“I got a question for you.” Even to my ears, my voice shredded the words. “Do you think people have to separate to be good?”
Addresses: home, school…friends?
Had I failed Jenny already?
Curzon mumbled, “Mmduhknow.”
Names: parent or guardian. Guardian. What a terrible word for it.
A woman stuck her head in the door. Curzon stopped typing.
“Amber Alert’s been issued,” she said without looking at me.
“We’ll have the rest for you in under five.”
She walked out. Curzon went back to typing.
“I’ve always thought there’s good and bad in all of us. Everybody’s capable of going one way or another at any time.”
“Are you more capable of the ‘bad’ because you see it,” I asked him, “because it’s around you all the time?”
Without hesitation, he answered, “Yes.”
“Really?” I was unprepared for how vulnerable his honesty made me-with no camera between us. I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to argue. “I’m not so sure.”
“Yes, you are. You agree. Those Amish people agree. Pretty much everybody agrees. Same reason people move to the suburbs. It’s why we build prisons in the middle of nowhere. It’s why you live alone.”
“What?” I spluttered. “What’s my living alone got to do with anything?”
“Who’d understand what you’ve got inside your head? You said you hadn’t had a date since Sierra Leone. My guess is that’s because you can’t picture chatting your way through a meal with some guy, then going into a bedroom with him, taking off your clothes, but never being able to show,” he snorted to himself, “to talk about what’s inside.”
This conversation was rapidly deteriorating. Direct eye contact seemed dangerously inappropriate, but Curzon wouldn’t look away, so I couldn’t either.
“How would it feel to lie beside someone, go to sleep, with that innocent mind on the pillow beside you?” He turned away from me just like that, and returned to typing paperwork. His last words were not speculative at all. They were hard with personal conviction. “It’d be a sort of punishment, wouldn’t it? Hiding a part of yourself all the time. Forever.”
“Does hiding it make you more capable of wrong, bad-ness?” I floundered looking for the right word. “Evil?”
“Like I would know? I’m on the protection-clean-up detail.” He blew me off. “One thing I do know, once you realize how bad a human being can be, once you can imagine it,” he shook his head as if the rest were obvious, “you can imagine hitting back. You can imagine hurting that person sleeping next to you. You can imagine all sorts of things.”
I was imagining all sorts of bad things right now with Jenny missing.
“Aren’t you just the Philosopher King?” I tossed off after too long a silence. This conversation was not helping me worry less. Topic change. “Living alone didn’t protect Tom Jost.”
“Tom Jost didn’t want to be alone. His problem was reaching for the wrong companions. Classic mistake.” Curzon laid out his version of the facts without hesitation.
“You think so?”
“Absolutely. So says the King.” He gave me a cockeyed grin that took the edge off the certainty in his voice. “Did you bring a picture?”
“In my wallet.”
“Good.”
“Aren’t you gonna say we probably won’t need it?”
“You want me to?”
“Yeah.”
“I hope we don’t need it,” he answered carefully. “I want to know about the SUV.”
“Don’t start. It’s nothing, I’m sure.” It was my problem for now.
The SUV run-ins had to be connected to my job. Someone at the station or someone connected to the story on Tom Jost. If I dragged Curzon in at this point, he’d slap a gag on the story. I’d never make the satellite feed.
Twenty-four hours from now, I could come clean.
“It’s work related. Got nothing to do with Jenny.”
Curzon fixed me with the stare. He didn’t agree. He didn’t disagree. “So you got people from your office trying to run you down. Work is going pretty well then?”
“Work is great. Especially being here, which means I am getting jack-all done on a piece that will probably be seen by an eight share of Nielsen homes nationally, which is to say, no one, and completely submarine my career.” Saying it aloud actually made the urge to puke worse. Jenny. Jenny, where the hell are you? “Have I mentioned I’m going to kill that kid when we find her? You got any Tums?”
Curzon slid a drawer open and lobbed a bottle across the room. He didn’t prompt, didn’t offer any consolation. He waited, silent.
I knew the trick of silence, but couldn’t stop myself from saying, “It feels like I’ve stepped into a time machine.”
“Because of the Amish?”
“Of course.” The Tums dried the inside of my mouth like road salt. “And Jenny. And my sister. That house of hers.” I quit rubbing my forehead to glare at him. “You, too.”
“Me?” He sounded pleased. “Why me?”
“I don’t know.” More rubbing, less glaring. “This place, I guess.”
“Ahh. You’ve been in trouble with the law before.”
“Ha.”
He surrendered with both hands.
I tried to stay seated. Couldn’t.
“Two more minutes,” Curzon soothed. He ran Jenny’s picture through a machine at the back of his desk. No wasted motions. “Almost there.”
“I wasn’t meant for kids.” I paced the tiny rectangle of space in front of his desk. “I can’t do this anymore. It’s crazy.”
“You can,” he replied, totally calm.
To me, it sounded like, you have to. “I stink at this. I swear, when we find her-” I kicked my heel against the leg of one of the wooden chairs in frustration. “I did not ask for any of this.”
Curzon looked up from his computer, nodded pleasantly. “Done?”
“Fuck you.”
“Sure.”
I wasn’t ready to laugh, so that pissed me off, too.
He spread his hands and tilted his head exactly like a dashboard Jesus. Men rarely open their hands and show their palms. Curzon’s looked smooth and ruddy. Alive. I remembered how warm they felt and my skin prickled.
“You can’t turn your back on family,” Curzon said. “Not and keep your self-respect. There it is. Nobody said it would be easy.”
Pompous, asshole, know-it-all.
“No shit, Sheriff,” I said. “Tell me about it. Why don’t you start with your divorce from the She-bitch.”
He didn’t move an inch but suddenly the man I’d been talking to disappeared. Where does a man go when he hides behind his eyes? Curzon had retreated to that dark interior before. It came easily. His eyes narrowed. His face became impenetrable from the inside out and I watched myself change in his view.
The hurt it caused me was another surprise.
“My bad. I shouldn’t-You don’t-” I closed my eyes to escape his stare, to hide from myself. My own callused hands reached out, pleading for retraction. “Sorry, Jack. Nothing you’ve said is untrue.” I realized as I said it, how much that meant to me.
Long time ago, I gave up trying to figure out the mystery of what makes human beings connect. Friends. Neighbors. Lovers. I couldn’t say if it was dumb luck or fine timing or the science of body smells the conscious brain has no control over, somehow Curzon knew how to read me. He knew what I meant. Maybe he knew the words I didn’t say as well.
“I’m not talking about Sharon here,” he said slowly. His hands laced together and the knuckles whitened with the force of his grip. “But I know what it’s like. All that business on Sunday with Marcus and my father- it’s the same for me. What I want. What my family wants.” He pulled his hands apart. “Sometimes it’s hard to separate them.”
I don’t even know if he realized, but his right hand tightened into a fist and his left wrapped around it. I thought of that kids’ game-paper covers rock. I felt the force of his will in his eyes, hoping for my understanding. I remembered Jenny running, laughing, playing in his family’s backyard.