BABY FOR A PRICE

by Kathryn Thomas

  I just lean back and stare at Mac silently, my only choice in this situation. He watches me for a few moments, grinning, looking so different to the Mac I’ve known all these years I’m almost certain that that Mac was a performance, a trick to make this wayward hulking teenage kid respect him.

  “You’re too modest,” he says. “I get it, Hound. You’ve always been a good worker, never letting anything slide. Always very—what’s the word—you have an eye for detail.”

  “Conscientious,” I murmur. Apparently my English literature course wasn’t a complete waste of time.

  Mac snaps his fingers, smiling up at Ripper and Hitter. “Do you hear that, boys? Hound knows the score. Hound’s a walking dictionary.”

  “He is, ain’t he?” Ripper says.

  “A walking dictionary,” Hitter repeats, when Mac looks at him expectantly.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Mac says. “Once, there was a man in prison, minding his own business, when four lifers came strolling down the hallway trying to cause trouble. But he was ready. He was fuckin’ ready. He’s got pepper spray in one hand and a razor shank in the other. He blinds two of them, guts the other two, and then guts the blinded fucks. And then after that, when he’s built himself a network of good strong men, everyone who was an inconvenience to him was removed. Everyone who wasn’t what they were supposed to be.” Mac pauses, stroking his chin. “But you’re always what you’re supposed to be, aren’t you, Hound? Efficient, cold. An enforcer. Just like the twins here. No time to get soft. No time to second-guess or any of that shit. So I reckon you’ll finish the job you’re too modest to admit you started: I reckon you’ll kill Dean Dunham.”

  I have to stop myself from doing several things: gripping the arms of the chair, shouting, shaking with rage, showing any sign of anger on my face at all. I’ve worked for Mac for a decade and a half, and as far as I can remember, that’s the first time he’s threatened me.

  I don’t trust myself to answer, so I just climb to my feet, nod, and leave the office. Mac waves at me, telling me I can go. I’m in the parking lot when I feel somebody tap my shoulder. I heard them coming, so I turn around quickly, ready to fight. But it’s just Hitter, scar making his eyebrows look twice the width. “Just do what he says.” He clenches his jaws, and then says, “Maybe in a different life you could fuck off to the suburbs and read books and whatever the fuck. But this ain’t a different life. This is the life. And you need to get that through your head.”

  “Why didn’t you just kill him?” I ask. “Why not just kill him if that’s what he wants?”

  “He doesn’t want us to kill him. You know that.”

  “The old man thinks he can kill me by killing him.”

  Hitter nods, and then turns and walks away.

  He wants to kill me, kill the part of me that confuses him, the part that has grown over these past couple of years. Hitter knows about the books and the suburbs, which means Mac knows, which means the whole organization probably knows. Which means they probably know about Daisy, too. When I’m in my car, I call Denton.

  “’Sup, man.”

  “I want you to tail Daisy Dunham and call me if anyone moves on her. Take a partner. Work shifts. I also want somebody outside Dean Dunham’s hospital. I need the name of the hospital, too, and the room number.”

  “Shit, man, but there’s a game on!”

  “Just fucking do it!” I snap. “You’ll be paid.”

  “Damn right I’ll be paid,” he says under his breath, before hanging up the phone.

  I have to keep her safe, because I know one thing for certain. I’m not killing her father. I’m not being the attack dog anymore. I want to see Daisy, I want to see Dean. I want to make this right. I want to be a part of her family, since my family has never wanted much to do with me.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Daisy

  I go to the window and look into the garden, watching them, unable to stop myself from smiling. The land for miles around is scorched dream-earth, unimagined, but that doesn’t matter to me. All that matters to me in this whole world is down there, playing in the yard. Hound—Henry, now; he was Hound a long time ago—is picking our child up over his head and flying around the yard with them. The child is neither a boy nor a girl, not yet, but they are laughing and shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” I tug my apron on and fry the bacon, taking great pleasure in the methodical movements. I’m no cook, I warned Henry long ago, but I can fry some bacon and butter some bread, squeeze ketchup onto the crispy meat. When I carry it out to them, Henry’s hair is a mess around his face, and his ice-blue eyes are alive with life. He takes the sandwich from me and devours it in two bites. After giggling, our child does the same. Then we’re all rolling around the freshly-mown grass, fighting, playing, Henry laughing, our child laughing—

  I’m woken by a nurse nudging me in the shoulder.

  “Excuse me, Miss Dunham? Miss Dunham?”

  “Yes? Yes? Sorry.” I rub sleep from my eyes and look up into her face: fake-tanned, tightly-drawn features, a no-nonsense look about her. “Is he—awake?” I almost asked if he was dead for a second then. I’m surprised to find that the world has turned dark, the light shining in through the windows streetlamps and moonlight. “Or…”

  “He’s awake,” the nurse says. She gives me the room number where I can visit him and then walks away to deal with somebody else.

  I’m nervous as I walk through the hospital, afraid of what I’ll find when I enter Dad’s room. They were working on him because his injuries were serious, which means he must look pretty bad. I catch myself thinking this and wonder if that’s the sort of thing you should be thinking in a situation like this. But when you’ve spent your entire life trying to avoid one particular thing, the prospect of being met with that thing doesn’t exactly fill you with hope. But I can only walk slowly for so long until I’m standing outside the door. I feel tears well in my eyes and force them back down. Pregnant, the father possibly involved in this, my own father coughing behind a hospital door.

  I force away the tears and then open the door, telling myself to be strong. When Mom had cancer, she was strong, right up until the end. She never complained. She never let herself cry, at least where I could see her. She was strong for the people around her and that’s what I have to try and be. But it’s easy to promise yourself that before you’re met with cold bloody reality.

  Dad’s face has ballooned to twice its size, covered in stiches and bandages, his body splayed out like a collection of meat and bones. IV drips feed into his veins, and a urine bag is attached to the side of the bed. His finger hovers near a Call Nurse button. When I enter, his eyes turn to me, but his head doesn’t. His head is propped up like a baby’s.

  “D-Daisy?” he manages to say, thought it comes out more like Dassheee, because of his swollen lips. “Oh, th-th-thank God!”

  I sit beside the bed, moving to take his hand before I see that it’s all swaddled in bandages. Seeing him like this is almost too much to handle, but I’m surprised to find that a big part of that doesn’t come from love or sadness, but from anger: anger that he would let this happen to himself after I’ve done so much to try and avoid it. Even as the anger grips me, I know, on some level, that it’s selfish. But it’s all too much to handle: the baby, Hound, and now this. I feel like screaming, I feel like hitting something.

  “Where were you?” I ask him.

  “I can’t say,” he replies. If he talks quietly, barely moving his lips, his voice is clearer and it seems to cause him less pain. “I wish I could, but, not yet, not yet…”

  “Who did this to you, then?”

  “I don’t know.” He winces. “I can’t remember. I don’t think I was facing them. I was—I was getting into my car, I think. I’ve talked to the police, but you know me, Daisy. You know I can’t really talk to the police.” He winces again, and then says. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  A pause lengthens between us and I realize, with a terrible sense of failure, t
hat we have nothing to say to each other. We’ve never talked, not properly. Our lives for the past decade has just been Dad spending the money I make him. We haven’t had time to talk. I wonder now, as I sit here with the silence growing more and more uncomfortable, if what I’ve been protecting all these years isn’t Dad, but an idea of Dad, or the man he was when Mom was alive, or some other phantom that was never realer than fog.

  “I hate seeing you like this,” I say, and I mean it.

  I mean it. Or am I just trying to convince myself? Is it that I hate seeing Dad hurt, or that I hate feeling like I’ve failed him—failed myself? I look up and down his bloodied, bandaged body and feel a profound sense of loss, but I’m not sure if that’s loss of Dad or loss of myself. If I can’t protect Dad, what am I? What have I spent these past ten years doing? Wasting away my twenties dealing with assholes at the Shack, never really even trying at anything better, using Dad as an excuse when in the end I’ll fail anyway? Is that all I’m worth? Is that all my baby’s worth? I tell myself I’m being selfish, but even if that’s true, it doesn’t change the way I feel.

  “What is it, Daisy?” Dad asks, his eyes looking small as they turn to me in his bumpy face.

  “I—” My fists are clenched. I’m shaking. I need to get myself under control, but my anger at Hound and my anger at myself and, yes, my anger at Dad is making it too difficult. “I—You should’ve been there for me.” I speak the words softly, decades-long-withheld words, words which have always lived between us but which neither of us have ever acknowledged as being alive. “You should’ve been there for me!” I repeat, voice cracking. “I was a child, Dad, I was a child and—and—oh, it doesn’t matter.”

  “No!” Dad shouts. He collapses in pain at the effort. “No,” he wheezes. “You need to say this. I owe you that much, at least.”

  “I just…” I take a deep breath. I don’t know how we got here. I was supposed to come in and play the good, supportive daughter. The elephant in the room was supposed to stay hidden, as he’s been for ten years. But we’re here now, so…“I used to hate you, Dad. I really used to hate you. Hate you with, like, a hatred that scared the shit out of me. I used to lie awake at night thinking of Mom and wondering how she would react to what you were turning me into. Oh, no, you didn’t make me drop out of school. You didn’t make me start working straightaway. No, you didn’t force me, or hit me, or anything. But you manipulated me, I’m sure of it. I’ve been sure of it for a long time.

  “I remember a couple of weeks after Mom died when you were drunk sitting on the couch, getting more and more drunk, when I came to sit with you. You turned to me with red eyes, looked me right in the face with those red eyes, eyes I still see every time I look at you, and you said to me, Dad, you said: ‘They’re going to kill me if I don’t start paying. If I don’t get them their money, they’re going to kill me. And I can’t work! Nobody will hire me!’ And when I told you how I was doing at school, you’d grunt and shrug. But, oh, when I came home one day and told you I’d gotten a job, you jumped up and wrapped your arms around me and told me you were the proudest you’d ever been!”

  I pause, wiping tears from my cheeks. Dad just stares down at his feet. I think he’s crying, too, but it’s difficult to tell with his puffed-up eyes.

  “Do you have any idea what that does to a daughter? Do you have any clue what it’s like to come home with your homework and have your dad grunt at you like an animal, and then have him all but push you into a job? Do you have an idea what it’s like for all your friends to be graduating and going off to college until you don’t have any friends left, not really, and you look back and wonder, What the hell happened to my life? You never supported me, Dad. I know it hurts to hear. I know it must really upset you. And I know I’ve kept quiet for too long. But it’s the truth. You killed a part of me the first time you took my money. It died. Because all I could think was, Shouldn’t he be protecting me? Shouldn’t he be the strong one? I never even got to grieve for Mom. That’s what it feels like.”

  I wipe the tears from my eyes, but there are so many now I’ve no sooner wiped my cheeks that they’re soaking again. Dad is trembling in bed, wincing in pain as his tears sting his bruised eyes. I grip my belly, thinking I might be sick, trying to get a hold of myself. All the pain of unvoiced anger, resentment, rage, self-loathing, washes over me, crippling me. A thousand memories of Dad snatching an envelope out of my hand whilst avoiding my gaze hit me. I remember asking him once if he wanted to go to the movies, and he agreed, but then he spent the whole time checking the time on his phone and tapping his foot. At the end, he jumped up and paced out of the theatre as quickly as he could. He didn’t want to hang out with his daughter. He wanted to party. He wanted to get away from his daughter as fast as he could, never mind that she was paying for the partying.

  “And I never really considered stopping,” I say. “I never truly thought that it was time to stop paying your way. I never wanted to see you hurt. And now—and now look at you. So what’s the point of it all, Dad? I wasn’t helping you. I wasn’t making you better. I was enabling you. That’s the truth. I was making it so you never had to get better. I was making it so you never needed to stand up and do something.”

  We both cry for ten or more minutes in silence. As time goes on, I find myself shocked at my words. But I also find that there’s far less tension than there usually is with me and Dad. There’s no longer a collection of unspoken agony between us. It’s all out there, except for one thing…

  “I’m pregnant,” I tell him. “I can’t tell you who the father is, not yet.” Why not? Maybe because I’m not sure about Hound; maybe because I don’t yet know if Hound has anything to do with this. “You’re going to be a grandfather.” I should leave it at that, but I can’t. “Let’s hope you’re better to your grandchild than you’ve been to me,” I add bitterly.

  Dad breaks down, weeping violently for around a minute, and then manages to calm himself down by breathing steadily. “Oh, Daisy,” he moans. “Daisy, Daisy. Fuck, I’ve been—I’ve been a horrible father. It’s true. You’re not wrong. Everything you’ve said is right. I’ve been a coward. When your mother died, I just—I froze, I guess. I froze and I stopped thinking of the next day or the next week and all I thought of was now, because at least now I didn’t have to think of her. But then what about you? I’ve been the world’s biggest coward, hiding from my problems. I hate myself!” He spasms in bed. I think he’s trying to punch the mattress, or the railing, but he’s too injured. He cries out in pain and slumps down. “I wish I was dead. I should’ve died, and your mother should’ve lived.”

  “Don’t say that,” I whisper. I touch his hand softly, careful not to hurt it.

  “Why not? It’s true. We both know it’s true.”

  “Maybe it is. I don’t know. But don’t say it.”

  He shakes his head as much as his bindings will allow. “I’ve always promised myself that tomorrow I would be better. I always did that, Daisy. I would lie awake, drunk and wheezing, and promise to myself that tomorrow, I would clean it all up. No booze, no poker, no blackjack, no anything. Some days I would even get to around four pm, but then I would start to see her, sitting sweaty after giving birth to you, or when we first met, turning her head to smile at me, and—”

  But he can’t go on. He starts crying again for a long, long time.

  “A grandfather,” he says. I start, sitting up. I thought he was asleep. “Me, a grandfather. Maybe if this thing works, it won’t be so—But life isn’t built on maybes. Whatever happens, I’ll be better. I can be better. I know I can.”

  “I hope so,” I say. “I really do hope so, Dad.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Hound

  I sit outside the hospital in my jeep, watching. I need confirmation from Dean that it was the twins, not that I know what I’ll do with that information. I know that, above all, Mac is a businessman, so perhaps if I can convince him that Dean is going to pay soon, he’ll drop this ve
ndetta and let it rest at that. But it’d have to be a damn lot of money to make him drop his interest in me. I think about the way he’s always looked at me, what I at first mistook for pride. That was my big mistake, thinking the old man was proud of me, and basking in that pride like an excited little kid. I was an excited little kid. I should’ve spit in his face and got the hell out of there the day Dad died. But no, I was too busy puffing up my chest and looking tough and liking it when the guys slapped me on the back.

  The night is dark, the moon hid behind a veil of deep black clouds, the stars winking out once or twice before retreating again. I lean back and half-close my eyes, doing the kind of resting I’ve done countless times before, while waiting on countless marks to show their faces. Usually at times like these, my mind will go to my one abiding fantasy: the massive house, the normal life. But whereas before I met Daisy I was always walking around the place alone—in a bathrobe, more relaxed than I could ever be in the city—now I’m walking around with a toddler’s legs on my shoulders, to the sound of Daisy’s voice calling me from the end of the hallway.