by M. O'Keefe
Where Abby, so sweet, so warm and so bright, gets what she needs.
She’d left without it. I gathered the envelope and slipped it into the pocket inside my sweat-soaked and blood-splattered jacket.
That night, before the diner, before going back to my place, she told me her address, and I drove there without thinking.
Her apartment was an old post-war building, with a security door at the front that I couldn’t get through. I stood in the drizzle of a late night and looked up at the windows. One apartment was lit up.
I had no idea if it was hers. I fished out my phone and looking up at that window I called her, believing—hoping—the woman who’d rushed to the club after getting that message from me would not, even having seen what she saw, refuse my call.
She would answer just to know if I was all right.
She would answer just to tell me she was never going to see me again.
I prayed because it was second nature to me. Because I spent most of life praying.
Please answer. Please, my sweet girl, please let me tell you you are safe. Let me tell you you don’t have to be scared. But you have to leave town.
But the phone went immediately to voice mail.
“This is Abby. Sorry I can’t get to the phone. Leave a message, or, better yet, text me.”
I closed my eyes at the sound of her voice. The laughter buried in the sharp edge of her tone, like she was asking me to laugh with her because she was so bad at returning calls.
I missed her. I missed her so much.
And she’d texted me. Days ago. And the only reason she’d reach out was if she was pregnant.
But Abby being pregnant wasn’t something I could think about right now.
I couldn’t let it in. Not even a little. That would break me into pieces.
“Listen,” I said. “I know… I know what you saw, but I can explain. And I know how fucking dubious that sounds, but this is real. Everything has changed and I…I want to tell you you’re okay. You’re safe. You need to call me. Please. I will not hurt you. Call me please.”
I hung up, staring up at that window, rain in my eyes.
But she never did.
Chapter Fourteen
JACK
AFTER
“Do the thing,” Sammy said, over Lamar’s bent head.
“I’m not doing the thing,” I said, shivering in my overcoat. The wind whistling across the bay was no joke tonight.
We’d dragged Lamar out of his house into the alley, lined on either side with dumpsters. We’d pulled Lamar away from a poker game surrounded by all his friends, all of them carrying guns. Not one single guy at that table, though, lifted a finger for Lamar when we came in.
Sammy and I, we were the Devil’s men. Stand up against us and we’d lay you to waste.
“Do the fucking thing,” Sammy said. “Lazarus likes it when you do the thing.”
I took a deep breath and turned toward Sammy and Lamar.
Sammy giggled, the giggle of the not totally sane.
“Listen, Lamar… can I call you Lamar?” I asked.
Lamar’s mouth was such a mess I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Go fuck yourself, was the best guess.
I paced in front of him, my boots kicking through the shallow puddles of moonlit rain and the various darker splatters of Lamar’s blood.
“Great, Lamar. The problem you’re running into here is your business model. You have made the mistake of selling an inferior product in the same market as my boss, for a lower price point. In a free capitalist society this might pull the price down of our product in an effort to regain our market share. But this isn’t a free capitalist society, is it, Lamar?”
His response this time was a very clear: Fuck my mother.
“Not really an option for you, she’s dead,” I said, with relief. If she knew what I’d become…
“But what we have in this market is a command economic system with one person controlling price, distribution, supply, and manufacturing. And you know who that command is, right?”
Lamar was disturbingly quiet.
“He knows,” Sammy jeered. “Everybody fucking knows, Lazarus runs this block, and the next block and the next one.”
Sammy was eager to get on with the beating he was supposed to give Lamar in an effort to teach the rest of the entrepreneurial drug dealers trying to make a living in the Loin, a lesson.
“If you tried to sell your shit literally a half a mile to the east or north, we wouldn’t have to do this,” I told Lamar, nearly pleading with him. “You wouldn’t make as much, not at first, but if you kept the price low, word would get out and in time, the market would come to you.”
It was suddenly a tragedy that Lamar was so greedy. So stupid. That he was weak this way.
Like my father. Just like my fucking father.
“He’s not your father.” Abby walked out of the shadows near the entrance to the alley. The streetlights turning her sequined dress to gold.
“I know,” I said.
“Jack?”
Lamar wasn’t Lamar anymore. It was my father on his knees in front of me, held in Sammy’s demented grip.
“Stop,” I said. “This isn’t real.”
“Please,” my father begged, his face so broken I could barely recognize him. “I have kids. Two boys—”
“Stop!”
“I’ll get you the money.”
“Stop!” I screamed but my father wouldn’t shut up.
“I’m sorry,” he sobbed. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I punched him, breaking his nose. Red blood splattered across the front of my shirt. I punched my father while Sammy held him and Abby watched and I thought of my brother. Of my mother and the tears she wept.
And how my father’s apologies never fixed anything.
I woke up with a start and hit my head against the car’s window. Jesus.
It had been a dream. I was in my car, not an alley off Taylor Street. My dad… Abby. I groaned and rubbed my face, trying to shake off the lingering horror and guilt from that shitty dream. My apologies, when I finally found Abby, would mean about as much as my father’s did. Which was nothing.
I checked my watch in the gloom of a San Francisco dawn.
Five a.m.
I’d been asleep for a half hour. Shit. I looked across the street at Abby’s apartment, the doors still shut, the foyer light in the old walkup gleaming gold.
While I watched, an old woman, a plastic hair protector tied under chin, struggled through the second door into the foyer. My chance.
I got out of my car, ran across the street, catching the outside door just as she was struggling to open it and pull her grocery roller cart behind her.
“Here, let me help you,” I said with rusty charm.
“Thank you,” she said and trundled past me.
Once inside and past the security code that had kept me in the car all night, I pressed on the button beneath her mailbox, and then touched the cream paper card with her handwriting on it.
Abby Blakely. Unit 212.
There was no answer as I pushed and another person came out, a woman about to go for a run. She gave me some side eye and I tried to smile at her, knowing how bad I looked.
“You’re looking for Abby?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“She moved out.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Last night. Packed up and left in the middle of the night. Gave me her plants and the shit out of her fridge.”
“Do you know where she went?”
The jogger shook her head, even though she clearly knew, and I had the sense refined in me in the last two years that if I pushed, if I pressed, she’d tell me everything.
“She must have gone to her sister’s,” I said, looking back at her mailbox, like there was an answer in there.
“Probably,” she said, but that was all. And it was fine, I could find Abby’s twin. I still had people in my life who could do some shady
shit. Finding Charlotte Blakely in the city of San Francisco wasn’t going to be so hard.
It took two months.
The information came in pieces from a guy I’d done some work with over the years, a computer hacker who called himself Domino.
And even he was surprised at how well Abby and her sister covered their tracks. Which only seemed to scream to me how desperate Abby was. How scared she probably still was. That she felt she had to disappear so completely.
Abby broke her lease the first night and emptied her bank accounts the second night.
Her sister sold her condo.
And they had been living, for a while, in a shitty hotel out by the airport while waiting for the sale of the condo to go through. I could only guess from everything Abby had told me about her sister that Charlotte sold her condo and gave Abby some of the money.
It shouldn’t matter. I shouldn’t feel anything about the fact that she took her sister’s money, but left mine on that bar. I understood—I did. But it still stung.
And then Abby left. She bought a shitbag truck and left town. Drove onto the interstate, and Domino lost all signal from her. She was living on cash and a new I.D.
But her sister stayed. Her credit card pinged every once in a while. Mostly at a gas station and a grocery store near the airport.
And I spent weeks searching every apartment building in South San Fransisco, leaning hard on every connection I had in that neighborhood, small-time drug dealers and professional gamblers, hookers, and pimps. I combed that neighborhood, staying as low as I could to the ground. Living off money I’d put away in different accounts for my brother if something ever happened to me. Looking over my shoulder every minute of every day.
And now here I was, somehow in front of my brother’s apartment. Fucking Shady Oaks. It was so perfect I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it first. The rent was cheap, there were always rooms, and it was right across from Jim’s Diner. Abby had stood next to me that night and read the wrought iron scroll work on the sign.
It would have seemed familiar to her, maybe? She might have picked it not remembering the connection to me, but feeling like she’d seen it someplace before.
And my brother picked it because of our mother and the damn diner.
And maybe after months of searching, this was the goddamn universe giving me a break. The coincidence of it was enough to break my heart.
My brother and Abby’s sister in the same fucking place.
I lifted my hand to knock on the door—the A in the 1A had swung loose from the top and hung upside down—but stopped. Suddenly nervous. Suddenly reluctant.
My brother. My brother was behind this door. It had been two years. Since I went to work for Lazarus, since I said the things I’d said and done the things I’d done to try and keep him safe.
And now here I was, asking for help. For favors.
This wasn’t going to go well. Jesse was pissed at me, and had every right to be. And if I told him that he could stop the fights—he’d know why. That the debts were all paid. And I’d paid them in blood.
But I’d come too far and there was too much at stake to stop now, just because it required me to come face to face with my little brother.
Do it, asshole, I told myself.
But still somehow it was harder than it should have been. Because we used to be friends, and I’d broken that as much as I could. Smashed it until it was hate and anger and fear.
We’d had this sleeping bag for those bus rides during high school wrestling season. It was some old thing of Dad’s, flannel on the inside, soft from use. Red and slick on the outside, mended by Mom where it had been torn. And we’d unzip the sleeping bag so we could each have the flannel side, and we’d brace our knees against the seat in front of us. And each of us would look out the window at the world waking up as we drove to some meet down the coast.
And the silence we shared—that was as close to a person as I’d ever been in my life until Abby.
Both of them, Abby and Jesse—all I wanted to do was keep them safe. But the dogs were at my door, nipping constantly at my heels. Bates was having me followed and it was only a matter of time before someone found out where I lived.
I had no more choices and there were no more chances to do this the right way. I had now and nothing else.
Jesse’s crap lock popped open in no time and I let myself into his rat trap one-bedroom apartment. I tried to feel nothing, I tried to stand there and feel absolutely nothing, but my baby brother was living like a hermit. Like a hermit in a shit apartment, with sheets taped to the windows and cracks in the plaster.
I saw pieces of him everywhere. The old bean bag chair from the house we grew up in. The Iowa State poster tacked over the worst of the wall.
And I also saw what he was doing in a way. The way he was living so lean, because he imagined I was living so lean. Each of us paying debts we couldn’t fucking afford.
And it was my fault.
I should have told him, right at the beginning. Right after the funeral. I should have let him in. Just like I should have let Abby in.
Going it alone had done what for me, exactly? Only made me more alone.
I sat down on the couch and ran my hands over my face. It had been a long two months after two even longer years, and I felt stretched so thin I was see-through.
I’m sorry, Jesse, I thought. I’m sorry it all got so bad.
He was in his bedroom. I heard the creak of his mattress and then after a few minutes the sound of his feet hitting the floor, and I braced myself for seeing him again.
But it did little good.
He came out of the bedroom into his living room like a beast. A wolf. He was a predator, heavily muscled. Alarmingly strong. A total stranger.
He’d had a fight two nights ago, that’s what I heard from the people who kept tabs on him for me. Reporting the news of these fights like Jesse was an Olympic prizefighter.
The fight had left its marks all over his body. His face was a black-and-blue mess. His eye swollen. His hands…
His hands looked like my hands the night after going on a run with Sammy. His hands looked violent and terrifying and I couldn’t believe we both ended up with hands like that.
“Well, look who finally decided to get out of bed!” I tried for a joke because otherwise I might cry.
He jumped and yelled and fell backward into his door and for a moment, I could have smiled.
“Sorry,” I said, still on the couch, unable to get to my feet, because the sight of Jesse after all this time had taken away my strength.
And then, for a second, split second so fast it was like I was imagining it out of thin air—my brother smiled. He smiled like he was happy to see me, and my heart lifted right into my throat.
But then the smile was gone and he was scowling at me hard.
“Jesus,” he muttered, “how the fuck did you get in?”
It was exactly what I deserved, so I put aside my hurt and got to my feet. Jesse, the muscle-bound beast, the basement prizefighter, stepped back like he was scared and I had to look away.
I never wanted to be this man. I wanted to be a fucking economist!
“How do you think?” I asked. Breaking into things had been one of my early skills, like numbers. I’d gotten us into more locked swimming pools and arcades as kids than I cared to admit.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t what?”
“Look at me like you miss me.”
I missed him like I missed my parents. Like I missed the life I was supposed to have. But two years ago I walked away from Jesse, and when he tried to follow I shut the door in his face.
So maybe he was right. I didn’t get to miss him.
I wanted to ask if he remembered when Dad died. How the two of us stood alone—no family, no friends—as they lowered the old man into the grave. On the far edge of the cemetery had been Bates and Sammy, smoking cigarettes and watching us. Like vultures, waiting for our weakness t
o be revealed so they could gobble us up.
Don’t show them anything, I’d said in his ear. Not now. Not ever.
We’d both gotten real good at not showing anyone anything. And suddenly, exhausted from the last two months, plagued by nightmare and fear, I wished I never said that. I wished somehow that I’d found a way to really let Jesse be free.
Because this shit he was doing. This was no better life than mine.
“I heard about the fight,” I said.
“You heard I won, then?” he said, all cocky.
“Yeah,” I said, trying not to get angry. Because I could see that he expected that. My brother wanted me to be angry. Because anger was easy. “I heard you won. And next week you’re going up against Martinez?”
He shrugged, like it meant nothing.
“Out of all the things you could do with your life. You pick this?” I asked, falling into the role even as I tried to stop.
“This is making me a lot of money.”
“Yeah,” I scoffed, looking around his place. “I can tell.”
“I’m good,” he said. “I’m really fucking good.”
I looked him over, every hard inch of him. He was a machine. All the boyhood beaten out of him.
“Of course you are,” I said, feeling like our mother. “But going up against these guys, you’re gonna get killed. Or hurt for real. Remember Lars?”
“Of course I remember Lars.”
He’d been a neighbor on Burl. A grown-up man living in his parents’ basement, playing video games with us because of something that happened to him in the war.
“Yeah, well, you’re probably one concussion away from Lars. Tell me, what was the point of getting you free of all Dad’s shit if you’re only going to get yourself killed in some junkyard fight in a basement?”
“It’s not like that.”
“Oh, it’s exactly like that.”
“Well, it’s none of your fucking business.”
“You could have been anything—”
He went to the door, ignoring the chain I’d cut through. His lock I’d busted; he’d fix it all later.