The Right Wrong Thing

by Ellen Kirschman

  “Tom have any of those distortion things?”

  “I told you I can’t repeat what someone else told me.”

  “So, if I had any of that, just saying, does it mean I’m crazy?”

  “No, it means you’re human.”

  She sinks back into the couch as though this announcement was so unexpected and so profound it has sucked all the fight out of her. Tears spill down her face. She wipes them away on her sleeve. “Busted,” she says. “I hate being human.” She pulls some tissues from the box on the coffee table and blows her nose. “So ask me.”

  “Ask you what?”

  “Which of those things I have.” She turns her hands over, palms up in an offering. “All of them. I have them all.”

  “So, tell me what happened. In as much detail as possible.”

  She takes a deep breath. “It’s like they say. I got scared. I froze. I tried to help. There were so many of them, hands, legs, feet, everywhere, grabbing me, trying to get my gun. I couldn’t see Tom. I couldn’t see anything.” Now she’s breathing in shallow sips, her face drained of color. “It’s dark. I can’t see. Someone is lying on my face, I can’t breathe, I can’t scream. I am going to die. I have to run, get out of here.” She scrambles to her feet, in panic mode caught in the terror of a past moment as if it is happening all over again.

  “Randy.” I’m on my feet. “Randy, look at me. Look at me.” Her hands are on her chest.

  “I can’t breathe. I’m having a heart attack.” Her eyes spin around the room looking for the door.

  “You are not having a heart attack. You’re having a panic attack. Take a deep breath, hold it, and let it out slowly.” Her eyes are still flicking over the room looking for danger. I step directly in front of her so I’m the only thing she sees. “Keep looking at me, Randy. Take another breath, hold it, and let it out slowly.” Her breathing eases just slightly. “Press your feet into the floor. Good. Keep breathing. Slowly. Tell me where you are.”

  “Your office.”

  “Good. Now look at me. What color is my shirt?”

  “Gray.”

  “Good. Keep breathing, longer on the exhale. Can you sit down again?” She backs up a few steps until she’s pressing against the couch. “Feel your legs against the sofa. Can you?” She nods. “Is it warm or cool? Hard or soft?”

  “Soft.”

  “Warm or cool?”

  “Hot.” She sinks down, her head drops back, and she closes her eyes. Her face is flushed, dripping with sweat and tears, but at least she’s stopped struggling for air.

  “Good. Now I’m going to get you a glass of water from the cooler in the waiting room. I’ll only be gone a minute and I’m right outside. I’ll leave the door open. Do you hear me?” She nods her head. When I return, she’s leaning forward, elbows on her knees, her head in her hands. She downs the water in a single gulp.

  “What happened to me?”

  “You had a panic attack. Have you had these before?”

  She shakes her head no.

  “We probably triggered it by talking about your incident. It happens sometimes.”

  “Still think I’m not crazy?”

  “This has nothing to do with being crazy. The things that happened to you at the creek were beyond your conscious control, beyond anyone’s conscious control. It’s called an ‘amygdala hijack,’ meaning the alarm center in your brain is in charge, not the thinking part. When your life is threatened, or even if you just think your life is threatened, the amygdala goes into overdrive. It’s been this way since the beginning of time. It’s not a choice, it just happens.”

  “They weren’t trying to kill me, they were trying to kill Tom.”

  “If someone was trying to cut Tom’s head off with a sword, what do you think they were going to do to you, give you a haircut? Cut you a piece of cake? You didn’t have time to analyze their behavior, all you had was a nanosecond to save your own life. That’s why we have a survival instinct.”

  “I ran off and left him because I thought I was going to die. That makes me weak.”

  And there it is, the “W” word. Better to be crazy than weak if you’re a cop.

  “Look. We ask cops to do their best to protect each other. We don’t ask them to commit suicide.”

  “I messed up. Jumped on the pile, couldn’t handle the heat, and ran away.”

  “So, a good cop wins every fight? Tom Rutgers didn’t win this one.”

  “That’s my fault.”

  “Really? Let me offer another perspective. I’ve never been a cop and I don’t want to second guess anyone’s actions—”

  “Go ahead. Everyone else is second guessing me.”

  “Maybe Tom Rutgers should have waited for backup before he ran down to the creek. Maybe he should have taken a minute to work out a plan with you. He was the senior officer.” Randy scrapes at her eyes with a wad of damp tissue. “This never occurred to you?”

  “No,” she says softly. “I doubt it’s occurred to anyone else either.”

  Her phone buzzes. She looks at the screen. “I gotta go. Rich’s waiting for me.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Good.” She looks at me quizzically.

  “I mean, what does he think about what happened to you?”

  “He doesn’t know about it.”

  “You didn’t tell your husband?”

  “He’s got enough to worry about at the jail. He needs to stay focused. He doesn’t need to worry about me too.”

  “He might like to know what’s going on with you. He might like to be included in something this important.”

  “I know. I read your book. We both did. I’ll tell him what’s going on, just not now.”

  “Well then, if you read my book, you both know that if there’s one thing harder than being a cop, it’s being married to one.”

  She smiles fully for the first time this session.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It’s Halloween. The cops are gearing up for pranks and praying for rain to keep everyone inside. They’ll be disappointed: the weather prediction is crisp, clear, with unseasonably warm temperatures. Halloween isn’t Halloween anymore, not like the Halloweens of my childhood. Parents are so afraid of kidnappings and candy spiked with pins or poison that most little kids go trick or treating at their schools. Even in a safe upscale suburb like Kenilworth. Captain Pence is being extra cautious. He’s shuffled the shifts around so that there will be a lot of cops on the street in the late afternoon and evening. The briefing room is filled to capacity. The chairs are arranged classroom style. I make my way to the back, prepared to stand until Manny gives me his seat. “I’ll be sitting in my patrol car all evening, I need to stand.” It’s a sweet lie. I spot Randy halfway to the front. If she’s seen me, she doesn’t give any sign. It’s been nearly a month since the incident at the creek. So far as I know, Pence still hasn’t completed his report. Thirty days is a long time to be dangling in the wind, waiting for someone to make a decision about your future.

  Randy and I have met weekly since her incident and, unless she’s lying to me, she hasn’t had another panic attack. Sitting at home was not therapeutic. Too much time to think, plus she and Rich were getting on each other’s nerves. We made a compromise. Randy could return to work, but only after she told Rich about the incident and how it affected her. Then she had to ask her internist to prescribe a fast-acting antianxiety drug, safe for short-term use if taken off duty. The downside? Addiction and a list of potential side effects long enough to cover the drug manufacturer’s very large posterior. It was a hard sell. Cops will drink coffee and caffeine drinks until their hands shake, but they resist taking medication because the people they know who do are drug addicts and psychotic street people. Truth of the matter, I would have preferred Randy deal with her anxiety with deep breathing or meditation. Except meditation doesn’t work with someone who is in such a state of hypervigilance she can’t sit still.

  The room quiets when Pence walks in. He is
dressed in uniform instead of his usual business suit, a sign that he will be out in public tonight showing the citizens of Kenilworth that the department is on the job, even management. I have yet to see Chief Reagon in uniform. Pence looks sharp, broad shouldered and narrow at the waist. His silky silver hair, smooth as a pearl.

  “Sorry some of you have to miss being home tonight with your kids. Hope Mom is taking a lot of photos with her iPhone. As you know, last year a couple of children nearly got hit by a car in a crosswalk, so we’ve got extra traffic patrols, and I’ve arranged for some crossing guards to be on duty.” There’s a murmur in the room and some raised eyebrows. “If that seems over the top, I’ll tell you why in a minute. We’ll also probably get some skateboarding on the sidewalk. That’s a cite and release. Be polite, but firm. We don’t want a repeat of last year where we had parents complaining we were too tough on their little darlings who were just out having some Halloween fun.”

  “They should complain to the neighbors. They’re the ones who called us in the first place.” Eddie Rimbauer is at the open door to the briefing room pushing a cart from Fran’s Café piled with coffee and sandwiches. He’s still on disability leave from the PD, filling his time volunteering at Fran’s cafe, lurking around any place remotely related to police work. Three turns at Pinkerton’s Rehabilitation Center, known as Pinky’s to the cops, is finally getting results. He’s lost about twenty pounds of the sixty he needs to lose and looks better than he has in a long time. Fran’s husband BJ was killed in the line of duty years ago. Surrogate mother to every Kenilworth cop, including Eddie, she never misses an opportunity to send food to the PD when there’s something special going on.

  “Remember this,” Eddie says, “there’s assholes, dumbshits, and cops: it’s the assholes who make the dumbshits call the cops.”

  “Thank you, Eddie,” Pence says. He’s smiling and scowling at the same time. “And thank Fran for the food. You can set up in the cafeteria.” Pence and Eddie are opposites: one cool, trim and precise, the other loud, big-hearted, and not in control of his mouth or his appetite. Pence turns back to the room.

  “Citizens are our most important link to solving crime. We want them to call us, to report skateboarders and anything else that’s amiss. Seems to me you can do a lot of damage to yourself or someone else if you’re high as a kite and moving at warp speed down a dark street. At any rate, if the little darlings want some fun, remind them that that’s why we have a skateboard park. Okay? Got it?”

  There’s a murmur of affirmation from the troops.

  “Now, here’s why I’m suited up and why I’ll be walking a beat downtown. Every year the community counts on us to keep the streets safe for legitimate trick-or-treaters. Word on the street is that some kids from East Kenilworth are going to be trick or treating on our side of the freeway. We had one or two last year, but this year there’s going to be a gang of them. Big kids in masks. They’re not interested in candy, they’re interested in casing houses, cars, and who knows what else? I don’t want any break-ins, any vandalism, or any broken windows. You know the drill.”

  “Want something good to eat or steal? Cross the freeway, come to Kenilworth,” someone says and everybody laughs.

  Pence’s scowl is deep, pulling at his hairline and carving a “V” between his eyebrows. He raises his hand for quiet. “Settle down, guys. Bottom line is keep your eyes open, take your break when you can, drop by the cafeteria for free eats, and watch yourselves out there.”

  We file out of the briefing room. I try to catch Randy, but she scurries away and disappears into the police garage. I walk back down the hall. Jay Pence is still in the briefing room talking to a few officers.

  “Hold up, Dot. I want to talk to you a minute.” He finishes his conversation and motions me inside the now empty briefing room. “I’ve completed my report on the incident at the creek. I want to give you a heads up because I know you’ve talked to both Tom and Randy. I’m going to recommend that Tom get a letter of commendation from the chief and that Randy’s probation is extended for a week. Plus she gets remediated in defensive tactics, for her own safety. Not a big deal.”

  I disagree. Remediation and extended probation is a big deal, no matter what Pence says. Official acknowledgement that you messed up and now everybody knows it.

  “Why isn’t Tom getting remediated or days off? Shouldn’t he have waited for backup before he ran down the embankment in the dark?”

  Pence looks at me. I can sense what’s coming next. Just like former Chief Baxter, he’s going to tell me to mind my own business and stick to what I know, which is not operational tactics. Only he won’t be as direct or as crude as Baxter. He starts gathering up his things.

  “Like I tell my wife, Doc, don’t sweat the small stuff.” I wonder if his wife wants to hit him like I do.

  * * *

  Eddie is in the empty cafeteria. Two large metal urns of coffee are sputtering and burbling on the counter. He is unpacking cartons filled with wrapped sandwiches and small plastic containers of potato salad. He gives me a big hug.

  “Crazy lady. How’s my favorite shrink?”

  “Excellent. Totally buzzed to see my favorite non-client looking so hale and hearty. Looks like life is treating you well.”

  “I am F-I-N-E, meaning fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional.” He laughs and the remains of his once enormous gut shakes under his t-shirt. “I’d be a helluva lot better if I could come back to work, but I still got to pass a fit for duty and get interviewed by the new chief.” He bends to my height. “What’s the old broad like?”

  “First of all, if you want to come back to work, don’t call her an old broad.”

  “I hear she hates drunks.”

  “You’re not a drunk anymore, are you?”

  “Once a drunk, always a drunk. You know that. One day at a time. I’ve been sober now for seventy-two days.” He fishes in his pocket for some coins and lays them on the counter. “Here’s my thirty- and sixty-day coins.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “And it only took me three trips to the funny farm to do it. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it swim on its back.” He dumps bags of chips into a huge metal bowl and puts the bowl on the counter next to the sandwiches. “Much as I hated it and hated you and Fran, and that backstabbing little prick Manny for dumping me in that joint, I gotta admit, once I got my head out of my ass and quit with the liquid therapy, I made a little progress. It was the best and the worst experience of my life. I was comfortable being numb and when they took away the booze, whoa.” His eyes tear up and he turns away, rearranging things that don’t need rearranging. “You told me I was a jackass. I told you to fuck yourself. Fran told me I was a jackass—fuck her too. But when the guys at Pinky’s told me I was a jackass for the tenth time, I strapped on my saddle and went to work on all the shit I’d been burying under the booze and food.”

  Suddenly, there’s shouting, doors slam, and people are running down the hall toward the garage. A minute later we hear tires screeching and a moment after that the wail of police sirens.

  Eddie looks up from the food, puts one hand over his heart, and stands quietly until the sirens fade away. “I love it,” he says, “when they play my song.” His face settles. “I need to get back to work, Doc. Anything you can do to help me out?”

  “Not my decision.”

  “Can you do my fit for duty?”

  “Nope. It has to be someone who doesn’t know you, who’s never been in a position to counsel you.”

  “Does it help that I never listened to a thing you said?” He laughs, then his face sinks into seriousness.

  “I’ve changed. I can talk about stuff now, tell you my whole life story, about my crappy parents, my dope-addict wife and how she killed our baby and herself. Nothing to hide. My life’s an open book.”

  “It takes time, Eddie. Policing is stressful. You’ve said it yourself; you’ve only been sober for seventy-two days. Don’t rush i
nto things. Take your time. You’ve got a whole year to rest. That’s what disability leave is for.”

  “I go to meetings all the time, drive all the way up to Pinky’s and back.”

  “No AA groups locally?”

  “Not unless I want sit next to some a-hole I arrested six times.”

  “Are you on medication?”

  “I got something for sleeping, that’s all.”

  “Having trouble sleeping?”

  “Hell no, I sleep like a baby. First I cry, then I take a bottle, and then I piss myself.”

  Now I’m the one who wants to cry. Still using humor to cover up his feelings and deflect any real conversation. Nothing grows in alcohol, especially people. Eddie may not be drinking anymore, but he’s one of those dry drunks, sober, but no wiser and, I fear, no better able to cope with the world. And now he’s got the two worst things an alcoholic can have, money and time on his hands.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It’s nearly nine p.m. The rainy season is in full display. Gusts of wind and rain are bending the fledgling trees in my tiny yard nearly in half, ripping the last remaining leaves off the branches and flattening them against the fence. Frank and I have finished dinner, downed an excellent bottle of pinot noir, and now he’s giving me a foot massage. We both know where this is leading. Time has been easy on us despite our jokes about wrinkles and cellulite. We were both equally shy and apologetic about our bodies the first time we saw each other naked. It is an agreed-upon miracle that we have found each other at this point in life. We may not be as handsome as we once were, but we’re a damn sight smarter about relationships. At least, I hope, I am.

  “How ‘bout we move upstairs to the bedroom? I have some other massage tricks in mind.” Parts of me undulate at the suggestion. I grab my wine glass and let Frank lead me up the stairs. At the door to my bedroom, my cell phone buzzes in my jeans pocket. “Let it be,” Frank says.

  “I’m on twenty-four-hour call. Part of my job.”