FIC: "Nothing at All"

[laguera25]

Title: "Nothing at All"

Author: laguera25

Fandom: CSI:NY

Rating: FRMAO for references to sexual intercourse and graphic violence

Pairing: Don Flack/OFC

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, and CBS. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only. Rebecca Stanhope and Diana Flack belong to me.

Summary: Don Flack has never liked wakes. They're exercises in voyeuristic hypocrisy as far as he's concerned, and since the day his sister died, he has never attended another. When an officer is killed in the line of duty, he has no choice, and standing in an unfamiliar kitchen, he takes an unwanted trip down Memory Lane.

Warning: This one-shot contains an OFC. If that offends thee, please exit to the rear and stay in your lane. There is no need to pee in my pool. If, however, you would like to tell me my story is awful for other reasons, be my guest.

A/N This story was originally called "Social Graces," but when the story was finished, I decided the new title was a better fit. This fic references "Going Under," but it can be read without it.


When he was sixteen, he had attended his sister's wake. He had hovered on the periphery of the crowded living room with a plate of food he could not taste in his hand and too-tight shoes on his numb, clumsy feet, a living phantom among the stunned and grieving. People had milled through the silent, choked arteries of his parents' apartment, brushing past each other and leaving the smell of dusty wool and sorrow behind as they offered condolences to his mother and father, the reluctant, haggard belles of the dark cotillion.

Nobody had offered him anything. Not a murmured apology; not a sweaty-palmed handshake; not a pitying squeeze of his shoulder. Not so much as a drink. He had simply stood in the corner with the must of a hundred wool uniforms in his nose and scouring his stubbornly dry eyes, and when the afternoon had stretched into early evening and the encroaching dusk had whittled his parents to gaunt, grim shadows with no lessening of the tide of well-wishers, he had dropped his untouched paper plate onto the couch and retreated to the safety of his room, which was the only room in the house that did not smell of wool and polish and sour disappointment.

Not just your room, corrected a gentle voice inside his head. Hers, too. Diana's. It still smelled like teenage girl, light and fresh and incomplete, a fresh canvas stretched over an easel and left unpainted, or fresh paper, left blank and empty. It was free of the taint that permeated the rest of the apartment, and that first night after the wake, you had wanted to sleep there, curl atop her repulsive lavender bedsheets and press your nose into the mattress, be lulled to dreams surrounded by her stuffed animals and let them watch over you with their sympathetic, shoebutton eyes. But when your father saw you standing in the doorway of her room in your socked feet, he closed the door and locked it, a terrible angel sent to block the gates of Eden.

You thought about sneaking out to the cemetery to see her, but she'd only been in the ground a few hours, and the odds were good that the earth over her grave was still an uneven hillock of New York dirt, and you knew how it would smell, like old shit and polish and wool and bitter disappointment. So you went to your room instead and stared at the ceiling until dawn.

The next morning, when he'd staggered into the living room, it was pristine save for his plate. His fastidious mother had inexplicably overlooked it. He'd stared at the mass of congealing mashed potatoes and clotted turkey tetrazini in logy confusion, and then the scent of stale grease and musty wool had struck his nose, and he'd lurched drunkenly into the bathroom to heave his guts.

He'd hated them all, the people who came with their casseroles dishes full of bland sympathy and crowded him out of his life. It was all lip service and empty promises, adherence to form with no sentiment behind it. There were a few exceptions, of course-old Officer Feldman, who had slipped he and Diana butterscotch candies from his pocket whenever they'd visited the precinct as children, and Sergeant Lippincott, who was her godfather-but most of them hadn't known squat about Diana beyond her name and the legacy attached to it.

He could have told them, had wanted to tell them with a compulsion bordering on mania. If they had only looked at him, spared him the briefest of glances in their quest to be counted among the socially blessed, he would have told them about grinders and quarters slipped into her stack at the arcade when she wasn't looking. He would have told them about the night terrors she suffered as a toddler, and of nights spent huddled with her on his bedroom floor, stroking her baby-fine hair with fingers not much older than hers and telling her that the monster under her bed couldn't get her as long as he was there. He'd have told them about sleeping on the floor with her beneath his old Transformers blanket, and of his mother finding them there the next morning, twin children of Morpheus but for the two years between them.

But nobody had ever asked him. He'd been the boy who'd gotten his baby sister killed by being an irresponsible fuck-up, and that was all they cared to know. His culpability mitigated his grief, diluted it in the eyes of the strangers in his living room, and so he'd been reduced to sitting on the couch with his fingers fisted around the edges of his paper plate hard enough to puncture them with his fingertips and his nose and throat clogged with throttled grief.

How the worm had turned. He wasn't sixteen anymore. He was pushing thirty, and now he was the unwelcome interloper into private grief, standing in the kitchen in his wool dress blues and shoes that felt too tight despite the fact that he'd checked the size three times before he slipped them onto his feet. He was also holding a paper plate piled high with food for which he had no appetite. He thought about putting it down, but decided against it; it wasn't his kitchen, and the last thing the grieving widow needed was to clean up his mess. So he stood stupidly clutching the sagging plate and stared at scene unfolding in the cramped, dim living room.

Mrs. Lipnicki was seated in an overstuffed lounge chair, surrounded by a milling, jostling throng of well-wishers extending white-gloved hands to massage solace into her skin with tentative pats and lightly brushing fingertips. They wore blue and black, and the brass buttons of the dress uniforms were bright flecks of gold amid the sorrow and shadows. They reminded him of a murder of crows, or a parliament of magpies with bits of stolen treasure in their beaks.

Murder of crows, his father grunted. That's a good one, kid. 'Cause that's exactly what happened to Lipnicki.

Flack grimaced. Lipnicki had been a good kid, about to complete his first year on the beat, and then four days ago, he-Flack-had been called out at three in the morning to respond to a triple at a bodega on Fifty-Third. When he got there, rumpled and bleary-eyed and mouth sour from sleep and bitter coffee, he'd found Lipnicki and the owners of the bodega, dead, blood pooling underneath their sad, splayed bodies to mark the spot of their unexpected exodus from the circles of the world. Lipnicki's gun had still been in one outstretched, blood-smeared hand, the muzzle glued to the cracked linoleum floor by drying blood and the brains leaking from the back of his head. The last vestiges of sleep had fled in a roundhouse slap of adrenaline and mounting rage, and by the time he'd called in the CSIs, his heartbeat had been thudding painfully against his sternum and lodged in his throat like a strangling knot.

He'd been the one to break the news to Mrs. Lipnicki, and when she'd opened the front door in her nightdress and bathrobe cinched tightly around her heavily pregnant belly, he'd momentarily forgotten how to breathe or speak. He could only cling to the doorframe and mouth gormlessly at her uncomprehending, sleep-puffy face. Pride had eventually wrenched the words from tongue and teeth, and when they lay between them in the electric silence like a rancid lump of gristle, she had thrown back her head and howled at him, a mindless, ululating warble of defiant denial and enraged grief. He'd wanted to stopper his ears against the wailing and the wormwood memories they conjured of his own mother, sagging bonelessly in his father's wooden, numb arms and shrieking into his cotton undershirt.

She was so small in his arms, so shrunken as she sobbed and sputtered and choked on snot and bile that you were sure it was an optical illusion. Your mother had always been slight, but never fragile, never so clearly broken. There was iron and fire under her skin. She'd been a cop's wife for twenty years and borne that burden with grace and poise. You and Diana might have skated at the edge of your father's threadbare patience, but neither of you was suicidal enough to test hers.

But she just kept screaming and shrinking, and you could only stand in the doorway with your hands crammed into the pockets of your piss-soaked jeans, buffeted by the impossible volume of her screams, chin tucked to your chest and scrotum seeking the sanctuary of your cramping stomach.

Ma, you said, but it was gummy and indistinct in your mouth, and inaudible over the ceaseless lowing of your sister's name.

You reached out to touch her, the only warmth in your hand that which had come from your sister's body as you cradled her on the floor of that godforsaken house, and she flinched. The woman who had once seen you through a virulent bout of food poisoning and cleaned up every bodily fluid you possessed while singing Marvin Gaye tunes, recoiled. You knew then, where you stood, and if you hadn't been so stunned and broken-hearted, groping for the half of yourself you'd left behind in that house, you'd have left and never come back. But you were and you stayed, and your mother wouldn't look at you.

Your father looked at you plenty, though. You were all he looked at while your mother rocked and wailed and clutched at his undershirt, and in his eyes, there was neither forgiveness nor pity, only smoldering anger and bewildered loss and galled disappointment that you had proven such a terrible waste of his sainted loins. Everything changed in that instant. Three days later, your nose became intimately acquainted with the scents of wool and polish and wet earth, and from that day onward, your morning greeting of, Hey, Pop, was answered with an irascible grunt, or more and more often as the days and weeks went by, not answered at all.

All of that came back on Mrs. Lipnicki's scream, and you would have shied away if you could, but the sergeant was there, and his partner, and you were damned if you were going to be chased from your duty by a ghost, so you stood there in your suit and weathered her screams and the flailing blows of her fists an your shoulders, and when her knees buckled, you and the sergeant wrestled her onto the sofa. You prayed she wouldn't go into early labor, but if she had, it would have been par for the course. You'd already dipped your finger into the congealing blood of the father, so why not bathe your hands in the warm blood of his wife and son?

He'd spent the next twenty hours pounding the pavement in search of answers, canvassing the surrounding neighborhood for potential witnesses. All fruitless. People who claimed insomnia for the scuttling of the rats in the walls or the garbage cans outside had suddenly been stricken stone deaf, and the usually reliable elderly busybodies who were privy to the shit stains on the guy across the street's undershorts had all developed temporary blindness or cataracts in their telescopic lenses. For all intents and purposes, Officer Michael Lipnicki had died in a vacuum.

He hadn't made it home until midnight the next day, and Rebecca had met him at the door in his old Rangers jersey that was four sizes too big for her, taken one look at his face, and rolled into the kitchen to pour him a glass of straight vodka. She'd handed it to him without a word. She'd let him down half of it before she'd threaded her fingers through his and pressed a kiss to the back of his palm.

"You all right?" she'd said in her measured, quiet voice, and he hadn't needed to look up from his rapidly emptying glass to know it was a question meant only to break the untenable silence.

He hadn't answered, just sat on the couch where he'd taken refuge and stared into the bottom of his glass, trying to shut out the image of Lipnicki's brains drying on the filthy floor like spilled oatmeal and the high, wavering wail of a Mrs. Lipnicki who wore his mother's face.

Rebecca, bless her infinite patience, had left him to his silence, but she did not leave his side. She sat with him while midnight passed into one o'clock and later still. Now and then, her small, splayed hand would flutter at his temple and brush back unruly strands, or she would lean forward to plant a kiss on his cheek or the butt of his jaw, lips warm and moist and light as dandelion fingers against his skin. It was her way of offering support without smothering him or leaping astride the exhausted steed of amateur psychology, and he'd been absurdly grateful for her unobtrusive presence.

"You wanna talk?" she'd asked at length, and when he'd shaken his head, she'd stroked his palm with cool fingers and said simply, "Okay, babe." No cajoling, no wheedling, no tearful demands to let her into his private hell, and in that moment, his love for her had been a sweet, sharp agony, glass and serrated steel beneath his breastbone.

You've made mistakes in your life, and more than one of them will send you to Hell when the priest closes his Bible and your eyes, but she wasn't one of them. She was a gift given to you by God and a hotfooting scumbag on 34th Street with delusions of freedom, and to this day, you can't believe it. She literally fell into your life with the wet snap of bone and a bunch of red skirt beneath her twisted, spindly legs, and if you hadn't suffered a pang of misplaced conscience and gone to see her at the hospital, she would have slipped through your fingers.

For once, the sense of guilt vested in you by virtue of your christening in the Roman Catholic Church paid off, and you drove to the hospital instead of going home to David Letterman and cold takeout and waited in the parking lot until she came out, arm in a cast and pushing herself along the cratered sidewalk with grim, thin-lipped determination. You watched her for a full thirty seconds before you opened your mouth, and when you did, you got your first taste of the wit behind her bony, fragile face.

It wasn't the attitude-attitude was part and parcel of a New York address, and you'd heard enough kiss-my-asses and fuck-you-buddys to start your own liturgy of the Stupid Bastards in the Holy Motherfucker Church of Staggering Assholery. It was the sincerity of it. Hers was no empty, street punk bravado designed to hide fear, because there was none. There was just a stubborn streak a mile wide and balls of fourteen-carat gold.

She should have known better, physically defenseless as she was, and the bitch of it was that she did know. You learned after you got to know her better that she just didn't care. As far as she was concerned, she had just as much right to roll the streets as anybody else, and no mugger or alley-lurking pervert was going to cow her. It was insane and stupid and gutsy as hell, and you admired her for it even as you shook your head in disbelief.

It was pity that brought you to the hospital that night, but it was curiosity that moved you to dig her phone number out of your notebook and call her under the pretense of departmental reimbursement for the damage to her chair. You wanted to see just how stiff-necked she was, how far her pride would take her. So you called her once and twice and three times, and on the fourth, you asked her to meet you at a café on 34th. And you found your miracle there.

Oh, you played it cool, but you knew by the end of that first date that she was going to be more than a casual date when there was no one else lined up. She was a riddle in divine origami, inscrutable, a universe unto herself that you could not read in a glance. She was the keeper of secrets, a child of Isis who curled around them and taunted you with laughing eyes and a twitching mouth devoid of whiskers.

She was smart, not just in the manner of books and theories with names your Yonkers-salted tongue could not pronounce, but about people. By your fourth meeting at the café, one of your favorite things to do was to watch her watch the people. She'd settle in her chair as though she were dropping onto her haunches and survey the scene through half-lidded eyes, turning a sugar packet lazily between her ungainly fingers. She would sit that way for twenty minutes at a stretch, ignoring you and her coffee, and then she'd lean across the table and whisper, her breath warm and conspiratorial against your cheek.

Once, she told you the waitress pouring your coffee was pregnant and had just found out, and when you asked her how she knew, she shrugged and pointed out that she took great pains to be sure that her belly didn't graze the counter or the jutting corners of the tables. You were skeptical, but three months later, the waitress was sporting an unmistakable bump. Not long after that, Rebecca pointed to a junkie slumped in a counter seat and picking at his track marks and announced that you'd see him again inside a week, and sure enough, you did. You found him in an alley, stiff and cold and dead from a gunshot wound in the gut.

That one scared you. You went so far as to run her background to see if she and the vic were connected. They weren't. She was as clean as he was dirty, a magna cum laude graduate of Florida State and a graduate student at NYU whose grades assured that she'd have another cum laude to add to her list of laurels. She took SSI and grants and paid her rent on time, and nobody who knew her could find reason to complain.

You asked her how she knew the junkie was going to end up on a slab when he did, and she only smiled, a coy curving of lip that made your stomach flutter.

Lucky guess, she'd said with a slow shake of her head, and fed you a bite of calzone.

You let it go because you were too far gone to care about a junkie who'd been dying since the day he plunged a needle into his arm, but you never forgot the hint of wry irony in her voice or the fleeting clouding of her eyes when she answered, a shadow of memory best left undisturbed. You still haven't. Every once in a while, you catch a glimpse of that darting shadow and wonder what lies behind it. You've even worked up the nerve to ask, but the minute you open your mouth, she stops it with a kiss or draws her fingers over the aching small of your back, and you forget why it mattered.

You redefined what was important when you were with her. You would always be a cop first and foremost, and your heart would always beat polished copper beneath your skin, but when you were with her, sitting on a bench in Central Park or on the couch in her apartment, your focus shifted from the broad strokes painted by the blood shed on the dirty streets to the fine brushstrokes and the grace notes that were ordinarily lost amid the mindless shrieking of the city. She looked you in the face when you spoke to her, not at the badge clipped to your belt or your gun in its leather holster at your hip. You never realized until then how few people met your gaze outside the interrogation room, and it startled you.

She studied your mouth, the flexing and rounding of your mouth as it formed words, and later, when attraction had deepened to affection, she cupped your face and smoothed the balls of her thumbs over the corners, as though she were searching for the words beneath the sound, the tingling, tuning-fork thrum of deeper truth. You'd had less innocent touches in your lifetime-when you were sixteen, you lost your virginity to Connie DeLuca in the backseat of her old man's Chrysler, but never one so unashamedly intimate. It made your heart stutter painfully inside your chest and the world lurch on its axis, and for as long as her fingers were mapping the contours of your face, you could be just Donnie again, unencumbered by badge or gun and the endless, eroding responsibility they carried, and kissing your girl on a cool fall afternoon or a breezy summer night down by the river.

Donnie. His mouth puckered, and his stomach gave a greasy roll. That had been his name until the day Diana died, an affectionate means of differentiating him from his namesake father, called from the stoop of his building or from the rickety fire escape to bring him home. His sister had called him that every day of her life, sometimes in playfulness, often in spite, and always in love. Then she had gone and left her spirit on his hands like dust, and she had taken Donnie with her.

No one had ever called him that again. Not his mother, who retreated into herself and scrubbed the kitchen until her knuckles were raw and bruised, and not his father, who seldom spoke to him at all, and when he did, he referred to him as "Don" or "kid." Both were cold and formal, and they had hurt him more than the backhand his father had laid across his stammering mouth as the paramedics wheeled his sister's body into the ambulance. Donnie had been a mark of innocence, a child's name, and his childhood had ended with the abrupt, ruthless snap of bone.

For a while, he had entertained the naïve hope that it was only temporary, that one day he would come to breakfast and see his mother smiling at him and hear his father call him Donnie as he clapped him on the back hard enough to send him stumbling into the table. His mother's smile had eventually returned, though it was never so bright or free as before, but the name did not. It remained to him only in dreams that drew him from his bed and led him to the closed door of Diana's room, where he would stand with his ears straining for the drowsy scrape of her feet across the floor or the gravelly susurration of her voice muttering his name. But she never called him that again, either, and shortly after his stone-faced father carried the box of his sister's belongings to the car for delivery to Goodwill, he had willed himself to forget that he had ever been called that at all.

And then one night, Rebecca had breathed it into his ear during lovemaking, the plosive rush of air sharp as the nails she drew along his back. It had shaken him badly, but he had been hip-deep inside her and too far gone to stop, and he could only shudder while the pleasure gripped his cock and guts like a cramp, and the invocation of his childhood honorific fluttered inside his chest and temples in a moment of temporal arrhythmia that robbed him of breath.

It wasn't the first time you'd heard it since Diana's death. You heard it in the car outside that house. She came to you then, fashioned herself from the stale breaths and cast-off cheer of others and sat in the passenger seat to see you through your annual pilgrimage to the site of your sin. She called you Donnie with numb, wooden lips and offered you absolution.

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other with a furtive squeak of rubber sole, and the rosary around his neck slithered against his too-hot skin. It had been his sister's, and it usually occupied pride of place on the bedroom mirror, but he had plucked it from the corner this morning and slipped it over his head, and he could not remember why.

Because you wanted her there with you, wanted her to stand on your left side as Rebecca sat on your right in the spring sunshine and watch you bury one of your own. She lives in the tiny, black beads of the rosary and the points of the crucifix-not all of her, no; most of her is still trapped within the rotting, corrupted walls of that house-but enough to ease you when panic and guilt threaten. Where it goes, she follows.

Besides, she's buried in the same cemetery, two rows up and ten headstones to the left of where the earth reclaimed Officer Lipnicki. You spent the entire graveside service staring at her marker.

The thought prompted a brief spasm of guilt. Today should have been about the sacrifice made by Lipnicki and the burden now borne by his pregnant widow. He should have focused on the flag draped over Lipnicki's casket and the somnolent wail of the bagpipes as they spread "Amazing Grace" over the mourners and morbid gawkers in a tangible vapor of grief. Instead, he had been fixated on the grey, granite hump of Diana's tombstone. The hidden rosary had been heavy around his neck, and his feet had been overcome with the compulsion to break ranks from the thin blue line of which he was inextricably a part and fly to his sister's resting place. Only Rebecca's grip, tight and trembling and desperate for the reassurance that it was not her husband beneath the flag, kept him tethered to his place.

The headstone that adorned her grave now was not the one that had marked her place the day of her funeral. He taken his first month's pay as a civil servant of the state of New York and bought a new marker, one that acknowledged her as a "beloved sister" and not just Diana Elizabeth Flack, daughter no more. His parents had been furious, and his father, with his typical penchant for melodrama, had accused him of desecrating her grave.

As if he had ever given a shit. As far as he knew, his father hadn't visited the grave since the dirt had been mounded over it, and three months after her death, she had been neatly expunged from the familial record, scrubbed and scoured and donated away. Pictures disappeared from the wall, and her chair had been excised from its place at the table. She had never been mentioned again, and the maintenance of her memory had fallen to him.

He'd been the one to visit her grave at Christmas and pay his penance on his knees at St. Patrick's, her rosary twined around his fingers and the beads trickling through them like chips from the pressing stones around his heart. He cleaned the beer cans and the used rubbers from her plot, sat on the grass, and told her how his life had gone after hers had stopped on a dime. He'd told her about Rebecca, about his engagement and subsequent marriage, and though there had been no third coming of Diana Flack, no flash of red on the periphery of his vision, he'd understood that she was listening. They were simultaneously soothing and crushing, these conversations with recollection and polished stone, and he always anesthetized the lanced wound with a stop at Sullivan's before he went home to Rebecca.

He searched the milling crowd for his wife and spotted her parked beside a chintz armchair. She was balancing a paper plate on her knees and talking to Sheldon Hawkes, the medical examiner, who just yesterday had told him that Officer Lipnicki had been shot three times, once in the chest, collapsing a lung and nicking his spinal cord. The second shot had struck him in the abdomen less than a second after the first, and the third and fatal shot had entered his skull at point-blank range. According to Hawkes, the bastard perp had stood over the kid while he was vomiting up his lungs and extruding his intestines through the gaping hole in his gut, pressed the muzzle to his forehead, and pulled the trigger.

Images of Lipnicki unable to even flinch in the second before his brains had adorned the bodega floor had driven him, and he hadn't seen her in the past forty-eight hours. He'd slept in the precinct cot room, bathed in the CSI lab showers, and grabbed breakfast, lunch, and dinner from street vendors and greasy spoons. He'd come home this morning to find her setting his coffee cup on the counter, one arm thrust into a black blouse and the other hand fumbling with the creamer for his coffee. She'd yawned, offered him a fuzzy smile and a kiss, and wobbled off to finish dressing.

Her head was cocked, and she was smiling as Hawkes whispered mutual secrets of the genius mind from behind an upraised pinkie and a saltine cracker, but she was pale in the muted light, and smudges of exhaustion ringed her eyes like soot. The hunch of her shoulders was more pronounced than usual, and she grimaced unconsciously as she groped for her plastic fork. Hawkes' mouth never stopped moving, but his long, surgeon's index finger surreptitiously pushed the handle closer to her scrabbling fingers. Rebecca said nothing, but her smile widened.

He experienced a fleeting surge of envy, elusive and undefined as smoke, and then it was gone. Of all the members of the nerd squad, it was Sheldon to whom Rebecca had gravitated, with his soft, jazz liquor voice and eclectic hoard of knowledge. Given her virulent antipathy to all things medical, the affinity had surprised him. Sheldon had adapted to her presence more readily than anyone else on the squad or in the lab. It had taken his captain six months after the wedding to stop counting his toes and sidling from foot to foot every time she entered the bullpen, but Sheldon moved chairs and held open doors without breaking stride, and Rebecca blessed him for it.

It was irrational, this petty jealousy-there was absolutely nothing going on between them-but it wasn't quite fair, the ease with which he read her needs and responded to them. That was his right as a husband, and he had come by it honestly, had earned it with long hours in her company. He had learned through observation and Internet research during dry spells in the bedlam at the precinct, and when all else had failed, he had gotten the balls to ask. Then Hawkes went and made it all seem so simple. That Hawkes had gained his expertise through a tour of duty in a Harlem emergency room made little difference.

Then Rebecca turned her head and caught his gaze. She offered him a wistful, bleak smile, and then she spotted his untouched plate. Her eyebrows rose in mute inquiry, and he gave a brief, one-shouldered shrug. She gestured to her own uneaten food and sniffed, a delicate huff of disdain that was more eloquent than speech. You're better off, it said. Tastes like cold shit. He swallowed a spate of inappropriate laughter, and her eyebrows rose again. Are you all right? Do you need me? He shook his head.

That was better. That was all right. Hawkes might be an expert on Cerebral Palsy, but he could never speak their secret language, written in glances and touches and sly, subtle twitches of finger or lip. Nor would he ever spend the night with her heartbeat fluttering against his chest, dampened by the swell of her breast and the soft graze of her nipple. Hawkes had a savant's understanding of her disability, but he would never spend a lazy afternoon in his apartment, watching her fold socks and boxers with the interminable patience of the afflicted, her fingers wrangling with the rebellious, sullen lips of his dress socks. He would never take guilty pleasure in watching her deliberate on whether or not to ask about the dubious stain on the seat of his undershorts. Those were for him alone, his small, private pleasures, and he guarded them jealously.

He should take her home soon. She would likely deny it in the interest of sparing him further stress, but he suspected she hadn't slept well the last few nights, curled alone in their bed, small, swollen feet peeking from beneath the blankets because she couldn't manage the necessary contortions to tuck them underneath the covers. She slept better when he was with her, she said, because when she was with him, enfolded in his arms, she knew that no one had stolen him away in the night.

For his part, he'd slept little better, consumed by visions of Lipnicki begging for his life in a wet gout of blood, teeth the color of overripe plums as the end came in a muzzle-flash of firefly light. He'd tossed and turned on the sagging, grey mattress until he could no longer stand the unyielding finger of the bedframe in the small of his back, and then he'd gotten up and paced the room, hands fisted behind his back and bare feet slapping against the gritty, stone floor in time to the dull, agonized throb in his abused kidneys.

He had known he should sleep, known he should let his frazzled mind and frayed nerves rest, but there had been too much energy, too much hatred in his veins to allow for sleep, and he could only prowl an endless circuit in the room while Lipnicki died on an endless loop inside his head. Soon, the room was too confining, and he had wandered to his desk in the deserted squad room and gone over his notes until his vision blurred. He'd run searches for crimes with similar M.O.s and ballistics checks on the slugs pulled from Lipnicki during autopsy, and nothing had turned up. He'd achieved jackshit with his frenetic burning of the midnight oil, but it felt better than lying on a cot that stank of other men's sweat.

He'd thought of Rebecca while the computer ran its searches and chirred to itself in a binary tongue that she would well have understood. He missed her, his beloved succubus who leached the heat from his bones and pressed the bony pikes of her knees into his spleen, and part of him had longed to go home and gather her up and breathe in the rhythm of her sleep, sugar and chamomile to his restless spirit. He'd wanted to be there to make sure that she didn't fall out of bed or go ass over teakettle groping her way to the bathroom in the dark, but every time he'd started to call it a night, he'd seen her eyes peeking out of Mrs. Lipnicki's haggard, tear-stained face, wide and uncomprehending and blank as sculpted marble, and sat down to perform another fruitless check.

She'd kick your ass for being such a goddamned worrywart. She's been getting herself in and out of bed and taking herself to the bathroom for almost twenty-five years without your help, and I'd bet my Jockeys she didn't marry you just to have her own Sir Galahad of the porcelain throne and personal nursemaid.

No, he was sure she hadn't, and she didn't need his help for anything, but he liked taking care of her, doing for her whenever he could. He might not be able to catch every perp or castrate every dirtbag child molester that crossed the threshold of his precinct with a pair of rusty pliers and a smile, but he could ensure that Rebecca got out of the shower without cracking her skull on the sink and help her with her bra before she throttled herself with it in a fit of red-faced frustration. They were small victories, triumphs that would have gone unremarked by most, but they were essential for his equilibrium, and without them, the tang of gunmetal was strong in his mouth.

Besides, it was his way of contributing more than a paycheck and a willing prick to their union. She was brilliant, a seamstress of numbers who wove miracles with her golden thread and coaxed truths from the elaborate tapestry she had created. In the early stages of their courtship, he had tried to keep pace with her, to read the mathematics and assorted academic journals scattered around her apartment in untidy piles, but they had proven an indecipherable garble to his community college mind and given him nothing but a headache, so he had surrendered to the inevitable, and now the only numbers he discussed with her were the batting averages of the New York Yankees and the shots on goal percentages of the Knicks and the Rangers.

And it's exquisite, sitting on the couch with your socked feet propped on the coffee table in front of you and her head pillowed on your thigh. You watch the game and run your fingers through her hair, soft as carded silk beneath your hands. You mutter about full-court presses and triangle offenses, and she points out the parabolic trajectory of the ball as it arcs toward the hoop, and it doesn't matter that neither of you has the foggiest idea what the other is talking about. It's enough to speak and be heard. When the game bores her, she turns her head and mouths your thigh or spiderwalks her fingers lazily over your ribs, and when skin touches skin and she applies her tenacity to a burning knot of tension she's found, the last vestige of your uniform disappears. You wonder if this is heaven, and you thank God for your good fortune.

In the back of your mind, you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the sweetness to curdle and sour to gall. You've seen it time and again, stood in blood pools inside apartments with Home Sweet Home hanging on the walls. Lovers quarrel and kill in the name of singed pot roasts. Sisters slip through clutching fingers in darkened stairwells and leave the world with the sharp, echoing finality of broken twigs, and fathers pass into the realm of the unreachable with a single look. Why should she be any different? How long until she wearies of long nights alone with her laptop and her theories and the endless, gnawing fear that you might not come home at all? How long until she trades in your meat-and-potatoes life for the champagne and caviar of a guy like Hawkes, somebody who can keep her intellectually stimulated without baseball and basketball as visual aids?

Rebecca was leaning forward in her chair, her hair dangling dangerously close to the green bean casserole on her plate. Her lips were parted, and he could see a glint of teeth and moist, pink tongue. Hawkes, too, was on the edge of his seat, elbows on his thighs, hands gesticulating wildly as he molded shapes and ideas from the thick, stuffy air. Her eyes followed their circuitous flutterings, studied the topography only she could see, and they were bright and sparkling with newly unearthed possibility.

Another stab of unreasoning envy, and he resolved to take some personal time as soon as Lipnicki's killer was reaping his just desserts in Riker's. Not long-just a weekend, maybe, but he'd take her out of the city, up to Atlantic City if she wanted. She could hit the casinos and revel in the wonderland of numbers, and he could sit and drink and watch her watch the people like she used to do in the café. Or maybe he'd take her to the beach and let her sun herself while the water foamed and lapped at her toes. Anywhere but here, where it smelled of wool and rot and long-festering grief.

You won't be taking her anywhere if you don't pay your respects to the widow, his father pointed out. Time to quit jackin' around and act like a respectable human being.

His old man was right, but he hesitated. He had no desire to join the throng of buzzards jostling around the widow in the hopes of seizing the choicest, most succulent scraps of mourning-a tear shed at their kind words, a glimpse of tear-scalded cheeks, the stale, yellow stink of sleeplessness and vomit-and he suspected that he was the last person she wanted to darken her door. He had let Death inside, after all, been its reluctant herald and brought it in on the soles of his feet and in the stern set of his mouth. His shoulder throbbed with the sudden memory of her clenched fist beating it in time to her furious, sobbed denials.

The truth of it is, you don't want to go in there and see your mother's face, thin and haggard and covered in rice-paper flesh. You don't want to stare at the hatchet blade profile of her nose in the somber darkness of the room so that you don't see her eyes, empty and dead as shuttered windows. From this kitchen to the parlor is twelve years, and the second your feet cross the border between them, you will be sixteen again, sixteen and begging pardon for the unpardonable while strangers observe your misery like it was a fucking museum exhibit set up for their amusement.

The sooner you do it, the sooner you can get out of here. His mother, calm and pragmatic and laced with maternal sympathy.

He tossed his plate into a nearby trash can, swallowed against a greasy lump of apprehension, and stepped from behind the particleboard and laminate protection of the counter. The carpet was lumpy and treacherous beneath his feet, and his legs were stiff and ungainly, wooden stilts attached to his torso with burlap and catgut. The room was too long and too wide a feverish landscape of Lovecraftian angles and astigmatic curves that offended his eyes and upended his equilibrium. He was tempted to put out his hands and grope his way along in a perverse game of Blind Man's Bluff, but pride would not allow it, and so he stuffed his fists into the pockets of his pants, eyes fixed on the far wall of the parlor.

The parlor was crowded and stuffy with the heat of too-warm bodies, and sweat prickled on the nape of his neck and dampened the starched collar of his shirt. The odor of wool and polished copper was suffocating in his lungs, unmuted even by the cloying reek of flowers.

Hothouse flowers, he thought as he brushed past a fellow officer. Funeral flowers. They were everywhere at Diana's funeral-on her casket, baby's breath and white roses, spread over the front of the church in an obscenely gay carpet of vibrant color, life to distract from the shadow of death so artfully concealed by the deft hands of the mortician and the arcane alchemy of embalming. There were so many of them that you tasted pollen on the roof of your mouth and on your tongue, gritty and bitter as powdered aspirin, and nauseating. You spent most of her memorial service staring at the casket and the enormous, wooden cross behind it and fighting the urge to stand up and shout, She hated flowers, you stupid sons of bitches. She was allergic to them. But your father had dictated that you had claim to neither voice nor sorrow, so you kept your mouth shut and clenched your fists so tightly that your knuckles ached and you left pale crescents in your palms, and then you went home with that sweet, diseased stink clinging to your clothes and your pores.

Mrs. Lipnicki sat on the couch, a cup of iced tea clutched loosely in one hand. She did not look at him as he approached, but her arms folded protectively over her belly, as though she feared he had come for her unborn child as well now that he had snatched the father away. He sidled uneasily from foot to foot and removed his cap.

"Mrs. Lipnicki, I'm-," he began, and kneaded the bill of his cap between his fingers.

"I know who ya are," she said indifferently. "Did ya find the bastard who murdered my husband?"

"No, ma'am, but I can assure you that we're doin' everything we can, and we ain't gonna rest until we get him."

('M sorry, Ma, I'm sorry. I never meant for this ta happen. She was right behind me, I swear. I tried-)

Mrs. Lipnicki snorted. "Is this where ya give me the big speech about justice? Save it, Detective. My husband believed in justice, and look what it got him-a kid he ain't never gonna see and a permanent stain on some shitty bodega floor. So do me a favor. Screw justice and just give the son of a bitch what he deserves."

(What did you do? What the hell did you do, Donnie? I told you to take care of your sister when you went out. We both told you to stay away from that house. Why don't you ever do as you're told?)

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but you know I can't do that." He tugged at the hem of his jacket with gloved hands. "But if there is anything I can do for you or…or the baby." He gestured at the neatly rounded mound of her belly.

(Ma, I di'n't mean ta. I thought she was right behind me. I got her outta the room, away from the dark, and she was alive. I felt her breathin'. She was behind me, and then she wasn', and oh, God, Ma-)

Mrs. Lipnicki looked at him at last, and he retreated a step despite his determination not to conduct himself like a sniveling pussy. They were his mother's eyes, red and raw from crying and glazed and drugged from lack of sleep, pressed into hollowed, sunken sockets possessed of too much bone and too little flesh. She smiled, a pallid, ghastly twist of lip that revealed uneven, white teeth.

"I told you what you could do for me, Detective, and if you can't or won't do that, then fuck you and your condolences, and get out of my house. I got nothin' to say to you anymore." She took a sip of tea and swallowed it with unladylike gulp.

(You've done enough, boy. Go on to your room. Now.)

"Yes, ma'am," he said quietly, and turned to go, hat poised above his head as though he were doffing it.

Just get out of here. You've done your duty, and nobody can say otherwise. Go home, take a decent shower, and get some shuteye before heading back to the precinct. You're so tired you're hallucinating, and Rebecca needs to rest before she collapses. The best thing you can do for Mrs. Lipnicki is find the cocksucker who did this and deliver him to the needle.

He started to call Rebecca's name, and the word died in his throat. He saw it, sitting on the table the family had set up as a chow line, a greasy, gelatinous yellow lump inside a ceramic casserole dish. Bile flooded his mouth at the recollection of its texture on his tongue, rancid and clotted and amorphous as vomit. He closed his eyes and opened them again, but it was still there, jiggling serenely beneath its membranous skin. An involuntary whimper escaped him.

Turkey tetrazini, he thought, dazed. Just like my ma never made. It looks just like it did at Diana's wake, appetizing as an excised tumor. I don't know how it ended up on my plate that day. I'd never eaten it before, and I sure as fuck never ate it again. It was just…there, alien protoplasmic glop that calcified to a cartilaginous mass overnight and soaked up all the bitterness and misery and disappointment in the apartment, bloated with it like a malevolent sponge. I found it the next morning right where I had left it, and I knew… She'll know, too, in the morning, when the vultures are gone and it's still presiding over the bare table in its casserole dish. Ten to one, she heaves her guts just like I did.

"Re-," he began, but his tongue was clumsy and wooden inside his mouth, and the rest of her name was lost in an acidic burp. He swallowed, drew a ragged breath, and tried again. "Rebecca? C'mon, doll, we gotta go." The words were cumbersome and heavy, and he suddenly wanted nothing more than to put his head down and sleep.

Rebecca appeared in the threshold of the parlor, one hand on the doorframe and the other curled around a wheel. She was smiling. "Hey, darlin'." Her smile faltered, then faded completely, and she rolled into the room with an authoritative snap of her arms. "Honey, what-,"

"We gotta go. Now."

"What? Wh-," She closed her mouth with a click of clashing teeth and blinked, nonplussed. "All right," she managed, and ran her fingers through her hair. "You got everything? We leave anything lying around?" She twisted in her chair to see if her handbag was still dangling from one push handle.

"Now," he snapped. "Please."

He was being too harsh with her, too demanding, the drill sergeant he'd sworn never to be as a husband, but he had to get out, to escape the wool and the hothouse flowers and the ghost of cuisine past that spoke of exile and condemnation. He gripped her hand in his own and tugged her towards the door, stride long and brisk with the need for open space. Beside him, Rebecca was cursing softly. Her arm was stretched taut with the distance between them, and her pushing arm scrabbled frantically in an effort to keep pace.

She didn't speak until they were on the street and he was tearing impatiently at the noose that had been his tie. "Stop," she said as he pulled impatiently at the knot. "Stop. Stop!" She curled her fingers around his wrist.

"I gotta get it off. 'Sides, what d'you care about this tie?"

"It's not the tie I worry about. You married me in that uniform, and I'm kinda attached to it. You keep pawing like that, and you'll pop a button."

"Right now, I could give a fuck. I just want it off. Anyway, you weren't this sentimental about your weddin' gown."

She shrugged. "I don't remember what I looked like. Now, will you let me help you?"

He dropped his hands, and she plucked the tie loose with a few strategic pulls of her trembling fingers.

"Anything else you want off?"

"I want the whole damn thing off." The wool was an unbearable itch against prickling skin, and every time he blinked, he saw the turkey tetrazini, gelid and yellow and ominous in its tureen, and a wave of vertigo washed over him.

Flack, ole buddy, you are in need of some serious couch time if you're attributing ominous motives to food the consistency of warm Jell-o, murmured Danny Messer in his head, and he uttered a cracked bark of laughter.

"Oh, fuck." His knees buckled, and he gripped the arms of her chair for support.

"Jesus Christ, babe." Her hands cupped his face, blessedly cool against his feverish cheeks. "What is it? What's the matter? You overheated? You eat something that didn't agree with you?"

Eat it? No, doll, I never touched it, but I saw it, and that was enough.

"Gimme a minute. Just gimme a minute, and I'll be fine."

"My ass," she retorted cheerfully. "Another minute, and you'll faceplant in my morning glory and get us picked up for lewd and lascivious."

He blinked and hiccoughed laughter. "Did you just call your…you know…a morning glory?"

"Yeah, I did." She looked over one shoulder and then the other. "C'mon. There's a bench about twenty paces to the left. Can you make it?"

He made it by dint of using her wheelchair as a makeshift walker and collapsed onto the thin, wooden slats. Rebecca put on her brakes, lifted off her armrest, tossed it carelessly onto the sidewalk beside her chair, and transferred onto the bench in a smooth, swift lift and pivot of shoulder and hip.

"What're you doin'?" he asked.

"Sitting next to you. What does it look like?"

He closed his eyes and let his head fall back, heedless of the fact that there was nothing to support it. The sun was warm on his face, cleansing after the close, stale air of the apartment, and he drew in a deep lungful of early spring air. A shadow passed over his face, and then his cap was pulled from his head. A moment later, Rebecca's hand was brushing the sweat-dampened hair from his forehead, and he shuddered at the unexpected pleasure of it.

She didn't speak for a long time. She simply stroked his hair and unbuttoned his jacket and the first three buttons of his dress shirt and slipped her hand inside to stroke the flesh she found there. It was slow and patient, comforting rather than seductive, and he relaxed by degrees, willed his muscles to uncoil as her fingers traced intricate patterns over them. The knot in his stomach loosened with an audible gurgle.

"Sorry," he muttered without opening his eyes.

She snorted. "For once, you're not blaming me."

"I never blame you."
"Yes, you do. All the time."

"Name one time where I blamed you," he countered lazily.

There was a moment of silence. Then, "You wanna tell me what happened in there?"

"You're changing the subject," he answered, but he raised his head and opened his eyes. "It's okay, doll. Really. It just got to me in there. All those people, the uniforms, the wool. The nasty food. I never liked wakes, you know? All those people tramplin' around where they ain't got no business goin'. I'm not comfortable with alla that."

Her fingers drew ever widening concentric circles on his sternum. "So why go?"

"'Cause he was a cop. I owed it. Just like I owe it to his widow to hunt down the bastard who shot him."

"You're going to, babe."

"Goddamn fucking right, I am. I ain't lettin' no scumbag copkiller dirtbag walk," he said emphatically.

"Easy, easy, babe. You're preaching to the choir." She craned her neck and kissed a bead of perspiration from his throat.

"Yeah, I know. Hey, did I hurt you? Pullin' you outta there?" He groped for her hand beneath his shirt. "Lemme see."

"It's fine. You scared the hell out of me, though. Came wobbling out of that room like you were on stilts, white as a sheet and glassy-eyed."

"I didn't mean to scare you. I just had to get out."

Her fingers dipped to the hollow of his belly. "Is it me?"

"What?" He stared at her in dumbfounded incredulity.

"Was there something I could have done to make it easier on you? Stayed closer? Hung back more? Not come at all?"

"Hey, hey, hey. Where is this comin' from? Mm?" He cupped her chin in his hand and tilted it so that they were eye-to-eye. "You didn't do anything wrong. You're doin' fantastic, and if anybody told you differently, you need to tell me who it is, 'cause I'm gonna cave their head in for 'em."

"Then what is it? What's wrong?"

"I told you. It just got to me, is all."

"You really think I ate construction paste as a kid?" she said wryly, and rested her head on his shoulder.

Her hands never stopped their ceaseless work. They caressed and fluttered, brushed away the slough to expose hidden lines and fractures, and when they had exposed them, they set about buffing them, erasing them with gentle strokes. What her hands did not touch, her lips did, nibbling along his jawline and nipping at his throat and dusting his face with phantom kisses. It was touch for the sake of touch, unassuming and delicate and agonizingly sweet. I am here, she said with every languid movement. I am here, and I will not leave, and it is all right.

"You'd better stop, or they're gonna think we're up to somethin," he said, and prayed she wouldn't.

"Given that this is the only thing that's gotten you to relax, I could give a damn what they think." Her hands never faltered in their explorations.

"My sister was buried in that same cemetery," he said abruptly, and though her hands did not stop, her gaze shifted from his throat to his face. "The whole time I was supposed to be rememberin' Lipnicki, I was starin' at her marker."

"I doubt Lipnicki minded."

How much do you tell her? sneered a sibilant, liquid voice, mud and silt and glottal accusation. She knows about Diana, knows you were there when she died, and that your father never treated you the same way again, but she doesn't know that it was your fault, that you took her to that house and didn't bring her out again. What would she say if she knew that you couldn't even protect your little sister? Would she look at you with the same tender adoration, touch you with the same uninhibited joy, or would she withdraw, seal herself away stitch by stitch until all that remains is the void where she used to be?

The thought of Rebecca dismissing him from her life sent cold panic into his belly. He imagined her face, set and cold as his father's, peering indifferently at him over the morning paper. There would be no more lazy mornings returning to consciousness by degrees and idle caresses beneath the sheets, no more good-natured fights over who got the last dollop of cream cheese for their bagel, just terse grunts of acknowledgement and passionless, mechanical sex twice a week to keep the urges at bay.

I can't. I can't lose her, too, he thought frantically, but his mouth kept on moving. "Then we got to the wake, and all I could remember was what it was like when Diana- How much I hated everybody, their fucking condolences and their sympathy. And the smell, that wool smell. It reminded me of turned earth. And the turkey tetrazini."

"You don't have to tell me this if you don't want to. I took your secrets when I took your name, sight unseen."

He lapsed into grateful silence and rested his chin on the crown of her head. "Someday, doll," he said quietly, but he knew it wasn't true. He would never tell her, not this.

"Mmm. In the meantime, is there anything I can do?"

He thought for a moment. "Just-don't ever get tired of doing this."

She laughed, a sultry, full-throated rumble. "Oh, honey," she said in a bizarrely Cajun patois, "You don't never gotta worry about that."

He sat on the bench, and the years he had lost to the Lipnicki apartment were returned to him, molded and refitted and smoothed down over his bones by the careful work of her endlessly patient hands and lips. She never made a sound while she worked, but that was fine by him. He found she was most eloquent when she said nothing at all.