Officer Jim Conway sat at his new desk touching the leather of his new belt and waited for something to happen, something to which he might prove worthy. His new nameplate was there on the desk but that alone did not make him worthy. When the phone rang, he picked it up and said “Officer Jim Conway” just like it was etched in the brass, taking pride but he hoped not too much pride in the sound. Six months of training and he was a real officer, proficient in CPR and frisking and cuffing and how to invoice property. If he rubbed his palm, he could still feel where the sergeant had gripped his hand to welcome him aboard.
The dispatcher informed him that a man had called the station because he was worried about his son. “Needs someone to meet him there to check on the kid,” he said. “Make sure nothing gets out of hand.”
Officer Jim Conway opened the drawer that held his standard issue service pistol. His handcuffs and taser were already clipped to his belt. “What kind of out of hand?”
“He’s called before—it’s all routine,” the dispatcher assured him.
Officer Jim Conway slid a fresh Bic pen from the box and took down the address. Would the dispatcher have said this to a more seasoned officer, assured him it was all routine? In the department database, he found the call records and reports. The son had been arrested for carrying a fake grenade in another city in another part of the state, but he was only fifteen then and had been released. He had gone missing once, twice, three times since, but he was always found again and never a threat, not like that. It was not against the law to refuse to call your mother. It was not a crime to go days with no one knowing where you slept. The police could not help in those matters, and Officer Jim Conway was not sure he could help now. An officer could not make someone kinder, for instance. He could not change what a person might want.
Later, when Officer Jim Conway received other calls about other checks on other men, he would think about this check, the first one he had been sent on, and wonder what might have happened if someone else had been around to go that day. Or sooner. Or not at all.
But there was no telling about those things, and anyway he did take the call and he did get in his squad car, so there was no use getting the imagination involved. He had responsibilities now. Ellie had said it to him just that morning when she insisted he go to work and not worry about her. “You have responsibilities, Jimmy. Don’t fuss over me.” He had been a ninth grader walking home from school one day, wondering why Ellie had been absent, when he turned down the block to see her father being led away in handcuffs. Those officers had made Ellie’s life better, and now his new badge could make someone’s life better too. Only he wished she would not call him Jimmy anymore, as though he were still somebody’s boy.
Officer Jim Conway was the first to arrive at the house. He parked on the street and walked up the driveway. He could not see through the curtains. No one answered when he rang the bell. Then a car drove up. A man was driving, the man who had called. He parked in the driveway. Officer Jim Conway watched as the wife went to get out of the car, but the man turned to her. He said something and the wife’s hand paused on the handle. She shook her head and he put his hand on hers, on the hand that was not on the door. Very gently, it seemed to Officer Jim Conway, who perhaps should not have been watching. The wife stayed sitting as the man got out of the car.
The man rang the bell and knocked and rang again, and still no one answered. He pulled out his phone and dialed. After a short wait, he hung up. “I don’t know,” he said in response to a question Officer Jim Conway had not dared to ask. Carefully, as if just then deciding, the man handed him the key.
Officer Jim Conway felt suddenly that he had no business being there. The dispatcher had said kid, but this was someone with his own truck, his own house, a house he did not live in with his parents—parents he likely had not lived with for some time. He should have seen that from the date of the arrest at fifteen, but “kid”had made him think that he was checking on a child. Officer Jim Conway had been living with Ellie in their apartment for less than a year, and Ellie still wondered if they should have stayed in his parents’ basement where they were lucky—very lucky, she said—to save money while he got on the feet he was getting on now. But he was tired of his father’s dry cough rattling above them, his mother squeezing by their bed with laundry on her hip.
Officer Jim Conway put the key in the lock. He used his shoulder to make the door unstick. “Jack?” the man called from behind him. “Jackson, are you in there?”
Officer Jim Conway already smelled the smell, a bad smell that made him think bad things. He did not want to go inside.
“Perhaps you should wait here,” he said, wondering if he should add, “Sir.” The man pushed past him in a rush.
Last night when Ellie was sleeping she had twisted out of the covers, and when he woke and tried to pull them back on her, she had pushed him away, saying, “Please, Jimmy. Don’t do that.” In the morning, she was up early. He had reached for the empty space beside him and then got up and went into their bathroom with their toothbrushes side by side and her creams and her contact lens solution, the green bottle not the blue one, he knew because he had bought her the wrong kind so many times that she had said, “Oh Jimmy, you memorized everything for that goddamn entrance exam but you can’t remember a simple thing like that.” And so he did not get the blue kind even though it was cheaper and every dollar had to count. It seemed a sign, when he saw it there. The proof of his care.
But she was not in their bathroom with their towels and their used, bristly things; she was in the smaller bathroom with the guest towels they were not supposed to use. They had to remain clean for guests, although it seemed to Officer Jim Conway that they could put out fresh towels if guests came over, which was not very often and only his parents and his sister for supper sometimes, not Ellie’s parents and not her brother at all. But Ellie said he did not understand and he accepted that he did not understand. The door was cracked and he saw the thin fabric of her nightgown pulled across her shoulder blades, pulled tight because she was kneeling on the nightgown, kneeling on the ground. “Ellie?” He loved her name, how he got to say it whenever he pleased.
She flushed the toilet and wiped her mouth on the guest towel, making it no longer clean. “I’m here, Jimmy. Everything’s fine.” She wiped her mouth again and asked what he wanted for breakfast.
It pained him that Ellie told him everything was fine when everything was not fine, he could see that with his very own eyes.
When Officer Jim Conway stepped into the house, he did not see any of the things that had been covered in the workshops and pamphlets and interactive, decision-making scenarios of his training modules. There was blood in the kitchen, a pool of it sticky and dark, and a maze of bloody paw prints crossing the floors, the counters, even in the sink. He pressed the heel of his palm to the solid, steady handle of his gun. It confused him how the small prints got on the dishes, where that raucous noise was coming from. As though he did not see the cats or hear the cats or understand cat at all. He kept looking at those paw prints instead of where he should have been looking, which was at the body splayed back in a kitchen chair.
The man—the father—was very quiet. The silence was itself a noise. He was not rushing anymore; he stood there and stood there, a hot flush creeping up his neck to the unshaven scrape of his chin. He did not move toward the body but he did not move away. Officer Jim Conway felt something lodge in his throat and had to clear it. He cleared his throat and the man’s head jerked. Officer Jim Conway realized it must have looked as though he had meant to clear his throat. I’m here, Jimmy. Everything’s fine. “Is that Jack?” he asked, and the man let out a groan just as Officer Jim Conway was thinking he should not have said that. Of course it was him, the boy who was not a boy, not really. He was a man. He had once been a man. He was not anything now.
He and Ellie were not married. They lived together in the apartment and in the basement before that and had been together for longer still, but they were not married.
“Please don’t tell my wife what’s in here,” the man said, very slowly. “She doesn’t need to know.”
Officer Jim Conway assured the man he did not have to worry, just as the dispatcher had assured him this would all be routine. The platitude was syrup in his mouth. He followed the paw prints into the living room, to make himself useful or to give the man privacy or so he himself could swallow something down. In the room sagged a scratched-up sofa and, against the far wall, four large black Rubbermaid containers spaced across the floor. The containers had no lids. A network of pumps snaked up and out of each one, up and into rows of tall shelves stacked almost to the ceiling. He had never seen anything like it, this contraption with hoses and cables all making a low, steady hum. The shelves were filled with rows and rows of dark green leaves and small light ones and also green beans and jalapeño peppers and a slew of tomatoes blushing shamelessly as if there was no such thing as somber.
The plants did not grow in regular soil but in dark, pebbly bits, their shallow pots connected to the pumps, which were connected to the containers on the floor. He peered closer, expecting water. And there was, but then came a burst of movement and he jumped back, reaching for his gun.
He looked again. Fish, a startle of them thick and muscled, flashing silver as they turned.
The man entered the room. Officer Jim Conway smoothed the front of his shirt as though he had not just reached for his gun. These were not small, clear fish tanks like at the pet store or the one Ellie kept in her classroom, replacing the goldfish each time they went belly-up before the kids could know. They were not small fish, the four tight schools of them swimming in the four black bins. He did not think Ellie should be so careful with the children, swapping out the goldfish like that. But he began to understand her wish for such protections. Near the containers the smell was sharp, ammonia cutting through the iron blood smell and the complex smells of the cats, their fur and their food, their many excretions. Two tanks were clotted with green blooms on their surface, and Officer Jim Conway did not know if it was meant to be that way or not.
An orange cat had fled from under the sofa. Now another one, brown with golden eyes, came to butt its head against his trousers, weaving between his legs, sniffing for the blue beating hearts in the tanks. It was shedding all over his pants but Officer Jim Conway could not bear to shoo it away. The man reached down and scratched under its chin and the cat tipped its head up to take more, a manic, motor noise spewing from its throat. “He loved these cats,” the man said, and Officer Jim Conway was glad he had not shooed it away.
He could not tell when the son had died. He would have to ask the neighbors if they had heard a gunshot, and there would be a postmortem even with no chance of foul play. This, too, was a form of routine. But it must have been long enough for the cats to grow restless, pacing through the dark blood, mewling their animal need. Although not so long because there was dry food left in their bowls, they were half full or more like three-quarters, the nuggets were pushed around and some had spilled on the floor and it was hard to guess the actions of another. The dead man might have heaped the food high as a tower. He might have known some time might pass in which he could not feed his cats, these cats he had supposedly loved, on account of his being dead and no one yet knowing.
It seemed a terrible thing to Officer Jim Conway to die in September when the sky was still so blue. To have given so much thought to making sure the cats were fed but not the same thought to making sure his own father did not have to see what he had done.
“Tilapia,” the man said, and Officer Jim Conway found he was still staring at the fish.
“Really?” he asked, because what more could he say.
“He was going to do trout next.”
Officer Jim Conway would look this up when he got home. Mud carp grass carp crucian carp. Tilapia could grow the size of dinner plates. Fish the size of saucers in your very own home.
“Those are harder, though. That’s what Jack said.” The name caught in his throat, the name of his son, and Officer Jim Conway wondered if it had caught when the man had called the station, saying please could someone come with him to check on Jackson Ward, please was there someone, anyone, out there who could help.
Officer Jim Conway watched the containers of fish, unsettled by their puckered lips. Their white flesh flaking in his mouth. A closed loop, the man explained, where the fish waste fed the plants and the plants cleaned the tank and the water pumped and pumped and Officer Jim Conway did not understand it even though he could have reached out right in front of him and plucked the fat tomato from the vine. He did not understand why there was a dead man in the kitchen even though he could have reached out and touched him too.
“He built the whole thing himself,” the man said, as if it were vital that Officer Jim Conway grasp this. “The first thing he did was bring us butter lettuce. Fresh lettuce in February. Can you imagine?”
No, Officer Jim Conway could not imagine.
“There was an article written about him. His innovations to their feeding.”
“Impressive,” he agreed.
The man looked at him. “I should go outside to my wife.”
The man walked out of the house with Officer Jim Conway behind him and the wife must have known from the look on his face what he did not want to tell her because she pushed open the car door and staggered out.
When she opened her mouth, a sound came that was not a sound Officer Jim Conway had ever heard before. It was not a sound that should come from a body, just like the body in the kitchen was not how a body should be. It was more cat-like than the cats themselves, who had struck Officer Jim Conway as human in their panic, their need.
The man went to her. He held her up before she could stumble, and he held her so her weight was on him. He held her weight as she held his, and then they were holding each other.
He thought of Ellie, who was very quiet when she cried, and did so rarely, and wondered if he had ever stood that close to her, really close to her.
The wife was still making that noise, a wet noise into his shoulder, and the man was so quiet Officer Jim Conway wondered, foolishly, if he would ever make a noise again. But the man did speak, Officer Jim Conway could hear him. He said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” and she nodded into his shoulder and said, “I know.”
“We’ll get through his,” he said.
Again she said, “I know.”
“Worse things have happened to people. Worse things and they go on.”
Officer Jim Conway felt he should not watch this but he did not look away. He shifted the gun on his hip and reached into his pocket, forgetting he did not have the box there anymore. It had not seemed a good idea to keep it with him because what if it got stolen and because he did not want the other officers to spy it, to say Congratulations, Jim! and thump him on the back when he was not even brave enough to do it. He had tucked it instead in the bottom of his underwear drawer, and whenever he reached in, he felt around to make sure. He had reached in and felt around just that morning, but he would have liked to feel it again now, the crushed velvet, the miniature hinge, the fearful promise he was not sure he could live up to.
The man said, “I’ll call Amy.”
The wife shook her head. “I’ll do it.”
“No,” he said. “You don’t have to.” His voice so steady that Officer Jim Conway knew he would never tell anyone what he had seen in the kitchen that day—not his wife, his daughter, his parents if they were alive; not a friend if he was lucky enough to have one. He would clean the cats of their bloody paws but he would not say a word.
“You drive,” she told him. “You drive and I’ll call.”
And what of Ellie crouching on the bathroom tile, the secret she would not long be able to hide? He tried to think of someone who was of him but not him. The future. He tried to think who he would be if he were not Officer Jim Conway at all.
After the body was in the morgue and Officer Jim Conway was back at his desk with the phone not ringing and not anymore wanting it to ring, he looked up the name they had said, Amy Ward. She was their daughter and she lived in a city, not the big one on the other side of the state but a closer one and Officer Jim Conway wondered how quickly she had arrived. The wife had not left the car until she saw her husband in the doorway, but that did not make her fragile. Officer Jim Conway had at first thought that made her fragile, but that was before he saw her pull her phone from her purse as the car backed down the driveway and turned.
Their son was supposed to have come over. He had said yes he would be there, but then he did not show and did not show and perhaps they should have called the police sooner—the man had said this in the kitchen, looking at the footprints as the cats howled. But they did not call sooner because their son had insisted he was not to be treated like a child, he resented when they treated him like a child who could not make his own decisions. And it was true he was not a child, he lived alone in a house with three cats and four fish tanks and taught woodworking at a small private school when he was not in the hospital close to them or the hospital far from them or missing or doing Officer Jim Conway was not sure what. And also, the man had said, a whisper then. They did not think the police were right for such a worry. They had hoped and hoped to find another way.
That night as Officer Jim Conway lay awake in bed, he was not thinking of the dead man’s inside-out face, that terrible glisten that could give a person the shakes and mumbles, that could get the sergeant to call you in and close the door. He was thinking of the mother who had stayed in the car.
“Ellie,” he whispered, quiet in case she was asleep but not so quiet in case he could coax her not to be.
She turned in the bed. “Hm?”
“Why do you love me?”
He was afraid she would be angry to be woken up at this time of night and for this kind of question. Better she dismiss him: Why, Jimmy? Ask me nonsense in the morning. But she turned. She traced a finger down his cheek. The dead man’s parents were the same age as his parents, but he had never seen his parents hold each other like that, each the tree trunk and each the red leaves, falling.
“You treat everybody the same,” she said. “You treat me right, not like there’s anything wrong with me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, El.”
After her father had been taken away and did not come back, some people talked to her louder like she could not understand them, or they talked softer like she was made of glass and would shatter. Officer Jim Conway was not yet Officer Jim Conway back then, but he knew she was not going to shatter. All that time they had known each other and been friendly and then together a little shyly and then together and not quite as shy anymore—in all that time he did not call her beautiful. She had heard it too many times in one way and so she did not like to hear it even in a different way.
But he had learned that there were other ways to tell her. So too might there be other ways to be of use.
In the morning, he awoke again to emptiness beside him. He did not walk to the other bathroom, where the guest towel, he knew, would bear the wet crush of her lips. In the bottom of his drawer beneath the folded stack of his underwear he felt for the small velvet box, and this time he did pull it out and he did clutch it in his palm and he did now put it in his pocket when he dressed, even though he would have to take care not to lose it.
Down the hall he sniffed the milk and got out the marmalade Ellie liked and put it on the table so it would be there when she was ready. He thought of the fish in their Rubbermaid bins, swimming and swimming. Did they know their lives were so small? He imagined the car ride home, the phone ringing. Amy’s voice: Mom? He could not guess what came next. But the man made sure his wife did not have to see it and the wife made sure he did not have to say it and Officer Jim Conway did not know if he had that kind of love in him. Could he step into a house so Ellie did not have to. Could he bear the kindness of her pulling out her phone.
A perfect system, the man had said. Completely self-sustaining. The cats had food and they had water and the fish had the plants and the plants had the fish but surely the tilapia and the tomatoes and the waxy long beans could not just grow and grow. Surely each life needed more care. He wanted to call the man, the father, and say that it was not enough. He wanted to throw open the bathroom door and tell Ellie what enoughcould be. But he suspected they both already knew that, and he had somehow been the last to learn. How did one ask for more, he wondered. How did one start to find that other way.
***
Rumpus original art by Dmitry Samarov
