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do. Afraid for your life. Four words that are supposed to provide absolution but provide Carson with no peace. Four words to explain the inexplicable. The four words that provide a police officer with a moral escape hatch but that can sometimes turn the heinous into the justifiable. The mantra every cop knows by heart, “I was afraid for my life.” I was afraid for
my
life, so I took
yours
. Before you could take mine. Carson has never until this moment heard the chilling paradox embedded in the words. The brutal math. If the cell phone had been a gun, would his anguish be less searing? If he’d killed a kidnapper, a robber, a murderer, would he still feel consigned to hell?
    Was he afraid? Although he has told everyone, Matthew Frey, Melvin Griffin, the investigators at the scene that he was, he doesn’t remember what he was feeling. He remembers only what he did. “Even while I was pulling the trigger, Bunny, I was praying it was a dream. And when I saw what I had done I prayed that he was asleep, or maybe that I was. That if he didn’t wake up, then I would.”

2

     
    Maybe it’s a dream.
Carson allows himself to think the hopeful blasphemy, throwing off the sheets and spread, sitting up, his feet hitting the bedroom floor with a thud that sounds to him, on this morning, totally ominous. He looks around the bedroom, sees everything he knows so well—the deep green and red paisley drapes at the window, the photos of Bunny and the children, his mother, and Bunny’s parents atop the mahogany chest of drawers, the twenty-six-inch television on a wide wooden table that faces the bed, the clock radio, the mobile phone, Bunny’s nightgown and robe flung over the back of the leather recliner, three pairs of heels huddled in a corner. It’s all familiar, and it’s all so strange. His uniform is bundled on the floor near the entrance to the bathroom. He tossed it there after stripping it off at six-thirty and diving beneath the spread and the sheets to hold Bunny, to let her hold him a few more minutes before she woke the children, prepared them for school, and left for work.
    It was under the sheets as they lay together that Carson said, “I’ll tell the children that I’ll have to be off from work awhile. I’ll tell them what happened.”
    “Everything?”
    “As much as I think they can handle. I’ll pick them up from school today.”
    “Are you sure?” Bunny asked skeptically. “There’s still time.”
    “No, there isn’t. It’ll be in the papers today, maybe tomorrow. They’ll have to know, and they need to find out from me.”
     
    He has made
that promise, and now, sitting on the side of the bed at eleven o’clock, Carson wonders if maybe what happened was a nightmare. He can’t shed this hope, even as it’s contradicted by the brooding malaise and queasiness festering inside him.
    Nothing would have seemed out of the ordinary to his children this morning. Carson often sleeps through their departure for school. When he’s on the midnight shift and sleeps during the day, they’ve been told to use their “quiet voices” when they come home from school, tiptoeing without much success outside their parents’ bedroom door, behind which Carson’s body clock struggles to adjust to the rhythm he has to maintain for the three nights of the shift. He’s in permanent flux. Four days on the day shift and then three days off. Three evenings on the night shift and three days off. On the day shift, he hits the streets while Bunny and the kids are showering and getting dressed. On the evening shift, he misses dinner. On the midnight shift, he comes home to an empty house at 8:00 a.m.
    It would have seemed like any other morning to Juwan and Roseanne and Roslyn. While they dressed for school and bickered over breakfast, Daddy was asleep. How will he tell them? He sits on the side of his bed, a stranger inside his skin. He’s on leave with pay from the department. Still a cop. But not able to be a cop. He