Kevin isn’t in the kitchen when I return. Annie’s playing solitaire with an ancient deck of cards that is for some inexplicable reason always sitting on the table. There’s friction in the air. It wafts toward me like the smell of spoiled food.
“What’s going on?”
“I was telling Cookie that just because cops usually get off, that doesn’t make it right necessarily,” Annie says, adding to the row of cards laid out before her.
“You’re talking about your brother-in-law.” Cookie glares at her from the sink, where she’s washing dishes. Annie can get away with saying the kinds of things that I could never say to Cookie, because she grew up down the street, literally six houses away. Cookie’s known her since she was in diapers.
“I knew little Annabel Myers when she was still wetting her pants,” is how Cookie opened her toast at Annie and Matt’s wedding. At which point my sister-in-law leaned over the table and whispered to me, “Yeah, because she scared me so bad, she made me wet my pants.”
“I’m not talking about Kevin. I’m saying in general. You know we had to do this bias training at the hospital, all the nurses. ‘Unconscious bias,’ they call it. Like a white nurse not listening to a Black patient tell her they’re in pain or judging them for being overweight. We all do and think these things subconsciously. Like I realized that I’m way nicer to the Black store clerks because I feel like they probably don’t like me, or how I call them ‘honey’ or ‘girl.’？”
“That’s all baloney,” Cookie scoffs. “Everybody wants to make everything about race. Calling everyone a racist right and left! I’m so sick of it. Sometimes things just happen.”
I remember Annie telling me about this training. We’d had drinks that night, our standing monthly date over dim sum we always used to catch up or, mainly, to complain about Cookie. She said they’d done an activity where the facilitator asked people what came to mind when they thought about race. Apparently, one of the nurses, a white woman named Stephanie who often works the same shifts as Annie, had blurted out, “I feel lucky I’m not Black.”
“Can you even imagine?” Annie said, horrified, blowing her indignation into her hot broth.
I shook my head, mustering all the shock I could, except the truth was, I could imagine thinking that. I’ve maybe even had the same thought pass through my mind before, quickly, like a dark shadow. Not that I would ever, ever admit it to a roomful of strangers, or my sister-in-law. Or even myself. It’s way too awful. What if Riley ever knew I thought that?
Annie sets down the cards and looks up at Cookie. “All I’m saying is, would Kevin have been so afraid of a fourteen-year-old white kid that he would have shot him?”
The air evaporates like the room itself is holding its breath. How did she dare to ask that question, the one I can’t even ask my own husband? Riley’s words from Monty’s echo in my mind. Well, it’s not usually white kids being accidentally shot by police, is it?
“Shut the hell up, Annie,” Matt hollers from the living room.
“Language,” Cookie yelps, as if “hell” is the worst thing happening here.
“Where’s Kevin?” I look into the living room, at the empty seat next to Matt on the couch, desperately hoping he didn’t hear this exchange.
“Bathroom, I think,” says Annie.
“Please don’t say that in front of him, Annie. Please,” I beg.
My sister-in-law nods. She loves Kevin like her own brother and would never want to hurt him.
I go off to look for my husband and find him in the narrow hall, charging out of the bathroom.
“Look at this!” His normally easygoing expression morphs into disbelief and then something even uglier: rage. He shoves his phone in my face.
It’s a screenshot from Twitter, a tweet with a cartoon drawing of a Black body on the ground and cops brandishing giant machine guns standing above it. Someone photoshopped Kevin’s real face over one of the cartoon cops’。 Floating above their heads are large block letters: KILLERS BELONG BEHIND BARS.
“Julia literally just told us we can’t look at stuff like this, Kevin. You’ve got to try to block it out. It isn’t helping anything.”
He bangs his head against the hallway wall a few times. The row of family photos shudders. Cookie in her wedding dress, a replica of Princess Diana’s, but even bigger and more sparkly; four generations of Murphys in their dress blues, years of school portraits—Kevin with a bowl cut, Matt with a rat tail.
Kevin speaks into the wall. “I’m a good cop. I’m not an asshole. I’m definitely not a racist. All the things I’ve done for people…”
“I know, Kev. I know.” I run my fingers through his hair.
This is the most emotional Kevin’s been in five days. Hearing him break down is a relief, better than the “I’m fine” he’s given me every time I’ve asked him if he’s okay.
When we were first dating, I loved that Kevin was so quiet, such a mystery. It was, and it still is, a challenge to try to unlock what he’s thinking or feeling. He’s similar to Riley in that way. They both require effort. I decided I was the only person in the whole world who could get him to open up, and every time he reveals something—the first time he found a body on his beat, the night he spent in the NICU with a baby whose mom was high on oxy—it’s a victory. Sometimes in the middle of breakfast, or a run, or once through the bathroom door while he was taking a shit, I would ask him, “What are you thinking right now?” Usually the answer was, “Er, nothing,” but it became a thing between us.
I try it now. “What are you thinking?”
He sighs and bangs his head yet again. “I don’t want to do this, Jen.”
I look at him, waiting patiently. It usually does the trick.
“Okay, fine, I’m thinking about the baby. I’m thinking I don’t want to be in jail when you give birth.”
This is what I get for wanting him to be honest and open up. “Don’t even say that.”
“You asked.”
“Here, feel him.” I grab Kevin’s hand, bring it to my stomach, where Little Bird is kicking.
“You mean her?” Kevin smiles. It’s barely there, but I hold on to the slight twitch of his lips like a kid clutching her favorite stuffy.
From the very beginning, Kevin has been convinced the baby will be a girl. I know it’s a boy though. The other night I dreamed about him. I pulled him to my breast, his eyes opening and staring up at me. They were greenish-brown like Justin Dwyer’s. I woke up then, swells of nausea overcoming me. I screwed my own eyes shut and prayed my baby’s eyes would be a boring mud brown like mine.
“We’ll know soon enough.”
Too soon. I’m so ready for this pregnancy to be over, though I know it’s easier with the baby inside me. I can’t have a kid in the middle of this, when everything is in chaos.
A wave of fatigue hits me. “I’m going to go lie down for a while. Why don’t you go watch the game with Matt. Try to relax for a bit if you can? And no more Twitter.” I kiss his cheek, my lips catching on sandpaper stubble. He hasn’t shaved since the shooting.