He carries his tools inside, and his table, and finally the desk. He puts the desk in the spare bedroom, where it won’t be always catching his eye. He would have liked to finish that desk together with Trey, before he had to send her away.
Probably he should make the rest of yesterday’s perch into dinner, but instead he gets himself a beer and takes it out to the back step. In the east the sky is deepening towards lavender; beneath it the red tractor stands still, abandoned in mid-furrow. The plowing has added a new layer to the air’s smell, something richer and darker, thick with hidden things.
See? he tells Donna, in his head. I can walk away from a case, if it’s the right thing to do. Donna, refusing to be obliging even in his imagination, rolls her eyes and makes a ferocious noise at the heavens.
Cal told Trey the truth: he does not, in fact, know why he and Donna split up. As far as he can tell, what happened was that in Alyssa’s junior year of college she got mugged and beat up pretty bad, and two years later Donna walked out, and apparently there was some mysterious connection that Cal is too dumb to understand.
At the time, there was no indication that the first of these events would lead to the second. He and Donna flew out to Seattle so fast that they got there while Alyssa was still in recovery from surgery for a smashed shoulder bone. Once Cal was sure she was going to be OK, he left Donna to sit with her and headed down to the precinct. He knew exactly what priority would be assigned to a random mugging, but the mugging of a cop’s daughter was a different matter, and the daughter of a cop who was all up in the precinct’s grille was another thing again. Over the next couple of weeks Cal harried that precinct, politely and relentlessly, till they pulled CCTV footage from every camera in a block radius. That got them a couple of grainy shots of the mugger, which Cal and the precinct guys worked—some days Cal put in twenty hours—till they dragged up a runty, redheaded junkie called Lyle, who still had Alyssa’s credit card in his jacket pocket.
When Cal told Alyssa, she was still too shaken up even to show relief; she just looked at him and then turned her head away. Cal understood: he had hoped she would be pleased, but he had seen enough victims to understand that trauma shapes feelings into forms you would never expect.
Over the next while, he and Donna were mostly taken up by worrying about Alyssa. She wouldn’t let them stay with her, after the first couple of weeks, and she wouldn’t come home, so they had to do their worrying long-distance. The attack had cracked her mind all over, like a dropped mirror where the pieces are still in place but the whole doesn’t function right any more. Cal never did figure out whether it was the physical harm or the things Lyle had threatened to do to her—Alyssa had tried to talk him down, connect with him like one human being to another, and Lyle hadn’t taken well to that. Either way, she would barely get out of bed, let alone go to class and hang out with her friends and whatever else she should have been doing.
Gradually, though, her mind healed over. She started going to classes again. One night she laughed on the phone. A few weeks later, when Cal phoned to tell her that Lyle was pleading guilty, she was at a bar with Ben. Cal knew the cracks were still there and still fragile, but he also knew how strong the drive towards life is in healthy young creatures. He put his trust in that, as far as he was capable of doing.
When Donna started giving him shit, at first Cal put that down to the same thing: delayed trauma, coming out now that she had room for it. The shit in question was initially a generalized buckshot spatter of anger, but gradually, as Donna talked her thoughts into clarity, it focused in on their time in Seattle: specifically, the fact that Cal had spent most of that time tracking down Lyle. Donna felt, apparently, that he should have spent it in Alyssa’s apartment, with her and her roommates and Donna and Ben and whatever other friends had shown up to offer moral support and gossip and crap with chia seeds in it.
“What was I gonna do there?”
“Talk to her. Hug her. Just fucking sit there. Anything would’ve been better than nothing.”
“I did something. I went out and got the guy. Without me, they would have—”
“She didn’t need you out somewhere being a cop. She needed you right in that room being her father.”
“She didn’t want me there,” Cal said, baffled. “She had you.”
“Did you ask her?” Donna snapped, hands and eyebrows flying up. “Did you ever ask?”
Cal hadn’t. It had seemed obvious to him that at a time like that, a kid needed her mama with her, and that Donna would do the talking and hugging part a lot better than he would. He had gone out and brought Alyssa the best he had to offer, which was Lyle’s louse-ridden scalp. That didn’t seem like nothing to him. Without his work, Lyle would still have been on the streets; every time she went out her door, Alyssa would have been watching for him on every corner. Now, at least for the next seven to ten years, she could go out without being afraid.
Either way, this did not, at first, seem like marriage-ending material. But over the next months it led them, via a series of leaps and skids that Cal barely managed to follow even at the time, into much darker and muddier places. They argued for hours on end, late into the night, far past the point where Cal became too punch-drunk and exhausted to understand what they were arguing about. In the end Donna got mad enough that she left, which stunned Cal to the bones. He had got plenty mad at Donna, in the course of their time together, but never mad enough that it occurred to him to walk out.
The only thing he took away from those arguments with any clarity was that Donna believed he would be a better husband, and a better father, if he wasn’t a cop. Cal thought that was a load of hooey, but he found himself willing to run with it anyway. He had his twenty-five, Alyssa was out of college, and the job was no longer what it had been, or maybe what Cal had believed it was. He couldn’t tell what it was, any more, but he was becoming clearer and clearer that he didn’t like it.
He didn’t tell Donna what he had decided until he had turned in his paperwork, got it all approved and got in writing the date when he would hand in his badge. He wanted to present her with something solid, so she would know he wasn’t bullshitting. Maybe he left it too long, because when he told Donna, she said she had something to tell him, too, which turned out to be that she was seeing some guy called Elliott from her book club.
Cal didn’t reveal that part to his buddies. They would have said that Donna had been banging Elliott all along and that was why she left to begin with, and Cal knows she wasn’t. He would like to believe she was, for his own peace of mind, but he knows Donna better than that. She has her code too. Probably the thought of hooking up with Elliott never so much as crossed her mind while she and Cal were together, or she would never have laid a finger on him even after they split. He just told the guys that she had said it was too late, which she had, and the guys bought Cal more beer and they all agreed on the incomprehensibility of women.
But this, which should have provided some comfort, just made him feel worse. He feels like a fraud, because the other thing he took away from all those fights with Donna was that somehow, without ever intending to, he had let her and Alyssa down. All Cal ever wanted to be was a steady man who took care of his family and did right by the people around him. For more than twenty years, he went about his business believing he was that man. Only somewhere along the way, he fucked up. He lost hold of his code, and the worst part is that he can’t understand what he did. Everything he’s been since that moment has been worth nothing, and he doesn’t even know what the moment was.