Chapter 31
MARY CATHERINE
There was concrete under my feet.
That was the first thing I knew with any certainty—that the ground was solid and I was on it, upright, though I couldn't quite account for the transition from lying flat on the crosswalk to standing beside a low concrete barrier with Brock's hand at my back and the world reduced to a series of images that refused to organize themselves into sequence.
People running. Or had been running. Now mostly stopped, standing, the stunned stillness of a crowd that has survived something and hasn't yet processed what that means.
Glass on the ground. A lot of it.
A car alarm going off somewhere, cycling, nobody attending to it.
Brock's voice, low and steady: "Stay right here. Don't look left. Eyes on me."
I looked left.
I looked left because that was what you did when someone told you not to—because some reflex older than obedience turned my head before the instruction had finished landing.
I saw the crosswalk and I saw what was on it.
I looked away again immediately and pressed my face against Brock's chest and stayed there.
"I've got you," he said. The words from the water, from the studio, from every moment when he'd said them and meant them. "I've got you. Don't look."
I didn't look again.
I didn't need to. The image had arrived and settled somewhere behind my eyes where it was going to live for a long time—the dark spreading across pale concrete, the shape of a man who had been carrying two bags five minutes ago and was not carrying anything now, the stillness of something that had been a person and was no longer.
Daniel.
The name arrived and I put my hand over my mouth.
He saved me. I had said it to Brock and I had meant it.
I had felt it, felt the weight and the warmth of it, the coverage, the deliberate interposing of a body between me and something I hadn't fully understood was coming—and I had said he saved me and looked at Brock's face and read something in it that I hadn't been ready to read.
I was not ready now either. But I knew.
The sirens were very loud.
Three of them, four, different pitches overlapping, coming from different directions.
The organized chaos of emergency services arriving to a thing that had already happened.
Police and something else—larger vehicles, the diesel grunt of something substantial pulling into the terminal loop.
I registered it without processing it because processing required a part of my brain that had gone somewhere I couldn't reach.
"Mary Catherine." Brock's hand at my jaw, tilting my face up. I let him. "Look at me."
I looked at him.
He had blood on him. I registered this the way I was registering everything—at a slight remove, through glass, the information arriving without the expected emotional response attached.
Blood on his forearm, dried dark. His shirt.
His hands, which were now on my face and therefore had transferred something to my cheek that I understood was not his and was not mine.
"Are you hurt?" he asked.
I did a slow inventory. Knees—I had hit the concrete, I could feel that now, a dull burning that was going to be worse later. My palms. My phone was gone, must have skidded somewhere on impact. I couldn't feel anything serious. "No," I said. "I don't think so."
"Good." He looked at me for another second with those dark eyes doing the assessment they always did, verifying independently what I had just reported.
Whatever he found, it satisfied him. "There are going to be people here very soon who want to talk to you.
You don't have to say much. You were crossing from the parking garage, there was shooting, you dropped to the ground, you don't know anything about what happened. "
"That's true," I said. "I don't know what happened."
Something moved through his face. "Stay close to me."
They came in waves.
The first wave was police—Charleston PD, two officers in uniform who were young and shaken and asking questions in the clipped, urgent way of people doing a job that had just become more job than they'd bargained for.
Were we injured? Did we see where the shooting came from?
Had we seen anyone with a weapon before the incident?
I answered in short sentences—no, the parking garage, I didn't see, I dropped immediately—and it was true, all of it, every word of it was true.
It also felt like it was being said by someone slightly to one side of me, someone who sounded like me and was using my mouth but was not entirely present behind the eyes.
Brock answered beside me. Differently—more, and less.
More authority in it, a particular cadence I didn't recognize, the tone of a man who had been questioned by people with badges before and understood the grammar of it.
Less emotion. The story he gave was compressed and squared.
I noticed that parts of it were true and parts of it were constructed in a way that was not exactly false but was shaped, deliberately, to fit into a frame that didn't require explaining who he was or how he'd come to be standing outside the terminal with a gun.
I didn't correct anything.
I didn't have the capacity to correct anything. I stood beside him and answered my questions and looked at my hands while he answered his and thought about Daniel's face in the car, turned toward the road, telling me about a pub in Killarney he'd written down three times.
The second wave was different.
I didn't see them arrive so much as become aware of them—a different quality of presence at the edges of things, men who moved in the organized, efficient way of people who'd been somewhere worse than this and had not been surprised by it.
They didn't wear uniforms. They were not police.
They spoke to Brock in the way of people who knew him—not warmly, not casually, but with a shared register, a mutual vocabulary of glances and short words that accomplished more than they appeared to.
Dominion Hall, I thought. Or something like it.
A man in a dark jacket spoke to the officer questioning Brock.
After that, the officer's demeanor shifted—still asking questions, but differently, the way you asked questions when someone had told you that the situation was being handled by people with a longer reach than yours.
I watched this happen from slightly outside my own understanding of it, the way I was watching most things.
Someone put a thermal blanket around my shoulders. I didn't see who. It crinkled when I moved. I held it closed with both hands because it gave my hands something to do.
There was a woman—I didn't catch her name, it was offered and slid past me—who asked me specific questions in a calm, measured voice.
Not a police officer. Something else. She had the manner of someone trained to speak to people in the state I was in, which I recognized with the functional part of my brain that was still cataloguing.
Her questions were gentle and specific. I answered them as precisely as I could.
Where were you standing when you heard the first shots? Did you see anyone before the shooting began? Did you recognize anyone?
No, no, no. The crosswalk. I was on the crosswalk. I looked and saw nothing specific and then, I was on the ground.
She wrote things down on a small notepad with a pen that clicked when she retracted it between questions. I focused on that click. The sound of it, that small, ordinary sound, was the most normal thing in my immediate environment. I held onto it.
Brock was somewhere nearby. I could feel him the way I'd learned to feel him—by the quality of the air, the gravity of his presence—even when I wasn't looking at him.
He was managing something, speaking to someone, and periodically, he looked over at me and his eyes said still here.
I believed them and went back to the woman with the notepad.
At some point, I became aware that we were moving.
I wasn't sure when the transition happened—one moment we were at the barrier, then we were inside a vehicle, large, dark windows, not my car and not Brock's rental.
Air conditioning. Seats that smelled like something neutral and institutional.
Brock beside me, close, his shoulder against mine.
"You're shaking," he said.
I looked at my hands. They were.
"Shock," I said. Because I was a person who named things, who had always named things, and naming this one felt like the only available handhold.
"Yeah," he said. He reached over and took both my hands in his and held them. Not a romantic gesture. Something more fundamental—the physical grounding of a warm body against a cold one. I let him hold my hands and looked out the dark window at the airport going past.
Daniel's mother had pearls. She'd been wearing them at the church. She'd had her hands folded in her lap like she was praying her gratitude.
I pressed the heels of my eyes with the knuckle of my first finger and breathed.
"Is he—" I started.
"Yes," Brock said.
Just that. He didn't make me finish the sentence.
He didn't qualify it or soften it or construct anything around it.
He said yes and let it be what it was, and I understood that this was the truest kindness available—not comfort exactly, not reassurance, but the simple dignifying act of telling me the truth.
"He covered me," I said.
"I know. I saw."
"He put himself—" I stopped. Started again. "He was carrying both bags. He carried both bags because that was Daniel, that was exactly Daniel, he always—" I stopped again.
Brock didn't say anything. He held my hands and let me find the end of the sentence or not find it. I did not find it, and that was all right. We rode in the dark-windowed vehicle through the Charleston afternoon and I thought about a man who had wanted Sunday dinners and had carried both bags.
"His mother," I said eventually.
"I know," Brock said again.
"My mother gave him her bread recipe. On an index card.
At the rehearsal dinner." I heard my own voice and it was strange to me—too calm, too even, the voice of a woman managing something that was going to cost her a great deal more than it was currently charging.
"She told him not to tell me. She'll want to know that.
" I looked at Brock. "Someone needs to find the index card. It was in his jacket pocket."
He looked at me for a moment with an expression I didn't have a category for—something that was not pity and not sorrow and was something more like the way a person looked at another person when they had just understood something significant about them.
“We’ll make sure someone finds it," he said.
I believed him. I believed him the same way I'd believed I'll be back in the dark—not because he'd proven himself over time, because we hadn't had time, but because he was the kind of man who meant the things he said. I had understood that very quickly about him and had not been wrong.
I leaned my head against his shoulder.
He was still holding my hands.
Outside, Charleston moved past the dark windows, going about its Sunday business.
I rode through it in the aftermath of a day I did not yet have the whole shape of, holding onto the warmth of a man who had, apparently, sprinted toward something that was trying to kill me.
I let myself be carried for a little while, because that was all I had.
Everything else could come later.
Later was a long way away.
For now, there was just this—the vehicle and the dark windows and his shoulder and the thermal blanket crackling when I breathed, and Daniel Whitaker's face, peaceful, on a crosswalk in the afternoon sun, not a mark of fear on it.
Not one.