First, Last, and in Between

by Jamie Bennett

  He was going to get himself killed. What kind of idiot ran toward a gunshot? “Get back inside and call Ronnie. And put your clothes on,” I yelled at him, and he immediately shut the door.

  I shook the kid again. “Well?”

  His answer was a squeaking cough and I realized that I had him a foot or so off the ground. I lowered him until he could put his toes on the dirty concrete and he gasped in a breath.

  “Memphis,” he told me, coughing. “Memphis sent me.”

  “Are you carrying anything else?” When he didn’t answer fast enough, I shook him again.

  “No! No, that was it. He gave me the gun,” the kid said. I felt around his pockets and his waistband and he wasn’t lying. He was also starting to cry.

  I heard tires and whipped my head around to watch Ronnie pull up. His eyes got huge when he saw me with the kid. “What the hell happened? Where’s Jourdan?” he yelled as he got out of the car and ran toward me. “Is she ok?”

  “Go get her,” I told him. “Go tell Leopold that he’s leaving. Take him home, take her to your place. Tell him that he can’t see her anymore because she’s a security threat. According to me.”

  “A security threat?” Ronnie nodded. “Yeah, ok. What are you going to do?”

  “I have to have a talk inside with this guy. Swing by and pick me up in an hour.”

  “He can’t breathe,” Ronnie pointed out as he rushed past us into the house, and I saw that I was holding the kid off the ground again. I put him down but kept my hand on his throat.

  “We’re just going to talk,” I told him, but the distinct odor of piss filled the air. I sighed.

  ∞

  Isobel

  Damn it. Where was she? “No, don’t touch me,” I told the old guy who reached for my sleeve as I looked around inside the dark interior of the bar. “Don’t touch me!” I repeated, and shoved his hand away. This place had always been her favorite, and it was as run-down, dirty, and filled with disgusting men as it had been when she’d brought me here as a kid and made me sit under the table so I wouldn’t cramp her style. But I didn’t see Jade here tonight. She hadn’t been at any of the hospitals that I’d personally checked out or the hair salons that she liked to visit and bother the stylists. The police didn’t have anything new, she hadn’t been back at her apartment or at the shelters I’d checked, and I was starting to feel a little desperate.

  I sat in my car after I left the bar, considering if I had time to stop anywhere else before I had to get to Ameyo’s house. I had shifted around my schedule and canceled two jobs so I could look for my mother, but I didn’t want to cancel on Ameyo, and I had to go to the Tollmans’. That was my biggest payout and I needed that money. No, I didn’t have time and right now I didn’t have any more ideas about where Jade could be, either.

  “Jade will turn up eventually,” I told the little cat riding in the front seat with me, but she didn’t care; I was just trying to convince myself. I checked my phone again but all that was there was another message from Rory, asking if I was all right.

  “I am,” I spoke to the cat again, who still didn’t pay any attention. I was worried, of course, that my mom was missing. That my boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, was going to come after me. That I had woken up that morning and found myself gripping Rory like he was some kind of flotation device keeping me above water, that I hadn’t wanted to let go, not ever. It had been a mistake to go to his apartment, but when he’d come over the night before and I’d been so scared…I had grabbed onto him like he was a floatation device then, too, and let him pack my bag and walk me out. All my clothes, I now realized, so that there was almost nothing that I could wear when I went back to my apartment tonight.

  The thought of going back to my apartment alone made my stomach start to hurt.

  The man who had tried to grab me in the bar now came stumbling out onto the sidewalk, blinking in the sunlight, and he turned and squinted in my direction. I stuck my phone in between the seats without answering Rory and started the tin can to drive to Ameyo’s house.

  No one was home as I let myself in, so I looked around before I started to clean. I checked to see if her husband Patrick’s clothes were still in the closet, if the suitcases were gone, if there was any sign at all that she had caught him cheating over the weekend when he was supposed to have been golfing with friends, and that she had kicked him out. But instead, there was a vase with bright pink roses in the kitchen, which were her favorite and he would often surprise her with, there was a note taped to the door reminding him to pick up the dry cleaning, and there was a stack of clean boxer-briefs on the dryer. He was still here, and she still didn’t know that he had lied to her.

  Probably it was a good thing, I told myself as I cleaned. Probably it was good that she didn’t know the truth about her husband and she would go ahead and have their baby and live out her perfect life, even if it was a lie. Maybe it was better to be in ignorance like that. After all, that was what I was doing with Rory. I didn’t know what he really did in his job which he said was “protection” and I didn’t know what he was doing to find that guy Memphis who had taken his money. The night before, I had dreamed about him, about watching him through a high window as faceless, shapeless people surrounded him and hurt him and all I could do was pound on the glass and scream, and no one could hear me. I had woken up in the dark, calling his name, thinking that he was dying.

  I looked at my phone as another message came in from him, saying that he was leaving the woodshop and asking how I was. I stared at the words for a long moment before I shoved the phone back into my pocket. I didn’t have time for this—I had to hurry and leave this place or Mrs. Tollman would take it out of my paycheck if I showed up late. I wasn’t sure if she just would fire me immediately, since the last time I’d been there, she’d been drunk off her ass and had fallen on her kitchen floor. I certainly couldn’t spend any more time thinking about Rory.

  As I walked into the driveway, shifting my bucket to my other hand, a little convertible drove in and parked next to me. Patrick, Ameyo’s cheating husband, got out of the car, wearing his hospital scrubs and looking tired. “Hey there, Izzie,” he called, and pulled a white coat and bag out of the back seat. “I just finished a long shift. I’m happy to come home to a clean house, so thank you.”

  “Sure,” I told him, nodding. Prior to finding that message on his phone, I had liked him. I had even asked him about some of the medications my mom was taking, to see if he thought there were better ones, and he had tried to help me by getting me in touch with a psychiatrist he knew and then following up a few times to see how Jade was doing.

  “Ameyo said you were in a car accident?” he asked, looking me over and then studying the tin can. “The car seems ok. How are you feeling?”

  “Great. And I wasn’t riding in this,” I said briefly.

  “That’s lucky. I have a feeling your car would act about the same way mine would in an accident.” He moved his palms together, like he was squishing something between them, and grimaced. “Having the baby has made me reconsider what I drive. I’m going to trade this in for a tank with millions of airbags and bumpers around it for safety. I’m always thinking about the baby and Ameyo now, even more than I thought about her before,” he said, and smiled like he was imagining his wife.

  The lying prick. Had he thought a lot about them while he was busy screwing another woman on the weekend that he snuck away and lied about it? How was “Charlie” today, still wanting him to “call me, babe?” “Great,” I repeated to Patrick. “Good for you, thinking about your wife. I have to get to my next house.” I backed up my unsafe, airbag-free tin can without looking at him again.

  Mrs. Tollman’s car wasn’t in the garage when I opened the door, but I could already hear music blaring through the house. “Hello?” I called as I went cautiously into the kitchen. No one answered me, but maybe no one could have heard over the guy yelling out lyrics about his bitch and what he was going to do to her. This was definit
ely new for the Tollman house, where I had never heard anything louder than her disapproving sniffs as she checked my work. “Hello?” I asked the empty kitchen again.

  A teenage boy walked into the room and stopped dead when he saw me. “Who are you?” he yelled over his music, and then yelled at the speaker to turn it down.

  “I’m the cleaning lady,” I said into the sudden quiet. “I’m just the cleaner.” I already knew who he was: Wilder, the Tollman kid who had been hiding his wads of cash around his room. Wilder, the one I had taken it from.

  He didn’t say anything to me at first and I felt like I could almost see him thinking. I planned what I would do if he rushed at me and tried to hurt me for stealing from him. I had lost my pepper spray, but I could use my bucket, swing it up suddenly into his stomach or between his legs so he couldn’t—

  “Are you going to tell my mom?”

  “What?” I asked, not understanding.

  “Are you going to tell my mom about the money?” He hesitated, looking at me closely. “I’ll give you some. I’ll give you…ten percent.”

  “You’ll give me money to keep me quiet about your money?” I asked, still not getting it.

  “Not ten, then. Twenty!”

  “I—”

  “Fifty. I’ll give you fifty percent,” he said. He licked his lips, nervous. “Every time I hide it, you find it. I can’t keep it at school because they can search our lockers and someone stole my graphing calculator out of my backpack so that’s not safe. Please don’t tell my mom,” he begged me.

  I shook my head. “Why are you here? Where’s Mrs. Tollman?”

  “I don’t know, the bank? She came today and took us out of school and said we have to leave. We’re going to our house in Grand Cayman for a while.” He started to bite his nail. “Please don’t tell her. When we get back, I won’t do it anymore. I swear.”

  “You’re going on vacation?” I asked in confusion. “Why? When?”

  “Now. Something happened with my dad. I don’t even know where he is.” Wilder looked around as if someone might overhear us. “My mom is freaking out and if you tell her about me, she’ll send me away somewhere, like juvenile hall or something. I have to be with my sister.”

  He seemed like such a normal kid, a normal, scared kid. I had been thinking that Wilder Tollman was like a character in a movie I’d seen, a guy in expensive sunglasses who ruled his school and treated the other kids like shit because they were afraid of him. It was a lot harder to think that I’d been taking from this guy, the one who was pretty scrawny and had some skin problems and couldn’t really look into my face with his frightened brown eyes. “She can’t send you to juvenile hall. The courts send you there,” I told him.

  Those brown eyes got huge. “Are you going to tell the cops on me?”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. I’m not going to tell anyone.” He started to reach into his back pocket, probably for his wallet, and I shook my head, no. “I don’t want any money from you. I won’t take any more, ok? But you should stop.” Whatever he was doing, he was probably in over his head.

  “It was my girlfriend’s idea,” he explained. “She gets the stuff from her dad and we sell it around school. But she thinks her dad knows, anyway, and we can’t do it anymore. He wants to send her to some boarding school in California where they make you—” Wilder broke off when we both heard the garage door open.

  “What are you doing in here, Wilder?” Mrs. Tollman asked when she came in. She was struggling to carry a stack of moving boxes, and they slipped out of her grip and fanned across the tile. She was flushed and frowning and her hair was messy, not as bad as the last time I’d seen her drunk on the floor of this room, but not up to her perfect standards.

  “I’m packing,” he told his mom, and took off, giving me one last, pleading look.

  “You’re not needed today,” Mrs. Tollman said to me. She tried to collect the boxes but a few fell again, making her swear like a sailor. That was new.

  I picked one up and leaned it on the cabinet. “Are you moving? Your son said you’re—”

  “We’re taking an extended vacation,” Mrs. Tollman was telling me, and as she did, the kitchen door slammed again. Mr. Tollman, the guy I’d only seen in framed, carefully-placed photos and only knew by examining his passport and dirty laundry, stormed in. His silver tie was pulled loose.

  “Are you ready?” he asked his wife, and then stared at me. “Who is this?”

  “No one. The cleaner,” his wife dismissed me. “We don’t need you,” she said again. “I’ll be in touch when I want you to come back in.”

  They were both looking at me, and we all heard a girl’s voice call from upstairs. “Mom? Are you there? What am I supposed to tell my friends? Why do I have to get rid of my phone? I don’t get why we have to leave like this!”

  Mr. Tollman’s face darkened. He pulled out his wallet and yanked out some bills, which he crumpled in his fist before he shoved them in my direction. “We won’t need your services for the next few weeks. We’re going on vacation,” he said to me. “Leave, now.” I took the money and my bucket and I left as fast as I could. But I only drove a few blocks before I pulled over, took out the cat from the carrier, and took out my phone. Rory had called again but I dialed a different number.

  “Hi, honey,” Rella answered. “How are you today?”

  I poured out the story of the Tollmans—not the part about Wilder and his money, but about how they were apparently fleeing the jurisdiction, maybe temporarily, but who knew? I’d been through that with Jade, taking off in the night several times in order to avoid rent due dates or other problems, but she had never been organized enough to pack up our stuff before we ran like the Tollmans were doing.

  “What do you think they were up to?” Rella marveled. “What are they running from?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. All my poking around in their house hadn’t prepared me for this. “I do know that I’m out all that money that she used to pay me, at least for a while. Maybe forever.”

  “You’ll be all right.”

  Maybe I would. “I’m going to come home now. What do you need at the store?”

  “Don’t come here again. Let that Kash settle down before you come back. Rory told me that you broke it off with that…that…” Rella didn’t like to swear, so she left the insult dangling. And no, I hadn’t told her about Kash because I hadn’t wanted her to worry, as happy as I also knew she’d be about the end of our relationship. When I didn’t answer, she persisted. “Don’t come here alone, Izzie Starr. I don’t want you tangling with that lowlife again if he decides to show up looking for you. Rory already brought me a whole cabinet-full of groceries and a container of lasagna from Roma’s for dinner, so I’m fine.”

  “He did? That’s his favorite,” I remembered.

  “He’s a sweet boy,” she said approvingly. And then she had to hang up to go to church because they were starting a new letter-writing campaign to the mayor about providing better mental health services in the city. Rella had suggested that one, and I knew she was thinking of my mother. Wherever she might be. “You call me later and let me know how you are. And give Rory my best when you speak to him.”

  I wasn’t going to speak to him, I had already decided. But I had somehow directed my car while Rella and I were talking, and now I found myself parked in front of Rory’s building. A sweet boy, she had said, the kind of person who brought a special dinner to an elderly lady and filled up her cupboards with food. Was he really that guy? I looked up toward where his windows faced north across the city and wondered. He seemed like he was the best thing that had ever happened in my life, but that was very hard to believe. He seemed like he wasn’t the same person who had gone to prison, but wasn’t he? That guy had been involved in scary stuff, and that guy had killed someone.

  Where was Rory right now, I wondered? When he wasn’t turning wood on those machines, was he back to doing the same things that had gotten him sent away? He had sai
d no, but why should I have believed anyone? Maybe I had enough going on, anyway, with taking care of Jade and Rella and staying away from Kash, that I didn’t need—

  A fist smashed into my window, and a voice boomed, “Hey.”

  When I jumped and screamed, the cat latched into my skin with her tiny claws. “Ow!”

  “Isobel, it’s me,” Rory said, leaning down to look in at me. “Open up.”

  First I unhooked the cat, and then I reached, my hand shaking, and unlocked the door. Rory got in and the car dipped down. He leaned over and kissed me, like it was a normal thing to do.

  “Hey, cat.” He took her from my lap and held her up so they could eye each other. “How was your day?” He turned to me. “What’s the matter with him? He’s upset.”

  “You scared her! You almost broke my window and you yelled and you—” I stopped. “She’s fine.”

  “Are you? Why didn’t you answer me today when I wrote to you?”

  “I was busy,” I hedged. “I was working. And looking for Jade.”

  “She didn’t show up yet? Rella said it usually takes a few days, but she appears when she needs money.”

  I turned to stare at him. “You discussed my mother over tea with Rella, too?”

  “Yeah, because when I didn’t hear back from you, I was worried. I wanted to know if she had any ideas for where to look for Jade before I went out.”

  “You looked for Jade?”

  “Rella gave me the names of some streets. She thought that Jade might be working them. Is that possible?”

  I looked through the windshield at other cars. Yes, it was possible that my mom was out selling herself somewhere in the city. I had driven on those streets looking for her, too.

  “We’ll go back and check there again and keep trying,” Rory continued, like I had spoken. “Also, I want to get Rella a cell phone so she can text us. Would she use it?” He turned. “What are you staring at?”

  I had seen something on his clothes. “Your shirt.” I pointed to his chest. “What is that stain?”