After the crowd was sorted and identified, one of the cops returned to his blue and white to place a call. I leaned against the dumpster listening to ten minutes of moans, curses, and commands before I was released. I wasn’t sure whether the rest of them were waiting for an ambulance or a paddy wagon. I was suspicious about my quick getaway and felt like asking if it was a professional courtesy. But my adrenaline was flagging and, in its place, the first rush of the Avengers’ damage. I just kept quiet and did what I was told; hell, my mouth hurt.

It was a hobbling Chester to my car, every breath followed by a small gasp caused by the pain in my chest. There was no reason to holler for Mr. Dillon since I’d be okay in a couple of days, but I decided to visit an emergency room. City’s.

Four interminable, almost intolerable, hours later, I was once again released. Most of the hurt brought to heel with prescribed codeine, the rest ignored in the rekindling of my anger after I sneaked into my new friend’s room. Blue had been right about the hospital. He’d also been right about Cheryl needing a vacation. The Avengers had broken bones in both her hands. She was lying on top of the steel bed’s covers, her slanted eyes open but blitzed on hospital dope. Despite the drugs, pain kept flooding her face, tugging at its angles. But all she would blurrily talk about was her shame for revealing my identity, for compromising a source, for setting me up. I listened as her contrition joined with my own. Eventually, I put my finger on her lips, sat down on the bed, and lightly ran my hand over her forehead. I sat with her until she stopped apologizing and fell into a deep medicated sleep. Then I stayed stroking her head until I felt numb.

When I limped out of the pastel-stark, false-friendly hospital, it was light outside; my long afternoon and night finally over. But with its conclusion came soul-rocked, apartment-locked, days of self-recrimination. Days of almost unendurable longing for my dead daughter.

I tried shutting everything down with my legal and illegal drugs. They didn’t do the job. After an initial dose of anesthetized stupor, I couldn’t keep Yakov, Cheryl, or Rebecca out of the night. Sleep turned traitor, ceaselessly jolting me with eye-opening nightmares. A cigarette, more sleep, another vignette. Sometimes about Rebecca, sometimes about Chana, sometimes Cheryl and Yakov. All had the same conclusion: I was always too late, too incompetent to prevent the grisly horror. It didn’t take a Freud freak to realize what I’d been fighting. And who had been running barefoot behind my anxiety, my denial, my rage.

The nightmares began stretching into the day. Days. I pulled the phone, shut down the clocks, refused visits. Part of the day I spent high, part I spent drunk. The nights were spent drunk and high. Every television show reminded me of walking a colicky baby, pushing an umbrella stroller, rolling a ball on the floor. Of having embraced a life I never thought possible. But each memory carried me closer to that ugly week in the hospital waiting for my family to die. Waiting helplessly, stuck to a brown Naugahyde couch in the visitors’ room, dreading the worst. And finally getting it.

Every room I limped through, every mirror I saw, reflected my dime-short, day-late identity.

I was tired of being the last to know. For yet another time I’d let my life’s shortfall transform into hate. My fight with the Avengers had been nothing more than a rabid blood hunt. I’d wanted to beat their bodies. I’d brought the Equalizer hoping to split their ignorance, hungry for the pleasure in my lack of control.

I thought of Blue lurking somewhere in the city and remembered Rabbi Sheinfeld’s “choose your enemies well…”

Maybe it was the acknowledgment of my grief for Rebecca, the sadness and shame in my violence. Maybe it was the chemicals, but I began to crawl out from my cloud of self-loathing. I started sleeping without company. Enough sleep to let the grass, codeine, and Valium meld with the solitary rhythm of recovery. I inspected my injuries, as if the light green swelling around my eyes, my splotched chest, or my painful breathing could somehow ease a troubled conscience. But it wasn’t until days later, when I stood under a hot stinging shower, my tears mixing with the spigot’s, that I could think of Becky without the despair I’d been fighting since this case began.

When I first heard about Simon’s Temple-joining, I’d felt lonely, left out. Difficult but doable. Only I hadn’t anticipated meeting Yakov or Cheryl. Hadn’t expected the case to unleash a tidal wave of paternalism. Of yearning. With no simple solution of joining Big Brothers. When I needed to belong, I wanted the real thing. I wanted my family. I needed what I could never have.

I stared into the medicine chest mirror relieved that I didn’t resemble Blue. I just looked like a banged-up me.

I restarted my clocks, plugged in the phone, and eased off the painkillers. I opened the door for Lou and even ate his cooking. He knew me well enough to accept my morbid silence, liked me well enough to keep everyone else at bay.

Finally, toward the end of the week, I felt patched together enough to try and explain some of what had happened to Simon.

“Always the victim or the asshole, aren’t you? This time you’ve managed to be both.” He sounded exasperated. “You get jumped by a half dozen neo-Nazis who want to stuff you into a dumpster and you’re worried about being too violent?”

“The pleasure of it, Simon.”

“I don’t get it, Matt. No, correct that, I don’t get you! You haven’t been non-violent since the Vietnam war and I’m not sure you were non-violent then.”

“Try ‘since the days of Martin Luther King,’” I offered.

“But when you finally win a damn brawl against rednecks who want to gas Jews and fry Blacks, you’re all over yourself?”

“Simon, I went looking to beat on them. I didn’t even wait to see if she’d been hurt.”

“You didn’t wait because you know the Avengers for what they are. I was the naive one. You understand them. You rushed in because you thought the lady needed help.” He paused, then added, “And because you’re stupid.”

“Well, you’re at least half right.”

“So let’s drop this mea culpa crap. Those pieces of shit got what was coming. And they’re going to get more when they realize they are going to spend the rest of their working lives earning money for a Black lady.” He clicked his teeth with genuine pleasure.

“You been in touch with Cheryl?”

“Of course. She wants to know if you’ll forgive her.”

“Make her stop that, Simon, I can’t take it. How is she?”

“About a week better. They don’t need to operate on her hands, but it’ll be a slow go.” He stopped then asked delicately, “What about you? How long do you think it will be before you’re on your feet?”

I didn’t answer.

Simon waited, then pushed on, “Look, I don’t want to rush you…”

“Yes you do,” I said.

There was a second of silence, a small laugh, and a considerable easing of tension in his voice. “You’re right, Matt-man, I do. I still can’t get a lick of information out of anybody.”

“So you want me back doing what?”

“More of the same. I was wrong to call you off the Hasids. Go back and get as much as you can. The news blackout doesn’t change my concerns, it adds to ‘em. My Jewish brethren like the silence, but want the legalities finished. They dislike the ambiguity more than I do.” Simon hesitated then continued, “I don’t want dime one hanging over Reb Yonah’s head. Otherwise it will be an open invitation for more anti-Semitic bullshit.”

What could I tell him? That I’d been blindsided by a gawky Hasidic teenager into a bonebreaking miss of my dead daughter? That I was frightened to see more of him? “I don’t know,Simon, I feel all right, but my face looks like Carmen Basilio after a whupping.”

“So I hear.”

“Who you been talking to?”

“Lou. He said you were pretty withdrawn so I didn’t bother you.”

“It didn’t stop you from calling today.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve been withdrawn long enough.”

“You sure you weren’t looking for the first opportunity to get me working? I mean you’re on a mission from God here, Simon.”

I couldn’t bring myself to say anything about Becky. Nor could I turn him down. Most of me wanted nothing to do with Yakov, the Yeshiva, the entire case. But I was still angry about Cheryl’s slender body bent and broken on the hospital bed. Also, a sliver in me still wanted more of the kid. It might not be a healthy sliver, but it was there. I wasn’t finished.

“You really are stupid.” Simon’s voice was suddenly gruff. “I’ve been talking to Lou because I wanted to know how you were doing!”

I suddenly realized how incredibly difficult it must have been for Simon to stand still during my recuperation. Especially since he knew he was waiting on a depression. “Look, Boss, I’m sorry. I’m finding this whole situation a difficult do. Give me another day and I’ll jump on it. Actually, walk on it. I’m not ready to jump.”

“Well, if you can’t jump, you better stay the hell out of trouble.”

I laughed and hung up the phone.

The laughter didn’t linger. Most of the next twenty-four was metal on metal, as if the past week had suddenly slipped away and I was back to where my hurting began. But as the day trudged into another restless night, what little sleep I had was free of nightmares.

By early morning, my throat ached from too many cigarettes, my mouth dry from alcohol dehydration. It was still dark when I dragged myself from bed. I plodded into the kitchen and put up the coffee. I wanted to drown the stale, burnt, bourbon after-taste.

I had to get the fog out of my eyes so I retreated into a shower. Standing under the hot, wet sting helped roll away the fatigue, but didn’t do much for my head. I might be able to understand the causes for my lingering depression, but that was a long leap from a fix. I lifted my face into the spray and thought again about quitting the job. But the idea had me shaking like a long-hairdog after a dip in a dirty pond. I convinced myself I was just shaking awake. I also convinced myself to start working that day, just as I had promised. I was so busy convincing I almost pitched my naked butt onto the kitchen floor before I realized the large Black shadow hulking at the table was Julius.