Rising Waters

by Chloe Garner

  “And what do you expect me to do about it?” Sarah asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’ll hire a nurse and a nanny, and I consider it your decision whether you even choose to speak to it.”

  “It’s a baby, Jimmy,” Sarah said.

  He blinked.

  This wasn’t a welcome subject.

  Not that that was going to put her off, all by itself.

  “You can’t just remove it from her,” Sarah said. “Like it or not, a baby needs a ma and a pa, and as much a shame of parents as Lise and Little Peter would be…”

  “Do you think I would take my son or daughter and just hide them away to spite her?” Jimmy asked. Sarah let her words stop, knowing he would speak again, letting him pick his time. He didn’t have to like it, but she knew him well enough to know that when she pricked him that badly, he’d finish his thought.

  He finished the vinna and let the glass dangle between his fingers.

  “I’m not going to be much of a father, and I know you want nothing to do with being a mother, but Peter was never much of a father to me the boys, anyway. It was just Elaine.” She’d never heard him use his mother’s given name before. Not like that. “She saved the family from all of the crazy that comes with the Lawson name,” Jimmy went on. “If there’s any hope for a next generation, it’s in me doing the same.”

  “Thomas and Rhoda…” Sarah started, and he nodded, rubbing his nose.

  “Yes,” he said. “Rhoda will raise strong, reliable children, and Thomas will teach them how he views the world. They will be… good people.”

  Unless one of them had an unexpectedly potent streak of Lawson in them, Sarah thought. She nodded.

  “They aren’t going to run claims,” she agreed. Jimmy drew air, looking back at the vinna but not going to get it.

  “I’m not looking for someone who can run claims. Petey, Rich, and Wade will have plenty of those, should any of them choose to have children. Just on the controlled side of civilized, isn’t that how you said it once?”

  She nodded. She remembered that critique of the twins at some point in her teen years.

  “I need someone who can control the family,” he said. “Who can keep us from turning into simple thugs.”

  The words were scathing in his mouth.

  “You think about this a lot,” Sarah said quietly. He nodded, watching the city.

  “There’s time, yet. But if there was one single reason for me to not return to Lawrence…”

  She nodded.

  She was no Elaine Lawrence. Eli’s strong, independent, calculating daughter had loved Sarah as a daughter, but Sarah only had her pa’s stubborn going for her. Jimmy was so much Elaine’s son. For a moment, she could see Elaine’s flashing gray eyes, there in his reflection. She turned away.

  She’d never thought that children were a good idea.

  For a long time she’d thought that they weren’t a good idea for anyone, but as the children who had been born after she came home from college grew into teenagers, she saw the burden they lifted off of their parents, the way that they shaped a future, even if they had control of that future and would often ignore their parents’ hopes for it. That future existed because they existed, and Sarah had begrudgingly begun to believe that they were a necessary evil.

  But she didn’t want to bear children, to have the responsibility of caring for an infant, to have the much larger responsibility of watching over them as they grew from infants to independent adults. She remembered so much of what Elaine had been like, as a mother, and she knew that it wasn’t within her reach.

  She wouldn’t force anything more than a dog to suffer her company, though Dog seemed content enough with it. A baby was just…

  Jimmy knew.

  He knew how bad an idea it was.

  He’d never even thought that maybe it would be different than she expected.

  There in his reflection, she could still see it. He loved her. He’d loved her since they were so very small. But he didn’t believe that she should mother his children.

  He would hire someone to do that, should it come to that. She shook her head.

  “It’s not a solution, Jimmy.”

  “Sometimes there aren’t any.”

  “She’s going to have that baby,” Sarah said. He nodded.

  “And if it’s mine, I’m going to act appropriately,” he said. “It won’t be your concern.”

  And there it was. The door.

  They were so good at closing that door.

  She sighed, draining her vinna and going to get the bottle, filling her own glass and then handing it to him without a word.

  “I can’t,” she said after several minutes of silence. “I can’t, Jimmy.”

  “I know,” he told her. “I’ve never asked.”

  Rhoda would have been another Elaine. Would have guided the family with strength and optimism and something approaching ethics. Sarah chewed her lip.

  “It wouldn’t have been better,” Jimmy said, reading her eyes. She turned away, finding a couch and throwing herself onto it. Screw Lise and her high society expectations. Sarah was in a room with furniture, and she was going to damn well use it.

  “Would have been simpler if you’d never come back.”

  “It would have meant leaving you to die,” he said. He turned, leaning against the glass and smelling the vinna before taking another slow sip, watching her. “I said there was a reason. Not that I ever considered not coming.”

  “Yes you did,” she said, and he smiled, real humor.

  “Yes I did,” he said, “but only because I consider everything.”

  She nodded.

  “If it’s your baby…”

  He shook his head, tossing the rest of the vinna back and pouring another brimming glass.

  “I’ll consider it,” he said. “You’ll follow. That’s all.”

  As stern as the words sounded, it was a permission. She didn’t have to make any promises. Not yet. It was his problem alone, for now. Mostly she wouldn’t have let him do it, but on this…

  This was different.

  She nodded.

  “So what do you do for fun around here at night?”

  “I’m going to go put in an order for a meal,” he said. “And then I’m going to sit down on the couch next to you and we’re going to finish the vinna.”

  “I’m not going to sit around and get drunk with you,” Sarah said.

  The corner of his mouth drifted, as he considered that.

  “When was the last time you got hard drunk?” he asked.

  She shook her head. She didn’t like the question, but he didn’t retract it.

  “Rhoda,” she said. He nodded.

  “And before that?”

  She pressed her lips, but he still didn’t relent.

  “Pete.”

  The man whose claim she had jumped, her best friend and the man she’d shot to try to keep absenta a secret. She didn’t remember going home from the tavern that night at all.

  “What if drunk isn’t the point?” he asked. “With vinna, there’s a softer curve into it. You don’t have to get drunk to enjoy it.”

  There was humor, and something more to the way he looked at her. She set her glass down.

  “I’m not the type, Lawson.”

  “Why not?” he asked, grinning. Before she could come up with an answer to that, he winked at her and turned, going into the kitchen and browsing a drawer without any concern for her at all.

  When he hung up, he came to sit next to her on the couch, not giving her any space at all, and one after the other he drew the knives from between her shoulder blades and the gun from the inside of her ankle, setting them on the glass table where they were just right there, but out of reach. He poured her a glass of vinna and wrapped her fingers around it.

  “To the new, and to the old, and to how both of them make us rich,” he said, picking up his own glass without letting go of her fingers.

  He held her eye for a
long time, then let his hand slip away to rest on her knee.

  She drank.

  --------

  The vinna made her feel pink and fuzzy.

  There was food, but she didn’t remember eating it.

  She laughed.

  So did Jimmy.

  She might have even giggled.

  That the pink sizzle of skin against skin was a one-time-only event there on the white living room carpet just made it all the sweeter.

  --------

  She woke up to the sun.

  There was no smell of dust or sand, and the air was cool and moist around her. Her head was muzzy, but it wasn’t a hard hangover like she’d had on occasion, and she remembered everything from the night before with a similar clarity to that she’d had, experiencing it.

  There were worse ways to be, in a morning.

  Bits and pieces of the night, laying on the carpet alongside Jimmy, every time he moved, every time she moved, coming awake and being aware of him there, it was all an easy memory.

  No regrets to that.

  He’d stolen a heavy blanket from somewhere for them, and a pair of pillows off of a couch, and while her body ached like it would, laying on a hard floor all night, so long as she didn’t move, she felt well.

  “All of the parties, here,” Jimmy said, his eyes still closed. “All of the foolishness that went on here. I’ve never had a better night.”

  He opened his eyes to look at her.

  “I know you don’t like it here, but you were missing.”

  “I don’t mind hearing it,” she said, rolling onto her side and stretching her legs to try to get blood back where it wanted to be.

  “There’s going to be a party tonight,” he said. She raised her eyebrows, and he rolled onto his stomach, planting his chin on a closed fist to look out the window. “We need everyone to know that I’m still around and I’m still Jimmy Lawson. Moving out to Lawrence hasn’t changed that.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Do you still have enough important business here that maintaining a reputation is worth it?”

  He put his ear onto his fist, looking at her.

  “If you didn’t think my reputation was worth that much, why did you help me burn down the warehouse?”

  “One, that was Preston, and we sell in Preston. Two, I’d have done it just because they threatened you. Your reputation didn’t have to have anything to do with it.”

  He looked out again.

  “My contacts in Intec are going to be valuable. Getting things, selling things, knowing what’s going on. It’s possible I could cultivate those in Preston, but I just don’t have them at the same level I do, here. I need to keep them.”

  She was concerned that he was holding on to power simply because he didn’t like letting go of it, but she didn’t say it.

  “We’ll find you something to wear, today,” he said. “And I have some shopping to do. We’ll go see Descartes tomorrow.”

  “I don’t like parties,” Sarah said, just to go ahead and say it. Even if he knew it, if she went along wordlessly, she was giving up something she wasn’t willing to part with. It didn’t need an answer, and he didn’t give her one. Instead, he pushed himself up off of the ground with his fingertips, letting the blanket pile behind him, and he stood at the window.

  Sarah shook her head, sitting up and going looking for her clothes. Him watching her dress was one thing. Exhibitionism like that was just foolish.

  “Dumber than a dancing cow,” she murmured, and she heard him laugh, but they didn’t say any more about it than that.

  She cleaned up the boxes of food, finding the trash output easily enough under the sink where it should have been, then turned back to look at Jimmy, who hadn’t moved.

  “Going to get a sunburn like that,” she said, and he looked over his shoulder.

  “I wish I could see Lawrence from the house like this,” he said. “I like that the house is up on a hill like it is, especially given the floods, but being out by ourselves like we are, it loses… this.”

  She went to stand next to him, giving his hairless chest and belly a dismissive glance. He didn’t wince. It wouldn’t have been fun, if he had.

  In the light, and with the situational distance, she noticed a lot more scars than he’d had when they were young. Life had been rough on him, but no rougher than it had been on her. He still had the skin of a teenager, the way lean muscle lay over a skeletal frame that felt just a fraction ahead of schedule. He was strong, but he didn’t have the Lawson build. Little Peter and the others were all solid-shouldered men with meaty cores. They were all of them lean, but not the way Jimmy was.

  He also had his mother’s freckles everywhere that ever got sun. He didn’t have tan lines, he had freckle lines.

  “Are we going to go shopping, or are you going to go pee off the deck, next?” she asked. He laughed.

  “I’m not wearing the same clothes as yesterday,” he said. “I actually have a closet full of clothes to choose from, here. I’m sure Kayla wouldn’t mind if you looked to borrow hers, for the day, if you wanted.”

  Sarah snorted - as he’d intended.

  “That windy tree? I’d ruin anything she owned, just trying to get it off the hanger.”

  “She has an entire room of clothes,” he said. “It was part of her conditions for marrying Wade.”

  Why? Why had that woman chosen a Lawson? Lise made sense. Sunny… Well, Sunny had no reason to marry anyone, in specific, so you couldn’t be surprised by who she ended up with. And Rhoda and Thomas were a fine match. But Kayla?

  “She loves him,” Jimmy said. “Can’t give you any more reason than that.”

  She shook her head, following Jimmy upstairs and down a wide hall. There were doors to either side that he passed without any attention, going to the pair of double doors at the end of the hallway and pushing them open ahead of him with a sense of grandeur that Sarah very nearly mocked out loud.

  “If you have a mirror in the ceiling…” she started, then stopped.

  Two Jimmies. It was everywhere in the room. Unlike the slippy black car downstairs, which was all Jimmy, just not the Jimmy she’d always known, his room had a foreign Jimmy. A man who brought women into this room to impress them, to seduce them. There was a pit off to her right, two steps down into a ring of plush black couches that were encircled by transparent black drapery. To the left, there was a wood floor, banks of mirrors, floor lighting.

  The bed was magnetically levitated.

  She’d known two or three pricks in college with ones just like it.

  In the back corner, overlooking the city, there was a wrap-around desk with three-high bookshelves that were overwhelmed with oft-used books, and by the bed, there was a stack of screens next to a mug full of pens. The rug by the bed was heavy and durable; the carpet everywhere else was thick and felt like moss under her feet.

  There were mirrors over the bed.

  “I’d like to go home now,” she said quietly, feeling the rumble of temper and trying to ignore it, trying to stave it off, trying not to let him see the emotion underneath it.

  Temper was one thing.

  Letting his bedroom break her was something else.

  “You deserved to know,” he said quietly, sitting down on a chair by the wooden floor and the wall-length mirrors. “Tell me.”

  She squeezed all of the air out of her chest, clenching her jaw as she got harder and harder. Finally she shook her head, knocking her hair back behind her shoulders on both sides and wishing she had something to bind it with.

  “Thought those monstrosities went out of style like fifteen years ago,” she said, indicating the bed. She moved forward. Being rooted to the spot said she was paralyzed, and paralysis was weak.

  “The low-end ones did,” he answered. No defensiveness. No play.

  She went and looked up at the mirror.

  “Heard some guys use distortion on these.”

  “Myth.”

  “You design this palace you
rself?”

  “No. My designer gave me some options to choose from, and I chose the ones I liked.”

  “Bull,” she said. The word was out of her mouth before she could stop it. What the hell. “Bull,” she said louder. “Ain’t none of this you, Lawson. Stack of screens and a helluva lotta books, that I get, but you ain’t the type to bring home the stupidest, most identical threesome of air-breathing makeup you can find and try to impress ‘em. Ain’t you, and I ain’t gonna sit here and listen to you tell me it is.”

  “And yet,” he answered, folding his hands. She shook her head.

  “You’re puttin’ on a parade for someone, and they ain’t the type of person you’d ever want to impress, not the man I knew when he was young. You didn’t choose this room because you liked it. You chose it ‘cause it got you what you wanted, and I’m more disappointed ’n I can say, lookin’ at it. Oughta be ashamed, crawlin’ this low for women to give you what you like.”

  There was a tightening around his lips - temper, humor? she couldn’t be certain - and she wished she had a hat to slam onto her head so she could charge out of the room.

  He sighed.

  She coulda slapped him for that sigh.

  “It is a comfortable, functional space, for the things I intended it,” he said. “And I knew you would hate it, and I brought you here, anyway, because I thought you deserved to know.”

  “This is what you were doin’ while I was shootin’ my best friend in the chest, tryin’ to keep the bits of whatnot we had to ourselves? This?”

  His mouth twitched in calculation.

  “I was probably packing, just then,” he said.

  “Looks like you left in a hurry,” she said derisively, and he nodded.

  “I did.”

  “You go put on your fancy duds. Point me at a train station and I’ll find my own way home. Damn you.”

  “I told you what we’re doing today,” he said. “I expect you to see it through, regardless of what you think of the character I adopted while I was here.”

  “Character,” she snarled. “You can’t tell me that this is what you like and that it’s all a charade, in the same breath.”

  “I can,” he said. The corner of his mouth twitched, and she anticipated the cruelty of what he was going to say next, without knowing what it would be. “I liked the man that I was here. I enjoyed it. I am powerful, I am respected, and I inspire men and women alike to want my attention. Yes, it is useful, and yes, it is calculated, but I also very much enjoy it.”