Welcome to Homicide.
20
TUESDAY, 6:00 AM
Byrne had been waiting for her with a large coffee and a sesame seed bagel. The coffee was strong and hot, the bagel fresh.
Bless him.
Jessica hurried through the rain and slipped into the car, nodded a token greeting. To put it mildly, she was not a morning person, especially a six-o'clock-in-the-morning person. Her fondest hope was that she was wearing matching shoes.
They rode into the city in silence, Kevin Byrne respecting her space and waking ritual, realizing he had forced the shock of the new day upon her unceremoniously. He, on the other hand, looked wide-awake. A little ragged, but wide-eyed and alert.
Men had it so easy, Jessica thought. Clean shirt, shave in the car, a spritz of Binaca, a drop of Visine, ready for the day.
They made the ride to North Philly in short order. They parked near the corner of Nineteenth and Poplar. Byrne put on the radio at the half hour. The Tessa Wells story was mentioned.
With half an hour to wait, they hunkered down. Occasionally, Byrne flipped the ignition to start the wipers, the defrosters.
They tried to talk about the news, the weather, the job. The subtext kept bulling forward. Daughters.
Tessa Wells was someone's daughter.
This realization hardwired them both into the brutal soul of this crime. It might have been their child. 'SHE'LL BE THREE NEXT MONTH,' Jessica said.
Jessica showed Byrne a picture of Sophie. He smiled. She knew he had a marshmallow center. 'She looks like a handful.'
'Two hands,' Jessica said. 'You know how it is when they're that age. They look to you for everything.' 'Yeah.'
'You miss those days?'
'I missed those days,' Byrne said. 'I was working double tours in those days.'
'How old is your daughter now?'
'She's thirteen,' Byrne said.
'Uh-oh,' Jessica said.
'Uh-oh is an understatement.'
'So… she have a house full of Britney CDs?'
Byrne smiled again, thinly this time. 'No.'
'Oh boy. Don't tell me she's into rap.'
Byrne spun his coffee a few times. 'My daughter is deaf.'
'Oh my,' Jessica said, suddenly mortified. 'I'm… I'm sorry.'
'That's okay. Don't be.'
'I mean… I just didn't-'
'It's okay. Really. She hates sympathy. And she's a lot tougher than you and me combined.'
'What I meant was-'
'I know what you meant. My wife and I went through years of sorry. It's a natural reaction,' Byrne said. 'But to be quite honest, I've yet to meet a deaf person who thinks of herself as handicapped. Especially Colleen.'
Seeing as she had opened this line of questioning, Jessica figured she might as well continue. She did, gently. 'Was she born deaf?'
Byrne nodded. 'Yeah. It was something called Mondini dysplasia. Genetic disorder.'
Jessica's mind turned to Sophie, dancing around the living room to some song on Sesame Street. Or the way Sophie would sing at the top of her lungs amid the bubbles in the tub. Like her mother, Sophie couldn't tow a tune with a tractor, but she was earnest in the attempt. Jessica thought about her bright, healthy, beautiful little girl and considered how lucky she was.
They both fell silent. Byrne ran the wipers, the defroster. The windshield began to clear. The girls had yet not arrived at the corner. Traffic on Poplar was beginning to thicken.
'I watched her once,' Byrne said, sounding a little melancholy, as if he had not spoken of his daughter to anyone in a while. The longing was obvious. 'I was supposed to pick her up at her deaf school, and I was a little early. So I pulled over to the side of the street to grab a smoke, read the paper.
'Anyway, I see this group of kids on the corner, maybe seven or eight of them. They're twelve, thirteen years old. I'm not really paying them any mind. They're all dressed like homeless people, right? Baggy pants, big shirts hanging out, untied sneakers. Suddenly I see Colleen standing there, leaning against the building, and it's like I don't know her. Like she's some kid who kind of resembles Colleen.
'All of a sudden, I'm really interested in all the other kids. Who's doing what, who's holding what, who's wearing, what, what their hands are doing, what's in their pockets. It's like I'm patting them all down from across the street.'
Byrne sipped his coffee, threw a glance at the corner. Still empty.
'So she's holding her own with these older boys, smiling, yakking away in sign language, flipping her hair,' he continued. 'And I'm thinking: Jesus Christ. She's flirting. My little girl is flirting with these boys. My little girl who, just a few weeks ago, climbed into her Big Wheel and went pedaling down the street wearing her little yellow I HAD A WILD TIME IN WILDWOOD T-shirt is flirting with boys. I wanted to cap the horny little pricks right there.
'And then I watched one of them light a joint, and my fucking heart stops. I actually heard it wind down in my chest like a cheap watch. I'm ready to get out of the car with my cuffs in my hand when I realized what it would to do to Colleen, so I just watch.
'They pass it around, casual, right on the corner, like it's legal, right? I'm waiting, watching. Then one of the kids offers the joint to Colleen and I knew, I knew she was going to take it and smoke it. I knew she would grab it and take a long, slow hit off this blunt, and I suddenly saw the next five years of her life. Pot and booze and coke and rehab and Sylvan to get her grades back up and more drugs and the pill and then… then the most incredible thing happened.'
Jessica realized she was staring at Byrne, rapt, waiting for him to finish. She snapped out of it, prodded. 'Okay. What happened?'
'She just… shook her head,' Byrne said. 'Just like that. No thanks. I doubted her at that moment, I completely broke faith with my little girl, and I wanted to tear my eyes out of my head. I was given the opportunity to trust her, completely unobserved, and I failed. I failed. Not her.'
Jessica nodded, trying not to think about the fact that she was going to have to deal with a moment like that with Sophie in about ten years, not looking forward to it at all.
'And it suddenly occurred to me,' Byrne said, 'after all these years of worry, all these years of treating her as if she were fragile, all these years of walking on the street side of the sidewalk, all these years of staring down the idiots watching her sign in public and thinking she was a freak, all of it was unnecessary. She's ten times tougher than I am. She could kick my ass.'
'Kids will surprise you.' Jessica realized how inadequate it sounded when she said it, how completely uninformed she was on this subject.
'I mean, of all the things you fear for your kid: diabetes, leukemia, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer-my little girl was deaf. That's it. Other than that, she's perfect in every way. Heart, lungs, eyes, limbs, mind. Perfect. She can run like the wind, jump high. And she has this smile… this smile that could melt the glaciers. All this time I thought she was handicapped because she couldn't hear. It was me. I'm the one who needs a freakin' telethon. I didn't realize how lucky we are.'
