Redemption

I used to be a cop, but you wouldn’t guess that from looking at me now.

It was 34 years ago. My dried, splitting skin and thin, oil-soaked hair makes it look much further in the past.

It feels much further in the past.

I still have three teeth left, and I’m hoping they leave soon. I found some discarded dentures that I think will fit pretty well. The quiet joy that thought fills me with is a testament to how piteous my life has become.

Don’t get me wrong, I have the life I deserve. I am not what you would call, a good person.

I had my drinking under control when I was still on the force, though I guess the bruises my wife kept covered suggested otherwise. Please don’t think all cops are bad, most are genuinely good people, I just wasn’t.

My life really took a turn when I sent my son to the hospital. He was only five but you can still see the scar I left on his face. I felt so betrayed when my wife wouldn’t tell them it was an accident. She knew it was. She had always understood that when I’d hurt her.

Prison is not a good place for a cop, even 6 months seemed like a lifetime.

I could have probably gotten my job back in a year or so after my release. If it hadn’t been for the heroine. I was put on paid leave after serving my sentence and was staying at some run-down motel just outside the city, waiting for my wife to wise up and lift the restraining order.

Thank god she never did.

Alcohol just didn’t pass the time fast enough, and heroine did.

A few years on, after the checks had stopped, I killed a man in cold blood. We had been staying together when he offered me half his recent score, which was only half as much as I wanted. I know that addiction is a disease and do understand that it takes part of the blame. But it can only bring out the worst in a man and there is so much darkness to bring out in me. No one ever came looking for me, we had both just been invisible junkies by then.

I’ve had no job and pretty much lived on the streets for the last decade now, though I’ve been mostly clean. Not clean because I’m better, don’t think that, I just find so little money that food is usually the first thing I see to spend it on.

I am getting weaker, though.

Some winter soon I will be my last.

I cling to the hope of redemption, I think that’s just human nature. That's why I’ve tracked my son over the years, his movements written down in my ragged little police-issued black notebook. My wits are still sharp enough for that, even if my memory isn’t. For a long time, I dreamed I’d get back on my feet and reunite with him, if I could just catch a break.

But the empty nights have given me space to realize that it wasn’t the booze or drugs that got me here, it was the same awful choices that made me a bad person long before those vices ever helped me along. Given a chance, I know what I’d become again. Things are better this way. Though, I suspected I only tell myself that to soften the knowledge that I would never have another chance.

At least, that’s what I knew before yesterday morning.

When I saw who was shaking me awake, I thought I’d finally died. She was the cleanest, prettiest person that had talked to me, willingly, since before I could remember. The young cameraman behind her made me sure I was still alive.

She started a spiel about her friends pooling their money, and I knew once she described herself as a local influencer that I’d be getting some cash. All they would want was to record my emotion-filled response in the hopes of getting more followers for it. That was fine, I’d seen it before, and though it was degrading, money was money and I had none. I'd done far, far worse things for money.

I was mentally setting a price point while she talked. If it was under that amount, I’d stick to a nice meal, but if it was over, then I’d buy something good to wash it down with.

My calculations were nowhere near the $20,000 she finally handed me.

I had been ready, should the amount have been $10 or $20, to fake emotions and over the top gratitude, as I knew was expected. But I didn’t have to fake anything, this was my last chance at redemption, and, blubbering, I told them so.

I told them that this was what I needed to get back on my feet. To get cleaned up, reunite with my family, find a decent job. Really turn my life around, you know? I thanked them profusely, and genuinely.

Some of it was true.

So here I am, not washed or shaven, waiting for the door that I just knocked on to be answered.

“Hello?” a young man asks, opening his door, clearly now wishing he had checked the peephole first. He didn’t recognize me, hell, neither did I the few times I saw a mirror in recent years.

“This is for you,” I say, handing him the large brown envelope I had brought in my shaky, gnarled hands. My eyes shifted from the scar I’d given him to my two beautiful grandchildren, playing on the floor in the kitchen, no doubt helping their mom prepare dinner. My eyes swam with tears of longing to sweep them up in my arms. To ask my son what his life was like. To meet his wife and friends.

“What is it?” he asks, looking inside, "Do we know each other?"

“Don’t worry,” I offer, ”It’s a good thing.”

The influencer had given me 200 $100 bills in a waterproof container, which I took and wrapped in the nastiest looking plastic bags I could find, and put the entire bundle in the weathered brown envelope I had just handed over. I figured he might look inside, but knew he’d want to find gloves before investigating any further and finding the money. Even if he was fast about it, I would already be gone.