“And you?”
“I don’t know. I should leave you. I should go away on my own.”
I pulled back to look at him. “Don’t say—”
He covered my mouth with his hand. “I’m not going to. I can’t. I should, but I can’t. The condo is secure. I’ll have bodyguards whenever I leave the house. There are men that will watch Ralphio—both from the cops end and from Dom’s end. And if there’s any indication that we’re in danger, we’ll adjust our plans.”
He leaned his forehead against mine and stroked the back of my hair.
“It’s only one week before we find out you’re the father. We could leave for our honeymoon and then not come back.”
I stared at his lips as they turned up into the slightest of smiles. “If it looks like we need to, we will,” he promised.
The next question I could only ask because he was holding me so intimately and because I couldn’t see his eyes. “And if you aren’t the father?”
He let a beat go by. Then two.
Finally, he said, “You already know I am.”
It wasn’t a real answer, but I didn’t press him. I was too afraid I wouldn’t like what he’d say if I did.
Chapter Nineteen
I spent the weekend in a daze. There was a lot to organize in terms of security. It was easy to hide a bodyguard at the club. The apartment, not so much. Neither JC nor I wanted someone inside the condo, invading our personal space, but I was willing to adjust in order to feel protected. JC, on the other hand, insisted on keeping the watch outside the doors.
“We have a high-tech security system set up already. No one’s getting in here,” he insisted. “A man outside is more than enough.”
I could agree to that, except I wanted the man just outside our door, and that wasn’t happening in our luxury apartment building. We settled for a man in the lobby. Dom made arrangements to have a team member pose as an additional doorman on each shift. It worked well enough, but I couldn’t believe it was something we could carry on for any length of time.
And the few times I tried to ask JC how long he thought we could pull this off, he dismissed the question. “I’ve got this,” he assured me.
Part of me believed him. Part of me believed he might even have something up his sleeve that he wasn’t ready to share. Another part of me believed he was in denial. That scared me too much to think about it for long, so I pushed that part of me aside and joined him in his delusion.
I worked both Saturday and Sunday night, which was a benefit. The familiar groove gave me something to focus on that wasn’t terrifying or out of the ordinary. At the club, my guard kept so well out of sight, it was easy to forget he was there. If Laynie had been working, I would have had to explain him, but she had weekends off. It bought me time to settle into the new routine.
Unfortunately, as grateful as I was to have the distraction, the hours at The Sky Launch were also a burden. There was much to do to get ready for my leave of absence, which started on Wednesday, and that made my shifts jam-packed. I was exhausted by the time I got home, with no mental bandwidth to deal with anything that wasn’t right in front of me. Luckily the majority of wedding plans had already been taken care of, so I could effectively ignore that for the time being. But there were other things I was avoiding. Two days passed before I let myself really think about the danger JC was in, that I was in.
On top of all of it, I had a baby growing inside me. I still hadn’t absorbed that. Monday morning, I got ready for bed, eyes already half-closed, when I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror as I undressed. Wearing only my panties, I stopped to examine myself. My belly was taut, which explained why all of my waistbands had seemed snug recently. And my breasts looked full, and my nipples seemed darker. The changes were subtle but there. Yet I still felt exactly the same as I always had. If I hadn’t seen the screen fill up with a face and a spine and limbs that waved at the doctor’s office, I’d never have believed the test I’d taken was accurate.
In the mirror, I saw JC come up behind me before I felt his hands at my waist. “You glow,” he said softly, his voice filled with awe.
I squinted at my reflection. Yes, maybe my skin did seem to have a rosier complexion than usual.
He wrapped his arms around me and pressed his body tight against mine. Since the meeting at Pierce Industries two days before, there’d been a subtle tension between us. We hadn’t ignored it, exactly, but we’d maneuvered around it. We talked about being safe without again addressing our alternatives. We’d fucked, we’d made love, but we hadn’t simply held each other. Until now.
He pressed his cheek to my head and sighed, and I felt the weight of it in his hot breath on my temple. “I love you. You know that, right?”
I nodded and placed my arms over his, tightening his embrace. “Everything you do tells me how much.” If he didn’t love me like he did, he wouldn’t have come back for me. He wouldn’t insist on staying while Mennezzo was free on bail.
“Too much,” JC mumbled. “Or not enough. I’m not sure which sometimes.”
He moved his hand down and slipped it inside my panties, but he didn’t go as low as I expected he would go. Instead, he caressed the stretched skin of my belly. “I hope she gets your eyes.”
“She?” It was the first time we’d really talked about the baby since the doctor’s office. “Are you hoping for a girl?”
“A girl is just the easiest thing for me to picture. A miniature version of you.”
My throat tightened. Because in my mind, I saw a miniature JC. And the accuracy of my picture was questionable.
“I hope she has your sense of humor,” I said when I could speak, turning into him. Even if it wasn’t JC’s biologically, I would make sure that he was very much a part of our child.
***
I woke up that afternoon, my hands clammy and my heart racing. JC was still sleeping next to me. Careful not to wake him, I sat up and tried to calm myself while I attempted to remember what I’d dreamed about. It had been vivid only a moment before and now was already fading, but I could recall part of it still. I’d been in a rocking chair, singing some sort of lullaby, a baby nestled in the crook of my arm. While I’d cooed and smiled down at the infant, JC had come up behind me. “She glows,” he’d said.
“She looks like you.” I’d glanced up at him only to find it wasn’t JC after all, but Chandler.
He kissed my temple. “She does look like me, doesn’t she? Pierce through and through.”
I’d panicked for a moment about the change of leading man, but as often happens in dreams, I adjusted quickly. I gazed back down at the baby. “We make beautiful offspring.”
“Beautiful and ungrateful offspring.” This time when I looked up, it was my father standing there, his face cruel and menacing. The baby and the rocking chair vanished, and I was cowering under my father’s raised hand. “Don’t tell me you don’t have any money. Your fancy clothes and fancy apartment say different. You should have given me what I asked for. Ungrateful bitch.” He’d raised his arm to hit me right before I woke up.
Gentle pressure on my thigh startled me from the memory. “What’s wrong?” JC asked, bleary-eyed.
“Bad dream.” I shuddered at the lingering image of my father.
JC sat up next to me and stroked his hand up and down my back. “Anything I can do?”
I started to shake my head then stopped. For the first time in days, I realized that there was one aspect of my out-of-control life that I could do something about—with JC’s help, anyway.
“Yeah,” I said, snuggling into his arms. “You can take me to see my father.”
***
Two days later, we stood on the step of a Staten Island condo. No one answered when we rang the bell the first time, nor the second. JC rapped his knuckles on the wood, and then cupped his hands to peer inside the window at the top of the door.
I’d been nervous on the drive out, as scared at the prospect of seeing my father as I
was of seeing the place he’d been living for most of the past year. Stereotypically, I’d expected JC to lead me to an abandoned building in the Bronx or to some makeshift housing under a bridge. I hadn’t expected to be taken here.
“Are you sure we’re at the right address?” I stepped back to look again at the strip of condos that lined the street. They looked like any other middle-income housing, not the drug den for heroin addicts that JC had described. The yard was well-groomed, and the cars parked in front seemed to be maintained. There was a golf course and country club only a block away.
“This is definitely it,” JC said, knocking again.
A shot sounded, and I jumped.
“It was just a car backfiring,” he assured me. “But we can still go back and get the bulletproof vests if you want.”
I shook my head. “He’s not going to shoot me. It just startled me. That’s all.”
A door opened at the end unit, and a mother walked out with two small children in tow. She threw a suspicious glance as she walked past us, clutching tighter to the small hands.
“They’re at the bad place,” I heard the little boy say before he was shushed and ushered along.
Maybe we were at the right address.
Cigarette butts littered the porch, but other than that, this unit appeared like any other. I looked over the stoop into the bushes and saw the first indicator that my father might be inside after all—a pair of used needles sticking out of the greenery.
I shivered. All this time, I’d imagined my father withdrawn from society while he fed his addictions. Instead he was hidden in plain sight, in the middle of suburbia.
With still no answer at the door, JC tried the knob. It turned. He shot me a glance.
I shrugged. “If it’s open, I guess.” It wasn’t as though we would be charged with trespassing. We were here with police backup, a unit of officers gathered right around the building, waiting for my cue to come forward and take my father into custody.
Simultaneously, we looked back to Drew, who stood at the edge of the driveway. Hunting down convicts who’d jumped parole was not his area, but when JC had reached out to him, he’d met with Officer Taylor, the cop who had been on my father’s case since he’d shown up at the Eighty-Eighth Floor and demanded I give him twenty thousand dollars. Together, the men had arranged both for the team of police and the deal I wanted to offer my asshole excuse of a dad.
Now, Drew nodded.
With that as permission, JC threw the door open. “Hello?” he called out as he stepped tentatively inside.
A terrible stench wafted from the condo and clung to me. It smelled like feces and vomit and urine and chlorine all mixed together. I covered my nose with my hand and paused half a second, wondering if it had been a bad idea to not let one of the plainclothes men to accompany us after all. I’d wanted to talk to my father without them, though, and I still did. If we needed them, all either JC or I had to do was say the word and the mic I wore would relay the message. So with a rush of courage, I grabbed the hem of JC’s jacket and followed him in.
The interior of the condo was dark even though there were still several hours before nightfall. Heavy blackout curtains over the windows shut out the sun. I blinked, letting my eyes adjust, as JC tried a switch on the wall to no avail. The door had swung shut behind me, but I pushed it back open to let some light in and immediately started to retch at the sight. The room looked like it was straight out of an episode of Hoarders. It was strewn with trash and dirty dishes crawling with maggots. Small drops of what looked like blood were smattered all over the walls and ceiling. Flies buzzed around a bucket in the corner, and I was certain without looking in it that it was filled with shit. At the other end of the room, a man and a woman were passed out on the floor, needles and spoons lying around them.
I half regretted bringing JC to this horrid place. I wished he could never know that I was related to someone who lived in this pigsty. Someone who was this disgusting. It was embarrassing.
Yet he was the one who turned toward me, blocking my view. “We don’t have to do this, Gwen. Just say the word, and the men outside can come in here and take your dad into custody. You don’t have to offer him your deal.”
He was right—I didn’t have to offer my father anything. For as little as he’d given me in my life, I didn’t feel obligated to him, which made it hard to explain my reasons for wanting to see this idea through, even to myself. Maybe I felt like I had something to prove. Or maybe it was about being the bigger person. Or maybe my few days of pregnancy had already changed me into someone more maternal. Someone who wanted what was best for my flesh and blood, even if the feeling wasn’t mutual.
Whatever the reason, I was committed to it. And as many strings as our authority friends had pulled to fulfill my requests, they couldn’t out and out skirt the law.
“If I see him,” Officer Taylor had told me, “I’ll have to arrest him.”
That meant that if I wanted to make this deal with Dad, it had to come from me.
“It’s okay,” I assured JC without much confidence to back it up. “I’m okay. Let’s just find him and get this over with.”
Reluctantly, he agreed, but he made me wait by the door while he crossed the room to nudge the sleeping man. “We’re looking for William Anders,” he said, when the guy seemed relatively coherent. JC’s detectives kept tabs on my father at all times, so we knew he was currently on the premises. Not having to trudge aimlessly through the shithole would be welcomed. “Is he upstairs or down?”
The man sat up, bobbing as he did, obviously still high on whatever drug he’d taken. It took him a minute, but finally he answered. “Will is down.”
Down was exactly the answer I was hoping he wouldn’t give. If it was this dark on the main floor, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like in the basement.
JC apparently had the same thought. He pulled out his cell phone and turned on the flashlight before gesturing for me to join him at the basement door. I stepped carefully over to him, then—my hand clasped tightly around his—we went down the stairs together.
Downstairs was even worse than the main floor. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how I wanted to look at it—the lights worked and were already on as we descended, making it easier to avoid the used needles and blood rags underfoot, but the waste was significantly worse, and the scene was chilling. How did people live like this? Existing merely for the next hit with no thought to hygiene or nourishment or even comfort. It boggled my mind and plucked at the nugget of filial affection that I kept buried deep inside.
The smell down here was worse too, the odor so thick and foul that I could taste it. I pulled my T-shirt up over my mouth and nose and tried not to breathe as JC and I paused at the bottom of the stairs to scan the space. What other horrors would we have to endure as we made our way through these rooms in search of the man who’d made my childhood hell?
Luckily, we didn’t have to look far. Two adult men and a half-dressed teenage girl lay sprawled out on the couch in front of us, and there, on the floor beneath them, was my father.
He appeared asleep or passed out or maybe just so doped up he wasn’t able to move. The latter seemed most likely since his arm was splayed to his side, a rubber tube tied around his bicep and blood dripping from a pinpoint just below the inside of his elbow. He was hard to see like that, but I couldn’t look away. He’d aged ten years in the last fifteen months. His hair was thin, his clothes unkempt, his face gaunt and his skin flushed. Bruises and track marks decorated his arm, and an abscess oozed on his forearm.
This man had always been a giant in my life. A monster with strength and rage that always made me feel frail in comparison. Like this, puny and pathetic, he was barely recognizable. I wanted to have compassion, and I guess I did or else I wouldn’t be there, but I wasn’t moved the way I thought I should be. Maybe all his faults had stemmed from his slave to addiction—first to alcohol and now to heroin. Maybe he couldn’t help the person he’
d been to my siblings and my mother. That didn’t make him forgivable. He’d had a responsibility that he’d ignored.
Now I understood my reasons for having to do this for him. It wasn’t out of love or obligation. It wasn’t, actually, for him at all. It was for me. I could only do this if he no longer had a hold on me. This was proof that I was free of him in a way that he’d never be free, even if he chose rehabilitation.
I took a deep breath, ready to confront him.
One of the men on the couch noticed us and turned his eyes slightly toward us. “If you’re looking to buy, we ain’t got anything. Unless Jake is back.”
JC tightened his grip on my arm. “Not buying.”
“Well, then.” The addict blinked a few times. “If you’re looking to steal, we still ain’t got anything.”
My father shifted, rolling his head to peer at us. His eyes were crossed, and I wasn’t sure if he could focus, but he seemed to meet my gaze. “Gwen,” he said, his tone absent of inflection.
It was the only word he spoke, and I took it as an invitation to approach him. JC kept his hand at my back until I crouched down at my father’s feet. “Hi, Daddy.”
“What are you doing here.” Again, his voice was flat, his question sounding more like a statement.
“I came to see you. The last time we saw each other, you said you’d be back. I got tired of waiting.”
His eyes lulled shut then he jerked up, as if he was fighting unconsciousness. His face was expressionless, so I couldn’t be sure he even knew what I was talking about. But then he said, “The cash. Did you bring it?”
He was slightly more animated now, as though the thought of money was the only thing worth getting excited over. I wondered how many bundles of dope twenty grand could buy him. Wondered if he was struggling to calculate it in his head. Wondered how long he’d go before spending it all. Would he even be able to go through half of it before he’d consumed enough of the drug to kill him?
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