When All Light Fails Read online

  He and Hero, both out of work, a couple of early retirees shuffling and sniffing around the still dewy yard. The ides of March behind them, no et tu Brutes, no thrusting of knives. Khatri dead and buried, the misguided shooter too. The judge in Connor McBride’s case hadn’t gone easy on him, had levied an upward departure judgment and sent him away for three lifetimes, plus twenty years extra for his part in the conspiracy that wounded DeMarco and Jayme and took away their baby.

  DeMarco felt more than a twinge of sympathy for the kid. Raised by a prostitute mom, a junkie, surrounded by the worst society has to offer. Yes, McBride had assisted in the deaths of three innocent people, so justice had to be done, but still. What if the judge and jurors all had near-death experiences and learned what DeMarco learned? Would the sentencing have been so severe and absolute? It had probably been a tough call to make. But this side wasn’t the other side, and both sides had their own set of rules.

  And that case up in Otter Creek, what a clusterfuck that had been for a while. He smiled to remember how ambitious Chase Miller had been, how reckless he was willing to be to prove himself. He and Georgina, the Lost City girl, had played significant roles in putting Luthor Reddick behind bars, and now, thank goodness, both were flourishing. Miller’s story detailing Reddick’s crimes and the path that led to his arrest had been picked up by both the Youngstown Vindicator and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and he used them to win a position as an assistant researcher with the Drudge Report, where, he boasted in his last email to DeMarco, he was “striking an occasional blow for truth” by combing through online stories the mainstream media ignored. He had his eyes set on a position with Project Veritas and promised to keep DeMarco posted as to his progress.

  Georgina, on the other hand, had chosen a quieter path. In January she had started classes at WVU. Reconciliation with her parents was not total, but, as she told Jayme by phone, “We’re working on it. They still sometimes act like the same clueless assholes they used to be, but they’re trying, I guess.” Her goal was to be an elementary school teacher. In the meantime, she was dipping into her trust fund now and then to make sure the residents of Lost City stayed warm and well fed and aware of their options.

  Jayme and DeMarco both enjoyed receiving such reports and took a bittersweet satisfaction from watching their former charges quickly grow away from them. The cases that had brought them all together for a while were history now, written by the survivors, already forgotten by all but a few.

  The spring equinox was history too. It had come in like a lamb and, but for a few windy nights and sodden days, was retaining a lamblike temperament. Such was the way of all things, DeMarco told himself, to come and to go. Except for that one time with Flores, he had spoken of his NDE to only Jayme and the dog. People did not like to hear that death is a good thing. It invalidated their grief to be told such a thing, and they did not want to give up their grief, it was the chunk of wood they clung too when the waters rose all around them, and even when the waters lapped only against their ankles. DeMarco knew that need. He had waded around in his own pool of stagnant water for how long? Too many years. Too many years of feeding on self-pity. What if somebody had come to him back then and said, “Hey, bud, let it go, okay? So what if your car got T-boned by a drunken driver? So what if your baby boy’s neck got snapped? Death is great, man! Death is when all the good shit happens!” He would have punched that person in the face. Because, in a strange way, embracing death as superior to life would have invalidated Baby Ryan’s short time on the earth and all of the revivifying joy those few days had brought to DeMarco.

  So he had to be careful and not show too much enthusiasm for death. People need their bugaboos. Life is too directionless without them, like a dim highway with no road signs.

  Most people cannot understand something until they are ready to understand it. Jayme was ready and even desirous of understanding, yet the details of his NDE were not easy to communicate let alone remember. They returned to him spontaneously sometimes, usually when he was alone, and seldom lingered. Plus, Jayme had a tendency to ask questions, which only frustrated both of them because of the inadequacy of his answers. Hero, on the other hand, was an ideal audience. His large, open eyes and ears took everything in without question. His was a soothing presence, and he had been a boon companion all throughout DeMarco’s convalescence.

  And now, out in the yard on an early Monday morning, the next to last day of March, Hero pranced and raced about, watering every bush in the yard while DeMarco, still in his nightclothes of red basketball shorts and V-neck T-shirt, scuffed along behind him. Showing off, DeMarco thought as he watched the dog, but with not a hint of resentment or malice in his heart. He did indeed love that hairy beast. Loved Jayme too, though she was mostly hairless. Loved this second chance he had been given with them. A new leash on life, he sometimes joked.

  But he was a different man now and he knew it. The change was difficult to explain. Impervious to analysis. It showed in little things, his new tenderness, for example. His patience. The enigmatic smile that might rise unbidden to his lips. And in what might be viewed as peculiar behaviors, such as a fondness for walking barefoot through the yard. He’d started it the first morning home from the hospital. Holy moly, the frozen ground had been cold at times! Even now he felt the chill in his toes, but that was good too—a kinder March chill, a bit of friendly discomfort was all it amounted to. There was just something so energizing about feeling the ground beneath him. Taking the temp of Mother Earth, so to speak. Sucking up her goodness and strength, Antaeus-style. Yes, there was something intimate and enlivening about it, no matter the season. Any touch is better than none.

  In many ways his NDE had turned him into an odd duck, even in his own eyes. He heard how foolish he sounded when he tried to tell Jayme about it. And for that reason he resented it. He wasn’t going to be one of those people who makes a YouTube video about his experience, or goes on the lecture circuit. What would he have to say about it? It was weird. Scary even. I really don’t understand much of it. Maybe the debunkers were right. Maybe all that happened during his coma was that his brain went into a spasm and started squirting out a lot of chemicals, a Timothy Leary cocktail of bug juices and toad slime and who knows what else. The thing is, it had all felt so real. So honest. Everything brighter and deeper and more meaningful than anything he had come back to. This grass, this sky, this dog with its goofy grin—it was all great, very pleasant, but somehow only skin-deep in comparison. At times this life felt more like a reflection on a flat screen, a quivering mirage, a trick of the light—

  “Hey, babe?” Jayme called from the porch. He turned. Blinked. Saw himself as she was seeing him, a grown man with wet toes, goose bumps up and down his naked legs, and he smiled sheepishly, embarrassed for himself and for her.

  She held up her phone. “Just got a strange text. You guys almost done out there?”

  He gave a short whistle, then slapped his thigh twice, and Hero came running, followed him to the porch. Jayme asked, “Are your feet okay? Too cold?”

  “Tickety-boo,” he said. “Who’s the text from?”

  “Do you know a judge named Morrison?”

  “Jack Morrison?”

  She read the text. “‘Good morning. District court judge J. D. Morrison here. Emeritus.’”

  “That’s Jack. I think he does a little teaching now. Why is he texting you at barely sunup?”

  “Actually it came in just before two this morning. And it’s a long one.”

  Okay, so he’s an insomniac. Or a late-night drinker. “And?” He sat on the edge of the porch with his feet on the concrete steps. The concrete was colder than the ground. No life in it. Or is there? he wondered. Rocks have life. Why not concrete too? He rubbed one foot and then the other as Jayme read the rest of the text.

  “‘I am writing to inquire of Sergeant DeMarco’s health,’” she read. “‘Rumor has it that he is fully reco
vered from the unfortunate incident last fall. It brought me great happiness to receive that news, and I pray that it is true. Though I know him well enough to suspect that he would answer the call to duty even if bedridden, and I hesitate to offer him that possibility, which is why my first contact is with you. If he is not yet truly recovered, please say nothing to him of this message. But if he is, I would like to offer you and the sergeant a temporary employment. It is nothing extravagant, and certainly nothing along the lines of those cases that have brought you both such well-deserved attention. It is a minor investigation, actually, but one that demands the utmost discretion. I would appreciate hearing from you, one way or the other, as to whether or not this might be of some interest. At your earliest convenience, of course.’”

  “I’ll be darned,” DeMarco said.

  “Not an answer, babe.”

  He turned his head, looked up at her and grinned. “Let’s hear him out.”

  “I vote no.”

  “Of course you do. So that’s one yea and one no. Hero! C’mere, boy.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” she said.

  “We need a tiebreaker. Who better to cast that vote? He’s impartial to a fault.”

  She reached down to grab a handful of his hair. Gave his head a gentle shake. “Grrrrrrr,” she said.

  “You don’t trust the judgment of your own adopted son?”

  “Forget it,” she said, and turned back to the door. “You’re hopeless. I’ll set up a meeting. How do you think he got hold of my cell number?”

  DeMarco shrugged. “Contacts,” he said.

  “It kind of ticks me off. You know?”

  “Nothing is private, my love.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?” she said before going back inside, leaving him there to smile at her words, she meaning one thing, he something else, that all things are known, all things are always.

  Fifteen

  Sweetness and light but lacking nutritional value

  When he first told her about his NDE, still in the hospital, she had sensed that he was indeed doing his best to explain what he had experienced, yet the elucidation factor seemed absent from his explanation. He’d said that he could still feel everything that had happened but could not articulate it, said the necessary words were like glistening bubbles in his mind, but they popped the moment he reached for them.

  “Then tell me how it felt to know everything,” she suggested. “Tell me how perfection feels.”

  “Nothing is ever perfect. Nothing is ever still.”

  “How can that be?”

  “I guess that what I mean is, it is perfect because it’s exactly what it should be at that exact moment. But it’s also supposed to change from moment to moment. Which means that it is perfect and yet it isn’t. Or something like that.”

  “Darn you, DeMarco. You can’t remember even a little of it? Nothing specific?”

  “It comes and goes. But it’s more like it is remembering me than I am remembering it. It runs past just to say hello, here I am, see you later!”

  She couldn’t conceive of anything more frustrating, yet he remained annoyingly imperturbable. Imperturbable and impregnable. Before the shooting he had finally been opening up to her, sharing his feelings and even his fears, but now he was a closed door again. And when she told him that, he had said, “Not on purpose, baby, I promise. But it’s all sort of like a…like a…”

  “Like a what?”

  “Let’s say I’ve eaten something unimaginably delicious. Something you’ve never tasted but always craved.”

  “A champagne and chocolate macaron?”

  “Okay, that. And I’ve just eaten one, even though it sounds disgusting to me. Ask me to describe it for you.”

  “Describe it for me.”

  “I can’t. Because it was literally too delicious for words. No word can touch how good it was. Sweet? Sure, but more than that. Scrumptious? Yep, but so much more than that too. The thing is, I can still taste it on my tongue, but I can never share that taste with you. Any words I use will be limiting and insufficient. I can’t even describe it to myself.”

  “What if I lick your tongue?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “You’d taste my mouth and a tiny bit of macaron, but the full experience of macaron would remain as insubstantial to you as a shadow. Because that’s what we are here, sweetheart. We’re shadows of who we really are.”

  Okay, she conceded, okay, he really is trying. He isn’t hiding it from me on purpose. Yet it stung nonetheless. Almost as if he’d had a lover, confessed to it but couldn’t remember her name, couldn’t recall how the woman looked or why he had done it. He’d had a life-altering experience and was discernibly changed by it but it had happened without Jayme, without the love of his life, and she couldn’t help but to resent him a little for it. He had gone away and come back to her a different man.

  Sixteen

  Tomar. Comer. Este es mi cuerpo

  Morrison was a big man with bad knees and swollen ankles and seven decades of plenitude piled atop his groaning bones. He came into the Mexican restaurant with a subtly shuffling gait while carrying his upper body stiffly erect as if to hold in abeyance a pain that was waiting for an opportunity to surge through his joints and render him immobile. He was wearing a loose gray suit, a navy-blue knit shirt with the top two buttons open, and a pair of white high-top sneakers.

  DeMarco watched him pause in the lobby to speak to the hostess, and said to Jayme, seated beside him in the booth, “He’s aged twenty years since I’ve seen him.” The hostess, a middle-aged woman with streaks of gray in her black hair, had already brought their water, a basket of tortilla chips and two small bowls of salsa. DeMarco played with a chip, absently turning it over and over between finger and thumb.

  “How long since you’ve seen him?” Jayme asked with her water glass raised.

  “Four years or so. It’s rheumatoid arthritis. Hit him fast, apparently. He used to stand six-five.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Early seventies.”

  Morrison looked their way then, and DeMarco raised a hand.

  What little was left of Morrison’s hair was snow white, his face round and fleshy, his cheeks red and mouth smiling. Grinning, he made his way to their booth and, just as DeMarco stood, stuck out his hand. “You’re looking fairly good for a man who catches bullets with his chest.”

  “Bullet. Singular,” DeMarco told him. “Low velocity. You’re looking pretty fine yourself, Judge.”

  “I look the way I feel, which is like yesterday’s roadkill.” He leaned across DeMarco, hand extended. “And this Irish beauty must be Trooper Matson.”

  “Scottish,” she said, and gave him her hand.

  “Scottish, then. Happy April Fools’ Day.”

  “And to you,” she said.

  Morrison nodded toward DeMarco but kept his eyes on Jayme. “Did this joker play any pranks on you today?”

  “She woke up and I was still there,” DeMarco answered.

  “Worst joke ever,” Jayme added.

  The judge grinned and gripped the edge of the table and lowered himself onto the empty bench seat. Then he looked up at the brightly colored mural on the wall to his immediate left. It ran from well beyond Jayme to a couple of feet past his shoulder and depicted a rendition of da Vinci’s Last Supper with Jesus and the disciples all wearing sarapes mexicanos and sporting Pancho Villa mustaches. All around the large room were other Christian-themed murals with similar Hispanic characters. “I love surrounding myself with all these saints,” he said. “You been here before?”

  “Many times,” DeMarco told him. “I’m surprised we never ran into you here.”

  The hostess came bustling over with a third glass of water, which she set in front of the judge. “¿Tendrás lo de siempre?” she asked.

  “Sí, gracias,
Estella. Burritos Aztecas y uno Dos Equis. Y para mis amigos, lo que quieran. En mi cheque, por favor. Y prepara mi cena para llevar.”

  “Sí, ¡por supuesto!” She turned to DeMarco. “And for you, señor?”

  DeMarco ordered the enchiladas supremas and chili rellenos, Jayme the chori pollo.

  “Nothing to drink?” the judge asked.

  “We’re water people,” DeMarco told him. Estella nodded and strode away.

  “You mean like dolphins?” the judge said with a grin as he reached for a tortilla chip. “Which bowl is mild?”

  “The one on your right,” Jayme answered.

  He dipped a corner of his chip and told her, “I’m glad to see you’re keeping him in line.”

  “Down the straight and narrow and loving it,” DeMarco said.

  Judge Morrison continued to smile. He put the chip in his mouth, chewed while wiping his fingertips on a napkin, then said, “First things first. Tell me about last fall. Every story I hear is more grandiose. So I want it straight from the horse’s mouth. How did it all go down out there?”

  DeMarco looked to Jayme. She smiled but said nothing. He faced the judge again. “We’d just wrapped up the thing in Otter Creek Township.”

  “The triple homicide,” Morrison said.

  DeMarco nodded. “Next morning the dog and I walked up to Sheetz for some coffee. I came back to find a letter from Khatri on the floor. You know about Khatri?”