“I’m sorry ma’am, but you know the drill. New York State law dictates that in the event of a domestic disturbance – ”
“You have to arrest someone. I know. We’ve been through this before,” she gave her head a brisk jerk, tossing her honey-colored waves out of her face.
Lieutenant Kirkpatrick stifled his grin. “So, ma’am, I’m going to ask you to put the pan down and put your hands behind your back.”
“Is the cuffing really all that necessary? You know I’m coming with you.”
“Well, at this point, you haven’t followed my instructions to lower your weapon, nor the ones given to you by Officer Bass, and at this point, it is standard procedure to treat you as a hostile suspect.”
“I am hostile.”
“You’re a crazy bitch, is what you are!”
“Sir, the situation is under control here, I’m going to ask you again to please return to the living room and sit down,” the lieutenant told the irate husband.
He complied, grumbling the whole way about his wife
Officer Bass, leaving the husband alone for the time being, tried his own tactics on the woman, “Mrs. Harris? Would you please return the pan to the counter and put your hands at your sides?” He ignored the sharp glare from his lieutenant as he indirectly disobeyed his orders. However, something about the police officer’s voice finally caught Mrs. Harris’s full attention, and she lowered her arm, putting the small saucepan back on the counter where she’d found it. When she turned to her arresting officers, it wasn’t the man who’d spoken to her that she locked on; it was Lieutenant Kirkpatrick.
Christopher Kirkpatrick, first lieutenant on the midnight shift of the Lancaster Police Department, didn’t look like an officer of the law. Fairly short for a male, bordering on stocky, he was starting to resemble a car salesman. Recently divorced, he’d thrown all his energy into his job, earning him the promotion to lieutenant just weeks ago. At age thirty-five, he knew this was a great achievement. This was his first visit to the Harris place with this new title, and it was the first time he had to arrest Mrs. Penelope Harris.
Upon arrival of the scene with Officer James Bass, he had expected the usual. Even though this was his first time as lieutenant, the Harris home was certainly no strange territory to the Lancaster PD. In fact, they were so familiar with the house that they could determine where the couple’s struggle started and ended based on which decorations were out of place. Penelope and Jeff were still newlyweds, having been married for just five months, but they’d lived together for almost two years, and regularly beat on each other. They never caused each other serious physical injury, caused no broken bones, rarely left any serious marks or bruises, and never drew blood. They just loved to fight.
The only reason the police were ever even there was due to the apartment complex’s ‘neighborhood watch’, a.k.a. Mrs. Gretchen Wodowski, the busy-body widow who lived down the hall. The second she heard shouting of any kind, she called the boys in blue (which was actually black), and half of the time they arrived to find someone watching a soap opera on high volume. The other fifty percent of the time, it was Penelope and Jeff.
Usually, they got there in time to look up through the patio door and see Jeff knock Penelope to the ground or throw her onto the couch. According to new laws, there must always be an arrest when police respond to a domestic disturbance whether or not the victim wants to press charges, and this was generally the person who had caused the most harm, almost always the male. The Harrises were no exception. Jeff Harris had an arrest record miles long, without a single charge that stuck. He’d spend the night in Lancaster’s single-cell lockup, and Penelope was there in the morning with bail money.
Kirkpatrick had been the arresting officer tons of times, and wrote the same thing in each report he filed. It was getting to the point he wondered if he could get away with making a stack of copies of the report, and leaving the time and date section blank to be filled in later. He brought the idea to his then lieutenant, who laughed heartily, but in a tone that suggested it might be a smart move. Now, as lieutenant himself, he had to wonder if he was in position to make it happen.
This night, when Bass pulled up to the Sturbridge Village apartments, Kirkpatrick riding shotgun, neither one bothered to rush upstairs, nor unholster their weapons. They just made their way inside and up to the second floor, knocking on the Harris’s door. Any other domestic call might have warranted a forceful entry, but after their long history with this couple, they knew one or the other would answer the door without any argument, and the one answering would usually have a smart comment to make to the other, like, “We disturbed old Wodowski again.” Even if they’d seen Jeff through the window, pushing Penelope around, they already knew no one would be seriously hurt, therefore, the rush wasn’t that great. But this night, the door wasn’t opened right away. Instead, the shouting continued.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, you crazy cunt?”
“What the fuck is wrong with me? Gee, I dunno, maybe you!” This was followed by a reverberating clang.
“That sounds like something heavy,” Bass remarked to Kirkpatrick.
“Steel. Like a pot or something. I guess we’re going in hard tonight,” Kirkpatrick said before taking a few steps back. He waited until Bass tried to knob to see if it was unlocked. When it wasn’t, he focused all his energy, took two heavy steps forward, and kicked the door off its jamb. “Both of you, freeze!” He shouted, but still hadn’t unholstered his service pistol.
“She’s fucking crazy this time!” Jeff Harris yelled. “She’s got a fucking frying pan! A frying pan! Just like a crazy old lady!”
“Ma’am,” Lt. Kirkpatrick began his customary routine of calming Penelope down while Officer Bass took on Jeff. “Why don’t you put the pan back on the counter and tell me what happened tonight?”
“She hit me with a pan, is what happened tonight!” Jeff shouted over his shoulder as Bass led him into the living room.
“Ma’am? Is that what happened?”
“What do you think?” she shook her arm, hand still poised in the air, gripping the handle.
“So…” he stalled, unsure how to handle the situation with Penelope looking like the one to be arrested. “Would you say you were the aggressor?”
“Damn straight. And it’s about damn time.”
Kirkpatrick cursed in his head. This was going to be a weird night. Bass’s shift was over once they got back to the station, the next shift would be out on the road, and since this was his collar, he’d have to sit down in the lockup with this woman all night. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but you know the drill,” he began, and eventually, with assistance from Bass, got her to put her hands behind her back, and led her down to the car in handcuffs.
At the station, he didn’t even bother to book her, just walked her to the cell and let her sit on the bench. He said goodnight to Bass and pulled up a chair, sliding the sports section of the newspaper out of the pile in front of him. He glanced over the top of it to see Penelope just gazing at him.
“Yes?” he asked.
“He called me a bitch. And a cunt. And a whore.”
Kirkpatrick was taken aback. “With all due respect, given that you’re always fighting, is that really a surpise?”
“Yes. He’s never called me names before. We just fight. He’s the middle child in a family with seven brothers, I grew up the only girl with three older brothers. Fighting is what we’ve done our whole lives. Most of our fights end up as just play.”
He had to admit he had seen this. For every ten times the police showed up at their door, they answered it together twice, laughing. On these occasions, since neither party would accuse the other of violence, no arrests could be made.
“But today he cursed at you?”
“Yes. Hard. Mean. Vicious. Like he really meant it, not even like the way you might joke with your friends. We were just fighting, and I kicked him in the shin, and then he pushed me into the wall so hard I actually saw stars for a second. Then he started with the name-calling. It was weird. And then I realized something.” Penelope Harris paused and looked up. “Maybe all this time, I was the only one who was really playing.”
Kirkpatrick froze. He was not prepared to turn this into a therapy session. Yes, he had a degree in psychology, but he took those classes years ago, as something to give him a little extra edge in the police force.
“And that’s when you grabbed the frying pan?”
“Yes, and I hit him over the head. It was the closest thing to me. Which is kind of ironic, because the fight started because he used that pan three days and still hadn’t put it away,” she laughed mirthlessly.
As a police officer, Kirkpatrick thought the woman was either putting on a really good show or just a typical beaten housewife who’d never seek justice and continue to waste police time. As a man, Christopher looked at Penelope and saw a woman who’d been misled about what her entire relationship was like. He gazed at her, watching as she slowly lowering her eyes back to the floor, shaking her head and sighing. He realized then that as a man, he was right. This woman just had the rug pulled out from underneath her and she just snapped, and now she was sitting in a jail cell because of it.
“They made you lieutenant, huh?” she asked suddenly, changing the subject.
“Yeah. I guess all those years of following procedure finally paid off,” he was referring to his countless trips to her place, but she wasn’t to know that.
“Yeah, and probably no harassment complaints or brutality or anything like that. You’re once of the nice guys here.” He knew she was alluding to a few of the other guys, who liked to rough Jeff up a little when arresting him.
“I guess,” he trailed off. “Penelope?”
The shock of hearing her name instead of ma’am raised her eyebrows. “Yes?”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“About what?”
“About the fact that it’s not just a game anymore.”
“Well, leave him, of course.”
“And what happens when you find it’s not that easy?”
“We’ve only been married for five months.”
“And together for much longer. Can you really just walk away?”
“Yes,” she scoffed.
He just stared at her. “I see ten domestic cases a week. Some where the husband beat his wife so bad she had to take medical leave from work, some where the wife has lost use of a hand, even one where the wife lost the baby she’d just found out she was carrying. And did any of them leave? Did they do what you’re telling me now is so easy?”
A single tear slipped down Penelope’s cheek. “That’s different. I can do this.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m going to ask you to help me.”
He was stunned into silence again. “Um…and just how do you want me to help?”
“When I’m out of here in the morning, I want you to go home with me, wait while I pack some things, and take me to my brother’s house. Then I want you to call me every night and make sure I haven’t gone back. Will you do that?”
Lt. Kirkpatrick would have told her to fuck off and handle her own shit. Christopher stared into her eyes and nodded. “If that’s what it’ll take, I’ll do it. As long as you realize you can’t go back there now that you realize it’s not a game.”
“I do. And I won’t.”
An internal battle ensued, with Christopher eventually winning over the lieutenant. “Penelope, I’ll tell you what? I’m gonna talk to the other officer tomorrow. We didn’t really see anything today, there’s no reason to hold you here tonight. Do you want to call your brother and see if he’s awake?”
The woman’s pale green eyes smiled up into his warm brown ones. “Yes.”
“Good. Let’s get you out of here, and then out of there.”
Six weeks of nightly phone calls went by to make sure Penelope hadn’t gone back to Jeff. After seven weeks, the calls were made every other day. After nine, they were made randomly, sometimes two calls in three days, sometimes only one call a week. Once the twelve-week mark came up, Kirkpatrick stopped calling. He figured she was healed, she wouldn’t be returning. He had done his good deeds by getting her out, by not letting her get an arrest record for what was technically self-defense but could have easily been seen as assault, and by making sure she stayed free and clear of an abusive relationship. Now, his work was complete. Officer James Bass had given him a bit of a hard time about the whole thing, but Kirkpatrick was able to convince him that they had done the right thing.
At fifteen weeks, it came time for Penelope to check up on him. He answered his phone, a bit puzzled when he saw what number showed on the caller ID, a bit frightened that she was calling for help. “Hello?”
“You haven’t called me in three weeks.”
“I haven’t seen any need to. You seem to be doing just fine. You haven’t gone back, you told me you’ve got your own apartment now; I don’t have to check up on you anymore.”
What she said next, he didn’t quite hear.
“What was that? I missed it.”
“I said I kind of missed talking to you every day,” he heard the smile in her voice, and he admitted that he had enjoyed their daily communications as well. They continued to have a normal conversation, not one just filled with the daily success rate of staying away from Jeff. Before hanging up the phone, Christopher heard himself invite her out to dinner. She accepted, and they arranged a time that weekend to meet.
The dinner was extraordinary. They met at a casual family restaurant, and stayed for hours just chatting. He hadn’t enjoyed a dinner like this in years. His ex-wife had filed for divorce when she realized that police work was a super-full-time job, and being able to have a relaxing dinner was one of the things she was upset about missing. Christopher briefly felt shame at not being able to provide that for her when here he was, doing it with Penelope.
“What’s wrong?” she asked suddenly, snapping him back to attention.
“What?”
“You looked a million miles away. God, I hope I haven’t gotten that boring.”
Christopher just laughed. “No, I was thinking about something. And feeling a little guilty about it at the same time.”
“Your ex-wife?”
He was stunned. “How… how did you know that?”
“Your ring suddenly disappeared last year.”
“You noticed that?”
“I notice everything.”
“I guess so,” he mused. “Say, what are you doing tomorrow night? Want to see a movie?”
Penelope looked startled, “Um…sure, I’m free.”
“A movie it is then. Why don’t you pick what you want to see?”
“Wow. I’ve never…never chosen anything before. Movie, restaurant, anything,” she whispered, as if realizing it for the first time.
“I guess it really never was a game, huh?” Christopher said gently, feeling for this woman, grateful to whatever higher power that had intervened and given her the ability to see her husband for what he was before it was too late. Then he remembered something very, very important. “Penelope? Are you filing for divorce?”
She gasped, as if she hadn’t even thought about it. “Shit.”
Reaching across the table, he took her hand in his. “I’ll be here for you. You know that.”
The procedure, when she got around to it, didn’t take long. Between Jeff and Penelope Harris, they didn’t have much to split up. Having only been married for five months, there was no spousal support involved, there were no children to consider, and each one’s car was registered in their own name. The only arguments about ownership were over small trinkets around the house, wedding gifts and such. Penelope’s lawyer argued that she should receive many of the small home appliances, Jeff’s lawyer disagreed, and Penelope herself agreed with that.
“I don’t want it. Any of it. I just want his name removed from mine. Is that really so difficult to understand?” she informed her lawyer. “Just get it over with.” At the next meeting, the two lawyers agreed to simply declare the union over, and Penelope immediately reverted to her maiden name, Mercer.
By this time, she and Christopher had been seeing each other pretty regularly and he had begun spending the night at her place when his shift was over. One night after he had let himself in with the key she had given him and had climbed into bed beside what he thought was his sleeping girlfriend, she whispered in his ear, “I think I love you.”
Not sure he was prepared for this, he tried to make light of the situation, “What do you mean, you think?” he joked.
She sat up. “Well, I don’t know if what I think is love is really it.”
He looked up at her, and saw the way she looked down at him. It was like she saw right into his very soul. Yeah, she loved him all right. Was he ready to be in love again? Was she? “Would it make a difference if I told you I think I love you too?”
She smiled. “Not really.”
“Alright, well, if it doesn’t matter, then I do.”
Her eyes sparkled now, “Good,” she leaned in to kiss him. That was the night they made love for the first time, and it was the most playful sexual experience Christopher had ever had. The mild roughhousing made him better able to understand how Penelope was able to stay in the relationship she was in. The wrestling was foreplay for them, at least for her. Her ex-husband had taken it to a whole new level, forcing her out.
After a particularly exhausting round, Christopher flopped back, panting. “Penelope.”
“Yes?”
“Look at me.”
“No, you look at me.”
“I can’t move.”
She laughed. “Neither can I,” she reached over and tickled him.
“This is serious.”
“What is, my looking at you, or the fact that you can’t move?”
“Uh, both. But really, look at me.”
She propped her head up on one hand and stared at him. “What?”
“I will never hurt you. Ever.”
“I know that.”
“I couldn’t, even if I tried. It’s part of the codes I live by as an officer.”
“You’re not just an officer, Christopher. You’re a gentleman.”
© Melissa Byrd 2006, for Reckless Abandon
Silent Tragedy Awards, Season 8:
Best Alternate Universe (tie)
Best Chris (tie)
Satisfaction Awards, Season 8:
Outstanding Shortie
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