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Before Olivia comes back to work after the shooting of Jenna Fox, Munch brings her a mangled bird from a serial killer’s apartment. He shows up at her door with a cage covered in cloth, apologetic as he reveals the bloody dove.
“Fin wanted to kill it,” he says. “Officially speaking, I took it to animal control.”
Olivia rubs her dry eyes, fingers clutched tight around her phone—she’d turned on both the ringer and vibration in case Elliot called while she was more than a couple feet away. She wasn’t ever more than a couple feet away, though. She couldn’t miss something like that.
“I’m not taking that thing,” she says, and her voice comes out cracked. If Munch notices that, or the dishes in her sink or the curtains drawn in the middle of the day, he doesn’t say.
“Just for a couple days.” He sets the thing down on her coffee table and looks at the hideous creature with something like affection. “You know, doves are some of the smartest birds. They can recognize letters and faces, and they have long-term memory.”
“Then I’m sure this one would like to die somewhere other than my apartment.”
Olivia winces at the raw spot on its neck, the bald patch where feathers should be.
“Just until the case is over,” Munch says again. “And then I’ll come get him.”
I’m going to get fired for this, of all things, she thinks to herself on her first day back, and starts to think about how she’s going to tell Elliot about it. It sounds insane, even in her head: It just looked so sad, and so ugly, and Munch said it was only for a few days.
That’s what she’s repeating in her head—the damn bird was just so sad and ugly—when Cragen tells her that Elliot is gone.
Olivia becomes somewhat aware that there was a sort of agreement behind her back. She figures it out after she’s come to work with red eyes for the second month in a row, and catches two uniforms cutting off their whispers. Maybe Fin had made an outright threat, or maybe they all just implicitly understood what was off-limits under the guise of small talk or an ill-timed bonding moment. She thinks she would be grateful for their consideration, another time. She doesn’t feel grateful for anything yet.
Grief makes her do silly, strange things—things she’s never done, not even when her mother died or she found out about her father or after any of the other laundry list of personal and professional tragedies. All that to say, she keeps the bird.
She goes home, that first week Elliot’s gone, and when she burns her hand on a plate, she throws the whole thing on the floor in front of the birdcage. She pulls her feet up onto her chair, arms around her knees, and thinks she’s never really cried like this. She recognizes the sounds, loud and anguished, as the ones from strangers that collapse in front of the morgue, the ones that release their weight onto her chest. She’s never heard the noises in her own throat, uninhibited like that. She stares at the chicken and rice on the ground with the shards of ceramic, and thinks it sounds unbearably ugly.
The bird squawks over her and she finally stops crying enough to tell it to shut the fucking fuck up. It falls suddenly silent at that. She stares at it, thinks about opening the cage out her third-story window and shaking the thing free.
She gets a broom, then, and cleans up the mess.
Olivia has measured her career by the case, so far. She joined the academy and thought, One day I’ll be a cop, then one day I’ll be a detective, then one day I’ll have my own team. It’s not so much ambition as assumption, she finds out the hard way.
“I’m Nick. Amaro,” he says on his first day, and Olivia feels it rising in her throat, the words, or maybe it’s bile, and maybe she’s really going to be sick. She is, she’s going to, and she imagines the weight of her gun in her hand, and thinks, “Get your backpack off of that desk, off of his desk.”
All these years later, and she still doesn’t remember if she said anything at all. She doesn’t know if she even shook Nick Amaro’s hand.
“Munch says you have a pet bird,” Rollins says on her second week, leaning against the vending machine. “That’s cool.”
“No, it’s not cool,” Olivia says. “And it’s not a pet, it’s a hospice patient.”
“Oh.” Rollins nods, clearly not understanding and clearly never going to ask for clarification. Olivia wants to throw her full coke can at her bleach blonde head. How stupid can this woman be, to try and make friends? How arrogant, to have come here at all?
Olivia calls the vet that night.
“I have a bird here,” she says, two-thirds of a bottle of cabernet to the wind, “and he’s dying, I think. Jesus, I don’t really know. I just— can you take him?”
“Is he standing?” the woman on the phone asks calmly, and Olivia wonders how many phone calls about half-dead birds she fields, if it’s more or fewer than the number of rape victims that come and go across her desk in a week.
“Yeah.” The dove blinks back from his perch in the center of the cage, and she adds, for some reason, “I don’t know if he can fly.”
“Why don’t you bring him in, and we can take a look? We’re open ‘til ten.”
She doesn’t break any plates today, or cry, or toss the cage out the window. She says, “Okay,” and puts the bird in her car.
The bird isn’t dying—the opposite, she’s told. The new spots on his neck are pin feathers, new and sensitive to the touch, swollen with blood.
“Does it hurt?” she asks, watching him shift from left to right. Her face must be scrunched in some sort of way, because the vet makes her voice go steady when she says, “A little bit, yes. But it’s a good thing. It means he’s healing.”
She drives to animal control after that. She’s very sorry for this bird, but not that sorry, and it’s not hers, anyway, and it’s been four months. She sits in the front seat of her car and stares at the cage in the passenger seat, and declines a call from Rollins, then Nick, then Fin all in a row. When Rollins calls again, Olivia lets it ring and says, “Stop, stop it, stop it, stop—” until it does. The bird is quiet, this time.
She takes the bird home, and sets him by the window where there’s a little more light, and a little bit of a breeze. She feeds him, fills his water, and rubs the side of her own neck unconsciously. Elliot would hate this bird, she thinks. Elliot would have made fun of her, first in a fun way, and then mean. First he’d smirk and say, “What, you starting an animal rescue in your apartment, now? Next it’ll be the city rats.” And the following week, in the middle of an argument, it would be, “Oh, I can’t save everyone, but you’ve got a fucked-up pigeon on your dining room table?”
It always turned, in the end, but now there is nothing for her to turn away from and nothing left to turn sour, and maybe that’s why she keeps it—out of spite, for something Elliot will never say.
She only lets those raw spots show sometimes. When Cragen calls her into his office and admonishes her for slapping a harmless twenty-something across the face because he’d tried to run, when he sighs at her for leaving cuff marks on another, she says it plainly—“Someone has to,” her head nodding automatically in the direction of Amaro’s desk, “when the only detectives we can afford are cheap imitations.”
The tears smart as soon as she gets the words out. She doesn’t say the rest of it—that when she’s reckless like that, when her fist curls and connects in a way she’s never let it, she feels closer to Elliot in some strange, terrible way. That it only makes her more angry, then. That it seems, these days, like there is always more—more sad, more ugly.
Cragen’s eyes are wet at the corners and he’s looking at her like he knows every single thought she’s ever had. He doesn’t tell her she’s out of line. He doesn’t tell her he’s sorry, or that Elliot’s not coming back, or that Nick is a good detective. He’s already tried all that, anyway.
He says instead, “I need you to step up, Liv.”
He calls her Liv, and that hurts, sharp on her skin. She feels the prick of it, the thing she’s never considered with all her lifelong casual absolutes: that life will go on. That someone new will sit at Elliot’s desk, and everything will be excruciatingly normal, and it might always feel like this.
It’s a good thing, the vet had said. New and bloody and swollen, painful to the touch, pin feathers in the neck.
Eight months after Elliot leaves, she gives the bird to a city animal sanctuary. It’s the kind of place even she would make fun of behind closed doors— “Why waste your time saving rats and pigeons when there are so many humans that need saving?” She still doesn’t get it, really, but here she is with the cage in her hand, cramped in a kitchen with an old woman who smells like jasmine.
“You’ve taken such good care of her,” the woman says, inspecting the clean, white feathers with her index finger.
“It’s female?”
“Well, there’s no easy way to tell, actually.”
“Oh.” Olivia looks at the bird again, its beady eyes she’s gotten a little used to, and feels sorry for not knowing.
“Did you give her a name?” the woman asks, examining the wing.
“No,” Olivia says, and feels the low swirl of guilt again. “I was— No. Sorry.”
“Oh, that’s alright. She doesn’t need one.” The woman smiles. She’s missing a tooth on the left side, and Olivia tries not to look in her eyes, not at the gap. “Doves are very social, you know. She’ll fit right in with the group.”
Olivia just nods, peering at the enclosure on the other side of the counter. She’s the kind of person who brings a dove to a sanctuary.
The bell over the door tinkles when she leaves, and she stops on the sidewalk, startled by the flock of pigeons. They tilt their heads and shift side to side. They coo and cry, and she goes around. There are so many, maybe too many, maybe twenty pigeons. She thinks twenty is so many more than one.