by Cole McCade
“You’re good for more than that.” He nodded decisively. “Any niece of Walford Gallifrey, Esquire, can do anything.”
“Not really. I have no marketable skills. I never finished my degree. All I can do is piecemeal work, and look where that’s gotten me.” She quirked her lips. “By the way, in case you didn’t know, that ‘Esquire’ isn’t hereditary.”
“Not so very long ago, I told a young lady not much older than you that in order to move on, you must be willing to let go.” He reached across the table and covered her hand with his own, his long, spidery fingers enveloping hers gently. “You must let go of what happened, dear. You have no confidence in yourself.”
Willow looked down at their clasped hands, biting her lip, and wondered when the hollows between Wally’s fingers had grown so pronounced. Probably when the channels around his mouth had grown deeper; when the lines around his eyes had grown from fine etchings into deep furrows; when his dashingly dark hair had turned to silver salt and coal-dark pepper; when his skin had become thin-stretched leather over bundles of sticks. He’d always been slender and trim and graceful, but she didn’t remember him being so thin—and she wondered if she’d been so wrapped up in growing up that she hadn’t noticed him growing old.
Her throat tightened; she swallowed. Her nose was filling with that feeling again, that swollen feeling she hated, that made her breaths thick with soft wet popping sounds. “I fucked up, uncle,” she said. “I fucked up really bad. Worse than you know. Worse than anyone knows. The official story’s all a fucking lie.”
“Language, dear,” he murmured, and she couldn’t help a sharp, startled laugh.
“Sorry.”
He smiled and gently stroked the pad of his thumb to the base of her hand, where the palm blended into the wrist; she closed her eyes and let the soothing sensation relax her. His was one of the only touches she could stand, her skin too sensitive to endure a man, a stranger, anyone who might touch her with any intent other than to make her breathe out slow and unravel the coils of anxiety she’d been winding herself into.
“What did you do that was so terrible?” he asked.
Her eyes opened again. “I can’t even tell you. I couldn’t stand it if you were disappointed in me. Not to mention it’s illegal, and I don’t want you on the hook for…” What had Dev called it? “…aiding and abetting.”
“I’ve done a fair bit of aiding and more than enough abetting in my day. Enough not to be worried. Enough to never be disappointed in you.” He chuckled; his eyes glittered with more mysteries than she’d likely ever know in her lifetime, dark and strange in that magical way that was so Uncle Wally. “But you have your secrets, dear. We’re all entitled to them.”
“Yeah.”
“So.” Those strokes stopped, his grip light, comforting without restricting. “I have a question for you.”
“Hm?”
“What do you intend to do?”
Her lips parted—then closed, snapping together so fast her teeth clacked painfully. She didn’t like that question. She didn’t like that question because right now the only thing she could do was survive, which meant falling back into minimum wage jobs and working sixteen-hour days and going home to make her father’s meals and promise him he didn’t need to do anything when his disability checks were enough to keep them going. She didn’t know how long she could tell that lie. Didn’t know how long she could stay in this rut, either, but she’d walked it for so long and the walls were so high she’d never climb out. Not when she was too heavy to lift herself, and the only way to make that ascent was to shed dead weight she wasn’t willing to let go.
She pulled her hand back from Wally’s and stood, offering a wan smile. “I intend to go home. Dad’s going to need me soon.”
“You’re avoiding an answer.”
She met his eyes: shrewd, thoughtful, never unkind and yet she couldn’t bear the weight of his stare. Somehow his quiet, gentle acceptance was worse than judgment, because that acceptance gave her permission to be…
Nothing.
Permission to be nothing, and never make a single attempt to do something. Anything. Make the effort.
As if she didn’t put out enough effort every day. For as long as she could remember she’d worked herself threadbare, and still she wasn’t doing enough to be more than what she was. Still she kept trying to find another drop in that barren jar, and coming up empty but shaking and shaking it anyway.
She turned away. But Wally stood, his chair scraping, and caught her hand to draw her back.
“Willow.”
Carefully he coaxed her into his arms, and after a trembling moment she sagged against him, curling her fingers in the back of his shirt and burying her face in his chest and letting herself breathe. He was so tall he made her feel like a little girl, and she needed that right now. Needed to feel like a little girl who didn’t have to carry the weight of anyone else at all, when adult responsibilities and troubles and fears were someone else’s problem and she couldn’t even conceive of life beyond another sunny day and the swingset in the yard.
He rested his chin to the top of her head; his breaths bled down to her scalp, warm and as soothing as standing under the pounding shower spray. When his fingers curled against her shoulders she felt safe, and caught herself wishing the traitorous, terrible wish that Wally could have been her father, and not…
Not the man who loved her, who apologized every day for something that wasn’t his fault, who didn’t deserve her resentment and her weary exhaustion.
“I’m terrible,” she choked out. “I am. I’m a terrible daughter, a terrible person.”
“You aren’t. Never,” Wally soothed softly. “Never in a heartbeat, in a lifetime of heartbeats. You are, quite simply, stuck. You may resent your mother, but she knew the one thing it takes most a lifetime to figure out: if you don’t choose, life will choose for you.”
She stiffened and pulled back. She wasn’t her mother. She wouldn’t be like her mother, leaving a trail of destruction in her wake. That was for women like Leigh. Runaway women who lived bold and bright, while Willow…
She didn’t know if she lived at all.
“Maybe so,” she bit off. “That doesn’t mean she had to leave.”
She fled up the stairs, and retrieved her clothing from the machine. Her jeans melted against her legs as she pulled them on, that warmth she loved of freshly dryer-hot, soft fabric, her shirt a sweet burn against her skin. She’d always loved touch¸ period—so tactile that sometimes it scared her. She often felt like a ragdoll cat, responding to the texture of a warm fleece blanket, the heat of a street post against her palm, the chill of ice on her tongue. She’d heard of a condition called allodynia that made the nerves react in a similar way, but that was mostly centered on hypersensitivity to pain.
She was hypersensitive to everything—sometimes in comforting, sometimes embarrassing ways.
Which meant she was just…odd. Sometimes her body was a stranger to her, this thing of prickles and nerves and sensation, and it unnerved her so much to touch herself that she couldn’t stand the idea of being touched by someone else. Someone not family, when family made that sensitivity safe and familiar and soothing. Someone who might claim that electric prickle for themselves, and be able to control how and why she melted for another burst of warmth or stroke of something silky and soft.
She shoved her feet into her sneakers, stuffed her clothes and her father’s into her messenger bag, then clattered down the stairs. Wally stood over the sink, elbow-deep in suds and humming softly under his breath. She lingered at the foot of the stairs.
“I’d better get home before it gets too late. Thanks for letting me use your shower. Later.”
“I only wish I had the wherewithal to offer more to help.” His brows lifted with a childish hopefulness. “Perhaps you could stay here—”
“Yeah…I think you know what Dad would say to that.”
His face fell in a way that made her gut hollow
out and tighten with guilt. She hadn’t meant to remind him, but it was hard to ignore the large and ugly rift between him and her father, and the cruel words her father couldn’t and wouldn’t take back.
“Yes,” he said gently. “I do understand that. But let me call you a cab, dearest.”
She smiled and slipped out into the living room, threading among all his dusty kitsch and seventies furniture toward the door. “You can’t afford it any more than I can. I’ll walk. It’s fine.”
“At least take the bus,” he called after her.
“I can pay bus fare, or buy six bricks of ramen.”
He appeared in the kitchen doorway, sighing and wiping his damp hands, then reached back into the kitchen, retrieved a saran-wrapped packet with the leftover muffins, and pressed it into her hands. Resting atop the packet was a little glass sculpture—a tiny betta fish with fluting, fronded fins, molded out of deep emerald beach glass. “Willow. Darling.”
“You worry too much,” she said, but tucked the muffins into her messenger bag and curled the glass fish against her palm, its smoothness familiar, a tradition that calmed her unease and reminded her she was loved. As long as she had these little trinkets…she was loved. “Dev’s taking care of us. I’ll find a job soon, and I’ll take care of Dad. I always do.”
He sighed again, before smiling and shaking his head. “You are stronger than you think. Not many would be so selfless.”
Am I, though?
Am I, when right now I’d rather run screaming into the night than go home?
Am I, when I think half the reason I let Leigh go is because I want so much to be her?
“Trust me.” She smiled bitterly. “I’m not selfless. I’m not selfless at all.”
She pulled the front door open—but he came up behind her and caught it, stopping her from closing it. “Be careful,” he pleaded. “People are disappearing in the Nests.”
Willow frowned. “I haven’t seen anything on the news.”
“It’s not the sort of thing that makes the news, dearest.” He tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear, tickling the underside of her jaw with the wispy tips. “I wish I still had your naïveté.”
“Thanks,” she said dryly. “I think.”
She tucked the glass fish into her pocket, then slipped down the main stairs, out the front door, and into the shop front. When she’d been a little girl, Uncle Wally’s DISKOUNT DESINES had been a wonderland full of princess dresses—princess dresses that sometimes became ice caves, where sometimes Willow was a damsel in distress chained to a giant icicle, sometimes she was a knight with a coat hanger sword, and sometimes she was the terrible and fearsome ice dragon full of teeth, skulking among the layered tulle skirts and snarling and gnashing while Uncle Wally pretended to quiver in fear. He’d placated the ice dragon with apple tarts and white chocolate chip cookies: the favorite foods of ice dragons everywhere, and the only way to turn the ravening beast back into a little girl.
She fingered the tag on one of the fluffy dresses, so faded the handwritten ink was almost invisible. $14.99. She doubted anyone would pay even $4.99 for one of these frothy creations Wally had probably bought on consignment from some bargain-bin tutu-factory-cross-quinceanera-warehouse. He never seemed to care. He sold maybe two or three dresses a month, as far as she knew…but he seemed happy nonetheless, tending shop each day and waiting for the customers who never came.
“Tell your father I said hello,” he called wistfully.
“I will,” she promised. “One day he might actually answer.”
She let herself out into the deepening evening. The Nests weren’t far, a half-mile over from the Jackdaws shop fronts. She took the back streets, moving from pools of light to plains of darkness, each puddle of gold like a shallow lake on salt flats, leading her across an endless expanse. She passed worn brick walls painted over with thick latex topcoat and sprouting tufts of grass in the cracks, like the earth under the blacktop was struggling to find a way out and climbing up the walls to find the sky.
The closer she got to the border between the Jackdaws and the Nests, the wider the cracks in the sidewalks grew. Cars passed fewer and farther between, until the only one she’d seen in ten minutes had been a low-rider that cruised by in that slow searching way that said the driver was checking his six and wondering if the girl hurrying down the sidewalk was a buyer, a trick, a snitch, maybe a combination of all three. She bowed her head and walked faster, clinging to the few working streetlamps, their light flickering and wan and shallow.
Someone’s car alarm was going off somewhere, ringing painfully in her ears, and no one was bothering to turn it off. The neighborhood dogs were on fire, howling and barking like the alarm was an intruder. She only hoped it wasn’t on her street, or there’d be no sleep tonight; sometimes the alarms went off until morning, and it was anyone’s guess what tripped them. Someone trying to break in. The boom and rattle of freight cars unloading down in the yards, shaking the earth with their weight. An accidental sideswipe. A shakedown, body slammed against the hood and guns drawn. Or maybe the car had already been stolen and whomever was driving it didn’t care, proudly announcing wee-woo-wee-woo look what I did wee-woo! as they raced through the night.
She ducked into a side alley, skirting the noise. Stumbling into a heist in progress, especially after her dark, would put a cap on this shitty day. The narrow strip of pavement ran between the derelict shell of the Suds-a-Go-Go laundromat and Mama Nina’s, the only Italian place in Crow City, a tiny treasure tucked into a forgotten corner of the shithole of the Nests. Her dad loved Mama Nina’s mostaccioli. Willow tugged her wallet from her back pocket and checked inside. Four dollars and a few dimes. Not even enough for an appetizer. Fuck.
Language, dear, Wally said inside her head.
A trash can rattled and boomed. She jerked to a halt, her heart thumping sick and hot, her breaths congealing in a lump, fingers clenching on her wallet. Christ. Jumping at raccoons in the garbage. After a lifetime in this neighborhood, she shouldn’t be so—
A dark shape lurched out from behind the laundromat: staggering, weaving, reeling back and forth in a drunken stumble. The soles of heavy shoes slap slap slapped, thudding erratic drumbeat thump that echoed her heart. She retreated a few steps, wary and wanting to turn away but not wanting to take her eyes off it. Him. A man, his clothing disarrayed. He fell into the cone of light over the restaurant’s back exit; light bounced off fine linen and slick, sleek wool in a thread count higher than any sheets Willow had ever slept on. Too rich for the Nests. Too fine for the stink of dumpsters boiling their innards in the sweltering, damp summer heat, until the entirety of the Nests smelled like a cooking landfill.
You shouldn’t be here, Willow thought, her discomfort ramping up into gut-clenching tension, nervousness. You don’t belong. Something wasn’t right. And right now, this particular street was somewhere she didn’t need to be. She stepped back.
Then she saw the blood, and her wallet fell from nerveless fingers.
Panting, heaving, the man slumped against the wall, clutching at his chest, where a growing pool of red spread beyond the lapels of his double-breasted suit. More crimson beaded on his brow like a film of sweat, rolling in droplets down from his scarlet-matted hairline. He had green eyes, she thought vaguely—while the world zoomed in and out, and her mind retreated from the moment. Just as green as hers. Red and green and white as death, like Christmas.
Call 911, drifted across the distance in a voice so far away it couldn’t be her own. But her body took over, backing away. Red meant danger. Red was a warning, screaming and bright. She took one step backward, then another, only to freeze when her heel scuffed against a can. It clattered across the pavement, ting-tong-tinging like a little hollow gong.
His head jerked up. He stared at her, his eyes wide and round and desperate, the whites showing and so much red in the spidered, bloodshot veins. He reached a hand out, dripping scarlet from his fingertips, little splatters raining against the p
avement.
“P-please,” he rasped, his voice weak and ragged with a wet, bloody gurgle to it. With the words came thin crimson bubbles, swelling on his lips and popping. “H-help me…help…”
Move, she told herself. Move! Go to him, call 911, run get help at the restaurant, something! But her legs locked, panic a paralytic cloud enveloping and immobilizing her until she was numb to everything but the throb-throb-throb of her pulse against her throat, and saw nothing but the red-filmed flash of danger, danger, danger filtering over her vision.
“Please!” he begged. He stretched toward her, toppled, barely caught himself. His coat fell open and bared a gun, black and sleek and deadly, tucked into his waistband. Like that gun had gone off at the starter’s block, it spurred Willow into motion—turning, bolting. He could be a cop or he could be a thug, but gun meant stay away. She’d run around the front of Mama Nina’s, get help before he died, do something but she couldn’t with the gun, the gun—
She ran face-first into a wall.
A wall of human flesh, solid muscle that stopped her short and knocked her back from the sheer bruising force of impact. She stumbled, tilting into a trash can, then caught herself against the brick, staring while her heart beat-beat-beat and her legs became petrified wood, the trunks of frozen trees with her feet the roots anchoring her to the ground.
A man towered over her: broad bulk and grace embodied, a strange creature who held himself as if he was more beast than man, and didn’t know how to mimic human body language. Tawny fox-eyes, so pale a hazel they bordered on gold, watched her over the top of half-rim glasses. Eyes like that were made of acid, capable of stripping flesh from bone with a single glance—peeling her open, trembling and laid bare as he raked her up and down with a penetrating look.
He tilted his head. His gaze roved over her, taking her in with a measured patience that said he had all the time in the world. Ashen, white-blonde hair drifted across his face, pale as moonlight reflecting from the underbellies of fresh spring leaves and cascading down his chest and back in a waterfall tangle, mingling with the spill of well-worn wooden rosary beads dangling against his chest. The platinum locks gleamed almost silver under the street lights, the crown of an ancient numbering their years toward the grave, yet the darkly handsome face framing those amber fox-eyes couldn’t be older than thirty-five, forty, though something had been carved into chiseled, princely features—something dark and hungry and cold—that seemed to have seen thousands of years, and laughed at every one with a cruelly sensuous mouth.