Free After by Marita Golden

that life gets cheap. There are a few officers on the force with me now—I call them the walking dead—they’re like zombies, shell-shocked and callous. Bad apples. I never want to be that way. I’d quit before I got like that.”
    Carson decided then and there that Bunny was the most beautiful girl he’d ever met. Hers was a muted yet eccentric beauty expressed in the details of her face, wide, olive-toned, featuring her pug nose, the mole above her lip, and the gap between her two front teeth, the generosity and frequency of her smile. In the weeks following this first date, Carson would come to love just looking at Bunny, dressed in an outfit that rippled with colors that seemed Asian or African or some melding of both, her jewelry always some ancient-looking precious stone—topaz, amber, or jade—dangling earrings, made of the same natural stones, that when she laughed peeked out from the shadows of her long auburn hair. She loved rings, silver mostly, and wore one on nearly every finger. She’d turned herself into a work of art, woke up every morning and saw herself as a canvas.
    The stories she told Carson that day about herself were blessedly normal. She was a Big Sister to a fifteen-year-old girl named Chantal who wanted to be a veterinarian. Bunny had graduated a month earlier from Marymount College in Arlington, Virginia, where she studied commercial art. During the summers she landed internships with local firms and had been hired by a small design firm in Georgetown as a junior designer, a job she would start in a week.
    “Everything in the world is designed,” she told Carson. The firm she would join created the logos and signs for the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian. “And I mean everything, from the rooms in the gallery, to posters, the brochures, maps, napkins in the cafeteria. Carson, everything you touch, from a bar of soap to toothpaste, has been designed. Nothing in the world that we live in is random. It’s either been designed by us or by God. I’m pretty good at details, and I have a steady hand. I feel sometimes like the work I do, as much as I love it, is theoretical, mostly a concept. But I like it because it’s functional and it can be beautiful at the same time. But what you do is so real. It’s so essential,” she told him, emphasizing the word
essential
as her fork grazed the flesh of her salmon steak. The word felt to Carson like an unexpected kiss on his lips.
    “So you’re an artist?” he asked, famished to know everything about her. Now.
    “Well, yes and no.”
    “You have to show me some of your work,” Carson said, nudging his way into her future, into days beyond this one.
    “I will.”
    When they talked about their childhoods, Bunny told him she was an only child.
    “That’s how I always felt,” Carson said, “although I’ve got a younger brother. But it toughened me up. Made me hungry for what I grew up missing, taught me that in the end you’ve got to depend on yourself to make it.”
    “I don’t believe that,” she shot back quickly, pleading her case with eyes he was now convinced could see everything he was and hoped to be. “We need each other, Carson—pitiful and cruel as we are, we’re all we’ve got. I’ll never believe we’re supposed to go it alone.”
    Her words were like the flash of a comet, inexplicable and grand across the dark firmament of the past that Carson carried always with him and used as a weapon and a balm. That night he would dream of Bunny saying those words and wake up the next morning remembering the relief he felt at how bravely she punctured his cynicism.
    Soon they were a couple, Carson going with Bunny to backyard barbecues and picnics and clubs on the Saturday nights he had off. Until then, he had taken all the overtime he could get and put in extra hours on the weekend at a security gig at one of the malls. The women before Bunny had to take his schedule or leave it. Between the overtime and the