I barely had a moment to register that we were all about to die when the police pulled up, sidearms drawn and pointed at him, shouting drop the weapon.
My husband looked down at me and said, “y’happy now? You've left me no choice but to shoot myself now: Sleep tight, love."
Then he shut the door behind us and locked it.
The neighbors across the street took their evenings on their glider and they waved to us to come over. The police surrounded us with giant shields to guard us from gunfire and ushered us carefully and swiftly down the front stairs, one of them carrying The Boy.
I had so many thoughts coursing through my head; I wished I had clothes on; I didn’t feel at all inside reality; and I had never so much as spoken a word to these people in whose home I was waiting for I didn’t even know what at the time.
We were ordered to stand clear of the front windows; I was asked a battery of questions, all of them empathetic and accusatory at once, asking for the details leading up to their arrival and I can’t remember what I said beyond what I’ve documented here, albeit with a lot fewer specifics.
I remember their house was air-conditioned – something to which we were not accustomed – and the Boy was cold so the Wife gave him a hooded sweatshirt and a pair of socks to wear while distracting him with milk and cookies. I remember him asking me, “Ma, they only have cow’s milk — am I allowed to have cow’s milk? I’m not allowed to have cow’s milk, Ma,” and I told him that this one time it would be fine, an exception was made and he was blissful eating cookies-I’d-never-fed-him and the forbidden cow’s milk.
The Neighbor-Husband was calm and spoke to me in a soothing voice, I recall him telling me that he’d been through this before, it was hell in the moment but that ultimately it would be better and as he said that, we heard another shot come from the house.
The police were suddenly present again and told us that we needed to relocate, we were not safe so close to the, “assailant,” and they ushered us out the back door, again carrying The Boy who complained he not finished with his snack and the utility belt of the officer carrying him hurt his leg. Behind the shields we were rushed, barefoot and mostly naked, through a number of backyards littered with dog shit and overgrown with sharp thistle that bit at my soles until finally we reached the end of our street and were parked behind a barricade of squad cars and ordered to sit down and stay down.
I was told there was a woman with flame-colored hair on the other side of the main road that wanted to take the Boy — my sister-in-law, the one who’d been on the phone. She’d been told I would be waiting for an undetermined amount of time, that a small child was present and could she find a place for him until we sussed it all out?
And my hair, as it is now, was a bright and deep shade of pink which prompted joking by the multitude of police officers about a sale on hair dye, it must have been a family affair. I carried my Boy across police lines and handed him to his aunt over yellow tape as she tearfully embraced me, telling me she loved me, that we would all be okay no matter what.
It is so tragically textbook how wrong she was.
I took inventory of my surroundings and realized that my neighborhood had suddenly become a hostage zone: yellow tape every which way, all residents ordered to stay indoors and away from windows, the main road — an interstate — off of which we lived blocked off as far as I could see. I stood, naked and trembling in the parking lot of the Dunkin' Donuts waiting for someone to give me direction, any direction.
Finally, my brother-in-law appeared by my side, visibly agitated. He’d tried to make his way down the street but was stopped by the police, told that the “assailant” was still armed and unaccounted for and that no one would be allowed within a certain distance of the house until the “assailant’s” condition was confirmed.
I blurted loudly, “he’s shot himself this time, what’re you waiting for? He could bleed to death and you’re doing nothing!” I was regarded with pity by a crew of men I’d come to know over the next four hours as the Mediums.
The Mediums were our connection to what was taking place at “the domicile.” They explained that because I had phoned in a suicide that had, in fact, been a “dummy shot,” they could not say with certainty whether or not the second shot was actually the One, or if it was just another “dummy.” If it were the latter and they entered “the domicile” to find him alive and armed, they would have no choice but to shoot him. They did not want to do that.
And so we waited, for four long hours, until the sun was long down and a Baltimore summer storm blew through, soaking us, and the Kenyan immigrants that held their service at the corner church were begging to be let out and my family arrived. My mother, my uncle, my sister and her husband, my grandmother, and my best friends and me and my brother-in-law sharing what would be our last moments of real togetherness, all of us (except for the Kenyans…and it’s hot in that church, I felt so guilty) standing in the July rain and me proudly refusing my sister’s shoes.
Four hours later, we watched the Mediums walking back up the street, taking off their riot gear piece by piece and lighting cigarettes and staring grimly at their feet to tell us what I already knew: that he was dead in his closet, a single gunshot wound to the right temple, likely hours old and they were sorry, so sorry, and there were more questions. All I wanted to do was get in that fucking house.
But there was more waiting.
The coroner was tied up elsewhere, his arrival time unpredictable, and as strongly as a pink-haired woman with bare feet in her underwear in the parking lot of a donut shop could assert herself, I said, “I am going to my house, I am cold and naked and my husband is dead and my grandmother has to pee and this has gone on long enough: I will walk down there, with my grandmother and if you arrest us, so be it, but I’d suggest at this point you just let us pass.”
And so they did, and so we all walked in the road and ignored the shouting Kenyans and the neighbors that were finally allowed out of their homes and wanted information. We ignored all of them so my grandmother could pee and I could put clothes on and so that Brian wouldn’t be alone as he had been for so many hours.
It surprises me still that we all voiced, in our own way, that we were most concerned with being in his company. We all believed it must have been so lonely for him to lie there alone while the neighborhood stood still and made sure that the man with the Irish accent in the green house with the hyper Boy and the pink-haired wife was not a threat to the police. When, after all this time, it was discovered that he had, in fact, died from that second shot I heard from across the street while my Boy ignorantly enjoyed his forbidden treat.
His brother demanded to see him; when he was finally granted permission I, too, was asked if I wanted to view the “deceased,” but I declined. I couldn’t imagine anything more gruesome. Brother-in-law was quick: up the stairs with urgency, his wailing audible for what was likely blocks, then back down again within a minute.
Until much later, I couldn’t imagine what drove his desire. I reminded myself, over and over when my own dear sister was holding my hand, walking me through the house, helping me make up my mind as to what I needed, for how long and for what purpose, that I had my only sibling, right next to me, warm and breathing and alive. How would I react if she were up in that closet? I couldn’t know; I don’t want to know and I pray – selfishly – I go before her because I never want to know.
After his brother came downstairs, sobbing and moaning, I ascended the stairs intent on procuring sundries and clothing for an extended stay elsewhere. There were medics in the closet, the medical examiner hadn’t yet arrived, but there were the guys in the hot and stuffy room that smelled of iron and salt.
They were taking notes and measurements, oblivious to my presence. They had me believe, the police officers who’d been my liaisons for the past five hours, that they were making exceptions for us: letting us back into the house before the M.E., giving his brother permission to see Brian in his final state, allowing us to undo what wreckage they’d made in their “rescue efforts.”
I felt special, in an odd sort of way, privileged, brittle and grateful that I wasn’t treated more poorly. I didn’t know that this was, in fact, true. I was being treated less poorly, less criminally than most suicide survivors: I was not interrogated (much), I was not taken to the police station, I was never a suspect: Brian's death was plainly a suicide, he was kind enough to make that abundantly clear. It was possibly the least ambiguous thing he'd ever done.
I didn’t own luggage, wouldn’t have been able to find it if I had, so I grabbed a blue plastic laundry basket and overturned it, emptying it of its dirty contents to blindly, unconsciously fill it with clothing, toiletries, books and pillows. The medics were still in the closet, they’d taken a lamp from my nightstand and dragged it to the entrance — the closet had no electricity and it was night, late by then. I worked in the bathroom while they were in the bedroom.
When I’d finished packing shampoos, cleansers, brushes and sponges, I asked permission to enter the bedroom — my own bedroom — and was granted a respectful “yes.” I placed another basket on the bed with the intent of filling it with clothing from the dresser when the medics stepped out of the room, into the overly-lit hallway to tidy up some notes. There were police in the hall, measuring bullet holes, being respectfully somber and quiet. I was alone for a minute, maybe two.
His body was on its side, its left side, not really laying down but bent that way; he’d been squatting on the floor of the closet under some hanging clothes, surrounded by piles of t-shirts and boxer shorts that were, in the end, mostly garbage.
I couldn’t see much blood at first, some spatter but there were so many clothes on the floor that it was mostly absorbed by the material. His eyes were open, slightly, as was his mouth; there was blood coming from his crooked nose and some around the entry wound in his right temple. A bit had trickled down toward his eye and was sticky in his brow and lashes; his hair, however, was soaked.
He'd fired that shot hours before, he’d bled a lot and although it was mostly contained under his head, there was still a lot of it. His arms were funnily contorted, his ribcage twisted and protruding in the way that it always did now breathless and still, his legs sprawled in a way that made it clear he was not sleeping.
I crouched frozen in that doorway for what felt like an hour until I heard the medics talking in the hall and realized, I had no permission to be viewing this and I jumped away before I was caught.
I calmly descended the stairs, no tears, full of freeze and fear and breathless shock. His brother, my sister and her husband were seated at the dining table; I sat nervously with them. They didn’t know I’d looked. I forgot moments later that I’d done so.
For the first and only time, I put ashtrays on that table and allowed smoking in the common area; I offered drinks and made one for myself. D played DJ, playing songs for Brian that he could not hear; my sister’s husband righted furniture, folded blankets and straightened toys while I washed the dishes left from the evening’s unfinished tea, while my sister packed a cooler full of vitamins and medication I would need for the coming week.
A detective asked me, “why are you washing dishes?” and I replied, “what would you have me be doing? They’re not going to do themselves,” all of this while Brian still lay above us, waiting to be shuttled to his next appointment.
Finally, the medical examiner arrived, took his brief assessment with what cut and dry evidence lay before him, and the medics performed their final task of bagging him and carrying him to the ambulance. We saw him off while blaring the Clash’s Robber Dub. A few years later, the Boy would ask me, “was Daddy a bank robber?” and tea came out of my nose.
I plodded around anxiously until the memory of those short minutes was buried, I did not want to remember, I wanted to undo what I’d seen.
And so I managed, for two years, to forget that I’d looked.
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