Fearless (The Solomon Brothers Series Book 3)

by Leslie North

“Wait…what?”

  7

  Roosevelt was already gone, threaded through a picket line to the apex of the bridge where a sea of concerned citizens sat cross-legged, elbows linked. Henry hotfooted after him, but his mental brakes smoked. He wasn’t prepared to see Maggie, not after the previous night when they closed in around the bag and he had almost kissed her, not after the day at the dry cleaner and the Mom says hello and the secret that made Henry, beyond the fighting and pacifist bullshit, quite possibly the most unforgivable person in the eyes of Margaret Kavanaugh.

  And there she was, part of the sit-in. Maggie. Arms linked, buttons with loud, angry words adorning her vest front, and a ridiculous foam hat that looked more like a football goal posts than a section of a suspension bridge. Her expression transformed when she spotted Roosevelt, much like the sunrise transformed the sky. He expected her smile, the gleam in her eyes, her entire countenance to fade when she saw him.

  It didn’t.

  She asked the people beside her to scooch and make room. Roosevelt and Henry bookended her. More like crowded. Actually, passing a strand of dental floss between them might have been difficult. Still, Henry couldn’t say he minded it. Her closeness warmed him; her animated body language awakened him.

  “I thought you’d be climbing Rising Main à la Rocky Balboa this morning.”

  Was that a flirt he detected? A toss of red waves over her shoulder? A jaunty little smile? A shoulder nudge? It sure as hell seemed to add up to a flirt. Maybe it was just a sexy-as-hell trait to be here, to be passionate about something, a foreshadowing of things to come, a carnal energy when a woman like Maggie focused her attentions on any one thing. The effect, he imagined, was nearly debilitating.

  “Right state, wrong city.” Still, that she knew the boxing reference squeezed his insides. Maybe the woman wasn’t so far left that she couldn’t meet somewhere on the spectrum of tolerance. “Shouldn’t you be writing letters to editors?”

  “I’m teaching Roosevelt a first-hand lesson on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Plus, it’s kind of in my blood. My parents had me marching picket lines as soon as I was old enough to walk. There’s an allure to taking on the elite, reminding them who and what’s important, having a common place to air grievances.”

  “And how many of these people fall into that idealistic category?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m just saying. Some are here for the bridge. Some are here for the network news cameras over there. Some are lonely and probably had nothing better to do this morning.” Henry encircled his upraised knees in his arms and nodded upward to two people who had tied themselves to the crisscrossed steel infrastructure, a Save Our Bridge banner hung between them. “Take those two freaks up there for example. Why aren’t they down here with everyone else? Their entire identities are probably wrapped up in chasing something that will make them feel worthy because they can’t find purpose on their own.”

  “And what if this bridge means something to them? What if he proposed to her beneath the northern portal because that’s where he first saw her and fell in love and to lose this bridge meant to lose a piece of their history?”

  “Now you’re just making up shit to justify civil disobedience.”

  “Nineteen-ninety-one. Finish line of the River City Run marathon. He gave her a cup of water. She gave him her heart.”

  “You know them?”

  “My parents.” Maggie waved. The woman strapped to the girder waved back.

  Henry mentally folded on himself—far more than the physical, cramped fold he had going on. Foot. In. Mouth. What had he called them? Freaks? He was relieved he hadn’t swung for the rafters and called them full-on nut jobs.

  “Still married, huh?” he asked.

  “Freakishly.”

  Henry smiled, took the jab.

  “Thing is, they don’t always see things the same. One may believe strongly in something the other doesn’t care much about. But they’re always there to support each other, no matter what.”

  “And you want that?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “I’d never strap myself to a bridge for anyone. Just saying.”

  “Yet you’d go a few rounds for someone you loved?”

  “Hell yeah. Who wouldn’t?”

  Maggie shrugged and looked up. “Just consider them on round twenty-five.”

  Henry liked this. Not at each other’s throats, the quiet alternative to a verbal cage match where no one gave an inch, a truce of sorts. He tipped his face to the sky and savored a lazy pull of the damp, morning air.

  “They weren’t always like this.” Maggie squinted up, into the morning sun. “This hard-core.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They radicalized when my uncle became the victim of a violent attack on the streets.”

  Henry should have known, should have been prepared. As it was, her words hit him like a roundhouse to the jaw, nearly a cold knockout. He struggled for breath, looked away. A fuzzy-haired old woman next to him gave him an odd look.

  “Kid got off because he was underage,” said Maggie. “Community service, some injustice. I was nine. My parents moved us to a peace commune northeast of here for a while, but after a while they decided to move back, to give their city a voice, to stop the injustice. They’ve been climbing bridges ever since.”

  Bwhoop-Bwhoop.

  A police car crept along the bridge’s roadway, the siren’s double-shot warning a not-so-subtle cue to clear the bridge. Henry felt sick. Dizzying red and blue flashers spiraled around him. Not a day went by he hadn’t thought of Caliban, but he hadn’t even considered that Caliban was someone’s brother, someone’s uncle. Henry had sentenced a nine-year-old Maggie to a fucking peace commune because her parents deemed the world too unsafe for her.

  Maggie sent Roosevelt ahead. Too much at stake, she said. Something like that. He wasn’t entirely sure because the world, the peace he had found that morning, was gone and nothing made much sense anymore. The crush of people leaving the demonstration was intense. Henry found himself simultaneously protecting Maggie and trying not to throw up when she looked at him with concerned eyes; he had been the one she needed protection from all those years ago.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  He manufactured a response. “Fine.” He felt less than fine.

  Maggie turned around, walked backward, her eyes on the scaffolding above the bridge. “Good. Because I may need a ride to the police station. My car’s in the shop.”

  Henry glanced back in time to see Maggie’s parents climbing down into the waiting arms of the law. Maggie’s hat, the whole situation—it was all so absurd. How had he gotten from a morning run with Roosevelt to cozying up to Caliban’s family? He settled on a long walk back to the gym to fetch his car and a drive to the precinct. That was all. In less than a week, Maggie had agreed to steer clear of the gym, his life. In less than a week, she would move on with her numerous crusades, never knowing he had once been public enemy number one.

  Henry insisted on waiting outside the station. Family privacy, he said. Maggie couldn’t help thinking it was more. When they pulled up, he had stared at the building as if he expected a Pandora’s box of zombies—or worse, glory-seeking, bored activists—to spill from its glass and steel doors. Maggie never assumed Henry would become a friend, didn’t want a violent fighter as one, really. But she did hope their time on the bridge would help him look at her with a greater understanding for why she was the way she was. Why she sometimes turned people off. Mostly, now, he didn’t even look at her.

  Maggie thanked him for the ride and bid him goodbye. She told him she could call a cab home; she didn’t expect him to wait out what could be a long ordeal. Her parents never made these altercations simple. They always made sure to tell everyone on their way out of the holding tank—civil servant and private citizen alike—about whatever cause had landed them there. Maggie’s savings consisted of the last thousand she had liquidated from h
er teacher’s retirement account—which hadn’t been much over five years. She had put the remainder of it toward things the kids under her care needed—school supplies, shoes that kept out the snow, a nice suit. Her parents were never ones to save much.

  “I make less now than I did as a teacher, Ma.” Maggie said while her parents scooped their personal effects from two trays at the booking desk. “You can’t keep calling me to bail you both out.”

  Her father padded up beside her and kissed her cheek. “That’s materialism talking, sweetheart. Besides, we’ll pay you back. Always do.”

  Though she appreciated the gesture, he brought the fishy stench of the Monongahela and a stale jail cell with him. “Tell that to my stomach when it’s growling.”

  As usual, her mother tossed in her two cents. “She’s just sore, Oliver, because she’s regretting her decision to leave the schools.”

  “The true battle lines for the future, for sure,” said her father.

  Maggie rolled her eyes. She could not have this discussion again. Her namesake, Margaret Fuller, was a social advocate for women’s education in the early 1800s. Fuller’s advocacy provided inspiration for Walt Whitman and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Nathaniel Hawthorne among others—a rather ambitious legacy for Maggie to follow. Maggie’s parents had been educators when they weren’t married to the gypsy, hippie mentality. Political science, mostly. Debate. And if there had been a high school course on passive aggressive manipulation, they would have helmed it.

  “I’ve been mentoring a boy named Roosevelt.” Maggie attempted to put a positive spin on the regret her parents forecasted. They exited the police station. The street crowded—no buffering steps, not much of a sidewalk. They paused. Traffic whizzed by on the main thoroughfare, churning the air around Maggie’s body.

  “Good name, that one,” said her father.

  “He’s gifted. Poised to design and build bridges that challenge convention.”

  “He the young man with you on the bridge?”

  “Yes.”

  “The one with all those tattoos?” Her mother’s voice had its own emergency response pitch.

  “No, darling,” said her father. Then he turned to Maggie. “That wasn’t him, was it?”

  “No.”

  Her mother gave an exaggerated sigh. “Good. That other one looked like a radical. All that ink. All those muscles.”

  Maggie was already on the defensive, always seeking out a place to stand her ground with her parents. She’d spent her first twenty-five years trying to please them about everything. And failing. Her latest sport was taking her mother up on her advice to challenge the status quo.

  “He’s my friend.” Even though he wasn’t. Not really.

  “Oh, honey.” Her mother tsk-ed. “It must be lonely, cooped up in that huge Victorian house with nothing but troubled youth all the time. You should come to the rally tomorrow outside the coliseum just before the circus. Those animal-rights men can be very sensitive. Make for good companions.”

  “Henry’s not that bad. He helps out inner city youth, like I do.”

  “What?” said Ma. “Teaching them how to be hooligans?”

  “Stop judging him based on his tattoos.” The hypocritical statement felt like a glob of sticky taffy on her tongue. Hadn’t she done the same when she met Henry? “You always tell me not to judge people and here you are judging someone you’ve never met.”

  “So hostile.” Her mother’s hostile on her New Jersey-rooted accent came out more like haw-style.

  As ever, her father was the voice of reason. Zen-like. Not prone to the hysterics of her mother. “You’re right, sweetheart. We’d love to meet your friend, Henry. What does he do?”

  Wait, what? Meet him? Her father was close, like he so often got, no space bubble, his nose tipped up so he could focus inside his squat eyeglasses. She always had a hard time lying when his proximity was a force in itself. His prematurely gray hair sprouted wildly from his beard and sideburns.

  A city bus pulled up nearby. Passengers in the windows shared their vacant stares. She was starting to feel like a caged animal at the circus, on display for the passersby to gawk at.

  “He runs a gym.”

  “What kind of gym? Jungle gym? After school day care? Physical therapy, what?” Her father’s roots were showing now. Long Island.

  “Just a gym. He took over after his mentor passed away.”

  Her father squeezed her in his stare. Lines at his brow crinkled. “There’s something you’re not telling me.” Then he turned to Ma. “There’s something she’s not telling us. She gets this twitch in her left eyelid when she’s not being truthful.”

  Maggie hadn’t noticed the involuntary muscle spasm until her father mentioned it. The bus’s hydraulic brakes fired and the engine revolutions assaulted her brain. The bus pulled away from the curb. She waited until the loud annoyance faded.

  “I’m right here, you know. I can hear you.” She felt cornered. There was only one way to back off a pair of social crusaders. Her pair of social crusaders. Shock and awe. “He’s a mixed martial arts champion.”

  “Aw, honey.” As if she had said he was Protestant. Or a blind barber. The disappointment in her mother’s tone was acute. “I knew it. No one’s built like that who doesn’t intend to use it like a weapon. You’re coming with us tomorrow. Meet you a nice PETA guy.”

  “I’m not going with you tomorrow,” Maggie asserted.

  “She’ll be with Henry, the mixed martial arts champion.” Her father tossed up his hands and shuffled along the sidewalk.

  Maggie glanced beyond him. Henry waited on the next block, arms and ankles crossed. His backside leaned against the driver’s side door of his pea-green 1965 classic Chevy pickup. Sol’s truck, Henry had told her on the way over.

  She had never seen a sight more beautiful. Except maybe the glassy green of Henry’s eyes in the first morning rays as he sat beside her on the bridge. A smile reshaped her lips.

  One of his hands raised in a down-low wave that hit her straight in her solar plexus. No smile, but he had waited for her.

  “I’m leaving now.”

  “I’ll pick you up at six am,” said her mother from behind.

  “Don’t bother.” She tossed a half-hearted kiss past her shoulder. “Love you both.”

  Before she jaywalked, her first real offense in the presence of Lawless Lorenz, in front of the police station, no less, she thought she heard her mother’s siren-like Jersey accent say, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, would you look at that? He’s going to crush her.”

  Maggie wasn’t sure to what Ma was referring—Henry’s thick neck, his enormous hands, his fighter’s mentality. But Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, help her. In most of her fantasies now, Maggie held onto that very hope.

  They drove for six city blocks before Henry pulled into a delivery lane, shifted the old truck into park, and shifted on the seat beside her. She had ambushed his ears the entire distance from the police station—she knew it—the whole haven’t taken a breath in three sentences thing Henry had already pointed out about her. He heard more about her struggles with wanting to please her parents but needing to find her own identity than any one person should have to. Except maybe her parents themselves. Eventually.

  “Man, you are intense.”

  Heat rose to her cheeks. She attempted an inhale. It was shaky at best.

  He sat sideways, his knee resting on the bench seat, his well-defined and colorful arm propped on the seat back. “Close your eyes.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it.”

  Normally, she’d be affronted by someone ordering her around, but she found that leaning into someone else’s take-control attitude felt like a lifted burden. She followed orders.

  “Is this another glass vessel thing?”

  “It’s better.”

  She wasn’t sure how that was possible. His vessel thing was pure gold. She had used it each night before she fell asleep. At least until she horrified her
self with the image of two glass figures entwined, a tangled vessel of sexual pleasure.

  “Put one hand on your chest, the other on your belly.”

  Maggie hesitated, peeked at him through slitted eyes.

  “It’s biofeedback. We use stuff like this in training all the time.”

  She did as he asked, felt stupid.

  “Now sigh, out your mouth. Like I said something to annoy you. Then close your lips.”

  The fodder she could recall would fill the bed of his truck. And then some. She picked the whole land-a-punch-on-me negotiation because it had been such a blatant affront to her principles. She sighed and closed her mouth. That she knew he studied her lips made her self-conscious. She rubbed them together, wishing she had something slick on them, like tinted honey-bee moisturizer, less of nothing, more of something not so plain.

  “Now push out your belly as you inhale through your nose. The hand at your chest is to keep it still.”

  She tried. And failed. She tried again.

  “When you exhale, pull your stomach muscles in. Stomachs and diaphragms have a lot of space to move. Chests and ribcages and shoulders, not so much.”

  Her hands undulated, a little like the swell of an ocean wave, the hand at her chest the sandbar, fixed, strong, the swell of her belly a wave that grew more and more gentle the longer she practiced. Soon, her parents were no longer in the pickup as they had been for six city blocks. She opened her eyes. The city swarmed around them, beyond the windows. Inside, it was just them, the warm sun stirring dust motes, the quiet sounds of her deliberate breaths at his mercy.

  “Better?” he whispered.

  His gaze slipped low on her face, back to her lips. Made sense, because he had instructed her on when to close her mouth to master the breathing technique, but Maggie couldn’t shake the sense that it was more. Not only did he master her breath, he possessed an invisible thread that drew them together without moving an inch.

  She nodded, her breath circumventing her lungs for an entirely different reason.

  “Maggie?”