Chapter 13 #2
"How are you here?" I ask.
He tilts his head toward the wall next door.
"I want to say I was taking an evening walk, but that's not the whole truth. I couldn't sleep. After the police cleared out tonight, even though the place was still taped off, I decided to walk down and take a look. Chew over a few questions. Whether it could be related to the Oregon cases."
He looks toward the broken doors.
"I was standing at the end of their drive when I saw two men through the trees with flashlights. I didn't think much of it." His jaw works once. "Then I heard you scream. So I rushed over."
He steadies, then gives me the rest slowly, in order.
"One went out through the terrace doors and slipped down the steps. He landed badly. The other got away over the fence. I'm just glad you're safe."
I believe him.
I'm sitting in a broken kitchen with a wrecked shoulder and my ears full of the rain. I don't have one single thing in my head I can trust. Not one. He's crouched in front of me, calmly telling me what happened. I take it from him gratefully, like a coat held out in the cold.
"Stay here, I'll be right back," he says.
"What?" I ask.
"I need to make sure no one else is here."
I nod.
He moves quickly through the house, room by room. I hear him in the hall, then the rooms beyond it, then the gutted end where no one goes. I hear him coming back through the dark. Then he steps into the kitchen and shakes his head.
"It's clear. There's no one here now but us."
The sirens start then, thin and far off, coming up the road from Medina.
David gets home at twenty past one.
By then, there are two marked Medina police SUVs in the drive, light bars turning across the front of the house.
An ambulance is backed onto the grass with its rear doors open.
The police have been at the back of the house for a long time.
Earlier, two medics brought the intruder around from the terrace on a board, strapped and collared and not moving.
They loaded him into the ambulance without hurrying.
I'm wrapped in a blanket from our sofa, sitting on the porch step. I watch David come up the drive.
He's out of the car before it stops rolling. He runs. That's the first thing, he runs, and something in me that's been clenched all night lets go a little, because he's running.
And then he gets to the porch and stops.
He looks at me in the blanket. He looks at the officer with the notebook. He looks past both of us into the house, at the open doors, the glass, the water on the floor. Then he goes very still.
"Was anything taken?" he asks.
Not are you hurt.
He says it to the officer, not to me, and his voice is perfectly level. It isn't the first question a husband should ask. He asked it first. I hear it, and I file it away without a word.
He realizes it right away. A second later he's on his knees in front of me, his hands on my face, saying my name, asking about the shoulder, asking about my head, doing all of it right.
But I can’t get past that he asked the other thing first.
The officer takes me through it again on the porch, notebook in hand.
“Just one more time.”
He wants to know point of entry. Time. Descriptions I can't give him. And then, near the end, without looking up from the page, he says, "Any firearms in the house?"
"No," I say, because there aren’t.
"Yes," David answers. "One."
I turn and look at my husband.
"A handgun." He says it to the officer, like it's the most ordinary thing in the world. "It's secured. I can show you it's still there, if you need that for the report."
The officer nods. David goes inside. Through the open door, I watch him enter the study and retrieve it from the low cupboard beneath the bookshelves, the doors that always stick. He comes back out with a small hard case, his initials stamped in one corner, and thumbs it open for the officer.
There it is. Black and snug in gray foam, exactly where it's apparently been the whole time.
"Still there," David says, and closes it.
He glances at me before returning it.
I don't say anything. I sit with the blanket around me and my arm strapped to my chest and consider the implications. He’s owned a gun the entire time, and I never knew.
I file it. It's what I do.
I'll take it out again later, in the dark, turn it over, and wonder what else is hidden in a cupboard I never open.
Later, while the police talk to David outside, I start to shake again. I can't stop.
It comes from nowhere. My legs go. And strangely, it's Henry who catches me. He's been at the end of my island for the best part of an hour, giving his statement. He puts his arms around me and holds me up, and I let him. I put my face against his wet shirt and I shake like something coming apart.
"You're all right," he says, into my hair. "It's over. You're all right."
When I lift my head, I see two things.
Out past the terrace doors, David has come around to where the officers are working. He's looking in at us, at Henry's arms around me, and he doesn't come in. He just watches.
Henry's face is close to mine. He's looking toward the doors, the black water beyond them, into the dark at nothing at all.
He isn't frightened. He isn't relieved. There is nothing in that face whatsoever.
He is as calm as a man waiting for a bus.