Title: Secret Keeper 2/4
Author:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
laguera25
Fandom: CSI:NY/HP
Rating: FRM
Pairing: Flack/OFC
SPOILERS: HP through HBP; CSI:NY through S6, especially "Pay Up" and "Cuckoo's Nest."
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events in the NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis.
All characters in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: Set immediately after "Skin" in the Flack/Stanhope crackverse.
Part I
He'd swallowed his guilt and gabbled uselessly at her and made promises to himself as much as to her, promises in which he would fail as he had failed in so many others, and then they had been there, and it been too late to do anything but help her out of the car and deliver her unto the birthplace of her darkest terrors.
Just for a little while, he'd sworn to himself as he'd pushed her through the sliding glass doors that had opened up to swallow her whole. Just until the baby comes. I have to keep him safe, too, now, right? As if he were nothing but a concerned father, and not a faithless husband deserting his wife in the loveless halls of the witch king. He still remembers the unexpected heft of the pen in his hand as he'd filled out the admission forms, and how small Rebecca had looked in her chair, cowed and shrunken and defenseless and pleading with her eyes even as her mouth remained resolutely shut. Love me enough to bear me away from here, she had silently begged, and he had hardened his aching heart and convinced himself it was for the best and concentrated on the paperwork balanced on his knees.
She had borne up until the blue, plastic ID bracelet had cinched around her wrist like a manacle, and then all her childhood nightmares had slipped their fraying tethers and run, screaming, from her mouth. She'd forsaken her cherished dignity then, had cast it aside like a millstone from around her neck and begged him not to leave her there, stripped of everything but her name and warehoused like so much damaged freight beside bodies wracked with cancer and the obsolescence of age. She had sobbed and pleaded and tangled her fingers in his shirt, had clung to him as if he were her only salvation.
It had frightened him to see his customarily-poised, proud wife so unmanned, lost in the throes of hysteria, and he had nearly relented, but the image of his son dead and blue between her cold thighs had welled to the surface of his mind like a pustulent boil, and he'd quashed the impulse before it could take root and damn his son to death before he'd drawn his first breath. He'd soothed and murmured and coaxed her into her room, and then he'd eased her into the bed that would become her prison with the gentlest of hands and tried to ignore the yellow, porkfat stink of death wafting from the wizened, pain-wracked form in the next bed.
Only a little while, he'd told himself over and over again as his terrified wife had hiccoughed and sniffled and clung to his hands with panicky tightness. Only a little while, as she'd shuddered and keened and gazed at him with a feverish mixture of shame and terror and a dreadful awareness. The terror would but endure for a little while, and then they would have a son, and the terror would dissipate like smoke in a heavy rain, displaced by the joy of family. Only a little while, as she prostrated herself before him, thrown herself upon his mercy and begged him to shield her from the monsters that waited for her just beyond his field of view.
She had been so persistent in her terror that the admitting nurse had offered to sedate her. A finger of unease had crept along his spine then, cold and unhurried as the slither of a garden slug, because she had told him this would happen, his hunched and beseeching prophetess. She had foretold it as she'd sat at the kitchen counter and enumerated the horrors to be found within a hospital's sterile, loveless walls, an apocalyptic Cassandra with truths black as pitch upon her tongue. She had told him, and like Ramses II, he had stoppered his ears and ignored the evidence of his heart, the recognition of truth beneath the mindless fear.
But unlike the luckless Pharaoh of Egypt, who ran his empire to wrack and ruin rather than concede defeat, it had not been he who had suffered for his intransigence. It had been Rebecca, his helpless prophetess unheeded. He had bid the voice of unease be silent and abandoned her there, had prised her clinging fingers from his hands and the fabric of his shirt and told her that he would be back tomorrow, and left her in the care of the monsters she so feared. He had left her there and congratulated himself on making the hard choice and told himself that thinking of her every moment of their necessary parting would be enough.
He thinks that if he could go back in time and meet himself in that hospital corridor, he would punch himself flat in the smug face, punch until the lip split and the knuckles bruised and the blood flowed down his chin in a warm, wet freshet, until his thick head had dislodged itself from the snug bower of his self-absorbed ass. He would seize himself by the collar and drag himself back to that hothouse death room and force himself to look into Rebecca's lost, heartbroken eyes until the truth struck home like a breath-stealing fist. He would sit himself down in an unpadded chair and watch as the minutes bled into hours with the torpid slowness of fluid through a saline drip and the night drew down and the sounds of the dying sharpened as light-blinded eyes grew more acute with the coming of the dark and they saw the shadows rising from the corners and floors like fleshless fingers rising from the River Styx. He would watch as she lay in the dark without the pitiful solace of his arms and listened to the breath wheeze and rattle from the body in the next bed like the autumnal wind soughing through the cornsilk and called for the bedpan and the glass of water that never came. He would force himself to watch as she counted the hours until he graced her with his attentions for a few hours in the early evening and left her again, his mind already turned to his caseload. He would make himself watch her face crumble as the fear closed in around her like a suffocating cocoon. He would make himself bear witness as she curled in on herself as best she could with her distended belly and sobbed into the thin, shabby hospital linen. He would make himself watch as she left calls for him that went unreturned because he was busy with someone else's life or death, and because it broke his heart to hear her small, sad voice on the other end of the line.
And he would make himself watch while she lay neglected, panting for want of water because the Nurse Ratchett in whose care he had left her was too busy to bring her the bedpan every few hours. He would watch as they left her on a diaper pad because it was easier than helping her relieve herself with a modicum of dignity.
And he would force himself to watch as they tied her to the bedrails and left her to stew in her own piss like a chained cur, drugged and thirsty and robbed of her voice by the Haldol they pumped into her veins when she dared resist. He would watch as her eyes rolled in their sockets and drool rolled down her chin and piss sluiced down her slack thighs in a warm rush. He would watch as everything that was her--her wit and intellect and shrewd awareness of the world through which she moved--drowned in a narcotizing tide of manufactured indifference. He would watch all that of which he had been blessedly, blissfully ignorant. He owes her that and then some. If he is honest, he owes her a debt he has no hope of repaying, a debt he cannot calculate in dollars and cents or hugs and kisses or dinners and candlelit backrubs. He owes her more than he is or could ever be, and the enormity of the debt makes him feel weak and small and ashamed.
It wasn't supposed to be like this, so one-sided and grossly unfair. When he had slid that small, black velvet ring box across the crisp, white linens of Delmonico's, he had thought he was offering her a place in an equal partnership, that the yoke of marriage would fall upon them both in equal measure. He would be a cop, and she would be a professor of mathematics, and they would walk through life on equal footing, hand-in-hand and heads bent against the wind. She would wash the laundry and fold the clothes and pay the internet and light bills, and he would vacuum and fix the leaking shower nozzle and pay for the groceries and the credit cards and her subway pass. She would rub his neck and his feet and make him homemade soup when he was sick, and he would clip her fingernails and toenails and set up the heating pad when the cramps laid her low. When adversity struck, they would meet it together, linked by love and common purpose, and weather the storm with heads and hearts held high.
He had promised himself that he would be a better husband than his father was, a better father, if the opportunity arose. He would love and honor and cherish her, would shield her from the predations of the job and establish limits it could not breach, no matter how insistent the clacking of its claws outside his door. He would not forget her, lose her in the blinding, blurring, dizzying shuffle of his superhero's life. She would always be venerated, a goddess among mortals who had chosen to walk with him alone, and he would never allow her voice to be lost amid the din and cacophony of his beloved city.
All the loftiest of intentions. He had held each of them beneath his tongue as he'd recited his marriage vows on his knees before the cold, imposing altar of St. Patrick, had tasted them on his tongue like Communion wine. He had held them as sacred as the vows he had made before God and five hundred people. He had been cocky and young and sure of his limitless capabilities, and he had wanted to be worthy of her whom he so blindly adored. So he'd taken her in his arms and velcroed her feet to his and waltzed her across the smooth, polished reception-hall floor, and later that night, he'd consummated his marriage and his unspoken promise in their bedroom, ardent and desperately in love and mercifully unaware of how long and winding their road would prove.
One by one, those lofty intentions and his unspoken vows had come crashing down and been trampled beneath reality's shattering heel. He had never forgotten her, no; to this day, she is the first thought on his mind when he opens his eyes and the standard he holds before him when he marches off to war in a city gone mad, more precious and talismanic than the St. Michael's medals he wears beneath his shirt and his Kevlar vest. But he has lost sight of her in the mad rush to snare madmen and murderers and uphold justice, has succumbed to the tunnel vision of the chase and let chances to demonstrate his devotion slip through his fingers. He has canceled dinners days or weeks in the planning, postponed vacations and aborted romantic evenings to race to a stranger's rescue because duty declares he must. He has left her far too alone for far too long with nothing in return save for useless apologies, and he has missed so many precious moments in her life--award banquets honoring her achievements as a molder of minds and leader of tomorrow. Hell, he'd even missed her transformation from mousy, unassuming mathematics professor into a preeminent mind in her field. While she was busily reshaping the world from behind a table in an NYU lecture hall, he'd been across the city, slurping bland canapes and playing young, dumb, and hung with a vapid undercover named Devon Maddox.
In three hours, his wife had changed the world; in three hours, he'd changed his bisque-stained shirt. She had performed her miracle without him there to see it, though not for want of begging. She had pleaded with him to come with her, to serve as her proud escort on this, her night of nights. Surely the city could spare him for one night, she had reasoned; surely, he could be her Prince Charming for a few hours while she put on a smile and hobnobbed with faculty members, fellow mathematicians, and glassy-eyed philanthropists who had understood nothing of her presentation but who had sensed the opportunity to be a part of history. Just a few smiles, a sip or two of cheap champagne, and a few aimless circuits around the room to nod and shake hands and exchange business cards and empty pleasantries, and she would release him with a kiss and her gratitude, free to return to the company of his duty. Hadn't she earned the right to ask this favor of him?
Yes, she had, a thousand times over, earned it with infinite patience and endless forgiveness and cool, soothing hands whenever he dragged himself home, battered and bruised and dragging his lank Superman cape behind him. With all the rebukes she had never uttered and all the fond endearments she had. With the suppers she'd left to warm in the oven and the two Saturdays of each month she lost to the kids at the youth center. She had every right to ask this trifle of him, this one moment when he put the husband before the cop.
And he had refused her. With boundless regret and a shame so deep and bilious that his guts had cramped and ached and roiled with the greasy, loose-boweled threat of revolt, it was true, but he had refused all the same, had denied her the simplest of requests. Not because he wanted to; indeed, he'd wanted nothing more than to stand beside her and watch her shine as he'd done on their wedding day, when she'd smiled so sweetly at him in absolute, blind faith and the snow had fallen on her thin shoulders like stardust, but because his oath to duty had given him no choice. To accompany her to the lecture would have meant leaving Maddox alone on their assigned surveillance and exposing his face to the glare of reporters' flashbulbs. It would have blown his cover as the hot, young cop who'd shed his crippled wife like an unwanted skin and lost himself in the hedonism and excess of Manhattan nightlife and put both his and Maddox's lives at risk. It would have meant another Jessica Angell.
And so, he'd steeled himself and forced himself to meet her wide, hopeful, desperate gaze and told her no. He would not be her Prince Charming, not when he was needed by another.
He will never forget they way she'd looked at him then, in the darkness of the squad car in which he'd picked her up from the airport. An indrawn breath, and then her face had wavered and crumpled, a reflection cast upon a lake's restless mirror. Another indrawn breath, and another. A cough, and then her face had hardened, grown smooth with steely resolve and the recognition of futility. She'd stared at him with wet, scornful eyes, and then she'd scoffed and shaken her head in disgust.
Fuck you, Donald Flack, she'd said dully. Fuck you and your precious thin, blue line. She'd stared out the bleary windshield, her chin set, and one hand had scrabbled listlessly at the car door like a dying spider.
Rebecca, doll, he'd murmured, heartsick, and reached out to caress her cheek, but she had rounded on him with the fury of a wounded animal, lips pulled back from her teeth in a soundless snarl, and he'd thought she was going to snap and lunge and sink her teeth into his consoling fingers.
No, she'd hissed furiously, and silenced him with a sharp slice of her palm through the air between them. Then, more quietly, No. No sound then save for her deep, shuddering breaths as she'd fought to maintain her teetering composure and the hiss of rubber on rain-soaked asphalt. No single syllable had ever spoken so eloquently to the storm behind her stony face and tightly-clenched fists, and he could only nod and hang his head and slink out of the car to retrieve her wheelchair from the trunk.
She hadn't spoken as she'd swung out of the car and into the chair and settled into the seat. Not a word as she'd straightened her clothes and smoothed her skirt and wrangled her twitching feet onto the footplates. When she'd finished, she'd straightened and swept loose strands of hair from her forehead with an irritated flip of her stiff, splayed fingers, and then she'd simply looked at him, eyes red and mouth a thin, grim line as she'd struggled against the choking, crushing swell of her hurt and tightly-bridled anger.
Her expression, mulish and mutinous and heartbroken, had twisted his churning, uneasy guts, and he'd wanted to comfort her, enfold her in his arms and stroke her hair and whisper that it would be all right, but she had been rigid and trembling, glass on the verge of shattering, and so he'd stuffed his hands into the pockets of his chinos and rocked on his heels.
I'm sorry, doll. So sorry. Lump in his throat and knot in his stomach and smoke in his eyes and hands fisted in his pockets.
Thank you for the ride, Detective. If he would not confer upon her the rights and courtesies of a wife, then she would not treat him as her husband. She'd swallowed and cleared her throat and blinked back tears, and then she'd spun away from him with a snap of her wrists and wheeled resolutely toward the bright, artificial light of the hotel lobby, where Charlie Eppes had waited with their luggage and their room keys.
He had watched her until she'd gained the safety of the lobby, and then he'd tottered to the driver's seat on legs gone wooden and dead. It had taken him two tries to start the engine, and he'd made it less than three blocks before he'd pulled over and heaved his guts into the rain-swollen gutter, hands on the rough, wet asphalt and squashed cigarette butts. He'd stayed there until his knees had been bruised and his stomach had been as empty as his heart, and then he'd wiped his raw, saliva-slick mouth with an unsteady hand and gotten back into the car and watched the windshield wipers flick desultorily across the windshield, smear the world into distorted incomprehensibility. When he trusted himself to drive, he'd driven to the stationhouse. It was the only bridge had had not burned.
When he thinks on it, which isn't often because it's a hard, sharp spear into the tender, battered flesh of his conscience, he thinks that it damns him to Hell as surely as his failure to stop his baby sister from going ass over teakettle down the stairs of the Whisper House when he was sixteen, as surely as those poisoned and poisonous words he had flung so carelessly at an unsuspecting Rebecca, those dreadful words that had lain her bare and let the rot set in. Those words that had shattered his china doll with the pulverizing efficiency of a closing fist. He's been thrice damned, and there can be no redemption for him now.
He'd left her then, and he'd left her at the hospital. And just like his wedding day, he'd had the best of intentions when he'd consigned her to the care of nurses in the Greatest City in the World. He'd thought she would be safe, warm and snug and unencumbered by the responsibility and worry of caring for herself and fighting her overburdened body for every tortured movement. He'd wanted to protect her from her stubborn pride and pathological need to prove her mettle to a ruthless, merciless world that would countenance nothing less than steel-spined perfection from a body inherently imperfect, to give her the reprieve she refused to grant herself. He'd wanted to give her the chance to rest and prepare for the grueling rigors of childbirth and the sleepless nights that would follow. He'd wanted, in his bumbling, graceless way, to provide for her, to love her as a good husband ought.
And let's not lie, boy, his father grunts in the enveloping silence of the kitchen, you wanted a reprieve for yourself, a chance to catch your breath, and one night of unbroken sleep, uninterrupted by her moans as the baby turned and writhed and kicked inside her with his healthy boy legs or by her insistent tug on your shoulder whenever her shrunken bladder began to complain beneath her distended belly. You knew it wasn't her fault, that she was doin' the best she could in this undiscovered country of late pregnancy, but you had hit the ground runnin' the day of her first ultrasound, and you hadn't drawn an easy breath since. In fact, you felt the flutter and settlin' weight of every breath since, as though God had reached down and wrapped His hand around your lungs. You were breathin' that mystical, magical, miraculous breath of life, and it scared the shit out of you. Fatherhood had been a happy daydream until Rebecca wandered into the living room with that positive pregnancy test in her cold, spasmin', disbelievin' hand. Eight months on, it had been a firm reality whenever you touched the swollen dome of her belly or saw her milk-swollen breasts as she struggled in and out of a bathtub that now held the potential to kill her and the precious gift she carried. Eight months on, and you were strugglin' to wrap your mind around the fact that you were someone's father, the guiding light and gold standard for a life that had not asked to be, but been drawn from heaven and created from love and wish and the urgent motion of two bodies joined at the hip. You were terrified and exhausted and crazy with nerves and anticipation and the daily threat of death by dirtbag, and you just needed a chance to lose your shit without feelin' like you were lettin' her down.
You needed a taste of normal, and in those days, before Junior brightened and broadened your horizons, normal was the precinct and the cramped bullpen and the fat desk sergeant who chewed his pencil erasers to ragged nubs and Detective Scagnetti and his chronic pants hitchin', as though he were genuflectin' before a forgotten god of haberdashery. Normal was fillin' out an endless stream of DD-5s and reviewin' witness statements and makin' follow-up calls about current cases. Normal was chasin' mooks and skels and mutts and scarfin' a loaded dog from the cart just outside the precinct or the modern nest of your beloved lab rats. Normal was stridin' down the halls with Mac or Stella or Danny and talkin' shop about the monster of the week. Normal was the job, and you wanted--fuck, you needed--to wallow in it while you could, before baby made three and turned your well-ordered world upside down and inside out.
So, you put your frightened, weak, defenseless girl in the in the belly of her green-walled beast and dove headlong into the chase. Just a little taste of as it should be, you told yourself, just a taste, and I'll be fine.
But you ain't never done anything half-assed, and the chase can be intoxicatin'. Like Pooh with his goddamned honey pot, you gobbled it up, the taste of life as you knew it sticky and sweet on your tongue, and it wasn't long before you were neck-deep in the job and sinkin' lower all the time. It wasn't like fatherhood, with its unknowable mysteries and unknown terrors, but familiar and comforting and safe despite the dangers waiting behind every unfamiliar face. The job you understood. The job you could handle, so you gratefully lost yourself to its lulling, slaloming rhythm, and you lost track of how long until visiting hours ended at the hospital. You'd look up from your desk and realize that your shift had ended two hours ago, and when you realized that you wouldn't have time to eat and shower and make it to the hospital, you felt a dirty, shameful relief because you wouldn't have to look into her sad lost face and tell her to be brave and strong for just a little longer. You promised yourself that you'd make it up to her on the next visit, or the next, or the one after that. Except that time always got away from you, and there never was a next time.
And then you got assigned to that serial task force, and it was down the rabbit hole. You got so blinkered by the chase that you rarely went home, let alone to the hospital. There wasn't time when there was a monster on the prowl, claiming daughters and sisters and wives. You crashed at the taskforce stationhouse, showered in the precinct showers and slept on the break room sofa or the grotty little rack room, with its scavenged steel prison bunks and thrift-store sheets and bolted soggy dogs and scorched coffee while you gathered around the conference table with your fellow detectives and thumbed through witness statements, crime scene photos, and suspicious persons reports. You worked your precious gumshoe hoodoo, the strange, inert magic you learned from life with me and from the instructors at the academy, the inorganic, safe magic of police reports and leads and suspect pools and the stale, close humidity of surveillance in a departmental sedan, so unlike the livin', fearsome magic the roiled around your girl and wept from her pores like musk and the ends of her fingers like bursts of static electricity. Your work in the taskforce stationhouse was for the greater good, for the protection and salvation of other men's wives and daughters, and besides, Rebecca was safe and sound in her not-so-gilded cage.
And then the call came while you were immersed in your precious routine. Your girl had slipped her cage and fled, drugged and weak and so heavily-pregnant that she could scarcely move, and the greater good was reduced to so much empty puffery. She was gone, and the focus of your world, so broad and grand and lofty that morning, when you'd been swillin' coiffee and cuttin' up and pattin' yourself on the back for what a noble, self-sacrificin' guy you were, was reduced to a population of one: the tiny, broken, unbreakable woman who carried your cheap ring on her finger and your priceless son in her belly. All talk of serial killers and predators was so much irrelevant quackin', and you left it behind without a pang of regret, and never mind Greene and Stabler's useless bleatin'. Your ears had ceased to work properly the minute the phrase, wife has gone missin' had reached them, as though the nurse's soft-spoken words, hissed through static like a confession amid the flames of Hell were such a thunderous indictment of your ultimate failure that they had rendered you deaf, and anyway, what were other men's wives when yours was alone and vulnerable and weak in a city without conscience? So much incidental chaff to be swept aside. So you left them behind. You would have left your phone, too, that strangling electronic leash, but you kept it just in case she called, in case she forgot your betrayal and summoned you to her side, reached out with that still, small voice that was so easy to lose amid the babble of the city and called for her knight errant.
And summon you she did. She scarcely had the strength to hold the phone, but the power in that tired, slurred voice could have summoned you from across the world, could have brought you on the run with glass in your soles and ribs in your lungs and blood in your mouth. Sweetheart, I need you. A plea stronger than any oath to the city of New York, the reminder of a promise forged by meeting lips and joined hearts and rolling, loose-jointed hips. You would have forsaken the citizens of the city to a thousand rapacious predators to answer her call.
You found her in Grand Central Station with Gavin, wan and exhausted and holding on by a thread. She was so drawn, with cracked, parched lips and greasy, lank hair, bird-boned and hollow-eyed, and you'll never forget the way she smelled, like stale sweat and unwashed skin and old urine, like the bums who stewed in the drunk tank on Friday nights. She'd been rough-skinned and feverish, had burned with a diseased, banked-ember heat that spoke of too long in the weltering heat of the city and unchecked infection ragin' in her blood. A year before, she had revolutionized the world with the wonders of her peerless mind, confident and poised and beautiful in her tailored blouse and skirt, and now, she sat before you, a dull-witted, stinkin' ruin. It was you who'd brought her so low, you and your benign neglect and your woefully-inadequate policeman's love.
And yet, the first words out of her loose-lipped, sprung-tongued mouth had been, There you are, love, as though you were a cherished gift for which she had been searching. She'd collapsed into your arms with a sigh of relief, and you could only bury your head in her musty hair and blink back tears and promise her that the worst was over.
And though she had no reason to, had no precedent for her faith, she had rested in the bracing circle of your arms and chosen to believe.
And in his typical and spectacular fashion, he had failed her again.
When Don Flack was thirty-one, Rebecca had delivered unto him a son, had willed him into the world with a straining, rippling heave of her belly and a defiant, warrior's cry. Junior had screamed his arrival into the face of a beaming Dr. Fiorello, and with his son's first breath, Don's life had ceased to be solely his. He had been seized by awe and a blind, all-consuming love that had threatened to tear his swollen heart from his aching, constricted chest right there in the delivery room. The severing of the umbilical cord hadn't severed the immediate, primordial bond between them. That had pulsed and roared in his veins like Greek fire, and he'd sworn as Junior had squalled and squirmed on his mother's belly and mouthed instinctively for her breast that he would gladly die for him, this flesh of his flesh, so helpless and fragile and tiny and unmistakably his.
And he'd sworn to die for her who had delivered him, who had bequeathed him this eternal and most precious gift. He had bent his head over her trembling, sweat-wreathed body as she lay, splayed and bloody, on the delivery table, and wept softly into her matted, sodden hair, anointed her with love and gratitude and an inexpressible devotion. The tears had been exultation and terror, the basis of a covenant that far surpassed the feeble power of words. He had resolved, as he'd let his tears fall onto her flushed forehead, that no one would come before her again, that she would stand forever without equal in the pantheon of his heart. She would be adored and venerated and duly worshipped. He would die for her without hesitation or regret, and every day that he lived, he would remind her of his devotion.
And he had tried to honor that promise, as he had so desperately tried to honor the vows he'd made five years earlier, when he'd slipped a ring onto her finger at the altar of St. Patrick's. He had cosseted her as she'd recovered from childbirth, and done patient, ceaseless circuits around the living room as Junior had howled in the throes of colic. He had bought diapers and changed them in the middle of the night so that she might sleep a little longer, and he had sometimes brought her baubles to remind her of his love--combs for her hair and lotion for her hands and heat wraps for her knees and back. He had doted on her, lavished her with the affection and attention for which she had so clearly been starved. And she, his rare and wondrous midnight sun, had blossomed. She had remembered her smile, and laughter, and she had unfurled from the tight, protective ball into which she had curled when he'd left her in the clutches of Nurse Ratchett. She had opened her arms and her legs and her heart, and he had found his way home.
He'd been determined to stay there, but the job is a relentless taskmistress, and when Junior was almost four months old, it had pulled him headlong into the harness, had beckoned him to the chase with the specter of haunted, hunted, abused children bought and sold like sweetmeats to perverts and predators without conscience. He had tried to resist, but their small voices had been loud in his ears, and he could not turn away, not when he'd started to see their snaggle-toothed faces superimposed over Junior's grinning, toothless mouth. So he'd gone, heart heavy and legs fleet, and told himself that she would understand.
She had, but she had also seen, and when she had seen him through the window of a Manhattan eatery, sitting at a table and pretending to be someone else's love for the sake of someone else's children, all the wounds that he had sunk deep into her soul during the Maddox assignment had opened anew, opened and spilled their black poison into her cool, clear waters. She had retreated into herself and fled from him, face blank and eyes dead as the corpses he fished from canals and pulled from public restrooms. She had left him, not with a wail, but with stony silence, broken but unbent, and duty had forbad him follow. She had been all but gone that dismal autumn afternoon when she'd seen him there with his hand in another's and his anguished heart in his throttled throat, and only the timely intervention of his father had kept her from disappearing through the concrete looking glass and leaving him with nothing but bittersweet memories and hollow bones.
His father had been her knight in creaking, departmental armor that night, and he's never forgotten it or forgiven himself. He was supposed to be her Prince Charming, just as she'd thought on that cold February day when she'd clutched his arm and swayed on her small, fragile feet and trusted him to anchor her while she defied God and gravity and tottered down the cathedral steps to her waiting wheelchair. Instead, he'd been the same screw-up he'd been at sixteen, when he'd let his baby sister, Diana, tumble down a rickety wooden staircase and headlong into that good night. His old man had cleaned up his mess and added another grain to the immeasurable weight of filial gratitude that he could never shed, and he'd been a two-time loser. He'd failed Rebecca again, and there had been nothing to do but open his arms and kiss her upturned lips and draw upon the wellspring of her forgiveness even as the silt had scraped his teeth and tickled his tongue.
Rebecca had never dwelled on his failure, had never so much as mentioned it when he'd come dragging home with his tail between his legs and stupid, useless platitudes on numb lips, but he is a seeker of truth by trade, and he had seen it in her eyes and the unfamiliar hardness of her thin face. She hadn't been angry then; his old man's visit had dampened those white-hot embers, but she had been disappointed, and that had been worse. Anger fades and cools, a pain but dimly remembered after the hurt that inspired it has been stitched and salved, but disappointment is neither so fleeting nor so shallow. Anger is a scrape cooled by a kiss, but disappointment is a scar, long and deep and indelible, and it tugs and pulls and throbs until the end of days, when the blood grows black and dead in decaying veins and blind eyes fill with spidersilk and curdled milk. She had kissed him and twined her spindly arms around him and told him that she loved him, and she had meant it, but there were things she hadn't said, and she'd meant them, too.
Life had gone on, a parade of shifts and diaper changes and love under cover, but a part of Rebecca had never returned from her silent retreat down a dirty Midtown sidewalk. He has no doubt that it is still there, buried deep within her fortress walls and surrounded by the coldness that sometimes radiates from her like a merciless, killing affliction, but he suspects it is lost to him forever. She has realized the folly of her youth, when her belief in him had been absolute and she had surrendered it along with her name and her maidenhead, and she had reclaimed it. Its light is cold and pitiless and biting as an arctic wind, but it is also bright, bright enough to make his eyes water and squint. It is her life spark, the seed from which the rest of her springs, and once, perhaps, he could have touched it, could have cupped it in his palm and watched it pulse and shimmer in his hand like an unborn dream. But no more. If he reached for it now, it would cut and burn, reduce his hand to bloody tatters and ash like an angel's holy fire.
He'd thought he could live with the loss of such a gift; it had, after all, been a fearsome dowry, as terrible as it was beautiful. He had seen its power but once, when she had loosed her fury upon a grey-eyed urchin in the precinct bullpen and slit his throat with a point of her finger and a sibilant hiss from between bared teeth, and he'd had no desire to see it again. In fact, he'd felt stunned and fortunate as he'd gaped at her across the flimsy barrier of his desk, as though he'd awoken from a deep and pleasant dream to discover a live wire in his hand. Just a glimpse, and it had still been too much. So he could have lived with the loss of that awesome and dreadful gift, and he might have done if that had been his last failure and her last disappointment.
When Don Flack was thirty-two, he had performed CPR on Kyle Sheridan in an interrogation room, on his knees on the dirty floor and acting as an artificial heart for a kid who was already gone. He'd done compressions until his arms had throbbed and burned and his own breath had grown shallow and ragged, had pumped and willed divinity into his trembling human hands. But he was no Prometheus, and Sheridan had remained a lump of unresponsive flesh beneath his hands. He'd pumped until Angell had prised him away, sweet in his nose and hard as steel beneath her clothes. There had been pity in her eyes and iron in her grip, and she'd held him fast as the paramedics had rolled Sheridan away.
It hadn't been Angell with him when the IAB had mounted their witch hunt and pinned him beneath their hot and baleful scrutiny like a moth beneath a hot magnifying glass, but Rebecca. He hadn't wanted to tell her, had wanted to hide his shame, but she had known him too well and smelled the secret on his skin, read it in the slump of his shoulders and the tight line of his jaw as he'd struggled to keep it behind his teeth. She was a reader of bone and muscle, his sharp-eyed girl, and she had come to him as he'd skulked in the bathroom and drawn the truth from him, had drawn the poison into her own mouth and rolled it on her tongue like soured wine.
She had never questioned his innocence. She had believed in him, quietly and unreservedly. She had listened to his truth and accepted it as the only one, and then she had cupped his cheek and kissed his mouth and gone to fix his dinner. She had gone on cooking his dinners and washing his clothes and folding his underwear and going to his bed, and when the IAB had summoned him to One PP to render their findings, she had bundled Junior into his snuggest romper and accompanied him to that great and terrible land of Nutcracker Oz, where the wizards of Gotham wielded their merciless powers. He'd held her hand until they'd called him into their office, and the memory of it had clung to his fingers long after, a lifeline that had bound them together even through the barrier of an oak-paneled steel door. That touch, cool and thin and fierce, had reassured him as he'd sat in an uncomfortable chair and listened to a smug suit pronounce his soul and his hands clean in the eyes of the department.
It had been Rebecca who had been waiting when he'd emerged. She'd been parked resolutely beside a bench in the lobby, Junior squirming and grizzling on her lap as she'd held him there with her graceless, spindly arms and stared at the top of the receptionist's head as she'd bent to the task of consulting a day planner. Her gaze had been stony and inscrutable, and she had reminded him of a lioness surveying a hapless ibis across an arid stretch of grassland. The comparison had startled and unnerved him, and he'd approached her cautiously, lest she turn and close crushing jaws around his outstretched hand. She'd looked up at his approach, and eyes that had been cold as her hands had warmed instantly, had suffused with a light that had made her lovely, his glorious china doll. She had known the verdict before it had tumbled from his lips in a jumble of relief and belated indignation, and she had offered him a broad, brilliant smile and plopped a squealing Junior into his arms. She had reclaimed his hand and led him from the building as though he were a conquering hero, and then she'd taken him to their favorite deli for a pastrami on rye with slaw and a pickle. He'd eaten with the relish of the pardoned while Junior had wriggled and bounced in his high chair and she had watched them both with pride and unabashed affection.
Later that night, when their son was tucked and dreaming in his crib with a belly full of milk, she'd ridden him slow and dirty in their marriage bed, knees clamped against his ribs and teeth gritted against the ground-glass protests of her joints. She had let him curl his broad hands around the sharp, fragile spars of her hips and drive into her with relentless, hot-bellied need, possessive and atavistic and grunting, and when he'd spent himself with a final hoarse cry and convulsive surge of his hips, she'd slumped atop him and mouthed his sternum until his hammering heart had slowed and she had grown heavy and pliant with the temporary release of sleep. He'd cradled her to him until the sensation had bled from his shoulder, and then he'd eased her onto her side of the bed and crooned inarticulate reassurance while her stubborn limbs had jittered and spasmed and gone rigid in an effort to reset her startled nerves. She'd settled quickly, comforted by the familiarity of his voice and his body, and soon, she'd been deep in Morpheus' bottomless sand.
He'd lain in bed and watched her eyelids flutter as she'd chased the tatters of her dreams, and he'd breathed deeply of their commingled scents and told himself he'd found an absolution the department could never grant.
When Don Flack was still thirty-two, he had been the subject of yet another IAB investigation, had sat in the same chair in the same office. He had answered the same questions. Only the face across the desk had been different, another IAB officer with the same dead eyes and the same cutting, predatory mouth with a tongue probing for wounds in the chink beneath his battered armor. Rebecca had occupied the same spot in the IAB offices, had parked herself in the same spot and folded her hands in a lap devoid of struggling infant. He isn't certain--so much is blurred and indistinct from the early days of his waking nightmare--but he thinks she had even stared at the bent head of the same harried receptionist.
The verdict of that inquest had been the same as the one before, and the one before that, and just as before, Rebecca had greeted his pronouncement of innocence with the same serene assurance, the same absolute faith in his innocence, in his goodness, in his ability to be the white white knight she so obviously thought him. She had led him to the same deli, and he had eaten to please her, but it had tasted of ashes and gall in his mouth. She had led him home and offered herself, her precious absolution, and he had wanted to accept it, had needed it so badly that he'd been cramped and nauseated with longing, but there could be no absolution for the undeserving, and no matter how tightly he had gripped her hips or how deeply he had thrust, he could feel nothing but emptiness, and when he'd disentangled from her, sweaty and spent, there had been no peace, no afterglow, just a sense of loss and hallucinatory distance, as though he were roaming an endless hall of funhouse mirrors, fingers outstretched to find, not smooth, cool glass, but mirrors of water and quicksilver and blood.
Everything had been the same, but everything had been different. He had been a liar then, a liar and a murderer. He had sat in that familiar chair in that familiar office and gazed into the familiar face of the IAB puppet while Rebecca had sat in her familiar place, and he had lied. He had done it with the peppery tang of cordite in his nostrils and the gelid, tacky glue of Angell's blood forever drying on the crisp, starched fabric of his dress shirt, and he'd clung, not to the cool, fierce reassurance of his wife's fingers, but to Jess' delirious, too-slack fingers as they'd screamed through the streets in the back of a speeding cruiser. He'd clutched them as he'd spun his truth from the whole cloth of cowardice, and he had had to smother the urge to flex and shake his fingers.
He'd crossed the line and become what he had most despised, and no one had been the wiser. To his mother, he'd been the same good boy, the same selfless son who pulled children from the grasp of monsters and helped old ladies across the street. To his father, he'd been just a chip off the old block, the guy who had gotten the job done and taken down a scumbag cop killer. To Jess's family, he'd been an avenging angel, wielding a nine-millimeter sword of fire and justice. To Rebecca, he had been her husband, battered and haggard and unnecessarily haunted by a necessary death. The IAB hounds hadn't been sniffing that hard, had possessed no interest in the shooting of a cop killer, and so, they had taken his statement and looked no closer than the lines on the page and clapped him on the back and sent him home to deal with his restless conscience and the images that stuttered and flickered behind his eyelids like a ragged filmstrip.
They hadn't seen him for what he was, what he'd chosen to become with the pull of a trigger. He had stood over Simon Cade in that boiler room and blown out his brains, had locked eyes with the piece of human trash that had struck an angel from the firmament and squeezed the trigger. There had been no hesitation, no still, small voice of reason and goodness and mercy. There had been only rage, white and hot as phosphorous beneath his frozen skin. The lethal plastic in his grip had surged with a blind, sniffing bloodlust, and the only clear thought in his mind as he'd exhaled and squeezed the trigger had been of Angell's mindlessly-rolling eyes and lolling, broken-doll neck as he'd cradled her in the back of a cruiser and bellowed for the white-knuckled uniform at the wheel to floor it. He had been weightless when his finger had twitched on the trigger and sent a slug into Cade's worthless brain, weightless and formless, transformed into a creature of clawed fingers and bared teeth and and the blind, savage need to crush his enemy and balance the scales with blood for blood and life for life. The muzzle flash had been bright as a falling star, and for reasons he cannot explain or understand, he'd thought of a Derek Jeter homerun as it had arced across the sky one sticky August night when everything had changed and the axis of his world had realigned.
He hadn't felt the copulatory buck of the pistol in his hand as it had extinguished a life and obliterated the moral high ground upon which he had stood for most of his life. He had felt the backspatter of blood and gunpowder against his face, so like the mist of blood that Jess had coughed into his face as he'd cradled her in the back of a speeding patrol car and felt her life sluice between the ineffectual compress of his fingers. He had felt it and gasped because it had been like waking from a nightmare, and then he'd trudged up the boiler room stairs and told Danny the first of many lies. He'd left a piece of himself behind along with a spent shell casing, left it to mingle with the spreading pool of Simon Cade's brains.
When Don Flack was still thirty-two, he had sat in a church pew beside Rebecca and clutched the pew in front of him with gloved hands while a priest ushered Jessica Angell's soul to the Lord with the words from his prayer book. Old, brittle, stale words as dry as the Communion wafer the priest had pressed to his tongue at service's end. Words that had nothing to do with the vibrant, tough woman he had known. He had sat with the itch of wool against his skin and breathed the smell of wool and old lace, so like gunpowder in the still confines of the church. Dust and grief had tickled his throat and burned his eyes, and he'd longed to let go of the pew and find the comfort of Rebecca's hand, but he had been ashamed and afraid, and so he had gripped the thick slat of polished wood in his hand instead and told himself that the eyes of the stained-glass Jesus couldn't see his sin. He'd stared at the runners of Jess' casket and listened to the endless drone of Mrs. Angell's wailing and told himself that it was worth it even if He could.
And he had been afraid of Rebecca. The legacy he had glimpsed in the precinct bullpen one February night when she'd stretched forth her hand and let death and vengeance spill from her pointing finger had stirred and seethed beneath her skin and rattled inside her small frame. It hadn't made her bigger, that terrible dowry, but smaller and tighter and harder. She had been all pale skin and bloodless lips inside her prim, black mourning clothes, her hands fisted in the sagging canopy of the skirt she hated to wear and cheekbones in stark relief against her skin. Too many angles and not enough flesh, and when she'd shifted in the pew, he'd heard the click and creak of bones, as though she were undergoing a terrible transformation. He'd been afraid to look at her, lest he see the shift and ripple of realigning bone. Only her hair had been the same, burnished gold that had burned brightly in the somnolence of the church.
She'd shifted again, had grabbed his knee as she'd groped for leverage and support, and her hand had been freezing even through the thick fabric of his dress pants, so cold that he'd almost winced. Rebecca's fury has always burned cold, and she'd been frozen there beside him in that lonely pew, as cold and dead as Jessica Angell in her bower of mahogany and white silk.
He had thought he'd understood her anger, the reason for her bloodless face and frozen hands. He'd thought her angry because of his failure, because she had realized that her darling Gryffindor was nothing but a badge baby dumbass from Yonkers who couldn't be Superman when it mattered most. He had thought her ashamed of him for his weakness, and of herself for her misplaced faith. And why shouldn't she have been? Her beloved Prince Charming had failed to slay the dragon and save the lady fair, and she had been forced to bear his shame and the weight of the surreptitious stares from the rest of the congregation. Just another sip from the bottomless cup of dishonor from which he had so often asked her to drink over the long and turbulent course of their marriage. He had resolved then to ask no more of her, to force not one more bitter drop past her lips, and so, when the service had ended and the assembly had streamed from the church and into the warm spring sunshine, clustered in blue-black knots of shared grief, he had told her not to come to the wake.
Oh, but looking at Rebecca is like looking at a reflection in fractured glass, and he had been wrong again. What he had thought a kindness, she had interpreted as yet another rejection, another exile from his clannish, secretive world of guns and blood and no room for her at her own table. While he had sat in the pew and relived the warm rush of Angell's blood through the ineffectual compress of his fingers and the stuttering flutter of her labored breathing beneath his pressing palm, Rebecca had thought him imagining illicit trysts in squad cars and at Jess' apartment, love under cover while his service Glock hung from the headboard or rested on the nightstand. Perhaps she'd even imagined the glint of his wedding band from behind the jar of Vaseline. While he had mourned his failure, Rebecca had torn off the skin grafts and tourniquets that had held her together for all these years and let the rage and hurt sluice from her badly-mended wounds. All her stitches had come undone, and while he had lost himself to guilt and self-pity and the anesthetizing burn of bourbon in his throat and belly, she had knitted herself back together again, had sloughed the stifling weight of forebearance and mercy and become a creature of tooth and bone and pitiless survival.
Part of him bridles at the unfairness of her dark surmises. He's loved none but her since that August night when he'd tasted spicy mustard on her lips and taken her maidenhead with a forward thrust and an unsteady breath. He's looked--he's only human--but the swaying curves of the women he passes are forgotten as soon as they are out of sight, and it is Rebecca his heart seeks when the day is done and the city air is lodged in his lungs like phlegm and all he can feel are the beginnings of the bruises from gripping his gun tightly enough to numb his fingertips. She is his God-given solace and his saving grace, and he wants to grab her by her fragile shoulders and shout that truth into her astonished face until the absolute truth of it sinks into her delicate skin like salve.
But then, why would she believe him? He isn't responsible for all the cuts and bruises that seethe beneath her skin, but there are more than he would like that bear his name, and he suspects that they are the deepest. He has asked her to do with less for the sake of those who have more than most, for those who look upon her as God's error, a trial to borne by the rest of the world and a test for the selfish and hard-hearted. He has left her alone when she needed him most, and he has profaned that which she holds most sacred. He has profaned their marriage, treated it as an inconvenience to be ignored whenever the job demanded. He has demeaned it, demeaned her by swanning about the city with empty-headed dream girls unworthy of even her scorn while she languished in her gilded cage across the country and clawed the talc and graphite consolation of numbers from the whiteboard in her borrowed office. She'd come home to off-the-rack wine and hothouse sunflowers, and just when she'd dared to draw an unhurried breath, he'd gifted her a child and asked her to devote herself to seeing him into the world healthy and strong. Not not three months after she'd dutifully wrought his miracle on demand, she'd rolled past a Midtown eatery and seen him tread their union underfoot again, this time in the name of someone else's children. Like Saint Peter in the garden of Gethsemane, he has betrayed she whom he loves most in order to save himself and called it his only choice.
Cont'd next entry
Author:
laguera25Fandom: CSI:NY/HP
Rating: FRM
Pairing: Flack/OFC
SPOILERS: HP through HBP; CSI:NY through S6, especially "Pay Up" and "Cuckoo's Nest."
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events in the NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis.
All characters in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: Set immediately after "Skin" in the Flack/Stanhope crackverse.
Part I
He'd swallowed his guilt and gabbled uselessly at her and made promises to himself as much as to her, promises in which he would fail as he had failed in so many others, and then they had been there, and it been too late to do anything but help her out of the car and deliver her unto the birthplace of her darkest terrors.
Just for a little while, he'd sworn to himself as he'd pushed her through the sliding glass doors that had opened up to swallow her whole. Just until the baby comes. I have to keep him safe, too, now, right? As if he were nothing but a concerned father, and not a faithless husband deserting his wife in the loveless halls of the witch king. He still remembers the unexpected heft of the pen in his hand as he'd filled out the admission forms, and how small Rebecca had looked in her chair, cowed and shrunken and defenseless and pleading with her eyes even as her mouth remained resolutely shut. Love me enough to bear me away from here, she had silently begged, and he had hardened his aching heart and convinced himself it was for the best and concentrated on the paperwork balanced on his knees.
She had borne up until the blue, plastic ID bracelet had cinched around her wrist like a manacle, and then all her childhood nightmares had slipped their fraying tethers and run, screaming, from her mouth. She'd forsaken her cherished dignity then, had cast it aside like a millstone from around her neck and begged him not to leave her there, stripped of everything but her name and warehoused like so much damaged freight beside bodies wracked with cancer and the obsolescence of age. She had sobbed and pleaded and tangled her fingers in his shirt, had clung to him as if he were her only salvation.
It had frightened him to see his customarily-poised, proud wife so unmanned, lost in the throes of hysteria, and he had nearly relented, but the image of his son dead and blue between her cold thighs had welled to the surface of his mind like a pustulent boil, and he'd quashed the impulse before it could take root and damn his son to death before he'd drawn his first breath. He'd soothed and murmured and coaxed her into her room, and then he'd eased her into the bed that would become her prison with the gentlest of hands and tried to ignore the yellow, porkfat stink of death wafting from the wizened, pain-wracked form in the next bed.
Only a little while, he'd told himself over and over again as his terrified wife had hiccoughed and sniffled and clung to his hands with panicky tightness. Only a little while, as she'd shuddered and keened and gazed at him with a feverish mixture of shame and terror and a dreadful awareness. The terror would but endure for a little while, and then they would have a son, and the terror would dissipate like smoke in a heavy rain, displaced by the joy of family. Only a little while, as she prostrated herself before him, thrown herself upon his mercy and begged him to shield her from the monsters that waited for her just beyond his field of view.
She had been so persistent in her terror that the admitting nurse had offered to sedate her. A finger of unease had crept along his spine then, cold and unhurried as the slither of a garden slug, because she had told him this would happen, his hunched and beseeching prophetess. She had foretold it as she'd sat at the kitchen counter and enumerated the horrors to be found within a hospital's sterile, loveless walls, an apocalyptic Cassandra with truths black as pitch upon her tongue. She had told him, and like Ramses II, he had stoppered his ears and ignored the evidence of his heart, the recognition of truth beneath the mindless fear.
But unlike the luckless Pharaoh of Egypt, who ran his empire to wrack and ruin rather than concede defeat, it had not been he who had suffered for his intransigence. It had been Rebecca, his helpless prophetess unheeded. He had bid the voice of unease be silent and abandoned her there, had prised her clinging fingers from his hands and the fabric of his shirt and told her that he would be back tomorrow, and left her in the care of the monsters she so feared. He had left her there and congratulated himself on making the hard choice and told himself that thinking of her every moment of their necessary parting would be enough.
He thinks that if he could go back in time and meet himself in that hospital corridor, he would punch himself flat in the smug face, punch until the lip split and the knuckles bruised and the blood flowed down his chin in a warm, wet freshet, until his thick head had dislodged itself from the snug bower of his self-absorbed ass. He would seize himself by the collar and drag himself back to that hothouse death room and force himself to look into Rebecca's lost, heartbroken eyes until the truth struck home like a breath-stealing fist. He would sit himself down in an unpadded chair and watch as the minutes bled into hours with the torpid slowness of fluid through a saline drip and the night drew down and the sounds of the dying sharpened as light-blinded eyes grew more acute with the coming of the dark and they saw the shadows rising from the corners and floors like fleshless fingers rising from the River Styx. He would watch as she lay in the dark without the pitiful solace of his arms and listened to the breath wheeze and rattle from the body in the next bed like the autumnal wind soughing through the cornsilk and called for the bedpan and the glass of water that never came. He would force himself to watch as she counted the hours until he graced her with his attentions for a few hours in the early evening and left her again, his mind already turned to his caseload. He would make himself watch her face crumble as the fear closed in around her like a suffocating cocoon. He would make himself bear witness as she curled in on herself as best she could with her distended belly and sobbed into the thin, shabby hospital linen. He would make himself watch as she left calls for him that went unreturned because he was busy with someone else's life or death, and because it broke his heart to hear her small, sad voice on the other end of the line.
And he would make himself watch while she lay neglected, panting for want of water because the Nurse Ratchett in whose care he had left her was too busy to bring her the bedpan every few hours. He would watch as they left her on a diaper pad because it was easier than helping her relieve herself with a modicum of dignity.
And he would force himself to watch as they tied her to the bedrails and left her to stew in her own piss like a chained cur, drugged and thirsty and robbed of her voice by the Haldol they pumped into her veins when she dared resist. He would watch as her eyes rolled in their sockets and drool rolled down her chin and piss sluiced down her slack thighs in a warm rush. He would watch as everything that was her--her wit and intellect and shrewd awareness of the world through which she moved--drowned in a narcotizing tide of manufactured indifference. He would watch all that of which he had been blessedly, blissfully ignorant. He owes her that and then some. If he is honest, he owes her a debt he has no hope of repaying, a debt he cannot calculate in dollars and cents or hugs and kisses or dinners and candlelit backrubs. He owes her more than he is or could ever be, and the enormity of the debt makes him feel weak and small and ashamed.
It wasn't supposed to be like this, so one-sided and grossly unfair. When he had slid that small, black velvet ring box across the crisp, white linens of Delmonico's, he had thought he was offering her a place in an equal partnership, that the yoke of marriage would fall upon them both in equal measure. He would be a cop, and she would be a professor of mathematics, and they would walk through life on equal footing, hand-in-hand and heads bent against the wind. She would wash the laundry and fold the clothes and pay the internet and light bills, and he would vacuum and fix the leaking shower nozzle and pay for the groceries and the credit cards and her subway pass. She would rub his neck and his feet and make him homemade soup when he was sick, and he would clip her fingernails and toenails and set up the heating pad when the cramps laid her low. When adversity struck, they would meet it together, linked by love and common purpose, and weather the storm with heads and hearts held high.
He had promised himself that he would be a better husband than his father was, a better father, if the opportunity arose. He would love and honor and cherish her, would shield her from the predations of the job and establish limits it could not breach, no matter how insistent the clacking of its claws outside his door. He would not forget her, lose her in the blinding, blurring, dizzying shuffle of his superhero's life. She would always be venerated, a goddess among mortals who had chosen to walk with him alone, and he would never allow her voice to be lost amid the din and cacophony of his beloved city.
All the loftiest of intentions. He had held each of them beneath his tongue as he'd recited his marriage vows on his knees before the cold, imposing altar of St. Patrick, had tasted them on his tongue like Communion wine. He had held them as sacred as the vows he had made before God and five hundred people. He had been cocky and young and sure of his limitless capabilities, and he had wanted to be worthy of her whom he so blindly adored. So he'd taken her in his arms and velcroed her feet to his and waltzed her across the smooth, polished reception-hall floor, and later that night, he'd consummated his marriage and his unspoken promise in their bedroom, ardent and desperately in love and mercifully unaware of how long and winding their road would prove.
One by one, those lofty intentions and his unspoken vows had come crashing down and been trampled beneath reality's shattering heel. He had never forgotten her, no; to this day, she is the first thought on his mind when he opens his eyes and the standard he holds before him when he marches off to war in a city gone mad, more precious and talismanic than the St. Michael's medals he wears beneath his shirt and his Kevlar vest. But he has lost sight of her in the mad rush to snare madmen and murderers and uphold justice, has succumbed to the tunnel vision of the chase and let chances to demonstrate his devotion slip through his fingers. He has canceled dinners days or weeks in the planning, postponed vacations and aborted romantic evenings to race to a stranger's rescue because duty declares he must. He has left her far too alone for far too long with nothing in return save for useless apologies, and he has missed so many precious moments in her life--award banquets honoring her achievements as a molder of minds and leader of tomorrow. Hell, he'd even missed her transformation from mousy, unassuming mathematics professor into a preeminent mind in her field. While she was busily reshaping the world from behind a table in an NYU lecture hall, he'd been across the city, slurping bland canapes and playing young, dumb, and hung with a vapid undercover named Devon Maddox.
In three hours, his wife had changed the world; in three hours, he'd changed his bisque-stained shirt. She had performed her miracle without him there to see it, though not for want of begging. She had pleaded with him to come with her, to serve as her proud escort on this, her night of nights. Surely the city could spare him for one night, she had reasoned; surely, he could be her Prince Charming for a few hours while she put on a smile and hobnobbed with faculty members, fellow mathematicians, and glassy-eyed philanthropists who had understood nothing of her presentation but who had sensed the opportunity to be a part of history. Just a few smiles, a sip or two of cheap champagne, and a few aimless circuits around the room to nod and shake hands and exchange business cards and empty pleasantries, and she would release him with a kiss and her gratitude, free to return to the company of his duty. Hadn't she earned the right to ask this favor of him?
Yes, she had, a thousand times over, earned it with infinite patience and endless forgiveness and cool, soothing hands whenever he dragged himself home, battered and bruised and dragging his lank Superman cape behind him. With all the rebukes she had never uttered and all the fond endearments she had. With the suppers she'd left to warm in the oven and the two Saturdays of each month she lost to the kids at the youth center. She had every right to ask this trifle of him, this one moment when he put the husband before the cop.
And he had refused her. With boundless regret and a shame so deep and bilious that his guts had cramped and ached and roiled with the greasy, loose-boweled threat of revolt, it was true, but he had refused all the same, had denied her the simplest of requests. Not because he wanted to; indeed, he'd wanted nothing more than to stand beside her and watch her shine as he'd done on their wedding day, when she'd smiled so sweetly at him in absolute, blind faith and the snow had fallen on her thin shoulders like stardust, but because his oath to duty had given him no choice. To accompany her to the lecture would have meant leaving Maddox alone on their assigned surveillance and exposing his face to the glare of reporters' flashbulbs. It would have blown his cover as the hot, young cop who'd shed his crippled wife like an unwanted skin and lost himself in the hedonism and excess of Manhattan nightlife and put both his and Maddox's lives at risk. It would have meant another Jessica Angell.
And so, he'd steeled himself and forced himself to meet her wide, hopeful, desperate gaze and told her no. He would not be her Prince Charming, not when he was needed by another.
He will never forget they way she'd looked at him then, in the darkness of the squad car in which he'd picked her up from the airport. An indrawn breath, and then her face had wavered and crumpled, a reflection cast upon a lake's restless mirror. Another indrawn breath, and another. A cough, and then her face had hardened, grown smooth with steely resolve and the recognition of futility. She'd stared at him with wet, scornful eyes, and then she'd scoffed and shaken her head in disgust.
Fuck you, Donald Flack, she'd said dully. Fuck you and your precious thin, blue line. She'd stared out the bleary windshield, her chin set, and one hand had scrabbled listlessly at the car door like a dying spider.
Rebecca, doll, he'd murmured, heartsick, and reached out to caress her cheek, but she had rounded on him with the fury of a wounded animal, lips pulled back from her teeth in a soundless snarl, and he'd thought she was going to snap and lunge and sink her teeth into his consoling fingers.
No, she'd hissed furiously, and silenced him with a sharp slice of her palm through the air between them. Then, more quietly, No. No sound then save for her deep, shuddering breaths as she'd fought to maintain her teetering composure and the hiss of rubber on rain-soaked asphalt. No single syllable had ever spoken so eloquently to the storm behind her stony face and tightly-clenched fists, and he could only nod and hang his head and slink out of the car to retrieve her wheelchair from the trunk.
She hadn't spoken as she'd swung out of the car and into the chair and settled into the seat. Not a word as she'd straightened her clothes and smoothed her skirt and wrangled her twitching feet onto the footplates. When she'd finished, she'd straightened and swept loose strands of hair from her forehead with an irritated flip of her stiff, splayed fingers, and then she'd simply looked at him, eyes red and mouth a thin, grim line as she'd struggled against the choking, crushing swell of her hurt and tightly-bridled anger.
Her expression, mulish and mutinous and heartbroken, had twisted his churning, uneasy guts, and he'd wanted to comfort her, enfold her in his arms and stroke her hair and whisper that it would be all right, but she had been rigid and trembling, glass on the verge of shattering, and so he'd stuffed his hands into the pockets of his chinos and rocked on his heels.
I'm sorry, doll. So sorry. Lump in his throat and knot in his stomach and smoke in his eyes and hands fisted in his pockets.
Thank you for the ride, Detective. If he would not confer upon her the rights and courtesies of a wife, then she would not treat him as her husband. She'd swallowed and cleared her throat and blinked back tears, and then she'd spun away from him with a snap of her wrists and wheeled resolutely toward the bright, artificial light of the hotel lobby, where Charlie Eppes had waited with their luggage and their room keys.
He had watched her until she'd gained the safety of the lobby, and then he'd tottered to the driver's seat on legs gone wooden and dead. It had taken him two tries to start the engine, and he'd made it less than three blocks before he'd pulled over and heaved his guts into the rain-swollen gutter, hands on the rough, wet asphalt and squashed cigarette butts. He'd stayed there until his knees had been bruised and his stomach had been as empty as his heart, and then he'd wiped his raw, saliva-slick mouth with an unsteady hand and gotten back into the car and watched the windshield wipers flick desultorily across the windshield, smear the world into distorted incomprehensibility. When he trusted himself to drive, he'd driven to the stationhouse. It was the only bridge had had not burned.
When he thinks on it, which isn't often because it's a hard, sharp spear into the tender, battered flesh of his conscience, he thinks that it damns him to Hell as surely as his failure to stop his baby sister from going ass over teakettle down the stairs of the Whisper House when he was sixteen, as surely as those poisoned and poisonous words he had flung so carelessly at an unsuspecting Rebecca, those dreadful words that had lain her bare and let the rot set in. Those words that had shattered his china doll with the pulverizing efficiency of a closing fist. He's been thrice damned, and there can be no redemption for him now.
He'd left her then, and he'd left her at the hospital. And just like his wedding day, he'd had the best of intentions when he'd consigned her to the care of nurses in the Greatest City in the World. He'd thought she would be safe, warm and snug and unencumbered by the responsibility and worry of caring for herself and fighting her overburdened body for every tortured movement. He'd wanted to protect her from her stubborn pride and pathological need to prove her mettle to a ruthless, merciless world that would countenance nothing less than steel-spined perfection from a body inherently imperfect, to give her the reprieve she refused to grant herself. He'd wanted to give her the chance to rest and prepare for the grueling rigors of childbirth and the sleepless nights that would follow. He'd wanted, in his bumbling, graceless way, to provide for her, to love her as a good husband ought.
And let's not lie, boy, his father grunts in the enveloping silence of the kitchen, you wanted a reprieve for yourself, a chance to catch your breath, and one night of unbroken sleep, uninterrupted by her moans as the baby turned and writhed and kicked inside her with his healthy boy legs or by her insistent tug on your shoulder whenever her shrunken bladder began to complain beneath her distended belly. You knew it wasn't her fault, that she was doin' the best she could in this undiscovered country of late pregnancy, but you had hit the ground runnin' the day of her first ultrasound, and you hadn't drawn an easy breath since. In fact, you felt the flutter and settlin' weight of every breath since, as though God had reached down and wrapped His hand around your lungs. You were breathin' that mystical, magical, miraculous breath of life, and it scared the shit out of you. Fatherhood had been a happy daydream until Rebecca wandered into the living room with that positive pregnancy test in her cold, spasmin', disbelievin' hand. Eight months on, it had been a firm reality whenever you touched the swollen dome of her belly or saw her milk-swollen breasts as she struggled in and out of a bathtub that now held the potential to kill her and the precious gift she carried. Eight months on, and you were strugglin' to wrap your mind around the fact that you were someone's father, the guiding light and gold standard for a life that had not asked to be, but been drawn from heaven and created from love and wish and the urgent motion of two bodies joined at the hip. You were terrified and exhausted and crazy with nerves and anticipation and the daily threat of death by dirtbag, and you just needed a chance to lose your shit without feelin' like you were lettin' her down.
You needed a taste of normal, and in those days, before Junior brightened and broadened your horizons, normal was the precinct and the cramped bullpen and the fat desk sergeant who chewed his pencil erasers to ragged nubs and Detective Scagnetti and his chronic pants hitchin', as though he were genuflectin' before a forgotten god of haberdashery. Normal was fillin' out an endless stream of DD-5s and reviewin' witness statements and makin' follow-up calls about current cases. Normal was chasin' mooks and skels and mutts and scarfin' a loaded dog from the cart just outside the precinct or the modern nest of your beloved lab rats. Normal was stridin' down the halls with Mac or Stella or Danny and talkin' shop about the monster of the week. Normal was the job, and you wanted--fuck, you needed--to wallow in it while you could, before baby made three and turned your well-ordered world upside down and inside out.
So, you put your frightened, weak, defenseless girl in the in the belly of her green-walled beast and dove headlong into the chase. Just a little taste of as it should be, you told yourself, just a taste, and I'll be fine.
But you ain't never done anything half-assed, and the chase can be intoxicatin'. Like Pooh with his goddamned honey pot, you gobbled it up, the taste of life as you knew it sticky and sweet on your tongue, and it wasn't long before you were neck-deep in the job and sinkin' lower all the time. It wasn't like fatherhood, with its unknowable mysteries and unknown terrors, but familiar and comforting and safe despite the dangers waiting behind every unfamiliar face. The job you understood. The job you could handle, so you gratefully lost yourself to its lulling, slaloming rhythm, and you lost track of how long until visiting hours ended at the hospital. You'd look up from your desk and realize that your shift had ended two hours ago, and when you realized that you wouldn't have time to eat and shower and make it to the hospital, you felt a dirty, shameful relief because you wouldn't have to look into her sad lost face and tell her to be brave and strong for just a little longer. You promised yourself that you'd make it up to her on the next visit, or the next, or the one after that. Except that time always got away from you, and there never was a next time.
And then you got assigned to that serial task force, and it was down the rabbit hole. You got so blinkered by the chase that you rarely went home, let alone to the hospital. There wasn't time when there was a monster on the prowl, claiming daughters and sisters and wives. You crashed at the taskforce stationhouse, showered in the precinct showers and slept on the break room sofa or the grotty little rack room, with its scavenged steel prison bunks and thrift-store sheets and bolted soggy dogs and scorched coffee while you gathered around the conference table with your fellow detectives and thumbed through witness statements, crime scene photos, and suspicious persons reports. You worked your precious gumshoe hoodoo, the strange, inert magic you learned from life with me and from the instructors at the academy, the inorganic, safe magic of police reports and leads and suspect pools and the stale, close humidity of surveillance in a departmental sedan, so unlike the livin', fearsome magic the roiled around your girl and wept from her pores like musk and the ends of her fingers like bursts of static electricity. Your work in the taskforce stationhouse was for the greater good, for the protection and salvation of other men's wives and daughters, and besides, Rebecca was safe and sound in her not-so-gilded cage.
And then the call came while you were immersed in your precious routine. Your girl had slipped her cage and fled, drugged and weak and so heavily-pregnant that she could scarcely move, and the greater good was reduced to so much empty puffery. She was gone, and the focus of your world, so broad and grand and lofty that morning, when you'd been swillin' coiffee and cuttin' up and pattin' yourself on the back for what a noble, self-sacrificin' guy you were, was reduced to a population of one: the tiny, broken, unbreakable woman who carried your cheap ring on her finger and your priceless son in her belly. All talk of serial killers and predators was so much irrelevant quackin', and you left it behind without a pang of regret, and never mind Greene and Stabler's useless bleatin'. Your ears had ceased to work properly the minute the phrase, wife has gone missin' had reached them, as though the nurse's soft-spoken words, hissed through static like a confession amid the flames of Hell were such a thunderous indictment of your ultimate failure that they had rendered you deaf, and anyway, what were other men's wives when yours was alone and vulnerable and weak in a city without conscience? So much incidental chaff to be swept aside. So you left them behind. You would have left your phone, too, that strangling electronic leash, but you kept it just in case she called, in case she forgot your betrayal and summoned you to her side, reached out with that still, small voice that was so easy to lose amid the babble of the city and called for her knight errant.
And summon you she did. She scarcely had the strength to hold the phone, but the power in that tired, slurred voice could have summoned you from across the world, could have brought you on the run with glass in your soles and ribs in your lungs and blood in your mouth. Sweetheart, I need you. A plea stronger than any oath to the city of New York, the reminder of a promise forged by meeting lips and joined hearts and rolling, loose-jointed hips. You would have forsaken the citizens of the city to a thousand rapacious predators to answer her call.
You found her in Grand Central Station with Gavin, wan and exhausted and holding on by a thread. She was so drawn, with cracked, parched lips and greasy, lank hair, bird-boned and hollow-eyed, and you'll never forget the way she smelled, like stale sweat and unwashed skin and old urine, like the bums who stewed in the drunk tank on Friday nights. She'd been rough-skinned and feverish, had burned with a diseased, banked-ember heat that spoke of too long in the weltering heat of the city and unchecked infection ragin' in her blood. A year before, she had revolutionized the world with the wonders of her peerless mind, confident and poised and beautiful in her tailored blouse and skirt, and now, she sat before you, a dull-witted, stinkin' ruin. It was you who'd brought her so low, you and your benign neglect and your woefully-inadequate policeman's love.
And yet, the first words out of her loose-lipped, sprung-tongued mouth had been, There you are, love, as though you were a cherished gift for which she had been searching. She'd collapsed into your arms with a sigh of relief, and you could only bury your head in her musty hair and blink back tears and promise her that the worst was over.
And though she had no reason to, had no precedent for her faith, she had rested in the bracing circle of your arms and chosen to believe.
And in his typical and spectacular fashion, he had failed her again.
When Don Flack was thirty-one, Rebecca had delivered unto him a son, had willed him into the world with a straining, rippling heave of her belly and a defiant, warrior's cry. Junior had screamed his arrival into the face of a beaming Dr. Fiorello, and with his son's first breath, Don's life had ceased to be solely his. He had been seized by awe and a blind, all-consuming love that had threatened to tear his swollen heart from his aching, constricted chest right there in the delivery room. The severing of the umbilical cord hadn't severed the immediate, primordial bond between them. That had pulsed and roared in his veins like Greek fire, and he'd sworn as Junior had squalled and squirmed on his mother's belly and mouthed instinctively for her breast that he would gladly die for him, this flesh of his flesh, so helpless and fragile and tiny and unmistakably his.
And he'd sworn to die for her who had delivered him, who had bequeathed him this eternal and most precious gift. He had bent his head over her trembling, sweat-wreathed body as she lay, splayed and bloody, on the delivery table, and wept softly into her matted, sodden hair, anointed her with love and gratitude and an inexpressible devotion. The tears had been exultation and terror, the basis of a covenant that far surpassed the feeble power of words. He had resolved, as he'd let his tears fall onto her flushed forehead, that no one would come before her again, that she would stand forever without equal in the pantheon of his heart. She would be adored and venerated and duly worshipped. He would die for her without hesitation or regret, and every day that he lived, he would remind her of his devotion.
And he had tried to honor that promise, as he had so desperately tried to honor the vows he'd made five years earlier, when he'd slipped a ring onto her finger at the altar of St. Patrick's. He had cosseted her as she'd recovered from childbirth, and done patient, ceaseless circuits around the living room as Junior had howled in the throes of colic. He had bought diapers and changed them in the middle of the night so that she might sleep a little longer, and he had sometimes brought her baubles to remind her of his love--combs for her hair and lotion for her hands and heat wraps for her knees and back. He had doted on her, lavished her with the affection and attention for which she had so clearly been starved. And she, his rare and wondrous midnight sun, had blossomed. She had remembered her smile, and laughter, and she had unfurled from the tight, protective ball into which she had curled when he'd left her in the clutches of Nurse Ratchett. She had opened her arms and her legs and her heart, and he had found his way home.
He'd been determined to stay there, but the job is a relentless taskmistress, and when Junior was almost four months old, it had pulled him headlong into the harness, had beckoned him to the chase with the specter of haunted, hunted, abused children bought and sold like sweetmeats to perverts and predators without conscience. He had tried to resist, but their small voices had been loud in his ears, and he could not turn away, not when he'd started to see their snaggle-toothed faces superimposed over Junior's grinning, toothless mouth. So he'd gone, heart heavy and legs fleet, and told himself that she would understand.
She had, but she had also seen, and when she had seen him through the window of a Manhattan eatery, sitting at a table and pretending to be someone else's love for the sake of someone else's children, all the wounds that he had sunk deep into her soul during the Maddox assignment had opened anew, opened and spilled their black poison into her cool, clear waters. She had retreated into herself and fled from him, face blank and eyes dead as the corpses he fished from canals and pulled from public restrooms. She had left him, not with a wail, but with stony silence, broken but unbent, and duty had forbad him follow. She had been all but gone that dismal autumn afternoon when she'd seen him there with his hand in another's and his anguished heart in his throttled throat, and only the timely intervention of his father had kept her from disappearing through the concrete looking glass and leaving him with nothing but bittersweet memories and hollow bones.
His father had been her knight in creaking, departmental armor that night, and he's never forgotten it or forgiven himself. He was supposed to be her Prince Charming, just as she'd thought on that cold February day when she'd clutched his arm and swayed on her small, fragile feet and trusted him to anchor her while she defied God and gravity and tottered down the cathedral steps to her waiting wheelchair. Instead, he'd been the same screw-up he'd been at sixteen, when he'd let his baby sister, Diana, tumble down a rickety wooden staircase and headlong into that good night. His old man had cleaned up his mess and added another grain to the immeasurable weight of filial gratitude that he could never shed, and he'd been a two-time loser. He'd failed Rebecca again, and there had been nothing to do but open his arms and kiss her upturned lips and draw upon the wellspring of her forgiveness even as the silt had scraped his teeth and tickled his tongue.
Rebecca had never dwelled on his failure, had never so much as mentioned it when he'd come dragging home with his tail between his legs and stupid, useless platitudes on numb lips, but he is a seeker of truth by trade, and he had seen it in her eyes and the unfamiliar hardness of her thin face. She hadn't been angry then; his old man's visit had dampened those white-hot embers, but she had been disappointed, and that had been worse. Anger fades and cools, a pain but dimly remembered after the hurt that inspired it has been stitched and salved, but disappointment is neither so fleeting nor so shallow. Anger is a scrape cooled by a kiss, but disappointment is a scar, long and deep and indelible, and it tugs and pulls and throbs until the end of days, when the blood grows black and dead in decaying veins and blind eyes fill with spidersilk and curdled milk. She had kissed him and twined her spindly arms around him and told him that she loved him, and she had meant it, but there were things she hadn't said, and she'd meant them, too.
Life had gone on, a parade of shifts and diaper changes and love under cover, but a part of Rebecca had never returned from her silent retreat down a dirty Midtown sidewalk. He has no doubt that it is still there, buried deep within her fortress walls and surrounded by the coldness that sometimes radiates from her like a merciless, killing affliction, but he suspects it is lost to him forever. She has realized the folly of her youth, when her belief in him had been absolute and she had surrendered it along with her name and her maidenhead, and she had reclaimed it. Its light is cold and pitiless and biting as an arctic wind, but it is also bright, bright enough to make his eyes water and squint. It is her life spark, the seed from which the rest of her springs, and once, perhaps, he could have touched it, could have cupped it in his palm and watched it pulse and shimmer in his hand like an unborn dream. But no more. If he reached for it now, it would cut and burn, reduce his hand to bloody tatters and ash like an angel's holy fire.
He'd thought he could live with the loss of such a gift; it had, after all, been a fearsome dowry, as terrible as it was beautiful. He had seen its power but once, when she had loosed her fury upon a grey-eyed urchin in the precinct bullpen and slit his throat with a point of her finger and a sibilant hiss from between bared teeth, and he'd had no desire to see it again. In fact, he'd felt stunned and fortunate as he'd gaped at her across the flimsy barrier of his desk, as though he'd awoken from a deep and pleasant dream to discover a live wire in his hand. Just a glimpse, and it had still been too much. So he could have lived with the loss of that awesome and dreadful gift, and he might have done if that had been his last failure and her last disappointment.
When Don Flack was thirty-two, he had performed CPR on Kyle Sheridan in an interrogation room, on his knees on the dirty floor and acting as an artificial heart for a kid who was already gone. He'd done compressions until his arms had throbbed and burned and his own breath had grown shallow and ragged, had pumped and willed divinity into his trembling human hands. But he was no Prometheus, and Sheridan had remained a lump of unresponsive flesh beneath his hands. He'd pumped until Angell had prised him away, sweet in his nose and hard as steel beneath her clothes. There had been pity in her eyes and iron in her grip, and she'd held him fast as the paramedics had rolled Sheridan away.
It hadn't been Angell with him when the IAB had mounted their witch hunt and pinned him beneath their hot and baleful scrutiny like a moth beneath a hot magnifying glass, but Rebecca. He hadn't wanted to tell her, had wanted to hide his shame, but she had known him too well and smelled the secret on his skin, read it in the slump of his shoulders and the tight line of his jaw as he'd struggled to keep it behind his teeth. She was a reader of bone and muscle, his sharp-eyed girl, and she had come to him as he'd skulked in the bathroom and drawn the truth from him, had drawn the poison into her own mouth and rolled it on her tongue like soured wine.
She had never questioned his innocence. She had believed in him, quietly and unreservedly. She had listened to his truth and accepted it as the only one, and then she had cupped his cheek and kissed his mouth and gone to fix his dinner. She had gone on cooking his dinners and washing his clothes and folding his underwear and going to his bed, and when the IAB had summoned him to One PP to render their findings, she had bundled Junior into his snuggest romper and accompanied him to that great and terrible land of Nutcracker Oz, where the wizards of Gotham wielded their merciless powers. He'd held her hand until they'd called him into their office, and the memory of it had clung to his fingers long after, a lifeline that had bound them together even through the barrier of an oak-paneled steel door. That touch, cool and thin and fierce, had reassured him as he'd sat in an uncomfortable chair and listened to a smug suit pronounce his soul and his hands clean in the eyes of the department.
It had been Rebecca who had been waiting when he'd emerged. She'd been parked resolutely beside a bench in the lobby, Junior squirming and grizzling on her lap as she'd held him there with her graceless, spindly arms and stared at the top of the receptionist's head as she'd bent to the task of consulting a day planner. Her gaze had been stony and inscrutable, and she had reminded him of a lioness surveying a hapless ibis across an arid stretch of grassland. The comparison had startled and unnerved him, and he'd approached her cautiously, lest she turn and close crushing jaws around his outstretched hand. She'd looked up at his approach, and eyes that had been cold as her hands had warmed instantly, had suffused with a light that had made her lovely, his glorious china doll. She had known the verdict before it had tumbled from his lips in a jumble of relief and belated indignation, and she had offered him a broad, brilliant smile and plopped a squealing Junior into his arms. She had reclaimed his hand and led him from the building as though he were a conquering hero, and then she'd taken him to their favorite deli for a pastrami on rye with slaw and a pickle. He'd eaten with the relish of the pardoned while Junior had wriggled and bounced in his high chair and she had watched them both with pride and unabashed affection.
Later that night, when their son was tucked and dreaming in his crib with a belly full of milk, she'd ridden him slow and dirty in their marriage bed, knees clamped against his ribs and teeth gritted against the ground-glass protests of her joints. She had let him curl his broad hands around the sharp, fragile spars of her hips and drive into her with relentless, hot-bellied need, possessive and atavistic and grunting, and when he'd spent himself with a final hoarse cry and convulsive surge of his hips, she'd slumped atop him and mouthed his sternum until his hammering heart had slowed and she had grown heavy and pliant with the temporary release of sleep. He'd cradled her to him until the sensation had bled from his shoulder, and then he'd eased her onto her side of the bed and crooned inarticulate reassurance while her stubborn limbs had jittered and spasmed and gone rigid in an effort to reset her startled nerves. She'd settled quickly, comforted by the familiarity of his voice and his body, and soon, she'd been deep in Morpheus' bottomless sand.
He'd lain in bed and watched her eyelids flutter as she'd chased the tatters of her dreams, and he'd breathed deeply of their commingled scents and told himself he'd found an absolution the department could never grant.
When Don Flack was still thirty-two, he had been the subject of yet another IAB investigation, had sat in the same chair in the same office. He had answered the same questions. Only the face across the desk had been different, another IAB officer with the same dead eyes and the same cutting, predatory mouth with a tongue probing for wounds in the chink beneath his battered armor. Rebecca had occupied the same spot in the IAB offices, had parked herself in the same spot and folded her hands in a lap devoid of struggling infant. He isn't certain--so much is blurred and indistinct from the early days of his waking nightmare--but he thinks she had even stared at the bent head of the same harried receptionist.
The verdict of that inquest had been the same as the one before, and the one before that, and just as before, Rebecca had greeted his pronouncement of innocence with the same serene assurance, the same absolute faith in his innocence, in his goodness, in his ability to be the white white knight she so obviously thought him. She had led him to the same deli, and he had eaten to please her, but it had tasted of ashes and gall in his mouth. She had led him home and offered herself, her precious absolution, and he had wanted to accept it, had needed it so badly that he'd been cramped and nauseated with longing, but there could be no absolution for the undeserving, and no matter how tightly he had gripped her hips or how deeply he had thrust, he could feel nothing but emptiness, and when he'd disentangled from her, sweaty and spent, there had been no peace, no afterglow, just a sense of loss and hallucinatory distance, as though he were roaming an endless hall of funhouse mirrors, fingers outstretched to find, not smooth, cool glass, but mirrors of water and quicksilver and blood.
Everything had been the same, but everything had been different. He had been a liar then, a liar and a murderer. He had sat in that familiar chair in that familiar office and gazed into the familiar face of the IAB puppet while Rebecca had sat in her familiar place, and he had lied. He had done it with the peppery tang of cordite in his nostrils and the gelid, tacky glue of Angell's blood forever drying on the crisp, starched fabric of his dress shirt, and he'd clung, not to the cool, fierce reassurance of his wife's fingers, but to Jess' delirious, too-slack fingers as they'd screamed through the streets in the back of a speeding cruiser. He'd clutched them as he'd spun his truth from the whole cloth of cowardice, and he had had to smother the urge to flex and shake his fingers.
He'd crossed the line and become what he had most despised, and no one had been the wiser. To his mother, he'd been the same good boy, the same selfless son who pulled children from the grasp of monsters and helped old ladies across the street. To his father, he'd been just a chip off the old block, the guy who had gotten the job done and taken down a scumbag cop killer. To Jess's family, he'd been an avenging angel, wielding a nine-millimeter sword of fire and justice. To Rebecca, he had been her husband, battered and haggard and unnecessarily haunted by a necessary death. The IAB hounds hadn't been sniffing that hard, had possessed no interest in the shooting of a cop killer, and so, they had taken his statement and looked no closer than the lines on the page and clapped him on the back and sent him home to deal with his restless conscience and the images that stuttered and flickered behind his eyelids like a ragged filmstrip.
They hadn't seen him for what he was, what he'd chosen to become with the pull of a trigger. He had stood over Simon Cade in that boiler room and blown out his brains, had locked eyes with the piece of human trash that had struck an angel from the firmament and squeezed the trigger. There had been no hesitation, no still, small voice of reason and goodness and mercy. There had been only rage, white and hot as phosphorous beneath his frozen skin. The lethal plastic in his grip had surged with a blind, sniffing bloodlust, and the only clear thought in his mind as he'd exhaled and squeezed the trigger had been of Angell's mindlessly-rolling eyes and lolling, broken-doll neck as he'd cradled her in the back of a cruiser and bellowed for the white-knuckled uniform at the wheel to floor it. He had been weightless when his finger had twitched on the trigger and sent a slug into Cade's worthless brain, weightless and formless, transformed into a creature of clawed fingers and bared teeth and and the blind, savage need to crush his enemy and balance the scales with blood for blood and life for life. The muzzle flash had been bright as a falling star, and for reasons he cannot explain or understand, he'd thought of a Derek Jeter homerun as it had arced across the sky one sticky August night when everything had changed and the axis of his world had realigned.
He hadn't felt the copulatory buck of the pistol in his hand as it had extinguished a life and obliterated the moral high ground upon which he had stood for most of his life. He had felt the backspatter of blood and gunpowder against his face, so like the mist of blood that Jess had coughed into his face as he'd cradled her in the back of a speeding patrol car and felt her life sluice between the ineffectual compress of his fingers. He had felt it and gasped because it had been like waking from a nightmare, and then he'd trudged up the boiler room stairs and told Danny the first of many lies. He'd left a piece of himself behind along with a spent shell casing, left it to mingle with the spreading pool of Simon Cade's brains.
When Don Flack was still thirty-two, he had sat in a church pew beside Rebecca and clutched the pew in front of him with gloved hands while a priest ushered Jessica Angell's soul to the Lord with the words from his prayer book. Old, brittle, stale words as dry as the Communion wafer the priest had pressed to his tongue at service's end. Words that had nothing to do with the vibrant, tough woman he had known. He had sat with the itch of wool against his skin and breathed the smell of wool and old lace, so like gunpowder in the still confines of the church. Dust and grief had tickled his throat and burned his eyes, and he'd longed to let go of the pew and find the comfort of Rebecca's hand, but he had been ashamed and afraid, and so he had gripped the thick slat of polished wood in his hand instead and told himself that the eyes of the stained-glass Jesus couldn't see his sin. He'd stared at the runners of Jess' casket and listened to the endless drone of Mrs. Angell's wailing and told himself that it was worth it even if He could.
And he had been afraid of Rebecca. The legacy he had glimpsed in the precinct bullpen one February night when she'd stretched forth her hand and let death and vengeance spill from her pointing finger had stirred and seethed beneath her skin and rattled inside her small frame. It hadn't made her bigger, that terrible dowry, but smaller and tighter and harder. She had been all pale skin and bloodless lips inside her prim, black mourning clothes, her hands fisted in the sagging canopy of the skirt she hated to wear and cheekbones in stark relief against her skin. Too many angles and not enough flesh, and when she'd shifted in the pew, he'd heard the click and creak of bones, as though she were undergoing a terrible transformation. He'd been afraid to look at her, lest he see the shift and ripple of realigning bone. Only her hair had been the same, burnished gold that had burned brightly in the somnolence of the church.
She'd shifted again, had grabbed his knee as she'd groped for leverage and support, and her hand had been freezing even through the thick fabric of his dress pants, so cold that he'd almost winced. Rebecca's fury has always burned cold, and she'd been frozen there beside him in that lonely pew, as cold and dead as Jessica Angell in her bower of mahogany and white silk.
He had thought he'd understood her anger, the reason for her bloodless face and frozen hands. He'd thought her angry because of his failure, because she had realized that her darling Gryffindor was nothing but a badge baby dumbass from Yonkers who couldn't be Superman when it mattered most. He had thought her ashamed of him for his weakness, and of herself for her misplaced faith. And why shouldn't she have been? Her beloved Prince Charming had failed to slay the dragon and save the lady fair, and she had been forced to bear his shame and the weight of the surreptitious stares from the rest of the congregation. Just another sip from the bottomless cup of dishonor from which he had so often asked her to drink over the long and turbulent course of their marriage. He had resolved then to ask no more of her, to force not one more bitter drop past her lips, and so, when the service had ended and the assembly had streamed from the church and into the warm spring sunshine, clustered in blue-black knots of shared grief, he had told her not to come to the wake.
Oh, but looking at Rebecca is like looking at a reflection in fractured glass, and he had been wrong again. What he had thought a kindness, she had interpreted as yet another rejection, another exile from his clannish, secretive world of guns and blood and no room for her at her own table. While he had sat in the pew and relived the warm rush of Angell's blood through the ineffectual compress of his fingers and the stuttering flutter of her labored breathing beneath his pressing palm, Rebecca had thought him imagining illicit trysts in squad cars and at Jess' apartment, love under cover while his service Glock hung from the headboard or rested on the nightstand. Perhaps she'd even imagined the glint of his wedding band from behind the jar of Vaseline. While he had mourned his failure, Rebecca had torn off the skin grafts and tourniquets that had held her together for all these years and let the rage and hurt sluice from her badly-mended wounds. All her stitches had come undone, and while he had lost himself to guilt and self-pity and the anesthetizing burn of bourbon in his throat and belly, she had knitted herself back together again, had sloughed the stifling weight of forebearance and mercy and become a creature of tooth and bone and pitiless survival.
Part of him bridles at the unfairness of her dark surmises. He's loved none but her since that August night when he'd tasted spicy mustard on her lips and taken her maidenhead with a forward thrust and an unsteady breath. He's looked--he's only human--but the swaying curves of the women he passes are forgotten as soon as they are out of sight, and it is Rebecca his heart seeks when the day is done and the city air is lodged in his lungs like phlegm and all he can feel are the beginnings of the bruises from gripping his gun tightly enough to numb his fingertips. She is his God-given solace and his saving grace, and he wants to grab her by her fragile shoulders and shout that truth into her astonished face until the absolute truth of it sinks into her delicate skin like salve.
But then, why would she believe him? He isn't responsible for all the cuts and bruises that seethe beneath her skin, but there are more than he would like that bear his name, and he suspects that they are the deepest. He has asked her to do with less for the sake of those who have more than most, for those who look upon her as God's error, a trial to borne by the rest of the world and a test for the selfish and hard-hearted. He has left her alone when she needed him most, and he has profaned that which she holds most sacred. He has profaned their marriage, treated it as an inconvenience to be ignored whenever the job demanded. He has demeaned it, demeaned her by swanning about the city with empty-headed dream girls unworthy of even her scorn while she languished in her gilded cage across the country and clawed the talc and graphite consolation of numbers from the whiteboard in her borrowed office. She'd come home to off-the-rack wine and hothouse sunflowers, and just when she'd dared to draw an unhurried breath, he'd gifted her a child and asked her to devote herself to seeing him into the world healthy and strong. Not not three months after she'd dutifully wrought his miracle on demand, she'd rolled past a Midtown eatery and seen him tread their union underfoot again, this time in the name of someone else's children. Like Saint Peter in the garden of Gethsemane, he has betrayed she whom he loves most in order to save himself and called it his only choice.
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