Every Little Thing (35 page)

Cohen didn't know his lawyer. He chose one from a list an officer offered him, and not too long after the phone call, a tired-looking man with a tan briefcase had shown up and introduced himself. His limp handshake and his baggy black eyes said,
I don't give a shit
. They said,
I'm too tired for this.

Cohen had too many questions of his own to care about answering theirs, paired with visions of Keith in critical condition, Lee in a prison cell, Allie, five or six years ago,pregnant. He had no idea what Allie knew about any of this. How much of it was true, how serious it all was. And he had no idea Zack's father had officially placed a complaint with the police, just two nights back, stating that Cohen had threatened him, in public, and not for the first time. The words the police used: slander, assault, and uttering threats. The quote, “Maybe I should stick a knife in your hand to teach you a lesson.”

Cohen shouted, “I never said that! I never said
to teach you a lesson
, and the quote is out of context. He's a negligent father, and because of that negligence, his son cut his hand on a knife! So I was only referring back to the child's hand injury, by a knife!”

“So the
to teach you a lesson
was implied in the threat?”

“I didn't
threaten
the man. I was making a point. I was referring to his parental negligence by referring to Zack's bandaged hand.”

And Cohen's lawyer intervened. “We're not here about—”

But Cohen, overtaken with emotion, silenced his lawyer. “You're taking out-of-context paraphrases, from negligent fathers and from jealous fiancés, to concoct what theory exactly?”

Looking over a file, smugly, like a man in control, “You do have a history of violence and questionable behaviour. Keith Stone has told us about your role in Allie's father's death. It means, you can rationalize devious action the way criminals can.”

“Whatever Keith told you about Allie's father is only half true. I'd talked him out of...what he did. And then he did it anyway. And it was fucking horrible, for me more than anyone!”

“Your name also surfaced from an incident in Halifax. In which you jabbed a key into a kid's face.”

“That's. Different. It didn't even go to court. It was self-defense. They had my goddamn arm stuck—” Cohen paused, looked at the man. “Keith and Allie are the only two people on earth who'd know that. Are you even allowed to take sides like this? To take their comments and use them against me?”

Cohen's appointed lawyer was staring at Cohen like he didn't know what he'd walked in on, and he started rummaging through papers, frantically.

“It was uncontrolled retaliation and speaks to an inability to contain your anger.”

Cohen turned to his lawyer, “Can he cite something not on a criminal record?”

The lawyer looked like his allegiance to Cohen was shifting. He went to say something but the cop cut him off. “This I do have on file. Last week you threatened to stab a man in the hand, in front of
many
witnesses. You were fired on the spot for an act of aggression. It doesn't bode well,Mr. Davies. You said what you said in front of a child, no less,which by anyone's standards shows an inability to control your own anger. When we visited your employer yesterday, he reluctantly informed us that you did, unquestionably, have a troublesome vendetta against this child's father and that you uttered threats involving a knife. Tonight you allowed a mentally impaired man to stab your former lover's fiancé.”

The lawyer intervened, finally, “
That's
unfounded specula-tion—” But Cohen shouted over him, “
Allowed
? I
allowed
Lee to stab Keith?”

“The location of Lee's bedroom, and the length of the kitchen, suggests that if you didn't
know
what Lee Brown's intentions were, you at least had to have seen him coming. This assumption can be verified by your and Keith's statements of where you were standing when the stabbing occurred. We have statements, photos, and measurements of the kitchen, and you
must
have seen Lee coming with the knife. An old man like that.”

“I didn't see him coming because I had my head down, quite in shock, on account of some very big news Keith had just told me. He—He's implied I have a—” Cohen's lawyer put a hand on Cohen's hand and said, “This is a bunch of speculation and nothing more. There's nothing solid here. And unless you have a charge to lay against my client, we're going to leave now.”

The officer looked at Cohen. “No one is saying you didn't stop him. Once the knife was in. But we have police officers, myself included, who heard Lee openly state he did this
for
you and Allie. We have a witness who has seen you and Allie out in public, alone. We have Allie Crosbie's confession of recent sexual relations with you, and, I'm told, Lee is in his holding cell right now, incoherently yelling about how we've all sabotaged his last chance to make a difference. A statement that means his actions were premeditated. A plan was formed. You understand now? There's clearly a lot of pent up anger in that man, which, of course, you
could've
used to your advantage. You seem remarkably indifferent to the fact a man has been stabbed. Chillingly so.”

“And you seem remarkably intent on making the stabbing about something more than one man's dementia. You expect me to show concern for a man who's telling you I had him stabbed?” Cohen's lawyer kept trying to tell him something. “And I might be a little more concerned about Keith's well-being if I hadn't of witnessed him being well enough to stick around and punch me in the face four or five times before calling his own ambulance.”Both the officer and the lawyer stared at Cohen's fat lip—the crusty scabbing—and the black mounds rising along his cheekbones.

The constable turned his attention to the lawyer now. “Your client has a bit of an attitude. I must say.”

And his lawyer said, “I think we're all done here.”

Cohen and his lawyer walked to their cars together. Cohen apologized for cutting him off so many times in the interrogation and asked him, “I haven't done anything wrong, right? They don't have any charges or grounds for any further investigation or anything?”

He wasn't overly convincing as he said softly, “We've got nothing substantial to worry about here. Rest easy.”He took his keys out of his coat pocket. “This is me.”He pointed to his black sedan. It beeped, flashing lights as he pressed a door opener on his keychain. “We'll be in touch.”

A yawn.

COHEN HADN'T BEEN home for weeks; when he plucked his keychain from his coat, he had to take a second look at his house key to be sure it was the right one. His mail slot was in his door, and enough mail had piled up behind the door to obstruct its swing as he pushed it open. His house was so quiet he pressed play on a stereo before picking up the mail. Sorting it. Nothing but junk mail and bills. He leaned against a hallway table. Looked around his house like he was searching for something. Something that should be filling the house with more life, sound.

He went upstairs. Turned his shower on, like maybe a shower could help. He ran the water, but took a second before taking his clothes off, leaning back against the bathroom counter—arms folded, head down—until the shower had been running so long, he could feel spongy moisture in the air. Breathe it in like smoke. He undressed, almost tripped in tugging his underwear free from an ankle it had caught on.

With the shower curtain drawn, and the temperature that high, he was standing in a hot cloud of steam. The free massage of hovering condensation. He put his head against the wall. Under the showerhead. Little bits of conversation coming to him. What Lee had done,what Keith had said,what the police had said. He'd left the police station opening and closing his cellphone. No calls from Allie. He couldn't call her. It'd play right into the cop's fantasy.

His guess was Allie couldn't possibly call him from Keith's hospital room.
Who are you calling?
And she had to be torn: the stabbing would force her to bar Lee from her life. It was that black and white now, how she'd have to forget about a twenty-year kinship with the man.

She was pregnant when she left you to live with Lee.

He turned the water up higher. The sting was soothing after the first few branding jabs of water. He pictured Allie in the hospital room with Keith, playing the concerned fiancé. A hamster in a shaking cage. Her actions limited to what she
ought
to be saying and what she
ought
to be doing. But Cohen deserved an explanation, and he'd get it. He couldn't call her, and yet the whole drive home he was opening and closing his cellphone, dialling the first few numbers and hanging up. He got out of the shower and checked his phone again, and there was nothing. Again.

He brought the towel to his face. Pressed hard, scouring the water from his cheeks and eyes. A sigh. He thought about the day Allie had come by and found his computer open to the adoption website. She looked nothing like a woman who'd given his child away. She looked exactly like a woman who wanted him to have a child. She'd said it, and her face had been glowing.
I'm so excited for you.

Keith had said, shouted,
Might not have even been yours
in a crass way that marred Allie more as a slut than a mother of a child.
Her and I started in long before she left you
. Keith always spoke about Allie as if Cohen and Keith knew her to be a different woman. And through their eyes, she was: how Keith saw her and how Cohen saw her was a reflection of themselves. It was a reflection of what they wanted from life and what they needed from her to get it. He ran his towel through his hair, wondering what she might have needed from him, from Keith, and the kinds of things she might not have gotten from either of them.

She wanted kids. But she'd given that child away.

Cohen checked his phone again. Nothing. Finished drying himself off. Caught himself in the mirror. Stared. He put two hands on his vanity and stared at himself. Brushed his teeth. He saw the scar above his heart and thought of Zack. Clarence's comments,
He's got ARVC, Cohen. He's been diagnosed...He's got what you got. And he's got it bad.

He was connecting dots now, from the flashes of conversation. How Zack had his genetic heart flaw. How Zack was roughly the same age his and Allie's child would be.
Would be
, if Allie's child was his. It was unlikely Keith had been telling the truth, but if he had been, it was unlikely Allie's child had been Cohen's. Birth control couldn't have failed them because they didn't use it. She found the pill
too unnatural
and Cohen hated five different things about wearing a condom. Allie simply insisted his two-second warning be twenty seconds.

All that stung now was
Her and I started in long before she left you.
The fact of her infidelity, back then, shouldn't have mattered. Not six years later. But it deflated something about how much he revered Allie. Shook the pedestal she was on.

He walked down over his stairs, to fetch a bottle of wine, and thought: Zack is around six and has ARVC. Less than a hundred thousand people lived in his city, and it's a genetic disorder.

He grabbed a bottle of wine from his rack. A bold, peppery shiraz that could burn a hole in his mouth, and he stuck the corkscrew in. He needed to hear that it had been a girl she'd given away. Or a boy with red hair, or Down Syndrome, or some other trait Zack never had, so Cohen could be certain Allie's child was in no way Zack.

He poured the glass of wine, turned his propane fire place on, and checked his phone again. Watched the fire flicker in time to music in the background. He closed his eyes, and the backs of his eyelids were immediately movie screens projecting memories: he and Allie in the car that night, her hair in his face, blocking out everything but her. Zack's father swinging that door like a bat into Zack's little face: all the blood there that night. And the tears.

He blinked. Saw the look in Lee's eyes as he ran across the kitchen with that knife. He looked like one of those bulls, in Spain, stuck full of spears: desperate, angry, and unable to communicate his pain.

Cohen opened his eyes, grabbed the handful of bills and mail beside him. For his bedframe and mattress on credit he owed $48. 57 in interest. He owed $108. 88 to Visa. Simple little reminders of his trivial life back at home: paying bills, keeping the fridge stocked, cooking for one. Here, in this house, a knock on the door would never be Allie.

He picked up his phone and he called her.
Boy or a girl
. It was all he needed to know for now. So he picked up his phone, and he called her. Fuck what the police thought, because it was understandable that the question was gnawing at him, the way it would anyone.
Boy or girl
. He dialled her number, and she didn't answer, and he dialled it again. He took two steps towards the porch and stopped. Reconsidered. Pulled his jacket on.

The closer he got to her place, the more agitated and angry he felt. It was a long drive, and his thoughts, the memories that came, weren't the best reflection of Allie. The red lights were too long. And he hit every one of them. They'd chain him there, like a dog on a leash, two inches from the bone wanted. When he pulled into her driveway, it was after midnight and he'd seen the kaleidoscoping of TV lights on her living-room walls. She was home, awake, and not answering his calls.

He knocked. Keith could have been home or still in the hospital, and he didn't care. He knocked and no one answered. The doorbell had two strips of duct tape, X-ing out the option to use it. He knocked again and nobody answered.

But the TV was blaring. Somebody was home. And he turned the handle. It was a simple question, and he'd go. She could have picked up her goddamn phone.

Allie was on her couch, clicking through TV channels. Puffy eyes and crumpled tissues in her hands. She saw him come up over the stairs and took on the shocked posture of a frightened cat. “Cohen, you
can't
be here!” She got up and threw her hands out like she was trying to stop a train. “You just can't!” She put a finger to her lips,
Shh!
“Keith is upstairs, livid, on the phone with his lawyer! You really can't be here. You don't...
get
that?”