August 30, 2017
It can’t be postponed any longer, Valerie thought. Just get on with it.
Nonetheless, she didn’t move. It was morning on her day off and she was still in bed. Nick had left for a racquetball game with Will, and for the time being it was simply too good to have the bed—the whole apartment—to herself. Not enough time alone these days.
Really? She imagined not living with Nick. She remembered what not living with Nick had been like. What she had been like. The word “feral” offered itself. Not just the booze and wretched one-night stands, the chain-smoking, the more or less perpetual exhaustion and compulsive self-distraction, but the domestic reality of living in a pigsty. When Nick moved in, things came with him: calm, order, pleasure, civilization. Someone coming over for dinner no longer required forty-eight hours’ labor to make the place fit for human occupancy. It was as if after years of flailing in a dark ocean she’d washed up on a sunlit beach. On the island of Happily Married.
And? And?
She got out of bed and stood naked in front of the mirror. A lull in the traffic had brought an unnatural urban silence. The curtains were open a few inches and through the gap a single shaft of sun lit a swirl of motes her movements had disturbed. The quiet and warmth and stillness combined to form a subtle intelligence, an invitation to the truth of herself. She looked at her reflection in the mirror. Conceded with manageable vanity that the new trim suppleness was a gift that refused to stop giving. Imagined Kyle Cornell describing her. Brunette, five eight, nice tits, all the requisite knowledge …
She moved closer to the mirror, examined her face. Her dark eyes were honest. Childhood innocence overwritten by the world’s reliable violence. The childhood was still there, its astonishment a stubborn irrelevance. All her earlier selves were still there, in fact—the curious girl, the stealthy teenager, the burgeoning woman—and the moment her wild energies found their focus and she knew she was Police. Look hard enough, she thought, and you could see a person’s whole life in the eyes. Windows to the soul, obviously. Her own said she’d had love, urgency, horror, self-loathing, and the humor or luck to outgrow it. They said she wanted the real world, no matter how ugly. They said she trusted her judgment. Just.
Further postponement beckoned. She could make breakfast. She could go out for breakfast. She could drive to the mall and buy something indulgent. She could—oh, the crazy, beautiful freedom!—go see a movie.
But the subtle intelligence was shifting its weight. Not an invitation, now: an insistence.
As if to emphasize the point, a truck broke the silence, roared, rattled, and downshifted with a gasp of hydraulics at the junction.
Okay, okay. Fine.
She went to the living room and took the Rite Aid packet from her purse. She’d fudged the dates with Nick. Partly because after years on the pill her period wasn’t a stickler for punctuality, but mainly because she wanted to give herself as much time to think about it by herself before it became something they’d have to think about together.
All well and good, but biology was running this particular show. Even by her own elastic standards she was minimum three days late.
In the bathroom she speed-read the instructions. Redundantly, since she knew exactly what they involved.
One-Step hCG Urine Pregnancy Tests are used for qualitative (visual) determination of hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) in urine specimens for early detection of pregnancy.
Immerse the strip into the urine with the arrow end pointing toward the urine. Do not immerse past the “max” line. Take the strip out after 3 seconds and lay the strip flat on a clean, dry, non-absorbent surface (e.g., mouth of the urine container).
Wait for colored bands to appear. Depending on the concentration of hCG in the test specimen, positive results may be observed in as short as 40 seconds. However, to confirm negative results, the complete reaction time (5 minutes) is required. Do not read results after 10 minutes.
She sat on the floor with her back against the side of the bathtub and set the stopwatch on her phone. Decided not to actually stare at either the phone or the test strip. Instead she looked out the open bathroom door, through the living room, and out the window. On a balcony of the building opposite, a guy with a short gray beard and no shirt was reading something on a sheet of paper and scratching his belly. On the next balcony someone had tied helium party balloons to the rail: red, pink, white. The day was so still they barely moved. Above the building the sky was deep blue. Two jet contrails crossed each other, miles apart, one curved, the other straight, the leftovers of vague, giant geometry. Her eyes came back to her own apartment. Her leather jacket on the back of a chair. A white bowl of clementines. Last night’s empty green bottle. Her shoes still where she’d kicked them off next to the couch. All the details were suddenly vivid. The way they must be, she thought, in your last moments just before a firing squad.
The problem was she’d outgrown the cop clichés. She’d had the cases that had damaged her. She’d done the monstrosity. She’d done the booze. She’d done the sex addiction. She’d done the rejection of love. She’d done the obsession, the monomania, the Work. Time had passed and she’d found herself awkwardly larger than all of it. Merely not killing herself had allowed her to forgive herself her trespasses. Astonishingly, even to forgive some of the trespasses against her. Love had come back, with a calm admission of its finiteness, its wonderful inadequacy. Now she was a creature of durable approximations. It had left her wondering what else she might become. It had left her a curious, large, quiet space, into which, with a sort of thrilling lunatic sacrilege, the word “motherhood” had insinuated itself.
When her phone rang it startled her so badly that she dropped it. And the test strip.
Carrie Wheeler Calling, the screen said. For a moment she had no idea who Carrie Wheeler was. Then remembered: Victim Support. The woman who had brought Elspeth to the hospital.
She let the call go to voice mail. The screen reverted to the stopwatch. One minute thirty-eight seconds.
She turned the strip over.
Then stayed where she was, naked on the floor, with her eyes closed.
She didn’t pick up the voice mail until after she’d showered and dressed, as if for work, despite the official day off. The Adam Grant file she’d been looking at last night was still open on the desk. Among other things it contained a results sheet from Forensics based on analysis of the wristwatch. Obviously, Kyle’s recognizing it as his half brother’s heirloom was enough for her, but for the record, prints and skin cell touch DNA had confirmed it. Also for the record, the droplet stain was blood, though whose blood was still unknown. Aside from that, they’d had zero movement on the case for going on two weeks. Still no sign of either Jenner or Sophia.
Carrie Wheeler’s message was a request to call her ASAP.
“What’s up?” Valerie asked her.
“Hi,” Carrie said. “I’m sorry, they told me you’re off today, but I thought you’d want to know right away.”
“Yes?” No matter the circumstances, Valerie thought, important news inflated the bearer. The short pause was the counselor’s reflex concession to dramatic effect.
“I’m back at California Pacific,” Carrie Wheeler said. “Elspeth Grant tried to kill herself last night.”