Instant Recall

by Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

I say the same eight words forty times a night. Nine-one-one, what is the address of your emergency? I've said them for nineteen years, in a windowless room in Toms River with the thermostat locked at sixty-eight, and I could say them in my sleep. Some nights I think I do.

The thing nobody teaches you, the thing you learn on your own, is to listen behind the voice. The voice tells you what the caller wants you to know. Behind it is everything else: the TV still on, the dog, the second person in the room who isn't supposed to be there. I once sent a unit to a fall down the stairs because behind the woman telling me she'd fallen, a man was saying, very quietly, say it right.

At 2:47 on a Tuesday morning in November my line lit up. The screen said WPH2, which means a cell phone and a location the computer trusts to about fifty yards, and I said my eight words.

"Bay Hollow Marina. Cedar Creek. B dock." A man. Wind across the phone like someone blowing over a bottle. "There's a guy in the water. He's not moving."

I was typing before he finished. That's the job: your hands are a sentence ahead of your head. Bay Hollow. Bayville. B dock.

Then my head caught up with my hands, and my hands stopped.

I have been married to Theo Ruddy for twenty-two years. He says guy like it has two syllables, a habit he brought down from Jersey City and never put down. And he breathes in through his nose before bad news, one short hard sniff, as if he's trying to smell whether it's true. I heard that sniff in the delivery room. I heard it in the parking lot of Community Medical Center the night his father died.

I'd heard it just now, right before he's not moving.

Theo was in Annapolis. He'd left on Sunday for a pre-purchase survey on a fifty-two-foot trawler: three days, a Hampton Inn by the highway. At breakfast he'd texted me a picture of the waffle maker.

"Sir," I said, "is he breathing? Can you reach him? Can you get his face up out of the—"

The line went dead.

---

The location dot sat on my map at the far end of B dock, over a slip I had stood on with a paper plate of clams every Fourth of July for six years. Slip 14. A thirty-one-foot Bertram with the name across the transom in gold script: the Carla S.

My sister's name. My sister's husband's boat.

I put it out. I did it right; I want that on the record, whatever record there is. Police, rescue squad, fire for a water rescue, Bay Hollow Marina on Shore Road, man in the water, unresponsive. Times stamped in the margin: 02:47:31, 02:48:05. Then I did the callback, because you always call back a hang-up.

It rang six times. Then: "You got Russ. Leave it."

Russ Szabo had had the same greeting for ten years. Twenty years on the Seaside Heights police and retired, and he still talked to the world like he was writing it a ticket.

Across the aisle Lou Fennimore, my supervisor, looked over his monitor. "Hang-up?"

"Called back. Voicemail." My voice came out of me exactly like my voice. "Units are rolling."

He nodded and went back to his crossword. And I sat with my hands flat on the desk and did not say, the caller is my husband, who is in Maryland.

I didn't say it at 2:50. I didn't say it at 3:15, when the scene came back on the radio asking for the medical examiner. I didn't say it at 3:22, when a woman in Lacey called because her husband had chest pains and wouldn't let her drive him, and I talked her through the aspirin, chewed not swallowed, and stayed on until the squad was at her door. You do that. You take the next call. I didn't say it at 3:40, when I went into the ladies' room and called Theo's cell and listened to it ring out in what I told myself was a Hampton Inn.

I had said one thing about that boat, once, to Carla, three summers ago, on its swim platform. She had her sunglasses on at nine o'clock at night so that nobody at the party would see her eye. Next time you call 911. You hear me? I'll be the one who picks up.

She never called. I kept picking up anyway.

---

Every console has instant recall: the last few calls, saved, so you can replay an address you didn't catch. At four o'clock, with Lou in the break room, I put on my headset and played it.

The wind. The halyards on the sailboats ringing against their masts, that hollow tink, tink every marina has in November. Bay Hollow Marina. Cedar Creek. B dock. There's a guy in the water. The sniff. He's not moving. My own voice, which I hate on tape, asking him to get the face up out of the water.

And somewhere under it, under the wind, something else. A higher sound, two syllables, maybe three. It could have been a gull. It could have been a dock line creaking on a piling.

I played it four times with the volume all the way up. It stayed a gull.

At a quarter past six, forty-five minutes before the end of my shift, a woman in a long camel coat came through the security door with Lou, and Lou brought her to my console the way you'd carry over a cake you knew somebody wouldn't like.

"Jeanine, this is Lieutenant Pires. Prosecutor's Office."

She was younger than me, with her hair scraped back and a paper cup of coffee she hadn't touched. "You took the Bay Hollow call."

"I did."

"The phone belongs to the deceased," she said. "Russell Szabo. Somebody found him, picked up his phone, called you, and left it on a dock box. Wiped." She watched me. "Lou tells me Mr. Szabo is your brother-in-law."

"He is."

"I'm sorry." She said it like a person, which I hadn't expected. "Anything about the caller? Age. Accent. Anything behind him."

Nineteen years. You learn to listen behind the voice. And you learn, without anybody teaching you, exactly how a lie sounds when it comes into your headset, so you know exactly how to tell one that doesn't sound like that.

"Male," I said. "Forties, fifties. Calm." I shrugged. "Wind."

"Calm," Pires said.

"A lot of them are. Calm is shock."

She wrote it down. Then she said, "I'm going to need the master recording," and Lou said of course, and that was the moment, sitting there with the headset around my neck, when I understood that I had about a day.

---

I didn't go straight home. I took Shore Road.

Bay Hollow is a gravel lot, a bait shop with plywood over the windows till April, and four docks reaching out into Cedar Creek like fingers. There's one light in the lot, on a pole by the dumpster, and it has been broken since Labor Day. A pickup could sit there all night under that light and nobody would look at it twice.

In the daylight the tape was strung across the head of B dock from a piling to the bait-shop railing, and a single cruiser idled with nobody in it. Down at slip 14 the Carla S. sat high on the rising tide with her fenders squeaking against the pilings. A man in a windbreaker was photographing the swim platform. Another was kneeling at a dock box with a brush.

I sat in my car with the engine running and the heater on my feet. I have dispatched maybe two hundred water calls in nineteen years. I had never once seen where one of them ended.

The man with the brush looked up. I put the car in reverse.

---

Theo's truck was in the driveway when I got home at half past eight.

He was at the kitchen table in yesterday's clothes, a mug held in both hands. Six foot five, gray at the temples, folded down over that mug like a man who'd come in out of the rain. He's the kind of big man who apologizes to doorframes.

"How was Annapolis?" I said.

He looked at me. I watched him decide whether to do it. I'll give him this much: it took him less than a second.

"I wasn't in Annapolis," he said. "You knew it was me."

"You said guy."

He almost laughed. He didn't. "I didn't know who'd pick up. There's three of you on nights."

"Where's my sister, Theo?"

"Home. In bed." He put the mug down. "Where she's been all night."

I sat down across from him. There's a clock above our sink that ticks. In eleven years in that house I had never once heard it.

He told me straight, the way he writes up a survey, soft spots and all. Since March he'd been helping Carla get out. A lawyer in Freehold, not Toms River, because half the lawyers in Toms River had played softball with Russ. A one-bedroom in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, first month and security, paid out of the business account he keeps for the surveys, which I never look at, because why would I. The Annapolis job was real; he'd handed it to a man he knew in Cape May.

Last night was the night. Russ had a charter at six, so he'd sleep aboard; he always did before a charter. Theo would wait in the marina lot with the truck and the engine running. Carla would go down the dock for one thing only: the blue folder with her passport and our mother's rings, which she'd hidden behind the access panel under the helm, because it was the only place on God's earth Russ never looked.

"She said five minutes," Theo said. "She was gone twenty. I went down the dock. He was in the water between the hull and the pilings, face down. She was standing on the swim platform holding the folder."

"Just standing."

"Just standing." He looked at his hands, which are the size of oven mitts and have never in my presence hurt anything bigger than a wasp. "I called. I wasn't going to leave a man in the water. But he'd been in there a while, Jeannie. I knew before I dialed."

"Did you touch him?"

"I got down on the dock and got a hand in his collar and turned him over. He was cold. His eyes were open." Theo's jaw worked. "I let go of him. Then I picked his phone up off the dock box, because you can call 911 from a locked phone, everybody knows that, and I wasn't calling from mine."

"Did you push him back under?"

He looked at me then, really looked, and I watched something in his face go out like a pilot light.

"No," he said. "You're asking me that. Okay. No."

"Why didn't she call me?" It came out of me torn. "Not 911. Me. Since March, Theo. Why you and not me?"

He was quiet a long time.

"Because you'd have made her report it," he said. "You'd have done everything right. The restraining order, the shelter, the domestic violence unit. And every one of those people went to Russ's retirement party."

Twenty-two years. He knew exactly which of my virtues was going to get somebody killed.

Above the sink, the clock went on ticking.

---

Carla lives in a split-level in Bayville, three streets back from the creek. When I pulled up, a dark Explorer was backing out of her driveway, and Lieutenant Pires lifted two fingers to me from behind the wheel.

Carla opened the door in Russ's old PBA sweatshirt with a scarf wrapped twice around her neck. Indoors. With the heat on.

"They told me," she said. "They were just here. Jeannie, they told me—" She put her face into my shoulder and cried, and I held her, and I could not tell, I honestly could not tell, whether she was crying because he was dead or because she was so tired.

In the kitchen I unwound the scarf. She let me. Four marks on one side of her throat and one on the other, the way a hand leaves them.

"He was awake," she said. "He wasn't supposed to be awake. He had me by the hair first, out on the platform. Then by the—" She touched it. "He keeps a fish billy by the transom door. For the tuna. I don't remember picking it up. I remember the sound it made." She looked at the window. "He went over the side without a word. And then it was so quiet, Jeannie. You don't know how quiet."

I did, actually. A man in your headset, and then nothing. I knew exactly how quiet.

"Did you try to get him out?"

She looked at me. She has our mother's eyes, gray-green, same as mine. "Theo came," she said.

Which wasn't an answer, and we both knew it wasn't, and I let it stand.

"Where was your phone last night?"

"Here. On the charger." She glanced at it on the counter. "Theo said to leave it."

I thought about that longer than I wanted to. Then I said, "She has the 911 audio."

"Is that bad?" Carla wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "He didn't say his name."

"No," I said. "He didn't."

On the counter beside the toaster lay a blue plastic folder, a little warped, the way paper goes when it's been wet and dried. Through the cover I could see a sandwich bag with two rings in it, paper-clipped inside.

---

Pires called me that afternoon at four, which is the middle of my night, and asked me to come in an hour before my shift.

She had Lou's office and the master audio from the logger, not my little instant recall, and the good headphones, the big ones the training coordinator uses for quality review. "Our tech says this is as clean as it gets," she said. "Lou says you have the best ears in the building. Humor me."

I put them on.

The wind. The halyards. Bay Hollow Marina. Cedar Creek. B dock. There's a guy in the water.

And there, in the half second before the sniff, where on my console there had only been a gull:

Is it her?

A woman's voice. Close to the phone, a breath more than a word.

And Theo, turned away from the phone, so low I would never have caught it at the console: Yeah. It's her.

Then the sniff, and he's not moving. Then me, asking him to get the face up. Then nothing.

I took the headphones off. Then I put them back on and listened again, because that's procedure. You never commit on one listen.

Is it her?

She hadn't asked if he was dead. She hadn't asked what they were going to do. She had stood on that wet platform with the folder in her hands and the man who had held her by the throat floating at her feet, and what she had needed to know was whether her sister had picked up.

I'll be the one who picks up.

And Theo, my careful, enormous husband who apologizes to doorframes, had heard my voice and told her yes. Then he'd said three more words to me and hung up and wiped the phone and driven home, and sat at our kitchen table, and waited. Because he knew, and she knew. Whatever I heard, I would carry.

"Mrs. Ruddy?" Pires had her pen out. She hadn't written anything. "There's a woman, isn't there? Before he says he's not moving. I can hear there's something. I can't make out the words."

Behind her, through Lou's window, the floor was filling up for nights. Somebody had brought in a box of crumb cake from the Polish bakery on Route 37 and left it open on the console beside mine.

"Do you recognize either of them?"

I listened one more time. I listened behind the voice, the way I've done forty times a night for nineteen years.

Then I took the headphones off and laid them on Lou's desk, carefully, with the cord coiled the way the training coordinator likes it.

"It's wind," I said. "Wind in the halyards. You get it on every marina call in November."

Pires looked at me for a long moment. Then she clicked her pen once and put it away in her coat without writing anything down, and I understood that she had heard everything she needed to, and that none of it had been on the tape.

At seven I logged in. My line lit up at 7:02.

"Nine-one-one," I said. "What is the address of your emergency?"

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Nōnās Octōbrēs (6 October 2026), ab Alanō Ginsberg-Cobden per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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