Seize the Night

absent more than not and dimmer than it had been. He broke his two-hand grip on the revolver, holding it in his right hand, and then finally holstered it. Blinking in surprise, he tasted blood, blotted his lips on his hand, and stared uncomprehendingly at the red smear across his palm.
    Harry, the second deputy, to whom Manuel had at last given a name, was already to the foyer by the time Frank Feeney stepped out of the kitchen and entered the hall. Manuel followed Feeney, and I found myself following Manuel, though at a distance.
    They had lost their Gestapo aura. They looked weak and weary, like three boys who had been playing cops with great exuberance but were now tuckered out, dragging their butts home to have some hot chocolate and take a nap, and then maybe put on new costumes and play pirates.
    They seemed to be as lost as the kidnapped children.
    In the foyer, as Frank Feeney followed Harry X onto the front porch, I said to Manuel, “You see it, don't you?”
    At the door he stopped and turned to face me, but he didn't respond. He was still angry, but he also looked stricken. By the second, his rage swam deeper, and his eyes were pools of sorrow.
    With light entering the foyer from outside, from the study, and from the living room, I felt more vulnerable here than under the gun and the yellow stare of Feeney in the kitchen, but there was something I needed to say to Manuel.
    “Feeney,” I said, though Feeney wasn't the unfinished business between us. “You see that he's becoming? You aren't in denial about that, are you?”
    “There's a cure. We'll have it soon.”
    “He's on the edge. What if you don't have a cure soon enough?”
    “Then we'll deal with him.” He realized he was still holding the billy club. He slipped it through a loop on his belt. “Frank is one of ours. We'll give him peace in our own way.”
    “He could have killed me. Me, Bobby, you, all of us.”
    “Stay out of this, Snow. I won't tell you again.”
    Snow . Not Chris anymore. Trashing a guy's house is dotting the final i and crossing the final t in finito .
    “Maybe this kidnapper is that guy on the news,” I said.
    “What guy?”
    “Snatches kids. Three, four, five little kids. Burns them all at once.”
    “That's not what's happening here.”
    “How can you be sure?”
    “This is Moonlight Bay.”
    “Not all bad guys are bad just because they're becoming.”
    He glared at me, taking my observation personally.
    I got to the unfinished business, “Toby's a great kid. I love him. I worry about what's happening. There's such a terrible risk. But in the end, Manuel, I hope everything turns out with him like you think it will. I really do. More than anything.”
    He hesitated, but then said, “Stay out of this. I mean it, Snow.” For a moment I watched him walk away from my vandalized house into a world that was even more broken than my mother's china. There were two patrol cars at the curb, and he got into one of them.
    “Come back anytime,” I said, as if he could hear me. “I've still got drinking glasses you can smash, serving dishes. We'll have a couple beers, you can bash the hell out of the TV, or take an ax to the better pieces of furniture, pee on the carpet if you want. I'll make a cheese dip, it'll be fun, it'll be festive.” As sullen and gray and dark as the afternoon was, it nonetheless stung my eyes. I closed the door.
    When a loved one dies—or as in this case is lost to me for another reason—I invariably make a joke of the pain. Even on the night that my much-loved father succumbed to cancer, I was doing mental stand-up riffs about death, coffins, and the ravages of disease. If I drink too deeply of grief, I'll find myself in the cups of despair. From despair, I'll sink into self-pity so deep that I'll drown. Self-pity will encourage too much brooding about whom I've lost, what I've lost, the limitations with which I must always live, the restrictions of my strange night-bound existence … and finally I'll risk becoming the freak that childhood bullies called me. It strikes me as blasphemous not to embrace life, but to embrace it in dark times, I have to find the beauty concealed in the tragic, beauty which in fact is always there, and which for me is discovered through humor. You may think me shallow or even callous for seeking the laughter in loss, the fun in funerals, but we can honor the dead with laughter and love, which is how we honored them in life.
    God must have meant for us to