Work Text:
To Every Thing There Is A Season
Stillman took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He had reread the paragraph twice without understanding its meaning. It was the damned heat. He closed the report and sighed in defeat. Once again the air conditioning wasn't working and nobody in the building got any work done. Although he had discarded his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, Stillman's shirt was soaked through and stuck to his back. It wasn't even noon and already he could feel a headache forming behind his eyes. He had opened his office doors earlier to feel less like an unfortunate turkey on Thanksgiving Day, but so far it hadn't worked. A glance at his detectives confirmed that they didn't fare better.
He could see them sitting behind their desks, trying to get their paperwork done without much success. Everybody tried to move as little as possible. Miller and Rush had buttoned down their blouses as far down as was acceptable while their male colleagues sweated in their shirt sleeves. Nobody talked - too exhausting, Stillman guessed. Vera had loosened his tie. It hung limp across his chest and ended in a crumpled heap where it was stuck between Vera's belly and the desk. Stillman had to smile. How Nick managed to look sloppier with a tie than without was beyond him.
It was going to be a long, long day. Stillman hoped that a short break would help his concentration. He stood up, straightened and peeled the wet shirt off his back while he sauntered over to his window. Not a single cloud in the bright blue sky fought the scorching sunbeam. New beads of sweat formed at John's temples. He cursed the large window front of the building.
On another day Stillman might have been tempted to go outside onto the balcony in the hope of a fresh breeze, but he knew that it was futile. It was one of those hot summer days that Philly had to suffer through each year, the ones where heat and humidity crossed the line from moderate to unbearable and even the most normal of people went crazy. Tempers would flare high in the city and the police would have to deal with a sudden peak in the crime rate as the ugly aftermath.
Stillman observed the hustle and bustle in the streets. On the surface it looked serene and peaceful, but the picturesque scene before him complete with blue sky, shining sun and lush green trees left a queasy feeling in his stomach. How many murders would be committed that day? How many people would lose their patience and do something they would end up regretting for the rest of their lives?
Maybe an unhealthy attitude, but Stillman had been a cop for far too long to enjoy summer.
It had been different when he had been a child. Like all children, he had loved summer. No school to attend meant plenty of free time, whole days to spend with his friends playing and joking around. They rode around the neighborhood on their bikes, played basketball in his best friend's driveway and just enjoyed their freedom. When his mother thought that they were too much of a nuisance to the neighbors she would shoo them away with a laugh and they would retreat to play in the park. There they spent their time alternating between playing tackle football while trying not to bother the older teenagers sitting in groups together on the lawn, and ogling the girls in their short summer dresses.
The games were the perfect opportunity to impress girls, or to try to anyway. John could remember how once a couple of kids he knew from school started a spontaneous soccer match and asked him and his friends to join in. It wasn't his favorite sport, but that day he was lucky. Maybe it was the extra incentive. His crush Treenie was one of the girls watching from under a tree. They pretended that they were not interested in the game, but whenever he looked over to her he found her looking his way, and when he scored she smiled at him. After the game Treenie made a beeline to him with giggling girlfriends in tow and kissed him on the cheek. She ran away laughing before he had a chance to say anything to her. He was left speechless, following her bobbing ponytail with his gaze until she was too far away for him to try to talk to her, but he was on cloud nine for the whole day.
Ah, those were good times. They tried to spend as much time as possible outdoors. The heat didn't bother them. They were too busy savoring every moment to the fullest before the dull school routine started and they would get cooped up in the classroom again, in the same procedure as the years before; familiar and yet different because they were different: another year had passed and brought them closer to adulthood. Oh, they couldn't wait to be all grown up and make their own decisions. How naive they had been back then, without the slightest idea what the future held in store for them in those turbulent times.
Stillman got his first glimpse of the real world when he was sixteen and spent the summer working at the docks to finance his first car. The work was hard, the tone rough and the pay meager. He had expected that, and gotten used to it after the first two weeks. He found it harder to cope with the way things were done there, the bending of rules, the favors, the corruption. He looked away, shut his mouth and just tried to keep his nose clean; it was the same strategy he used when he became a cop. It was something he regretted later from time to time, and he had tried to make up for it when he had climbed the ladder in the police hierarchy.
At the end of that summer he hadn't earned as much money as he had hoped for and had to settle for an old and battered green Chevy. He didn't like it very much, but simply couldn't afford a better car. It was either walk or buy the reliable Chevy; that's how his parents called it. He would have preferred a less parent-friendly sports car, but that wasn't going to happen. Only later did he learn to appreciate his flivver --after he lost his virginity in it.
His stint at the docks might not have earned him the car of his dreams, but he had discovered his love for the sea. It was one of the reasons he joined the Navy after graduation. Join the Navy, See the World, only that his ship had carried him straight into the green hell. Then time seemed to stand still, and he was stuck in the mix of heat, humidity, mud and blood called the Vietnam war when it seemed like only yesterday that he and his friends had played tag in the flirring Philly air. Endless hours stretched into days, weeks, months. Sometimes he doubted that he would ever return home, and when he did it felt like he had left the a vital part of himself overseas. The last shreds of his childhood were washed away by the relentless Vietnamese rain and John didn't recognize the man that surfaced at the end of his tour. In his darkest moments he envied his friends who came home in a wooden box.
He missed his family over there and felt terribly homesick. He also missed the turning of the seasons, and the cold.
Philly winters were mild compared to those in the north, the occasional blizzard notwithstanding, but the first snow of the winter was always a magical event. The air was crisp and chilly and the children would look up to the clouds, blinking, watching the thick fat snowflakes that fell from the sky and melted as soon as they hit the pavement. It was a game between man and the powers of nature. The kids tried to catch the flakes in their flight, running around with wide-opened mouths, while the snow danced around them and stuck to their eyelashes. Stillman could remember it so clearly. From time to time a snowflake would land on his tongue and leave a promise of snowball fights and Christmas.
He had never spent a Christmas without his family before he joined the Navy. Every year they would go to the midnight Mass, in many ways a special event. John and his older brother Andrew were allowed to stay up late. They all would put on their best Sunday clothes and walk to the church when it was dark and cold outside and their breathes would freeze into tiny clouds. It wasn't much warmer inside the church and young John, sitting between his parents in the wooden bench, would snuggle up to his mom. The church was decorated with a myriad of burning candles, every one of them forming a pool of light, and pine trees whose scent mingled with the heavy odor of incense in the air.
Andrew wasn't sitting with them because he was a ministrant. He was standing at the altar in his white robes and looked very dignified. John was the only one who knew how nervous Andrew had been before, afraid that he would drop the incense and embarrass their whole family. Nobody would ever believe it looking at the tall boy. John was glowing with brotherly pride. “There's Andy!”, he would whisper to his mother and tug on her sleeve. Years later when his brother had been ordained a priest and their whole family was sitting in the church listening to his first sermon, John had felt the urge again to point out his brother and whisper to anybody in hearing range that this was his older brother over there, and wasn't he doing great?
After the final chord of the organ had faded away, the churchgoers filed out and the Stillman family headed back home. John fell straight into bed and was woken early next morning by his brother. They would silently sneak down the stairs of their small house so as not to wake their parents and sit in front of the Christmas tree, debating quietly which present they should open first.
John could remember that on one of those Christmas mornings it started to snow in earnest and after they had opened their presents his father loaded the boys into the car and they drove to Fairmount Park to spent the day sledding. John was sitting behind Andrew and clung on tight when their father gave the sled a shove and with a shouted “here we go” they went down the hill cheering loudly. Andrew steered them out of the way of other children while John couldn't decide if it was better to close his eyes or peek over his brother's shoulder, at the same time fearful and having the time of his life. His father pulled the sled back to the car when they were too tired to climb up the hill again. They had red noses and couldn't feel their feet, but they made their father promise to take them sledding again the next day. Back home their mother made them hot cocoa with marshmallows and listened to their adventures.
Christmas lost its magic when John grew older, but he learned to see it through a child's eyes again when his daughter was born. He could still see her marvel at the lights reflected by the red and golden ornaments they had decorated their house with when she was four years old. How time flies... by now Janie was a parent herself and his grandson Sean was old enough to look forward to Christmas (and the presents, of course). The year before last the three of them were buying a tree together and it had been Sean that had persuaded him to buy that little crippled thing of a Christmas tree to “give it a home”. Stillman had deposited it in the station kitchen, but it was a sad little reminder of the season. He didn't buy a tree for the division again.
The shadow of a bird flying by close to his window woke Stillman out of his reverie. Embarrassed he looked around but apparently nobody had caught him daydreaming. He stepped into the kitchen and took a bottle of water from the cramped fridge. The little tree had stood right on the table in front of him. John took a sip and leaned against the counter. Maybe he should get another tree this year. He creased his brow in thought. Christmas was a family holiday, and in some regards his team was like a second family. His gaze fell on Lilly sitting at her desk. For some of them it was the only family left.
Heaven knew they spent more time together than with their relatives.
***
Vera came out of the kitchen and headed back to his desk. "Boss has gone crazy." He shook his head and fell back into his creaking chair with a sigh.
Scotty looked up just in time to see Stillman sit down in his office and open a file. "Looks normal to me."
"No, believe me. He's one sandwich short of a picnic." Vera leaned forward conspiratorially and nearly dipped his tie into the coffee mug he had fetched from the kitchen. "He was humming 'I'm dreaming of a white Christmas'!"