“Are things that bad out there?”
“Clearly, some people think so.”
“Maybe there was no crime, Irv. As you said.”
“In which case . . . Lydia’s parents live in torment forever thinking of their daughter in hell.”
“Religion is cruel.”
“Procedure says I have to bring Marcus in, Sigrid. You know that. The 9-1-1 call, the eyewitness, the disappearance, the golden triangle of motive, means, and opportunity . . .”
“We don’t have a motive.”
“There’s love involved, Sigrid. You can always impute a motive. And this happened blocks from Marcus’s house. And he was there. So something happened and it was something emotional. Clearly. But . . . let me finish.”
Sigrid can hear him adjust the phone and she uses the moment to take a sip and reconnect with the Caribbean.
Irv continues: “Here’s my worry. If you’re right about Lydia’s suicide, it means that Marcus was a nice guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. He runs away from guilt and grief. We bring him in, but then we let him go. That’s the law. But not the optics. Because from outside, all we see is a black professional woman who was the aunt of Jeffrey Simmons murdered by a white man with supremacist connections who is soon released without charges by a police department a town over from where Roy Carman was exonerated by a grand jury. You’ll notice how the inside voices don’t sound the same as the outside voices, and the same facts sound very different depending on what you emphasize.”
“The facts of the case remain the facts of the case,” Sigrid says, “whatever they sound like, and whatever language you use. I accept that you have a communication problem, and a race problem, and a political problem. But you don’t have an evidentiary one. I’m not going to let you lock up Marcus because your country can’t get a grip on itself. Your job is to solve the case,” says Sigrid. “Not fix America.”
“Maybe not, but I don’t want to burn it down, either. I live here.”
Sigrid pours herself another and, thanks to a highly attuned ear for that particular sound, Irv asks what she’s drinking.
“It’s a twenty-one-year-old rum. I haven’t seen this bottle in four years.”
“How much have you got left?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“For the same reason I want to know how many clean glasses you have left.”
“There’s one wrapped in paper in the bathroom.”
“You have plans for it?”
“I usually just use one,” Sigrid says.
“I’m coming over.”
“I didn’t invite you.”
“I’ll knock.”
By the time Irv arrives, Sigrid is asleep. As promised he knocks gently on the door and she, groggily, walks barefoot across the threadbare carpet near the door. She opens it and he stands outside with his hat in his hands, looking more boyish than she remembers him.
“You actually drove all the way here?” she mutters. “At this time of night?”
“We need an early start, like you said. And I can’t drink in the morning.”
“It’s easier than it looks,” she says.
“I have some strong stuff in the car. Should I bring it in?”
“Why did you get divorced?” she asks him, hand on the door and pinching sleep from her eyes.
“We didn’t have any questions left for each other. Why aren’t you married?”
“When I was young I thought it was me. When I grew up I started thinking it was them. And then I stopped thinking about it entirely.”
“How about that drink?” Irv asks.
“You’re sleeping on the sofa, Irv.”
“There’s a sofa?”
“Not all of your plans work out either, huh?” she says.
Sigrid flattens her palm against the door. Irv lowers his head and slips inside the room, placing his hat on the dresser to his right, below the mirror that faces the bed. Sigrid releases the door and allows the natural forces of the spring to do the rest.
Falling
It was an epithelial ovarian carcinoma. Sigrid’s mother, Astrid, was under thirty-five years old and otherwise in excellent health, so it was caught late, during stage three, when her chances of surviving five more years were twenty-nine percent. There was no familial link. No genetic predisposition that might have warned her. Cancer cells had spread from the ovaries to the lining of the abdomen. Morten was the first to know, and so the first to hold the secret. They ordered themselves along two fronts—managing the cancer, and managing her decline in front of the children.
She told her husband everything. They only spoke about it in their bedroom so as to keep the plague contained and so that the place where life was created—where the children were conceived—could counter the forces of death. They did not say this. Words were immaterial. And yet, together and with a shared understanding, they cordoned off the topic from the wider world and locked it in a private place.
Astrid’s doctor was named Gunnar Nilsen. He was calm and precise. In his early fifties, he had no talent for putting her, or anyone else, at ease. Astrid would later learn, through discussions with Dr. Nilsen’s secretary, Hilde, that he was tired of his job spent with suffering innocents. His own father had suggested he take up architecture as it was more suited to Gunnar’s disposition. To his father’s mind, such a job would be creative, solitary, and less socially or emotionally demanding. And so Gunnar went into oncology to spite his father while secretly resenting his own success. Astrid asked Hilde if she should see someone else. “No,” she explained. “He’s very good. His spite runs very deep.”
Astrid met him in a rotation of examination rooms. She peed into cups and submitted to blood tests and waited for human contact that never arrived.
She sat on the crunchy rolling paper on the elevated table with her feet dangling childishly when Nilsen came in on a Tuesday. He smiled weakly and sat down. They did not shake hands. He opened a brown folder. He explained what stage three meant, what stage four looks like, and, to some extent, would
