by J. R. Ward
“So I see.”
“You must be relieved.”
“I guess.”
Now he was the surprised one. “You don’t actually want her to stay with you, do you?”
“Not really. But I want her safe above all. That’s what I worry about.”
“She’s not a geriatric who’s a slip-and-fall risk. She can move back in tonight.”
“Is the security system fully functional?”
“Not yet. They need to come and put contacts on the new window.”
“Then she’ll stay with me until that happens.”
Off in the distance, a dog barked and the neighbor on the right came home from work, parking their Kia in their garage. He hoped they didn’t see through the bushes that there were people out here and decide to come over and talk about the tree falling.
“Are you okay?” Anne asked. “I’m worried about you. You’re too quiet.”
“Nah, I’m fine. It’s no problem. Nothing I can’t handle.”
“Okay.” There was another pause. “You sure you don’t want to keep talking?”
“Yup.”
In the back of his mind, he was aware that they were following standard compartmentalizing procedure, and as he thought about Emilio in that hospital bed, and Danny going rogue-crazy, and Chuckie P’s drinking problem, he felt compelled to open the normally closed door of stoic privacy.
Not as it pertained to his own life, though. No, no, not tonight, motherfuckers.
“Can you please tell me why you hate Mom so much?” he asked. And before Anne could shoot him down, he shook his head. “I just want to understand. I’m not asking to try to change your mind or where you’re at or to judge you. I just don’t get it. Maybe if I did, I could stop bugging you about her.”
As Anne’s eyes drifted over to the grill to avoid his own, he shrugged. “And if you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine, that’s your business.”
The way she looked back at him in downright shock made him think about the mayor’s diatribe on his failings as a manager. Fuck. He really had a problem, didn’t he.
Anne took a deep breath, as if she were bracing herself to lift a car off the ground. “Do you remember, two days after the funeral, when you and Uncle Aaron went on that biking trip? The one Dad was supposed to go on with you.”
There was only one “funeral” in this context. And he hated the memories he had of that day: the hundreds of firefighters in dress uniform, walking behind an engine bearing his father’s draped coffin; his mother twitchy in her black outfit; him, just graduated from college and ready to enter the Academy in the fall.
Anne . . . refusing to cry, even though she’d only been thirteen at the time.
Funny, he hadn’t thought about it until now, but he’d considered her lack of emotion to be disrespectful. And he’d resented her because of it since that day.
He brought himself back to the present. “We were raising money for the benevolence fund on that bike ride.” Images of him and their father’s best friend, “Uncle” Aaron, pedaling like hell through Connecticut reminded him of how they’d both had anger to work out on those ribbons of asphalt through the countryside. “We made like fifteen hundred bucks for them.”
“I stayed behind.”
“You wanted to go.”
“I was a girl, I wasn’t allowed.” As anger tightened his sister’s features, he realized he’d rarely seen her without that expression hovering close by, a driver waiting to take the wheel. “You were supposed to be home the next night.”
“We decided to hang at the campground.”
“Yeah.”
There was a long pause. “So?”
“A woman showed up at the house the next afternoon. She was young. Pretty, for a townie. She was frantic, so Mom invited her inside. When I heard the voices, I tiptoed down the stairs and listened out of sight. The girl was pregnant. She said it was Dad’s.”
A cold shaft went down Tom’s spine. “What are you— who the hell was she?”
“She was his girlfriend. That’s what she told Mom.”
Tom blinked like he’d been slapped. “Jesus . . . Christ. What did Mom do?”
“She wasn’t surprised.”
“Excuse me?”
Anne shrugged and leaned back in the lawn chair. “I gathered this wasn’t the first time it had happened. That a woman showed up at the house, I mean. I also got the feeling that the girl had been banking on a very different outcome than carrying the baby of a dead fireman. She was looking for money. For an abortion. She’d just turned twenty.”
Tom stared at his sister, looking for signs that this had been blown out of proportion, improperly extrapolated, falsely reported.
“I’d spent my life trying to impress that man,” she said. “And he knocks up a nineteen-year-old? And then Mom . . . she gave the girl the money. She didn’t even seem upset. It was like paying off a yardman for godsakes. I didn’t sleep all night. I just kind of was done with them both at that point. Mom, I’d never had anything in common with, anyway. She was always pushing me into these frilly, flowery dresses, and trying to get me to go to dance class. I’d been sick of her for a while, but after that? I just lost all respect for the woman. Like, seriously, what kind of doormat do you have to be to get betrayed to that extent and just take it? Yell! Throw things! Stand up for yourself. Leave the bastard, especially if it happened before. But don’t roll over like you don’t have a voice in your own life. It’s as if she were just cleaning up one more mess for him—how the hell could she live with herself?”
Nineteen? Tom thought. Nineteen.
As he did the math, he figured his father had been even older than he was now. The thought of a relationship like that made his stomach roll.
“And when it came to Dad?” Anne shook her head. “I just refused to buy into the lie anymore. He was supposed to be this hero down at the station, this stand-up guy who rescued people and saved pets by running into burning buildings. Come to find out, he was a philanderer who liked girls barely out of high school. All I’d ever wanted to be was him, and suddenly, I had nothing to live up to, nothing to be proud of. Those two people brought me into this world. I guess I owe them a debt for that. But I don’t like either, and wouldn’t choose to associate with them otherwise.” She cursed. “At the end of the day, he fucked a teenager and she enabled him, and it wasn’t the first time. And that’s too ugly for me to bother trying to rationalize.”
Tom opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried again to speak . . . and failed.
“You had no idea, huh,” his sister said quietly.
He just shook his head. “Is it wrong to say . . . I liked the hero image better?”
“No, it’s honest.”
“Do you know who the girl was?”
“No, I’d never seen her before. And as far as I’m aware, she never came back.” Anne rubbed the back of her neck like it was full of tension. “How many others were there, you know? I mean, you don’t just start there. That girl was the culmination of a pattern of bad decisions and behavior.”
Images of their father, tall and strong, in turnouts at the station came to him. Like Anne, Tom had molded a life on living up to those memories, and the fact that the man had been killed early had turned those recollections into legend.
Taken the man and made him a god.
But the Bible had a point about not worshipping false idols, didn’t it.
* * *
When Anne finally left her parents’ house, she was nervous abandoning her brother on that porch. He was too still, too composed, for the bomb she’d just dropped on his head.
Pent-up anger had finally made her speak frankly, and as she got into her car, she wondered whether she’d done the right thing in staying quiet all this time. Didn’t that make her as bad as her mother, who’d covered up things? Looking at it like that, she should have told Tom long ago.
Then again, when would she have had the chance to talk to him about it all? Tom was just as sh
e was, locked behind a fence of barbed wire when it came to things of a personal nature.
At least, she’d finally done the right thing. Pulled back the curtain. Cut the shit. Spoken the truth.
So why did she feel so goddamn awful?
Driving through familiar streets, she got caught up in the past, remembering a childhood spent running after her brother and being left out of things because she was a girl. She had always ended up sidelined with her mother, relegated to cheerleader instead of participant because of something she couldn’t change and hadn’t volunteered for.
And her mom had been perfectly fine with all that, content to raise a daughter in her image of pretty possession instead of equal partner.
Anne had to guess that to do it any other way would have shined too much light on how fucking lame Nancy Janice’s own existence was.
And we wouldn’t want to do that, especially not when there was furniture to move around and clothes to pick out.
As for her father’s funeral, that somber display of firefighters coming out to honor one of their dead was the last afternoon Anne had been proud to be an Ashburn. After the service at St. Mary’s, she and her mom and Tom had gotten in a Lincoln Town Car and proceeded to the Catholic cemetery where the family plot was.
Tom had been remote. Anne had been determined not to cry like a girl. And Nancy Janice had only cared about everyone having a Certs so their breath was fresh.
Like hygiene and the impression made on others was the only thing that mattered.
It had been a spring day, cold and bracing, the wind eating through coats and chilling ears and noses in spite of the sun in the sky. After disembarking from the limo with her minty-fresh breath, Anne had stood in her black dress, next to her mother in a black dress, by her brother in a black suit, in front of the black hole of the freshly dug grave. The fire engine bearing her father’s coffin had been the one he had crewed on, and it had been draped in black bunting.
The firemen escorting it had all had tears in their eyes.
But Anne hadn’t. Even as the men had shifted her father off that engine’s top deck and carried him over to the grave that was waiting for him, even as the little girl inside of her had wept and been lost, she had refused to break with the decorum that was all around her.
She had searched for women on the service. Been relieved to find four or five in the two hundred or so in uniform—because that meant that she had a shot.
Tom had eventually cried. Not her, though. Not even as the priest in the black vestments had read from the Bible as her father, her hero, the head of their family, had been lowered into the greedy earth.
And the next day that pregnant girl had shown up at the house.
She had stayed about an hour. Anne had tiptoed back to her room when the conversation had come to an end, the cost of $582 given, the question of a check answered, her mother heading to the kitchen for her purse.
The windows by Anne’s bed had looked out on the front yard, and the crappy car parked across from the house had been one she’d never seen in the neighborhood before.
The girl had left and walked over to it. She’d put the check in the pocket of her jeans as she’d gotten in, and as she’d pivoted, Anne had seen her face. If it had been a put-on, then she’d been a terrific actress: she’d been crying so hard, it had been a wonder she could drive, her face contorted into a mask of pain and suffering.
No, Anne thought. It hadn’t been a lie.
Coming back to the present, she saw where she had driven to and cursed. “Shit.”
It was the 499 stationhouse. Somehow, in her distraction, her hand and feet had taken her here.
Then again, it had been her father’s house, too.
Putting the Subaru in park, Anne sat back and stared across the road. The old red fire station was framed by the gray sky, its windows clean, its sidewalk swept free of fallen leaves, its bay doors down.
They were probably on a call. Even though it was cool, going on cold, the doors were always open for the fresh air if they were on-site.
The past returned, sure as if it were a passenger getting into her car with her.
By the time Tom had returned from that bike ride after the funeral, Anne had hated both of their parents. And in the decade and a half that followed, all of her emotions had gotten locked into that one-note of righteous anger.
Except . . . now that she considered everything, she worried that the truth might be more complex.
Hazy memories of things she hadn’t thought about in years bubbled up. She remembered her father coming home after long shifts, changing and leaving immediately for Timeout—even as her mother’s face had fallen in disappointment. She recalled with clarity Nancy Janice planting a patch of flowers in the backyard and her father making a wisecrack about wasting lawn space.
But worse, she re-lived what it was like to hear her father’s booming voice rattling the closed door of her parents’ bedroom as he yelled at his wife about what had been cooked, cleaned, purchased, or given away. Big Tom had been a product of the military, and as such, nothing in the house could ever be out of his control. And if an errant pair of shoes had been taken off by the back door and left there? It had never been the kid’s fault.
It had been Nancy Janice’s.
Looking back on it now, the dominance her father had exerted over everything at the house, even as he’d rarely been home, seemed like just an excuse to yell at the wife. A way of justifying the release of anger and frustration that built up as the result of him doing a brutally hard and dangerous job.
God, Anne thought. Put like that, what else had she expected her mom to turn into?
Maybe the adaptive behavior of being a doormat wasn’t a critical character flaw.
Maybe . . . it had been survival.
chapter
41
Help me . . . I can’t . . . breathe . . .”
Danny leaned down and put his face through the side window of the T-boned car. The older woman behind the wheel was in her late sixties, and there was blood in her gray hair from where her head had struck the inside of her door on impact.
“I’m getting you out, don’t you worry. What’s your name?”
“Silvia. My granddaughter—”
Danny nodded. “We got her out of her car seat. She’s just fine. Let’s get you free.”
The accident had taken place in the middle of a four-lane intersection. The woman had been traveling westbound on the green light when some eastbound hotshot had blown through his red turning arrow and hit her so hard, it’d pushed her car all the way off the asphalt and onto the shoulder.
“I can’t . . . breathe . . .”
“There’s gonna be some noise. Stay with me, Silvia.”
Bringing the hydraulic splitter up, he crammed the twin wedges into the hinged seam of the door and engaged the power. The squeaking and squealing rang in his ears as the tool separated the busted steel panel from the body of the car so that he could yank it free and expose the victim.
Paramedic team members ran forward and began their assessment as Danny tossed the useless hunk of door out of the way. The aggressor’s car had likewise cue-balled off into the weeds, and its driver was standing off to the side with airbag powder all over his black shirt, his face swollen and red.
Made you want to go over and finish that nose job with your fist.
Danny refocused on Silvia. Her mouth was open, and she was wincing and gasping. Given what kind of shape her door was in, she probably had broken a rib or two and had a pleural effusion due to a pneumothorax or hemothorax. Or both. But the good news was that head wound looked mostly superficial even though it was bleeding.
She was going to live.
At least . . . he thought she was going to live. What if she had underlying conditions? What if it was a blood clot in her lungs instead?
Or a myocardial infarc?
As the last of the light bled out of the sky, and the headlights of the rerouted traffic flashed i
n his eyes, his heart started to pound and he looked toward one of the ambulances. In the glow from the bay’s illumination, the four-year-old granddaughter was screaming her head off as strangers with scary-looking medical things came at her.
She was terrified about her grandmother and for herself. All because some prick was in a hurry.
How many times had he seen this, innocent lives interrupted by assholes who thought their shit was more important than the traffic laws.
“Danny?”
As his name came over to him on the motor oil–scented air, he turned and was blinded by the strobe lights of police cars. When all he saw standing in front of him was a tall broad shape in turnouts and a helmet, reality bent and twisted, no longer something linear, but a convolution that doubled back on itself.
“John Thomas?” he breathed as he saw his dead twin brother before him.
“What the fuck?” Moose stepped closer. “What the hell are you talking about, Danny?”
“Sorry.” He shook himself. “Nothing. What’s up?”
Moose pointed to a flatbed truck that Danny hadn’t noticed having arrrived on scene. “I thought you might appreciate not getting run over as that thing backs up. ’Cuz you don’t seem to have seen it.”
As the reverse lights came on and the towing vehicle started coming toward Silvia’s wreck, Danny got with the program, picking up the door he’d taken off like he’d meant to do that all along. Man, it was alarming to note how much had progressed at the scene since he’d checked out. The other damaged car had been removed, Duff was putting sand down over the oil leaks under the light, and the police squad cars were getting ready to release the rerouted traffic.
On the ride back to the stationhouse, he stared out the engine’s lowered window. The others were talking about the Patriots game that was coming up, and Duff was saying he needed to get laid, and Moose was talking about his Charger, and Doc was behind the wheel, humming.
Danny tracked all of it to reassure himself that he was actually on the planet and that his brain was still capable of keeping up with reality.