He’s killing her this time!” over the second floor railing to anyone in earshot. James the Younger took the stairs two at a time and crashed through the flimsy door of number two twenty-nine leading with his right shoulder. He quickly scanned the room for threats. Gar trailed after him, winded by the steep steel stairs.

  Dolly was on the far side of the unmade double bed with blood drizzling down her right hand and off the tip of a stainless steel bread knife with an ordinary looking wooden handle. The instant her eyes met James the Younger, she tossed it harmlessly on the dingy white cotton sheet in front of her. Dolly meant no harm to the policemen. There were no tears or emotion in her face, just the long-standing sad eyes James the Younger had seen so many times before.

  Aaron was slumped on the floor in the doorway between the bedroom and the bathroom clutching his chest and wheezing as his lungs filled with blood. His eyes were fixed in a stare straight ahead at nothing in particular. Aaron did not look much like the shirtless powerful drunken bully that usually held court in these situations. Part of James the Younger felt an intense relief that ‘justice’ had been served at the hands of Aaron’s punching bag. He knelt down beside Aaron to assess the damage.

  Gar cursed softly under his breath as he stepped over the piles of trash and clothes on the floor. While James the Younger stayed with Aaron and guarded the crime scene, Gar deftly cuffed Dolly and led her downstairs to his patrol car.

  “Hope she walks on this. Nobody deserved it more than he did,” Gar whispered to James the Younger as Gar and Dolly stepped over Aaron’s feet on the way out. Dolly didn’t look back as she kept an even pace out the door.

  James the Younger glanced around the hovel for evidence without getting up. The place was trashed as always with fast food wrappers, beer cans, and dirty clothes. He couldn’t tell by looking at the place whether or not they had struggled - it always looked like World War III. He moved his knee back as Aaron’s blood began spreading out in a pool on the cheap brown carpeting.

  James the Younger pulled on a rubber glove and grabbed a yellow t-shirt from the floor nearby and held it up against Aaron’s chest as the wheezing seemed to slow. He wanted to care, but couldn’t raise the enthusiasm to worry whether the EMS attendants would make it in time. By the time they did arrive, the wheezing had reduced to a whisper. At least Aaron did not expire on James the Younger’s watch.

  Dolly was been Mirandized, but her mind was a world away and of no use to them in the immediate investigation. There was little point in calling homicide investigators out in the middle of the night if a good report and pictures was all the police stood to accomplish, but the call was a procedural requirement. Doc gave orders to canvass the neighboring rooms for any relevant information, but knew from experience that nobody ever hears anything. Even the loud-flowered female on the balcony was of little use other than to justify James the Younger breaking in the door because of a woman screaming. Doc went back to the office to make notes on the log and finish paperwork.

  Doc always held out hope that someday an oaf meaner and stronger would take Aaron out leaving Dolly in the hands of Adult Protective Services. She had no better preparation for independent living than a grade school child. She had never worked, had no driver’s license or ID card, and her educational background was dubious. She couldn’t even print a coherent victim statement form on past calls. Now she was to face the fight of her life alone and unequipped.

  But it was not Doc’s problem - he had enough stress of his own. It was getting close to the end of shift and he was determined to get off on time for a change. He enjoyed field work because every day was a new day. Rarely did problems cross the gulf between dawn and nightfall to plague him on a fresh shift.

  Detective Andy Jackson from Homicide showed up at the back of the roll call room without advance notice. When Doc walked out of his office to the head of the room, Doc eyed him from the podium and Andy stared back intently. Although they had known each other for years, it was out of the ordinary for a detective to just show up at roll call and claim a back chair. Doc would have expected Andy to come into the office before roll call with a joke, a bit of gossip, and most likely a request to share or obtain information on a current case. Doc couldn’t read Andy’s face. It could have read antagonism, anger or any number of unpleasant emotions.

  At the close of roll call Andy circled around the back of the room and preceded Doc into the office.

  “You might want to close the door, Doc,” he seemed to growl. Doc complied and claimed his comfortable high back faux leather office chair donated when a generous businessman recently remodeled his business.

  Andy cleared his throat. “It’s about this Aaron Garner homicide. The DA is sure that this isn’t going to trial, of course. She doesn’t have the mental capacity to help with a defense, so he is going to buy into self-defense.”

  “I expected as much,” Doc agreed. “She’s a sad creature. Somebody should have taken him out years ago.”

  “Doc, we have an ID on her now.” Andy threw out the words, pushing deeply back into the metal frame side chair as if the lingering sentence was contagious.

  “We’ve run her name before on family violence calls and never came up with anything.”

  “She doesn’t have a criminal history, Doc. She has no history at all. No ID on file, no next of kin on her jail registration. Just on a hunch we ran her by Missing Persons. We got a hit on a set of prints off of a Washington State database for missing children. The PD out there does ID kits on kindergarteners in the public schools in case they ever get lo
st or abducted.”

  “Kindergarten? Geez, how long has she been gone, Andy?”

  “Over thirty years, Doc.”

  Doc relaxed back in his chair with the news that finally Dolly might have someone left to care for her. Maybe she wasn’t just adrift in the world after all if someone had reported her missing.

  “We’ve been working calls on her and Aaron for years - she’s been gone awhile. Have you notified her relatives? If she’s free to go on the criminal side of the house, are they ready to take responsibility for her with all that’s happened?“

  “We’re notifying her relative now.” Andy glanced at the door as if he were getting ready to run from a grizzly. “She’s out of Washington, Doc. Out of Spokane, gone about thirty years. As far as we’ve been able to piece together, Aaron raised her all over the country, keeping her out of school, changing her name, telling her that her family abandoned her. She was just a little kid back then - what could she do? The Adult Protective Services psychologist said she had Stockholm syndrome where a vic bonds with her captor and becomes dependent on him for survival. Aaron kept her from forming a relationship with anyone else, so he effectively kept her imprisoned by her isolation. Her name’s not Dolly Garner. The name Rachel Harrison came up - it’s your sister, Doc.”

  Dolly couldn’t possibly be Rachel his brain railed. Doc had been given thirty years to make up for the night he left her behind to chase the stupid puppy. He wasted so many years when she was on his radar screen all along. Shame and guilt smothered any trace of elation. With trepidation he slowly dared to wonder what his responsibility would be to her.