Glass, glass, glass. Stay away from broken glass. Don’t run with a glass in your hand. Never take glass containers to the beach. Glass in the sand beneath bare feet. I am a child on the beach. No, I am a woman on a sofa.
Glass, glass, glass. My arm ached. I wanted to throw up.
Oh, glass. And a man’s voice: “I think she’s awake.”
Open your eyes, I told myself. I did not want to.
Not glass. Lass. “Lass, lass, lass.” A voice like porridge. Warm, rich, soft. My neighbour Maude Blair was speaking to me. Fifty years out of Glasgow and she still wore her soft highland burr like a tartan, like a brooch in the shape of a thistle. Maude and her husband, Jock, are two of the few friends I have on the beach strip. Not “How are ya?” friends you pass on a walk or in the supermarket. I have many of those. I mean friends who know and care about you. They’re more difficult to find. The beach strip is made up of individuals who prefer to remain that way.
Maude was stroking my head, and when I opened my eyes she smiled at me but spoke to someone else, out of my view. “Aye, she’s fine now,” Maude said. “She’s awake. You’re awake and all right, aren’t you, lass?”
Two medical attendants entered from the kitchen. They looked purposeful, the way professionals do when they’re allowed to demonstrate their training and use their tools. They took my blood pressure, shone lights into my eyes, gave me a pill and some water, asked if I needed a blanket, and left, satisfied that they had practised on a living person.
I rose from the sofa, helped by Maude Blair. I stumbled into the kitchen and sat slumped in a chair, drained in the manner you have when your body’s supply of tears is exhausted. Nothing ached, but everything pained me.
“Should I be staying with you?” Maude asked. Her hands were touching my head, my shoulders, my arms, as though she wanted to assure herself or me that I wasn’t falling apart physically as much as I appeared to be mentally.
I hugged her to me, burying my face against the printed pattern of her dress, and permitted myself to wail while Maude patted the back of my head gently, saying, “There, there.”
When I sat back, I saw Jock, Maude’s husband, peering around Mel and two uniformed officers, all three making notes on small paper pads.
“We need to question Mrs. Marshall,” Mel said to Maude, then added “privately,” and Maude nodded and stood, looking from me to Jock and back again, dabbing at her eyes with a small lace-trimmed handkerchief. Jock raised a hand to me, then took Maude’s arm and walked toward the back door, into the garden.
Mel followed them, returned to speak to the two uniformed cops, who nodded and left, and sat facing me.
“Who did it?” I asked him.
Someone had brought coffee in paper cups and set several on the kitchen table. Mel placed one in front of me.
“He did. Gabe shot himself.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Josie—”
“My husband did not shoot himself in the head. My husband did not tell me to meet him out there just so I could find him dead. My husband was not that mean or that selfish. I spoke to him, he called me on the telephone, he was fine, he was Gabe …”
“An hour ago. Maybe more.”
“Where were you?”
“With Mother. Just down …” My throat tightened. “You know where she is.” I shook my head. My words emerged between sobs. “Gabe did not kill himself. Where was the gun? Why wasn’t it in his hand? How could he shoot himself without a gun in his hand?”
“The gun was there. He was kneeling when he shot himself. He fell to his left, his arm … when he died, all the muscles relaxed, Josie. That’s what happens. The arm drops, the gun is released. It was there on the blanket. The weapon does not always remain in the hands of a suicide, Josie. I’ve seen it a dozen times. The recoil, the kick of the gun—”
I didn’t want to hear about it. “You’ve seen it a dozen times. Good for you. I’ve seen it once and I hate it. I hate it and I don’t understand it. I don’t believe it, either.”
Mel rose from his chair and walked outside, leaving me listening to sounds I had rarely heard on other evenings: traffic on the twin high bridges, feet shuffling along the boardwalk, muffled noises from factories along the bay. When he returned he said, “There’s an open bottle of wine with him.”
I told him I knew that. I knew all about it. Merlot. Rich, red, chewy Merlot. That’s what we drank.
Walter Freeman entered the kitchen with authority and without knocking. “Josie,” Walter said, “I need a statement.”
“About what?”
“About Gabe calling you tonight.”
“Who told you that?”
“I did,” Mel said. “Somebody has to put the facts down.”
“Then put down the fact that my husband did not commit suicide.” I was crying again. Tears must be inexhaustible.
Walter gestured to Mel, who rose from the chair and walked outside. Walter took his place at the table, watching me as he set his wire-bound notebook in front of him. He reached for a pen in the pocket of his cheap shirt. Walter always wore cheap clothes. Walter had no class. “Walter Freeman is a man,” Gabe said to me once, “who is confident enough in himself to be an ass and not care about it. You have to admire him for that.” I did not admire Walter for anything.
“You see this?” Walter said. He took a small page of lined paper from inside his notebook. Two pieces of sticky tape extended on either side, like coiled transparent wings. On the note was, I’m in the bushes. Get naked! It looked like Gabe’s writing. It was Gabe’s writing.
I shook my head.
“It was stuck to the door, the back door,” Walter said. “Look like Gabe’s writing to you?”
I nodded.
Walter inserted the note between the pages of his notebook. “What did Gabe say when he called you tonight?”
“He asked me to come home. You saw the note. He wanted me to go with him into the bushes.”
“Why?”
I looked at Walter, who was staring at me with the same expression he wore, I suspected, while reading a telephone directory. I did not want to speak to Walter, and I wanted him to know it, so I replaced my despair with anger. It made a good substitute. “Why the hell do you think?”
Walter blinked. “We didn’t find his clothes. It appears he left the house naked, wrapped in the blanket. Once you’re inside those bushes at night, nobody can see you.”
“Do you suppose that’s why he wanted to make love there?”
Walter wrote something in his notebook, and as he wrote he said, “Tell me what time your husband called you. At a retirement home, was it?”
“Trafalgar Towers. My mother lives there. I work there twice a week. You already know that. It was around nine.”
Walter’s eyebrows moved up his forehead and stayed there. “It’s past eleven now. You haven’t been here for, what? Half an hour? What took you so long?”
“I walked.”
“Which way? Along the highway?”
“Along the lake to the bridge.”
“Any reason you came down the lake tonight, didn’t walk along the road?”
I shrugged.
“Coming back along the road should have taken you twenty minutes. Half an hour at the most. You took over an hour to get here. Why so long?”
“I was not aware that a wife needs to drop everything and run home just because her husband wants to screw her in the moonlight.”
I watched Walter’s eyebrows descend slowly into place. “What was the state of your marriage?” he asked. He was making notes again.
“The state of our marriage? What the hell kind of question is that?” I looked away, then back again. “The state of our marriage? I don’t know. Michigan? No, Florida. Gabe liked Florida. How’s that for a state of marriage? If Florida is a state of marriage, is Nevada a state of divorce?”
“Josie—”
“Call me Mrs. Marshall. That’s my name. My husband is dead, so I’m the widow Marshall now, but it’s still my name, and you damn well better use it.”
It was a tantrum, but I thought I deserved to throw one and Walter Freeman deserved to catch it. He drew a deep breath and started to speak, but I wasn’t finished. “Did Gabe leave a note? Where’s his note?”
“There is no note.” Walter nodded at his own words as though confirming something. He looked up at me. “Was your marriage happy, Mrs. Marshall?”
“Delirious.”
“Are you certain?”
“I know when I’m happy.”
“Did your husband give you any gifts?”
“Of course he gave me gifts. And I gave him gifts.”
“Expensive ones? Recently?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Were there conflicts in your marriage?”
“Conflicts? Like arguments? Sure there were. We were married.”
“I was thinking of other partners. I was thinking of that kind of conflict.”
I shook my head. “Think about something else.”
“Neither of you was having an affair?”
“No.”
Whenever I lie, I’m convinced something happens to inform the other person that I am not being truthful. I blush, I look away, I stutter, my mouth gets dry, maybe my nose grows longer, I don’t know. Walter Freeman knew I was lying, and he sat looking at me, saying nothing, which made me so uncomfortable that I spoke first. “Who found Gabe’s body?”
Walter pushed both lips forward like a man playing a trumpet, a habit he had when thinking deeply, or as deeply as Walter’s intelligence could take him. “Couple of kids. Down on the beach. They heard the shot and thought it came from your house. One of them called us on his cell phone, and a bunch of them came up here, looking around. They found the opening into the bushes. Stomped all over the place. Screwed up a lot of things, but …” Walter shrugged.
“If I heard a gunshot, I’d run the other way.”
“So would most people over the age of twenty.” He stood up just as Mel entered the room again.
“They’re ready to take Gabe away,” Mel said. “Is there anything I can do, Josie? Somebody I can call?”
I could only shake my head. I could think of nobody I wanted to speak to. Only Gabe. “I want to go with him,” I said. “I want to see him and hug him.”
“I’ll arrange something,” Walter said. “You can follow the coroner’s vehicle in a cruiser. It’ll be out front. The officer will call you.” He walked out of the kitchen through the back door, and Mel took his place in the chair facing me.
“I know it’s hard to accept.” Mel looked back over his shoulder to confirm we were alone, then reached for my hand and held it as he spoke. “It always is. Gabe did it. He had reason to. We both know that. God, I feel terrible. Gabe was …” He dropped my hand and turned away.
“He wanted to make love to me.” I was crying again. Damn it, damn it.
“He carried his gun out there with him, Josie.” Mel turned back to me. “Maybe he planned to do something else.”
“Like what?”
He wiped his eyes and looked at me.
“Bullshit,” I said. “That’s bullshit, Mel. He wouldn’t do that. Gabe loved me.”
“He knew things.”
“He suspected them. Unless you told him. Did you tell him, Mel? Jesus, did you tell him?”
Mel shook his head. “How could I? Why would I?” He knelt to look directly at me. “It’s his weapon, Josie. They’ll retrieve the bullet, and when they match it to his gun, what else can they think?”
I walked to the cupboard next to the refrigerator and opened the top drawer. Then I walked to the pantry and looked behind the sugar. Gabe always followed the same routine with his weapon when he was off duty, removing the ammunition clip and placing it in the drawer near the refrigerator, and keeping the gun itself in the pantry behind the sugar. All the cops had their own way of dealing with their guns. Gabe told me they joked with each other about it. One put his ammunition clip inside an empty cereal box. Another hid his behind his wife’s box of tampons.
Neither piece of Gabe’s gun was where he would hide it. I leaned against the kitchen counter, staring into the sink.
“It’s his gun, Josie.” Mel was watching me, his head tilted to one side.
“He wouldn’t take it with him,” I said. “Not to meet me. He knows I hate guns.”
Someone called Mel’s name from the door to the garden, and he left me alone for the first time since I arrived home. Gabe disliked carrying a gun, and he disliked police officers who expressed a desire to use their weapon. “If I didn’t have to carry one, I wouldn’t,” he told me once. “Anybody who collects weapons or loves to fire them or says he loves them—I’ve heard guys say that—well, they’re sick.” Gabe was always late for his tests at the firing range, and he always dismantled his gun as soon as he arrived home because he knew I hated the sight of it. He would not have taken it with him to the caragana bushes for that reason. Not to meet me. Not to use it on me. He loved me that much. I knew he did.
When Mel returned, he closed the door behind him. “The coroner wants to move the … to move Gabe,” he said. “The officer in the cruiser out front is ready to take you to the morgue. You’re sure you want to do this?”
I nodded.
“You could ride with me, but …”
Riding with Mel was the last thing I wanted to do. No, seeing Gabe on a slab in the morgue was the last thing I wanted to do. I could avoid one, but not the other. I wanted no one to accompany me to see Gabe. I wanted to speak with no one. I didn’t even want to look at anyone. I buried myself in myself. I didn’t want to do that, either, but I had no choice.