“Why are you here, sweetheart?” Her mother’s reflection appeared in the same pane of glass. “Really?”
Elizabeth sighed, knowing this was the reason she’d come. “Am I a good person?” Her mother started to smile, but Elizabeth stopped her. “I’m serious, Mom. It’s like now. It’s the middle of the night. Things in my life are troubled and uncertain, and here I am.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Am I a taker?”
“Elizabeth Frances Black, you’ve never taken anything in your whole life. Since you were a child I’ve watched you give, first to your father and the congregation, now to the whole city. How many medals have you won? How many lives have you saved? What’s this really about?”
Elizabeth sat again and stared into her drink, both shoulders lifting. “You know how well I shoot.”
“Ah. Now, I understand.” She took her daughter’s hand, and creases gathered at her eyes as she squeezed it once and took the seat across the table. “If you shot those men eighteen times, then you had good reason. Nothing anybody ever says will make me feel different about that.”
“You’ve read the papers?”
“Generalities.” She made a dismissive sound. “Distortion.”
“Two men are dead. What else is there to say?”
“Baby girl.” She refilled Elizabeth’s glass and poured more in hers. “That’s like using white to describe a full moon rising, or wet to capture the glory of the oceans. You saved an innocent girl. Everything else pales.”
“You know the state police are investigating?”
“I know only that you did what you felt was right, and that if you shot those men eighteen times, there was a good reason for doing so.”
“And if the state police disagree?”
“My goodness.” Her mother laughed again. “You can’t possibly doubt yourself that much. They’ll have their little investigation, and they’ll clear your name. Surely you see that.”
“Nothing seems clear right now. What happened. Why it happened. I haven’t really slept.”
Her mother sipped, then pointed with a finger. “Are you familiar with the word inspiration? The meaning of it? Where it comes from?”
Elizabeth shook her head.
“In the Dark Ages, no one understood the things that made some people special, things like imagination or creativity or vision. People lived and died in the same small village. They had no idea why the sun rose or set or why winter came. They grubbed in the dirt and died young of disease. Every soul in that dark, difficult time faced the same limitations, every soul except a precious few who came rarely to the world and saw things differently, the poets and inventors, the artists and stonemasons. Regular folks didn’t understand people like that; they didn’t understand how a person could wake up one day and see the world differently. They thought it was a gift from God. Thus, the word inspiration. It means ‘breathed upon.’”
“I’m no artist. No visionary.”
“Yet, you have insights as rare as any poet’s gift. You see deeply and understand. You would not have killed those men unless you had to.”
“Look, Mom—”
“Inspiration.” Her mother drank, and her eyes watered. “Breathed upon by God himself.”
*
Thirty minutes later, Elizabeth drove back into the heart of downtown. The city was of a decent size for North Carolina, with a hundred thousand people inside the limits and twice as many spread across the county. It was still rich in places, but ten years into the downturn the cracks were starting to show. Storefronts were shuttered where none had ever been shuttered before. Broken windows went unfixed, buildings unpainted. She passed a place that used to be her favorite restaurant and saw a group of teenagers arguing on the street corner. There was more of that now, too: anger, discontent. Unemployment was twice the national average, and every year it got harder to pretend the best times weren’t in the past. That didn’t mean parts of the city weren’t beautiful—they were: the old houses and picket fences, the bronze statues that spoke of certainty and war and sacrifice. Pockets of pride remained, but even the most dignified people seemed cautious in expressing it, as if it might be dangerous, somehow, as if it might be best to keep one’s head down and wait for clearer skies.
Parking in front of the police station, Elizabeth stared out through the glass. The building was three stories tall and built of the same stone and marble as the courthouse. A Chinese restaurant filled a narrow lot on the side street to her right. The Confederate cemetery was a block farther, and beyond that was the train depot, with the tracks running north to south. When she was a kid, she’d follow those tracks into town, walking with her friends on a Saturday morning to see a movie or watch boys in the park. She couldn’t imagine such a thing, now. Kids on the tracks. Loose in the city. Elizabeth rolled down the window, smelled pavement and hot rubber. Lighting a cigarette, she watched the station.