The Lost

by Cole McCade

  She didn’t want to care about anything right now.

  Every time she wrapped her lips around the cigarette, they pulsed, tender and sore from that vicious, claiming kiss. Her fingers shook as she tapped the ash into an empty peanut dish. What gave him the right? What gave him the right to kiss her that way, to jerk her around the way he did and then…and then…

  She closed her eyes and scrubbed a hand back through her hair. Let it go. Let it go. It hadn’t meant anything. None of that had meant anything at all, and she’d only spilled that stupid, self-pitying story on him in a moment of weakness when she’d felt sorry for him.

  She’d say it until she believed it. She had to believe it.

  If she didn’t, she’d run into the streets and disappear with nothing on her back but Gary’s shirt. She’d started over once, and she could do it again.

  Slow and deliberate, she breathed in the burning smoke, then exhaled in rippling clouds and imagined she was blowing the poison from her veins, venting it like exhaust fumes, cleansing herself with every lazy drag until she could hardly feel her throat for the numbing bite of nicotine. Hardly feel the tightness, the knot that refused to go away, this thing inside her a growing tumor that couldn’t be cured or excised.

  She chain-smoked her way through half a pack, stalling on going back up. She’d only be going back to dry her clothes and get her things together so she could get out of here. That had been the original plan. It hadn’t changed. It wouldn’t change. But she glanced up as Gary came stumping down the stairs, his rat’s nest of hair sticking up everywhere and sleep still crusted in his eyes, and she wondered why she hurt with a strange aching pull at the thought of never seeing his cragged face again.

  Their eyes met in the mirror over the bar, reflections watching each other warily, before Gary moved behind the counter to uncap a bottle of Wild Turkey, pour two tumblers three fingers deep, and slide one across to her.

  When he joined her on the barstools, settling next to her, she lit up a fresh cigarette and passed it over. “Thanks,” he muttered, and stuck it between his teeth.

  They sat together for some time, smoking, neither touching their drinks, in a silence that felt like the sort of odd communion that only smokers could understand. That quiet where you didn’t need to talk; where you could just be, as long as smoke wreathed your head in an angel’s halo and all you had to worry about was that hot red cherry creeping closer and closer to your lips. She remembered reading about it once in a King short, The Ten O’Clock People, only for her there were no aliens and slick corporate deceivers; just demons that wouldn’t leave her be.

  Gary’s cigarette burned down. He stubbed it out, cleared his throat, then took a swallow of his whiskey before breaking the silence. “Hart’s sleeping. Gave him enough water to drown an elephant. Should flush his system. He’ll probably be up in an hour or two needing to piss like a racehorse. Told him he could stay through the week, until the shakes pass.” He held his tumbler up, staring into the golden liquor as if trying to divine his future. “You did good with him.”

  Leigh’s spine went stiff as a string of cordwood embedded into her flesh. Gary watched her sidelong. She practically squirmed under the pressure of his cock-eyed gaze, but he only shrugged.

  “I put your clothes through another cycle. They’d up and gone sour.”

  “Thanks.”

  He sighed. “You okay?”

  No. No I’m not.

  I don’t know what to do when I don’t know what I want.

  She rolled her cigarette between two fingers, watching the coils of smoke looping and lassoing off the tip. “How do you really know Hart?”

  Gary stilled—a wooden man, carved into place on the bar. When he moved again, he set the tumbler down with a hard thump. “My daughter was in the service.”

  “I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

  “You didn’t want to know I had a daughter,” Gary pointed out with a dry, crooked smile, and Leigh winced and dropped her gaze—until Gary flicked his fingers and nodded toward one of the many framed, faded photographs propped against the mirror behind the bar.

  Leigh leaned forward on her elbows to look. She’d never paid much attention to the pictures before, glancing over them with a sort of deliberate blindness. She recognized a younger Gary in many, holding up racing cups or posing with a sleek roan mare wreathed in roses, newspaper clippings about races and against-all-odds wins curling against the photo frames. But the one he pointed to was of a young woman with Gary’s mulish jaw and green eyes set against dusky skin and night-black hair, with the fine, high features of the hinóno’éí out in the Ravens. Her U.S. Marine Corps uniform sat crisp on her slim shoulders, the tilt of her head proud and stern, but there was a touch of Gary’s rough, no-nonsense edges in the cynical twist of her lips.

  Leigh wondered what the story was there, that Gary had over a half-dozen pictures of himself with the horse, but not one of himself with the girl.

  “My Serafina,” he said. “She was a member of Gabriel’s unit. With him every step of the way, that girl—even when they deployed to Afghanistan. Told me, when she wrote home, that he was the biggest dick she’d ever met, but he kept ’em alive. Kept ’em moving. Fought with ’em, fought for ’em.” His eyes lidded. He took a deep sip of whiskey, and when he spoke again he sounded as if the liquor had burned his throat out and left nothing but bleeding meat. “Then one day, the letters stopped coming. No more emails with ‘REDACTED’ in big bold letters. No more crackly phone calls with a five second delay. Then…”

  Another deep swig, nearly emptying the tumbler to nothing but dripping golden film. He stared down into the glass, his witch-eye wet and gleaming, the glass eye eerily calm, so devoid of emotion. “Then that mother fucker shows up on my doorstep in full uniform with a folded American flag, looking like he’s made of glass and steel and depending on where you hit ’im, he just might break into pieces.”

  Clotting pressure closed Leigh’s throat. In the back of her mind she’d known. The article had said one of two surviving members of his unit, but in some deep secret part of her that still knew how to be naïve, she’d hoped Serafina was the other survivor and this would be just a story of a relationship gone bad and a father dealing with the man who broke his daughter’s heart.

  Not the man who brought her home in a bodybag.

  She itched to reach for him. To slide her arms around those rail-thin shoulders and give him her warmth, but she clamped her hands tight on her tumbler, her cigarette nearly bending in half between her fingers, and listened with that cancerous lump in her throat metastasizing and swelling and choking off her airways.

  Gary shook another Camel from the near-empty pack and lit it with shaking fingers. “He did ’em all personal. Every last one who died. Said he was sorry. Sorry it was him standing there with a flag, and not someone I loved coming home. Told me my Sera was brave to the end. That he’d trusted her with anything and everything. Fought with her and fought for her. That she was the hardest one to lose, because they were both hinóno’éí, both Crow City téí’yoonéhe’.” He smiled, thin and bitter, an ugly gash of hurt cutting his face as he lifted filmed eyes to fix on the picture once more. “So I decked the mother fucker.”

  He laughed, harsh and humorless, and reached for the bottle of Wild Turkey. “He just stood there and took it, stubborn bastard that he is. And he held me when I broke down sobbing, and cried with me. Man lost everyone and came home to bury his sister. That’d break anyone.” He poured a good four fingers, the stream of amber splashing and jumping and jittering, almost sloshing out of the tumbler. “I hated him for a good long while, for not bringing my little girl home. For all those missed goddamn chances. But he’s a good man, Hart is.” The whiskey bottle thunked down; he screwed the cap back on with fumbling fingers. “And he hates himself so much for the same damn thing that after a while, I thought it’d be just cruel to keep hating him myself.”

  Leigh took a wetly broken breath and scrubbed
the heel of her palm against one stinging eye. She didn’t know what to say. What she could say. She’d always been bad at the kind of useless platitudes and social niceties people expected, because she knew they didn’t change anything, didn’t help. If she was going to say something she wanted it to mean something, wanted it to matter.

  But it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t bring Serafina back, and nothing she could say would give Gary all the lost chances in the story told in that line of photographs.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and didn’t know if she was apologizing for his loss or for her own inadequacy, her own pathetic words that could only rub the wound in deeper. She closed her eyes and leaned over, shoulder to the thin, ropy shoulder poking bony through his perfect, crisp shirt. “I’m so sorry.”

  Gary made a garbled sound that might almost be a sob, his chest rattling hard enough to shake her—and she tried not to go stiff when he turned his head and buried his face against her hair, warm breaths trickling down to her scalp. Tried not to pull back when the seeping wet heat of tears followed, soaking into her hair and sliding over her skin. She didn’t want to pull back. Not this time. And as she let Gary have his silent grief, as she breathed in the scent of unfiltered tobacco and that lingering faint aroma of horse shampoo all steeped deep in the sharp-edged arm that wrapped around her…she wondered if this was what it really felt like, to be held by a father who loved his little girl.

  Slowly, his rasping breaths quieted. And slowly she relaxed, letting him need her, letting him just be. Letting it not be about her, right now…because even if she wanted to hate him for it, he’d been right about her.

  When he moved, sitting up, Leigh drew back and opened her eyes. Once more their reflections met in the mirror behind the bar, and he smiled the horrible, hurt-filled smile of a grieving jackal, even his glass eye gleaming wet as he lifted his whiskey in a toast.

  “Bottoms up, eh?” he said.

  Leigh clinked her tumbler against his, then tilted her head back and tossed it down, the whiskey burning through her like cleansing fire until she gasped and swallowed and rubbed her watering eyes.

  “Good stuff, ain’t it?” Gary grinned.

  “Yeah,” Leigh said and reached for the bottle, for the promise of forgetfulness in its amber flame. “Real good.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LEIGH LOST TRACK OF HOW many shots she traded with Gary; she lost track of everything, except the ratchety sound of his laughter and the lightness that rolled over her when she fell under whiskey’s swooping wing and didn’t have to think. She remembered a vague worry that opening time was coming soon, and she hadn’t washed a single glass. Her next cogent thought was wondering how Gary’s brittle bones didn’t break when he lifted her against his chest and carried her up the stairs.

  Then everything went black—a thick and oily darkness that felt less like sleep and more like the kind of death she’d expect Nietzsche to write about, all senses gone but the mind remaining, dull and thoughtless yet self-aware in an endless and eternal nothing. She woke to a throbbing hangover headache and the coarse upholstery of Gary’s couch scraping her cheek. It smelled like dirty gym socks and ten decades of trapped farts. Maybe Nietzsche’s trapped farts. With a tired groan she pushed herself up, looking around muzzily and smacking her lips against the sour fermented taste in the back of her throat.

  She could hear the riot of a Friday night in full swing from below, and Jimmy’s cackling laughter that always sounded like a cockatoo having a fit. Her fuzzed vision cleared, adjusting to the low lamplight, and as she pushed her straggling hair back out of her face, she froze.

  Hart was awake and watching her.

  He sat upright in Gary’s bed, the covers pushed aside, leaving him bare in nothing but those thin white boxer-briefs: a cougar stretched out with lazy, powerful ease, velvety sandy hide and black points just like a cougar’s black-tipped ears. A dog-eared paperback rested on his thigh, something so dusty it looked like he’d scavenged it from under Gary’s bed, the cover worn and illegible except for a scrawl of color and exaggerated shapes—some pulp sci-fi illustration from the fifties.

  And all of that was irrelevant when he was looking at her, silver gaze once more impenetrable, steady, as if the pain and fevered clammy withdrawal shakes had never happened. Her throat tried to close; her heart tried to stop, and she only kept it beating through sheer force of will.

  He folded the book closed with that calm deliberation that always made her think of a cold and methodical killer. That gunsight steadiness, only now she knew it was the steadiness of a soldier who couldn’t allow himself to feel in those moments when things hurt the most, or he’d fall apart when other people depended on him.

  She wondered if he’d been grim and silent and broken when his unit died, or if he’d held steady even when he’d known he wouldn’t be able to pull them out.

  Wondered why she was even thinking about this, when she still hated him for the hungry sensitivity of her bruised lips.

  The silence trembled like dew on a thread of spider’s silk, pregnant and ready to drop. He held her with a cobra’s hypnotic gaze, until she wanted desperately to look away from this feeling that peeled her open and touched all her raw places.

  But she couldn’t.

  “Little mouse.” Frostbite rimed the nickname. “Hello.”

  “Hey,” she squeaked, her tongue thick. She picked at the pills of lint on the blanket Gary had draped over her, focusing on her hands. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Better. Though it’s likely a temporary reprieve.” There came the faint sounds of shifting, then a low groan as sensuous as fingers dragging through velvet. “I suppose I should be humiliated, letting you see me like this.”

  She looked up sharply, but he was no longer watching her. His rested against the headboard, his eyes closed, his mouth a disapproving slash. She stared at him, confusion swaying seasick in her gut. “Why?”

  “I never meant to be this weak.”

  Weak? God, what a stubborn, prideful man. He sat there like nothing was wrong, only the twisted macabre art of the scar on his thigh giving him away, and yet he considered himself weak. Secretly, she thought he was stronger than anyone she’d ever met. Strong enough to make the choice to break his dependency; strong enough to refuse even the smallest fix to ease the pain.

  Stronger than her.

  And she couldn’t help but respect that—though like hell she would tell him so.

  She pushed herself off the couch. When her feet touched the floor, pins and needles shot up in tingle-pricking waves, and she nearly fell. Catching herself on the arm of the sofa, she pulled her borrowed T-shirt down her bare thighs before wobbling across the room to the bathroom, giving the bed a wide berth.

  “People are weak,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s kind of beautiful, really.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s when you get completely hard inside that you stop being human.”

  She dug in Gary’s medicine cabinet, shook three aspirin into her palm, then filled the cup by the sink and downed the pills, rinsing the sour taste from her mouth—even if it could do nothing for the sour feeling in her stomach, or the way her lips burned against the cool condensation on the glass’s rim. She leaned against the bathroom doorframe, folding her arms over her chest and watching Hart; he watched back with a sort of thoughtful blankness. He was so strange, she thought. A puzzle, fully assembled but missing pieces that she didn’t think would ever be found again, the holes just a curious void shaped like the things he’d lost.

  “Maybe being weak means we make some bad decisions,” she continued. “Or that we’re selfish. Or…a lot of things that make us less than perfect, really. But I’ve lived perfect before, Hart.” Her fingers dug into her arm until little crescents of pain dug into her skin. She looked down at her stark-ridged knuckles. “Perfect is hard and cold. Perfect is…complacence and numb acceptance and loveless apathy. There’s nothing good in that. Nothing good in not bei
ng weak enough to feel the loss of things that matter.”

  The sound of ripping paper tore the air; she looked up. Hart’s fingers dug into his book, nearly crushing it in a brutish grip, the cover ripping half-off the spine in ragged soft edges that showed white against the clownish colors. She started forward, the words are you okay? on her lips, when his harshly clipped voice stopped her dead.

  “Why did you run?”

  Her chest tightened up in that way she hated, like she had a hole over her sternum, an open window to look in and see the beating, vulnerable meat inside. “I…” She willed her voice to stop shaking. “I never told you you could kiss me.”

  “But you want me to react to you.” That skewering gaze dared her to deny it. “I see it in the way you look at me.”

  “Not like that.”

  Her arms tightened around herself, pressing until the bones of her elbows dug into her ribs. She stared at the shimmer of beads walling off the head of the stairs, subtly rippling with the vibrations of the noise from below. That noise beckoned her toward something familiar and easy, a dozen men waiting for her to point and say you. Tonight I want you, though she didn’t even want the idea of them anymore. Hart had ruined that. He’d ruined everything, and he was going to ruin her.

  “Never like that,” she whispered.

  He said nothing. He didn’t need to. He didn’t need to say a word to call her a liar, because the word was printed on her lips and her tongue in the taste of him, and all the whiskey in the world couldn’t wash him away.

  “You forgot this.”

  She flinched, dragging her gaze warily back toward him. He held out her little blue iPod, the tiny rectangle of plastic almost lost in his enormous hand, the earbud cord dripping between his fingers like entrails.