by M. O’Keefe
I looked down at her face. And she saw in my hesitation something I couldn’t even put a name to.
“Do you want to?” she whispered. “Do you want to be free of him?”
“I’m a Morelli, Poppy, I’ll never be totally free.”
She nodded. “But working for him. With him. Taking that place at his side that he seems so hell-bent on giving you? Do you want that?”
I’d been fighting so hard to get out of this cage and now that I was really about to be free, I felt fear leaving that cage.
“I don’t know who I am without violence. I’ve been in it for too long. The blood on my hands…it’s permanent, Poppy.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said and stood. “But I can’t…” Her voice broke and I hated myself for hurting her. For giving her a second of doubt.
I realized, at once, how Poppy was some combination of all the women in my life.
Loving like Sinead. Clever like Caroline. Fierce like Niamh.
“I love you,” she said. “And I think you’re so much more than the weapon people have made you. And I’m yours no matter what you decide but if you could see yourself the way I see you, this wouldn’t even be a question. I can’t make this decision for you.” Poppy said and stroked my face.
She left me to do what only I could do.
I thought about Jacob saying he didn’t want to kill again, but that if anyone hurt Zilla, he’d kill them. I’d understood those words the minute he said them. I didn’t want to be anyone’s weapon. Not anymore. But I would be her shield forever.
Did I want to stop being a weapon?
Did I want to stop fighting a war that wasn’t mine?
The answer was yes. The answer was please. The answer was so complicated I didn’t know how to say it out loud. I thought of Niamh and I felt guilty for finding love. For wanting a future, while she was here with her chilblains and 1970s kitchen. The way she held herself still and clung to all her mistakes and never gave herself a moment of comfort or kindness, her unhappiness made her sacrifice worthwhile. And I’d been about to do the same to Poppy.
But if Poppy wanted me not to fight.
Then I wasn’t fighting.
* * *
I made my way across the back lawn, wondering if Bryant would have wised up since the last time I broke into his house, but no security came to greet me. No bullets stopped me.
I grabbed another apple from the kitchen, didn’t bother hiding from the maid who dropped her little dust mop when she saw me. Bryant was already in his study, behind his desk.
He smiled when he saw me and I tossed the thumb drive onto the desk.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Everything the senator did for you.”
“The idiot kept it on a thumb drive?”
“Insurance, I imagine. We’re done.”
“Done?” Bryant got to his feet.
“You got what you paid for. We’re done.”
“You’re turning down my job offer?”
“Aye.”
“Is this a fucking joke?”
“No. Not a joke. We have copies of everything on that thumb drive. Come after us and we’ll release the information to the FBI and every journalist in New York City.”
“Are you threatening me? How very Morelli of you.”
I turned and walked away from my uncle. Which predictably, he didn’t like.
“That bitch you married—”
I turned on my heel, aware that he was trying to provoke me and I didn’t care. I took two steps around the desk before he could shout for one of his bodyguards. I punched him across the face and the old man folded like paper back into his chair.
“That’s for touching Poppy. If you threaten her, call her juvenile names, if you so much as look at her again, I will break every bone in your body, Bryant. Do you understand me?
Bryant wiped the smear of blood off his lip. “You could have been so much more, Ronan. So much more than this.”
“I’ll take what I have,” I said. A good woman. Fine friends. A chance at happiness.
And I left Bryant Morelli, like every other person in my life who would use me as a weapon, behind.
I made a quick stop at Poppy’s old house to pick up the box that was still on the bed and remembered that Bryant had said he had a box of my mother’s. It would have been nice to have those things. Maybe someday I’d break back into his house and get Gwen’s things, but that day was not today.
At home I found Poppy on the couch, eating something I didn’t make her, which I didn’t like.
“Hi,” she said, licking the tines of her fork. “What have you been doing?”
“I went to Bryant, told him we were none of his concern.”
She put the bowl down and got up on her knees on the couch, happiness dawning on her face. “I also told him if he looked at you funny I’d break every bone in his body.” I handed her the box and she clutched it to her chest.
“Thank you,” she breathed like I’d handed her the keys to a castle.
“Thank you,” I said and pulled her up off the couch into my arms. She’d handed me a future I’d never been able to dream of. A life out of a fairy tale.
“We’re free,” she whispered.
I’d never been free before. Out of the life. I’d never lived a day that I wasn’t in service to violence and violent people. A strange sound erupted out of my throat.
Poppy leaned back, looking at me strangely. “Are you…”
“Laughing, lass. I’m laughing.”
She stroked my face. “What do we do now?” she whispered.
“I want to get you pregnant,” I told her, walking her backwards to the bedroom.
“Okay, but we need to think outside the bedroom.”
“I want a boat.”
“For birds and shit?”
“What’s wrong with that? I’m a simple man, Poppy. I want to get you pregnant and I want a boat.” She blinked at me startled and then her face fell open with a radiant smile. And I swear to God I saw her soul beaming up at me.
“All right, Ronan. Let’s get you a boat.”
“What do you want?” I asked her and I imagined some answer about taking our money and starting her own foundation to help families. Or maybe going back to school to be a teacher. Or rescuing cats. Some big-hearted soft thing. And I would support her in any of it. All of it. I would take my blood-soaked hands and build gardens all across Northern Ireland if that was what she wanted.
“I just want you,” she said and kissed me. I walked her out of that room into the bedroom, where I got on my knees and worshiped her, our future and that little pink bow.
* * *
Ronan
I left her sleeping, sated and twitching in her dreams, holding my heart in her cupped palm. How was this going to work, I wondered. Her with all her hope and her feelings. Me with my fallow garden of a soul.
It had to, I thought. Whatever I needed to do to keep her, I would.
She was mine and I was hers. We were married. With my body I thee worship.
The words had been said, the promises made. There was no going back. Beneath us, in the rest of the brownstone, I had the sense of my men. Of Niamh. I felt protected, which meant Poppy was protected, and if I woke up every day for the rest of my life and only felt this—it would be enough. But that girl, she would not be content if I wasn’t feeling everything. It wouldn’t be easy, but I would try. For her.
I made coffee and walked into the living room.
The jewels had been picked up and put back in the plastic bag. I wondered if Poppy wanted those kinds of things.
Diamonds and the like.
I remembered her, in her life before. There’d been the gala after the senator died and she wore those black pearls like a collar around her neck. I remembered thinking how delicate they made her throat look.
How lovely.
The first thing I was going to do was get rid of that Morelli ring on her finger. It was big and she
kept hitting me with it as she slept. It packed a fucking punch.
There was a quiet knock on the door and I went to open it. Raj stood there with a big cardboard box in his hands.
“This came for you, boss,” he said and handed it over. On top of the box was a cream envelope sealed with wax. It had the imprint of the Morelli family crest.
I thanked Raj and took the box into the living room and set it down on the table in front of the couch.
I understand these belonged to your mother, so now they belong to you, the letter said. The job offer still stands
Signed Leo Morelli.
It was weird that my hand trembled as I pulled open the box.
Whatever I’d been expecting, little-girl diaries and high school scrapbooks and the like, that wasn’t what was in there. There was art. Tons of it. Faded pencil drawings of cats and brighter drawings of flowers and people. One, a woman with dark hair and sad eyes was just marked Eve. Bryant was immortalized in another; she captured his smug upturned nose perfectly.
There were hands, lots of hands, and I had to think they were hers. I held my own up to compare them and then felt foolish. She did a series of watercolors of a black dog at a beach and she captured the dog’s joy and the sparkling water so perfectly it felt real. She’d been so talented.
Compelled, I pulled from the wall the picture of the woman I didn’t know on a sand dune I’d never been to. There was paper on the back and I tore it off and then carefully pulled the photograph from the glass and replaced it with one of the dogs. I did it with two other pictures. They didn’t fit perfectly in the frames, but I liked that about them, too. That I could see the edges of the paper where she’d torn it from the notebook. The smudge of her thumbprint at the bottom corner. It framed the art and its maker.
I took down the rest of the stranger’s pictures and found Poppy’s framed photographs—the ones Zilla brought when she brought Poppy’s jewelry, salvaging the only things Poppy might need from that house. They were sweet photographs of two girls in matching bikinis, their little-girl bellies poking out. I recognized Poppy from her smile. The light that bounced off her. There was another one of Poppy when she was older, high school maybe, with some very unfortunate hair. It was Christmas and she wore a red velvet dress and Zilla wore a sneer and black satin and they stood, hugging a glamorous woman with a distant expression. Their mother. I hung up the photographs on the wall with my mother’s art. It didn’t make much sense. The sizes of the frames were out of balance, but it was better. It was ours.
Us. I cleared my throat and sat back down. The only thing left in the box was a tin lunch box with an old-school Betty Boop on it. When I opened it a waft of skunky weed floated out from the three joints and Ziplock bag of ancient marijuana in the bottom. Beneath the joints, there was a thin strip of pictures that you get from a photo booth. Four pictures in a row of a young girl with long dark hair. My mom. In the first picture she stared out at the camera, her eyes glittering, her mouth curved into a smile.
She had the look of a person who knew herself.
And who wasn’t scared.
There was a guy sitting next to her, with blond floppy hair. Gwen was looking at the camera, he was looking at her like she was his whole world. Loving a Morelli had cost him his life. The second picture he was holding out what looked like a ring box. The third she was crying, her hands over her mouth and the fourth they were kissing. A proposal. She looked so happy.
I flipped over the back of the picture and it said Me and Danny. The date was a year and a half almost to the day before I was born. This kid proposed to her, she said yes, her father killed the poor guy and she ran away to England.
Where her whole life ended. Fuck. It was just so sad.
I set aside the picture only to find in the corner of the lunchbox a small faded red velvet ring box.
Impossible, I thought, but opened it anyway. And there on the velvet was a round diamond twinkling madly in the sunlight. It was small. A young man’s ring. Bought with a young man’s money. But it was a ring that should be worn. Too beautiful to be put away in a box with old memories.
“Hey,” Poppy said, walking, sleepy-eyed and wearing one of my tee shirts, into the living room. She yawned with her whole face, a hand over her mouth. “Sorry.” She shook her head. I could watch her wake up for years. “What are you doing?”
“Leo sent a box of my mother’s things.”
She sat down next to me on the couch, her bare legs practically in my lap. As if it was her own, she leaned over and picked up my coffee cup for a sip. “Is this her art?” she asked, picking up a drawing of a cat sleeping on a windowsill. “Oh, Ronan, it’s so sweet.”
I pointed at the pictures I’d framed, the dog on the beach. And her own pictures of her and her sister and mom hanging beside them. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered.
“I found this, too.” I held out the ring, which caught the sunlight and threw rainbows around the room. It was as if Poppy had been created in ring form. I told her the story of poor Danny.
“And it’s been in a box all this time?” she asked.
I unwrapped her fingers from my coffee mug and slipped the ugly piece of Morelli history off her body. “I’ll get you something else later,” I told her. “Something you pick out or whatever. But for now it would mean a lot to me if you wore this ring.” I slipped the diamond on her finger like it had been made for her.
“It’s perfect,” she whispered, and kissed me before resting her head on my shoulder. She held it out on her hand, admiring the way it sparkled in sunlight. “I guess it’s real, then,” she said.
“Us?”
She nodded.
“We’re already married.”
“You know what I mean.” I pulled her up into my lap, sliding my hand over her stomach where there might or might not be a baby we’d made. If wanting her to be pregnant made it so, then she was surely pregnant. If not now, then soon.
“I love you.”
“How do you know?” she asked me, stroking my face. Smiling at me because she knew the answer.
Trust. Faith. Surrender. This glowing fucking hope in my chest.
“Because I know.”
EPILOGUE
Poppy
The blue of the sky was the same blue as the sea. It was endless. And you’d think it would get boring, nothing but sea and sky and sun.
But it had been a month, and so far…not boring.
Not boring at all.
Of course, I was very busy.
“Ronan?” I yelled from my spot on the deck. I had cushions and towels and an array of drinks and all the watermelon I could keep down.
“Yeah?”
I turned to find him on the upper deck, the open-air captain’s chair. He had his leg propped up on the railing, the damn sketchbook open on his lap.
“Honestly,” I said, crossing my arms over my breasts. “It’s getting a little pervy, Ronan.”
“You’re gorgeous,” he said. He set down the sketchbook and took the ladder down to the deck where I was lying. He was all sleek tanned muscles in a black swimsuit. His hair was long. He’d lost some of that edge. The lethal grace. He slept through the night, and when the nightmares came for him, I was there to push them away.
To remind him that he was a different man. “And you love it.”
He sprawled against my cushions with me. His hands stroking my breasts. The mound of my stomach.
“Lass,” he breathed. “You’re more beautiful every day.”
I stretched my arms over my head. I was tanned from all the sun. Brown all over from sunbathing topless. I was embarrassed at first. Pale and timid.
Feeling like a whale.
But now I am four months pregnant and loving it.
He stroked my hair back from my face.
It was red again. Pulled back in a ponytail. Stiff and curly from the sea air.
“How’s the schoolwork?”
“Good,” I said. I was taking social work courses online
from NYU. I hoped between the courses and all this money we had, Ronan and I might be able to do some real good for kids. Kids like Ronan.
He kissed me. Kissed me again. And I was drunk on sunshine and peace and love but there were realities we needed to deal with.
“We need to get back to harbor soon,” I said.
“You feel all right?” he asked, stroking my stomach. He held his hand just above my hip bone, tapping the taut skin until the baby inside of me kicked.
Hi there, son.
Hi there, Dad.
They did this a million times a day, Ronan and his child.
“I’m good, but we’re running out of watermelon.”
“Then we’d better get back quickly.”
I had terrible morning sickness the first three months and I didn’t know if it was being on the water that made it better, or if it faded on its own. It was very different from the first time.
Being pregnant was endlessly fascinating.
The monitor at my hip buzzed as Gwen woke up from her nap. She really was the sweetest child. She woke up singing, babbling to herself.
“Grand. I thought she’d never wake up,” Ronan said and swung away from me to go get our two-year-old.
Our boat was palatial, larger than the apartment in Brooklyn. And we’d spent a fortune making it as safe as possible. But there were still problems and risks with a two-year-old on a boat, and as he came to the doorway of the cockpit with Gwen in his arms, her red hair in a wild rooster tail on top of her hair, my heart caught in my throat.
Nothing can happen to them.
Nothing will happen to them.
“Mama,” she said, and I opened my arms to her. Ronan set her against my skin and she cuddled close. She smelled like sunscreen and baby powder.
“Did you have a good sleep?” I asked her, kissing her cheek.
She rested her head in her hand and babbled at me. I nodded and smiled, only understanding a third of the words she was saying to me. Something about a dog and a fish and a popsicle.
“Poppy,” Ronan said, watching us with his heart in his eyes. “I think it’s time to go home.”
“Yeah?” I asked, watching him over our daughter’s head. “You’re done being a ferry boat captain?”