Tangled Up in Blue

by Rosa Brooks

  Or maybe they just weren’t interested. Usually, when someone in the policing world asked about my day job, I’d say something vague, like “I’m a lawyer.” This was not entirely accurate, but it was simple, and it had the virtue of being both boring and off-putting (most cops dislike lawyers), so few people pursued the subject. Sometimes I said, “I teach,” which usually led other officers to assume that I taught elementary or high school kids. Almost no one bothered to ask any follow-up questions.

  Mostly, I was glad. As much as possible, I wanted my partners to accept me as just another officer. But sometimes it created an almost vertiginous sense of double vision, of two worlds existing in uneasy juxtaposition, with, at any given time, one of those worlds invisible to everyone but me.

  I’m probably overdramatizing. Everyone inhabits multiple worlds: our families, our homes, our workplaces, our neighborhoods, our present, and our past. If my multiple worlds were unusual, it was only because they so rarely intersected, and because they were, in so many ways, mutually unintelligible.

  My mother—one of the few who knew about both my worlds—still wasn’t happy with me. She rarely raised the subject directly, but periodically she’d send me links to news stories about police abuses, and whenever we were together, she’d make a grim reference to the latest travesty:

  “So, how about those cops in Utah who arrested a hospital nurse because she wouldn’t let them draw blood from an injured suspect?”

  “Uh-huh, I saw that,” I’d say. “Terrible.” And I’d change the subject.

  A few days later, she’d look up from the newspaper again. “It’s outrageous how the NFL is treating Colin Kaepernick. But thank goodness someone’s raising the issue of racism and police brutality.”

  “Mmmm, yeah,” I’d say.

  Occasionally, she was less indirect. “Well,” she’d say, “I was going to tell you that smoking marijuana is really helping with my back pain, but I remembered I’d better not say anything, because you’d probably arrest me.”

  I’ve never found it easy to confront my mother about conflicts or tensions between us. But after months of this, I finally lost patience.

  “Mom, would you please cut the crap!”

  She gazed at me wide-eyed, all injured innocence.

  I ground my teeth. “I understand perfectly well that there’s a lot wrong with policing, and that it’s very, very easy to read the news and find examples of cops doing awful things. I don’t need you to constantly remind me of that. I read the news too.”

  She sniffed. “I’m just mentioning a few issues.”

  “Mom, I get that you don’t like that I’m doing this, but why do you trust me and respect me so little? You act like I’m uncritically joining ‘the enemy,’ and you keep making nasty cracks about it. It’s offensive, and it’s hurting my feelings.”

  She stared at me. I expected her to be defensive, but for a moment, she just seemed taken aback.

  After a long pause, she said, “I’m sorry.”

  We were both silent for a few minutes.

  Then she said, “My encounters with the police have all been bad. I mean, very bad. Traumatic. So I can’t help finding it upsetting that you’re doing this.”

  “Just trust me a little bit, okay?” I wasn’t sure how to make her understand. “Please, just trust that I’m the same person I’ve always been. I haven’t become blind to any realities or abandoned any values. But I think the world is complicated, and people aren’t all one thing or all another. I’m trying to learn something. I don’t know where I’m going to go with this, or what I’m going to do with this.” I hadn’t yet told my mother about the proposal for a new fellowship program I had put together while I was at the academy, the program that I hoped would create a space for young officers to talk about racial justice, over-criminalization, alternatives to arrest, and all the other issues resolutely ignored in the official recruit curriculum. I didn’t know if my program proposal would go anywhere, so I hadn’t mentioned it, but I was still hoping it would eventually come together. “Just trust me, whatever I do with this, it won’t be something bad. Okay?”

  She looked at me again, a little uncertain. “I love you, and I’m always proud of you. I’ll try.”

  It was something, at least.

  Like a Sparrow

  Many lay responders worry about hurting the person (for example, by breaking the person’s ribs or breastbone) while giving CPR, but a person who is in need of CPR is clinically dead (i.e., the person has no heartbeat and is not breathing). It is very unlikely that you will injure the person while giving CPR, but even if you do, consider this: any injury you may cause is secondary when compared with the person’s current circumstances.

  —American Red Cross, First Aid/CPR/AED

  Clear!”

  We all stood back, leaning away from the elderly woman on the floor. The medics had ripped her shirt open to apply the defibrillator pads to her chest, and her body jumped slightly as the machine buzzed and electricity coursed through her.

  “Resume CPR,” ordered one of the medics.

  My partner that night, Adam, was a full-time paramedic when he wasn’t working as a reserve officer, and the DC medics who arrived a few minutes after us seemed content to defer to his expertise. Now, Adam looked over at me. “Your turn.”

  I knelt by the old woman’s side, adjusted my hands, and started chest compressions. Her skin was warm and soft and crinkly. I was flooded by a sudden memory: sitting on my grandmother’s lap as a small child, running my hands wonderingly over the soft, wrinkled skin of her arms. She died of a heart attack when I was eight.

  You’re supposed to aim for thirty compressions at the rate of a hundred compressions per minute, followed by two rescue breaths, then more compressions. In training, they told us to sing the lyrics to the Bee Gees song “Stayin’ Alive” while doing chest compressions, because the aptly titled song turns out to have precisely a hundred beats per minute. But it didn’t seem right to belt out “Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive!” over the body of a dead or dying woman, so I tried to just keep the song going inside my head while I counted compressions out loud. “One!—Two!—Three!—Four!”

  It’s a terrible thing to do to someone, slamming the heels of your hands repeatedly into their chest. There’s nothing decorous about CPR. It’s undignified, exhausting, and violent. By the third or fourth compression cycle, I was breathing hard. The old lady was still unresponsive, her body tiny and vulnerable, her wrinkled breasts shifting slightly with each compression.

  “Fourteen!—Fifteen!—Sixteen!”

  Under my hands, I felt the brittle bones in her rib cage shift and crack, and it took all my willpower not to cry out and jump back. Instead, I kept slamming my hands down on her chest.

  “Seventeen!—Eighteen!—Nineteen!”

  More bones cracked.

  Fractured and broken ribs are considered an acceptable by-product of CPR, since it is better to be alive with some cracked bones than dead with an intact rib cage. But it felt like sacrilege. The old woman was like a tiny injured bird. Like a sparrow, I thought. And I was crushing her soft, fragile chest.

  “Switch,” Adam finally ordered, and a medic slid in beside me and took over the compressions. I pulled myself up, relieved.

  We continued the CPR for another few minutes, but finally the senior medic with the ambulance team gave a small shake of his head. “I don’t think there’s any point continuing. I’m calling it,” he said. He looked at his watch and made a note on a tablet. We all stood back, breathing hard. It was crowded in the small bedroom, with four or five adults hovering over the little body on the floor.

  Outside, there was an awful wail of rage, or pain. Then a male voice, cursing, and thuds and crashes, and more cries of pain. It sounded like someone was taking a beating. Adam and I looked at each other and, stepping as carefully as
we could over the body, rushed out to the hallway.

  In the short corridor running between the living room, bedroom, and bathroom, an enormous man appeared to be trying to smash down the wall. He cursed and howled and smashed his fists into the drywall, shouting and kicking and clawing at it. His long dreadlocks snapped back and forth as he flung himself at it, and tears streamed down his cheeks.

  We had rushed out prepared to intervene in an assault, but it took only an instant to understand that what we were watching was simply grief, raw and angry. Adam sighed and went back into the bedroom. I stayed where I was, watching the man howl and writhe until finally, exhausted, he slid down onto the floor and wept.

  After a few minutes, I cleared my throat. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah.” His voice was ragged and muffled. “That’s my mom. . . . I came right over. I was bringing her dinner. I saw you all doing CPR and I thought she was going to be okay, then I heard him say—I heard him say—” He stopped talking and sobbed some more.

  After a few minutes, he stopped crying, stood up shakily, and walked into the living room. I trailed after him.

  He wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “Can I go in and see her?”

  “I’m sorry, not yet. A doctor or a detective might need to come in and take a look first.” I held my hands out, palms up, trying to preempt his incredulous questions. “I know, it’s crazy, but even when it looks like clearly it’s natural causes, we still have to do that. I’m sorry.”

  “Can we at least put a blanket over her?”

  “I’m sorry, but not yet.” I felt like the worst person on earth. “For now, we need to leave everything the way it is. I’m really sorry. I know this is hard.”

  He nodded, looking down. “So what happens now?”

  “Good question. Let me go check in with my partner, okay? I think he’s calling this in.”

  I went back to the bedroom. The medics were packing up their equipment, and Adam was on the radio. I waited.

  “Detective has to come,” he confirmed. “He should be here in half an hour or so, maybe a little more. He’s on the other side of town.”

  Which left us with nothing much to do but wait. I went back out to explain it to the dreadlocked man.

  “So everyone just waits here?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Aw, Christ. I fucking can’t stand this.” But his anger had been taken out on the wall, and he just sounded sad. “She was fine just a few hours ago. I was over earlier today. She was completely normal.”

  I took out my notebook and started running through the usual questions. Name, age, health history, occupation.

  The dreadlocked man was Thomas, and his mother was Ernestina. She was in her seventies, but had still been working as an accounts clerk at a school.

  “That’s what I hate,” said Thomas. “She worked her whole goddamned life. Her whole life. She brought me and my siblings up alone and she worked the whole fucking time. She worked three jobs sometimes. Now, I was always on her to retire, but even though she had money saved up, she kept saying she couldn’t afford it.”

  I thought of my own mother, also in her late seventies, also still working. She too had worked all through my childhood, writing books and articles, traveling to give lectures, organizing protests, marching on all those picket lines. Somehow, she had managed to support her family that way, and though money was tight throughout my childhood, eventually the success of her books left her financially comfortable. Now she didn’t really need to work anymore, but like Thomas’s mother, she kept at it anyway, still writing and speaking and organizing, even though she was becoming frail, her once-strong frame shrinking and growing brittle.

  By now two more people had come into the apartment, a young man and an older woman. Both sat at the kitchen table.

  Thomas gestured at them. “That’s my boy. He’s autistic. My mom kept saying she needed to keep working because his care’s so much money, and I’m out of work. That’s why we’ve been staying with her.” He gestured with his chin at a mattress on the floor at the opposite end of the room.

  Tears flooded down his cheeks again.

  “I told her I could handle it, I’m gonna find a job, I got some savings too. I told her she needed to take a break, enjoy life a little for once, she didn’t need to be helping me. She said maybe next year she’d retire, travel a little. She worked her whole goddamned life. Her whole goddamned life. I never could get her to just take it easy.”

  We waited for a while, in silence. I was tired and wished I could sit down. But if my own mother was lying dead on the floor, I wouldn’t want a bunch of cops sprawling lazily around on my living room sofa, so I just shifted my weight from one leg to another.

  Finally Thomas waved listlessly at the kitchen. “That’s my son, Robert, and Mary, a neighbor.”

  Mary made a little harrumphing noise and gestured at the bedroom with her chin. “She gone to Jesus.”

  Thomas scowled at her. “She’s not with Jesus. She’s just fucking dead. She spent her whole fucking life working and she never got to rest, and now she’s dead.”

  Mary harrumphed again and looked away. Robert didn’t say anything. He just rocked his body back and forth in his chair and made a quiet keening sound. He looked to be in his late teens or early twenties.

  “Shit.” Thomas stood up. “I guess I better start calling people to let them know. I’m gonna go outside and make some calls, okay?”

  He left. Through the window, I could see him out on the sidewalk, pacing and talking into his cell phone.

  After a few minutes, Mary made more harrumphing noises and walked out too.

  That left me and Robert, who continued to rock and moan softly. From the bedroom, I could hear Adam and the medics talking quietly. They were standing in a dead woman’s bedroom, her still-warm body cooling on the floor. I knew they were trying to keep their voices low and respectful, but every now and then there was a muted snort of laughter from one of the medics, quickly suppressed.

  After a while, I said, “Hey, Robert. You okay?”

  He made a little high-pitched noise.

  “Your dad’s going to be back soon, Robert. In just a few minutes. Can I get you something? Maybe a glass of water?”

  Robert didn’t make eye contact, but he nodded his head and said, “Glass a water, glass a water.”

  I rummaged around the cupboard and found a clean glass. I filled it at the sink and offered it to Robert. He took it and drained it in quick gulps.

  “Wow, you were pretty thirsty, huh?”

  “Glass a water, glass a water,” he said to the floor.

  “Another?” I asked.

  “Glass a water, glass a water, glass a water.”

  “No problem. Can you give me the glass back? I’ll go fill it up again.”

  Robert looked at the wall over my head, but he handed me the glass.

  I filled it up and gave it back to him, and he gulped it down again.

  “You hungry, Robert? Looks like there’s some crackers here too.” I handed Robert a box of crackers I’d spotted on the kitchen counter, and he wolfed a few down, then shoved the box toward me, making a mewling noise. “For me? No, I’m good. Thanks.” He took the box back and ate more.

  Time was passing agonizingly slowly. Where was the detective?

  “Adam,” I called out. “What’s the story?”

  “Just gotta wait,” Adam called back.

  I wandered around the room. It wasn’t a bad apartment; if there hadn’t been a queen-size mattress taking up floor space at the end of the living room, it would have seemed comfortable and open. On the walls, there were framed travel posters and African art, along with some bright paintings of flowers and birds.

  By the time Thomas came back in, Robert had gone through two more glasses of water and the whole box of crackers. “Hey, buddy,
” Thomas said, crouching in front of his son. “You’re going to your auntie’s house, okay? She’ll be here in a minute.” Robert made a noise that sounded happy.

  “That’s a really beautiful painting,” I said, pointing at the wall.

  For a moment, Thomas’s face brightened. “Yeah, it’s nice, isn’t it? My mom loved African art. She collected it. She always wanted to go there, you know? See what it was really like.” His face crumpled again.

  “I like that one too.” I pointed at a painting of birds.

  “Robert did that one.”

  “Robert? He painted that?”

  “Yeah. He’s a real good artist. Aren’t you, Robert?”

  Robert nodded and grinned and made a little yipping sound.

  “Wow, Robert. That’s amazing. You’re a really good artist.”

  “He goes to this program for autistic people, they do a lot of art there. They keep saying he could sell his paintings.”

  “He could. This is great.”

  “You want to see some of his other stuff?”

  “Sure.”

  Thomas opened a big wooden chest and rummaged around a bit, coming out with a large scrapbook. We spent the next ten minutes going through Robert’s paintings and drawings. Until Adam came in and cleared his throat, I almost forgot about Thomas’s mother lying dead in the next room.

  “It looks like the detective got held up at a crime scene, sir. But the medical examiner talked on the phone with the ambulance team and says that since everything looks okay—in the sense that this was natural causes, I mean—they don’t need the detective to come after all.”

  Thomas looked unsure. “So, okay, no detective, but what do we do now?”

  “Well, it’s okay to release the bo—your mom—to a funeral home. Usually, they come pick people up. You got a funeral home you like?”