On her usual ‘work’ days (she and her fellow docents were volunteers, not employees) at the State Women’s Museum in the city, she would have arrived home by now. Making the forty-minute drive back to their semi-rural subdivision before it got dark was important. At their ages, the retired couple avoided driving at night whenever possible.
Tempted to call or text her to find out where she was and when she might be home, Ken hesitated, as he knew her phone ringing or a notification pinging irritated Lydia while she was driving - she would just ignore it. And she was surely on the road by this time.
This late in the day, Ken had already whiled away the hours with his usual chores and errands, answered emails, scanned his usual blogs, listened to a podcast for an hour, so he was left in the unusual position of having nothing to do but sit and think until his wife arrived home. What could be holding her up?
He had never known the museum to stay open past six p.m. And Lydia didn’t usually stop to do errands on the way home when darkness was imminent. Car trouble, maybe? He was fairly certain her car had nearly a full charge when she left; if she had car trouble, she would have called by now. It was almost completely dark.
Maybe he should jump in the Prius and head toward Lake City. Little chance that they would miss each other en route. Except it was now fully dark and he didn’t trust himself to pick out her blue Tesla on the divided highway between Green Maples and the city.
Oh, hell, get the phone and call, he thought. She would just have to understand that these were extraordinary circumstances.
He had just touched her contact icon when headlight beams flooded the kitchen window and the garage door hummed into operation. Relieved, he waited for his wife to come through the door from the garage and fill him in on her late arrival.
‘Glad you’re home, Sweets’, he started, ‘I was beginning to worry ─’
Based on the stricken look on Lydia’s face, worrying was not out of the equation yet.
‘Oh, my God!’, she almost shrieked as she rushed through the door, right past his proffered peck-on-the-cheek. Dropping her keys and purse on the kitchen counter, she headed for the living room and fairly collapsed onto the sofa, her face in her hands. ‘Oh, my God, Ken! Oh, my God!’ The last exhortation became a sob, and she was in tears.
‘Honey, what in the world …’, Ken tried to think of some utterance that might calm and reassure her - from what kind of trauma he did not know. ‘Can you tell me what happened? Where were you all this time? Are you alright?’
‘No! I am not … ALRIGHT! I AM NOT ALRIGHT! I WAS NEARLY SHOT TO DEATH! Oh, my God!’, her angry tears continued. She shoved her husband’s embracing arms away in wild fury and wailed.
‘What the hell … shot to death? I’m calling the police!’ He took another worried glance at her red eyes and frazzled hair and reached for his phone.
‘Put that down’, she demanded as she fought for emotional control. ‘I have just spent an hour talking with the police. Oh, my God!’
Ken hoped there was a way to calm the situation and find out what happened and where he fit in amid all this hysteria. ‘Let me get you a cup of herbal tea. Have you eaten? Can I slice some baguettes for toast? We have some cold salmon in the fridge.’
Gasping, and finally calm enough to talk, she made an effort to address her husband in somewhat measured tones. ‘I need a glass of wine, that’s all I want. Please. Now. The cab.’ Ken dutifully stepped over to the wine credenza, upturned two stemmed glasses, and divided the remainder of a bottle of Kendall Jackson into them. Handing one to his distraught wife, he took a seat next to her on the leather sofa.
‘Ken, I have never been so scared, so angry, so … oh, my God! They shot a couple right in front of our museum - a bullet flew through our door and missed my head by inches! A drive-by … they must have fired … it sounded like fifteen shots! A white girl, she was pregnant … she’s dead; the baby daddy was still alive in the ambulance, but who knows? Plus two innocent bystanders got hit.’
‘Oh, my God, hon, why didn’t you call me?’
‘And have you do WHAT? I was afraid for my life, for Christ’s sake, and the police made me explain over and over again what I heard and saw. My heart was beating so loud and so fast, I thought I was going to have a heart attack! Oh, my God.’ Lydia pulled a long draught from the wine glass and shuddered.
‘Did they catch the shooters?’, Ken asked, hoping to find out more while trying to head off another emotional upheaval.
‘No, not by the time they finally let me leave. I heard witnesses who were on the sidewalk tell the cops there was a car full of them. A big black … Tahoe-something-or-other with tinted glass. They said the car pulled up alongside the couple, windows open, and just started shooting, spraying bullets everywhere! Thugs. Dreadlocks and hoodies, two gunmen, the witnesses said. No one even had time to take a video, at least not that could help the cops at all. Oh, God, that poor girl! And her baby!’
‘Holy Jesus’, Ken had murmured several times during the telling, while sipping his own wine. He drew his phone from his pocket and began scrolling.
‘What on earth are you doing, Ken?’, she demanded.
‘Want to see if the Lake City Sentinel website has any updates. Yep, here’, He touched a link and spread his fingers on the screen to enlarge the text, ‘Four men in custody on suspicion.’
‘Let me guess …’, Lydia’s shoulders sagged, ‘they’re all from the ‘hood. God, I feel like such a, like such a … racist!’
Her husband continued to read and scroll. ‘Yep. Bowser Street, Kroehle Ave, I guess that’s the Five Points area alright. The suspects and the male victim of the couple are all from there. Stolen car, too.’
‘Five Points - you know what they call Five Points in the city? ‘Shots Fired’ is what they call it’, Lydia exhaled deeply.
‘What do you mean, you feel like a racist?’
Exasperation showed all over her face. ‘I mean, it’s just, it’s … THIS every time, isn’t it? I mean, this kind of crime, this … it’s this lawlessness! So predictable. So sadly preDICTable! Same cast of characters, and here we sit like victims, with our white skin ….’
‘Yeah. But our white privilege too, remember’, he sought to clarify.
‘Our privilege? OUR privilege? What the hell kind of privilege? That bullet that missed my face by inches, was THAT my privilege? Because I have a home in Green Maples, because we’ve worked and saved and invested and gone to church and volunteered and tried to make a difference in the world, I am somehow privileged and need to be reminded of that when a bullet nearly hits me? Please’, she snorted, ‘we’re fools if we believe that. YOU’RE a fool if you believe that.’
‘Lyd, they are people, just like us, except the world has taken so much from them. There is so much rage ….’
‘Rage? No, I see the faces, I saw the two - fifteen-year-olds! – do you remember the two who had the stand-off with the cops at The Confectionary across from our museum last month? They smirked! There was no rage! What I saw in their eyes wasn’t … it was entitlement! They were going to take what they wanted from the poor frightened kids working there. Rage, my eye! AS IF they were rising up in righteous anger against oppression!’ Lydia had by now nearly drained her glass.
‘Lydia, they are oppressed and we know that! We have not lived in their world. How do you expect ….’ Ken was searching desperately for a means of turning the issue away from the tripwire of race.
‘I’m beginning to think ‘their world’ is more a result of their bad choices, not our privilege.’ Anger was smoldering in her eyes. ‘Please get me another wine.’ Calmer now, but there was a determined set to her jaw.
Ken rose again to select another cabernet sauvignon and uncork it. ‘Until we’ve walked in their shoes, we can’t judge. Until we’ve had store managers follow us around because we’re ─’
Lydia nearly spat, ‘Wait a minute. Do you really think store managers follow your friend from church, what’s-his-name, DeMario …?’
‘DeMarcus. DeMarcus and Chanise Briscoe.’
‘Do you think they follow people who dress and act like the Briscoes around in stores? In Lake City? Please. That kind of excuse-making is getting tiresome.’ Lydia took another swallow. ‘Store managers follow around people who look and act like the people who shoplifted and stole from them yesterday and the day before, and the day before, and are ruining their businesses. Poor innocent victims! Talk about privilege! How about the privilege of breaking all the laws and still wearing the mantle of ‘victim’!’
Ken wanted desperately to douse the fiery rhetoric. His wife was reacting to trauma - a bullet just missed her head! - and this kind of fury was not helpful, even if somewhat understandable. ‘Why don’t you take a hot bath and a melatonin and get some sleep, hon? A good night’s rest will help put this in perspective.’
‘Jesus, Ken, are you serious? Are you trying to mollify me? Are you afraid I am going to say something that upsets your happy worldview? I ALMOST GOT MURDERED BY THUGS WEARING DREADS AND HOODIES!’ Lydia was now shaking, using two hands to lift the stemmed wine glass to her lips. ‘What does ‘in perspective’ mean, anyway? Do you think I’ll wake up tomorrow and forget the street scenes that happen more and more often on Merchant Street, right in front of our front door? Uchanna Ebi, who sometimes works with me, is afraid to go out the front door for her lunch break - she says they call her awful names, it’s always ‘Hey, n____’ this and ‘n____’ that … and she’s from Nigeria! She hates them! She is terrified of what Lake City is becoming!’
‘Lyd, the world is not perfect. We need to remember to judge people as individuals, not lump them into groups’, Ken chided her, and then tried on a strained smile, hoping to mitigate his lecturing tone.
‘And yet’, Lydia fired back, swiping away his smile, ‘and yet ‘groups’ are all we hear about; groups that we must accommodate and celebrate, groups about whom we must never misspeak, groups who can slander us, harass us, ruin our businesses and get people fired. Groups swing all the political power now. God, it’s so obvious.’
‘You’re starting to sound like … ‘, Ken had to be careful here; this was not a comparison he wanted to make lightly, lest his wife go ballistic (there had been a history). Instead of finishing the sentence, he rose to pace over to the wine credenza again, even though his glass was nearly full.
‘Like what, Ken? Say it … like what? A racist? Yeah, no kidding; that’s exactly what I feel like, too. A bullet flying past your skull can almost make you reason like a racist.’ If anything, Lydia was now building steam, not decompressing. ‘Mike always said ‘a liberal is just a conservative that hasn’t been mugged yet’, and I’m beginning to see the sonofabitch’s point.’
Ken, trying desperately to defuse the conversational dynamite, could not help himself. ‘You told me that’s why you divorced him - his knee-jerk conservatism.’ Now what was he getting himself into? Marriage kerosene splashed on a flaming race relations argument? He had to find an offramp from this contentious dialogue in a hurry.
‘We have to think like rational adults here, not reactionary yahoos’, he added, and immediately regretted it.
‘Oh, okay. My ex is a ‘reactionary yahoo’ now! Listen, I had my reasons for divorcing Mike, and they are none of your damn business’, Lydia growled. ‘Mike was many things, including a lying philanderer, but I will tell you what he wasn’t: A victim! Mike is not going to stand by while thugs take what’s his because THEY feel entitled! Mike doesn’t bear a shred of guilt about ANYthing, least of all his skin color or ‘privilege’’.
Ken regretted bringing up her former husband in the first place, but by God, there were principles at stake here - principles he knew in his heart that Lydia shared with him, despite her frantic ravings of the moment. ‘He kept a gun, too, didn’t he?’
Lydia shot Ken a look that could have bored a hole through him. ‘Guns. Plural. Yes, he did, and it scared the living daylights out of me. He kept one right there in that hall stand by the front door’, she gestured. ‘One under the seat of his car. One in the bedroom. All loaded. Mike was prepared to defend himself and his property with deadly force. It used to make my skin crawl. But Mike never gunned down a biracial couple on a city street, I’ll give him that.’
Feeling utterly defeated, Ken proposed a cease-fire. ‘We can talk about this in the morning if you want to. Look, I am so sorry this happened to you and I’m glad you’re home safely. I am ready to hit the hay - what do you say I straighten up around here and we turn in for tonight?’
Lydia sat staring into her wine glass and said nothing. In a post-adrenaline letdown, her eyes sagged, she leaned back, and she surrendered to torpor. Five minutes went by while Ken loaded some dishes and his wine glass in the dishwasher, wrapped up a baguette, returned some Whole Foods kikka sushi to the refrigerator and snapped out the kitchen lights.
‘C’mon, Lydia, let’s go to bed.’ He was pleading by this time.
She was almost in a trance now. ‘You go ahead. There is no way I am going to sleep - not yet.’
‘Hon, I can only imagine how this … horrible incident must make you feel. Believe me, it’s awful; it’s mind-blowing! … but it’s OVER, and tomorrow, things will start to make more sense’, he tried to encourage her to give up, give in, retire.
Lydia continued to stare at nothing and spoke as if under sedation. ‘You say that. You don’t see … you don’t want to see the hell that is rising over the land. You want to believe in a world that’s not real, a world that makes us feel good and just and righteous and right about everything we believe. You haven’t been mugged yet. Yet!’
By now, Ken could feel a giant wave of despair crashing over his soul. How could his wife - his wife and partner! - be so overwhelmed that she could think … that she could consider, even … discharging all her compassion for her fellow man at the passing of a single bullet? Can human compassion be so brittle, so ephemeral?
‘Listen, hon, I am going to bed. Please, give your mind and your emotions a rest. Giving in to hatred is never going to solve anything’, his tone was gentle and soothing as he leaned in to kiss her cheek tenderly, ‘C’mon’, he whispered.
She sat and said nothing.
Ken went down the hall to his bathroom, and she heard him brush and floss, and close his door. The sliver of light from beneath his bedroom door went out.
Why should she do the same, she thought, only to lie flat on her back in her bed and replay the entire shocking episode over and over in the dark?
One more glass of wine would help to bring on sleep, and if sleep came to her while nestled on the leather sofa, well, so be it. But first, she rose on wobbly legs, walked from the front door to the kitchen/garage door to the back porch door, checking and re-checking the locks. She tried all the windows and turned off the living room lights before she settled once again on the sofa.
Then she rose once more, and turned on the soft light in the foyer, before returning to her sanctuary. Within minutes, she got up again and turned on every light in the living room.
About the author
Doug Stoiber writes poetry and short fiction and is a member of the Mossy Creek Writers in East Tennessee. His short story, "The Friends of Daniel Cabot", appears in The Rabbit Hole Volume VII anthology, and his original short story, "Woowo" debuted at The Literary Heist on June 21, 2024.
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