“You mind getting the kids to school this morning, babe?” he asked.
“Sure,” Skylar said after Brandon released her. “Are you in the lab?”
Brandon shook his head. “No, Eric and I need to go do some things. We’ll be back later this afternoon. I’ll pick the kids up on our way, all right? Text me if you need anything at the store.”
Skylar nodded. “All right. I’ll tell Jane before I go.”
21
The engine purred like a kitten as Brandon shifted into third gear. It was a newer acquisition, purchased sometime after Luis had arrived—a shiny blue bullet of a thing with two racing stripes down the nose.
Hello, midlife crisis. Eric smirked, hearing Jane’s pointed voice in the back of his mind. She’d commented on Brandon’s car collection, which had bloomed since he entered fatherhood, more than once.
“It’s funny,” Eric said as he admired the leather interior, “but I never really took you for a muscle car kind of guy. I think I’ve only ever seen you with a driver, actually.”
“Well, this isn’t just a car, my friend. It’s a 1970 Chevelle. A classic.”
Eric shrugged. The name meant nothing. He grew up in a city jammed with people, not automobiles. He didn’t even get his license until he was in college and needed a way to get around rural New Hampshire. “I’ve never been much for cars.”
“Spoken like a true New Yorker.”
“Hey, a lot of people in Boston don’t drive.”
“Yeah, I’m from South Boston, de Vries.” Brandon smirked and tipped his worn Red Sox hat at Eric, looking very much like someone from the rougher side of the city in a pair of worn jeans and a black fleece. “If the Sox weren’t on, we were either playing pool or working on engines.”
Eric knew for a fact that was an oversimplification. But despite being a lauded attorney and former investment guru, Brandon had also graduated from MIT by nineteen and now ran a lab with his foster father, an electric engineering professor. It shouldn’t have surprised Eric that he liked any kind of machinery, automotive or otherwise.
“My old man liked cars,” Brandon added quietly. “He taught me a few things before he got locked up. On the days he wasn’t wasted, anyway.”
Eric didn’t press. He also knew from bits and pieces over the years that Brandon had a nonexistent relationship with his biological father, a man still in jail for assault. There was a reason why he had gone to live with Ray and Susan—the people he now called his parents—at age twelve and never left. Eric knew how that felt, the need to abandon one’s previous life.
But some things from that life had stuck with Brandon, apparently.
Eric knew how that went too.
It wasn’t until Brandon exited Franklin Park that Eric realized they were closer to his friend’s past than he’d thought. The buildings around them fell further and further into disrepair as they drove away from the zoo and the golf course and drove right into the heart of Dorchester, the neighborhood where Brandon had grown up. Eric hadn’t spent a lot of time on this side of the city in all the time he’d spent in Boston. A Sox game or two at Fenway was the farthest south he’d really ventured, with the exception of a few girls’ apartments he’d visited back in his law school days.
Missing those days, Petri dish?
There she was again, teasing him. God, he wished she would call him that stupid fucking name for real. He’d slap a hand over that smart mouth of hers, tell her in no uncertain terms that it takes one to know one, and then teach them both a lesson in fidelity until the sun rose.
Would he ever get to do that again?
God, he fucking hoped so.
Dorchester was an interesting mix of cultures and money, changing the way a lot of the older neighborhoods in Boston were changing. Thirty or forty years ago, it had been dominated mostly by Boston’s infamous Irish-Catholic groups, including the Westies. Now you were more likely to find Vietnamese restaurants as pool halls. As the city itself became more strapped for cash, the younger, more affluent people were gentrifying the neighborhood.
“Like a damn department store,” Brandon muttered as he turned the car onto Park. “Look at that. A French bakery in Field’s Corner. I never thought.”
“Come on. The Vietnamese love their French pastries,” Eric countered. “Fruits of colonialism, right?”
“You sound like your wife when you say that,” Brandon replied dryly.
Eric’s mouth quirked. He did sound like Jane, didn’t he? He didn’t altogether mind the idea, actually. How many times had she teased him over dinner about mixing Asian and European foods with exactly that argument?
They parked and got out. Eric looked up and down the block. There wasn’t much to see—a bunch of crooked row houses in need of paint jobs, an abandoned Chinese restaurant covered with grates, and an unused parking lot across the street. Most of the signs of gentrification in Dorchester were still confined to housing costs and renovations on its main streets.
“This is it.” Brandon gestured at the large, unmarked brick building behind them.
Eric looked up and down at it. “Are you planning to have me whacked, Sterling?”
Brandon snorted. “Eric, do yourself a favor and don’t say things like ‘whacked.’ Your Upper East Side is showing.”
Eric rolled his eyes. “Please. You’re about as Dorchester as I am these days, my friend.”
Brandon just shook his head and deliberately turned up the intensity of his South Boston accent so he sounded like a Marky Mark impersonator. “Never, never. You can take the boy out of Dorchester, but you can’t take the Dorchester out of the boy.”
He grinned, and Eric couldn’t help but laugh with him. He felt that way himself about the city sometimes.
“So what is this place?” he asked as he followed Brandon to the entrance marked by a heavy steel door.
“It’s where I come to let off some steam now and then. Get away from the estrogen running my fuckin’ house. Welcome to the South Boston Firing Range.”
“You’re telling me that shooting a gun makes you feel more like a man?” Eric asked doubtfully. “Isn’t that a bit of a cliché?”
“Maybe.” Brandon shrugged. “But it helps. Listen…” He paused with a hand on the door handle. “All jokes aside. I’ve been where you are now.”
Eric opened his mouth to ask where exactly that was, but shut it when Brandon continued.
“When that motherfucker kidnapped Skylar, I felt like there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do to save her,” Brandon said. “I swear to God, Eric, I have never felt so helpless in my whole fuckin’ life. Not even when I was a kid, bouncing around group homes and shit. That day, coming back to her apartment to find her missing? Seeing her blood on the floor? Not knowing where the fuck she was or how I could help her? Worst fuckin’ day of my life. Bar none.”
“For me, I think it was worse when I found Jane,” Eric replied somewhat numbly. “If we’re being honest.”
Brandon released the handle. “How do you figure?”
“Because even when I found her, I still needed someone else to help her.” Eric couldn’t stop his voice from shaking. “She was sick and dying, and I couldn’t do a fucking thing to make it better.”
“You did, though,” Brandon countered. “You showed up. If you hadn’t, she probably would have died, right? That’s something. Maybe the most important thing.”
“Still. I felt so fucking worthless. I still do.”
Brandon watched Eric, maybe waiting for his emotions to level again. When at least Eric was able to look at him without wanting to rip his own skin off, Brandon grabbed the door handle once more and pulled.
“That,” he said, “is exactly why we’re here. Come on. I’ll show you.”
Four hours later, Eric was a newly certified student of the Basic Gun Safety course at the South Boston Firing Range. By a trick of fate, they had had one available spot that morning, and so while Brandon enjoyed some time shooting by himself and grabbed some
pho around the corner, Eric found himself learning to do things like dismantle and clean a weapon—things he’d never even considered until today.
“I can’t believe you made me sit through all of that,” Eric said later that afternoon as he and Brandon were guided to a lane at the end of the range. He had to shout above the racket of shots by other patrons. Both men carried the ear protectors and plastic eyewear but hadn’t put them on yet.
Brandon shrugged. “In Massachusetts, you have to take a certified course to get a license,” he called. “I don’t know about New York, but you want to know the truth, I think everyone should at least know how to manage a firearm.”
“I didn’t realize you were such a second amendment advocate,” Eric said. “You and Skylar donate a ridiculous amount of money to gun-control causes.”
“Oh, I believe in gun control. There’s plenty of weapons—some made by Jane’s father, as it happens—that don’t belong in civilian hands any more than nuclear bombs or anthrax. But I also believe in a person’s right to protect their family. For their own sake as well as others’.” Brandon placed his gun and Eric’s rented Glock on the counter of their lane.
“What kind of gun is that?” Eric asked. “That looks like the same one the infantry were carrying at the base in Korea.”
“It probably is. The M9 is the standard sidearm for the U.S. armed forces.” Brandon grinned sharkishly. “It’s also one of the few big enough for my hand.”
Eric just rolled his eyes and put on his ear protectors. He wasn’t interested in getting into a pissing contest with a guy who outweighed him by at least thirty pounds.
“I’ll go first,” Brandon yelled.
He removed the safety, and Eric stood back and watched his friend proceed to fire off six rounds at the target. About five landed directly in the center of the outlined “person’s” chest, the other two not far from it.
“Nice,” Eric remarked after Brandon replaced the safety and put down his gun.
“Yeah, yeah, thanks, Hawkeye. Let me see what you got. Barry said you were a sharp fuckin’ shooter for being so green.”
Eric rolled his eyes. Of course Brandon was on a first-name basis with the instructor here.
But then he picked up the Glock he’d used earlier during the live fire practice at the end of the course, and found himself comfortably holding it up. He glanced at Brandon, then looked back at the target and took a few lame shots. One hit the far side of the target. Nothing else landed.
“Come on, de Vries,” Brandon chided behind him. “You can do better than that.”
Eric replaced the safety and turned back to his friend. Suddenly he wasn’t in the mood for this kind of joking. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to fail anymore.
“I’m tired. Let’s just go, all right. The girls are probably wondering where we are.”
But the bigger man didn’t move.
“What would you do if that was John Carson or Jude Letour?” Brandon asked. “If Jane was behind you, and it was either you or them? Don’t think about it. Your security is downstairs. There’s nothing else but you and them, Eric. What do you do?”
It was all too easy to imagine. Too easy to see Carson appearing from behind the drapes of the ultrasound room. If Eric had been there—fuck, if he had only been there—maybe Jane wouldn’t have been taken. Maybe he could have saved her. The baby. Both.
He turned back to the counter, picked up the Glock, and proceeded to fire straight through the target. One, two, three, four, five, six. John. Car. Son. Jude. Le. Tour. One after another, Eric fired, until fourteen rounds had been discharged. All landing within maybe a six-inch radius of the head-shaped target.
When he was finished, he was breathing heavily, but his shoulders felt lighter. Slowly, Eric removed the earmuffs. The shooting range had gone silent. Brandon’s mouth was open.
“Holy shit,” someone muttered a few lanes down. “Did you see that?”
Eric replaced the safety and set down the gun. “Stop staring at me like that, Sterling. Did I do something wrong?”
Brandon swallowed. “Ah, no. No, you didn’t.”
Eric’s mouth tugged to the side in a smirk. “So I did something right?”
“I’ll, uh, put it this way. The only other person I’ve ever seen shoot like that in here was a Marine Expert Marksman.” Brandon shook his head, expelling a long breath. “I think you might have missed your calling, my friend.”
“Yeah, maybe I should trade Wall Street for the O.K. Corral,” Eric replied dryly.
Brandon cast him a sideways look. “Hey. I didn’t mean to push you. If you want to go, we can go.”
Eric started to nod, then stopped. His legs felt heavy, and his finger itched. He looked back at the target. There was still one part of the head that was free of bullet holes.
“No,” he said. “Let’s, ah, let’s shoot a few more rounds.” He held up the gun again, squinting as he looked through the target with one eye, as if it would help him see it better. “I do feel like James Bond.” He pressed the trigger, and the final bullet went flying through the neck of the target.
Brandon put his eyewear back on with a smile. “You feel a little better, don’t you?”
Eric put on his muffs and didn’t answer, pretending like he hadn’t heard Brandon’s question. But yeah, he had to admit to himself as he proceeded to finish off the target. He did feel better. A lot better.
22
The idea came to him in the middle of the night. Jane was asleep next to him, curled into herself like a nautilus shell, per usual. Well, her new usual.
For more than three weeks now they had been living a strange life out of Skylar and Brandon’s guest room, watching everyone but them live some semblance of normal around them while Eric floated between New York and Boston. It was uncomfortable, taking advantage of someone’s hospitality like this. Eric wanted home. He wanted his own bed. His own coffee. His own fucking life.
But Jane put off every suggestion that they return home.
To their credit, the Crosby-Sterlings didn’t say a word. They just went about their daily routines, taking the kids to school, going to work, basically living their normally busy lives around their perennial houseguests. The perfect hosts.
Yu-na seemed to be getting right back to herself. Eric still didn’t know his mother-in-law very well, but between her cousin and Skylar’s grandmother’s insistent nurturing, Jane’s mother had definitely been stepping out more and more confidently each day, and largely without her daughter. She and Ji-yeon had hooked up with some new friends through the Korean church just a few blocks from Skylar and Brandon’s house, and they had started taking daily sojourns around town with Sarah, Skylar’s grandmother.
Yu-na wasn’t enjoying her veritable playdates, however, she was trying to harangue Jane out of bed, and Jane wasn’t fucking having it. If she and her mother had been fighting properly, that would have been one thing. But the conversations mostly consisted of Yu-na shaming her daughter’s grief, and Jane just murmuring wordlessly into her pillow.
Because three weeks later, and a full five after Eric had found her in that dusty, freezing house, Jane still couldn’t seem to shake the despair that had invaded her normal buoyant self. Korea had broken her. Carson had broken her. And, it seemed, she didn’t believe she could ever put herself back together.
The nature of that despair, however, hadn’t really reached Eric until he had overheard a conversation between her and Skylar just after he arrived home from New York that day.
“Do you ever regret it?” Jane was asking her. “The first one, I mean.”
There was a long pause.
“I…” Skylar started. “Yes and no.” Another pause. “It’s not really the same thing, though.”
“You lost a baby,” Jane countered. “And you’ve told me yourself you wondered what it might have been like.”
“Sure, I do. But…well, it was totally different circumstances. To start, it was my choice. When I found ou
t that I was pregnant, I was twenty-six, broke, and I thought Brandon was married and totally lost to me. I was in no place, mentally or otherwise, to take care of a child the way it deserved, and so I thought I was doing the right thing, even if sometimes I wish I could take it back now.”
There was some shuffling on the covers and a long silence.
“I should have protected her.” Jane’s voice was so weak, the words almost inaudible. “I should have done more somehow.”
Her? Eric shook his head. She had barely been eight weeks along. No wonder she was a mess, in there imagining a child that hadn’t really existed yet.
“Oh, Janey…there was nothing you could do. You have to understand that. But you have a partner to help you through it. Don’t push him away like I did. That’s my real regret, you know. Not treating him like the partner he always was.”
Jane hadn’t responded. And so Eric had entered and Skylar had left, giving him a meaningful green look before bidding them good night. Jane had only wiped at her eyes and turned away, claiming she was too tired to talk anymore that night. Or at all. Maybe ever.
Now, Eric watched her sleep with hands pressed protectively over her stomach. Her guilt that was eating her alive.
He turned back to the book of Yeats poetry, an old favorite. It was flipped to one of Yeats’s last poems, “Man and the Echo,” which reckoned with the writer’s regrets, written as a call and response between a man’s thoughts and the echo from somewhere else.
Man
In a cleft that's christened Alt
Under broken stone I halt
At the bottom of a pit
That broad noon has never lit,
And shout a secret to the stone.
All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
The Love Trap (Quicksilver Book 3) Page 21