What’s happening?
I know he won’t respond anytime soon—he warned me these meetings could take hours—but that doesn’t stop me from staring at the screen, willing it to light up until I can’t stand it a second longer. I should avoid the news, but I move to the living room anyway and turn to Channel Five out of loyalty, half expecting to see Riley’s face even though she isn’t on in the mornings. If it weren’t for Riley, I wouldn’t watch the news, period. None of the officers’ wives do. It’s impossible to listen to the crime reports when you have a man on the streets.
Gayle King appears on the screen announcing that CBS This Morning will be right back. After the commercials, they switch to a local news break. Riley’s perky colleague, Quinn Taylor, comes on-screen, looking every bit the Texas pageant queen Riley told me she once was.
It takes a second for what she’s saying to make sense, as if my brain is on a time delay.
“Fourteen-year-old Justin Dwyer remains in critical condition at Jefferson Hospital after being shot by police yesterday evening.”
Fourteen? I’m falling through a trapdoor, my iron grip on the armrest of the couch the only thing keeping me tethered to the room. He’s only a kid. Never once did Kevin say that he shot a child.
The face of a young Black boy fills the screen. He’s right there in the living room—handsome with a gap in his front teeth that makes him look younger than his age, light hazel eyes that remind me a little of Riley’s brother, Shaun’s.
The screen cuts to a shot of a woman—the mother—covering her head with a plaid scarf, hiding her face as she walks toward the hospital. When she reaches the glass double doors, she stops abruptly and lets the scarf fall away before staring directly into the camera, her face the very picture of heartbreak.
“That’s my baby in there. Please pray for him.”
Her baby. I reach for my swollen stomach.
It takes me a minute to realize I’m crying. I’m not a crier. Lou always said tears were like pets and men, useless and needy, and made a point of ignoring me whenever I cried. By six, I’d learned not to bother.
Don’t die, little boy. Please don’t die.
Quinn’s voice floats across the room again. “Sources close to the police department have confirmed the identities of the officers involved as Kevin Murphy and Travis Cameron.”
No. No. No. The room spins. Everyone knows.
When the doorbell rings it sounds like it’s coming from far away, like the voice on TV.
Please be her. Please be her.
I’m dizzy as I wobble to the front door. It has to be Riley, the person I need the most right now. The phone in my hand buzzes as the doorbell trills again.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” I yell, wiping the snot off my face with the back of my hand, drying it on my sweatpants.
A white light blinds me as I throw open the door and stumble backward; a barrage of questions assaults me.
“What did your husband say about the shooting?”
“Did he see a gun?”
“Is your husband going to be indicted?”
A white man in his fifties with a complicated comb-over breaks from the pack of reporters to climb the porch stairs and thrusts a microphone in my face. I bat it out of his hand and try to step back inside. A cameraman has already wedged his foot in the door.
“I’m pregnant, goddammit!” Both of my arms wrap around my middle, and I push my shoulder as hard as I can into the guy who has his foot stuck in my door. Adrenaline pumps through my veins. I need to calm down. This is bad for Little Bird.
“Is your husband here?”
“Would you care to comment on the shooting?”
“Has your husband had problems working with the Black community before?”
A lanky Black kid pushes his way forward. He’s wearing a Temple T-shirt and a Black Lives Matter pin. It’s small, but I notice it as he thrusts his iPhone in my face.
“Are you a racist?”
He pointedly repeats the question. “Are you a racist?”
Am I a racist? You’re a teenager who writes for the school paper and knows exactly nothing about nothing and you come here to my house and ask me something so insane? I think of Riley, of all the nights I spent at the Wilsons’， of helping Mr. Wilson organize his fishing rods, and of rubbing Gigi’s feet when her corns were “acting up.”
“Fuck you.” I regret it the second it leaves my mouth, but I can’t stop now. “You don’t know anything! My best friend and godmother of my future child is Black. How dare you, asshole!”
I finally manage to slam the door shut and slide down the other side until I’m a heap on the floor. Fred licks the sweat that’s turned cold on my arms.
I remember my phone buzzed right before I answered the door. A text. From Kevin.
Meet me at our spot after work. It’s bad.
My nerves are so frayed, like guitar strings pulled too tight, it’s hard to get my fingers to cooperate. I finally type three words: I’ll be there.
* * *
With reporters practically barricading our street, I have to sneak out the back-patio door and trek through Mrs. J’s yard, where I step in a mound of fossilized poop on my way to meet an Uber three streets over. I gulp air from a crack in the window to escape the noxious mix of strawberry air freshener and dank weed in the car. The cold wind in my face does nothing to help the nausea or the nerves. I’m a mess by the time the guy drops me on Kelly Drive.
I trudge to “our spot”—a little azalea garden sandwiched in between the Victorian dollhouses of Boathouse Row and the looming burnt-orange columns of the art museum. In the summer, hot-pink flowers burst from every bush like confetti. Today the branches are bare, gray, and gnarled like an old woman’s hands. A flock of bored Canada geese that forgot it was time to migrate gnaw on bits of trash at the river’s edge.
Kevin chose to meet here so we could be alone, and sure enough, it’s empty—the temperature nosedived into the low forties this morning and it’s drizzling. As I walk along the river, I’m taunted by the happy memories we’ve had here. Like when Kevin dropped down on both knees to propose.
“I think you’re only supposed to be on one knee.” I laughed.
“I’m begging,” he’d replied, grinning like a fool.
Kevin didn’t notice there was a split second I hesitated, faltered before I gave him my hand. The proposal wasn’t a complete surprise, but the sudden panic that came with it was. This was the moment when everything in my life would change, and it was more terrifying than I thought it would be, the permanence, the “ever after,” all the other doors closing. I wasn’t used to getting what I wanted, and when it finally happened, this momentous thing, I didn’t know how to feel anything else other than confused fear. I never told anyone about that moment, not even Riley. And when I remember back to how we got engaged or when I retell the story, I gloss right over the part where I didn’t answer right away. In fact, I never answered at all. I just thrust out my hand for Kevin to slip on the delicate diamond ring and assumed he would think it was shaking from excitement and not from nerves. I falter again now, for a different reason this time, as I spot Kevin’s broad figure hunched over on the bench. I worked myself up on the way here, imagining what I’ll say. A child, Kevin. You killed a child. You shot a child. He was a boy, a kid.