Life Detonated Read online

  “There aren’t too many ways to wire a bomb.” He put the knife and fork down. “So once you know the circuitry, it’s just a matter of steady hands and a lot of patience.” He settled back into his seat.

  “So, as a cop, you would take apart bombs?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  I looked down at my plate and felt the excitement of the direction his life would take, and wondered if I would be part of it, if he really meant it when he said he wanted to marry me.

  “Actually, would you cut the broccoli, too?”

  “Pleasure’s all mine.” He started cutting again.

  Over dinner, he poured my wine, told me he was building garages until he could start at the academy, said he had a brother who was a state trooper and married, with a little girl. He had three sisters. One was married with a baby, another took care of the third sister who had Down syndrome. Their alcoholic mother couldn’t take care of herself.

  “But my father,” he said, “is a great guy who does his best to hold things together.”

  He tugged at his new sideburns while he talked. When he asked about my family I dodged his questions. The ones I couldn’t dodge, I answered carefully, filtering my replies. But eventually the wine loosened me up, and I found myself telling him about how my mother was the manager of the Horn & Hardart on 59th, across from Bloomingdales, and about my father leaving when I was a kid. While we talked, the wax dripped off the candles in the Chianti bottle holders, their flames flickering every time Marie walked past; Brian told me he liked my hair, loved my smile, asked did I want more wine? He asked if my steak was okay. Did my hand hurt? He said since we met at McGuinness’s, he was pretty sure not one minute had gone by when he wasn’t thinking about me. With each question, I fell a little more in love.

  It was still sleeting when we left the restaurant, and Brian drove slowly the few blocks to the apartment. With the car idling we talked until three in the morning. When I looked up again, the sleet had stopped, and the trees sparkled like silver prisms.

  “Would you like to go to the Bronx Zoo next Sunday?”

  The Bronx Zoo was my favorite. Growing up, I took the bus there weekly to get away from home. “All right.”

  His kiss was soft, and we lingered for just a moment before he whispered in my ear, “Good night, Kathy from the Bronx.”

  I have spread my dreams under your feet;

  Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

  — W. B. Yeats, Aedh Wishes for

  the Cloths of Heaven

  Not Suitable For Viewing

  1976

  Back in our darkened bedroom, I felt safe from the forlorn looks of my family and friends that threatened to send me over the edge. Lying in bed, I could still feel him with me, the heat of his body, the faint scent of his lime shaving cream on the sheets. I’ll never wash them. I remembered buying the bedroom set seven years ago when we were first married and thought we would sleep in this bed for a lifetime.

  Now I closed my eyes and felt the vibration from downstairs where top brass from the department Brian had devoted his life to were making plans to bury him.

  My mother brought me tea and toast. I hardly recognized her. Growing up, she had been elusive, always trying to pull herself away from our neediness. She was an empty nester now, still living in the Bronx, but without eight children in tow, free for the first time in her life. The mothering that had lain dormant all those years suddenly emerged now, in the aftermath of Brian’s death. She sat by my bed and wiped my face with a washcloth and held my hand while I slept, as though caring for me had come naturally all her life, making me forget the little girl who’d begged her for scraps of love all those years ago.

  An NYPD doctor tried to give me tranquilizers, but I was afraid of drugs, afraid I would drown in them like Gracie and never resurface. During my fitful attempts to sleep, dreams of Brian tormented me. I dreamed of my father’s dark street in Brooklyn, crowded with rows of dilapidated apartments with slumped wooden stoops, aligned railroad style, one bedroom the entrance to another, without any privacy. The child-sized bathroom was an afterthought, the kitchen windows nailed shut to keep out the Bushwick Avenue junkies. His piles of paperback crime novels were stacked around the room knee-high, serving as makeshift tables holding filled ashtrays. I could see a blue light under the door, but as I moved into the next room, the light vanished and slipped under the door into the room beyond, and then again until there were no more rooms. I opened the last door to find Brian sitting in a faded red wing chair, his hands on the dirty armrests. The right side of his face was as I remembered him, but parts of the left side hung off, like the stuffing of the chair. “They want me to disappear for a while,” I heard him say. “So the terrorists get the death penalty. It’s the only way.” He filled the room and I breathed him in, floating toward him, so relieved to have him back. His injuries didn’t matter. I would heal him. But when I reached out, he vanished.

  I tried to fight off my mother’s voice, but I woke to sweltering heat and sat up, confused. In the bathroom, I lay on the cool tile, too weak to lift my head, the room spinning. I noticed a slight film around the bathtub where I had let out the water just a few days ago, when I’d bathed in blissful ignorance, my world still intact, before the pall that now hung over the house showed even in the eyes of my little boys.

  “Let me run a shower for you,” my mother said. I watched her prepare a towel and washcloth. She washed my hair like I was a little girl again, as if it had been her, and not Gracie, who had taken care of me then. “God, you’re so thin,” she mumbled.

  Who cares? Who will ever care? I let the wall hold me up. She came back with a black dress I had never seen. “Gracie bought this for you. You need to be at the wake tonight. Everyone wants to know where you are.” Gracie, I thought. The only one I want to be with.

  Looking around the bedroom now, it seemed incredible that nothing had changed. My mother had pulled the curtain closed, leaving a crack of light where the harsh sun slanted across Brian’s closet—a crude reminder of the suits he wore to work that were still on credit. On his dresser was a mahogany jewelry box with a pair of cufflinks inherited from his father, a crumpled five-dollar bill, loose change, a napkin with the name Rob, and a 212 phone number written in Brian’s slanted handwriting. His khaki slacks, flung across a chair, were frayed at the back pocket where he kept his shield. I picked up the pants and in the front pocket found a book of matches from the Market Diner in Hell’s Kitchen where he sometimes had dinner with Charlie. I folded them over a hanger and added them to the row of khakis in his closet the way he would have, if he were still here.

  By his own admission, Brian was a neat freak, organization he said he brought back from his military days when he shined his shoes until they were mirrors and folded his clothes precisely. It was a trait I clearly lacked, my clothes on wire hangers smooshed together in the bigger closet Brian let me have all to myself.

  Compromise was a big part of our marriage. We divided household chores, Brian the better cook, I the shopper and scrubber of toilets. I put in as many work hours as he did in the beginning of our marriage. After Keith, and twenty-one months later, when Chris was born, I reduced my time to anywhere from three to five days a week, from nine until two, so I could be home in time for Brian to leave for his steady four-to-twelves, with rotating days off. We had even compromised on the names we choose for our children. “You get to name girls,” he had said, “and I get to name boys.”

  __________

  For the first time since the doorbell rang two nights before I glanced at my reflection in the mirror. I had become a shadow. The green eyes Brian had loved held an emotion he’d never seen, a new anger, a cold rage, and I didn’t recognize the person in them. I would never feel his body again. My sons would never know their father. I could feel the erosion of trust I had built with Brian and realized I had lost the life I had spent my whole lif
e waiting for.

  Downstairs, everyone I knew seemed to be in the living room, stepping around the polished hardwood floors Brian and I had discovered hidden under worn carpet. We found this Rockville Centre house right before Keith was born. Brian knocked down walls and finished the basement, and we spent years making the house our own.

  Now the house was crowded with police officers who stood talking about losing one of their brothers. It no longer felt like ours. Thankfully Brian’s parents were both dead, saving me from having to deal with his alcoholic mother and sweet-natured father who would be crushed by the death of his boy.

  “Mommy!” Keith left the Candy Land game he and his cousin had been playing and ran to me.

  “Mommy’s okay, sweetie.” I bent down to hug him, and his arms squeezed with all the might of a four-year-old.

  “Come give Mommy a hug, Chris.” My youngest pushed aside Goodnight Moon and slipped off the couch. I blinked away tears. I had to be strong for them.

  On my way to the kitchen, I passed my neighbor. “Terrorists?” she asked, her eyes red and swollen. I shook my head, unable to give her an answer.

  Annie closed the refrigerator door and looked up, surprised to see me. My younger sister had been making sandwiches, ever the efficient and organized one. Rose stood at the sink washing dishes and gave me a sad smile when she saw me. “You okay?” All I could do was nod. The oldest of our sprawling family, she might have been composed up to that point, but when she grabbed me in a tight hug I could feel her quiet sobs.

  I couldn’t cry with her. If I did, I would never stop. My mother sat at the kitchen table with the red-checkered tablecloth staring out the window. Gracie was standing next to her, and after meeting my eyes, she led me back through the living room where my brother Timmy sat alone in a chair, his hands braced on the armrests. I stopped for a moment to kiss his cheek, drained and ghostly white, and I remembered Charlie said it was Timmy who identified Brian’s body. Outside, my brothers Danny and Patrick were on the front porch, smoking. I was grateful Corky had stayed away.

  In our bedroom, a place where I could curl up and disappear, I began to process what I knew thus far. Brian removed the bomb from a locker and brought it to the range. Then what? The implications of his next steps settled in my stomach like acid. Did he cross wires? Was it his fault? The idea was impossible to imagine.

  __________

  The air in the police car was hot and close. My mother and Gracie sat on either side of me. “The dress is too big on you,” Gracie said, taking a cigarette out of her pack. She looked pale, her short-sleeved dress revealing slight track marks running up her wrists. She was clean as a whistle now, and not going back, she said. When I reached over to roll down the window, she patted my arm. “No handles in squad cars.” She lit her cigarette. “I should know.” She leaned over and put her match in the steel ashtray. “First ride in one of these without handcuffs.”

  My mother kept her eyes on the two escort cars ahead, parting traffic on Clinton Avenue, which was normally quiet.

  “I don’t want to see those uniforms.” I looked at the Rockville Centre police cars lining the street. “It hurts to look at them.”

  Gracie leaned against the window and closed her eyes. “Tell me about it.”

  With its white clapboards and green shutters, Macken Mortuary looked more like the colonials that lined the streets of Rockville Centre than a funeral parlor. I’d driven by it a hundred times and never given it a second thought. But now, my husband was lying in a coffin inside one of the rooms.

  I looked out at the line snaking down the sidewalk and around the block. It surprised me, as I hadn’t thought about anyone else mourning him. His death belonged to me alone, to our sons.

  We parked in the back next to a Mercy Hospital ambulance. “So you can go in without having to pass all those people,” my mother explained, adjusting the pearls around her neck.

  “Why is the ambulance here?” I asked the police officer when he opened my door.

  He didn’t meet my eyes. “In case someone needs medical attention.” Me, I thought. They mean me.

  Through the back door and down the long hallway, my mother and Gracie held onto me. The tinny smell of the air-conditioning came through the vents and goose bumps stood out on my arms. We stopped at a side doorway and looked in at the dimly lit room. The accordion walls had been folded back so it was double in size, but the crowd and the hundreds of flower arrangements made it appear small. My family and Brian’s were in clusters near the coffin. Two military guards in decorated uniforms stood sentry over the shining wooden box. A police officer kept the line moving past the coffin, as though directing traffic on some crowded thoroughfare. The coffin was closed. “Why?” I asked my mother.

  She squeezed my hand. “They didn’t want you to see him.”

  That rage arrived again, titanic and almost unbearably restless. “I don’t care what he looks like.” I tried to control my voice. “I want to see his face again.”

  “He’s wearing his police uniform and his wedding ring,” she said. My mother held fast to my arm as though I might run from her. Does that mean his body was in one piece? I wanted to ask. Or shredded and mutilated?

  When we first began to date, I thought Brian would realize his mistake and stop driving to the Bronx. I told him my darkest secrets, about my brother, my father, my mother, and confessed that I didn’t think I knew how to love. But he didn’t shy away from those stories, and instead told me of his own dark memories, of a mother who only played at her role in the presence of his father, of the military assignment to assemble explosives, of the Vietnamese children he met on bike rides through villages, innocent of the torn-up country around them. He wanted to do something for them, he told me, of the village children who all looked alike in the grainy photos he kept in his desk drawer, with dusty shorts and bare feet. So he brought candy just to see their faces light up at the surprise Hershey bar. He confessed that he dreamed about the families whose lives could be obliterated by the bombs he assembled.

  __________

  “You feel that?” Gracie whispered. A palpable ripple went through the room, as though a slight wind had caught the crowd. “They just realized you’re standing here.” And that’s when I understood I wasn’t invisible. All my life I felt invisible. It was one of the things that had drawn me to Brian—that he actually saw me, all of me. And now, standing in that room, I realized that everyone was looking at me. On the one day I wanted to be hidden from view, I had become the most conspicuous person in the room—The Widow.

  “Come.” My mother touched my arm and led me into the room.

  Dennis, Brian’s older brother, looked down at me with those blue eyes so much like Brian’s. “How you doing?” His square jaw flexed over and over again. A man’s grief was different, tense and secretive. Dennis was an FBI agent and Brian had looked up to him, followed his footsteps and joined the Air Force, then went into law enforcement.

  Dennis gave me a sturdy hug, and I felt myself collapse into him. Over his shoulder, I watched his sister crying. “He was crazy about you,” Dennis said into my hair. I nodded. It was hard to look at Eileen, who could have been Brian’s twin. “Hey sweetie.” She came over and hugged and kissed me, dabbing at her eyes, and then mine, with her handkerchief. “Us Brian lovers have to stick together.” Her voice was deep, exhausted. “He was our hero.”

  The fifteen remaining men on the bomb squad stood in a close-shouldered group by the wall. When I looked over at them, they seemed to study the floor or each other’s shoes, as if they were afraid to speak to me. When I started to walk toward them, Paul Eckelmann and Bobby Tellone left a group of police uniforms and came over.

  “You okay?” Paul folded me in his arms. A six-foot-four teddy bear, I felt tiny next to him. He and Bobby were at the academy with Brian. We danced at their weddings, celebrated the birth of their children. “Hold on there,
Kat.” Bobby took my other arm. I thought if they let go, I would fall down. “The room’s clean,” Paul waved his arm toward the crowded room. “Swept of weapons. Bomb dogs called it safe.” I nodded mechanically. Safe. Bomb dogs.

  As we approached the bomb squad, only Charlie stepped forward to greet me. Odd, because these men were family. Charlie’s familiar eyes had a hardness to them, as though part stone, and he held me by the shoulders instead of hugging me, keeping me at arm’s length. “We’re all broken up he’s gone.” I saw his blonde hair had been freshly cut, marine short. It framed a face that looked paler, even, than the night he rang the doorbell. I nodded, and, for one stinging moment, I hated his wife for still having a husband.

  Hank Dworkin put his hand out to me, his face covered in red welts where the shrapnel had hit him. He squeezed my fingers.

  “How did it happen?” I asked Hank. I hadn’t planned to ask. Inspector Behr, commander of the bomb squad unit, stepped between us.

  “Brian was a hero.” He said it defensively and then glanced around, his deep-set eyes shadowed by a pair of darkened glasses. “Admired by everyone who knew him.” He took my hand from Hank and held it, his lips disappearing when he smiled.

  “How is Terry McTigue?” I tried to get my hand free from Behr.

  Charlie glanced at Hank, who ran his fingers around his shirt collar. “Severe injuries.” Behr slowly shook his head. “But he’s alive.” I had a swift vision of Terry in that coffin instead of Brian.

  “The mayor is here.” Charlie nodded to Behr. “He wants a few words with her.”

  Paul took my hand from Behr, and he and Bobby led me to a group of police who surrounded Mayor Beam. “You have our deepest regrets.” The mayor had an air of confidence some short men have and reminded me of my boss Harry. “If there is anything you need just call my office.” His pink scalp peeked through strands of hair.

  “Thank you, Mr. Mayor.” Thank you? I watched him continue toward where the real brass was, where Commissioner Codd lingered.