"Baby..."
"I'm okay," I assured him, feeling my heart flutter at the rawness in his voice as he said that one word.
"Helen..." he tried again.
"I'm fine. Like Connor said, nothing happened. I stopped him."
"I should have been here," he said, taking the blame onto his shoulders, where it did not belong.
"I can take care of myself," I assured him, putting some steel into my voice even though I knew I could trust him with all my soft and mushy.
"You shouldn't have to," he insisted.
"In what world would that even be a remote possibility?" I shot back. "This wasn't about you," I told him. "This was about some scumbag who thinks he can have whatever he desires simply because he is stronger. I showed him that he can't. That's it."
"This is..."
"Charlie," Connor's voice broke in, "Can you step outside for a moment? I need Helen's official statement."
Charlie gave me a long look. "It's okay. I'll be okay," I assured him.
"Just a few minutes," Connor added as Charlie moved past, both of them holding gazes for an almost uncomfortably long time, speaking in that silent man-language women are usually not fluent in, but I seemed to pick up on some posturing, some warning, before Charlie finally walked out, only closing the door halfway.
"Where should I start?" I asked, wrapping the blanket more securely around my body, my wet hair still dripping down my back, chilling me.
"At the beginning," he suggested, taking out a notebook. So I took it from the beginning, the greeting Bobby had given me, how he knew I was alone, editing out the parts that might incriminate Charlie, then ending with the lights flashing across the room. Connor tucked away his notebook, moving across the room toward me. "I hope you understand what you are getting yourself into here, Helen. This won't be an easy life."
"I don't expect it to be," I agreed.
"His work can blowback on you."
"I realize that too," I agreed, leaving out the part about how I was the mastermind of it all.
"It's a risk you're willing to take?"
"It's a risk I want to take," I clarified.
There was no mistaking the look of pain in his eyes, old wounds always being the kind that left a pang, even years later.
"I didn't deserve you, Connor," I told him, shaking my head. "You were too good a man. You deserve better than me."
"Not sure such a thing exists, Helen," he told me with a bittersweet smile. "But I'm happy for you. You deserve some happiness. Even if it comes with risk. I can't break the law for you, but I will try to do my best to make sure his messes don't splatter all over you."
"I would never ask..." I started, moving to stand.
"You will never have to."
With that, Connor Collings walked back out of my life as abruptly as he had burst in.
Hardly three seconds later, Charlie rushed back in, not even hesitating in wrapping me up.
But carefully.
Like I might break.
But I was done breaking.
Life had beaten me so hard over so many years.
I had no idea what it was doing.
Breaking me down to rebuild me.
Into a new shape, made of stronger stuff.
Unbreakable stuff.
"It's okay," I assured him, hands sliding up and down his back. "I'm okay."
"That motherfucker better hopes he gets locked up for a while," he growled, squeezing me tighter. "He's gonna pay for this."
"It's over," I countered, Connor's words weighing heavy on me. About Charlie. About this lifestyle. About what could happen to him because of it. I could at least protect him from the repercussions of this revenge plot building in his head. "Let's leave it where it is," I suggested, pulling away. "I have something else to tell you."
Charlie's brows knitted. "Let's get your face cleaned up first," he suggested, turning to lead me back into the bathroom.
I rushed forward, hand reaching for the counter, and turning before he could guess what was making me act so erratically.
Taking a deep breath, I held it out.
Two pink lines.
It was funny to realize your whole future came down to something like that.
Lines on a white background.
Telling us nothing would ever be the same again.
"You're sure?" he asked, voiced slow, careful, like he was afraid to get his hopes up.
"I'm sure," I agreed, having missed my period by almost three weeks before I finally bought a test. And this was the third one. The foolproof one. The one that was meant to be a happy surprise to pick up his mood after his first rough day at his new job.
"Woman," he said, shaking his head, but he was smiling. "You trying to kill me tonight?" he added, looking up, his eyes warm. Happy. Excited.
I knew those feelings all too well.
Mixed with others.
Because the timing was off.
Because we were just getting on our feet.
Because we didn't have a place of our own yet.
Because we weren't married.
Because I wasn't sure I knew how to be a mother, not having had a lot of time with my own.
There were so many worries to ponder.
But Charlie cut through my swirling thoughts as he was so often known to do, pulling me away from their oppressive weight, lifting me up.
"What do you think of the name Ryan?" he asked, head ducked to the side.
"It won't work if it is a girl," I told him, feeling my swollen lips twitching even as I said the words because I knew what would follow them.
"That's fine. Because we're having boys. All boys," he told me as his arms moved to wrap around my lower back.
"All, huh?" I asked, tipping my head back to keep eye-contact.
"I'm thinking five."
I snorted at that, rolling my eyes. "Easy for you to say. You're not the one who has to carry and birth them."
"Aw, come on. Five boys. What isn't there to look forward to?"
"Bloody noses, bad aim, and stinky feet?" I suggested, head lolling to the side a bit as his fingers found the exact sore spots on my back, pressing into the knots with the precision that came from experience. My own personal massage therapist. I could get used to a lifetime of his magic fingers. Among other things. Which was good. Because a lifetime was what I was planning to have with him.
"It will be an adventure."
"What if I want girls too?" I asked, brow raising.
"I dunno. Someday they will age up, settle down, and bring some girls around."
"In what? Thirty years?"
"We got nothing but time, baby," he told me, eyes warm, mind clearly on the same track as mine, a realization that made my heart swell in my chest. "We need to move," he added a long couple of moments later when I had finally given in to the comfort in his hands, leaning into his chest, letting him work all the tension out of my body.
"Yeah," I agreed, not willing to admit it aloud, but feeling the whole space was now tainted by Bobby and his evil ideas.
"I'll start looking for apartments tomorrow. Gotta start somewhere. Especially with a baby on the way. And neighbors would be a good thing if I have more late nights in the future." He paused for a moment, then pressed a kiss to my temple. "I'll get you a house before that baby turns one," he assured me.
"Promise me one thing," I said, turning my head into his neck, breathing in his scent, something that never ceased to make my heart swell in my chest.
"Anything."
"You'll always be home for Sunday dinner."
I don't know where it came from, never having known the tradition in my own life.
But maybe that was exactly it.
It was a thing people did.
Normal people.
And if there was one thing we could use in this life bound to be fraught with worry and concern and illegal activity and cops and uncertainty... it was a little normalcy.
I had no idea at the time what that wo
uld eventually come to be.
It was just a wish from a woman about to be a wife, about to be a mother, made to the man she wanted to build a life with, however unusual.
"I'll never miss a single one," he assured me, voice firm.
Time would tell that he would make good on that promise.
He never missed them.
Not a single one.
And I never stopped to ask what the hell ever happened to Bobby.
TEN
Charlie - 3 years
Those early years weren't easy.
For the business.
For me.
For Helen.
It was one thing to struggle. As a single person. With no one for it to affect but yourself.
It was another to know that my struggles were her struggles, were Ryan's struggles, were Eli's struggles when he followed not long after Ryan.
I had three mouths other than my own to feed, had four people living in a too-small house in a crummy neighborhood because when there was extra money, it had to be reinvested back into the business.
"We have a house, Charlie," Helen told me as I leaned back against the kitchen counter, a half-drained coffee cup hanging from tired fingers, the knuckles crusted over with scabs, a hint of blood under one of my fingernails where I missed it while scraping when I got home.
"The schools on this side of town suck."
"The boys aren't in school yet," she reminded me, sending me a soft smile even if her words were firm.
She'd gotten good at it.
Adapting.
But the thing was, I didn't want her just to live with the life I could provide her. I wanted her to flourish. I wanted her to have the soaking tub I had seen her mooning over in a magazine once instead of the tub/shower combo we had with the sliding glass doors and brass accents that I heard her cussing out on cleaning days. I wanted her to be able to watch the boys run wild in the backyard, not the little square patch of grass we currently had. I wanted her not to have to storm over to the neighbor's house that was nearly butting up to ours, pound on the door, and tell them to pipe the fuck down when she was trying to put the boys to sleep.
It looked easier when I watched other men rise to the top of their respective empires. Fucking Grassi was living in a mansion bigger than any I had seen before. His restaurant was nearly built. He drove a new car every two years.
He came from mob money, Helen had reminded me when she caught me at a low moment, complaining about the struggle. You can't compare our lives to others. You came from nothing. We started with nothing. I think it is amazing what you've made in such a short period of time.
And, when you put it that way, in terms of what I had earned, not what I presently had in the bank, then yeah, I had made more money than a lot of men would see in their lives. But it needed to keep getting reinvested, earning more interest, securing my reputation of always having it when someone needed it.
It was one thing to turn someone down because you didn't trust them to repay, but it was another to turn them down because you didn't have the cash.
It didn't look good.
It didn't help your reputation.
And in this business, your reputation was everything.
That was why I was splattered with blood more often than I wasn't.
"You should be draped in fucking diamonds," I told her, putting the mug down. "And you're buying bread with coupons."
"Firstly, you know how I feel about diamonds," she said, waving her engagement ring around - an aquamarine stone - because she said it reminded me of her eyes, and she refused to be part of little kids enslaved in Africa. "Second, it is stupid to throw out a coupon. I don't care if you have a million dollars in the bank. That bread was practically free. Only an idiot turns their back on practically free food."
"You know what I mean, baby," I told her, my breath sighing out even if my lips were curved up. Because I could see her. Pulling up to the grocery store in a Mercedes with a handful of coupons, brow raised like she was daring anyone to say something about it.
"I know you need to stop being so hard on yourself," she told me, chin raising, arms crossing, giving me a hint of the hard she usually only showed people outside the house, or Ryan when he was giving her a hard time about eating his vegetables. "And I know we have everything we need. If you want more, it is just that. Want. And it is fine to want things. But don't you dare diminish what we have here."
Her words were a knife, cutting through my bullshit the way only she seemed capable of doing.
My Helen.
Life, time, wifedom, motherhood, they had molded her into a woman very different from the scared girl in the prison she called a life.
And, let's face it, this world we lived in changed her as well.
Starting, I was almost sure, on that night.
The night I wasn't there for her because of the career I had chosen, when a man caught her alone and vulnerable and unarmed.
And she had needed to fight her way out.
It had shown us both a side of her we hadn't truly known before. Or when it had surfaced, when she had turned a gun on her father, had attributed it to survival instinct.
But it was more than that.
It was something encoded in her DNA.
It was something, as much as she hated to even think it, that came from her father.
A ruthlessness.
A determination to be her own person. One who commanded respect, was capable of instilling fear.
And it was fully awoken the night in the motel when that scumbag thought he could put his hands on her without permission.
From that day forward, there was a determination to her, a confidence, an almost intimidating aura she carried around her.
The woman, just an up-and-coming loanshark's fiancé had the attitude of a kingpin's wife.
One of the men who owed me money once came up to us while we were pushing Ryan in a carriage down the street late at night because it was the only thing that put him to sleep sometimes.
I hadn't even been able to get a word out of my mouth before she was around the carriage, stepping between Ryan and the man, in full-on mama-bear-mode, leaning in so that her nose was inches from his, telling him in a voice that gave fucking me chills that he was never going to approach her family like this again if he hoped to see another day.
The scariest part was that she meant it.
And she meant that she would take the rest of his days away. Not me.
He'd paid me back two days later after two weeks of me threatening him.
One talk with my woman, and the man was selling off plasma and semen to get the money he needed.
She had that effect when she needed it.
But she rarely needed it with me.
So if she was using it, she was genuinely pissed.
And because Helen wasn't one for being ruled by her emotions, it meant she felt she had a right to be.
I looked around, seeing fingerpaint drawings where I would normally see the fridge they were on instead of the fact that the fridge needed to be replaced. I saw the picture of Helen and I on the beach the night of our wedding, focusing on the way we were looking at each other instead of the fact that I wanted to give her a better wedding than that. I saw the dinner on a plate on the stove that Helen had cooked while humming as she often did, maybe with one of the boys on her hip, yanking on her hair or earrings, instead of the fact that what was on the plate was bought at a discount.
She was right.
It was fine to want more.
So long as you appreciated what you had. First.
"Are you really trying to tell me that this isn't enough?" she asked, the hard slipping away a bit, the hurt shining through.
Because this wasn't just my house, my life. It was hers as well. And she had put everything she could into it, staying up late to paint the walls while the boys were sleeping, getting up early on weekends to hit flea markets or garage sales to snag furniture that she could refinish and f
ill our home with. She put up pictures and Christmas decorations and made Sunday dinners.
Saying this wasn't what I wanted was saying what she did wasn't good enough.
And that couldn't have been further from the truth.
"No, baby," I said, reaching for her, pulling her close. "What we have here is plenty. It's everything."
"Damn straight," she said, attempting firm, but the smile on her face betrayed her.
Helen - 6 years
"Eli, get that sand out of your mouth," I said for the fifth time, the words coming out more like a sigh than a demand since there was only so many times you could tell your child that the sand in the public park was likely teeming with cat pee before you kind of just had to give up and save yourself.
I was pretty sure no one died from ingesting cat pee before.
And sometimes, that was what motherhood came down to. Being pretty sure the thing your child is doing has never led to death.
Picking your battles, the other moms would call it.
Saving my sanity was more like it.
I had four boys.
Four.
And another on the way, seeming to prove Charlie right, much to my chagrin. It was getting to the point where I wanted a girl just to prove him wrong for once. But the ultrasound showed another boy just the week before.
If I intended to make it to their adulthood, I needed to care less about the ingestion of potentially disgusting things. Because as they would prove time and time again, they had no intention of stopping putting gross shit in their mouths.
Maybe another mother - say one with only one child - might have rushed over when he started retching up said cat-pee-sand that I told him five times to stop eating.
But my belly was round, and it would take me at least four tries to get onto my feet. By then, he'd be done, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and tackled one of his brothers.
So I raised my coffee, ignoring the sideways look from one of those moms on the bench next to mine. You know those moms. The ones who do everything by the book. No fish, soft cheese, deli meat, or caffeine moms.
Well.
Yeah.
She had one little girl, meek and mild and clearly good at sharing.
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