by Julia Keller
Libby broke off her sentence, breathing with an effort. She had a look in her eye that Bell had seen before. It was the look that came when someone’s belief in justice was destroyed.
It was more than just normal disappointment. There was a sense of betrayal—not just by the bad guys, but by the good guys who didn’t seem to give a damn about what was being lost, what was dying right before their eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Libby said. “I didn’t mean to go off like that.”
“It’s okay.”
“That’s what happens to me now. I think I’m over it and then something reminds me and…” She couldn’t finish.
Bell didn’t have the heart to tell her that there was no “over it.” So she nodded and put a hand on the closest stack of printouts. Her meaning was clear:
Back to work.
* * *
Out on the dark, cold street, Bell pulled up the collar of her jacket. God, it was freezing.
She looked around. No one else in sight. No cars in the street, either. Just the shadow-black outlines of the closed businesses—some closed until tomorrow morning, some closed forever—brooding over the broken sidewalk. Towns like Acker’s Gap became ghost towns at night.
She hated this town. But she also loved it. That didn’t make sense, but it was true.
Maybe, she thought, you couldn’t truly love a place until you’d gone through a spell of hating it, too. If you didn’t care about it at all—and she knew plenty of people who didn’t give a damn about their hometown, who left it behind as quickly as they could, never giving it another thought—then you couldn’t summon up the passion to love it, either. The hatred enabled the love. You hated it because you loved it—and because it had broken your heart, over and over again.
Bell raised her eyes to the mountains. The great dark shapes eliminated a big chunk of the sky, blocking entire constellations. Each season, there were stars that the people of Acker’s Gap never saw.
Sometimes she sensed that those mountains weren’t just innocent bystanders, after all. Sometimes she sensed that they secretly dreamed of swallowing this place whole.
Might be a blessing, she thought.
Chapter Thirteen
The next night, in the narrow living room of a small house in one of the scruffier neighborhoods of Acker’s Gap, a lithe young woman stood in front of a man in a wheelchair. She leaned over and picked a small thread from the sleeve of his shirt.
“Quit fussing,” Jake snapped.
“I’m not fussing. Just want you to look nice.”
“Are too fussing.”
“Maybe I am. But it’s for a good cause.” Molly checked out the rest of his shirt, concentrating, looking for imperfections, like a jeweler pricing a gem.
He was wearing dark green corduroy trousers, brown socks, and brown loafers, plus that chambray shirt. The shirt was so new that it still featured the creases caused by its long-term internment in a flat plastic package.
The shirt was a gift from Molly. She’d brought it along with her tonight when she showed up with Malik to make dinner.
“Nobody’ll know what I look like,” Jake said. “I’ll be sitting in a damned room. Alone. Taking calls.”
“You’ll know what you look like.”
“Yeah? So?”
“It matters. If you look sharp, you’ll be sharp.” She continued to study him with an appraising eye. When she leaned forward again and tugged at his collar, straightening it, he caught a whiff of the soap she used. He didn’t react—not outwardly—but inside, he was thrown into a tumult of longing. He had declared himself to her once, three years ago, and she had explained all the reasons why it wouldn’t work. He didn’t fight her on it. Maybe, he’d thought at the time, he would try later. Make his case again.
And now, of course, everything was different.
He had no idea why she kept coming around. When he tried to talk about it or—God forbid—to thank her, the glare he received in return was intense, prolonged, and definitely unpleasant, and he backed off. Molly Drucker was a hard person to thank.
She turned to the couch, where Malik sat with his card deck.
“What do you think, Malik?” she asked. “Does Jake look like he’s ready to go to work?”
Malik grinned. “Yeah,” he said. He added a squeal, and then he tossed the entire deck up in the air. He scrambled on his hands and knees amid the delirium of scattered cards.
She turned back. “Okay, then. There you go. By the way, I can drop you off at the courthouse. I’m not on the duty roster tonight, so I can pick you up after your shift, too.”
“That’s just dandy.” The word, the way he said it, was heavy with sarcasm. “No thanks. I’m not a kid on his first day at school. I don’t need your help.”
“Yeah. You do. Your van still needs a new transmission—unless there was maybe a spontaneous healing that you forgot to mention.”
They glared at each other for a few seconds, him looking up at her, her looking down at him. That was the thing about Molly: She always spoke her mind. She didn’t sugarcoat things. He was dependent on other people for some basic necessities—things such as cleaning himself and his environment, and lately, until he came up with the money to get his van fixed, getting places—and while it irritated the hell out of him, it was a fact, stark and simple. No hiding the reality. Other people hemmed and hawed, coming up with coy conversational work-arounds so that his needs weren’t always front and center—but not Molly.
If she didn’t drop him off and pick him up, he’d have to call the county van, the one used to haul Medicaid patients and special-needs kids to their doctor appointments. Chances were, he’d be late for work; the county van was notoriously unreliable, especially at night. Jake had been depending on it ever since the transmission on his van conked out.
“Let me get a comb,” Molly said. “I think that hair of yours could use another pass-through. Anybody ever tell you that you’ve got a cowlick there in the back?”
“Noticed it myself a time or two.” He didn’t mind her ribbing. In fact, he sort of relished it.
She stood behind him, pushing the comb through his springy brown hair. His hair was longer now than at any previous time in his adult life, falling almost to his shoulders. As a deputy, he’d kept it razored short for many reasons: No time to fuss with hair when you were answering emergency calls. Plus the deputy’s hat—brown, flat-brimmed, with a circle of gold braid around the crown that he was supposed to think was silly but that secretly pleased his vanity—fit better over a smooth head than one unruly with too much hair. The new deputy, Dave Previtt, had thick blond hair, so thick and so blond that some county employees had taken to calling him Surfer Dave behind his back, and Jake always wondered why he kept it that way. Surfer Dave’s hat always looked ready to pop right off, the hair forcing it out like the charged-up waters of Old Faithful.
Jake closed his eyes. Molly took a few minutes combing his hair. To steady herself while she did it, she put one hand on his left shoulder. The feel of that hand was something he would remember through his entire shift, he thought, and maybe his entire life. He let himself be melodramatic in his thoughts in a way he’d never let himself be out loud. The feel of her hand—strong and true—centered him. Back when he first realized he was falling in love with her, he’d watch her do her job at accident scenes and it was her hands that drew his appreciative gaze. He had a job to do, too, at such times, from unwinding the yellow tape to taking notes to collecting evidence to shooing away rubberneckers, but when he could, he’d sneak another look at Molly’s hands.
“There,” she said. “All done.”
She lifted her hand from his shoulder. The loss of that pressure instantly grieved him; he felt as if he might fly right off the face of the world, without her hand there to hold him down. But that was silly, and he knew it.
She thrust a mirror in front of his face, a small round one with a pink plastic handle.
“What do you think?” she said. She
held on to the handle.
He pushed the mirror away. “Jesus Christ, it’s not a beauty pageant, okay?”
“Just didn’t want you looking like you don’t give a damn.”
“Maybe I don’t.” He was feeling restless now, moody. He didn’t know what to do with his feelings for her, the ones that still lingered, even after all that had happened. They annoyed him, those feelings. They were too intense. He wished they’d go away.
Sometimes.
“If I thought that was true,” she said, “I wouldn’t be here.” She put the mirror down on the coffee table.
“Where’d you get that thing, anyway?” he said. “That’s not mine.”
“It’s mine.”
“What’s with the pink?”
“I like pink.”
“You like pink.”
“Yeah. You got a problem with that?” She said it in a mock-tough style, like a wannabe gangster.
Malik’s voice flapped in the background: “You got a problem with that? You got a problem with that?” If he heard a line that he liked, or that was familiar to him, he had a tendency to repeat it. This one scored on both counts.
“No,” Jake said, once Malik had settled down again. “No problem.”
Truth was, pink seemed a little—well, a little girly for Molly Drucker. Pastels didn’t suit her. To him she was all about primary colors: the dark blue of her EMT uniform, the trousers and the shirt; the black of her skin. When he was growing up in Beckley, West Virginia, he had seen exactly one African-American. One. That was it. Not three, not five—one. West Virginia, he’d read, was one of the least diverse states in the country, and he believed it.
Sometimes when he felt sorry for himself—usually first thing in the morning, when the reality of his handicap came slamming back into his newly roused consciousness—he thought about Molly, and what it must have been like to be an African-American growing up in Raythune County, West Virginia, the loneliness, the unabashed stares from the old-timers. The muttered comments. She’d never said so, but he knew there had to have been muttered comments. There always were.
“Time to go, Miss Congeniality,” Molly said. “I’ll go start up the truck. Can you help Malik with his coat?”
He grunted and obliged. He was still thinking about her hand on his shoulder and how good it felt. Too good.
* * *
“Ever tell Sheriff Harrison how you really feel about the job?” Molly asked. They had almost reached the courthouse.
“Don’t have to. She knows.” Jake leaned his head out the open window as Acker’s Gap went rolling by. Brick streets, parked cars, mailboxes, houses, empty lots.
He liked to feel the cold wind on his face. Found it bracing. He tilted his head, looking up. The sky had started out starless but at some point had cleared up. Dashes of light now rippled across the black fabric.
“So she’s a mind-reader now,” Molly said.
Malik sat between them, jittery as always. Humming.
“I mean I made it clear by my attitude,” Jake countered. “When she first offered it.”
“And you think she picked up on the subtle little signals you were sending out.”
“Sounds silly when you say it that way. Not what I meant.”
“How would she know if you didn’t tell her?”
He considered the question. “She knows me, doesn’t she?”
“Maybe.”
Molly swung the truck into a parking spot just up the street from the courthouse. At this hour, there was only one other vehicle parked along the block, a small yellow hatchback. Jake assumed it belonged to Beverly Epps. The courthouse was a brooding presence off to the right, three stories of tired stone heaped into a dull, massive square, fronted by a series of wide concrete steps with a wrought-iron railing on either side. Only one window was lighted, on the bottom left-hand side; that was the dispatcher’s office. Beverly Epps was waiting for him in there, to show him the ropes.
Like he couldn’t figure out how to punch a button all by himself.
“Okay,” he said, as soon as Molly had shut down the engine. “I’ll tell Harrison that being a dispatcher is beneath me. Great way to start out a new job.”
“Might be another way to phrase it. Just so she knows you’re on the lookout for something else. If it comes up. That’s all I meant.” She patted Malik’s arm. “Sit tight, buddy. I’m getting Jake’s chair out of the back. Then you and me will head home.”
She helped Jake into the chair and they moved toward the courthouse. A handicap entrance had been added on the north side. The ramp predated Jake’s injury—the county commissioners had wanted to head off a federal order—but he knew that a lot of people resented the cost of it and somehow considered him responsible. The timeline didn’t work out, but they didn’t care about timelines. So far he was the only one who really needed the ramp. A couple of elderly people used it, but they’d managed the steps before the ramp was available—a fact about which certain citizens still muttered, their eyes dark with judgment, while they scratched the back of their necks.
Molly pushed his chair up the ramp. Jake had tried to argue her out of it; he could get himself up a damned ramp, couldn’t he? But then it dawned on him, as she ended the argument by grabbing the rubber-capped handles that jutted out at his shoulders and guiding the chair up the incline, that this wasn’t about his disability. She was aware of the fact that he could do this for himself.
She wanted to be with him a few more seconds, before they said their brusque good-byes.
He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. He just did.
“So,” she said, “if I get a call to go in to work and can’t get back here by the end of your—”
“I’ll call Steve,” he said. “He’s on duty tonight. When he gets a break he’ll swing by and take me home.”
“You’ll have to wait.”
“Used to that.”
She nodded. “Don’t take this wrong, but I hope you have a boring night.”
“Yeah. Know what you mean.” A boring night meant no emergencies. No sudden blooms of violence, with attendant human misery, to deal with. Just a long, unbroken stretch of black Appalachian night.
“Thought you would.”
Still she didn’t leave. The awkwardness increased by a tick.
“Okay,” Molly finally said. “See you around.”
He nodded. “Thanks again for the lift. Tell Malik I said he needs to brush his teeth before he goes to bed—even if he doesn’t want to.”
That brought a smile. “He never wants to. But I’ll tell him.”
Then she hit the buzzer—again, he could do it himself, and she knew that, but she did it quickly, before he could lift his hand, and she said, “They’ll have to get you your own key.”
“Already been discussed. Bev’s got one ready. Going to give it to me tonight.”
“Okay.”
And then Molly did leave, turning and heading back down the ramp. Jake suddenly wondered—he let the thought rise and fall in his mind before dismissing it, because it couldn’t be true, could it?—if she had secretly wanted to kiss him good-bye.
Maybe that was the reason for her hesitation.
They had kissed only once. Three years ago, on the night his life changed forever. They had kissed and then she’d rejected him, rejected everything he was offering her—his heart, his devotion, his entire life—and then he had driven away in his Blazer. He was grateful for its heft and its speed, because he had needed to be enclosed right then, wrapped up in something larger than himself, something that could contain the rapid spread of his sorrow. Something that could form an impervious barrier, stopping his immense sadness from seeping out into the world.
Also, he’d needed to get the hell out of there for the simple sake of his pride, which is why the speed mattered, too.
Later that night, he had walked into a gas station and a cowardly punk had shot him. And that was that.
He and Molly were friends now. The relation
ship was easily explained: He was a cripple, helpless and needy, and she was a kind woman. In any case, he was in no position to offer anything to anyone. End of story.
But still. Something in the way she’d stayed with him at the courthouse door tonight, before she rang the buzzer—that pause, that fraught moment—did a terrible thing: It gave him hope. Hope for something more with Molly.
He hated hope, hated and feared it. Hope had betrayed him, over and over again. Hope was cruel. Hope, he knew, was for suckers and for idiot assholes—but damned if that wasn’t what he was feeling right now, just the faintest, frailest edge of hope, and it was like an unraveling hem, like something you shouldn’t touch because you might make it come apart even faster, dissolving before your very eyes.
* * *
The desk was not the right height. The wheels of his chair didn’t fit under it, and so Jake had to stretch forward to reach the equipment he would need to answer the phones and send deputies or EMTs to locations in need of them. It was awkward, but it was okay.
“No problem,” he said. “I can make do.”
“You sure?” Beverly said. “I mean—we could tell them that from now on we need something else…”
“Really. It’s fine.” What he wanted to say was: This is not a permanent gig for me, lady. No point in changing the furniture.
Bev put both hands under her belly and staggered clumsily across the room toward the utility table. She was short, blond, and stout; she had been stout even without her pregnancy and with it—“Just call me Shamu,” Bev had told him cheerfully when he first arrived. “Won’t bother me a bit. Truth’s truth, I always say.”
She wanted to show him how to work the shiny red Keurig coffeemaker, even though he had assured her repeatedly that he could figure it out on his own.
Watching her lurch from her right foot to her left foot, right to left, right to left, with only a modicum of forward progress, Jake realized that he moved more smoothly—and definitely faster—in his wheelchair than Bev did on two good legs. But that was not the sort of thing you could say out loud.
