Trigger Finger (9 page)

“Abby,” I said
quietly.

She looked
up.
 
Although still a child at thirteen,
her face already foretold the woman she would become.
 
She’d inherited Allie’s rich brown hair along
with the delicate structure of her mouth and cheeks.
 
        

“You’re famous,”
she said with a wry smile.

I opened the
cardstock box in which my McRib sandwich had come.
 
I didn’t feel
 
hungry anymore, but I understood that at this time of day, I was
supposed to eat.

“I never wanted to
be famous,” I replied.
 
“Just rich.”

“Seriously!
 
You’re, like, a celebrity!
 
The guys at school have put together an
Abby’s Dad Is Awesome page on Facebook.
 
Know who the profile picture is?”

“Who?”

“Dirty
Harry.”
 
She talked in between
bites.
 
To emphasize the Dirty Harry
point, she made a gun with her right thumb and index finger and pointed it at
me with a Clint Eastwood grimace.
 
Then
it disappeared, and she transformed into a thirteen-year-old girl again.
 
“Aren’t you going to eat?”

“Oh.
 
Yeah.”
 
I took a bite.
 
I loved
McRib.
 
Allie refused to eat it, claiming
that while she didn’t know for sure what they put in it.
 
Personally, I didn’t care.
 
It looked like a rib, it dripped with tangy
barbecue sauce and it tasted good.
 
Don’t
ask questions; just enjoy.

Barbecue sauce
dribbling on my fingers, I set the sandwich down and wiped my hands on a
napkin.

“So,” I said.
 
“What do you think?”

“About what?”

“About what I
did.”

She put her
sandwich down on the wrapper before her.
 
In the space of just a few moments, she’d almost finished it.
 
She cocked her head to one side, looking away
and thinking.
 
Like the hair and face,
this gesture very much echoed Allie.
 
“I
guess…” she started, then paused.
 
She
pursed her lips, her brow wrinkling.

I waited.

“I guess it is
what it is,” she said.
 
“I mean, what
else are you going to do when two guys break into your house?
 
You do what you have to do to survive.
 
When thugs get all up in your house, you
either call 911 or you blow them away.”

She shrugged and
appeared to think some more.

“I don’t know, I
guess I do think it’s kind of cool.
 
You
have this boring job, you go to work in a suit every day, but now you’re, like,
an action hero.”

From its position
in the box, the McRib called to me.
 
Eat me,
it said, bleeding barbecue
sauce.
 
Eat me now.

“Death is not
cool,” I admonished.
 
“No matter who it
is that dies.”

She rolled her
eyes.

“Human life is
precious,” I said.
 
“All of it.”

“I know, Daddy,
chill.”

“I’m not happy
about what I did,” I continued.
 
I lied,
but if she knew how I really felt, she wouldn’t call me “action hero”
anymore.
 
She’d realize that her dad was
a psychopath, and so I said the things I had to say, because I so badly needed
to hide the ugly truth.
 
“I’m not proud
of it.
 
I didn’t even want to do it.
 
In fact, if you and your mother hadn’t been
home, I’d have gone out through the basement door and run off, because the only
reason I did what I did, and I mean the
only
reason, is to protect you.
 
They could
have taken everything else—the TVs, the computer, the jewelry, everything down
to the curtains.
 
I’d have let them.”

She blinked at
me.
 
I suddenly felt myself laying it on
too thick, preaching now instead of just talking, my tongue dripping not
barbecue sauce but bullshit.
 
And the look
in her eyes—they were green, like my mother’s—made me realize that I was
preaching to myself.
 
She wasn’t
listening to me; she was observing me.

But I couldn’t
stop.
 
“Those guys will never learn from
their mistakes, Abby.
 
Not now, not
ever.
 
Whatever they could have become,
we’ll never know, because they’re dead.
 
We’ll never get a chance to win them back.
 
And I think it’s sick to celebrate that.”

“And I think
that’s a bunch of nonsense,” she said.

My eyes
widened.
 
My spine straightened and I
drew back, as if she’d just reached across the table and slapped me.

“They were going
to
rape
me, Daddy.”
 
Her voice remained level, but cool.
 
“You shot them, though, so they didn’t.
 
You can say all you want, but to me, I think
that’s pretty awesome.”

“Do you know what
‘rape’ means?”
 
I asked.
 
My face felt numb.

“It’s when a guy
holds you down and sticks his thing in you even though you don’t want him to.”

They got her.
 
They weren’t after Allie at all; they were
after her.
 
They went straight into her
bedroom while I laid on the floor drooling in the basement.

“Who told you
about that?”

“Come on, Dad, I’m
thirteen.
 
By the way, they were going to
rape Mom, too.
 
Why else would they have
come in when we were home?
 
If all they
wanted was TVs and computers and whatever, they’d have been better off waiting
until everybody left in the morning.
 
The
cops even said that.”

Abby folded her
arms.
 
She looked away at something I
couldn’t see—an idea, maybe, a feeling—and her eyes narrowed.

“So I guess I
don’t really understand why you feel so bad about it,” she said.
 
“They were going to rape me, they were going
to rape Mom, so why would you ever feel guilty about shooting guys like
that?
 
I don’t get it.”

Are you a pussy, Daddy?
 
She hadn’t asked that, but I heard it dancing
around in her words.
 
Are you?

Hell, no,
I thought.

Then what are you?

I’m one hard son of a bitch.

“What?”

I blinked.
 
“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your lips were
moving.
 
Are you even listening to me?”

“Of course I am.”

“Then why were
your lips moving?”
 
She demanded.

“They’re not.”

“Yes they are.”

“It doesn’t
matter,” I said.
 
“Don’t change the
subject.
 
Do you feel like I’m sorry
about it?”

“It seems like
it,” she replied.
 
The chicken sandwich
had vanished.
 
During this discussion of
things like rape and killing, she’d eaten the sandwich anyway.
 
The subject matter made that small an impact
on her.
 
Suddenly, I envied her very
much.

“God will forgive
you,” she said.
 
“But you know what?
 
I think if you’d let those guys hurt me and
mom even though you had a gun and could have stopped it, He wouldn’t forgive
you.
 
I think that would have made Him
mad.
 
I think that would have made Him
really
mad.”

My mouth.
 
I couldn’t eat anymore, McRib or not.
 
“I think you’re right,” I said hollowly.

She gestured at my
sandwich.
 
“But He’s not mad.
 
And now you get free food at McDonald’s.
 
Which is cool, because you deserve it.”

I swallowed.
 
A
ki
breath filled my chest.
 
I didn’t want to
ask this next question, but I had to.
 
“What do you remember?”
 
I asked.

“About what?”

“About that
night.”

She shrugged and
stole one of my French fries.
 
I watched
every movement of her face, searching for some sign of the truth.

“A bunch of
firecrackers going off, then a bunch of screaming.
 
Mom hauling me out of bed, and I’m still half
asleep.
 
I’m all like, what’s going on
here, and Mom’s dragging me into the bedroom and calling the police.
 
Aside from that, not much.
 
Why?”

“What happened
before that?”
 
I asked.

“Uh…nothing.
 
I was sleeping.”

“The whole time?”

“The whole
time.
 
What is this?”

I folded my
arms.
 
Ki
breath.
 
Time to ask
point-blank: “There’s a theory,” I said, “advanced by my therapist.
 
You knew I was going to counseling, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“My therapist is
wondering if maybe I didn’t encounter these two men on their way
out
of the house instead of on their way
in.
”

Her face screwed
up with the effort of trying to catch my drift, but then she got it and her
eyes widened.

“That’s crazy!”

“Did something
happen to you that night that you’re afraid to talk about?”

“No!”
 
She shook her head emphatically.
 
“No, no, no!
 
Eeew, Dad, that’s disgusting!
 
No,
nobody ever…yuck!
 
Gross!
 
Absolutely not.
 
I’d have screamed and screamed and
screamed.
 
They’d have had to kill me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m
sure!”

“You know you can tell
me and your mom anything, right?
 
Anything at all?
 
No matter what?”

She rolled her
eyes again.
 
“Yes, Dad, I know.
 
Tell you what, if it’ll make you feel better,
I’ll swear on a Bible that those guys didn’t rape me.”
 
Her eyes came back to center and fixed on
me.
 
“And you know why they didn’t rape
me?
 
Because
you
shot them dead.”

She reached out
and stole another French fry.
 
To Hell
with Pinnix, to Hell with Ramseur, she was hungry.

“And now you have
a Facebook fan page.”
 
She smiled and
added, “Tell your shrink he’s stupid.”

Her words made me
feel better.
 
Her smile made me feel
better.
 
I’d watched her reaction to Dr.
Koenig’s suggestion and saw nothing hiding underneath it.
 
I looked at the healthy glow on her face—a
combination of winning her soccer game, seeing her father worshipped like a god
and then getting to tell that same god he was being silly—and I thought,
nope.
 
Didn’t happen.

It didn’t happen
because I’d been ready.
 
And I’d shot
those two pieces of shit like a pair of landfill rats.
 
Whatever remained of Pinnix and Ramseur lay
now in a pauper’s grave in Burlington or Durham or wherever the
coroner had sent the carcasses.
 
And I
sat in McDonald’s, eating free food with my daughter.

And suddenly, I
felt hungry again.

“When you’re
done,” Abby said, “go up there and see if you can score us some free ice
cream.”
 

11.

That evening, I
got on the internet and did a search on how to tell if your kid had been
sexually abused.
 
Her eating habits
hadn’t changed, her grades hadn’t fallen, she hadn’t started sleeping more or
sleeping less, she hadn’t suddenly become any more sullen or cantankerous than
usual—nothing to indicate she’d suffered any sort of trauma.
 
As far as I knew, she hadn’t suddenly become
sexually promiscuous, either.
 
I finished
my web investigation satisfied that as to my daughter, at least, Dr. Koenig was
barking up the wrong tree.

But my wife
had
changed—she’d gotten interested in
having sex with me again—and so before bed that night, I asked her.

“Let’s say that I
got knocked out longer than I think I did and when I shot those guys, they’d
already come up here and…you know.
 
Would
you tell me?”

She set down her
book, a library hardback with a blurry picture of a girl riding a bicycle down
a country road on the cover.
 
She removed
her reading glasses and put them on top of it.
 
“Of course I would.
 
Where did
this come from?”

“Dr. Koenig,” I
said.
 
“He remarked that the timing seems
a little messed up with the shooting—he doesn’t think I could get hit, recover
and get the gun in time to intercept Pinnix and Ramseur on their way
upstairs.
 
So he asked if there was a
possibility that maybe I got them on their way down instead of up.
 
Which would mean…”

“I see.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry about
it, because it didn’t happen.
 
Okay?”

I rolled over on
my back and stared up at the ceiling.

“Are you
worried?”
 
She asked.

“No,” I said.
 
“It’s just…that caller said a bunch of
bullshit, and he rattled my cage.
 
But
then my therapist goes and brings up some of the same things, like the asshole might
have been right or something, and so that
really
rattled my cage.
 
Because it’s a good
question.
 
When you have so many
coincidences and the outcome could change with any one, you do wonder.
 
Sometimes.”

She picked up her
book and glasses and placed them on the nightstand.
 
Then she rolled over and propped herself up
beside me, her brown hair spilling down over the hand on which she rested her
head.
 
I thought then that with a woman
so beautiful, it was a miracle she didn’t have crazies following her home every
week.

“You know what I
think?”

“What’s that?”

“I think that
you’re nervous about this whole thing and your therapist threw that out there
to make you
confront
the idea.
 
Bring it up, make you face it, let you put it
away.
 
It’s actually a pretty good
tactic, I’d say.
 
Do you feel any better
after asking me about it?”

“Yes.”

There came a
silence then, my mind working through what she’d just said and trying to decide
whether or not to tell her that Dr. Koenig wanted her to come to treatment with
me.
 
I had agonized over that, because I
didn’t want her there.
 
I wouldn’t do that, man,
Bobby had said
when I asked him about it.
 
You’re supposed to be her hero, which means
you’re supposed to be strong.
 
Not
breaking down and crying in a shrink’s office.
 
I agreed.
 
My wife now
understood better than most women the importance of a strong mate.
 
Sniveling, crying sissies have ways of
getting people killed.

“What are you
thinking?”
 
She asked.

“I’m just thinking
that you’re right,” I replied.

She smiled and
turned off the light.
 
“You should be
getting used to that by now.”
 

At our next
session, Dr. Koenig was running behind and so I had to cool my heels without
him for several minutes.
 
When he came
in, he found me standing at the window looking out over that little courtyard,
my hands behind my back.
 
Today, an old
woman sat on the bench eating popcorn from a small red-and-white striped
bag.
 
White-haired and hunchbacked, the
she chewed with the slow deliberation of one with few teeth and nothing but
time—although, from the looks of her, she didn’t have much of either.
 
A stainless steel walker frame stood parked
beside the bench.
 
Her eyes stared into
space.

Alzheimer’s
, I thought.
 
Dr. Koenig’s office occupied the first floor
of a large building; she was probably an outpatient in somebody’s eldercare
practice.
 
Right now, a man or woman in
his or her fifties or sixties was watching her from another office window I
couldn’t see, talking with an entirely different doctor from mine about
Mother’s options.

“Who’s that lady
out there?”
 
I asked.

“I have no idea.”

He joined me at
the window.
 
He had eschewed the informal
attire this morning, and now his skinny neck poked out of a white collared
shirt, the inverted noose of a necktie falling down towards his beltline.
 
He had important obligations today, people to
do, things to see.
 
Drive over to the
university in Chapel Hill, maybe, give a
lecture to the next generation of psychotherapists so that they could
adequately counsel the next generation of neurotic lawyers.
 
Dr. Koenig had a life.
 
When I wasn’t in his office, he probably
didn’t even think about me.
 
He ran
marathons.
 
He made organic salads.

“She’s got
Alzheimer’s,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” I
replied.
 
“It’s a guess.
 
More than a third of the population has
dementia by her age.
 
Maybe it’s not
Alzheimer’s, but it’s something.
 
Pick’s
disease, Lewy Body disease, vascular dementia, could be anything, I guess.
 
Look at her.
 
Did I ever tell you I have a little experience in the mental health field?”

“You didn’t.”

“I do.
 
When I first started at Carwood Allison, they
really hadn’t figured out what to do with me yet, so they had me running around
doing all this random shit for this partner or that.
 
I used to tell people at the courthouse I was
like a hooker, only I had seven pimps.
 
One of the things they had me do was Guardian Ad Litem work, where you
get appointed by the Clerk of Court to represent the respondent in an
incompetency proceeding.
 
You know, make
sure nobody’s trying to take advantage of them or anything, look out for their
best interests.”

The old woman
chewed her popcorn.
 
A pigeon lit on the
sidewalk at her feet and she stared at it for several seconds before tossing it
one white piece.
 
The bird gobbled it
whole.

“I get appointed
to represent these people, and ninety-nine percent of the time, they’re out to
lunch.
 
They have no idea what’s going
on.”

I paused, watching
her and thinking.

“Once upon a time,
I felt sorry for them,” I remarked.

“And now?”

“Now I’m jealous.”

I turned away from
the window and walked to the suede sofa where I’d unburdened myself and gotten
nowhere.
 
Dr. Koenig took his customary
seat.
 
He reached into his briefcase and
out came that legal pad, the one where he scribbled notes that he wouldn’t
share with me, notes that ostensibly helped him reach a care plan that he
wouldn’t share with me, either.
 
I’d
grown tired of not sleeping, but I’d grown tired of this, too, this
talking.
 
I was sick of talking.

I was sick of
everything.

“You’re jealous of
Alzheimer’s patients?”

I sighed and shook
my head.
 
You couldn’t say anything
around a shrink.
 
They’d take it and
twist it, and before you knew it, they’d have you strapped into a straitjacket.
 
“It’s just an expression.”

He looked down at
his pad again.
 
There came a long pause,
as if he had to think hard about how to approach a difficult task.

Then he asked,
“Have you talked to Allie about coming in to speak with me?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“A number of
reasons.
 
Main one being, I disagree with
your little theory.”

“My ‘little’
theory?”

“That I could have
laid unconscious for longer than I think—that Pinnix and Ramseur had their way
with my wife, my daughter or both and I nailed them on their way out.
 
I mean, don’t get me wrong; it’s an
interesting point.
 
And a valid one—the
timing is one of the miracles that night.
 
But I talked to them about it.
 
Allie and Abby.
 
It didn’t
happen.”

“Do you think that
if someone’s willing to go to the lengths necessary to block something out that
they’re just going to tell you yes, this terrible thing actually did happen to
me?”

I chuckled and
shook my head.
 
“No, Doc, I don’t.
 
But I do think that there’d be some kind of
cue when you confronted them about it.
 
If a woman gets held down and raped in her own bed, aside from the
obvious physical evidence that would exist immediately after the act, there
would be…this
thing
in her mind that
she’d have to cover up.
 
I think that if
Allie or Abby had been attacked that night in any way, I’d have seen it.
 
The coverup,
 
I mean.”

He studied me in silence,
digesting what I’d said.
 
He made a note
on his pad and remarked, “Some people are very good liars.”

“Abby’s never been
a very good liar.
 
And Allie, well—I’ve
known her for eighteen years.
 
I’ve got
eighteen years of baseline behavior, and I’m telling you, the only thing that’s
changed is she’s into sex again.”

Another glance
down at the pad.
 
Due to the angle, I
couldn’t see what he’d been writing on it and it occurred to me that it could
be anything.
 
I wondered if Dr. Koenig
was doodling.

“So you don’t
believe there’s a possibility that something else happened there that you’re
just not aware of,” he said.

“No,” I
replied.
 
“I’ve considered it, I’ve given
it a lot of thought and since I see absolutely no evidence to support it, I’m
going to go ahead and discard it as a workable theory.”

“Fine.
 
But why haven’t you brought your wife in to
see me?
 
I told you I wanted to meet
her.
 
She’s not here.”

“She’s not here
because I didn’t bring her.
 
I didn’t
mention it to her.”

“Why?”

I shrugged and
took a deep breath.
 
Not a
ki
breath—this was just your ordinary,
everyday sigh.

“This is kind of
a…I don’t know…a
weird
process.
 
Psychotherapy, I mean.
 
Me coming in here, baring my soul to
you.
 
I’m supposed to confess and
confront my insecurities.
 
Lay out my
fears.
 
I will never look less like a
hero than I do in here with you.
 
If it’s
all right with you, I’d like to avoid looking like a pussy in front of my wife.
 
Bobby agrees with me.”

That seemed to
catch his attention.
 
“You consulted with
Bobby about this.”

“I did.”
 
I gave a half-smile.
 
Outside, the old woman had disappeared.
 
All traces of human misery and tragic endings
had vanished, leaving behind only the concrete bench and the full, green
trees.
 
“Women, he pointed out, want a
strong man.
 
Especially women who came
within inches of getting raped and probably killed—they don’t want to see you
in a shrink’s office, crying about your feelings.
 
They may act all supportive, but what they
really want is for you to handle it and go on.”

“This is Bobby’s
opinion.”

“It’s mine,
too.
 
I’m going to tell you something
else; Bobby thinks that what I need to do is go ahead and find this Bald Man
who called into the radio show and get in his face.
 
I tend to agree with him there, too, by the
way.”

“I see.”

“See what?
 
What is there to see?”

“Bobby,” he said.
“He was in your head that night, you said.
 
Coaching you on.”

“He was.” Forearms
resting on my knees, I laced my hands.
 
Thinking about Bobby’s running commentary that night made my trigger
finger start to twitch.

“Bobby’s your big
brother.
 
And he’s a Marine.
 
You look up to him.”