Chapter Five
In the solitude of her private room—which reflected the hospital’s willingness to let cops recover in peace, when there were enough beds to allow it, rather than Annie’s financial status—she was blessedly emotionless. The bomb and her injuries had left her even closer to numb than usual, she thought, and the painkillers helped, too. She would miss Ryan, although in some sense she was relieved not to have to worry about breaking up with him. She hadn’t known Matson or the uniformed cops that well—if she hadn’t been in the hospital, she would have gone to their funerals out of a sense of duty, not loss. And while she was worried about her hearing, dwelling on it didn’t seem productive. When she was alone, she was herself, that was the important thing. She spent her time emailing her fellow detectives about her cases, all being worked by other people now, reading about deafness online, dipping into the Laura Lippman novel, and sleeping.
A lot of that.
She woke up when nurse Helen came to check up on her. Annie awoke feeling like her blanket had turned to lead, crushing her, and she shoved it off. Helen offered a half-hearted smile. “What’s wrong, Helen?” Annie asked.
Helen shook her head. The smile grew broader, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Something’s wrong,” Annie said. “Don’t tell me it’s not.”
Helen picked up one of the notepads Annie was surrounded with these days. “I’m fine,” she said.
“No you’re not.”
Helen flinched, and Annie hoped she wasn’t coming across as angry. Tone of voice meant so much, and she had lost all control of hers.
Helen fixed her with a solemn gaze, all pretense of smiling gone now. She started to open her mouth, then shut it again. A muscle in her jaw twitched. Annie had interrogated enough people to know when someone wanted to open up but was holding back. She might say a couple of words, but mostly at this stage she would listen. Even the creeps of the world wanted someone to hear them out, sometimes more than they wanted anything else, including drugs, cash, or sex.
That was the one thing Annie couldn’t do.
“What, Helen?” she said. Spill. It wasn’t that she was concerned with Helen’s personal problems, but she wanted to know why she felt so mournful every time Helen came around. The first time the nurse had come to her room, after she had awakened in the hospital, she had thought it was her own experience getting to her, the certainty that the others had died, and her own injuries. Since then, however, the sensation returned each time Helen did, no matter how Annie felt before or after. Even if Dr. Ganz or someone else was in the room, Helen’s sorrows overwhelmed the others’ emotions.
Annie had been developing a theory. Now she needed to test it.
Helen rested the pad on the end of Annie’s bed and wrote for a minute. When she showed the page to Annie, her face was frozen into an emotionless mask, her brown eyes liquid, her movements brusque. She was angry that Annie had “made” her write, but write she had.
“My son is 17 and getting mixed up with opioids,” she had written. “I’m worried he’ll be arrested or die, but he won’t listen to me or anybody. So I carry that around with me all the time, and it makes me sad. OK?”
As Annie read, Helen’s hand started to shake. Her mask fell away and the grief she had tucked behind it burst out as tears and sobs that Annie could see if not hear. Annie was caught up in it, her own tears flowing, and she said, “I’m sorry, Helen, I’m so sorry,” barking the words and extending her arms. Helen came into them, cautious of Annie’s clavicle, and the two women held each other, both crying for Helen’s son and for Helen but not at all for Annie.
Annie didn’t expect to ever be a mother, and she was glad, because as role models went, hers was about as shitty as it got. She remembered telling Matson her usual fiction, on the way to the trailer park where he had died. Mother in France, enjoying herself. It was a convenient story because it was hard to check. Not too hard to find out the truth, if one went to the effort of searching online for old news stories about Annie or her father, but she would usually tell the real story to those few people who were likely to go to that much effort. The rest of them, the casual acquaintances, didn’t need to hear about the way Claire Jourdan O’Brien had dashed down a gin and tonic and then, with shaking hands, pressed her husband’s duty weapon against her right temple and thumbed the trigger. No one wanted to hear about the fourteen-year-old girl who had watched it happen, horrified but unable to stop it.
Before the suicide, Annie and her mother had spoken in a rapid Franglais that her father couldn’t begin to keep up with. After, Annie never spoke French again, and for a long time she hardly spoke at all. When her father talked to her during that period, it was in cop, that half-secret language rich with skells and suspects, evidence and accusations. They had continued to live together but their lives were increasingly separate, unlinked except by occasional physical proximity, until Annie announced her intention to become a cop.
Her father had been pleased, and that was half of it right there—since they could barely communicate, to tell him something that prompted a smile and a big hug felt like a coup. The rest of it was less clear—she felt that she was carrying on a family tradition of some sort, and she had always been impressed with her dad’s social status, but when she really tried to reach inside herself for explanations, she thought some of it was a desire to figure people out, to solve the puzzles that human behavior presented. Why would someone rob a convenience store for thirty bucks when they could work at the store and make more than that every day, without worrying about going to jail? Why did people murder their loved ones, instead of divorcing them? Why would a woman put a gun to her own head? If police work would answer those questions, it was worth pursuing. And until those questions could be answered, the idea of being a parent was terrifying.
So she wasn’t sure how she would handle a situation like Helen’s. Probably with violence, she guessed, because that was her typical response to drug dealers who preyed on kids. And seventeen was a kid, as far as she was concerned.
After Helen left, Annie checked her email again. There was a response from Nanci Keller in her in-box.
“I was at that trailer park canvassing for witnesses today,” Nanci had written. “Some whack job had coated the entire inside of his trailer with foil, to block alien death rays, he said. Windows too. How did crazy people protect themselves before there was tin foil?
“Anyway, it sounds to me like your empathy meter has gone off the scale. You’re feeling everybody else’s pain, or happiness, whatever, stronger than you feel your own. Must be strange for you, since you’re not exactly Miss Emotional. It’ll probably go away, but until then it wouldn’t be a bad idea to avoid people with strong emotions, just in case. It’s lucky you’ll be in surgery tomorrow and won’t be at the funerals for Ellis and Matson.”
Luck had nothing to do with it. Suspecting something was off-kilter with her “empathy meter,” as Nanci put it, Annie had made sure to schedule the surgery in conflict with the funerals. The last thing she wanted was to be someplace where a lot of people were in mourning.
The email contained more about the Trey Fairhaven case—no one doubted that Fairhaven himself had detonated the bomb, but Annie was the only living witness and the department was hoping to back up her account independently, since there was talk of civil actions seeking compensation for damage done to nearby trailers by the explosion. Annie skimmed over that part. She already felt removed from the job, as if the gulf between the hearing world and her new, silent one was too vast to bridge.
But maybe there was something to that empathy business. Annie worried that she was losing her mind, as if her psychological condition had somehow prompted the unprecedented emotional upheaval. She did an online search on the word “empathy,” and spent some time reading various definitions and descriptions, scientific and otherwise. She found articles on the difference between empathy and sympathy. She read about people with no empathy, or little—people who couldn’t put themselves in anyone else’s shoes, who couldn’t bring themselves to understand, or care, how anyone else felt. Some of the criminals she had dealt with seemed to have that problem—she had thought of them as sociopaths, but maybe it was more specifically a malfunction in the empathy department. Maybe she had somehow been granted their unused portions.
She kept reading, following link after link.
One of those links took her to a derivation that seemed to have come from comic books, but she wasn’t entirely clear on the word’s origin: “Empath.” An empath was someone who was supernaturally empathic. Reading further brought her to the word clairsentience, derived from the same root as clairvoyance. This one expanded on the supernatural aspect. A clairsentient was someone who could know things about other people, psychically, by feeling their emotions.
Annie was not a believer in the supernatural. She didn’t go to church, didn’t read her horoscope, didn’t think the lines in her palm meant anything more than that people needed friction ridges if they were going to hold onto objects. And they came in handy in making identifications in criminal cases. Everyone in Phoenix had heard of the psychic Allison Dubois, the subject of the old TV show Medium, but the show gave the impression that Dubois worked with the Phoenix Police Department, which wasn’t precisely true. Annie had never met Dubois and had always doubted her claims.
But the shock of recognition, as she read about empaths and clairsentients, reached down to her marrow. Someone else had experienced what she was going through and had put names to it. Not only wasn’t she alone, she wasn’t even unique. It wasn’t like there was a club she could join, but the simple fact that others had lived through it made her more genuinely happy than anything had since the explosion.
Best of all, she knew the happiness was hers. She was alone in her private room, with no one else near enough to force their emotions onto her. She wanted to clutch her joy to her breast like a beloved teddy bear but settled for smiling so broadly that it hurt her face.