by Leslie North
In those first, quiet moments of consciousness, she puzzled through how she came to be here with Henry. She didn’t want to admit to defiance of her parents, her assertion of independence she should have made years ago as a grown woman, or the allure of the bad boy when she had only ever been good. Maggie settled on the anomaly of the man beside her. Sure, he was a fighter, but his best fights had not come inside a cage. He fought against poverty and circumstance, things that held meaning far past the few minutes that comprised a match, things she was intensely passionate about. Her few previous relationships had died because she burned too hot about too many things. With Henry, the heat was matched.
Maggie slipped from beneath the blanket, careful not to wake him, and fetched her shirt on the way to the restroom attached to the office. A pink glow, the first full contact of daylight, warmed the gym’s industrial ceiling. A desk light in the office lit her way past the mess Henry had yet to sort. She took five minutes in the tiny bathroom, washing her face, buttoning her shirt against the morning chill, using Henry’s tooth paste and her finger to freshen her mouth, noting the pink patches on her body where his scruff left a mark and smiling at how they came to pass. Lingering in the office long enough to dig in her bag for something to apply to her kissed-raw lips, her gaze snagged something on the desk—initially because the green file folder stood out in a sea of plain paper then because someone had written a word that looked close to Caliban with a fat, black marker on the raised label.
She blinked, sure she had read it wrong: Calihan or calculations or callbacks or something urban related. But the more she closed in on the word, the more it cemented in her mind.
Caliban.
Chills spread along her arms and pooled at her neck.
The cool morning. Nothing more. She glanced beyond the office glass to the gym. All was quiet. She was alone.
Maggie opened the file folder. Her mind was unable to sort the paperwork—eviction notices, rent receipts, all of it meaningless until she found a flattened old-school photo envelope thick with photos. The glue on the envelope had yellowed and gummed with age. Written across the photo mat’s logo, in red ink: Peter Caliban.
Her stomach felt pinned. Probably from hunger. There had to be more than one Peter Caliban in a city the size of Pittsburgh, right? She reached inside the envelope and pulled out a small stack of three-by-five photos.
She rotated the prints until a likeness cemented. Her uncle’s likeness but younger—photo after photo, all vaguely stalker-ish because they were taken at a distance, the subject unknowing. There was no mistaking her uncle’s ginger hair and beard, his distinct Caliban nose, the skeletal appearance of his deep-set eyes, the gnarled set of his leg.
Maggie dropped the photos.
“What are you doing?” Henry’s voice reached her from the doorway, alarmed and strong in the morning hush. His sizeable frame—naked but for the cotton blanket around his waist—filled her exit.
A stab of guilt pierced her navel. She quickly forced it back to whatever misguided place it originated. Sure, she had snooped, but Henry had a file on her disabled uncle.
“I should ask you the same.” She smacked the file folder closed and lifted it. “What is this?”
Henry gave a heavy sigh. Eyes closed, he leaned his arm against the door frame and tapped his forehead against it while she tapped herself out of patience.
“Henry?” She hated the pitch of her voice, her threadbare desperation telegraphed in that moment.
“I’m the one who beat your uncle that night. The kid who got off because he was underage.”
One low throb of disbelief centered in her chest and radiated, ripple-like, through her body, a heavy rock dropped in calm waters. She stepped outside herself, two of her existing in the same place and time—the strong, pushy broad issuing a sharp-tongued “What?” and the nine-year-old girl inside who just learned her enduring fear of living in the city, that the man who had harmed her uncle would do the same to her, the one she had to rationalize away as she matured, was justified.
She had nightmares about the faceless monster; now, she had fucked him.
Maggie backed away, tripping over boxes and a half-dozen items stashed on the floor.
“Maggie, wait. Let me explain.”
“What kind of sick bastard keeps a file on the victim he almost killed?”
Her words scorched her own ears. Skin at her face and neck broiled. Breaths became erratic.
“Sol kept the file. I didn’t know until recently. I was trying to help your uncle.”
The absurdity of his words triggered a ripe sarcasm deep within her. “Help him? Help him? He’s had to piss into a fucking catheter since that night because of blunt force trauma. His knee tendon was snapped, but without surgery, the cartilage built up, made it worse. And don’t even get me started on his hearing loss or his back.” Maggie paced, mostly because Henry blocked her from leaving, but part of her needed one final truth. “Did you know? That he was my uncle?”
Henry nodded.
His admission must be what a punch to the gut felt like—sharp and localized, diffuse and all-consuming, a sting to the soft-tissue, a ricochet to the heart.
“So what—you have sex with me out of some sick curiosity? Some pathological need to keep insinuating yourself into his life?” She had found her voice again, the one that didn’t give a shit if she hurt him like he hurt her uncle. “My mom was right. No one looks like you unless they intend to hurt people.”
She grabbed her things and muscled past him. He didn’t even bother to put up a fight.
Roosevelt told Henry where he could find Maggie. Kid didn’t know the half of what went on, he just knew Henry had hurt her. He told Henry he hadn’t seen tears like that since his dad got ahold of his mom. Henry explained that it was nothing like what he thought, that he needed to find Maggie to make it right, but the visual the kid summoned made Henry feel lower than his stepfather, lower than scum. Reluctantly, Roosevelt scratched out an address on a slip of paper and gave it to him. Said she had taken him there a few times for family dinners.
Henry knew he would be up against her parents.
He sat in his truck outside Affleck-Martin and weighed his next move. Her parents had such a stranglehold on Maggie, he felt the sting of a lost fight before he even started. Explaining to her the rest of the story might make him feel better, but he couldn’t be sure it would ease her anger. Mostly, he just needed her to understand he was no longer the person who hurt her uncle all those years ago.
Though he wasn’t sure he believed it himself.
He had come close—dangerously close—with Roosevelt’s stepfather. Henry’s control outside the gym was shaky at best. That included Maggie. His connection to her tapped into something authentic inside, something that Sol had recognized and turned toward and nurtured. If Sol could see his worth, even in the face of harsh truths, couldn’t Maggie?
On the way to the city’s north side, Henry talked himself out of the drive a handful of times and back into it just as many. He pulled to the curb in front of a tidy, powder-blue Bungalow-style home nestled in the kind of white oaks and maples that canopied the neighborhood in perpetual shade—so very different from Roosevelt’s home, so very different from the home in which he grew up. The lawn was blanched of its green summer hue, trapped under a layer of crisp, autumn leaves, but it was shorn even, few weeds, straight-up blades at the sidewalk. Henry’s boots crunched a path to the front door.
At the second drop of the heavy knocker, Maggie’s mother answered.
“You’re not welcome here,” she said, her hee-ah not at all local. Maggie was the younger, spitting image of her mother but for the high hair and the displaced accent.
“I’m sorry for what happened to your brother, Mrs. Kavanaugh.”
Not exactly how he had rehearsed the apology. The woman raised her hands, the same tireless animation he had come to know from Maggie.
“Even now, he doesn’t own it.”
B
y her words, he assumed someone occupied the room beyond her. He wanted to kick his own ass for not choosing his words with more care. Henry amended his statement.
“I’m sorry for what I did to your brother, Mrs. Kavanaugh. I wish I could trade places with him. Every day, I wish I could.”
“Peter was not a violent man. None of us are. Your lifestyle makes us ill.”
And just like Maggie, she didn’t mince words.
“May I speak to Maggie?”
“Not when she’s finally come to her senses.”
He shook off the latest barb, focused on a pumpkin at his feet, gathered his thoughts. This time, his words would be precise, no more lies.
“I know your pacifist daughter spending time with a fighter doesn’t fit into your idealistic world, but Maggie has the courage to push outside those boundaries, and she inspires me to do the same. Please…just a few minutes.”
Her mother reared up for another round but was shut down by the presence of her husband, who came from behind and laid a gentle hand on her arm. She stammered a bit but stayed silent.
“She’s in the treehouse out back,” said Maggie’s father. “Driveway side of the house.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The door closed slowly, the whispered protests lost to him. He had already hopped off the porch and circled the house. The treehouse showed up in impressive relief against the shaded backdrop: reddish-brown planks, enclosed but for a low top-hinged door and a ladder near the branch porch rails; structurally sound with two, thick-barked trunks speared through its center; round, glass windows and details that came straight from nature. The treehouse looked as if it had always been there and always would be there.
No noise came from inside. He climbed the ladder. The structural creaks gave him away.
Maggie cracked the door to look out, saw him, and retreated inside.
“Maggie?”
“How did you find me?”
He established his footing on the porch and stepped inside. The interior was cramped but neat. Every square inch had a purpose. Books leaned against the exposed framework. A mattress on the floor looked slept-in. A domed skylight the expanse of the roof flooded the space with light and collected falling leaves at the edges.
“Roosevelt.”
A wistful smile brushed her features before she pulled it in check. “And Layla?”
“She’s staying with an aunt while Roosevelt goes to New York.”
The trip was planned for the following day. He still wanted to get them both there safely. It was the least he could do to make up for not telling her the truth sooner, but he knew Maggie would have something to say about him coming.
“He must be worried,” said Maggie.
“He’s packing his bridge inside the crate I brought over this morning.”
Maggie nodded. She had given Henry almost everything, they both had, but words between them were harder, somehow. Henry went for a safe topic.
“This place is incredible.”
“Roosevelt slept in here a few times. Said it reminded him of his mother’s stories of faraway kingdoms.” She swallowed audibly, thickly. “My uncle built it.”
Henry wanted the trap door to open, to drop him from such a height that he would pay for his crime the rest of his life, the way Peter Caliban had. The realization Caliban had crafted something so beautiful but could never again climb inside to enjoy it was a kick to the nuts. Henry settled on the floor. There wasn’t room to stretch out, so he hugged his knees.
“When Sol died, I had the task of going through his office. Guy kept everything, none of it in any kind of order. I found out he had been tracking Peter Caliban, all those years, keeping tabs on him. Maybe he aimed to keep him from coming after me when my name hit the front page of the sports section, undoing all the progress I had made to move past it. Maybe he figured one day I’d want to know. He was always protective of me. Sol had gotten your uncle a job sweeping floors in some dive bar, but he drank everything he made. No place for a drinker. I convinced one of the boxers at the gym to give him work at his dry cleaning business and a place to live.”
“So that’s where the money comes from,” Maggie said, her tone matter-of-fact, inevitable, as if she had already figured it out. “You.”
Henry nodded.
“He always said it was his luck, turning around. Uncle Peter was an alcoholic. As far back as I can remember, he had a drink in his hand. His wife had one foot out the door because he had already blacked out one too many times around their baby girl. Him losing the house, his job as a construction foreman, his family? As good as done before that night.”
The new facts loosened things in Henry’s mind, but he had pieced together the guilt for so long, the fragments were slow to pull apart. That he was, perhaps, Caliban’s final catalyst was something Henry may never let go.
She stared at a leaf blown in through the open window, unable to meet his eyes since he had entered the tight space. Her jaw was set. Lips that had once moved beneath his had set into a frown.
“When did you know he was my uncle?”
“Sunday before last. The day you hugged him on the street.”
“And you just happened to be there?”
“I’m there every Sunday. In the park, across the street.”
“To gawk?”
“To pay Manny for his rent, his grocery bills.”
Maggie stalled on a sharp response. He wouldn’t have told her about the money if she hadn’t figured it out, if she hadn’t accused him of being a sick fucking voyeur to his crime.
“You should have told me.” She leveled him with a stare capable of knocking the wind out of him.
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t want this.” He motioned, an absent gesture between them. “I’m not that person anymore.”
“I wish I could believe that. But look at you. You’re still a fighter. Only now it’s not a crime.”
“I’m sorry, Maggie. I should have told you that day in the gym, that first day after I realized. But you punched that bag and I saw how excited you were and I wanted to have value in your eyes.”
“You have value, Henry. Just not in my eyes. Not anymore.”
A gust of wind stirred the overhead leaves into a spiral, battering the skylight. Once upon a time, he had taught her how to calm, to put the mind at rest, to breathe through adversity. Now, he couldn’t remember himself.
He stood, half expecting her to stop him. She didn’t.
“I’m still taking you both to New York tomorrow.” His voice was not his own. He cleared the squeeze from his windpipe halfway through his declaration.
“That’s not necessary.”
“Cops have yet to track down Davonte Howard. So in my mind, yeah, it’s necessary. Even if you can’t stand the sight of me, I have to know you’re both okay.”
He had to leave, to end her chance to protest. But there was the cramped space and the trap door and the ladder, all conspiring to give her time to say no, to dash his hopes that on the ten-hour round trip and all the time in between, he could change her mind about him. She knew him now, knew all of him. On some level, the relief was palpable. He still had so far to go.
“Henry—”
Past the tree’s base, he had almost reached the driveway. The wind picked up, drowning out what she said. She had crawled onto the treehouse porch on her hands and knees, her hair caught in a wild torrent around her. He couldn’t read her expression. Part of him didn’t want to.
Henry cupped a hand to his mouth and hollered, “I’ll pick you up at seven.”
He climbed into his truck cab. Draperies inside the house resettled.
11
Maggie climbed out of her sedan. Since the threats at Affleck-Martin and the suspicion surrounding the arson at Sol’s gym, she hadn’t made it a practice of returning after dark. But her parents insisted on a family meal and a mind-numbing talk to reiterate the values on which they had raised her
. When Maggie asked her mother why she never helped Uncle Peter financially, she clammed up and poked at her butternut squash risotto. When Maggie pressed for the reason for her mother’s estrangement from her brother all those years ago, Maggie learned her grandfather had engaged in the same negligent and alcoholic tendencies. Some things, she supposed, were inevitable.
“The first time, it’s a mistake. We took him in. That’s when he built the treehouse,” said her father. “All the times after? Those were choices.”
She wanted to ask why her uncle was worthy of a second chance, but Henry wasn’t. But the day had stretched long, and she still had to stop on the way home to pick up a few things for the trip to New York. Her parents would have had some short-sighted response, anyway, maybe something about Peter being family. Maggie wondered if all maturing children awakened to the hypocrisy in their parents or just her.
Lower-floor lights spilled out of the youth house onto the darkened pavement. Lucy, the day-relief resident director, had promised to stay past her time. Maggie made a mental note to reciprocate the hours when she returned from New York. So it was in this mindset—distracted, laden with bags, rushing to relieve Lucy—that Maggie exited and locked her car.
She wasn’t alone.
Just beyond her rear bumper stood a man in silhouette.
Maggie snatched air into her lungs, but they didn’t expand. Her brain catalogued her options—reenter the car and drive away or run to the Victorian’s back entry.
Where the hell was Jerry?
“You Miss Kavanaugh?”
She was being ridiculous, profiling the guy because he was black, wore a hood. Because Henry suspected arson at his gym. The man knew her name. No random violence here. Maybe she had it all wrong.
Still, she took two steps back, toward the house. “I’m sorry—who are you?”
“You got my son.”
Fourteen boys lived at Affleck-Martin, thirteen of whom no one gave a hang about. The remaining boy brought with him a stepfather with a history of mental instability, substance abuse, and a criminal record.