Jace

by Jessie Cooke

  “I brought my son to see his new sister.”

  The nurse looked at Jace and smiled. “Well, isn’t she a lucky girl to have such a big, strong brother to look after her?” Jace didn’t say anything until he felt a nudge in the middle of his back.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, in a voice that was already much too deep for a nine, almost ten-year-old.

  The nurse came around the desk and led them to Myrna’s room. Jace stayed in the background while the Colonel fussed over Myrna and the baby in a way that Jace had never seen the old man act. Jace wondered if the Colonel would like the baby more, just because he liked Myrna more than Jace’s mother. Jace was smart enough to know that didn’t make any sense, since it wasn’t his fault who his mother was. It wasn’t his fault that she had made him ugly. The Colonel was a good-looking man with light brown hair and green eyes, so Jace was sure his mother had been the ugly one. But what confused him was how he was the only one who seemed to know that wasn’t his fault.

  “Jason, come meet your sister,” the Colonel snapped at him. “Why are you always lurking in the corner? It’s creepy. You remind me of a serial killer, or something.” Jace didn’t know what a “serial killer” was, but he knew “creepy.” The kids at school had called him that, plenty of times. He wasn’t surprised that his old man used the term to describe him, especially now that he had a new kid to love. Jace did as he was told and went close to the bed. The Colonel held his arms out to Myrna, and reluctantly, it seemed, she placed the baby in his arms. Jace was suddenly looking into the baby’s face, and at first, he wasn’t impressed. She was pink and wrinkled and her eyes were closed. Her lips and cheeks were moving rapidly, like she was sucking on something. Jace thought she looked like one of the aliens on the old black-and-white movies he watched late at night. “Her name is Rosie,” the Colonel told him. As if the baby already knew her name, she pulled open her eyes and she was looking directly into her big brother’s. In shock, because he’d never seen anyone who looked like him, Jace said:

  “She has black eyes, like me.” He was happy about it, but Myrna stole his joy once again, snatching the baby from his father’s arms and saying:

  “They’re brown, and I’m sure they’ll lighten up eventually.”

  Jace hoped not. He hoped that God…or whoever was up there…had finally put someone else on earth like him. For the next few hours, Jace was forgotten again, as usual. But he kept his eyes on the baby. He got a strange feeling when he looked at her, especially when she opened her black eyes and looked back at him. It was a good feeling. It made him feel warm inside…and he felt something else too…protectiveness. He knew, before he left the hospital that day, that he was never going to let anyone hurt his baby sister. Maybe that was his purpose in life all along. He was too young to know about any of that. But what he did know was that from that point on, the only time he felt content, and safe, was when he was in the company of his little sister, Rosie. Rosie liked him too. She’d smile and coo every time he looked at her. When she got old enough, she’d reach for him and cry. Myrna didn’t seem to like how close the two of them were, especially since Rosie seemed to prefer Jace over her. The Colonel didn’t notice any of it, of course. He was back to business as usual and Rosie’s newness, or whatever it was, seemed to have worn off.

  When Rosie was two years old, Jace woke up to the sound of her screaming. His heart raced as he jumped out of his bed and ran down the hallway to the nursery. When he got there, Rosie was on the floor, bleeding from her tiny little mouth and nose. She’d tried to climb over the side of the crib and she’d fallen four feet to the floor. Jace ran over and scooped her up into his arms, just as Myrna came into the room. From there, it took Jace a while to even process what had happened. Myrna was screaming, and then an ambulance was there, and then the MPs. The Colonel showed up not long after and within days, Jace was on a bus, headed to a private, military boarding school, one thousand miles away from his sister.

  Twelve-year-old Jace stared out the window of the bus, thinking about Rosie. His little sister was barely two years old and she wouldn’t understand why he went away. She was too small to understand that it wasn’t his fault, that he’d done everything he could do to protect her. The pain consumed him, mile after mile. It felt like it was eating his insides out and even at twelve years old he knew he’d never survive it. He had to find a way to deal with the pain…so somewhere along the path between Boston and his new school in New York, he let the pain simmer, and then burn, and ultimately turn into rage. Jace knew rage. He’d known it for years. The difference between rage and pain was that he knew what to do to release the rage when it burned too hot. From that moment on, Jace was like a volcano, always on the verge on a spontaneous eruption…and for the next fifteen years of his life, that rage would be his compass, leading him, guiding him, controlling him…and every so often leaving him dangling on the very edges of hell, sometimes hoping the thread would snap and put him, and everyone around him, out of their misery.

  2

  Jace hated military school. It wasn’t any different for him. The kids still made fun of him, and he still spent most of his time alone. When he was fourteen he talked the old man into buying him a laptop for Christmas and in his spare time, of which he had a lot of for a teenage boy, he started Googling everything to do with motorcycles. He learned all about the history of them. He learned how they worked from the ground up. He studied every Harley Davidson manual he could find online. It wasn’t about Miss Morgan and her biker guy anymore…not really. He still had that image in his head…he romanticized riding off into the sunset with a beautiful blonde someday. But the poor kid had no real reason to honestly believe it would ever happen, especially with a beautiful woman. To make matters worse, he was in an all-boy school so he had no idea how to even talk to girls.

  The motorcycles kept him busy, but what made him happy was going home. He still didn’t care much for Myrna, or her for him, and the Colonel still looked right through him most of the time. But someone there finally loved him. Rosie would always be waiting at the door for him when the Colonel picked him up and brought him home for holidays and summer break. She didn’t like to be touched and cuddled like other kids, but Jace taught her how to give him “knuckles” and she always had a big smile on her face when she saw him. Jace knew there was something not right even before he left for military school. At two years old, his little sister wasn’t even trying to form words. He tried to ask Myrna about it then, and she would just snap at him that she would talk when she was ready. By the time she was three, she still wasn’t talking. She couldn’t feed herself and she had a strange aversion to a lot of different foods. She still wore a diaper too and Jace knew that wasn’t right. Myrna still wouldn’t talk to him about it, so he braved the Colonel’s annoyance and finally asked him. The Colonel, with a sad lack of emotion, simply said:

  “She’s autistic. She won’t ever be normal.”

  Jace had no idea what autistic was, so it became his new obsession. He studied everything he could find on it and he discovered that instead of concentrating on what his little sister couldn’t do, he would concentrate on what she could. Rosie loved numbers, and Jace realized that she had an amazing ability to put her number cards in order, 1-25, when she was only three years old. She was fascinated with clocks too, and she would stare at books with pictures of numbers in them for hours. While he was away, he would save part of the monthly allowance the Colonel sent him and buy a puzzle or game, or a book to take home to her when he went, and it always put a big smile on her face. Jace would do anything to see her smile. She was the only person on earth that seemed to genuinely love him. She didn’t care that he was too big for his age, or that his nose was too wide, or his eyes too dark. She looked at him like he was the prettiest thing she’d ever seen and Rosie became the only thing that thawed the ice that encased his teenage heart. And then…shit happened, again.

  Jace was fifteen years old and it was the first day of summer break. He was
even more excited than usual about the gifts that he’d bought for Rosie since the last time he had seen her nearly three months before. He found a doll that could sing the alphabet and count to one hundred. In doing his research on autism, he’d found out that dolls sometimes helped both with learning and the child’s social skills. Rosie was set to start kindergarten in the fall, and she’d never had interactions with other kids, at least that Jace knew of. He had also bought her a little tablet for preschoolers. She’d be able to practice her numbers and her alphabet on it, but what Jace was most excited about was that the tablet had a function where you could set it to “talk” to you. So when Rosie pressed any picture on the screen, it would tell her what that picture was. He hoped that between the doll and the tablet, she’d be somewhat more prepared for kindergarten in the fall. He hated the idea of her being bullied the way that he had always been. At least he was big and strong and could fight back. Poor Rosie was tiny and she wouldn’t even be able to tell anyone if someone was mean to her. That broke his heart and made him angry just thinking about it. It also made him determined to do everything he could to make sure she learned how to talk, and he loved summer break because it gave him almost three months with her.

  Jace packed his things that day and waited for the Colonel to pick him up. It was nightfall before he realized his father wasn’t going to come. He still waited, until all the other boys were gone, and finally when it was time for the office staff to lock up for the night, he used the office phone and called him. It went to voicemail so while the recording was playing, he pretended like he was talking to the old man. “It’s okay, Dad. I’ll just walk down to the diner at the corner and wait for you so everyone here can go home.” He forced a hard smile and said, “Great! I’ll see you then. Be safe, I love you.” He put the phone down, wondering what the Colonel would think if he actually listened to the message. Then, with the smile still pasted to his face, he turned to face his commanding officer, waited to be given permission to speak…and lied. “He’s stuck in traffic. He’ll be here soon. He told me to just wait at the diner on the corner so y’all can go on home.”

  The look on the officer’s face was relief. He wanted to get out of there and start his summer break as badly as everyone else did. “You wait there for your father, Cadet Bell.”

  “Yes, sir. I will, sir.” Jace had been a model student for a while at that point. The bullies still picked at him, but he was huge by that time…well over six feet tall, and buff from all the working out they did in PT. Nobody had been stupid enough in well over two years to pick a fight with him. Their words still stung, as much as he would never admit it, but as long as they kept their hands to themselves, he left it alone. He realized quickly that none of them were worth the punishment he received for fighting at the military boarding school. Of course, it had taken him dozens of hours of peeling potatoes, picking up trash around the schoolyard and even out front in the gutters, and doing excessive physical training before he finally got it, but he did.

  “Okay then, Cadet. We’ll see you in the fall.” The officer saluted him and Jace stood at attention and saluted him back. Once he was dismissed, he picked up his suitcase and walked to the corner. He sat at the diner long enough to drink a Coke, just in case anyone was watching…and then he walked the four blocks to the subway and took that to the train station. He used what was left of his allowance to buy a ticket to Boston. By the time he got there it was late, dark, and it looked like rain. He started the long walk to his house. He was about halfway there when the sound of a group of motorcycles caught his attention. He stopped on the sidewalk and watched as they rolled up to the red light just ahead of him. They were loud and shiny, and each one of them carried a powerful man in leather on its back. The men had big, round patches with a super cool looking skull in the center of it. On top it said, “Southside Skulls” and underneath, “Boston Chapter.” Jace was checking out the Harley in front.

  Thanks to Jace’s research, he knew exactly what he was looking at. It was a 1990 HD Fat Boy…that was the first year they came out. That meant the bike was almost ten years old, but to someone that didn’t know, it looked brand new. It was pimped out with chrome and custom pipes, and as Jace wandered toward it, still on the sidewalk, he could see a blue skull painted on the gas tank underneath the jean-clad leg of the man sitting on its back. He knew that he was probably salivating, but it was dark and they weren’t paying him any mind anyway. It was the revving of the engines that alerted him that the light was about to change and that’s when he saw something dark slide off the back of that big, vibrating Fat Boy and silently land on the pavement, behind the man’s big, black boot. Jace didn’t stop to consider what he was doing before he was in motion. The second he stepped off the pavement, however, a gun suddenly appeared in the hand of the man sitting on the Harley behind him.

  “Don’t move!” the man growled at him. Jace didn’t scare easily, even then. But the look in that man’s piercing blue eyes scared him, not to mention the barrel of the gun he was looking down. Jace dropped the bag he was carrying and automatically put his hands up, palms out. The light had changed in the meantime and there were a few cars behind the group of bikes. They started honking, but the middle fingers of a couple of the guys in the back silenced them.

  “Hey!” Jace very slowly, and cautiously, moved his eyes without moving his head, to look at the man on the Harley that he’d been going toward. When his eyes locked into that man’s eyes a chill ran down his spine. They were the same color eyes as the man with the gun was looking out, of only much colder.

  Jace felt like his throat was closing up, but he was able to force out, “Jason Bell…sir.”

  “What the fuck were you doing just now?”

  “You dropped something, sir.” Jace tossed his head in the direction of the shadow on the ground and the man looked down. With a dry mouth, he glanced back at the much younger man with the gun. He hadn’t flinched. The gun was still trained on Jace’s head. Meanwhile, the man with the icy blue eyes had bent down and picked up what was on the ground.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch.”

  “What is it, Dad?” the man with the gun asked. At least Jace understood why he was being stared out by not two but four of the bluest eyes he’d ever seen.

  “My fucking wallet. Put the gun down, Dax.” “Dax” lowered the gun, but he didn’t put it away, so for the moment, Jace kept his hands up. “Come here, kid.” Jace’s legs felt like he was walking on boiled noodles, but he walked over closer to the blue-eyed man, hands still in the air and said:

  “Yes, sir?”

  The man’s blue eyes softened, slightly. “Put your hands down, kid. How old are you?”

  “Fifteen, sir,” Jace said, still keeping one eye on “Dax” as he put his hands down at his sides.

  “Fifteen? Fuck. You’re a big one, aren’t you?” Jace knew that was a rhetorical question, so he kept his mouth shut. The blue-eyed man went on, “What the fuck you doing out here so late? This isn’t the best part of town, you know? Gangs and shit wandering around here.”

  “I live a few miles from here, sir. Just headed home.”

  “Fuck,” the man said. It seemed to be his favorite word. “Why are you dressed in fatigues?” Jace never wore his dress uniform home. He dressed in his gray and army-green fatigues. He looked down at them now and it was the first time it occurred to him that the man was probably right…walking through gang-infested streets dressed like a military man, with a buzz cut, was probably not the best idea in the world. Like cops, the gangs weren’t particularly partial to the military.

  “I’m a student at Brooklyn 909, sir.”

  “Fucking military school?” The man laughed. “Shit. My old man must have not known those existed…or maybe they didn’t back in the day, who the fuck knows? Where’s your old man, kid?”

  “Don’t know, sir. He didn’t show up today.” That was more information than Jace usually gave someone about his family in a year. But this man seemed lik
e he would know somehow if Jace tried to lie to him.

  “Motherfucker. Well, I appreciate you not stealing my wallet, so how about we give you a lift?” Jace felt like he was going to have to reach down with both hands and pick his jaw up off the pavement. He stared for so long that the man finally laughed and said, “Can you hear me talking, kid?”

  “Yes sir, sorry…”

  “Well, do you want a ride, or not?” Jace wanted a ride on one of those Harleys more than he wanted anything in his life. He wasn’t quite sure how it would work, though. He was so fucking big…and all the men with the blue-eyed man were huge too.

  “Um…I wouldn’t want to put you out, sir.”

  The man chuckled again and said, “My name’s Doc, don’t call me sir. And it won’t put me out. You’re gonna ride bitch with Dax there. Dax, put that goddamned gun away. Go on, kid. Get on the back of that bike, we need to get going.”

  That didn’t sound like a request to Jace. He looked at Dax again. The young blue-eyed man was shaking his head, like he was annoyed, but he had tucked the gun away and had his feet down on the ground. “Get the fuck on,” he growled. Jace went over and awkwardly juggled his bag while he swung his leg over the back. He didn’t know what to do with the suitcase, but Dax hollered at one of the other guys to take it. Once Jace was on the back of the Harley, and thanking God it had a sissy bar, Dax said, “Where the hell do you live?”

  Jace gave him the address and Dax said, “Hold on, but don’t fucking hug me.” Jace took hold of Dax’s vest, tentatively at first, but when Dax hit the throttle, his knuckles turned white as he held on for dear life. For the first block or two, Jace could hardly see straight for the fear clouding his vision, but after that it was like the world suddenly came into clear focus. He was on the back of a…to use Doc’s favorite word…“fucking” Harley! He smiled the rest of the way home, not even thinking about what the Colonel was going to say when a motorcycle club drove up in front of their house, in their quiet, middleclass neighborhood.