After a few moments Carson pads softly over to Roslyn’s bed. She is sprawled on her back, arms and legs akimbo. A gentle fluttering of her eyes behind her closed lids makes it seem as though she’s merely feigning sleep. Roslyn’s left leg twitches several times and she turns on her side.
In Juwan’s room, the boy sleeps too, a copy of Treasure Island tucked beneath his pillow. Carson stares at the face slack with sleep. He looks deeply into the face of a son that he is sure, even before this night, he has already lost.
Carson stands outside Juwan’s door and considers the steps he will have to take to enter the room where his wife, Bunny, sleeps. The thought of those steps fills his mind like a forced march. Bunny wakes up at 7:00 a.m. Maybe, just maybe, he will have a reprieve until then. He knows he won’t be that lucky but walks back downstairs anyway, slumping into a chair at the breakfast nook in the kitchen. He is more than tired, feels an ache that is primordial and awful in his bones and in his skin. He’d like to make a cup of coffee but doesn’t want to make any movements that would signal that he is home. There have been other times in his twelve years on the force when he was hours late because of a fatal accident. Sometimes he had a chance to call. Sometimes he didn’t. Bunny knew this was part of The Job. Shit happened. So she would have guessed, Carson convinces himself, that shit happened last night. To someone else.
If he can just be alone for a while. So that he doesn’t have to face Bunny, to tell her what he did. Even if alone means having nothing and no one to distract him from the images and the memories of the shooting playing over and over in his head. A videotape that on the ride home he promised that he would only allow to play for fifteen minutes of every hour, a promise he has absolutely no power to keep.
The clock on the kitchen wall ticks in all this silence, too loudly, and when he finally switches on the kitchen light to see that he has been sitting in the breakfast nook for half an hour, Carson hears Bunny coming down the stairs. She stands in the kitchen doorway, bundled in a terry-cloth robe, her hair in rollers.
“I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t been able to sleep all night,” she complains, yawning and walking over to the table. “What’s wrong? Why are you so late?” she asks sleepily. “Why are you sitting down here? Why didn’t you come to bed?”
“I know I should’ve called,” he begins.
“I was worried … I started to call the station,” Bunny whines.
“I’m sorry.”
“Carson, sorry just doesn’t cut it. You don’t seem like yourself. You look strange, Carson, what’s wrong?” she asks, sitting down heavily beside him.
He thinks he will tell her calmly, slowly. Instead, the words speak themselves, stumble out. “I’d given him the ticket. The stop was over. I was on my way home.”
“Carson?” Bunny asks, saying his name like a question, and to Carson his name sounds as odd as the inquiry he has heard, it seems, a thousand times this night, Are you okay?
“It was dark. Hell, I didn’t know. How could I? All he had to do was drop what he was holding. Like I told him. Then I would’ve known.”
“Carson, you’re scaring me.”
“It happened so fast.” And that is the truest thing Carson has thought or said this night. “It happened so fast. I killed a man. I stopped him because he was speeding and driving with no headlights.”
“And you killed him?” Bunny whispers, rising so quickly she nearly falls, clutching the collar of her robe tight at her throat and covering her mouth with her hand. Carson stands and walks to Bunny as if he could protect her, save her, from the wrath of what he has done. They cling to each other. Never before have they held each other with love so total and so blind.
About the contributors
Rhozier “Roach” Brown, while serving a life sentence for murder, founded the Inner Voices, a drama troupe that was allowed out of prison more than eight hundred times to perform their brand of social drama. Largely as a result of the group’s success, President Gerald Ford commuted Brown’s sentence to immediate parole. The play Group Work was nominated for three television Emmy Awards and won Best Social Film at the New York Film Festival. A television documentary titled Roach was created about his life story. Later, he worked as a special assistant to Mayor Marion Barry for offender affairs and has been active in endeavors dealing with prisoners and former prisoners, both as the director of community-based programs and as a political activist. Brown played a key role in getting legislation passed that gave ex-offenders the right to vote in D.C. elections. He has also worked as a television and film producer.
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was among the first African American poets to garner national eminence in the U.S., gaining popular recognition for his collection Lyrics of a Lowly Life (1896). Although born in Ohio, Dunbar attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he lived in LeDroit Park. Shortly after his marriage to fellow poet Alice Ruth Moore, Dunbar took a job at the Library of Congress. His time there was short-lived, however, as he blamed the library’s dust for his worsening tuberculosis. Dunbar’s other poetry collections include Oak and Ivy (1893) and Majors and Minors (1895), and his poems and short stories were published in Harper’s Weekly, the Sunday Evening Post, the Denver Post, and Current Literature. What was originally established as the first high school for African American children in Washington, D.C. was renamed in honor of Paul Laurence Dunbar and continues to carry his name after a recent relocation to the Northwest quadrant of the city.
Marita Golden is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent novel, After, was named a 2007 Outstanding Work of Fiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She is president emeritus of the Hurston/Wright Foundation.
James Grady is a former investigative reporter and author of the best-selling novel Six Days of the Condor. He has spent his career writing from Washington, D.C., publishing more than a dozen novels and numerous short stories — including a selection in the original D.C. Noir. Also active in movie and TV writing, Grady’s literary work has won two Regardies Short Fiction awards, garnered an Edgar nomination, and received Italy’s Raymond Chandler Medal, Japan’s Baka-Misu Award, and France’s Grand Prix du Roman Noir.
Elizabeth Hand is the multiple award — winning author of nine novels and three collections of short fiction. Since 1988, she has been a regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World, the Village Voice, and DownEast Magazine, among other publications. She lives on the coast of Maine.
Langston Hughes (1902–1967), most notably recognized as a founder of the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, was a poet, short story writer, and playwright. After traveling throughout Africa and Europe as a young man, Hughes moved to Washington, D.C. for a period of time in the 1920s, where he lived at the 12th Street YMCA. There he was part of the blossoming literary scene, publishing poetry in the Howard University-associated journals The Crisis and The New Negro. Influential in his rhythmic, jazzlike writing style, his other works include The Weary Blues (1926), Not Without Laughter (1930), I Wonder As I Wander (195), Tambourines to Glory (1958), and a series of books involving the character Simple.