by Kylie Brant
Ellie followed Sully up the rickety stairway. Noise barraged the senses. There was a baby crying in one of the rooms, and the sound trailed after them to the next floor. On the fourth floor a loud argument was punctuated with the sound of fists meeting flesh. There was an angry shout, and something shattered. He fit the key into door 401 and looked down at her. “Welcome to the Ritz, kid.”
Pushing the door open, he stepped through and Elizabeth slowly followed. There was only one room to the apartment, with a tiny kitchenette fit into a corner. A dirty mattress lay on the floor, and the rest of the place was littered with clothes and debris.
She stood in the middle of the room, looking at the sum total of his mother’s life, and felt an incredible sense of sadness for a life wasted, for a woman she never knew.
“She wouldn’t have had much,” he said distantly. “Best we can do is clear the place out.” He picked up a box lying on the floor and dumped its contents on the mattress. A syringe rolled onto the floor. His gaze caught hers. “Must have kept it for old times’ sake. Heroin was always her drug of choice, but when all her veins collapsed, she turned to crack.”
His voice was matter-of-fact, as if he were discussing a ball game, but his eyes... Elizabeth looked into his eyes and knew she was looking into the pits of hell. She pushed aside the sickness at the realization of what he was telling her and sank to her knees beside him. “Let me help you. We’ll put all the clothes in the bag, and anything you want to keep in this box. Make a pile of things to throw away.”
She turned and quickly picked up the clothes strewed on the floor, wincing once or twice when something skittered from beneath them. When she’d finished, she went to the closet and opened it. There were a few more blouses on hangers, so she took them out and placed them in the sack. Spying a box on the shelf above the rack, she stretched up and retrieved it.
Elizabeth eyed it curiously. It was taped closed, and obviously hadn’t been opened for a long time. The tape was dark with age, and cracked. She carried it over to where Sully was sorting. From the looks of the piles, he hadn’t found anything he wanted to keep.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I found it in the closet. Maybe it has her valuables in it.”
He gave her a terrible parody of a smile and said, “Any valuables she ever had were sold long before I was born. By the time I knew her, drugs were her most prized possession.”
Her gaze met his, held. “Tell me,” she invited softly. She braced herself for his withdrawal, and the pain it would bring. He looked at her from enigmatic eyes, and that smile that really wasn’t a smile faded. She saw the denial on his face, even before he voiced it. Then he looked away, and a muscle jumped in his jaw. She’d resigned herself to the fact that he’d shut down, again. Then his voice sounded, harsh and strained.
“This place isn’t much different from most we lived in towards the end. At first, though, we at least had running water, real appliances.” He stopped, his gaze roaming around the small apartment. She knew he wasn’t seeing his mother’s last home, but a series of his own.
“It didn’t matter. We never stayed in one place long. She always said the way to keep people off our backs was to keep moving.”
“What kind of people?”
He lifted a shoulder. “Cops. Do-gooders.” He slid a glance at her and elaborated, “Social services. And then there were always the landlords who got ticked when rent wasn’t paid. Which it often wasn’t. Marcy stuck most of what she earned in her veins.”
She struggled to imagine the life he was describing for her. It was a dark and desolate picture. “How did you live?”
“I was hungry a lot, until I became an accomplished thief.” His eyes were shuttered. “I was a wise kid. Learned to walk miles to steal in better neighborhoods. People there had more to lose, and felt sorry for kids like me. Of course, it helped that I was big for my age, and quick. I dodged most of the trouble that could have come my way. Slugged my way out of the rest.”
She sat perfectly still, absorbing his words, and more, the tightly leashed emotion behind them. She’d known he hadn’t had an easy life. The evidence was there in his eyes, in the constant guard he wore. But coming face-to-face with it now hurt unbearably. She ached for the little boy in tattered clothes who hadn’t known if he would eat each day, or when. She and her mother hadn’t had much after her father had died, but at least they’d been able to keep the house. And her mother’s job, while not high paying, had kept groceries on the table.
“What kind of work did your mother do?”
“She worked on her back.”
Abruptly he rose and went to the window and stared out. Elizabeth knew he wasn’t seeing the squalid street below. His gaze had turned inward. “I don’t know how old I was when I figured out what that line of strange men in and out of her bed meant.” He shrugged. “Five or six, I guess. I was always supposed to stay in the bathroom when she had ‘guests,’ or in the closet. Didn’t take long before I preferred the streets. She told me once that she’d named me for my father—john. When I figured out what that meant, I started going by ‘Sully’.”
Slowly, reluctantly he turned to look at her then, and froze. “Damn you, don’t you cry, Ellie. I don’t need you crying over me.”
She made no move to wipe away the trickle of tears tracing down her cheeks. “Yes, I think you do,” she said shakily.
He turned away in a violent movement. “Pity doesn’t change anything.”
She rose and went to stand very close behind him, close enough to feel the heat radiating from his body, but not touching. Not yet. “Pity might not change anything, but caring does. I care, Sully. I always have. And because you can’t cry, I’ll do it for you.” She leaned against him then, her face pressed against the taut muscles in his back, her arms linking around his waist. He was rigid in her embrace, but she didn’t let go. She wondered if he really thought she couldn’t see the scarred-over hurt beneath the anger.
She hurt desperately for the little boy who’d gone to bed hungry at night, lullabied by the sounds of addicts and johns. She’d wondered at that careful shield of his. Now she knew its cause, and it quite simply broke her heart.
“Why did you stay?” she murmured against his back. “There must have been someone you could have gone to...a teacher...the police.”
“I was taught to spit at cops and dodge the suits. I went to a lot of different schools the way we moved around. At least it meant a couple of free meals a day. And it wasn’t home or the streets.” His hands went to hers and unleashed them, stepping away as if her touch was suddenly painful. He paced in the little room, kicking at the debris on the floor and sending the insects below it scuttling.
“She was getting more paranoid at the end. Always accusing me of stealing her stash, or hiding it. I only tried that once—when I was a kid. Flushed it down the toilet, and she beat me until I could barely walk. Taught me that people can’t be saved, if they don’t want to be. And she didn’t want to be.”
“And yet...you stayed.”
He was silent while he reached for a cigarette, lit it. It was half-burned-down before he spoke again. “I stayed. Around, anyway. She was getting herself into more trouble by then. She’d been a looker, but the drugs took their toll on her physically and mentally. I needed to get some odd jobs to come up with bail money for when she’d get picked up for prostitution. She’d always come home shaken, full of tears and promises.”
The reason, she thought sickly, for his reluctance to make a promise, any promise, to her. She wondered how many had been made and broken by his mother. Enough to cause him to doubt, to teach a young boy distrust.
He took a quick, deep puff of the cigarette, then dropped it to the floor and ground it out. “Let’s get finished up here and go.”
She bent down and folded up all the clothes and put them in the sack. “Is this to be thrown away?” she asked about the pile he had in the middle of the mattress. When he nodded, she p
laced the things in the empty box, while he picked up the debris littering the floor. “What about this other box? Are you going to open it?”
His back to her, he answered, “Go ahead.”
She ripped off the tape and opened the flaps. There were some documents inside, and a few pictures. She picked up one of the snapshots, curling at the edges. A little boy with a shock of white hair dressed in a pair of shorts, solemn and unsmiling. Her lips tilted. Sully. She didn’t need the name printed on the back to recognize the still, waiting air that had existed even when he was—she checked the back again—seven years old. She riffled through the photos, ignoring the yellowed documents for the time being. There was one of Sully as an infant, and a few more taken up until the time he was eleven. One showed him with his mother, who was holding up a hand to ward off the camera.
She took out the packet of documents, and noticed a few more snapshots on the bottom of the box. She picked them up and studied them, turning them over to read the back. “Did you have any relatives?”
He looked swiftly through the cupboards, then brought handfuls of trash back to the box they were using to discard it. “If I did, I never knew them. Why?”
She turned to look at him, the photographs still in her hands, questions in her eyes. “Then who were Jed and Cage Sullivan?”
Chapter 11
Sully surveyed her impassively. A streak of grime marred her skirt, picked up, no doubt, from her position kneeling on the filthy floor. He’d expected to see horror in her eyes at his story; he’d steeled himself to face her revulsion. Pity was almost as distasteful.
Pity would have been simpler to overlook, to walk away from. But Ellie had offered more than that. When he’d seen those tears sliding down her cheeks, tears for him, the tight knot in his chest had loosened a fraction. It was then he’d realized how much he’d been anticipating a much different reaction. By telling her more, far more, than he’d ever told another soul, he’d expected to see her cringe away. It probably would have been easier for both of them if she had.
He strode over and took the photographs from her and studied them. The first depicted a toddler and an infant. In the next the boys were older. His mother was holding the younger of the two, and the other boy was standing beside them. He turned them over. They were both dated before his birth. He handed them back to Ellie and shook his head. “I can’t figure it. My mother was from Nebraska, but she came to Florida when she was eighteen. We had no relatives that I ever heard about.”
Ellie held up the packet of documents, and he took them from her, and flipped through them. There was his mother’s birth certificate, complete with her parents’ names, Henry James Sullivan and Marilyn Denton Sullivan. He was unprepared for the jolt the names gave him. They were unfamiliar; Marcy had never spoken of her home, had only said her family was dead. But they would have been his grandparents. For the first time in his life he thought about family, and what it would have been like to have one. He couldn’t imagine it. There had only been Marcy and him, and she’d always been more shadow than substance in his life.
“Is your birth certificate in there, too?” Ellie asked.
He shook his head. “I’ve got mine.”
“Then what are those?”
He tore his gaze away from the certificate in his hand and looked at the next one. He stared dumbly for a moment, then comprehension punched through him and sent him reeling.
“Sully?”
When he didn’t answer, Ellie rose and peered down at the document in his hand. “It’s another birth certificate.” Shock filtered through her voice, and her gaze flew to his. “For Jed Sullivan.”
He turned to the next paper, certain of what he’d see, yet the sting of shock was fresh. “And Cage Sullivan. Birth mother Marcy Elaine Sullivan. Fathers...unknown.” Just like his own read, he thought dully. There had been a lot of men through Marcy’s life over the years, transient men who hadn’t stayed for more than a month, a week, an hour. Three of them had become fathers. He doubted they’d ever known it, or that they would have cared.
Checking the dates, he found that the boys had been older than him—Cage by two years, and Jed by almost four. Brothers.
The shaft of emotion that pierced him then went deep and burned. He’d always been alone. Marcy had been more a self-indulgent child than a parent, concerned with getting high, staying high and getting money for her next fix. It had never occurred to him to wish for brothers or sisters. He’d learned early you didn’t ask, you didn’t want. Disappointment was infrequent when there were no expectations.
He turned to the last sheaf of papers in his hand, and unfolded them. They were written in legalese, and he frowned, trying to make sense of them. He felt Ellie’s hand on his arm, heard her indrawn breath, knew understanding dawned in both of them at the same time.
“She gave them up.” His voice sounded dully in his own ears.
“They were taken away,” Ellie murmured. She leaned closer to read the rest of the document. “They charged her with neglect. She probably didn’t have many options.”
He swung away from her. “She chose to sign over her parental rights rather than make the changes the court ordered. Everyone has options, Marcy just chose the drugs. She always did. Do you know how many treatment centers I’ve put her in over the years? Six. She only made it three days in the last one before she took off again.”
He gave a humorless laugh that tasted sour in his throat. “They told me at those places over and over that the addict has to want to change. And no matter how much she cried and promised, she didn’t want to change.”
He prowled the small area, the tension coiled tightly inside him. “I’d set her up in an apartment, pay the rent on it and pay a nearby restaurant to feed her whenever she stopped in. I knew better than to send her money, or give her anything she could sell. But that last time I took her to treatment did it. When she ran, she ran from me. She went on her own rather than chance me trying, one more time, to help her.”
He avoided looking at her. Coming here had freed longdormant memories. It hurt seeing Ellie here, more than he could ever have predicted. And because it hurt he lashed out, wanting to shock her. “I didn’t ask the hospital what she died of. I didn’t have to. She had AIDS.” He turned to her then, wanting to see the revulsion, the horror on her face. “She was diagnosed five years ago. The only surprise is that it didn’t appear sooner. Her life-style was about as high-risk as it gets.”
He waited then for the disgust to appear on her face. But she said nothing, and her expression never changed. Her gaze was steady on him and for a moment he forgot himself and wished he could take what it was offering. Comfort, sympathy.
He scrubbed both hands over his face. The room, the day’s events were closing in on him. It was so easy back here to remember where he came from, and what he was, what he’d always be. A man who’d grown up suspicious of everyone he’d ever met, one who regarded trust as a luxury for dreamers and fools.
Ellie rose with the bag and the box she’d taken from the closet. “I think we’re done here.” Her voice was calm, matter-of-fact. She handed him the bag and retained her hold on the box. “Let’s see if you can remember how to get us back to the hotel.”
He let her guide him out the door and didn’t look back as she pulled it shut behind them. He didn’t have to. The room, as with all the others like it, was branded on his memory. She talked all the way down the stairs. He couldn’t concentrate on the words, but focused on the way her low, soothing voice seemed to cut through the sounds of arguments, the raucous stereo and the cries of the child that seemed to envelop them.
The old woman was still sitting in front of the building. Without a word he dropped the sack in front of her, then turned Ellie away as the woman started rooting through it. “We’re going to have to walk a ways to find a taxi.” His eyes cut to the group of gangbangers loitering on the curb, and he moved closer to Ellie. “Don’t worry. We’ll make it okay.”
There was a
different meaning in her eyes, in her voice, when she said, “I’m not worried. I have faith in you.”
Her words brought a familiar jangle of pain and pleasure, but for once, just this once, he pushed the pain aside and let himself concentrate on the pleasure.
“You didn’t eat much.” Elizabeth got up and joined Sully at the railing of the small balcony outside his room.
“I’m not really hungry.”
That’s what he’d told her when they’d gotten back to the hotel and she’d suggested finding a restaurant. She’d decided to order room service instead. As far as she knew, he hadn’t eaten at all that day, and the hours had been stressful. She eyed the remaining food on the trays that had been delivered by the hotel kitchen. If the time came when he was prepared to eat, she could order more. She just wished it would be as easy to fix what else ailed him.
It was agonizing to watch Sully hurt. A stranger might interpret his silence, his absence of expression, as a lack of feeling. But she knew better. Beneath the surface there seethed such a cauldron of emotions she wondered if he could even identify all of them. She doubted he’d had much practice at it. Left to his own devices, he’d tuck them away in the bruised corners of his mind, along with the unwanted memories he’d torn open for her today. The need to comfort warred with the need to make him lay some of those emotions out in the open where their sting would lessen with time. She took a deep breath and prepared for battle.
“What did you arrange with the funeral home?”
He leaned on his forearms and didn’t look away from the tiny pool ten stories below them. “A graveside service tomorrow afternoon. Someone from the place will say a few words.” His voice was raspy from the cigarettes he’d been smoking nonstop since they’d returned to the hotel.
He brought the one in his hand to his lips absently. “Marcy wasn’t much for religion, so it didn’t make sense to get a minister.”