“We have to talk about this, Ben. There’s a reason why—”
“I just want it to stop.”
She nodded—giving up a little too easily, he thought—and ran her fingers along the edge of his hand. He didn’t pull away, and she finally clasped his pinkie between her thumb and forefinger and they sat like that for five minutes, the trash truck stopping and starting, the compactor crushing what the neighborhood tossed away.
Maybe that’s why he got shot three weeks later. He was distracted in the street: Moments when he should have been watching a suspect’s right hand for sudden movement, moments when he should have been tuned to the bullshit some perp was feeding him, he imagined Rachel, her hand on his coat, pleading for him to stay and him not knowing how he could or how he couldn’t.
“You know, sweetheart,” Ben said now. “It’s hard to explain what happens to husbands and wives.”
“You mean you think I’m too young to understand, right?”
“No,” Ben said. “I mean it’s difficult to explain.”
“Give me some credit,” she said. “I’m fourteen, not some little girl.” She sliced a red onion in half and then pointed at his arm with the tip of the knife. “I know what that scar on your arm is. I’ve always known. You don’t think I believed that stupid story about being in a car accident?”
Yeah, he did think she bought that stupid story. Rachel thought she bought it, too. Ben remembered Emma, a nine-year-old in ponytails, peeking around the corner into their bedroom, her face white with fear, while he unwrapped the bandage and drained the fluid from the hole. He yelled at her to go away, and a few moments later he listened to her crying in the kitchen while Rachel tried to calm her down.
“We were just trying to protect you.”
“Well, it made it scarier, not knowing the truth.”
After he came home from the hospital, Rachel babied him. She wanted to bring him dinners in bed, wanted to swab the wound with alcohol, wanted to drain the pus and blood herself and wrap the blue-yellow flesh back into the gauze and tape. She tried once. He was groggy-headed and looped with painkillers, and when she touched his arm he slapped it away. No way could he let her touch him. She took his punishment, which just pissed him off more, made him feel like an absolute jerk. When she went back to teaching after a week’s leave to care for him, Ben put in a call to Dan Garrett, the resource officer at the high school, and had him keep an eye on Rachel and the history teacher. Dan said he never saw them together, not even a glance in the hallways, and Ben, sitting on his ass in the house in Marina del Rey, unwrapped the wound and dabbed it with the stinging alcohol twice a day until it healed into a molten scar of flesh.
“I’m sorry it scared you,” he said.
“Well, you can’t take it back,” she said, halving an avocado now. “I just wish you and mom would stop BS’ing me.”
“We’re not BS’ing you,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t really know what happened. You know, I’m not all that great with emotional stuff.”
“No kidding,” she said. “Maybe it’s because you were always out in the barn, listening to the scanner.” She hacked the pit with the knife and twisted it out of the avocado meat. “I mean, Mom would sometimes stand in the kitchen, staring out the window at the barn. It was kind of depressing.”
“Maybe,” he said. Ben remembered Helen Galloway this afternoon, saying kids sometimes blamed themselves, thought they caused their parents to split. He knew Emma wanted a clear answer, some one thing to blame that would acquit her of any responsibility. Maybe he did spend too many nights alone after they returned to Santa Elena. Maybe he did ignore Rachel. But coming back here had been more difficult than he imagined, a sort of desperate retreat, an admission of failure. The big bad world was too big and too bad for Benjamin and Rachel Wade.
“Look, whatever happened with me and your mom,” he said, touching the back of his daughter’s head, her hair fine and soft like her mother’s, “has nothing to do with you, okay?”
She stopped cutting into the avocado, her eyes welling with tears.
“I love you and your mother loves you, period. You got it?”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “It’s rotten.” She showed him the blackened half of the avocado.
“It’s a tragedy,” he said. “We’ll have to suffer through.”
Ben threw the tortillas in the pan now to fry them up, and Emma started setting the table. The radio went to commercial, some announcer screaming about a monster-truck jam. Ben reached into the refrigerator and popped the tab on a Coors, happy to have an evening off and glad to have that conversation out of the way. Then the commercial gave way to guitar and driving bass.
“Yeah you’re gonna feel my hand.” The voice a low growl from the hi-fi speakers. “Honey you’re gonna feel my hand…”
He set the beer on the counter and ran across the room to turn up the music. “What is this?” he said to Emma.
Emma leaned her hands on the kitchen counter, cocked her hips, and smiled.
“The Stooges,” she said, bobbing her head to the beat.
“Danger…little stranger…” There was a vulgar power in the voice, as though the singer would destroy everything and no one could stop him.
“What?” Ben said, turning down the noise.
“Iggy and the Stooges.” Then she launched into a pop-music history lesson. Detroit. Godfather of punk. Something about David Bowie. Drugs. But Ben wasn’t really listening; he was rifling through his coat in the hall closet, pulling out the Polaroid he’d snapped at Rafferty’s scene.
“Iggy did crazy things onstage,” Emma was saying. “Cut his chest open with shards of beer bottles, smeared himself with peanut butter.”
Ben stared at the words in the picture. That was it, lyrics.
“He walked over a crowd once, with people in the audience holding him up,” Emma went on. “Said he was Jesus afterward.”
“How do you know this stuff?” he said, looking up at her. He didn’t like the excitement in her voice.
She shrugged. “I’m just cool, I guess,” she said, smiling again. “Iggy was crazy. People walked out of his shows freaked out.”
He wrote down the name on a slip of paper by the phone and stuffed it into his jeans pocket.
“What is that?” Emma asked, nodding to the picture in his hand.
“Nothing.” Ben slipped it back into his coat.
“Ah, an investigation. But that’s ‘adult’ stuff.”
“Stop it,” he said, his voice louder than he wanted.
“Geez,” she said. “All right.”
When the song was over, he switched off the radio and put Al Green on the turntable—sweet, sweet vinyl, with all the scratches and pops. They sat silent, bent over their tacos, Al Green preaching the “Love Sermon.” But the killer’s song had upset the air of the house, filled it with a darker tension. He only sat at this table when Emma was here, the empty third spot generally relieving him of his appetite. “I want to do everything for you,” Al sang, “that ordinary men won’t do.” Yeah, man, preaching to the choir.