She chose the man at the end of the bar. He was a traveling salesman, he told her, as he blinked at his own good fortune. Only in town for a few days. What do you sell? Saffy asked. Fishing rods. Saffy had planned to say she worked as a waitress, but the question never came. Are you Arab? he asked instead. He pronounced it like A-Rab.
Back at Saffy’s apartment, she did not turn on the lights. She didn’t want to see the dirty dishes stacked in the sink or dilute the vodka tonic coursing through her bloodstream. She pushed the salesman onto the couch, flung off his tie, bit the flesh of his neck. She pulled his erection from his pants, stiff and unimpressive in the glow of the streetlamp out the window—she shoved it into her mouth. She gagged as the smell of her couch cushions wafted up and thought about what she deserved. It was an ambitious concept, justice. The idea that your lot in life could be based on your own choices. That you could work for things or ruin them for yourself. For a flashing instant, she considered biting down, but the salt of him tasted like some sort of wanting. Saffy shimmied out of her jeans and pushed him inside. He grunted. She purred. She felt very little. She fucked him harder, until he was gasping and stuttering, his fingers twisting her nipples, until Saffy thought, Okay. The warmth of the salesman shot up inside her. Okay. This, at least, was an explosion she had asked for. She knew how to live in the wreck.
*
Kristen married on a Sunday in April.
Saffy stood at the altar with three of Kristen’s friends from the salon, wearing a silky purple dress she couldn’t really afford. Kristen’s spine looked so delicate in her intricate white gown, Saffy wanted to fling herself across the vertebrae, to protect them from the harsh of the world. Over Kristen’s shoulder, Jake looked like the heavens had opened up. Saffy had to give the man some credit. He was not one of the bad ones.
She had been reinstated at work. The winter had been long and dark, and things felt different now. Moretti was icy, distant. She still gave Saffy advice under her breath as they approached a scene, still came in with an extra cup of coffee, but there was a layer of coolness that hadn’t been there before. Moretti was more untouchable, more unknowable, more inimitable than ever, and most days Saffy tried not to let it break her heart.
The trial for Izzy, Angela, and Lila was coming up soon, and everyone knew they’d lose. The homeless guy they arrested had become the center of a newfound wrongful-conviction campaign, and the committee had pooled the funds for his bail and a fancy lawyer. The captain, so keen on the arrest, hadn’t prepared for this. The case was shaky, the evidence even shakier. Saffy knew, with a grim and somewhat smug acceptance, that they’d been wrong, and the jury would see it. Nicholas Richards was innocent, and he would walk free.
Saffy told no one about her drives, though she thought of them now, as Kristen’s bridal veil whipped in the wind. The long weekends she spent winding through Vermont, only to park in front of Ansel Packer’s house, waiting for something to give him away. She’d watched as he unloaded groceries from the bed of his pickup, as he hunched over the workbench in the garage, as he washed dishes in front of the kitchen window. It was not obsession, and it was not addiction, though the hours she spent trailing Ansel filled some of the cravings of both.
It was only a matter of time. Saffy knew you could not hide your real self forever, no matter how normal you looked; the truth would come out eventually.
“In sickness and in health,” Kristen was saying. Goose bumps prickled Saffy’s arms as the wind picked up. A storm had gathered in the distance, hovering over the mountains in a looming black cloud, though the sun still shone flaxen over the wedding guests. Saffy begged the rain closer.
This day was about love, but Saffy had always been more interested in power. The black and pulsing heart of it. Power was the clink of her badge against the kitchen counter. It was the heft of the gun at her waist. As she stood at the altar, wind blowing her carefully pinned hair from its bun, as the bride and groom kissed and thunder rumbled in the distance, Saffy wondered about her own internal compass, the needle that kept her on this path, stopped her from wandering or regressing or giving up entirely. It scared her to realize there was no compass. There were only days and the choices she made within them.
6 Hours
Goodbye to every crack in the wall. Goodbye library books, goodbye radio. Goodbye to the toilet’s sour stench and filmy rot. Goodbye, you say, to the elephant on the ceiling.
Goodbye, old friend.
*
You reach back for the handcuffs.
They clink, snap.