by M. O'Keefe
“Tell me,” he said. “Just tell me the truth. Are you healthy? Is the baby healthy?”
“Why do you feel I owe you that? The truth? When you have never given me the same? How is that fair, Jack?”
It was starting to get cold, the wind blowing down the street from the mountains to the east of us. He ran his hand over his face and I stopped myself from telling him he looked tired. I stopped myself from caring that he looked like he might fall over at any moment.
“My father was killed by Lazarus,” he said, dropping his hands to stare at me. Right at me too, like I couldn’t look away from him and the naked nature of his gaze. This was the man in those nights at his house. This was the man whose skin I knew by heart. It was shocking to see him again.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Jesse and I were in college. Mom was already dead and they found Dad shot in the back of the head in the passenger seat of his car.”
I put my fingers to my lips, holding back my sounds of sympathy.
“Jesse and I came back from school and we were cleaning stuff up. Getting the house ready to sell and all that stuff. Going through pictures. It was… endless, you know,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe how much stuff my parents had. How many things they’d kept and how far we’d all spun away from each other. Anyway, we were mostly done, Jesse and me were both getting ready to go back to our schools, Jesse really fucking reluctantly, but I didn’t want to hear it. I just wanted to get back to classes, finish my degree and put all this shit behind me. No, I needed Jesse to just…go.”
“What happened?”
“Bates showed up.”
I sucked in a breath of air and then another, forcing myself to breathe.
“My dad owed Lazarus a half a million dollars.”
I thought of that tattoo under his arm. 500,000.
“And we had two weeks to pay it back, or one of us could work it out in trade, or one, perhaps both of us would get shot in the head in the passenger seat of some car. That was the deal Bates presented to me. There was no way we had that kind of money. No way we could get that kind of money. So I sent Jesse back to school, telling him I’d handle it, and I dropped out of school and went to work for Lazarus.”
“Oh my god.”
“Mostly, I was like a trophy he kept around. A warning to his other associates that debts got paid no matter what. That no one’s child or wife was safe.”
“What happened to Jesse?” I asked.
“He quit school, came back, tried to pay off the debt by risking his life in those fucking fights. And it didn’t matter. I was already in it. I already couldn’t get out.”
“Didn’t he try and stop you?”
“Of course,” he said with a wan smile. An exhausted broken smile in his exhausted defeated face.
I don’t care, I told myself, curling my hands into fists so I wouldn’t reach for him. Push back that tangle of curls over his forehead.
“That night,” he said. “The night you saw…what you saw…we’d spent the night before that in Oakland, picking up what we thought was a shipment of drugs. We got the container open and it was…” He looked away, up to the sky as birds flew overhead. “It was women.”
I felt myself gag.
“They were all dead.”
“Stop,” I said and he did. He closed his mouth. Coughed and didn’t say any more.
He would keep it inside if that was what I asked for.
“Then what?” I asked.
“You saw what happened next.”
“No. How did you get to that point? In the office?”
“Lazarus was threatening war on everyone we met. Every dock worker, every security guard. I thought we were all going to be killed. But we got him back to the Moonlight and we all kind of lost our minds. Bates… just started beating Lazarus. Like… I’d never seen him do anything like that before. And then he told me if I killed Lazarus, the debt would be paid. I could go.”
“And so you shot him? So you could be free.”
“I’ve been running that night over and over in my brain for months, but I think… I think I shot him because I wanted to. Because he was such a cancer. An evil. And the world was better without him in it. I shot him because in my upside down world, it was the right thing to do. Bates just gave me the excuse.”
“But he set you free.”
“For the price of Lazarus’s life and my silence, yes. He set me free. I have to stay out of the city for a while. You should too, because of what you saw.”
“He texted me,” I told him. “He told me to meet you at the Moonlight. That’s why I went. I wouldn’t have gone, but I was so scared for you. After that message—”
The message when he told me he loved me. Neither of us said a word about that. We stiffened. He coughed. We might never be able to talk about that voice mail. It might just be a thing that happened in the past. Like those three days in his house.
Memories. That’s all.
“I think he brought you to the Moonlight,” he said, “because he knew I was lying to you and he knew how you felt about me. And he wanted you to see who I really was.”
“Why is that any of his business?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t understand Bates. I never will.”
We stood there for a long time, silent and breathing. The world spinning around us.
“I pushed you away, Abby,” he said, “because I never thought I’d be free. I couldn’t let you get attached. I couldn’t get attached, because I believed I would always be owned by Lazarus.”
The door to the café opened and Margaret stuck her Mrs. Claus head out and swore at me.
“The hell you doing, Abby? You got those boys in there wanting to call in the National Guard.”
“Sorry, Margaret,” I said. “I’ll be in in two seconds. Tell Dale and Doug that I’m fine. That everything is fine.”
She muttered something foul under her breath and went back inside.
“That’s my truth, Abby,” he said. “I’ve done terrible things, telling myself I was keeping my brother safe. Paying my father’s debts. I’ve turned myself into someone I never dreamed I’d be. And I’m not telling you that to make you sympathetic, but just to make you understand how I didn’t, not once, know what to do with you. How to want you and not hurt you. How to let you be in my life in any way. I messed up, I know. But I don’t know if I could have done it any differently.”
I understood that. I didn’t want to, but I did.
“And I know you want me to leave. I understand that. But I can’t, princess.” The endearment made me flinch. It made me cringe and ache. Because part of me so badly wanted to still be his princess. “You’re pregnant. And you’re alone.”
“Lots of women have babies on their own.”
“Not my baby, Abby.”
His eyes… oh, his eyes. His eyes told me he wasn’t going anywhere. His eyes told me he would not leave, and he would not push me away. Never again.
Something had happened to me since coming out here. I stopped wondering what my sister would do if she were in my place. I stopped wishing I was smarter about some things. Leaving the city and running out here had pulled away some of the doubts I lived with. Largely because there wasn’t any time anymore.
That version of me, so beautiful but so insecure—it seemed like a long time ago. A different person, even. I didn’t see my beauty when I looked in the mirror anymore, I just saw my face.
I just saw me.
And I looked at Jack and I tried to just see him, but it was difficult because he wasn’t easily seen. He was buried deep and down. And out of sight.
But I’d seen him, those three days in his apartment, I wasn’t making that up. I’d seen him.
And that man, the one I’d seen, he deserved the truth.
“I’m healthy. The baby is healthy.”
“Thank you,” he whispered, his eyes damp.
“I have to go back to work,” I told him and opened the door.<
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“I’m not leaving,” he said. “I’m staying in town until we get some things figured out.”
Probably he wanted to talk about the baby and the future and custody and money, and I didn’t care about those things.
Well, I did, sure. But mostly… mostly I cared about him.
I ran hundreds of miles, and here I was right back in the same spot.
In trouble. With Jack Herrara.
Chapter Eighteen
AFTER
JACK
The Bluebird Motel was nothing special, but despite the crappy mattress and the sound of semis rolling by on the highway outside my door, I slept like I was dead. I woke up disoriented and strange, reaching like I did every morning for my anxiety. Searching through my subconscious for all the things I worried over.
Abby.
The baby.
Her future.
And I realized they were all here, within reach. I’d found her, and she was healthy, and the baby was healthy, and the future was not a cold blank place.
I showered and then, standing in a threadbare Bluebird Motel towel, wiped the steam off the mirror and carefully shaved, putting more into my appearance than I had in years. I got dressed. Having left all my suits behind in the city, I planned to never wear a suit again. Not ever. And instead I wore the clothes of who I’d been. The son, brother and student.
Old faded Levi’s and a fisherman’s sweater my mother had knit for me before she died. All of it still fit, thanks to the weight I’d lost in the last three months. I was like a razor-sharp version of myself.
And I liked it. I liked the sweater against my skin and I liked the age in my eyes.
I wondered if Abby would like it. If she would see this version of me and miss the gangster in the suits with the scowl.
I liked the version of her I’d seen yesterday. She looked somehow younger, with that braid down her back and no makeup, but also older. More solid. More grounded. And I knew that I had done that to her.
I had taken away some of the brilliance that had attracted me to her. I had wiped away some of the shine.
And I had no business admiring what I’d left behind. No business thinking her more beautiful for the pain I’d caused her.
But I did.
I grabbed my keys from the uneven table beside the door and headed out, planning to go back to the café. I would give her the money she left behind, and I’d try to convince her to let me take care of her in whatever capacity she felt comfortable with.
I expected her to resist. I expected to have to wear her down.
Halfway into town I saw the church spire, and my soul recognized the beacon as something I needed. I hadn’t confessed once since the murder. Since Abby. The baby. I’d been clinging to my sins like a rosary.
I turned into town earlier than I would to get to the café. Over the tree line I followed that spire until I was stopped in front of a Catholic church that was sandwiched between a train overpass and the public library.
Without thinking, I put the car in park and went inside. Embraced immediately by the smell of incense and mildew. Wood cleaner.
I loved that a Catholic church in small-town Idaho was in so many ways no different than a Catholic church in San Francisco. The gory stations of the cross plaques. The blood-red stained glass. The crucifix.
The violence of it all made me feel at home.
“Can I help you?” a man asked, poking his head up from behind the lectern at the front of the building.
“I’m, ah, just passing through,” I said, walking slowly up the center aisle.
“Well, we’re always happy to see those passing through. I’m Father John.” The man came down the stairs, wearing the collar of his faith. The black clothing of his calling. “I’m trying to fix a microphone problem at the lectern, but I think I’ve only made it worse. Betty told me I would make it worse, and now I’ve only proven her right.”
“I’m Jack,” I said, feeling tongue tied. I only talked to priests when they were behind screens in confessional. “When are your hours of confession?”
“Sundays,” Father John said. “After Mass.”
Sunday was four days away. I must have looked crestfallen because he said, “But I have time to talk now, if you’d like.”
“Talk?” I asked, like the idea was horrible.
“Not so different from confession, really.”
Except that it was completely different than confession. There was a script in confession. There was a screen between me and the priest. This… was not that at all.
He sat down in the pew closest to him. “Please, have a seat.” He gestured to the pew in front of him and I found myself sitting down.
“What brings you to Bloomfield?” he asked, his blue eyes piercing beneath bushy white eyebrows.
I killed a man.
That’s what I wanted to say, but I wasn’t there yet. I might never be there. I might never be able to say those words to a priest in my life.
“A woman.”
“Uh oh.” He said it with a smile, a tired old joke that had the effect of making me smile.
“She’s having my baby.” Even saying the words was ridiculous. They sounded outrageous coming out of my mouth. Abby was having my baby.
“Are you married?” He sounded stern and disapproving and I very nearly got up, but I’d come here for this. I’d come to be judged and then forgiven.
“No.”
“Are you going to be?”
I hadn’t thought of that. Married? It was the twenty-first century, marriage was hardly a requirement for being a family. But… married? The idea of it, the quiet nature of the word and all the strange comfort it would provide. Me and Abby and the baby. Forever.
“If… if that’s what she wants.”
“What do you want?” he asked, and I turned sharply to look at him.
He held his hands out in front of him. “It seems like a reasonable question. Do you want to marry her?”
Yes, I thought, so small and so quiet. Of course. She is all I want.
“I don’t think what I want matters,” I said.
“Who told you that?” he asked, sounding angry on my behalf.
“It’s… well, it’s complicated.”
He sighed and sat back against his pew. “I think that’s bullshit.”
I gaped at him in surprise and he smiled at me. “The important things,” he said. “Love. Forgiveness. Commitment. Faith. Hope. They are simple things with yes or no answers. You love or you don’t. You believe or you don’t. You forgive or you don’t.”
I sat there for a long time, and he sat with me silently.
“Son,” he finally said, “you are welcome here for as long as you like, but I need to fix that microphone before Betty finds out I broke it worse.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Remember,” he said as he passed, a friendly hand on my shoulder. “There are worse things than love.”
Perhaps that was true.
But I couldn’t think of them.
I showed up at the café an hour later, not sure if she would be working but hoping she would be. Because I had real doubts anyone in that place would tell me where she lived.
My plan, such as it was, was to sit there and eat and drink coffee until she came in.
Walking into the coffee-scented air with the bell ringing overhead was such a familiar thing, and so soon after the piercing familiarity of church, I felt overcome in a way. By all the parts of my life. My mother and my past. My brother. And now Abby and perhaps my kid.
Abby was there. Behind the counter. An apron tied around her waist, revealing the small swell of her stomach.
She looked so different than she did in the city. Plainer. Simpler. Fiercer.
I wondered if other people looked at her and just thought she carried some weight there. Or did everyone know she was pregnant?
I wanted—like a caveman—for everyone to know she was pregnant. With my baby.
She glanced
my way as I stepped in, and her cheeks were flushed from the heat of the café, and today her hair was braided again but this time it was wrapped at the top of her head in a bun.
Placing my memory of her from the club next to this creature watching me—I would be unable to say they were the same person. That girl had been lovely. Captivating.
This woman was irresistible. I wanted to crawl to her on my knees.
She didn’t look surprised to see me. But she didn’t look happy either. I didn’t know what to make of this resolute creature in front of me.
“Hungry?” she asked, cutting through the thousands of things we could say.
“Yes.”
I felt my hunger like a black hole inside of me. My hunger for her. For that smile in her eye and the glow that suffused her. For a baby, a family. For a place to belong.
“Have a seat at the counter. The eggs and bacon are local—everything else is gross.”
“I heard that!” yelled the crusty old woman from yesterday as she walked by.
“Well, it is,” said Abby with a shrug.
“Eggs and bacon sound good.”
“Have a seat, I’ll bring you some coffee.”
I sat down and spent the next hour watching her light up the room like she did in the Moonlight Lounge. She had magic, and I didn’t know if she even realized how magical she was. Even here in the middle of nowhere, she brought something to the people in this café that had nothing to do with the food. She smiled and touched people’s shoulders as she poured their coffee. She looked right into their eyes and said thank you and you’re welcome and I hope you enjoyed it with complete sincerity.
It was her dream, the café where everyone came to get what they need, and she was the one pouring it with her coffee.
Finally, I had to turn my back on her before I fell apart. Before I fell to my knees.
At long last she came up to my shoulder, wearing the sweater she wore yesterday, and she had a plate in her hand. An omelette with a side of tomatoes.