by Anna Martin
I’d never been to this part of the campus. I hadn’t been a student here, so I only knew my way around from an exhibition of Nae’s that I’d gone to once. Inside, the walls were covered with drawings and paintings. Yet more were on the floor, leaning against the wall.
“Hi,” I said, stopping the first person who passed us. “I’m looking for Zane Hadlin.”
“You’re Ellis, right?”
I nodded, wondering how this girl with waist-length dreads knew my name.
“He’s upstairs, in the studio. He’s way over on the left when you get to the top of the stairs.”
She stopped to give Harrison a hiya, then smiled at me before moving on.
A big curved staircase led up to the second floor, each step covered in muck and paint and God only knew what else. I held Harrison a little tighter on my hip.
Upstairs, in the studio space, there were enough stations for about twenty or thirty students, although there were only a dozen or so actually working. The ubiquitous paint-spattered studio radio was playing Bon Jovi. Zane had his headphones on.
He had several boards set up to create a little hideaway that he worked in, and as I approached I could see more of the huge canvas that was covered with layers of acrylic. I didn’t want to disturb him, but Harrison had other ideas and let out one of his little shrieks of happiness when he caught sight of Zane.
“Hey,” Zane said with a smile as he tugged his earbuds out. “What are you doing here?”
“We missed you,” I told him as Harrison chattered at him excitedly and reached out for a hug.
“I’m covered in paint,” he said apologetically, leaning in to give Harrison kisses on the cheek instead as I tried to balance my squirming toddler in my arms.
“I’ve just come from Linda.”
“Oh?”
“She had some… interesting news.”
“Tell me,” he said immediately. “Please.”
“Oliver got a hold of your daddy’s name from somewhere,” I said. “They’re using Al-Jazari on all the legal documents.”
He sighed heavily. “Oh shit.”
“Yeah. I’m so sorry, baby.”
For a moment he fiddled with a paintbrush, rolling it between his fingertips. Then he shrugged. “I suppose I can’t hide forever.”
“You’re a lot calmer about this than I thought you’d be.”
“I don’t know what I’m thinking right now. I should call Cass, get his take on it.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
Zane shrugged out of the plaid shirt he’d been wearing to paint, leaving him in a thin white undershirt that reminded me too keenly of what he looked like naked. When he reached out for Harrison I let my baby fall into his sure hands to give the comfort I knew Zane needed.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I should have left it until later. You’re working here.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “Honestly. I like that you can come out here.”
“Have you had a break for lunch yet?”
“No.”
“Want one?”
There was a cafeteria hidden in one corner of the huge building, but Zane directed me back onto the street and took us a few blocks down to a little Italian deli tucked out of the way. As we walked, he tugged a fresh shirt out of his backpack and shrugged it on. When we got inside, I wondered just what he wanted to eat there. Then he ordered blueberry pancakes, and it all made sense.
“For lunch?” I teased him.
“As far as I’m concerned, breakfast food should be all-the-time food.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
They had cute (and clean) high chairs for Harrison and good coffee and a waitress who looked like she was smiling because she wanted to, rather than because it was her job. We managed to snag a booth just before the lunchtime crowd started to filter in.
I pulled a couple of cars out of my backpack for Harrison to play with, although his favorite game was throwing them at us and waiting somewhat impatiently for them to be put back on his tray. Zane tangled his feet with mine under the table and rebuttoned his shirt, getting them misaligned and not bothering to correct it.
“You have a little smudge, just here,” I said, and then I beckoned him closer over the table to wipe the charcoal from the side of his nose.
“I’m such a cliché right now,” he sighed.
I smiled at him indulgently and brushed my thumb over his lips, pleased when he caught it in a kiss.
“Did I tell you I spoke to my mom last night?”
“No?”
Evenings had become a lot less stressful now that Zane lived with us and helped with Harrison’s bedtime routine. It had been a late night for me, though, working on a project, and Zane had been asleep by the time I got into bed.
“She knows I’m living with you now. She still hasn’t asked—I guess she won’t—but I think she knows you’re not my roommate.”
“Bless her.”
“How was your mom when you came out? And Leo too?”
I sighed and played with the edge of my napkin. “I don’t think she understands. For a long time she’s been looking for a ‘reason’ why she made two gay children. For a while it was because she smothered us when we were little, but she seems to have decided now it’s because our dad left us when we were kids, and we’re trying to replace that missing father figure with a male partner.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” I said with a chuckle. “It’s not a malicious thing, she’s not trying to change us or anything, but I think she needs to have her reason to understand and be at peace. Mom never got why I wanted to get married and have a baby. She thought if I wanted that, I could get it from a woman.”
Zane handed Harrison back his toy, then reached for my hands across the table, feathering our fingertips together.
“You’re a really great dad, you know that?”
I shrugged it off.
“No, really,” Zane insisted. “Someone told me the other day that parents don’t get to hear it enough. So, Ellis Broad, you’re a great father and a really awesome boyfriend.”
“Love you,” I murmured, squeezing his fingers.
“Love you too.”
The waitress reappeared then, with drinks for us both and some juice for me to water down and put into Harrison’s sippy cup. It was organic, she insisted, when Zane turned the bottle around to read the label.
“It’s fine,” I said, hoping to reassure her, and I kicked Zane’s ankle under the table. “Thanks very much.”
“Ow,” Zane said as she walked away. “It’s not a crime to be watchful of what you’re feeding him.”
Harrison would only throw it at us, anyway. He liked doing that, throwing things, at anyone and anything.
“So, tell me what you’re working on,” I said, hoping to steer the conversation away from my psychotic ex-husband and the drama that came with him.
Zane leaned back in his chair and grinned. “No.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, picking up on his playful mood and running with it. It was a much better alternative than moping. “I never get to see anything you’re working on.”
“I don’t like showing half-finished things,” he said. “I’m quite self-critical.”
“I’d noticed.”
He frowned for a minute, then visibly gave up. “Okay. We had a still-life drawing class this morning. We’ve been looking at stuff which is degenerated—rotten or rusted or falling apart, whatever. Then we have to take that drawing and recreate it in sculptural form, so making the old new, but still looking old.”
“How interesting.”
“Hmm. We have these mini-projects to do alongside all of our big project work, for our final pieces. Sometimes it’s really good. You end up learning a new technique, and you can incorporate that into your final project in a way you hadn’t thought about before. It forces your mind in a new direction. But sometimes it’s just a pain in the ass.”
“I suppose it depends on what the p
roject is,” I said and passed Harrison back his sippy cup, which had, predictably, been thrown at me. “If it’s not something related to your dissertation piece, then it’s a waste of time.”
“Exactly.”
“So, this one?” I prompted.
“Is a waste of time,” he said with a laugh. “Actually, that’s unfair. I’ve learned a lot of sculptural techniques, again, but it’s not something that’s going to help me with my project.”
As he was talking, Zane had slipped one of his shoes off and was playing footsie with me under the table, rubbing the arch of his foot against my ankle, pushing my jeans up my leg and teasing me. I didn’t mind. It was cute, especially as he was smirking as he did it.
“Did you not do any of this with your degree?” he asked.
“No. My coursework was good, but it was really CAD orientated. They made it clear to us from the outset that we were digital design majors, not art majors, and if we wanted to join the art students then we had three weeks to change our mind and move across.”
“Wow.”
“That was all right by me. I’m really not great at fine art.”
“You can draw,” he said, protesting on my behalf. “I’ve seen you.”
“Cartoons,” I said, conceding. “Nothing better than that.”
When lunch—or brunch—arrived, Zane didn’t even bother to fuss about the huge pile of bacon on top of my pancakes. The waitress had brought Harrison a handful of fresh blueberries, which he went nuts over for some reason, and I shared my bacon. A little bit of my bacon. It was a weird combination, not that Harrison seemed to mind.
By the time I walked Zane back to campus, the stress of the morning had started to dissipate. He certainly seemed lighter somehow and gave me a lingering kiss before heading back inside. I watched him walk away until he turned a corner and I couldn’t see him anymore, and wondered and thought and worried.
Chapter 15
The next time the police arrived at the door it was a woman, wearing an ill-fitting suit rather than the harsh uniform the men had worn. She flashed her badge at me, and I took the time to read it. I considered calling up the NYPD to check it out, then decided against it.
“Mr. Hadlin?”
I shook my head. “Mr. Broad.”
She nodded. “Can I speak with Mr. Hadlin, please?”
“The last of your colleagues who came to my home insisted on calling him Al-Jazari.”
Detective Western nodded slowly. “I understand he doesn’t use that name any longer.”
“Not for some time.”
I opened the door a little wider and let her in. Zane was in the living room, sitting on a wide sheet, finger-painting with Harrison. The two of them were covered with paint and looked equally in their element.
“Zane, this is Detective Western,” I said softly.
He looked up briefly, and in that moment I saw his eyes harden. “Here, baba, with the blue. There you go. How can I help you, Detective Western?”
He was polite to a fault. I counted his ability to say calm as one of his best traits. I had a habit of flying off the handle.
Since Zane hadn’t asked her to sit down, I did, taking the space next to her on the sofa so we could look at what Zane and Harrison were creating. It was a big mess, actually, but Zane had spent plenty of time explaining to me about hand-eye coordination and cerebral development and how children respond to color therapy. I thought they were just having fun.
“I need to know where you were last night, Mr. Hadlin, between five and midnight.”
The only indication that he’d heard her was the slight clearing of his throat.
“At five,” he said, “I was in a class at school. At SVA. That finished at five thirty. Then Ellis picked me up in his car because it was raining and I wanted to bring some work home, and I was worried about it getting damaged if I took the subway.”
She nodded. “And then?”
“Then I made dinner,” he said, carefully directing Harrison’s hand to the one area of parchment paper that wasn’t already covered in paint. This was the type of paper that didn’t get soggy and was strong enough to hold the weight of all the finger paint. It was one of the scraps he’d brought home from his job at the center.
“We didn’t go out last night,” I said, filling in some of the gaps for him. “Harrison goes to bed about seven. I put him to bed last night because Zane was working in here. We both worked for a couple of hours, then went to bed at about eleven.”
“We made love first,” Zane said, still not looking at the police officer. “That might not be important to you, but it is to me. Will you tell me now why I have to give all this information to a person I’ve never met before? I’m guessing something happened.”
I gave Detective Western a few more mental points for not even flinching at his words. “The man who was convicted of your brother’s murder was found dead at eleven o’clock last night.”
About the time I rolled you onto your side and spooned up behind you, I thought. You let me hold you when we made love. You were whispering my name when I was inside you.
“Oh.”
“Can you tell us anything else?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not at this time. It’s an active investigation. I can keep in contact with you, though, if you’d like.”
“Yes, please.” I took a card out of my wallet and passed it to her. “Are you seriously looking at Zane for this?”
“Seriously? No. But it’s nice to scratch him off the list and move on. I’m going to ask the building owner for the security tapes just to verify. That’s for your safety, not mine. No, I didn’t think you had anything to do with it.”
“That’s nice to hear,” Zane said. “That’s green, baba. Green.”
For a moment, Detective Western looked like she was going to say something else. Instead she stood, nodded at Zane, even though he wasn’t looking at her, and let me lead her back to the door.
“I’m sorry about him,” I said. “We’ve got other things going on at the moment, and finding out Sabri’s murderer had walked free on top of everything else… it’s just a lot. For anyone.”
She shook her head. “For what it’s worth, Mr. Broad, it was not me who put your partner on that suspect list in the first place. He’s a lot safer now that we’re looking out for him.”
“Calling him Hadlin went a long way toward making him trust you,” I said.
“Thank you for your time.”
“You too, Detective.”
He was in the same place when I returned, helping Harrison smear colors together over the vast sheet of paper. My son looked happy. Zane looked like he was being tortured.
“Zane,” I murmured.
He shook his head sharply.
Words would be no comfort to him. I went and sat down just behind him, letting him lean back against my chest. Very slowly, very carefully, I ran my hand up and down his arm, steering clear of his paint-covered hands. Then I kissed his shoulder and whispered my “I love yous” against his skin.
“How could they think I would do something like that?” he said softly.
“Only a person who didn’t know you at all could think that. Someone who doesn’t know the first thing about you.”
“Ellis?”
“Mm?”
“Love you too.”
I closed my arms around him and tilted his head back with a flick of my finger under his chin. The kiss was at a weird angle, and nice for it. Words of reassurance didn’t feel appropriate, but this—this physical reminder of our relationship—seemed to encourage him to relax.
Since he seemed to be calmer when he was painting and when he was hanging out with Harrison, I left the two of them alone to make some great works of art and fired up my computer to get some work done.
Instead of opening the design program, though, I pulled up the Internet and did a quick search for reports of violence in the local area. There was too much to go through, a depressing amount that just serve
d to remind me of the dangers of living in a big city. It was all I knew, though.
I glanced over at Zane quickly. He was absorbed with his task, so I did another search, this time for the name of the gang he was almost a part of.
There wasn’t much: a Wikipedia entry under street gangs of New York City, a couple of lines about rivalries, and no more. Apparently the gang wasn’t as prominent as it used to be. I wondered if that was a good thing or not and decided not to look any further.
I’d thought a lot about whether Zane’s past was actually anything to worry about now, or if I was just concerned about the fourteen-year-old version of the man I loved. In reality, if someone was desperate to track him down, it wouldn’t really be difficult to do. But after nearly a decade of living in Vermont, he couldn’t be on the radar of many people back here. Since he’d changed his name too, there wasn’t much to link the Zane Al-Jazari, youngest brother of a murdered gang member, and Zane Hadlin, the inspired young art student.
That was what I hoped, at least.
When someone pressed the buzzer to be let in downstairs, I seriously considered not answering it. It had been a fucking terrible morning, complete with stressed baby, tired daddy, and compromises that were really just me giving in.
Still, I had been raised to be polite, even when it grated, and I pressed the button next to the phone without picking it up to ask who was there.
That was my first mistake.
The second was not looking through the peephole before opening the front door.
The third was not slamming it shut when I saw Oliver standing in the hall.
“What do you want?”
I couldn’t make my voice angry or disdainful—I was bone tired and didn’t have the energy.
“To talk,” he said simply.
A quick glance over my shoulder told me Harrison was playing quietly for now, so I suppressed a yawn and leaned against the door for support.
“So talk.”
“Are you going to let me in?”
“No.”
“Ellis. Come on.”
“You wanted to talk,” I said, feeling childish. “You never said where.”
He sighed heavily and looked away, like he was exasperated with me already. Not that I cared. A little part of me wondered what he wanted, and another bigger part said I was probably better off not knowing.