“All evidence suggests that it didn’t,” said Sigrid.
She’d been stupid. She knew that. So had Lukas. But over the years she’d also come to appreciate how pervasive and deep our learning is, whether it is helpful to our condition or not. Now she knows better. And she knows how to put that understanding to use.
Sigrid stands with her hands in her trousers, messenger bag over her shoulder, watching a Panasonic TV that has a sharper picture than the one next to it. Melinda arrives beside her—armed and in uniform—and places her hands inside her own pockets too. Obama’s lips are moving. The closed-captioned text says he’s talking about hope.
“You have a strange way of looking for your brother,” Melinda says, immobile.
“What do you think about this?” Sigrid asks, nodding toward the election polling.
“I think McCain’s gonna win.”
“Why?”
“Because Obama’s black.”
“The polls are all saying Obama’s going to win.”
“I think Fox News is right. I think that in the privacy of the voting booth, white people just won’t pull the lever for the black candidate. I wish things were different. But I’ve learned a lot recently about how things really are. And they aren’t good.”
“Who do you want to win?”
“I’m on the fence. I like the idea of more local government and less federal. McCain seems like a pretty regular guy while Obama seems like a fancy lawyer with all the right words. But McCain thinks everything’s just fine out there all by itself and all we need to do is leave things alone. I know that’s not true. Broken things don’t fix themselves. Obama gets that part. I guess I’m OK either way.”
“Tell me about what happened to Lydia’s nephew. Jeffrey.”
Melinda averts her eyes. “He was a little boy playing with his friends outside while his mom was doing the dishes. Two cops showed up like they were a SWAT team and blew him away. The grand jury decided it was a clean shooting because the cap gun looked real and the cops acted according to the rules.”
“Do you agree?”
“The police union, the commissioner, the departments—they’re all saying it was a good shooting.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Sigrid says.
“Irv said it happened in the next county and we’re to mind our own business and focus on Lydia.”
“That wasn’t my question either.”
“I think America’s screwed either way.”
“What does that mean?”
“If the grand jury had decided it was a bad shooting, it would mean we have a police force that can’t tell the difference between right and wrong. And if they call it a clean shooting, it means we have a whole country that can’t. But no one cares what I think.”
“Does the sheriff feel the same way you do?”
“Irv went to talk to Lydia’s parents. They’re Jeffrey’s grandparents too. They’ve been through hell. He went there to pay his respects and learn more about Lydia. He came back all quiet. And then he talked to the police commissioner. And then Reverend Fred Green. And after all that . . . all he wants to do is talk to Marcus. I guess the situation is pretty . . . well, you know.”
Sigrid checks her watch. It’s almost time.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Again?”
“Traveling upsets my stomach.”
“All right.”
Sigrid moves briskly toward the bathroom.
“That bad?” she hears Melinda ask behind her.
Sigrid ducks through the aisles and around whirling carousels of marked-down shirts and skirts. She rounds a bend filled with humidifiers and dehumidifiers in equal numbers. She enters the hallway for the restrooms, checks her distance from Melinda—about twenty meters—and makes her move.
Melinda stands watching Obama’s lips move as Sigrid turns the corner into the bathrooms. Melinda didn’t know Jeffrey Simmons’s shooter but she’d heard his name: Roy Carman. Jefferson County is pretty big, area-wise, but the cops tend to know each other and there’s a policy of trying to get people to know each other across the county lines. Barbecues, picnics, pickup softball . . . that sort of thing. Roy had attended high school two towns over, and had graduated from the police academy three years before Melinda. Rumors among Melinda’s colleagues at the office were that Roy had attention deficit disorder, was known for having a short temper, and liked to listen to right-wing talk radio, which he often quoted. He always banged on about personal responsibility, and law and order, and consequences for actions, and that sort of seesaw thinking that made the world tilt only one way and only so far.
When she listens to other cops talk, every argument about shooting Jeffrey sounds both reasonable and incomplete to her at the same time. Somehow, though, she can’t put her finger on the missing ingredient that explains what’s wrong with the actions except for the outcome.
Melinda was born in the small town of Harrisville, New York, which has a population of under 650 people. It was clean, gentle, and unassuming, but not the sort of place a young woman could fulfill her dreams or ambitions. It wasn’t a town that gave her a national perspective let alone a global one, and life wasn’t so much about trying to change history as it was pushing through the day-to-day and trying to hold the line on being a decent person while doing it. This involved fighting the small-time battles of family arguments, alcoholism, and unemployment, and pressing back against the atrophy of all things built by man—car transmissions, truck engines, roofing, potholes. The move to the sheriff’s office after the police academy was a godsend for her, and working for a boss like Irv, who not only had a college education but a master’s degree to boot in something involving Latin and Greek, well, that turned Melinda into a disciple. Still, for all that, it never much occurred to her that a local police shooting—even one caught on video camera—might actually be noticed by people living in foreign countries across the ocean.
Melinda watches Obama talk about the economy. She can’t hear him but she can see him and read along. She feels his confidence, and body
