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Title: Secret Keeper 1C
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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 Ia Part Ib
How she must have hated him then, sitting in the middle of the bustling sidewalk and watching him kiss another woman's hand as he so seldom kissed hers. But she had never said a word of her hurts; not then, with nothing but the thin pane of glossy plate glass between them, and not later, when he had locked himself inside a cramped hotel bathroom and tried to soothe them from afar. She hadn't even spoken of them when he'd come home three days later with bags of takeout in his hands and his thudding heart in his mouth. She'd simply smiled and swallowed her sorrow behind a gentle kiss, because that was what she had always done, his uncomplaining beast of unseen burden, his perfect little sineater who closed her mouth and opened her legs and asked for nothing in return save the meagerest of affections--a kiss before work, an absent stroke of her crown as he passed her with his morning coffee or post-shift beer, a warm embrace in which to be enfolded when her body revolts and wracks her with a pain that pulls her lips from her gums in a savage, canine sneer and wrenches breathless, agonized cries from a throat bent on throttling her as she writhes in her rapidly-cooling piss.
She has reached her limit, his perfect, sinless sineater, and all the sins and private hurts she has swallowed in order to preserve their most imperfect union have begun to come up, forced from her belly like bile and spilling from her lips in black profusion. She had delivered but a small measure of it yesterday, had brought it forth with the cold pitilessness of an avenging angel, and it had burned his skin like lye and threatened to crush his aching heart in its merciless fist. I have done everything you've asked of me. What could you possibly have to ask of me now? Raw with hurt and cutting as the knotted lash, an indictment whose truth he cannot protest.
Now Don Flack is thirty-two, and he sits in his kitchen and tastes fear on his tongue like black currant wine and prays for her to come home. It's quarter-past six, and the hallway beyond their door is still silent. No whetstone hiss of skin on rubber grip as she approaches the door. No jingle of keys as she jabs the apartment key at the dumb pucker of the deadbolt's disapproving mouth. No defeated click as the tumbler retreats. No quiet inrush of air as she pushes open the door with her spidery, splayed fingers and slips inside, a fox casting about for the scent of danger as she enters her den, eyes sharp and expression sharper still as she surveys her surroundings. The fifteen bleeds into sixteen, and the door remains firmly, shut, and his heart sinks lower inside his chest.
He has no reason to believe that she won't come home, won't push through the door like a crowning life. Traffic can be hell in Midtown this time of day, and it's possible that there was no room for her on the overcrowded commuter train and she was stranded on the platform, fighting for a seat on the next and hoping for a patient conductor. She had kissed him goodbye when she left for work this morning, and last night, when he'd woken from a doze to find himself on his knees with his arms wrapped around her legs as she sat in a rocking chair with Junior dreaming in the shallow crook of her arm, she had let him put Junior into his crib and carry her into their bedroom and arrange her among the pillows and blankets. When he had slid into bed beside her and brushed the hair from her face and rubbed the stiff coil of knotted muscle between her bony shoulderblades, she had not shied from his reverent touch, had, in fact, pressed into the warmth in the center of his palm and bid him bury his face in the deep hollow of her shoulder, but she'd been drowsy then, half-lost to the temporary respite of sleep, when her tortured, recalcitrant muscles finally slacken their cruel grip and let her drift upon oblivion's blessed currents. Maybe her acceptance of his tremulous touch had not been an act of love, but the startled, last-gasp reflex of the small part of her he has not corrupted with his failures. Maybe in the cold light of day, with the sleep washed from her eyes and without the weight of Junior's diapered bottom on her lap to distract her, she had recognized the pauper beneath the prince's clothing and recognized the taste of gall and bile in her throat. Maybe cold rationality had reasserted itself as she'd rattled and rumbled to work beneath the city, and she'd washed her hands of him, of them. Maybe she'd checked into a hotel after work--perhaps the Radisson to which she'd fled when he'd unceremoniously ousted her from the place she called home with no notice and the sad excuse of justice on his apologetic lips; Rebecca had a fine appreciation for irony, particularly that of a darker vintage, and if she chose to twist the knife on the way out the door, then she would have no qualms about sinking it deep. The outside to match the inside, and tit for tat.
There would be no way of knowing. She could go where he could not follow, could slip between the walls and disappear forever. She had offered him the chance to follow her once upon a time, to follow her beyond the wall and partake of the wonderland that she had once called home, the strange, Dickensian New York of panting Victorian novels, where hansom cabs idled at the curbs and steaming piles of horseshit had disappeared without a trace, but he had rebuffed it, rebuffed her in a moment of panic, and she had never offered him the chance again. That world is closed to him now, as alien as the plains of Leng. It is hers and hers alone. If she has returned to it, he will never find her
She wouldn't abandon the baby, Gavin points out, and God, he wants to draw comfort from his gruff pragmatism, the pragmatism of concrete and graphite and gun oil, but each time he tries, he sees Rebecca's finger extending to hurl red fire from its bony tip, sees a dirty, wild-eyed man with impossibly blond hair fold silently to the floor with the mute grace of a falling leaf. Brimming with malignant life one instant, dead as a begrimed, alabaster statue of a toppled leader the next. He sees his colleagues emerging from the captain's office with blank faces and aphasic voice, reeling on their feet and planning New Year's parties a month in the rearview mirror. He sees the sharp-mouth dybbuk who had reached over the side of her chair and shaken the body, a terrier with a rat in its bloody, vengeful jaws. His girl isn't bound by the bloodless, crumbling laws of concrete and steel and graphite. If she wants her son, then she will have him. He remembers the hard, pitiless, seething creature beside him in the pew while they had offered Jessica Angell and their useless prayers for her soul unto a dead god of plaster and acrylic paints, and imagines his mother sprawled and lifeless in the splintered wreckage of their home, blood pooling beneath her head like a halo and drenching her doughy bosom in a tacky bib. Imagines his father stiffening in his easy chair, head lolling at an unnatural angle and pages of the sports section draped over his legs like a shroud.
He tells himself she wouldn't, that Rebecca would never-, but he has broken too many promises to be blindly assured of her fidelity to hers, and fear greases his suddenly-constricted throat, tallow and cold, rancid gristle. He's tempted to call his parents, but what would he say? That he has sinned too deeply in the name of the job and now an avenging angel with his wife's face will come to collect wages long overdue? That she carries bloody justice in her spindly fingertips and rage without end within the swollen, infected cockles of her heart? They don't know, his greying, quietly-fading parents; they hadn't seen her slip her fragile human skin and become a goddess without mercy in her sizzling veins. If he called them with stories of magic and Jedis and X-men, they would think his mind had finally buckled beneath the strain of too many losses and too many disappointments.
So he remains in his chair and watches the pot of French-onion soup and the clock and rubs his palms together with the dry, furtive rasp of turning pages.
Finally, the scrape of plastic on steel, a sword being drawn from a scabbard. The phlegmatic rustle of plastic bags and the surprised jingle of keys. The clack of turning tumblers, and then the dull scrape of her footplates against the door as she nudges it open. They play hell on the paint, those footplates with their scouring kiss, and more than once, he and the super have squabbled over the grooves and marks those squares of cheap plastic leave on the door. The super calls them acts of negligence and carelessness; he calls them the price of life with his improbable queen. He suspects it's a battle he's going to lose and he'll pony up for the installation of a kickplate, but he doesn't care. He just wants her to keep coming through that door at the end of the day.
It's her toes he sees first, the unblemished toes of sneakers she bought years ago that have yet to be bruised by the relentless scuffing and pounding of city streets. They may never be. She stands only when she must, and she wears shoes only because they disguise the thin, purple-skinned frailty of her flat, untested feet. The pristine toes are rigid heralds of her arrival, jutting stiffly from her footplates and twitching and flexing as though casting for his scent.
Her hair comes next, a soft, golden fall that obscures her pale face save for the tip of her nose and the glint of blue that marks her eyes. Her hair is thick and glossy, and he longs to card his fingers through it, to let it drift through his worshipful fingers like spun silk. He knows how it would smell now, like lavender and peaches and wild oats, conditioner and the simple human warmth of her.
He knows how the rest of her would smell, too, like talc and slate and ink and the queerly-ozone tang of fluorescent lighting. Like textbooks and wooden lecterns and snatches of stolen perfume left behind by inquisitive or brown-nosing students. Like the dirty ball-bearing stink of a subway-car support pole and the threadbare nylon of fraying tiedowns. Like trenchcoats and messenger bags and hot brakes and sun-warmed vinyl. Like the commute, the rattling rumble of coming home.
The rest of her comes into view. Aside from her customary messenger bag, which sags heavily from one push handle, she's freighted with several plastic bags crammed haphazardly into canvas totes and hanging from the drooping back of her chair like fetishes. Another plastic bag rests uneasily on her canted lap and threatens to spill its contents with every snap of her arms. One arm rises from the wheel and yanks irritably on the sliding bag, an agitated cat swatting an impudent mouse.
"Shit," she hisses, and the strain in her voice jolts him from his paralysis.
"Hey, doll," he says, and rises from his chair and hurries forward to lift the bag from her lap. "Anything I can do?"
"Can you grab the keys?" she asks from behind her hair, and propels herself into the kitchen, where she sets her brakes and twists her torso at an impossible, tortured angle to reach the bags that sag from her push handles like a gangrenous scrotum.
He wordlessly retrieves the keys from the lock and closes the door, and then he sidles from foot to foot and rolls the keys from hand to hand. "What's all that for?" He nods at the bags.
"It's the ingredients for a salve to help your bruises." She wrestles a bag free with a pained grimace and heaves it onto the counter.
"Aw, doll, I don't need it. I figure I deserve 'em for being a jackass the last few months."
"Then it'll be for the next time," she retorts, and it's perilously close to a snarl. She frees another bag from its impromptu hanger and bucks it onto the counter.
Probably figures you're rejectin' her again, Gavin grunts inside his head, and the keys in his incessantly-turning hands develop a reedy, asthmatic wheeze.
"Where's Junior?" She brushes the hair from her face and looks towards the nursery. On the rare occasion that she comes home after Don does, the baby is usually to be found playing happily on the nursery floor or wobbling gleefully underfoot while Don washes dishes or surfs the couch. He never fails to come running at the sound of her voice, chubby fists outstretched and diapered ass crinkling triumphantly as he thunders across the living room like a miniature Godzilla, stepping on Duplo blocks or teething crackers as he comes. If he were here, he would be jabbering at her in his strange, cawing, pidgin language and trying to climb her bony legs.
"He's with my folks for the night. I thought it would be easier for us to talk. Plus, I thought it might be good for them to spend a little time with him just in case."
"In case what? In case I wash my hands of this and walk out?"
"Yeah." He swallows with a click and quashes the urge to rub his nape. "Don't worry, though. I'm not tryin' to keep him from you or anythin' like that."
She pauses in her excavation of the bags' contents, and an unpleasant smile twists her lips like a cramp. "If I wanted him, I could have him." Flat and reptilian, the cold, atonal burr of a predator with blood in its teeth and no room for regret in its heart, and he thinks again of a blond lunatic who had gone to his death without a sound, a windup man whose key had been ripped out, and of his parents, old and powerless and without even the memory of former kindnesses with which to blunt her terrible vengeance.
He flounders, momentarily stunned. "I know. I'm just sayin'." His heart flutters greasily in the back of his too-tight throat, and he nearly fumbles the keys.
"Mmm." She smiles that lightless smile again and pulls a bunch of unfamiliar herbs from the depths of the bag. "Besides, I'm not going anywhere."
"You don't know that."
"I do know that," she thunders, and slaps the counter. "I have always known that. You're the one who's never believed it." Her eyes narrow. Or maybe you do know. Maybe that's why you keep standing on my throat every time the department tells you to step lively. You know I won't leave, so what does it matter if you kick me in the face?"
"Just like you refuse to believe I love you?" he shoots back. "Well, I guess we're fuckin' even, huh?"
She stares at him in silence. Her eyes are bruised and hollow and red-rimmed, as if someone has fetched her a blow to the face. He supposes maybe someone has. She hollows her cheeks in contemplation, and then her shoulders slump. "Point taken."
It's the first time she's ever acknowledged the secret fear of his heart, and for a moment, he forgets to breathe. His heart stutters and stills inside his chest, and then it drops like a stone into his feet, where it settles beneath his sole. He opens his mouth, but all thought has fled, and there is only the hurt, smothering and ravenous and without end. He closes his mouth to keep it from tumbling out and carrying his innards with it. There's no shock; he's too much an observer, too much of a detective, for that, and he's brought this on himself, he knows, but hurt is hurt, for all that it is deserved, ugly and weeping and gnawing as cancer in his churning guts.
"And so now here we are," she says matter-of-factly, and shrugs, eyes dull with truth a long time coming.
He goes to her on wooden legs and drops to his knees before her chair. He's grateful for the support of her armrests because he's not sure he has the strength to hold himself up. Even though his chest has been unzipped and emptied of its contents, it feels so heavy, a wet sandbag beneath his shirt, and he suspects that without the support of her armrests, he would simply sprawl bonelessly to the floor at her feet, another windup doll robbed of its animus by a flick of her wrist.
How long? he wants to ask, but self-preservation won't allow his tongue to slit his throat. The hot, ragged mouth that sleeps just above his right hip stirs into sudden, gleeful consciousness and buries its needling, infected teeth deep into his roiling guts. Nausea rises like bitter pitch in his throat, and he grits his teeth against a grunt of pain and an acrid belch. Do you still love me? he thinks, but that question, too, threatens to lay him bare. He would touch her if he could, but when he raises his hand, a dead, hard stone at the end of his wrist, he sways wildly and nearly sends them both sprawling to the floor. So he replaces it on the armrests and racks his brain for something to say.
His mouth works, but nothing emerges except breath stale with confusion. Her face is impassive, but her eyes are filled with a terrible pity, a priest offering useless comfort to a grief-stricken widower. He tries to force them, those magic words that will--must heal this dreadful wound, but nothing comes, and she slowly shakes her head as though to say, There's nothing to say. Go with God and be at peace, my wayward son.
"I'm going to take a shower," she says, and backs away from him.
It feels so much like goodbye, and he can barely speak when he asks, "Can I give you a hand?"
"If you want," comes the reply, the indifferent whisper of rustling pages in an abandoned room.
He stands, winces at the creak and pop of bones that have never felt so old, and steps around her to fiddle blindly with the knobs on the stove. The conscientious cook in him wants to keep the soup at a simmer, though Christ knows who's going to eat it now. There is a hot pebble of anguish lodged in his throat, and his mouth feels numb and toothless and oddly disarticulated, as if a sadistic perp had reached inside his mouth and torn out his tongue at the root. Even if he could force sustenance past dead teeth and nerveless gums and a throat clogged with words and cries he cannot expel, his stomach is a hot, cramped ball behind his bellybutton. His stomach has always been his conscience, and right now, it's too full of guilt to accept anything else.
She's in the bedroom by the time he gives up the pretense of checking on the soup, parked beside the laundry hamper and wrestling with her shoes. She's half-naked, shirtless and braless, and there are too many curves and too many angles. Her shoulders aren't so much rounded as collapsed, as though bowed by a great weight, and her scapulae are harsh, bony ridges beneath translucent skin. Her plucking, tugging, prodding fingers are fleshless twigs on the end of her hands. Her face is hard and angular, almost craggy, and as her lips pull from her teeth in a lupine grimace, he thinks of pictures he'd once seen in his history textbook, of haggard, leather-skinned women gazing at the dust-ravaged prairie with lifeless eyes. They'd been hard and spare, those women, stripped of everything but the will to live, creatures who had dispensed with dreams and all their pretty trappings and exchanged them for the grim, unadorned truth of life without pity or kindness or the weakness of faith in a better tomorrow. For them, there had only been now and the unforgiving reality of barren fields and unfed children and unmarked wooden crosses behind the outhouse. Looking at their gaunt, dust-grimed faces, he'd seen the unglamorous face of the survivor.
He wants to reach out and smooth the lines from her face, to fill in the hollow of her cheek, but he senses a terrible sharpness beneath her skin, the promise of blood and tattered flesh, and so he shuffles past her to the bed and drops to one knee to retrieve her bath seat from beneath the bed. There's a fine layer of dust on it when he pulls it out like one of Hammerback's autopsy slabs, and he wonders how long it's gone unused. She'd smelled of soap and and warmth when he'd knelt before her, so she had clearly bathed recently. He furrows his brow and tries to remember if she bathed this morning, but all he can remember is the heady, delirious relief he'd felt when she'd kissed him goodbye on his way out the door. He purses his lips and wills himself to recall, to feel the dampness of her hair beneath his fingers as he'd brushed stray strands from her cool temple and the humid, astringent whiff of soap on the air, but nothing comes except the memory of his heart triphammering unsteadily inside his chest as his lips had met hers. It shouldn't matter, this fine layer of dust, but it does, and he swallows a sour pang of unease and carries the seat into the bathroom and settles it into the tub, aligns it in the center of the tub and carefully tightens the anchoring clamp. He'll never hear the end of it if he cracks the goddamn fiberglass. He turns to the sink and opens the cabinet beneath it and helps himself to the baby wipes Rebecca uses for her hands and Junior's ass, and then he returns his attention to the tub and dusty bath seat.
He wipes it down with scrupulous care, and then he reaches for her shower wand. He plucks it from its plastic wall bracket, and then he shifts his weight to his toes and leans forward to turn on the tap. He manipulates the knobs with practiced familiarity. One twist cold and three twists hot is what she prefers. He tests the water that sloshes from the tap anyway, a protector to the last, and when he is satisfied he's not filling her bath with scalding water, he shakes the water from his fingertips and rocks back on his heels and rises from his crouch and returns to the bedroom.
She's conquered her sneakers, which lay in front of the hamper like a brace of dead hare, but now she's wrangling with her socks, which obdurately refuse to yield the scrawny atolls of her heels. She's jammed her spindly index finger into her sock and pushed the thin, white fabric down, and it squirms and twists like a turning worm. She curses, and breath leaves her in a plosive, ragged gasp.
"You want some help?"
She struggles for a moment more, and then she sits up and jabs her feet at him.
"I'll take that as a yes," he says drily, and tugs absently on the fabric of his pants before dropping to one knee again.
He gently peels off her socks and tosses them into the hamper, and then he cups her cold eggshell feet in his palms. They're cold and mottled and flex and tremble spasmodically in the cups of his palms, and when he draws his thumbs over her fallen arch and the tops of her swollen, purple toes, he feels the noisome grit of dead, dry skin. The skin of one toe is raw and scabbed, as though she'd caught it beneath a bedframe or smashed it into the door or the back of a subway seat, and when he probes it with a cautious finger, she startles and tries to withdraw her foot.
"That hurt?"
She snorts and favors him with an incredulous look. What do you think, o, Master Detective? It would be funny if he weren't so terrified that he's losing her. "I'm doing the best I can," is all she says, and her jaw works in quiet defiance as she stares at a point far above his head.
"I know. "I'm not- I just want you to be okay, that's all." He massages the soles of her feet and discovers more grit, as if she'd crossed the desert in bare feet, and he watches her toes curl and fan and flex. "I know it might be too late for that to matter anymore, but that doesn't mean it isn't true."
She lowers her gaze to meet his, and her face softens. "Always the cop." She reaches out to stroke his cheek, and he turns into her touch, light and spidery but warm and alive and unmistakably his Rebecca.
There you are. Don't leave me, Rebecca. Please hang on. Don't give up on me. Please. He presses a feverish kiss to the heart of her cool, dry palm, and like her toes, her fingers close reflexively around his mouth for an instant, the fleeting brush of an anemone. "Not a a cop, dammit," he murmurs into her puckered palm. "Not because I'm a cop. Because I'm your husband."
Soft, mirthless laughter. "Are you? Sometimes it's impossible to distinguish one from the other."
It cuts him to the quick, and he would argue if he could, but the proof is etched in the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth and in the bruised, distant melancholy in her eyes. Neither had been there before, when he'd been so besotted with her that he'd pushed duty aside for the first time in his life and courted her with reckless abandon. Her face had been unlined when he'd brushed the rice from her hair and the fabric of her wedding dress from her narrow shoulders, and when he'd helped her down the snow-slick steps of St. Patrick's, her eyes had been bright with future's rosy promise.
He's not sure when the lines began to appear, but he he's watched that glorious light fade ever since some nutjob named Lessing had opened a hole in his guts and his world courtesy of a bomb and a plummeting photocopier. It had merely been obscured at first, dimmed by exhaustion and worry as she fretted at his bedside and bargained with God to keep his feet planted on her side of the river, but then he'd opened his idiot, pain-wracked mouth, and it had dimmed in earnest, smothered by hurt and old insecurities and wounds he could feel but had never seen.
She's bounced back so many times, has fanned and fed the dying flame of her quiet admiration with reserves hidden deep within her heart. The light has returned again and again, only to be stamped out by the relentless demands of a city that neither sleeps nor remembers its gratitude. The uniform he swore to serve has been stitched into his skin since he was crawling across his parents' living room in short pants and investigating the shiny bauble of his old man's badge with his toothless mouth and chubby, clutching fingers. Being a cop is a part of him, encoded into the immutable helices of his DNA, and he could no more forsake the compulsion to serve and protect than he could escape his blue eyes or the New York embedded in his tongue. His badge is an extension of his heart, and not so long ago, she had washed pieces of his guts out of its crevices with a damp cotton swab. He could no more live without it than he could live without his heart. Hasn't he told her as much, admitted the sorry, addict's truth of it with his traitor's mouth?
He has been a cop always but a husband when he could, and the master he serves too often bids him break his mistress. He has ignored her dreams in favor of a stranger's pleas and left her to celebrate joint milestones alone. He has denied her what he freely gives to others, and he has done it all in the name of a greater good in which she never seems to share no matter how quietly she accepts her place in the gilded cage of second place.
And it is second place. He has denied it to himself and to her, but she has always known the truth. Your second place is better than a lot of men's first, she had told him once upon a time, when the light in her eyes had been bright and the ties that had bound them had been unsullied by so many broken promises and empty IOUs, and maybe she had believed it then. She isn't a liar, his china doll--secretive and brusque and a keeper of her own counsel--but never a liar. Her tongue cuts, but it does not fork.
There is no light in the eyes that look down at him while he kneels with her fragile, dying feet in his hands, only sorrow and unwanted knowledge and smoldering ash where love had once burned so brightly.
Is love still there? he wonders as he lowers her feet and rises to his. Is it still there, buried beneath all those disappointments I swore I couldn't help and fighting for the breath necessary for one more resurgence? Or has it finally succumbed, smothered beneath the cloying weight of not right now and I'm so sorry and I know I promised, but...?
"I'm gonna make sure the bath is ready," he says, and turns away. He draws a breath and waits for her to tell him not to come back, but there is only stony silence and the dismal echo of her humorless laughter, and so he rolls up his sleeves and toes off his loafers and shuffles into the bathroom to turn off the water before it sloshes over the side of the tub. He carefully avoids his distorted reflection in the cold steel and the mirror mounted above the sink.
He turns to go back for her but finds her waiting for him, parked a foot from the bathroom with her footplates swung wide like a broken hangman's scaffold, half-naked and barefoot and withered in her chair. All that remains of her clothing is her skirt, and she raises her arms and waits for him to lift her to her feet.
He bends at the knees and waits for her to rest her hands on his shoulders. "Ready?" he asks when her palsied, groping grip settles, and when she nods, he stands and brings her with him, hands on either side of her ribcage. She sways drunkenly, right hip sagging with the effort of compensating for a leg two inches shorter than its counterpart, and he steadies her, acts as her center of gravity until she lurches into her own. "I got you," he murmurs as she twitches and spasms, and a strangled laugh escapes her.
Her jittering legs fall still at last, and she sags against him, her face buried in the fabric of his shirt. "You said that once before," she mumbles into the thin cotton, a voice from beneath the loose earth of a freshly-dug grave. "On our wedding day. "Do you remember?"
"Of course I do," he replies thickly, and cups the delicate curve of her skull. "I haven't forgotten a single thing about that day, not one. And I meant what I said."
"I know you did." She presses her cheek to his heart and wraps her arms around his hips.
"Do you still believe it?"
No answer comes, and the heart lodged firmly in his soles spasms in unnameable anguish. She is boneless and heavy and inert, and he suspects that if he were to let go, she would simply crumple to the floor and splay there, legs akimbo and eyes open and unblinking and chest rising and falling like a punctured bellows. She would lie there and let the world roll over her in its cruel tide while she withdrew into herself and shut it out, and when the world had passed, she would gather her strength and rise again and march onward with those unblinking eyes.
She is, after all, a survivor.
He holds her until her legs begin to jitter and shake again, this time from fatigue, and then he reaches behind her and unclasps the magnetic snap of her skirt. It falls to the floor with a sigh of relief and puddles around her naked feet as though to hide them from judgmental, scornful eyes. Then, he hooks his thumb into the frail waistband of her panties and eases them down. They're thin and insubstantial in his grasp, almost threadbare, and as they slide down her wobbling, coltish legs, he wonders how long it's been since she's treated herself to a new pair.
Like it matters. Even if she could, the Kmart panty three-pack is all she could afford. Dying housewife panties. Just one of the perks of being a civil servant's wife. The voice sounds inexplicably like Scagnetti, he who sports a brushcut like a badge of honor and hitches his khakis in a sign of respect whenever Rebecca makes an appearance in the precinct. He finds himself thinking of sitting in an unmarked car with Angell and listening to a spoiled editor named Amber Stanton sneer down her reconstructed nose at his "civil servant's salary." The wide, black brim of Stanton's hat as she leaned jauntily through the window to sneer at him through a cloud of high-end perfume and Angell's tight, sardonic grin as she swanned down the sidewalk. Grief joins guilt in its torment, and the cramp that seizes his roiling belly is so intense that he nearly cries out. He presses his lips together until he can feel bone and breathes through his nose until it passes.
Mourning Angell with Rebecca in his arms strikes him as yet another betrayal, and so he closes his eyes and buries his nose in her hair and wills her scent to flood his nostrils and fill all his empty, lonely places. I'm sorry, he thinks, and the guilt is so heavy inside his chest that he feels like he's drowning in it, hot and thick and sweet as nectar. 'M so sorry, but she's dead because of me. Maybe if she hadn't been flirtin' with me and chasin' somethin' that was never gonna be, she woulda seen it comin'. Maybe she woulda seen that armored car barrellin' toward the diner a second sooner and found cover before that son of a bitch, Cade, ever got a draw on her. Maybe she and that snot-nosed punk she was savin' from bein' caught in his own dirty laundry woulda made it out the back before those bastards ever made it out of the truck. Maybe she coulda called for closer backup. But she was on the phone with me, playin' it cool and coy because she thought there was heat between us. Now she'll never be warm again, never have the chance to find what she was lookin' for with me with someone who could give it to her, and that's on me. Not even splatterin' Cade's brains all over that boiler room is gonna change that. That stain is forever, and I still haven't figured out how to live with it.
He tightens his hold on her and trails his fingertips down the sagging, uneven ridge of her spine. There should be more flesh to cover it, but the job has demanded so many pounds of flesh over the years that there is precious little with which to dress her misaligned bones. She is hard and spare beneath his hands, a stripling eking life from the stingy soil of a rocky hillside. So different from the pale, eager young girl who had so innocently gone to his bed and the fierce, healthy young woman who had carried his child and grown into the enticing, voluptuous curves of a woman in full splendor, with ripe breasts and curvaceous legs and taut thighs and a soft, yielding belly that spoke of a life of, if not plenty, then of comfort. He lets his stroking hands dip to the meager swell of her buttocks, and her shanks are flat beneath his palms. They've always been long and compressed from hours of sitting with no respite from the pressure save her sporadic attempts to shift in her seat, but they've never been so lean, so small.
He cups them to balance her, and then he nuzzles her temple and the sensitive nautilus of her ear. "You need to eat somethin'," he whispers. "I made a pot of soup for supper. French onion with lots of cheese, just how you like it."
She tenses immediately, and his stricken heart cries out again, though he can hardly fault her. Too often, food has come as a final mercy to the condemned, a last, sweet morsel before the end. He has offered her food because he can think of no words with which to comfort her as he issues the department's edicts and strips the flesh from her bones. Words are so much oral flatulence when you're being set upon the road to nowhere. At least food offers nourishment and fleeting solace.
He tightens his grip and presses his lips to her clenched jaw. "No! No," he hisses. "Rebecca, I swear, this isn't another last supper, another last meal before the department comes to shake my hand and kick you in the ass as they drag me out the door. It's just- I know you don't believe it anymore, but I love you. I love you, and I want you to be happy like you used to be. Just...please."
For a moment, she remains stiff as a board, and all he can hear is her rapid, shallow breathing, a small, dangerous animal trapped in the hunter's strangling snare. Then she goes slack and sags against him, and she turns her face to mouth the fabric at his sternum.
"All right. All right," he croons, and he's so relieved that his vision swims.
She raises one small foot and paws arrhythmically at the floor, a foal taking its first uncertain steps. It's Rebecca-speak for My legs are giving out, and so he carefully lowers her into her chair again and watches in silence as her legs shudder convulsively and she grits her teeth against the spasms that threaten to wrack the rest of her. It's a spectacle to which he's borne witness a thousand times in the privacy of their bedroom, his proud, brilliant queen shamed by the vicious vagaries of her warped body and misaligned nervous system, and it never fails to cleave his heart in two. It's not fair that someone so fierce and redoubtable and unrivaled in her field should be reduced to twitching in her chair like a drooling electroshock victim and fighting tooth and claw for the simple dignity of upright. He watches her struggle to achieve the latter, feet thumping and scrabbling for the purchase of footplates that aren't there, and he reaches out to brush his fingers over her flustered, exertion-reddened face.
Her legs continue their uncontrolled, insectile dance, the skin of her quadriceps rippling and puckering with its nervous energy, but the rest of her stills. Her contracted, wildly-pitching arms and clawed fingers unfurl and sink to her lap, where they dangle limply from her weakly-pumping knees, and her torso ceases its restive, agonized torsion. She closes her eyes and sighs at his tentative touch, and the tension drains from her face as his fingertips ghost over the tip of her nose and graze her parted lips and narrow chin. The chair hisses and squeaks as she shifts to achieve greater contact, and he obliges her unspoken need, presses the ball of his thumb to her lower lip and lets a tremor that has nothing to do with exertion or unruly muscles prickle against the gun-callused skin. Her longing for contact is palpable, and a fanciful part of him swears that he can see her pores opening to drink him in, never mind that he can scarcely see for the tears in his eyes.
I wonder if she'd be so damn eager for your touch if she knew that thumb that was just strokin' her lower lip belongs to the hand of a murderin' bastard who spread some merc's brains all over the boiler room floor. Wonder if she'd think it was so damn sweet if she could taste the blood it's covered in, sneers a mocking, cold voice inside his head, the voice of Shane Casey and a thousand other skels whose ranks he'd joined the moment he'd squeezed that trigger and left his oath to act as the city's conscience in a lazily-swirling cloud of cordite and dust.
The thought inspires another cramp and the urge to withdraw his hand, but he understands that to do so would destroy the last, fragile thread of chance that dangles before him, and so he resists the impulse and instead repeats the motion, retraces the unhurried, reverent movement of his fingers over her upturned face. She sighs as though the weight of Sisyphus has been lifted from her bowed shoulders, and his heart trembles in recognition. Somewhere behind this thin, alien face with its dead, baleful eyes, his Rebecca stirs.
Still here, he thinks incredulously. She's still here somewhere.
Yeah, but how long you think she's gonna stick around once she knows the truth? the voice needles. She signed on for a choirboy, not some hypocritical waste of air who blows a guy's brains out in the heat of a tantrum and then drowns his sorrows in cheap hooch because he can't stomach the truth. Why should she stay? Look around, Detective . This isn't exactly the Waldorf-Astoria, and these days, you can't even be assed to throw a fuck into her. What's left for her here except another twenty years of almosts?
Dull panic cramps his aching gut, and he emits another acid belch. "You ready?" he asks when the tremors have stilled, and bends to slip the slack puddle of fabric from her feet. He bunches it in his fist and tosses it haphazardly at the open hamper. The skirt flares and catches on the edge, but the panties land atop her shoes in a rumpled, white clot that reminds him of Jess' intestines pulsing and fluttering against his hand, and his mutinous gorge rises. The guilt rises, too, and he's not sure which is making it so damn hard to breathe, like gasping for air through a layer of mud and dead hair.
Haunted, he thinks dumbly as Rebecca's slender arms reach for him and hover in the air before his eyes like beseeching revenants. I'm haunted.
He reaches for her blindly. It's a ritual as old as their union, and he works on muscle memory. One arm around her shoulders. One slipped behind her stringy, too-straight knees. Lift from the knees, not the spine. Hold her close so that she does not slip from his arms on an errant spasm and tumble to the bedroom floor, all pained groans and panicked breathing as her stunned nervous system processes the pain of sudden, unceremonious impact and struggles to catalogue bumps and bruises that blossom beneath her skin. She curls her arms around his neck and tucks her head in the crook of his shoulder, and it should feel good, this moment of absolute trust and familiar intimacy, but all he can feel is Angell's lolling, dead weight in his arms as he'd pulled her from the back of the squad car and raced into the emergency room. He remembers the limp, listless swing of her arms the most, how their slack swing had perversely mirrored the urgent stride of his legs as he'd burst through the lethargic sliding doors and screamed for help into the morose and jaundiced silence.
No swinging arms, thank God for small and useless mercies, just her bobbing feet, mottled, purple flashes on the periphery of his vision. It should ease the grip of this memory, this intrusive anomaly, but it doesn't. It only intensifies it, and though he knows he's holding Rebecca, who is wounded and irritable and brittle, but blessedly alive, his tortured conscience screams that it's Angell, motionless and heavy with Charon's mantle and slipping through his fingers no matter how fast he runs or how tightly he holds her.
(soheavyonygodshe'ssoheavyholdonholdon) his mind howls even as his eyes register that it's Rebecca he's holding, Rebecca of the golden hair and mouth full of serrated blades. Rebecca, whose breath is plosive and warm against his neck, and whose arms tighten reflexively around his neck in response to his wordless terror. She clings to him as he scissors through the bathroom door on legs gone numb, and she stiffens spasmodically when he lists unexpectedly to starboard to spare her outthrust feet a painful meeting with the doorjamb. She turns into him, and her breasts graze his sternum with every rise and fall of her chest. Alive, alive, yet his mind insists that she's nothing but a handful of blood and blind eyes and unmitigated failure.
The cognitive dissonance between what is and what so recently was is so great that he nearly topples headlong into the tub when he bends to lower her into it, but his muscles remember to love her when his mind cannot, and he holds his feet as he lowers her into the water toes-first.
And now I lay my burden down, he thinks, and hates himself. This is not a laying down of imagined burdens, but a sacrament, a sacred baptism. And he anointed her head with oil.
"Too hot?" his mouth asks when she hisses. He doesn't proceed until she shakes her head, and then he slowly sets her on the narrow, padded strip of plastic and vinyl. She releases herself to the water at once, lets the tension ebb from her body and into the water, and her limbs float to the surface and bob like bits of driftwood. It's the picture of serenity, a rare chance to see her as she was before he'd caressed her face and left hollows and lines in his wake. Unblemished and lovely and adrift on blissful, painless tides, and he should savor it, especially now, especially after his renewed acquaintance with death on a lonely, rattling subway car. But all he can see when he looks into the tub is Angell's still, white form in the hospital morgue, her eyes closed and her lethal wound tastefully hidden beneath a thin, green sheet the color of early decomposition, a free preview of what awaited her after her star turn on the mortician's table.
He drops to his knees, grateful that the linoleum floor will bear him up, and turns the plastic crank on the bath seat until Rebecca's breasts and belly disappear beneath the water. "You want some bubbles?"
A languid shake of her head, and the ends of her hair undulate with the clutching, illusory grace of kelp. He finds himself at loose ends. He has promised her a confession, and so he must give it, but he doesn't want to disturb her rare and precious peace, to see the serene softness of her face harden into damning scorn. He doesn't want to see the feral changeling behind his maiden fair's face, and so he busies his hands with useless movement, scoops water into his cupped palm and tips it over her head; it sluices down her face, drips from the tip of her nose and beads in her eyelashes like dew. There's a melancholy beauty to it that soothes him, and so he repeats the act, a vassal attending to a sleeping goddess.
"Enjoying yourself?"
"You remember when I did this for you in the hospital? Washed your hair?" It isn't what he'd planned to say, what he needs to say, but they are the only words that he can find.
"Mmm." It's a soft hum, almost drowsy, but he knows that she's listening intently behind those half-lidded eyes, mind as sharp as her expression is logy. "'S when I knew I was safe."
A strangled noise escape him, and he struggles to breathe around the sudden ache in the center of his chest, a wave of emotion so huge that it threatens to swamp him. Oh, Christ, he thinks, and clutches the side of the tub to keep himself upright.
Her eyes remain heavy-lidded, but her head turns, and she raises her hand from the water and rests it on his wrist. A faint smile, and she draws light, lazy circles on the spar of his wrist with the gibbous crescents of her nails. They're far longer than she usually keeps them, and jagged where she's caught them on a door opener or the fabric of Junior's clothes, and he makes a mental note to trim them once she's warm and dry. They scrape his skin in a loose, wavering circuit, and his skin prickles at the contact, as though someone has blown on it.
It's Jess, he thinks with the stuporous lucidity of the mad. She's come to haunt me for not gettin' to the diner in time, for not savin' her. He blinks, and suddenly, it's Jess in the tub and her hand on his wrist, cold and white as bone and bloated with water and decomposition. Her fingertips are pruned and perversely soft, like the rotten, gelid heft of overripe nectarines, and she floats in a wash of blood and tiny clumps of tissue. Her wet hair is matted to her scalp and water runs down her face in pale pink rivulets. The ends of her hair squirm beneath the befouled water, grave worms and bits of blackened entrails, and his gorge rises and spasms.
You called me baby, she croons in a glottal, gargling voice, as though she's speaking through a mouthful of black and clotted blood. Do you remember?
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 Ia Part Ib
How she must have hated him then, sitting in the middle of the bustling sidewalk and watching him kiss another woman's hand as he so seldom kissed hers. But she had never said a word of her hurts; not then, with nothing but the thin pane of glossy plate glass between them, and not later, when he had locked himself inside a cramped hotel bathroom and tried to soothe them from afar. She hadn't even spoken of them when he'd come home three days later with bags of takeout in his hands and his thudding heart in his mouth. She'd simply smiled and swallowed her sorrow behind a gentle kiss, because that was what she had always done, his uncomplaining beast of unseen burden, his perfect little sineater who closed her mouth and opened her legs and asked for nothing in return save the meagerest of affections--a kiss before work, an absent stroke of her crown as he passed her with his morning coffee or post-shift beer, a warm embrace in which to be enfolded when her body revolts and wracks her with a pain that pulls her lips from her gums in a savage, canine sneer and wrenches breathless, agonized cries from a throat bent on throttling her as she writhes in her rapidly-cooling piss.
She has reached her limit, his perfect, sinless sineater, and all the sins and private hurts she has swallowed in order to preserve their most imperfect union have begun to come up, forced from her belly like bile and spilling from her lips in black profusion. She had delivered but a small measure of it yesterday, had brought it forth with the cold pitilessness of an avenging angel, and it had burned his skin like lye and threatened to crush his aching heart in its merciless fist. I have done everything you've asked of me. What could you possibly have to ask of me now? Raw with hurt and cutting as the knotted lash, an indictment whose truth he cannot protest.
Now Don Flack is thirty-two, and he sits in his kitchen and tastes fear on his tongue like black currant wine and prays for her to come home. It's quarter-past six, and the hallway beyond their door is still silent. No whetstone hiss of skin on rubber grip as she approaches the door. No jingle of keys as she jabs the apartment key at the dumb pucker of the deadbolt's disapproving mouth. No defeated click as the tumbler retreats. No quiet inrush of air as she pushes open the door with her spidery, splayed fingers and slips inside, a fox casting about for the scent of danger as she enters her den, eyes sharp and expression sharper still as she surveys her surroundings. The fifteen bleeds into sixteen, and the door remains firmly, shut, and his heart sinks lower inside his chest.
He has no reason to believe that she won't come home, won't push through the door like a crowning life. Traffic can be hell in Midtown this time of day, and it's possible that there was no room for her on the overcrowded commuter train and she was stranded on the platform, fighting for a seat on the next and hoping for a patient conductor. She had kissed him goodbye when she left for work this morning, and last night, when he'd woken from a doze to find himself on his knees with his arms wrapped around her legs as she sat in a rocking chair with Junior dreaming in the shallow crook of her arm, she had let him put Junior into his crib and carry her into their bedroom and arrange her among the pillows and blankets. When he had slid into bed beside her and brushed the hair from her face and rubbed the stiff coil of knotted muscle between her bony shoulderblades, she had not shied from his reverent touch, had, in fact, pressed into the warmth in the center of his palm and bid him bury his face in the deep hollow of her shoulder, but she'd been drowsy then, half-lost to the temporary respite of sleep, when her tortured, recalcitrant muscles finally slacken their cruel grip and let her drift upon oblivion's blessed currents. Maybe her acceptance of his tremulous touch had not been an act of love, but the startled, last-gasp reflex of the small part of her he has not corrupted with his failures. Maybe in the cold light of day, with the sleep washed from her eyes and without the weight of Junior's diapered bottom on her lap to distract her, she had recognized the pauper beneath the prince's clothing and recognized the taste of gall and bile in her throat. Maybe cold rationality had reasserted itself as she'd rattled and rumbled to work beneath the city, and she'd washed her hands of him, of them. Maybe she'd checked into a hotel after work--perhaps the Radisson to which she'd fled when he'd unceremoniously ousted her from the place she called home with no notice and the sad excuse of justice on his apologetic lips; Rebecca had a fine appreciation for irony, particularly that of a darker vintage, and if she chose to twist the knife on the way out the door, then she would have no qualms about sinking it deep. The outside to match the inside, and tit for tat.
There would be no way of knowing. She could go where he could not follow, could slip between the walls and disappear forever. She had offered him the chance to follow her once upon a time, to follow her beyond the wall and partake of the wonderland that she had once called home, the strange, Dickensian New York of panting Victorian novels, where hansom cabs idled at the curbs and steaming piles of horseshit had disappeared without a trace, but he had rebuffed it, rebuffed her in a moment of panic, and she had never offered him the chance again. That world is closed to him now, as alien as the plains of Leng. It is hers and hers alone. If she has returned to it, he will never find her
She wouldn't abandon the baby, Gavin points out, and God, he wants to draw comfort from his gruff pragmatism, the pragmatism of concrete and graphite and gun oil, but each time he tries, he sees Rebecca's finger extending to hurl red fire from its bony tip, sees a dirty, wild-eyed man with impossibly blond hair fold silently to the floor with the mute grace of a falling leaf. Brimming with malignant life one instant, dead as a begrimed, alabaster statue of a toppled leader the next. He sees his colleagues emerging from the captain's office with blank faces and aphasic voice, reeling on their feet and planning New Year's parties a month in the rearview mirror. He sees the sharp-mouth dybbuk who had reached over the side of her chair and shaken the body, a terrier with a rat in its bloody, vengeful jaws. His girl isn't bound by the bloodless, crumbling laws of concrete and steel and graphite. If she wants her son, then she will have him. He remembers the hard, pitiless, seething creature beside him in the pew while they had offered Jessica Angell and their useless prayers for her soul unto a dead god of plaster and acrylic paints, and imagines his mother sprawled and lifeless in the splintered wreckage of their home, blood pooling beneath her head like a halo and drenching her doughy bosom in a tacky bib. Imagines his father stiffening in his easy chair, head lolling at an unnatural angle and pages of the sports section draped over his legs like a shroud.
He tells himself she wouldn't, that Rebecca would never-, but he has broken too many promises to be blindly assured of her fidelity to hers, and fear greases his suddenly-constricted throat, tallow and cold, rancid gristle. He's tempted to call his parents, but what would he say? That he has sinned too deeply in the name of the job and now an avenging angel with his wife's face will come to collect wages long overdue? That she carries bloody justice in her spindly fingertips and rage without end within the swollen, infected cockles of her heart? They don't know, his greying, quietly-fading parents; they hadn't seen her slip her fragile human skin and become a goddess without mercy in her sizzling veins. If he called them with stories of magic and Jedis and X-men, they would think his mind had finally buckled beneath the strain of too many losses and too many disappointments.
So he remains in his chair and watches the pot of French-onion soup and the clock and rubs his palms together with the dry, furtive rasp of turning pages.
Finally, the scrape of plastic on steel, a sword being drawn from a scabbard. The phlegmatic rustle of plastic bags and the surprised jingle of keys. The clack of turning tumblers, and then the dull scrape of her footplates against the door as she nudges it open. They play hell on the paint, those footplates with their scouring kiss, and more than once, he and the super have squabbled over the grooves and marks those squares of cheap plastic leave on the door. The super calls them acts of negligence and carelessness; he calls them the price of life with his improbable queen. He suspects it's a battle he's going to lose and he'll pony up for the installation of a kickplate, but he doesn't care. He just wants her to keep coming through that door at the end of the day.
It's her toes he sees first, the unblemished toes of sneakers she bought years ago that have yet to be bruised by the relentless scuffing and pounding of city streets. They may never be. She stands only when she must, and she wears shoes only because they disguise the thin, purple-skinned frailty of her flat, untested feet. The pristine toes are rigid heralds of her arrival, jutting stiffly from her footplates and twitching and flexing as though casting for his scent.
Her hair comes next, a soft, golden fall that obscures her pale face save for the tip of her nose and the glint of blue that marks her eyes. Her hair is thick and glossy, and he longs to card his fingers through it, to let it drift through his worshipful fingers like spun silk. He knows how it would smell now, like lavender and peaches and wild oats, conditioner and the simple human warmth of her.
He knows how the rest of her would smell, too, like talc and slate and ink and the queerly-ozone tang of fluorescent lighting. Like textbooks and wooden lecterns and snatches of stolen perfume left behind by inquisitive or brown-nosing students. Like the dirty ball-bearing stink of a subway-car support pole and the threadbare nylon of fraying tiedowns. Like trenchcoats and messenger bags and hot brakes and sun-warmed vinyl. Like the commute, the rattling rumble of coming home.
The rest of her comes into view. Aside from her customary messenger bag, which sags heavily from one push handle, she's freighted with several plastic bags crammed haphazardly into canvas totes and hanging from the drooping back of her chair like fetishes. Another plastic bag rests uneasily on her canted lap and threatens to spill its contents with every snap of her arms. One arm rises from the wheel and yanks irritably on the sliding bag, an agitated cat swatting an impudent mouse.
"Shit," she hisses, and the strain in her voice jolts him from his paralysis.
"Hey, doll," he says, and rises from his chair and hurries forward to lift the bag from her lap. "Anything I can do?"
"Can you grab the keys?" she asks from behind her hair, and propels herself into the kitchen, where she sets her brakes and twists her torso at an impossible, tortured angle to reach the bags that sag from her push handles like a gangrenous scrotum.
He wordlessly retrieves the keys from the lock and closes the door, and then he sidles from foot to foot and rolls the keys from hand to hand. "What's all that for?" He nods at the bags.
"It's the ingredients for a salve to help your bruises." She wrestles a bag free with a pained grimace and heaves it onto the counter.
"Aw, doll, I don't need it. I figure I deserve 'em for being a jackass the last few months."
"Then it'll be for the next time," she retorts, and it's perilously close to a snarl. She frees another bag from its impromptu hanger and bucks it onto the counter.
Probably figures you're rejectin' her again, Gavin grunts inside his head, and the keys in his incessantly-turning hands develop a reedy, asthmatic wheeze.
"Where's Junior?" She brushes the hair from her face and looks towards the nursery. On the rare occasion that she comes home after Don does, the baby is usually to be found playing happily on the nursery floor or wobbling gleefully underfoot while Don washes dishes or surfs the couch. He never fails to come running at the sound of her voice, chubby fists outstretched and diapered ass crinkling triumphantly as he thunders across the living room like a miniature Godzilla, stepping on Duplo blocks or teething crackers as he comes. If he were here, he would be jabbering at her in his strange, cawing, pidgin language and trying to climb her bony legs.
"He's with my folks for the night. I thought it would be easier for us to talk. Plus, I thought it might be good for them to spend a little time with him just in case."
"In case what? In case I wash my hands of this and walk out?"
"Yeah." He swallows with a click and quashes the urge to rub his nape. "Don't worry, though. I'm not tryin' to keep him from you or anythin' like that."
She pauses in her excavation of the bags' contents, and an unpleasant smile twists her lips like a cramp. "If I wanted him, I could have him." Flat and reptilian, the cold, atonal burr of a predator with blood in its teeth and no room for regret in its heart, and he thinks again of a blond lunatic who had gone to his death without a sound, a windup man whose key had been ripped out, and of his parents, old and powerless and without even the memory of former kindnesses with which to blunt her terrible vengeance.
He flounders, momentarily stunned. "I know. I'm just sayin'." His heart flutters greasily in the back of his too-tight throat, and he nearly fumbles the keys.
"Mmm." She smiles that lightless smile again and pulls a bunch of unfamiliar herbs from the depths of the bag. "Besides, I'm not going anywhere."
"You don't know that."
"I do know that," she thunders, and slaps the counter. "I have always known that. You're the one who's never believed it." Her eyes narrow. Or maybe you do know. Maybe that's why you keep standing on my throat every time the department tells you to step lively. You know I won't leave, so what does it matter if you kick me in the face?"
"Just like you refuse to believe I love you?" he shoots back. "Well, I guess we're fuckin' even, huh?"
She stares at him in silence. Her eyes are bruised and hollow and red-rimmed, as if someone has fetched her a blow to the face. He supposes maybe someone has. She hollows her cheeks in contemplation, and then her shoulders slump. "Point taken."
It's the first time she's ever acknowledged the secret fear of his heart, and for a moment, he forgets to breathe. His heart stutters and stills inside his chest, and then it drops like a stone into his feet, where it settles beneath his sole. He opens his mouth, but all thought has fled, and there is only the hurt, smothering and ravenous and without end. He closes his mouth to keep it from tumbling out and carrying his innards with it. There's no shock; he's too much an observer, too much of a detective, for that, and he's brought this on himself, he knows, but hurt is hurt, for all that it is deserved, ugly and weeping and gnawing as cancer in his churning guts.
"And so now here we are," she says matter-of-factly, and shrugs, eyes dull with truth a long time coming.
He goes to her on wooden legs and drops to his knees before her chair. He's grateful for the support of her armrests because he's not sure he has the strength to hold himself up. Even though his chest has been unzipped and emptied of its contents, it feels so heavy, a wet sandbag beneath his shirt, and he suspects that without the support of her armrests, he would simply sprawl bonelessly to the floor at her feet, another windup doll robbed of its animus by a flick of her wrist.
How long? he wants to ask, but self-preservation won't allow his tongue to slit his throat. The hot, ragged mouth that sleeps just above his right hip stirs into sudden, gleeful consciousness and buries its needling, infected teeth deep into his roiling guts. Nausea rises like bitter pitch in his throat, and he grits his teeth against a grunt of pain and an acrid belch. Do you still love me? he thinks, but that question, too, threatens to lay him bare. He would touch her if he could, but when he raises his hand, a dead, hard stone at the end of his wrist, he sways wildly and nearly sends them both sprawling to the floor. So he replaces it on the armrests and racks his brain for something to say.
His mouth works, but nothing emerges except breath stale with confusion. Her face is impassive, but her eyes are filled with a terrible pity, a priest offering useless comfort to a grief-stricken widower. He tries to force them, those magic words that will--must heal this dreadful wound, but nothing comes, and she slowly shakes her head as though to say, There's nothing to say. Go with God and be at peace, my wayward son.
"I'm going to take a shower," she says, and backs away from him.
It feels so much like goodbye, and he can barely speak when he asks, "Can I give you a hand?"
"If you want," comes the reply, the indifferent whisper of rustling pages in an abandoned room.
He stands, winces at the creak and pop of bones that have never felt so old, and steps around her to fiddle blindly with the knobs on the stove. The conscientious cook in him wants to keep the soup at a simmer, though Christ knows who's going to eat it now. There is a hot pebble of anguish lodged in his throat, and his mouth feels numb and toothless and oddly disarticulated, as if a sadistic perp had reached inside his mouth and torn out his tongue at the root. Even if he could force sustenance past dead teeth and nerveless gums and a throat clogged with words and cries he cannot expel, his stomach is a hot, cramped ball behind his bellybutton. His stomach has always been his conscience, and right now, it's too full of guilt to accept anything else.
She's in the bedroom by the time he gives up the pretense of checking on the soup, parked beside the laundry hamper and wrestling with her shoes. She's half-naked, shirtless and braless, and there are too many curves and too many angles. Her shoulders aren't so much rounded as collapsed, as though bowed by a great weight, and her scapulae are harsh, bony ridges beneath translucent skin. Her plucking, tugging, prodding fingers are fleshless twigs on the end of her hands. Her face is hard and angular, almost craggy, and as her lips pull from her teeth in a lupine grimace, he thinks of pictures he'd once seen in his history textbook, of haggard, leather-skinned women gazing at the dust-ravaged prairie with lifeless eyes. They'd been hard and spare, those women, stripped of everything but the will to live, creatures who had dispensed with dreams and all their pretty trappings and exchanged them for the grim, unadorned truth of life without pity or kindness or the weakness of faith in a better tomorrow. For them, there had only been now and the unforgiving reality of barren fields and unfed children and unmarked wooden crosses behind the outhouse. Looking at their gaunt, dust-grimed faces, he'd seen the unglamorous face of the survivor.
He wants to reach out and smooth the lines from her face, to fill in the hollow of her cheek, but he senses a terrible sharpness beneath her skin, the promise of blood and tattered flesh, and so he shuffles past her to the bed and drops to one knee to retrieve her bath seat from beneath the bed. There's a fine layer of dust on it when he pulls it out like one of Hammerback's autopsy slabs, and he wonders how long it's gone unused. She'd smelled of soap and and warmth when he'd knelt before her, so she had clearly bathed recently. He furrows his brow and tries to remember if she bathed this morning, but all he can remember is the heady, delirious relief he'd felt when she'd kissed him goodbye on his way out the door. He purses his lips and wills himself to recall, to feel the dampness of her hair beneath his fingers as he'd brushed stray strands from her cool temple and the humid, astringent whiff of soap on the air, but nothing comes except the memory of his heart triphammering unsteadily inside his chest as his lips had met hers. It shouldn't matter, this fine layer of dust, but it does, and he swallows a sour pang of unease and carries the seat into the bathroom and settles it into the tub, aligns it in the center of the tub and carefully tightens the anchoring clamp. He'll never hear the end of it if he cracks the goddamn fiberglass. He turns to the sink and opens the cabinet beneath it and helps himself to the baby wipes Rebecca uses for her hands and Junior's ass, and then he returns his attention to the tub and dusty bath seat.
He wipes it down with scrupulous care, and then he reaches for her shower wand. He plucks it from its plastic wall bracket, and then he shifts his weight to his toes and leans forward to turn on the tap. He manipulates the knobs with practiced familiarity. One twist cold and three twists hot is what she prefers. He tests the water that sloshes from the tap anyway, a protector to the last, and when he is satisfied he's not filling her bath with scalding water, he shakes the water from his fingertips and rocks back on his heels and rises from his crouch and returns to the bedroom.
She's conquered her sneakers, which lay in front of the hamper like a brace of dead hare, but now she's wrangling with her socks, which obdurately refuse to yield the scrawny atolls of her heels. She's jammed her spindly index finger into her sock and pushed the thin, white fabric down, and it squirms and twists like a turning worm. She curses, and breath leaves her in a plosive, ragged gasp.
"You want some help?"
She struggles for a moment more, and then she sits up and jabs her feet at him.
"I'll take that as a yes," he says drily, and tugs absently on the fabric of his pants before dropping to one knee again.
He gently peels off her socks and tosses them into the hamper, and then he cups her cold eggshell feet in his palms. They're cold and mottled and flex and tremble spasmodically in the cups of his palms, and when he draws his thumbs over her fallen arch and the tops of her swollen, purple toes, he feels the noisome grit of dead, dry skin. The skin of one toe is raw and scabbed, as though she'd caught it beneath a bedframe or smashed it into the door or the back of a subway seat, and when he probes it with a cautious finger, she startles and tries to withdraw her foot.
"That hurt?"
She snorts and favors him with an incredulous look. What do you think, o, Master Detective? It would be funny if he weren't so terrified that he's losing her. "I'm doing the best I can," is all she says, and her jaw works in quiet defiance as she stares at a point far above his head.
"I know. "I'm not- I just want you to be okay, that's all." He massages the soles of her feet and discovers more grit, as if she'd crossed the desert in bare feet, and he watches her toes curl and fan and flex. "I know it might be too late for that to matter anymore, but that doesn't mean it isn't true."
She lowers her gaze to meet his, and her face softens. "Always the cop." She reaches out to stroke his cheek, and he turns into her touch, light and spidery but warm and alive and unmistakably his Rebecca.
There you are. Don't leave me, Rebecca. Please hang on. Don't give up on me. Please. He presses a feverish kiss to the heart of her cool, dry palm, and like her toes, her fingers close reflexively around his mouth for an instant, the fleeting brush of an anemone. "Not a a cop, dammit," he murmurs into her puckered palm. "Not because I'm a cop. Because I'm your husband."
Soft, mirthless laughter. "Are you? Sometimes it's impossible to distinguish one from the other."
It cuts him to the quick, and he would argue if he could, but the proof is etched in the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth and in the bruised, distant melancholy in her eyes. Neither had been there before, when he'd been so besotted with her that he'd pushed duty aside for the first time in his life and courted her with reckless abandon. Her face had been unlined when he'd brushed the rice from her hair and the fabric of her wedding dress from her narrow shoulders, and when he'd helped her down the snow-slick steps of St. Patrick's, her eyes had been bright with future's rosy promise.
He's not sure when the lines began to appear, but he he's watched that glorious light fade ever since some nutjob named Lessing had opened a hole in his guts and his world courtesy of a bomb and a plummeting photocopier. It had merely been obscured at first, dimmed by exhaustion and worry as she fretted at his bedside and bargained with God to keep his feet planted on her side of the river, but then he'd opened his idiot, pain-wracked mouth, and it had dimmed in earnest, smothered by hurt and old insecurities and wounds he could feel but had never seen.
She's bounced back so many times, has fanned and fed the dying flame of her quiet admiration with reserves hidden deep within her heart. The light has returned again and again, only to be stamped out by the relentless demands of a city that neither sleeps nor remembers its gratitude. The uniform he swore to serve has been stitched into his skin since he was crawling across his parents' living room in short pants and investigating the shiny bauble of his old man's badge with his toothless mouth and chubby, clutching fingers. Being a cop is a part of him, encoded into the immutable helices of his DNA, and he could no more forsake the compulsion to serve and protect than he could escape his blue eyes or the New York embedded in his tongue. His badge is an extension of his heart, and not so long ago, she had washed pieces of his guts out of its crevices with a damp cotton swab. He could no more live without it than he could live without his heart. Hasn't he told her as much, admitted the sorry, addict's truth of it with his traitor's mouth?
He has been a cop always but a husband when he could, and the master he serves too often bids him break his mistress. He has ignored her dreams in favor of a stranger's pleas and left her to celebrate joint milestones alone. He has denied her what he freely gives to others, and he has done it all in the name of a greater good in which she never seems to share no matter how quietly she accepts her place in the gilded cage of second place.
And it is second place. He has denied it to himself and to her, but she has always known the truth. Your second place is better than a lot of men's first, she had told him once upon a time, when the light in her eyes had been bright and the ties that had bound them had been unsullied by so many broken promises and empty IOUs, and maybe she had believed it then. She isn't a liar, his china doll--secretive and brusque and a keeper of her own counsel--but never a liar. Her tongue cuts, but it does not fork.
There is no light in the eyes that look down at him while he kneels with her fragile, dying feet in his hands, only sorrow and unwanted knowledge and smoldering ash where love had once burned so brightly.
Is love still there? he wonders as he lowers her feet and rises to his. Is it still there, buried beneath all those disappointments I swore I couldn't help and fighting for the breath necessary for one more resurgence? Or has it finally succumbed, smothered beneath the cloying weight of not right now and I'm so sorry and I know I promised, but...?
"I'm gonna make sure the bath is ready," he says, and turns away. He draws a breath and waits for her to tell him not to come back, but there is only stony silence and the dismal echo of her humorless laughter, and so he rolls up his sleeves and toes off his loafers and shuffles into the bathroom to turn off the water before it sloshes over the side of the tub. He carefully avoids his distorted reflection in the cold steel and the mirror mounted above the sink.
He turns to go back for her but finds her waiting for him, parked a foot from the bathroom with her footplates swung wide like a broken hangman's scaffold, half-naked and barefoot and withered in her chair. All that remains of her clothing is her skirt, and she raises her arms and waits for him to lift her to her feet.
He bends at the knees and waits for her to rest her hands on his shoulders. "Ready?" he asks when her palsied, groping grip settles, and when she nods, he stands and brings her with him, hands on either side of her ribcage. She sways drunkenly, right hip sagging with the effort of compensating for a leg two inches shorter than its counterpart, and he steadies her, acts as her center of gravity until she lurches into her own. "I got you," he murmurs as she twitches and spasms, and a strangled laugh escapes her.
Her jittering legs fall still at last, and she sags against him, her face buried in the fabric of his shirt. "You said that once before," she mumbles into the thin cotton, a voice from beneath the loose earth of a freshly-dug grave. "On our wedding day. "Do you remember?"
"Of course I do," he replies thickly, and cups the delicate curve of her skull. "I haven't forgotten a single thing about that day, not one. And I meant what I said."
"I know you did." She presses her cheek to his heart and wraps her arms around his hips.
"Do you still believe it?"
No answer comes, and the heart lodged firmly in his soles spasms in unnameable anguish. She is boneless and heavy and inert, and he suspects that if he were to let go, she would simply crumple to the floor and splay there, legs akimbo and eyes open and unblinking and chest rising and falling like a punctured bellows. She would lie there and let the world roll over her in its cruel tide while she withdrew into herself and shut it out, and when the world had passed, she would gather her strength and rise again and march onward with those unblinking eyes.
She is, after all, a survivor.
He holds her until her legs begin to jitter and shake again, this time from fatigue, and then he reaches behind her and unclasps the magnetic snap of her skirt. It falls to the floor with a sigh of relief and puddles around her naked feet as though to hide them from judgmental, scornful eyes. Then, he hooks his thumb into the frail waistband of her panties and eases them down. They're thin and insubstantial in his grasp, almost threadbare, and as they slide down her wobbling, coltish legs, he wonders how long it's been since she's treated herself to a new pair.
Like it matters. Even if she could, the Kmart panty three-pack is all she could afford. Dying housewife panties. Just one of the perks of being a civil servant's wife. The voice sounds inexplicably like Scagnetti, he who sports a brushcut like a badge of honor and hitches his khakis in a sign of respect whenever Rebecca makes an appearance in the precinct. He finds himself thinking of sitting in an unmarked car with Angell and listening to a spoiled editor named Amber Stanton sneer down her reconstructed nose at his "civil servant's salary." The wide, black brim of Stanton's hat as she leaned jauntily through the window to sneer at him through a cloud of high-end perfume and Angell's tight, sardonic grin as she swanned down the sidewalk. Grief joins guilt in its torment, and the cramp that seizes his roiling belly is so intense that he nearly cries out. He presses his lips together until he can feel bone and breathes through his nose until it passes.
Mourning Angell with Rebecca in his arms strikes him as yet another betrayal, and so he closes his eyes and buries his nose in her hair and wills her scent to flood his nostrils and fill all his empty, lonely places. I'm sorry, he thinks, and the guilt is so heavy inside his chest that he feels like he's drowning in it, hot and thick and sweet as nectar. 'M so sorry, but she's dead because of me. Maybe if she hadn't been flirtin' with me and chasin' somethin' that was never gonna be, she woulda seen it comin'. Maybe she woulda seen that armored car barrellin' toward the diner a second sooner and found cover before that son of a bitch, Cade, ever got a draw on her. Maybe she and that snot-nosed punk she was savin' from bein' caught in his own dirty laundry woulda made it out the back before those bastards ever made it out of the truck. Maybe she coulda called for closer backup. But she was on the phone with me, playin' it cool and coy because she thought there was heat between us. Now she'll never be warm again, never have the chance to find what she was lookin' for with me with someone who could give it to her, and that's on me. Not even splatterin' Cade's brains all over that boiler room is gonna change that. That stain is forever, and I still haven't figured out how to live with it.
He tightens his hold on her and trails his fingertips down the sagging, uneven ridge of her spine. There should be more flesh to cover it, but the job has demanded so many pounds of flesh over the years that there is precious little with which to dress her misaligned bones. She is hard and spare beneath his hands, a stripling eking life from the stingy soil of a rocky hillside. So different from the pale, eager young girl who had so innocently gone to his bed and the fierce, healthy young woman who had carried his child and grown into the enticing, voluptuous curves of a woman in full splendor, with ripe breasts and curvaceous legs and taut thighs and a soft, yielding belly that spoke of a life of, if not plenty, then of comfort. He lets his stroking hands dip to the meager swell of her buttocks, and her shanks are flat beneath his palms. They've always been long and compressed from hours of sitting with no respite from the pressure save her sporadic attempts to shift in her seat, but they've never been so lean, so small.
He cups them to balance her, and then he nuzzles her temple and the sensitive nautilus of her ear. "You need to eat somethin'," he whispers. "I made a pot of soup for supper. French onion with lots of cheese, just how you like it."
She tenses immediately, and his stricken heart cries out again, though he can hardly fault her. Too often, food has come as a final mercy to the condemned, a last, sweet morsel before the end. He has offered her food because he can think of no words with which to comfort her as he issues the department's edicts and strips the flesh from her bones. Words are so much oral flatulence when you're being set upon the road to nowhere. At least food offers nourishment and fleeting solace.
He tightens his grip and presses his lips to her clenched jaw. "No! No," he hisses. "Rebecca, I swear, this isn't another last supper, another last meal before the department comes to shake my hand and kick you in the ass as they drag me out the door. It's just- I know you don't believe it anymore, but I love you. I love you, and I want you to be happy like you used to be. Just...please."
For a moment, she remains stiff as a board, and all he can hear is her rapid, shallow breathing, a small, dangerous animal trapped in the hunter's strangling snare. Then she goes slack and sags against him, and she turns her face to mouth the fabric at his sternum.
"All right. All right," he croons, and he's so relieved that his vision swims.
She raises one small foot and paws arrhythmically at the floor, a foal taking its first uncertain steps. It's Rebecca-speak for My legs are giving out, and so he carefully lowers her into her chair again and watches in silence as her legs shudder convulsively and she grits her teeth against the spasms that threaten to wrack the rest of her. It's a spectacle to which he's borne witness a thousand times in the privacy of their bedroom, his proud, brilliant queen shamed by the vicious vagaries of her warped body and misaligned nervous system, and it never fails to cleave his heart in two. It's not fair that someone so fierce and redoubtable and unrivaled in her field should be reduced to twitching in her chair like a drooling electroshock victim and fighting tooth and claw for the simple dignity of upright. He watches her struggle to achieve the latter, feet thumping and scrabbling for the purchase of footplates that aren't there, and he reaches out to brush his fingers over her flustered, exertion-reddened face.
Her legs continue their uncontrolled, insectile dance, the skin of her quadriceps rippling and puckering with its nervous energy, but the rest of her stills. Her contracted, wildly-pitching arms and clawed fingers unfurl and sink to her lap, where they dangle limply from her weakly-pumping knees, and her torso ceases its restive, agonized torsion. She closes her eyes and sighs at his tentative touch, and the tension drains from her face as his fingertips ghost over the tip of her nose and graze her parted lips and narrow chin. The chair hisses and squeaks as she shifts to achieve greater contact, and he obliges her unspoken need, presses the ball of his thumb to her lower lip and lets a tremor that has nothing to do with exertion or unruly muscles prickle against the gun-callused skin. Her longing for contact is palpable, and a fanciful part of him swears that he can see her pores opening to drink him in, never mind that he can scarcely see for the tears in his eyes.
I wonder if she'd be so damn eager for your touch if she knew that thumb that was just strokin' her lower lip belongs to the hand of a murderin' bastard who spread some merc's brains all over the boiler room floor. Wonder if she'd think it was so damn sweet if she could taste the blood it's covered in, sneers a mocking, cold voice inside his head, the voice of Shane Casey and a thousand other skels whose ranks he'd joined the moment he'd squeezed that trigger and left his oath to act as the city's conscience in a lazily-swirling cloud of cordite and dust.
The thought inspires another cramp and the urge to withdraw his hand, but he understands that to do so would destroy the last, fragile thread of chance that dangles before him, and so he resists the impulse and instead repeats the motion, retraces the unhurried, reverent movement of his fingers over her upturned face. She sighs as though the weight of Sisyphus has been lifted from her bowed shoulders, and his heart trembles in recognition. Somewhere behind this thin, alien face with its dead, baleful eyes, his Rebecca stirs.
Still here, he thinks incredulously. She's still here somewhere.
Yeah, but how long you think she's gonna stick around once she knows the truth? the voice needles. She signed on for a choirboy, not some hypocritical waste of air who blows a guy's brains out in the heat of a tantrum and then drowns his sorrows in cheap hooch because he can't stomach the truth. Why should she stay? Look around, Detective . This isn't exactly the Waldorf-Astoria, and these days, you can't even be assed to throw a fuck into her. What's left for her here except another twenty years of almosts?
Dull panic cramps his aching gut, and he emits another acid belch. "You ready?" he asks when the tremors have stilled, and bends to slip the slack puddle of fabric from her feet. He bunches it in his fist and tosses it haphazardly at the open hamper. The skirt flares and catches on the edge, but the panties land atop her shoes in a rumpled, white clot that reminds him of Jess' intestines pulsing and fluttering against his hand, and his mutinous gorge rises. The guilt rises, too, and he's not sure which is making it so damn hard to breathe, like gasping for air through a layer of mud and dead hair.
Haunted, he thinks dumbly as Rebecca's slender arms reach for him and hover in the air before his eyes like beseeching revenants. I'm haunted.
He reaches for her blindly. It's a ritual as old as their union, and he works on muscle memory. One arm around her shoulders. One slipped behind her stringy, too-straight knees. Lift from the knees, not the spine. Hold her close so that she does not slip from his arms on an errant spasm and tumble to the bedroom floor, all pained groans and panicked breathing as her stunned nervous system processes the pain of sudden, unceremonious impact and struggles to catalogue bumps and bruises that blossom beneath her skin. She curls her arms around his neck and tucks her head in the crook of his shoulder, and it should feel good, this moment of absolute trust and familiar intimacy, but all he can feel is Angell's lolling, dead weight in his arms as he'd pulled her from the back of the squad car and raced into the emergency room. He remembers the limp, listless swing of her arms the most, how their slack swing had perversely mirrored the urgent stride of his legs as he'd burst through the lethargic sliding doors and screamed for help into the morose and jaundiced silence.
No swinging arms, thank God for small and useless mercies, just her bobbing feet, mottled, purple flashes on the periphery of his vision. It should ease the grip of this memory, this intrusive anomaly, but it doesn't. It only intensifies it, and though he knows he's holding Rebecca, who is wounded and irritable and brittle, but blessedly alive, his tortured conscience screams that it's Angell, motionless and heavy with Charon's mantle and slipping through his fingers no matter how fast he runs or how tightly he holds her.
(soheavyonygodshe'ssoheavyholdonholdon) his mind howls even as his eyes register that it's Rebecca he's holding, Rebecca of the golden hair and mouth full of serrated blades. Rebecca, whose breath is plosive and warm against his neck, and whose arms tighten reflexively around his neck in response to his wordless terror. She clings to him as he scissors through the bathroom door on legs gone numb, and she stiffens spasmodically when he lists unexpectedly to starboard to spare her outthrust feet a painful meeting with the doorjamb. She turns into him, and her breasts graze his sternum with every rise and fall of her chest. Alive, alive, yet his mind insists that she's nothing but a handful of blood and blind eyes and unmitigated failure.
The cognitive dissonance between what is and what so recently was is so great that he nearly topples headlong into the tub when he bends to lower her into it, but his muscles remember to love her when his mind cannot, and he holds his feet as he lowers her into the water toes-first.
And now I lay my burden down, he thinks, and hates himself. This is not a laying down of imagined burdens, but a sacrament, a sacred baptism. And he anointed her head with oil.
"Too hot?" his mouth asks when she hisses. He doesn't proceed until she shakes her head, and then he slowly sets her on the narrow, padded strip of plastic and vinyl. She releases herself to the water at once, lets the tension ebb from her body and into the water, and her limbs float to the surface and bob like bits of driftwood. It's the picture of serenity, a rare chance to see her as she was before he'd caressed her face and left hollows and lines in his wake. Unblemished and lovely and adrift on blissful, painless tides, and he should savor it, especially now, especially after his renewed acquaintance with death on a lonely, rattling subway car. But all he can see when he looks into the tub is Angell's still, white form in the hospital morgue, her eyes closed and her lethal wound tastefully hidden beneath a thin, green sheet the color of early decomposition, a free preview of what awaited her after her star turn on the mortician's table.
He drops to his knees, grateful that the linoleum floor will bear him up, and turns the plastic crank on the bath seat until Rebecca's breasts and belly disappear beneath the water. "You want some bubbles?"
A languid shake of her head, and the ends of her hair undulate with the clutching, illusory grace of kelp. He finds himself at loose ends. He has promised her a confession, and so he must give it, but he doesn't want to disturb her rare and precious peace, to see the serene softness of her face harden into damning scorn. He doesn't want to see the feral changeling behind his maiden fair's face, and so he busies his hands with useless movement, scoops water into his cupped palm and tips it over her head; it sluices down her face, drips from the tip of her nose and beads in her eyelashes like dew. There's a melancholy beauty to it that soothes him, and so he repeats the act, a vassal attending to a sleeping goddess.
"Enjoying yourself?"
"You remember when I did this for you in the hospital? Washed your hair?" It isn't what he'd planned to say, what he needs to say, but they are the only words that he can find.
"Mmm." It's a soft hum, almost drowsy, but he knows that she's listening intently behind those half-lidded eyes, mind as sharp as her expression is logy. "'S when I knew I was safe."
A strangled noise escape him, and he struggles to breathe around the sudden ache in the center of his chest, a wave of emotion so huge that it threatens to swamp him. Oh, Christ, he thinks, and clutches the side of the tub to keep himself upright.
Her eyes remain heavy-lidded, but her head turns, and she raises her hand from the water and rests it on his wrist. A faint smile, and she draws light, lazy circles on the spar of his wrist with the gibbous crescents of her nails. They're far longer than she usually keeps them, and jagged where she's caught them on a door opener or the fabric of Junior's clothes, and he makes a mental note to trim them once she's warm and dry. They scrape his skin in a loose, wavering circuit, and his skin prickles at the contact, as though someone has blown on it.
It's Jess, he thinks with the stuporous lucidity of the mad. She's come to haunt me for not gettin' to the diner in time, for not savin' her. He blinks, and suddenly, it's Jess in the tub and her hand on his wrist, cold and white as bone and bloated with water and decomposition. Her fingertips are pruned and perversely soft, like the rotten, gelid heft of overripe nectarines, and she floats in a wash of blood and tiny clumps of tissue. Her wet hair is matted to her scalp and water runs down her face in pale pink rivulets. The ends of her hair squirm beneath the befouled water, grave worms and bits of blackened entrails, and his gorge rises and spasms.
You called me baby, she croons in a glottal, gargling voice, as though she's speaking through a mouthful of black and clotted blood. Do you remember?
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