Broken and Beautiful

by Ryan, Kendall

  I poured myself half a shot of Hennessy, figuring it was safe because the baby monitor had been silent for the last hour, and settled onto my couch. I sliced the envelope open and slid the contents onto my coffee table. The toxicology report held the answer to my most burning question, so I started there.

  Clean.

  She was completely clean.

  There wasn't a trace of drugs or alcohol in her system. Relief flooded through me but was soon replaced by guilt. I'd expected her to be high. I'd expected her to be doing something thoughtless and reckless, but she hadn't. She cleaned herself up and had a child. A child whose mother was there for him and not battling her own demons. She'd conditioned me to assume the worst of her, and now I didn't know what to think. Who was this woman in the coroner's report?

  I moved on to the accident report. Crystal was driving a late model Chevy Impala registered to Amy Smith, her strange alias. It was a big car for her and almost new. So far, I hadn't found any evidence of her having any sort of job. So where the hell did she get money for a new car, and why that one? It was cherry red, her favorite color, and I imagined her matching her lipstick to the paint job every time she drove it. The thought stabbed a sharp pang through my heart. I took a small sip from my glass and let the cognac burn its way down my throat until the ache in my chest softened before I picked up the file again.

  There were photos of the car wrapped around a tree. She'd hit it head-on, which explained the bruise on her forehead. There were more photos of the scene and a few from the interior of the car. I flipped through the pictures, and my heart stopped when I came to photos of Crystal's body. It was the same Crystal from the gurney, pale and bruised, but she was fully nude with a large "Y"-shaped surgical scar across her chest and torso. There was a long bruise across her shoulder, and her chest, which I assumed, was from the seat belt. Something about it struck me as odd, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Pieces of the puzzle rattled around in my brain, but between the sleep deprivation, the Hennessy, and the shock of seeing Crystal's body again when I wasn't entirely prepared, was making it hard to focus.

  I dropped the file and picked up her death certificate. The cause of death pretty much reiterated what Detective Tan told Mom and me at the coroner's office in conjunction with the accident report. Crystal was the only passenger in a single-vehicle collision and was pronounced dead at the scene. Something about it didn't seem right. I was obviously tired, tipsy, and grasping at straws. I shuffled the papers into a stack and picked up the envelope to stuff them back into it when a business card slid out. It was another one of Detective Tan's cards. I picked it up and flipped it over. On the back was another phone number written in blue pen with a message that read, "Call me if you have any questions about your mother's case." The word "questions" was underlined. This wasn't a thread I could pull tonight. It was almost three in the morning, and if I was lucky, I could squeeze in four hours of sleep before CJ woke up screaming for a meal that I would later find myself squeegeeing off of the walls.

  * * *

  “Oh. My. God. Is this him?” Judy squealed and ran around the reception desk.

  I could’ve just dropped CJ off at the daycare before I made my coffee deliveries, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to show him off at work.

  "He is so cute!" She cooed at him and tickled his belly. As if on cue, my wingman flashed the cutest gummiest grin, and his gaggle of admirers grew considerably.

  "Hey, Judy." I grinned. "Would you mind keeping an eye on him while I deliver the rest of these?"

  "Of course, I don't. Do I, handsome?" She didn't even look up at me when she answered.

  When I returned ten minutes later, CJ was sitting on the reception desk involved in a rousing game of peekaboo where three of the receptionists would hide behind the counter and take turns popping up to surprised squeals.

  "Sorry, ladies." I picked up CJ, planted a kiss on his chubby cheek, and strapped him into his stroller. "I have to get this little guy to daycare."

  I was greeted with disappointed teeth sucking and choruses of, "You come back and visit anytime you want, cutie pie."

  * * *

  The daycare was clearly created as an afterthought and utilized abandoned office space, but it was spacious, clean, and the staff seemed happy. I signed CJ in and handed him off to an attendant feeling an unexpected lurch in my stomach. It had just been the two of us, and now I was handing him off to strangers.

  "Okay, is there anything else I should know?" Cindy, the daycare director, asked.

  I blinked and realized that I had been staring at CJ without speaking.

  “He’s teething. There’s some stuff in his bag. He’s really picky about what he eats. He likes airplane rides. He’ll only nap in the stroller. Uh…maybe I should take him home and try again tomorrow.”

  "CJ is gonna be fine." She put a comforting hand on my bicep that only succeeded in making me feel tenser. "I know it's a little strange leaving your baby for the first time, but I promise you he's in great hands. We'll take excellent care of him, and you can visit whenever you want."

  I swallowed what felt like a lump in my throat and nodded, still frozen in place. Cindy put her hand on my shoulder, gave me a nod, and I turned to walk toward the elevator.

  “Cole!” Cindy called.

  I turned to her, slightly alarmed.

  "You can leave the stroller," she said with a laugh. "Sorry, habit," I mumbled. I wasn't even aware that I was still pushing it.

  “He’s gonna love it here. You’ll see.”

  I nodded again and walked to the elevator feeling weirdly empty. CJ had been my entire world for three weeks, and it felt strange to leave him again.

  * * *

  "All right, Papa Bear?" Dev Phadkar, one of the firm's best investigators, walked to my cubicle and sat on my desk. "You rang?"

  “Yeah, are you busy right now?” I looked around the mostly deserted office.

  “Mate, I’m always busy, but whatcha got?” He leaned forward as I pulled the thick yellow envelope out of my backpack and placed it on the desk.

  "I got my birth mother's accident and coroner's report, and I don't know if it's wishful thinking or I'm just sleep-deprived, but something's off." I slid the files out of the envelope and handed it to him. He flipped through files quietly for a few minutes. I rolled my chair back a few feet to avoid accidentally catching a glimpse of Crystal's autopsy photos again.

  “Well, this is definitely suspicious.”

  Damn. I was hoping Dev would tell me I was crazy and that everything looked fine. “What do you mean?”

  "I think you know what I mean, or you wouldn't have called me up here."

  "The bruises," I muttered, not looking at him and pinching the bridge of my nose in frustration, a tic I picked up from my dad.

  "The bruises," he agreed. "And this." He slapped down one of the photos from the interior of the car. For a split second, I thought it was one of Crystal's body and had to stop myself from flinching. Instead, I was looking at a photo of a large dark stain on the passenger seat, but it wasn't dark enough to be blood. "Remember that old joke about car accidents?" He paused for effect. "‘First you say it, then you do it.' Somebody was in this seat at the time of the collision. The seat belt and forehead bruises are consistent with injuries sustained by a passenger, but there's no blood on the dashboard.”

  “Maybe it didn’t bleed?” I supplied.

  "Possibly, but unlikely." He slid the photo closer to me. "What else do you see?"

  I looked at the photo again. Fuck. How the hell did I miss that? There was a large scrap of white fabric hanging out of the center console of the steering wheel. It was a fucking airbag. I sat back in my chair.

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “You see some pretty nasty injuries from airbags deployed at high speeds. Broken noses, burns to the face and chest, abrasions… Your mother just has a broken wrist—she most likely tried to put her hands out to brace herself—and smacked her forehead on the dash. The seat belt di
d its job and prevented her from going fully airborne.”

  I nodded again.

  “Lipstick.”

  “What?”

  I rifled through the accident photos looking for a clearer picture of the airbag. “Crystal always wore red lipstick, even in prison.” There were three different angles of the deployed airbag. Not a trace of red lipstick. Crystal wasn’t driving.

  "Look, you know I can't say anything definitively, but I don't think your mother was driving that night. I do think the accident killed her. At the speeds indicated here, not even a seat belt could've helped her. The seat belt probably caused a fair amount of damage." Dev wasn't the warm and fuzzy type. He was direct, honest, and really fucking good at his job. "Look, I have a friend at the coroner's office, I can have her take a look at this—off the record—and I'll have a buddy at the NYPD take a glance at it too… If you want."

  I nodded.

  “Okay, it might take a while. I’m going to Mumbai for a couple of weeks for a wedding. Do you have any leads that might help?”

  “Leads? I’m not the detective here.”

  “Yeah, but you are a lawyer. Any ideas?”

  “There is one.” I pulled out Detective Tan’s business card and handed it to Dev.

  “Oh, shite.” He glanced at me. “That explains all the photos.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Unless you make a request, you don’t usually get this many photos. It’s typically one of the deceased and one of the vehicles. If you even get that. There are almost a dozen pictures here. And with this…” He held up the card. “This Detective Tan wanted you to ask questions. You should ring him.”

  I took the card back from Dev and slid it into my top drawer.

  “I’ll wait to hear what your friends think. No sense in stirring shit unless I know there’s something to stir, right?”

  "Sure, mate." Dev clapped me on the shoulder and began replacing the contents of the envelope. He knew I was deflecting, and I was glad he didn't call me on it. "So, I guess you won't be coming out for drinks tonight."

  I barked out a surprised laugh. My nights would be filled with bath times, very hungry caterpillars, and ducky pajamas for the foreseeable future. That tiny sip of Hennessy I had a few nights ago almost took me out. "Nah. Not for a while."

  We laughed.

  “So, wedding, huh? Who’s getting married?”

  “Me,” he said as if he was telling me the time.

  “Congratulations, man. I didn’t know you were seeing anybody.”

  “I wasn’t, not exactly. Our parents set us up about a year ago. We’ve been chatting online ever since. We’ll finally be in the same room this time next week.” His face spread in an excited grin.

  “You’re gonna marry someone you’ve never met in person. That doesn’t seem crazy?”

  “Mate, I’m an investigator at a law firm. I can tell you from experience, no one knows who they marry.”

  “How did you get together?”

  “Actually, we met once as kids in India. She beat me in a chess tournament when I was seven, but I haven’t seen her in person in over twenty years. Our parents are acquaintances.”

  "So, you let your parents choose your wife?"

  "Why not? My parents’ marriage was arranged. They had one five-minute phone call before they got married, and they've been together for forty-seven years. Things are done a little differently now, but it's still a good system." He chuckled.

  “What do you know about her?”

  "She still loves playing chess. She was accepted into a graduate program at NYU in the fall. She loves to eat and hates to cook. She thinks I'm handsome and that I have kind eyes. She laughs at most of my jokes." He smiled again, and his look was boyish.

  “Do you have a picture?”

  As if he'd been waiting for me to ask, Dev whipped out his phone and pulled up his screen saver. He turned the phone around to reveal a pretty, dark brown-skinned woman with long dark hair parted down the middle and flung over one shoulder. She'd been in the middle of laughing when this photo was taken. Dev was waiting for my assessment with his eyebrows raised.

  “She’s gorgeous, man. Congrats.”

  "I know. I'm excited." He grinned, but then his smile faded. "We were waiting for ages for her student visa to get approved. Bryce was good enough to call in a few favors for us. For some reason I can't put my brown finger on, her application was taking a lot longer to process than mine did eight years ago." He let out a mirthless chuckle that I returned in understanding, and he stood to leave, tucking my envelope under his arm. "You might want to think about settling down yourself." He tapped me on the shoulder. "Now that you've got a kid and all."

  My parents have been together for almost thirty years and got engaged after a couple weeks of dating. My mom's also a psychiatrist, so she'd probably do a decent job of finding me a wife if I could ever stop thinking about my neighbor.

  I also thought of the weird coincidence of never seeing Lisa after living next door for months, then meeting her the night Crystal died and wondered if it meant anything.

  8

  cole

  My first week back was rough. I was still exhausted all the time, but the kid and I were settling into a routine. I couldn’t work the long days that I usually did because the daycare closed at seven, so I found myself bringing work home more often and staying up after CJ went to bed.

  Friday night, I bumped the stroller up the stairs and pushed it into the foyer and was greeted by a clean house. The faint odor of dirty diapers was absent, and I could smell food, hot food. There were only two people who could have been responsible for this miracle, and I knew one of them was in Barbados.

  “Mom?” I called out.

  “In the kitchen, baby.”

  I dropped my bag, kicked off my shoes, grabbed CJ, and walked into the kitchen to find my mother wiping down the stove. She loaded a plate with collard greens, candied yams, and sliced turkey with biscuits and placed it on the island. I grabbed a biscuit and shoved it into my mouth whole, but I wasn't fast enough to avoid getting popped on the hand with her spoon.

  “Boy, if you don’t wash your hands…”

  “I’m going,” I said through a mouthful of biscuit, planting a kiss on her cheek on my way to the kitchen sink.

  Five minutes later, I was shoveling food into my mouth like it was my last meal. Mom filled the kitchen sink to give CJ a bath while he worked on a small pile of mashed yams. He was mostly smearing them around the tray of his high chair with his hands. Some of them made it to his mouth.

  “You’re gonna bathe him in the kitchen sink?” I asked, gulping down my second glass of iced tea.

  "I bathed you in the sink, and you were barely older than him." She laughed, and her smile faded. "Honey, how are you holding up?"

  "Fine. You know." I sighed. "It's a big adjustment. I need to get into a rhythm." I was lying through my teeth. I was not fine. It didn't hit me how not fine I was until I was face to face with my mother, the person I always depended on to fix whatever was not fine in my life. I was burning out and unsure how long I could keep this up. This wasn't something I was going to admit, but I had a sense I didn't have to.

  “We have not seen hide nor hair of you all week. You don’t answer your phone. All I get from you is the occasional text message.”

  “Sorry, Ma. I’ve just been busy with work and CJ.”

  "And why are you back at work? I thought you had six weeks’ paid leave."

  “I did, but I didn’t want to fall behind. It’s like a shark tank. You can’t show weakness. Dad would understand.”

  "Oh," she said in a clipped tone, which let me know I'd fucked up. She wrapped CJ in a towel and lifted him out of the sink. "You think I don't understand what's going on here?" She perched CJ on her hip with one hand, and with the other hand, pointed at me, making a circling gesture. "I understand better than you know. Because, as a psychiatrist with not one but—“

  Two Ph.D.s, I though
t to myself, knowing it was coming.

  “—two Ph.D.s. It is literally my job to know, and as your dad’s wife, I watched him go through the same thing when he started at Hollander and Cameron. The difference was your father was already a practicing attorney for five years. He had a wife, multiple streams of income, and, most of all, he had help. You are trying to do this all on your own, and you've just lost a mother."

  I looked at her, then down at my plate. I'd almost forgotten about Crystal. Forgotten isn't the right word. She was always buzzing around somewhere in my brain. Sometimes the buzzing was too loud to ignore, and sometimes she just hovered in the background, barely perceptible while I focused on other issues.

  "I'm gonna put the baby down, and then you and I are gonna have a talk."

  Twenty minutes later, Mom came back downstairs. She started tidying the kitchen, and I helped. Finally, I collapsed on my couch, and she sat beside me.

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “You're welcome, baby.” She sighed. “So, how are you, really?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know.”

  “Have you had time to mourn Crystal yet?”

  I snapped my head up to meet her gaze. She raised an eyebrow.

  "What's there to mourn? She abandoned her life in New York to move back to the place that she hated and had a kid with God knows who. And in case you haven't noticed, I'm too busy cleaning up her messes to have time to mourn her."

  "What do you mean when you say messes?"

  Shit. My mother is a human bullshit detector, and I was too tired to school my words. I decided transparency was the best course of action. It would save time. Mom always ended up finding out what she wanted to know anyway, so there was no point in trying to hide it.

  “I think there are some things about the accident that aren’t adding up.”