“I love you, Alex,” she whispered over the phone. Nana sounded almost as tired and beat-up as I was.
“! love you, too, old woman,” I told her.
That night, miracle of miracles, she actually let me get in the last word.
The crowd of ambulance-chasers on Summer Street finally broke up. Even the most persistent reporters and photographers left. One of Christine Johnson's sisters had arrived to be with her in this terrible time. I hugged Christine hard before I left.
She was still trembling. She had suffered a horrible, unspeakable loss. We had both spent a night in hell. “I can't feel anything. Everything is so unreal,” she told me. “I know this isn't a nightmare, and yet I keep thinking that it has to be one.”
Sampson drove me home at one in the morning. My eyes felt lidless. My brain was still going at a million miles an hour, still buzzing loudly, still overheated.
What was our world coming to? Gary Soneji? Bundy? The Hillside Strangler? Koresh? McVeigh? On and on and on. Gandhi was asked once what he thought of Western civilization. He replied, “I think it could be a good idea.”
I don't cry too much. I can't. The same is true for a lot of police officers I know. I wish I could cry sometimes, let it all out, release the fear and the venom, but it isn't that easy Something has gotten blocked up inside.
I sat on the stairs inside our house. I had been on my way to my bedroom, but I hadn't made it. I was trying to cry, but I couldn't.
I thought about my wife, Maria, who was killed in a drive-by shooting a few years back. Maria and I had fit together beautifully That wasn't just selective memory on my part. I knew how good love could be -- I knew it was the best thing I'd ever done in my life -- and yet here I was alone. I was taking chances with my life. I kept telling everybody that I was all right, but I wasn't.
I don't know how long I stayed there in the darkness with my thoughts. Maybe ten minutes, maybe it was much more than that. The house was quiet in a familiar, almost comfortable way, but I couldn't be soothed that night.
I listened to sounds that I had been hearing for years. I remembered being a small boy there, growing up with Nana, wondering what I would become someday Now I knew the answer to that question. I was a multiple- homicide expert who got to work the biggest, nastiest cases. I was the dragonslayer.
I finally climbed the rest of the stairs and stopped in at Damon and Jannie's room. The two of them were fast asleep in the bedroom they share in our small house.
I love the way Damon andJannie sleep, the trusting, innocent ways of my young son and daughter. I can watch them for long stretches, even on a howling-bad night like this one. I can't count how many times have peeked in and just stood in the doorway.
They keep me going, keep me from flying apart some nights.
They'd gone to sleep wearing funky, heart-shaped sunglasses like the ones the kids wear in the singing group called Innocence.
It was cute as hell. Precious, too. I sat on the edge of Jannie's bed.
I quietly took off my boots and carefully lay them on the floor without making any noise.
Then I stretched myself out across the bottom of both their beds. I listened to my bones crack. I wanted to be near my kids, to be with them, for all of us to be safe. It didn't seem too much to ask out of life, too much reward for the day I had just lived through.
I gently kissed the rubber-soled slipper-sock of Jannie's pajamas.
I lay my hand very lightly against Damon's cool bare leg.
I finally closed my eyes, and I tried to push the rushing scenes of murder and chaos out of my mind. I couldn't do it. The monsters were everywhere that night. They truly were all around me.
There are so goddamn many of them. Wave upon wave, it seems, Young and old, and everything in between. Where are these monsters coming from in America? What has created them?
Lying there alongside my two children, I finally was able to sleep somehow. For a few hours, was able to forget the most horrifying thing of all, the reason for my extreme sorrow and upset.
I had heard the news before I left the Johnson house. President Thomas Byrnes had died early that morning.
I WAS HOLDING and gently petting Rosie the cat. I had the kitchen door open and peered outside, squinted at Sampson.
He stood in a freezing-cold rain. He looked like a big, dark boulder in the teeming rainstorm, or maybe it was hail that he was weathering so stoically
“The nightmare continues,” he said to me. A simple declarative sentence. Devastating.
“Year, doesn't it, though? But maybe I don't care about it anymore.”
“Uh-huh. And maybe this is the year the Bullets win the NBA championship, the Orioles win the World Series, and the raggedyass Redskins go to the Super Bowl. You just never know.”
A day had passed since the long night at the Johnson house, since the even longer morning in New York City. Not nearly enough time for any kind of healing, or even proper grieving.
President Edward Mahoney had been sworn in the day before.
It was necessary according to law, but it almost seemed indecent to me.
I had on dungarees and a white T-shirt. Bare feet on a cold linoleum floor. Steaming coffee mug in hand. I was convalescing nicely. I hadn't washed off my whiskers, as Jannie calls the act of shaving. I was almost feeling human again.
