Rated PG.
The Defenestration Provision
by Helen W.
"And then..." JD had to stop for breath, he was laughing so hard. "And then Solman tries to follow Ezra out the window!"
Ah, they were back. Chris Larabee closed up the report he was working on and moved to lean silently against his office's doorframe. He wanted to hear this, in the raw. Buck had called in from the scene, of course, to give him a quick report - Todd Solman captured and now in the custody of the Denver PD, the weapons he'd pilfered secured, nobody, not even Solman, more than a little bruised. Another day at the office.
In ten minutes, Buck, Vin, JD, and Ezra would be briefing him and Travis, and in another half-hour they'd be working on their formal statements. Right now, though, they seemed to have some adrenaline to burn off, and Nathan and Josiah were playing backstop, letting the men involved in the action bounce their interwoven recollections around informally, keeping things inbounds, so to speak. It was a job Josiah was made for; Nathan usually had a harder staying out of the way of the story. Matter of fact, Chris had had to chide him a time or two about holding his tongue. Memory was as delicate a form of evidence as any other, and a critique, critical or not, at the wrong time could confuse recall, or, at the very least, compromise completeness. It wasn't that his men weren't truthful - they were, to a fault - but the mind was a strange thing.
"Which Ezra'd just barely gotten through," joined Buck. "I'm there on the street by this time, and I see Ezra do this flip that shoulda been in the Olympics."
"Yeah, yeah," said JD. "I'm right under the window, trying to get the door open and I look an' all I see is this pennywheel of arms and legs and I'm wondering whether I should try to break his fall or what, but he does this extra twirl and lands on his feet."
Ezra took a sip of his coffee. "I believe Mr. Dunne means 'pinwheel.' And I'll simply note that your concern is touching, though I'd be more touched if you hadn't had to pause to consider the matter."
"But..." sputtered JD, "all I meant is..."
"Of course, if you'd actually managed to insert yourself between me and the ground, we'd probably both be in the ER of Mercy General right now," Ezra continued. "So you are forgiven."
JD flopped down into his chair and Chris winced. Was Ezra trying to be hard on the kid? No, probably just being honest. Annoying stuff, honesty.
Buck, of course, was perfect; he reached over and dope-slapped JD, then rose and gave Ezra double. He then smiled at Nathan and Josiah and said, "Like the kid was saying, Solman tried to follow Ezra out..."
"The operative word being 'tried'," cut in Ezra.
"And he lets out this howl like you wouldn't believe," said JD, "because he's STUCK. And he's mad. But not because we just caught him and we've got a room full of AK-47s behind him. And not because Ezra'd grabbed some discs of his, which is why he started running after 'im in the first place..."
"Which as a tactic, makes NO sense, Ez," put in Buck.
"No," continued JD, "he's mad because he'd gotten IN the window in the back just fine, but front of the building had replacement windows. And so he's hanging there yelling 'DAMN vinyl! DAMN vinyl! This building shouldn't have vinyl! I'm gonna call the historical commission!'"
Ezra shrugged. "Mr. Solman and I had reached an impasse. It was my belief that he had a handgun trained on me from under the table, but I couldn't be sure. I also couldn't be sure that, if this were the case, he couldn't get off his shot faster than I could."
"Eh, Vin, you developing modesty?" cut in Nathan.
"Perhaps. So my choices were either manslaughter or being shot myself, and so I chose to change the equation."
"Good thinking," said Josiah.
"Fortunately, the discs I grabbed must have contained information of some value, and not his game collection."
"Hey, I'd have chased you if you'd grabbed all my games!" said JD.
"Our subsequent mutual defenestration was inspired by my earlier observance of Solman's mode of entry. He clearly considered windows an option, and I knew, or at least hoped, that you were in the street below."
"Wait," said Buck, "you did WHAT with him?"
"Jumped out the window," said Josiah. "Defenestration means throwing someone out a window; not sure throwing oneself actually qualifies, but who am I to deny Ezra a five-dollar word right after a bust?"
"It's from the Latin fenestra, or window. Think of the French fenetre..." said Ezra.
"Okay, but how do we know that the Latins - um, Romans - used the word first? Why do they get all the credit all the time?" asked JD. "I've always wondered about that."
"Well..." Josiah began, "you see..."
Chris slipped back into his office and reopened his document, then stared out his window. Defenestration. He'd heard that word before. Why did he know that word?
Damn.
He'd just gotten home from work and Sarah had been in tears, nursing a fussy infant Adam, or trying to; his latch still didn't seem to be right, she'd been saying, though Adam was gaining weight okay. It looked like Sarah hadn't managed a shower yet that day, and the cumulative effect of almost a month of interrupted sleep had pushed her complexion from porcelain to, well, blotchy. She looked up at him with teary eyes, not saying anything - nothing he could remember, at least, now - while she pushed herself and their child back and forth in the glider in a manner he'd previously only associated with junkies. It was an unpleasant image to go with an unpleasant scene.
Chris had immediately felt guilty on all sorts of levels, which made him mad, and he'd snapped, "What do you want from me? I've got to go to work if we want to make the mortgage. Do you know what sort of shit I had to put up with today? Do you know how lucky you and the baby" - for, to him, Adam had still been 'the baby', not really a person - "have it?"
Sarah had turned away from him and gasped. Chris'd realized that he'd probably never been so cruel to her before - never intentionally tried to hurt her. But he was tired too!
"I'm sorry," he'd said after a moment. "It's just the day I've had. Got a domestic violence call this morning - there was this little boy with cigarette burns..."
And sarah had - broken. "Stop it!" she'd screamed. "Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! I don't want to hear anything, another word about it!" And then she'd curled into Adam and sobbed.
Chris had shaken himself hard. This was NOT about him, he'd suddenly grasped. Not that it mattered if it was. He'd grabbed a chair from the dining area and pulled it in front of the glider, then grabbed it by the padded arms. "Tell me," he'd said.
Sarah'd been breathing hard, like they'd been hiking at altitude. "It's all I hear," she'd said. "All anyone wants to talk about. Ways that people hurt their own children, on purpose or by mistake. Ways others hurt kids. Ways kids get themselves killed all by themselves. Diseases, drownings, suffocations..."
"Who? Did someone come over? Did anyone say anthing today?"
Sarah'd nodded. "Mrs. Johnson and Arlene from church, then the mailman, then... then my mother called a half-hour ago with some defenestration story from New York City."
"Defenestration?"
"She wanted me to know the stats on how many kids die a year from falling out of tenement windows. 'Just so that you'll know,' she said. Damn it, we live in a one-story ranch!"
"Ah," Chris had said. He'd reached over and taken his son from Sarah's lap. "Adam," he'd said, "promise me you'll stay our of tenements and away from their windows."
"It's ALWAYS for our own protection," Sarah'd said. "All these stories. Chris, there's so much that can go wrong with a baby. We can do everything right, and, and he can choke on a pebble or something. Don't people know I KNOW this? That sometimes all I can think about is how dangerous the world is?"
"Do you - do you think you think about it too much?" Chris had asked. That had been a warning sign of some sort, he'd thought he remembered.
"No," Sarah'd sniffed. "No, I don't think I have post-partum depression, or not bad at least. Most of the time... honestly, most of the time, we do pretty well. It's not REALLY all I think about. As long as I stay away from all our friends and relatives."
"Well then," Chris'd said. "How about I call for some Chinese take-out, and then print up a bunch on contracts. From now on, nobody is allowed inside the house unless they, A, bring food, and B, sign the defenestration provision."
"The what?"
"They sign something saying they aren't going to tell any stories involving harm to small children."
Sarah'd almost giggled. "Or large ones," she said. "Nobody is to ever allude to the fact that Adam will be driving in sixteen years, and follow it up with some story about some teenager who drove himself into a lake or something."
"Noted," Chris'd said. "I'll print up a stack and put them in one of those flyer holders like real estate agents use sometimes. Whadaya think?"
The defenestration provision. Chris was pretty sure he'd never followed through, and anyway things had started to turn around for Sarah and Adam pretty soon after that. Adam's night-waking had gone from every two hours to every three; they'd hired a neighborhood twelve-year-old to watch over Adam while Sarah got an afternoon nap a few days a week; and Sarah'd started to get out and make friends with other women with infants. He'd even eventually begun to be able to talk about his job again, though he'd stayed away from telling her the most disturbing bits. Before Adam, he'd been able to tell her everything, but having a child had changed that.
Man, he'd been a jerk that day. And Sarah had been a mess. He hadn't really thought about things being like that - less than perfect - since her death.
The kicker was that the Mrs. Johnsons of the world had been right. The world was a terrible, dangerous place. You could institute a defenestration provision, but all it did was make you feel a little better for a little while.
A rap on his doorframe. "It's 3:00," said Buck. "Travis's office says he's on his way down." A pause. "You all right, buddy?"
Chris nodded and rose. "It's nothing," he said.
Time to go and hear what had happened with the Solman bust, start to finish. The account would be linear, logical, and as complete as the four agents involved could make it.
As for his own recollections of a decade ago... for a long time, he'd blocked all thoughts of Sarah and Adam. Finally, more recently, he'd begun to allow himself to remember fragments of the really good times. They sometimes felt like being stabbed between the eyes, but, in a way, the pain had been a bearable punishment. And, he'd come to hope that, with time, he'd be able to gain some pleasure from the memories, like the shrinks said he should.
Today's flash of memory hadn't been painful, he realized. He felt, well, shame, but no more than he'd felt at the time. It felt - normal. He and Sarah had worked things out. Yeah, they'd been normal people, with a normal life. A mostly good life. Maybe it was time for that all to rub off, well, forward to now? Maybe?
*** The End ***
All feedback welcomed, negative particularly! helenw@murphnet.org.