Final Option

thud.
    “You’re kidding!” exclaimed Claudia, horrified. “When did you get this?”
    “My father gave it to me after I was attacked last year. He meant well. I mean, he worries about me. It was actually sweet. He was almost shy when he gave it to me. I think he was worried that I would take it the wrong way.”
    “So how did you take it?”
    “How else could I take it? I said thank you and put it in my purse. At least now he doesn’t nag me about moving to the suburbs all the time like my mother. I hardly even think about it. But when Ruskowski handed me that search warrant tonight, my first year criminal law course came back to me. If he’d found it, Ruskowski would have been able to charge me with possession of an unregistered handgun, which is a misdemeanor, and carrying a concealed weapon, which is a felony.”
    “Can I touch it?” asked Claudia.
    “Be careful, it’s loaded. Do you want me to take the bullets out?”
    “No, that’s okay,” she said, picking it up carefully and pointing it at the refrigerator. Her face was a picture of solemn concentration. “It’s heavy,” she remarked finally, laying it back down on the table between us. “You know, I spend a piece of every day repairing the damage done by guns. Everybody has one—the drug dealers, the kids in gangs, the frightened single mothers who don’t have enough money to afford a decent place to live and who are trying to keep their kids safe from the drug dealers and the gangs. I see stick-up artists, guys who just want to feel tough, sixteen-year-olds who were at the wrong street corner at the wrong time, and four-year-olds who get shot by their six-year-old brothers by accident.... I’ve got to tell you. I’ve never seen anything good that’s been done by a gun.”
    “I know,” I said. “And yet you have to admit that people come into the emergency room who never would be in the shape they’re in if they’d had a gun. People who’ve been raped, mugged, beaten senseless.”
    “Yes,” agreed Claudia reluctantly.
    “I know there aren’t very many circumstances when you need a gun,” I said slowly, thinking of the night six months before when I’d been jumped on the beach by my parents’ house, beaten, and left for dead, “but when you need one, you need one very badly.”
     
    Ruskowski and his men disturbed more than the contents of my drawers. All night I wrestled fitfully with sleep, dreaming that I was forced to clean up after Bart Hexter’s murder. Pamela Hexter handed me a bucket of soapy water, and I worked on my hands and knees, washing out the splattered white interior of the Rolls Royce until the bucket was filled with red and my arms were slick with soap and blood. Finally, as dawn approached, I fell into a sleep beyond dreaming. When the alarm went off I reached for the button and was wrapped, for one sweet moment, in the certainty that Russell was asleep beside me. I could hear the quiet rhythm of his breathing, feel the familiar warmth of him, but when I reached for him I was shocked into consciousness by the cold and empty sheets beside me. There was a time when I woke this way every morning, with a cry stuck in my throat and the dizzying downward spiral of loss. Over the years I’ve done it less frequently, but I always combat it the same way, by forcing my reluctant body out of bed, dragging myself into sweats and going for a run. It wasn’t until I was scrabbling through the chaos of my closet floor that I realized my running shoes were bagged and tagged and in the possession of Detective Ruskowski.
     
    I arrived at the office practically growling with bad temper only to be reminded, as Cheryl and I went through the day’s schedule, that I was supposed to go to the Arthritis Foundation Benefit that night.
    “Damn it,” I snapped, disgustedly. “I forgot all about it. I wanted to bring my dress to the office and change here tonight. Now I have to go all the way back to Hyde Park.”
    “Did it ever occur to you,” replied my secretary, “that the reason you always forget this stuff is that you want to? In the four years I’ve worked for you, you have never once forgotten anything related to work. Not one single thing. But when it comes to parties and the things you do with Stephen, you always have your dress but not your shoes, or you schedule a deposition that you know will take four hours for two hours before you’re supposed to leave.... Why do you do this stuff when it’s so