Loud Pipes Save Lives

by Jennifer Giacalone

  She tossed her helmet onto a table and clomped across the gleaming oak floors to where he sat, reading a dog-eared copy of Steppenwolf. “Hey, cripple,” she said affectionately and kissed him on the cheek, ruffling his longish, shaggy brown hair.

  “Hey, loser,” he replied, setting his book down. All he could see clearly was her small, leather-clad silhouette with its choppy haircut, the late afternoon light pouring through the front windows and directly into his face. “I’ve got water on for some pasta, you hungry?”

  “Yeah, sure. Here, you keep reading, I’ll throw some meatballs on.”

  Quin hadn’t moved out of the house because of the lengths his mother had gone to to customize the place to be comfortable for him after the rock climbing accident that had cost him his legs. Ainsley hadn’t moved out because she was pursuing a kickboxing career, as evidenced by the row of trophies on the mantle. She was good, but it still didn’t really pay, so they’d developed a comfortable routine together, clinging to each other like the last two Cheerios in a bowl.

  As she seared some premade meatballs in a pan, he rolled into the kitchen. Her riding jacket was carefully folded and laid across the back of one of the kitchen chairs.

  “So, where’s Mom?” she asked, not looking up from the sizzling stove.

  He shrugged. “You know. Somewhere. Doing something.” It had been that way for a while now. Since their father had died.

  “I hope she snaps out of it one of these days,” Ainsley sighed. “I kinda think it would be nice if she came out riding with me. I mean, I’ve got Dad’s old Indian working like a dream; I think she’d really enjoy seeing it in action again.”

  He nodded, idly running a thumb over the leather of her riding jacket. “Yeah, you really got it in shape. I guess the girls you know from the gang helped you?”

  “Club, not gang, idiot.” She threw a potholder at his head.

  He ducked to one side, cackling.

  “So,” he began over dinner, “you’ve not really been around much lately?” He phrased it as a question.

  Ainsley paused, looking at him with those intense grey eyes of hers; they mirrored his own, but had dark smudges of sleep deprivation under them. “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Are you out with your gang?”

  Ainsley snorted and rolled her eyes. “It’s not a gang. It’s just a riding club.”

  “What’s the difference?” he asked.

  “When it’s a gang, we dance around in circles with switchblades and sing songs from West Side Story.”

  Quin snickered with a mouthful of food, which he almost choked on.

  There was an awkward pause. His sister had something on her mind.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Um, well… yeah, the club… I, uh…” She paused. “I met a girl.”

  “Well, it’s a girls’ motorcycle club, so I guess you meet a lot of girls.”

  She gave him a frustrated look. “No, I mean… I met…a girl,” she said again, slower and with more emphasis.

  “Like a girl, like, you’re dating her?”

  She nodded.

  He took a moment, thought it over, and decided it was no big deal. “Okay. So, you’re, like, gay or something?”

  She waved a hand around noncommittally. “Yeah, you know. Whatever they say. Gay. Bi. Queer.”

  “I thought they stopped saying queer.”

  “They did, but then they brought it back.”

  “Okay.” Quin took another bite of spaghetti and asked, “So, what’s her name?”

  “Khady.”

  “Katty? As in, like, Katty Kay?”

  “As in, she’s Palestinian, and her real name is something Arabic.”

  Quin smirked. “So you’re dating and she won’t tell you her real name. Sounds like a solid basis for a relationship.”

  She shot him a dirty look.

  “Is she cute?”

  Ainsley’s face suddenly looked fourteen again. “Oh, my God. Yes. She bleaches her hair blond, and she’s just… Her body is like…” She covered her eyes. “Yes. She’s cute. And hot. And just, really…cool. And smart. And she looks so good on her bike, it’s like…” She let out a little whistle.

  Quin chuckled. “Am I ever going to meet her?”

  Ainsley hedged. “I hope so. Maybe soon. We’ll see.”

  The front door opened, and their mother came in. Neither of them knew where she’d been. “Hi, you two. I’m going upstairs if you need me,” she said briefly and breezed up the stairs.

  “Hey, Mom, Ainsley’s a lesbian,” Quin called after her, earning him a punch in the arm from his sister.

  “All right, just call me if you’re going to be late,” her voice drifted back down the stairs; clearly she hadn’t heard him.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Ainsley hissed at him.

  “She’s been like this all week,” he sighed. “It’s like we’re not even here.” He looked at her. “Ainsley, you really should tell her. Take her out riding this weekend and tell her. I feel like she’s just…nowhere. It’s been an issue since Dad died, but lately I feel like it’s a lot worse.”

  Ainsley sighed. “Ugh, okay, maybe.”

  “Fuck ‘maybe.’ Promise me.”

  She looked at him, registering the urgency in his look. Their mother had brought him back from the brink, he felt compelled to return the favor.

  “All right. I promise.”

  Eleanor sat at the kitchen table, drumming her long fingers on it while she fretted, espresso in hand. “I gave her Graham’s old bike, hoping it might be a way for us to connect,” she said to Caroline, “and I was glad she found a club, but… I don’t know. She’s into something bad. I know it. She comes in at all hours of the night, and sometimes not at all. She comes home tracking broken glass on her boots. She has these marks and scratches on her hands sometimes that don’t look like what she’d get from sparring at the gym. I don’t know what she’s up to, but I know—I just know—I’m going to get the ‘Come bail me out’ phone call. I feel it.”

  Graham had often jokingly referred to Caroline as Eleanor’s emotionally unstable doppelgänger. While that was probably unfair to both of them, it was undeniable that when they stood together, you could nearly take them for twins, and when you engaged them on the right subjects, they were equally sharp and well-educated. Caroline’s face showed more wear and tear than Eleanor’s; she’d struggled with bipolar disorder since they were both very young, as well as shades of paranoia and delusion from time to time.

  “Well, El,” Caroline sighed, and Eleanor could hear the eyeroll over the phone, “I think in general, you and Graham didn’t make too many mistakes when you were raising those kids. But here’s where I’m going to say I told you so: you treated her ADHD and sensory issues like a behavior problem instead of something that needed meds, and I know you don’t like to hear it, but you guys were just wrong about that one.”

  Eleanor sighed. Growing up with Caroline, whose problems had been so severe, had probably blinded her to the different nature of Ainsley’s needs, which had still been no less real. “Yes, you’re probably right. I just don’t know how I’m going to handle things when I do finally get that call.”

  “Well…” Caroline paused. “Do you want me to handle it?”

  “What, you mean get her out of trouble?”

  “Well, yeah, that. If I can. John’s been in the ground a while at this point, so I’m not sure how much I can do in that regard.” Caroline was the widow of a very prominent judge, and it was possible that his name, if dropped in the right places, might be able to pull Ainsley out of a scrape. “But what I mean is, do you want me to talk to her?”

  Eleanor hesitated. While she and Caroline spoke on a semi-regular basis, the kids hadn’t seen her in ages, because her energy was so erratic. Eleanor didn’t think it was good for them, especially when they’d been younger. “I don’t know, Caroline… She barely knows you. It’s been a very long time since she’s seen you.”

&
nbsp; “Well, that wasn’t really my decision,” Caroline snapped. “But still, El. I have a perspective you don’t. Maybe I can help.”

  5

  Detective Sparr’s Day Off

  Lily woke up on the first day of her suspension, looked at the clock, and forced herself to turn over and go back to sleep. After an hour of rolling around, trying this position and that, refolding the pillow and tucking it a hundred different ways, perpetually looking for the cool spot, she got up. She brewed a pot of coffee, made herself banana pancakes. She watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s on television and took a long, relaxing bath. It was glorious.

  After drying off, she sighed, looked around, and thought, Now what?

  She slid into some jeans and a light sweater and decided rebelliously that she was going to leave her hair down today, because dammit, today she wasn’t a cop. She was just going for a stroll in the neighborhood in the cool fall air, wandering down the tree-lined streets and looking at the turning leaves.

  Five years ago, as a rookie, she had moved out to the precinct as soon as she was assigned there, because she felt like she couldn’t protect and serve a community she didn’t understand. That, and she didn’t care for commuting. It wasn’t what she’d grown up with, but it felt like home by now. On what she made, she could afford a modest place that was her own, with no need for roommates and no leaning on her family’s money. It was a second-floor walkup in one of those odd brownstones; it had an immense living room and tiny kitchen and faux-wood linoleum throughout the place. But it was hers, paid for with her own money, and there was something satisfying about that. And the heavily immigrant neighborhood had a sort of motley, cobbled-together charm that made her feel welcome, if not entirely part of it.

  She passed the produce shop, the good pizza joint, the elevated subway station. She passed the park, the shoe repair place (how did that even stay in business?), the crummy pizza joint, and the post office. It wasn’t long before she realized that her stroll was turning into walking the old beat she’d walked before she’d been promoted to detective.

  She’d been a lousy beat cop. Not because she couldn’t do the job, but she didn’t want to do all the shitty little things you have to do to sometimes to make your numbers as a beat cop. She once caught a desperate, poor woman trying to steal diapers from the cramped grocery store by the subway station. That would have been a pretty clean arrest if there ever was one. But who would she have been helping, she wondered. She looked at the terrified woman, the baby in the stroller, and shook her head, and then without saying a word, she walked up to the register with the diapers, bought them, and slipped the bag into the undercarriage of the stroller, leaving the woman in grateful tears on the sidewalk in front of the store.

  It was fortunate that Captain McArdle was smart enough to see what she was really good at: following a thread, finding a story, investigating it carefully, and telling it clearly, with evidence.

  And now she wasn’t allowed to do it. Two weeks wasn’t a long time, but right now, it seemed like an eternity. She decided to go visit her brother.

  “Suspended?” Finlay repeated with disbelief.

  Lily nodded. “Yeah. Just two weeks, but still. I’m losing my mind already, and it’s only the first day.”

  He sighed. “Look, Lil. I think it’s admirable, what you’re doing. We all do. But…that’s not where you belong, and you know it. I mean, clearly it’s getting to you, if you’re running around punching people in the face.”

  “Not people. Kyle Klotzman.”

  Finlay shook his head. “Okay, but still. Let me put you at a desk over at Fast Forward. You could be interviewing Neil deGrasse Tyson by next week. You could be editor in chief in a few years.” He ran his fingers through his dark curls, which seemed more defiant today than unruly, and she still saw the eighteen-year-old who used to skateboard down Second Avenue. He looked funny to her in expensive Brooks Brothers shirts and Manolo Blahniks.

  Lily rubbed the back of her neck and walked over to the window, looking at the cars (mostly yellow cabs) like matchboxes, thirty seven floors down, inching along Seventh Avenue in a scrunched-up line, one after the other, nose-to-butt. In a few hours, it’d be lit up and look like a neon snake of red taillights from up here. She’d seen it a hundred times, when she and Finlay and her other brother and sister had come to Christmas parties, back when Dad was running the show.

  “Thanks, Finn, but I like my work.” She wasn’t lying. “And I’m good at it,” she added after a quiet moment during which she imagined Finlay was probably hoping for her to change her mind. “I don’t want to have to start somewhere else and work my way up all over again.”

  “You wouldn’t have to,” Finlay said, smiling calmly. “You’re a Sparr.”

  Lily frowned at him. Finn was smart and good at the business, kind-hearted, generous, treated his wife Jin-Mei like a queen, and she could sing his praises till the stars burned out, but there had always been a little bit of an entitled air about him. She’d never noticed it as a kid, or at least never thought there was anything wrong with it, but then she started walking a beat in Ridgewood.

  Growing up, she’d always struggled to get along with her tomboyish younger sister, who constantly railed at having to toe the line of everything that came along with being a Sparr. But now, after a few years of the buzzsaw accents of Queens natives, the stink of the meat from the butcher shops on hot days, the sweatsuited Polish mothers in designer knockoffs, pushing strollers full of sweatsuited babies wearing matching designer knockoffs, the balding Italian retiree who sat on the corner in his lawn chair every damn day in the warm weather, because he had nothing better to do…

  She understood a little better why the weight of the family name drove her sister nuts. This wasn’t even some dangerous ghetto; it was just a noisy, colorful, bustling, mostly safe, working-class neighborhood. Yet still, the people she protected and served were never going to have half of the opportunity and privilege that she was born to.

  What is the difference, she wondered, between a handout because you’re poor, and a handout because you’re rich?

  “I love you,” she said to Finlay, “but you don’t get it.”

  He shrugged. “You can’t blame me for trying, Lil. Dad built this thing from a few million dollars of Sulzberger money. Everyone said he was nuts when he sold our family's share of the Times to start it, and now look at it. It’s personal for us. I hate it every time I have to go away on business and there’s not another Sparr around Vanderbilt Towers.”

  Lily smiled. Even Finlay couldn’t make himself call it the SparrMedia Building, though their father had bought and renamed it almost ten years ago. “Jin could be a Sparr if she wanted. How come she won’t change it?”

  “She says it doesn’t flow right. Sounds weird.”

  “She could hyphenate?”

  “Jin-Mei Ling-Sparr?” Finlay looked legitimately aggrieved at the notion.

  Lily nodded, chuckling and grimacing at the same time. “Yeah. Yeesh. That’s too many hyphens.”

  They looked at each other for a minute, and then Finlay got up, walked soundlessly around the desk across the thick tan carpet, and hugged her. “Jin’s in Hong Kong visiting her dad. Do you want to come with me to a theater benefit at NYU this Saturday night?”

  “Why don’t you bring our sister?” she suggested mischievously.

  “Because she’ll show up in a Sex Pistols t-shirt, singing along loudly to Public Enemy on her iPod?”

  Lily laughed. “Okay. Ask Mom. If she won’t go, I’ll go.”

  “Mom won’t go,” he sighed. “She’ll write a check, but she doesn’t show up to this stuff anymore. C’mon, it’ll be fun…” he wheedled. “The Tisches always get Ducasse to cater. Ian McKellen’s supposed to do some dramatic reading or something. C’mon, dork. You’ll have fun; just come.”

  Lily relented. “Okay, fine."

  As she headed down to the subway, she started mentally rifling through her closet to decide what she was
going to wear.

  The doorbell rang around six-fifteen. Lily opened it to find Miri standing there with a box of freshly-made lemon bars from the Polish bakery. The only thing that could have made that sight more welcome is if she’d been holding a stack of case files in the other hand.

  She came inside and Lily started peering into the refrigerator. “Dinner?”

  “Sure,” Miri answered, “but the cupboard looks a little bare. Maybe we should order in.”

  “Ye of little faith,” Lily responded cheerily.

  She pulled out a package of bacon. She found half an onion in the vegetable drawer. Then out came the eggs.

  “Omelettes?” Miri asked, trying not to sound doubtful.

  “Nope.”

  She opened the freezer and pulled out a bag of frozen peas, then walked to the cabinet and found half a box of linguine. Fifteen minutes later, she was grating parmesan cheese and sprinkling black pepper onto two steaming bowls of linguine carbonara. Miri was duly impressed.

  They tucked in, and Lily began recounting her day while Miri studiously contained her smirking. After dinner, they sat on the couch together, eating the lemon bars, Lily’s head resting comfortably on Miri’s shoulder while they watched The News Hour, Lily snarking occasionally at Jim Lehrer while Miri drifted in and out of snores. In truth, Lily thought, it was the happiest she’d been all day.

  Miri was a partner who understood her. Like Lily, she’d grown up with a bit of privilege and was grateful that it allowed her to do something meaningful with her life. Despite their visual mismatch, she reflected, they could not have been better paired. Lily with her slender build stood a good head shorter than Miri with her linebacker shoulders, and her long, copper hair and general femininity of presentation (earrings, always, and lipstick, always) was a contrast to Miri’s cropped haircut and crisp, unadorned style.