“I sometimes think it happens too much.” Kluren looked back down at her desk, as if done with the conversation. But Simone wasn’t done. She didn’t want to be Kluren’s punching bag anymore.
“I know about you and my dad,” Simone said. Kluren’s face, already hard as stone, seemed to stiffen.
“Weiss, you leave.” Peter nodded and walked out of the office, closing the door behind him.
“You see her when you see me, don’t you? The woman you couldn’t get my dad to leave for you.”
Kluren shook her head, her face almost soft. “I see your dad, who quit the force because both of us fucked up. I didn’t quit. I worked hard to get past it. So I see a coward, and, yeah, I see your mom, but I always liked her okay. When I see your mom I don’t think about how your father didn’t leave her. I think about how she disappeared all of a sudden after your dad confessed.”
“Yeah, she left us ’cause she was angry.”
“I didn’t say left. I said disappeared.”
Simone let the words sink in and suddenly realized she wasn’t smiling anymore.
“What are you saying?”
Kluren stood and walked around the desk so she was close to Simone.
“I was never in love with your father,” she said, her voice gentler than usual. “Maybe you have some fairy-tale idea that he was perfect and no woman could resist him, but it wasn’t like that. It was time together, boredom, stakeouts, restlessness.” Simone thought maybe she’d seen her dad as irresistible as a kid, but now she remembered what he’d spent his life teaching her, and it made her think that he had been lonely. Lonely, sad, and angry.
“It wasn’t love,” Kluren continued. “I don’t know if he even liked me very much. Hell, I didn’t like him. So when he said we should stop, I said fine, and applied for a new partner. He said he was going home to tell his wife. Next thing I know he’s retired and your mom is gone. He was a cop. A good cop. He always got the evidence, even if he had to put it there. You can’t be that good a cop without having a little darkness in you. Not out here. So, yeah, I wonder sometimes where your mother went. She ever write to you? Did she leave you a goodbye letter?”
Simone crossed her arms.
“Didn’t think so. Makes you wonder about how he went out, doesn’t it?” Simone willed herself not to blink, to keep staring forward. “When I look at you, I see all that. But that’s not why I’m hard on you, Pierce. I’m hard on you ’cause you’re sloppy. You follow your instincts, but nothing else. That’s why deCostas is getting away. That’s why people are dead.”
Simone opened her mouth but had nothing to say and closed it again.
“Right.” Kluren walked back around to her side of the desk and sat down, looking at the papers in front of her while Simone stared, waiting for something, though she couldn’t say what. “You should go now.”
Peter was outside, waiting for her. She tried to smile at him but then realized she looked angry and shook her head. He followed her out of Teddy.
“What did she say?”
“That the ocean is deep and dark and we’re all just a few feet from drowning,” she said tonelessly. She could feel Peter stepping forward, reaching out to put his hand on her. Ten minutes before she would have wanted that, but now the thought of it made her sick. She didn’t know who he was. She didn’t know who anyone was. Her dad had been a corrupt cop. She was probably dirty, too, in some way, and she didn’t want to get that on Peter, if he was clean. And if he was dirty, she didn’t want to know.
She turned around before he could touch her and locked her eyes with his. She sidestepped his hand. “I should go,” she said. “I’m supposed to meet Caroline and Danny. I’ll see you later.”
“Sure,” he said. He looked confused and sad and Simone knew it was her fault, but she couldn’t fix it.
“We can all drown together,” Simone said. Peter nodded, though he clearly didn’t understand, then went back inside. But Simone stayed on deck a few minutes longer, staring up at the sky, where the seagulls flew like dirt in the wind. The air was getting even colder, and the salt smell was stronger now, burning her nose and eyes.
She remembered the day she’d poured her dad into the water. She’d found him dead in his office armchair one morning, gun in his hand, bullet in his skull. She’d taken his body to the recycling center herself, wrapped up in sheets in the back of a taxi boat with a driver who kept staring at her. She asked them to take care of it as quickly as possible, but when they saw the red button on his temple, the entrance and exit wounds, they asked her to wait in the other room.
She’d sat alone there, didn’t call anyone, didn’t cry, didn’t check her messages. The room was small and white and brightly lit like a freezer. Eventually, one of the attendants had come back in and brought her back to the room where her father was. She was led in as Kluren was walking out. They stared at one another as they passed in the hall, and Simone looked back as she went into the room. Kluren stood outside, arms crossed, waiting.
They had burned her father and handed her the ashes in a black plastic cylinder. She’d held it in both hands as she walked back out, as though it held something more than dust. Kluren was still there. They looked at each other from across the room, and Simone felt her eyes water up but then swallowed, deeply, and forced her face straight. She’d never spoken to Kluren alone. It had always been her dad who handled things when they got hauled in to the police.
Simone walked across the room to her. Kluren’s golden eyes seemed to dilate slightly, taking her in. They’d stared at each other, Simone trying to figure how to ask what she wanted to ask.
“Clearly a suicide,” Kluren said, as if reciting to a judge. “No need for investigation. Case closed. File sealed.”
Simone let out a deep breath and stared down at the black cylinder.
“And you won’t tell anyone?” she asked.
“No,” Kluren said.
“Then it was a heart attack,” Simone said, looking back up. Kluren’s expression didn’t change, but she leaned forward very slightly.
“You have a lot of potential. You should join the force. I could make sure you moved up the ranks quick, lose some bad habits.”
Simone shook her head, her eyes watering again, though she didn’t know why. “Dad always said the cops had too much red tape to deal with. Couldn’t get things done.”
Kluren let out a disappointed sigh. “Look around, Simone. You’re alone in the middle of the ocean. We all are. Do you really think it matters what color the tape is, as long as it holds us together?”
“My dad—”
“Don’t be him.” It wasn’t so much an order as it was a warning. “Be better.”
Simone realized how close they were now, how she could feel the heat off Kluren’s body, almost see the circuits in her eyes, and she stepped backwards. She stroked the black cylinder in her hands and looked down at it. It was made of cheap plastic. It felt like if she squeezed it, it might crack and explode in her hands, sending ashes everywhere in a cloud.
When she looked back up, Kluren was gone. Simone told everyone it was a heart attack. Her dad hadn’t taken great care of himself. No one doubted it. They told her how sorry they were and offered to cook for her and take her in and make everything better. She smiled and shook her head. She was fine. Never trust anybody. Not even Dad.
There had been clouds on the horizon that day, and the water had been choppy. It had looked to Simone like the waves were reaching out to pull the ashes down, to sink them as low as they would go, to the blackest part of the water.
Her mother had never left her a note, but that didn’t matter much anymore. It didn’t even matter if what Kluren was implying was true or if when she met Simone at the recycling building that day, she’d been unsurprised. Relieved. However her mother had gone, she’d gone.