by M. O'Keefe
“Well, if you do find her, she won’t have anything to do with you. At all,” she said.
My chest lifted with a soundless laugh. “That is much more likely. Why does she need the doctor?” I asked, the question burning in the darkness of my heart exploding into the air. “Is she all right?”
“I’m not telling you shit,” Charlotte said and I expected nothing less.
“I will find out for myself soon enough,” I said, sounding ominous as hell, and I wanted to tell their terrified faces that I meant Abby no harm. That I would die to protect her from the mess I made, but there was no point. And worse, there was no time.
I wondered, briefly, if this was the last time I would see Jesse. And I found I couldn’t help myself from being his big brother just one more time. I took a deep breath and looked him in the eye, willing him after all these years to feel what we used to have. To trust me like he used to trust me.
“Tell her. Tell her everything,” I said. “If you want a shot with her, you’ve got to tell her. And if she stays after that… don’t let her go.” I then turned to Charlotte. “I’m sorry this is how we’ve met. I hope… well, let’s just say I hope a lot of things.”
My words dried up and my time was gone and my very last chance was slipping right out of my hands, so I just nodded in the end and gave Jesse one last look. Soaking in the man he’d become and glad, at least, that I’d protected him in the small way that I could.
My best was a shabby thing, tattered and small, but I’d done it for him. Given it to him. And it was all I’d had.
“Bye Jack,” Jesse murmured and I walked out the door.
Abby, I thought, now, it was only Abby.
Chapter Sixteen
ABBY
AFTER
“More coffee?” I asked, taking the pot over to Dale and Doug Hardt. I didn’t really need to ask; they would drink coffee until the café ran out of the stuff.
Every few days when they came in and I served them cup after cup of coffee, they reminded me of Jack’s mother in a diner with her two kids, the endless cups of coffee making her happy.
I shook the thought away, like I’d been shaking away every thought of Jack. It was as if every few minutes I’d pull myself out of the creek of some memory covered in leeches. And I had to pluck them off one by one or risk losing all my blood.
Dramatic, yes, but I was in fucking small-town Idaho, pregnant with a killer’s baby and living above the café where I worked.
These were dramatic days.
Oddly, they were good days too. Quiet. Full of work I liked. Full of people that didn’t ask more from me than what I could give.
Idaho had been a good choice. The right choice.
“Thank you,” Dale said—or was it Doug, really hard to tell them apart. They wore the same tan Carhartt jackets and the same denim pants. Fluorescent orange hunter caps on their balding heads.
I loved these twin men in their sixties, who had a small cattle farm outside of town. They were practically the opposite of my sister and I in every way, but just the way they ate together, and handed each other the things they needed before they could ask, reminded me so sharply of Charlotte I wanted to cry.
“You want the special?” I asked. The special was always a hot turkey plate, and they never ordered anything else. I liked that about them too. Reminded me of sushi with Charlotte and extra California rolls.
“Not today,” Doug said.
“Thought we’d try one of them muffins,” Dale said, pointing to the pastry case I’d put together. It was nothing special, all muffins and cookies I’d bought from the store, but the little elevated pastry case made it seem special. And it had worked. People were buying the muffins and the cookies, coming in at three o’clock for extra cups of coffee and something sweet.
Yeah, I know, it was ridiculous to be so proud of such a thing, but Margaret the owner treated me like I’d just created a new business model. And the praise was balm on my ragged soul.
I lifted my eyebrows in surprise and smiled at them. “Look at you two, branching out.”
Doug—or was it Dale—blushed, but only at the tips of his ears, and I went to get them the muffins.
My body felt different this month, all over bigger, not just at my stomach, which was just now beginning to swell. I covered it up with the apron I wore, and my looser shirts, but even if people couldn’t see how I’d changed, I could feel it. My breasts were bigger. My thighs. My hands and fingers felt twice their thickness, and my feet too.
Some days I woke up and felt like a new puppy with paws the size of dinner plates.
The bell over the door rang as someone new came in and I cried out “Go ahead and sit anywhere, I’ll be with you in a second.”
The café had six booths and a tiny eat-in counter, and in the afternoons it was only ever the Hardt twins and a few high schoolers coming in after school for big plates of French fries.
I put two muffins on plates and turned back to the front of the café, where the guys sat in the window seat next to the door.
The door where a man stood in a long overcoat. His black curls a mess around his weary face. His midnight blue eyes pinning me to the wall with a fever-bright intensity.
Jack.
For a moment, honest and blazing, I was so happy to see him. So relieved.
He’s here.
And then the fear set in and the plates fell from my numb fingers to shatter onto the floor and I jerked back hard into a table, nearly falling over.
Jack reached for me, and the Hardt brothers were up and out of their seats, and I put my hands up and shouted: “No!”
All three men stilled. Looking at each other and then at me.
“You all right up there?” asked Margaret from the back where she was sitting on her stool in the corner of the kitchen, reading a newspaper, waiting for an order to come in.
“I’m fine,” I cried over my shoulder. But my hands were still up like I had any hope in warding him away.
“Abigail,” Doug said. I knew it was Doug because he called me Abigail. I’d talked him down from Ms. Abigail, because when he called me that for the first few weeks I’d felt like a Sunday school teacher.
“You okay?” Doug asked.
No. No I wasn’t okay. I shook my head.
“Is this man a problem?” Dale asked.
“Yes,” I said, and just like that Dale and Doug turned to face Jack, a solid wall of Idaho stubbornness between me and my baby’s father.
But then I remembered that gun. The trigger pulled by this man’s finger, and I could not believe I put these men at risk. “No!” I said just as quickly. “No, boys, he’s… he’s an old friend. I just… I got startled for a moment.”
“You don’t seem startled,” Doug said. “You seem scared.”
I was. I was terrified.
He found me. That seemed ominous. Everything about him seemed ominous. The overcoat, the exhausted lines around his eyes, the stern set of his mouth like he’d been sent to do an impossible and distasteful job.
Like kill me.
“I mean her no harm,” Jack said, lifting his hands as if to show the guys he had no weapons, but I was looking at that overcoat, remembering what this man kept in his pockets.
“She doesn’t seem to believe you,” Doug said.
“Perhaps you’d best go outside,” Dale said.
Jack looked at me over their fluorescent hats like he didn’t understand how I’d gotten such a strange pair of bodyguards. But all I could think was I would not have them hurt on my account.
“Thank you, guys.” I bent down and grabbed the muffins from the floor and the plates that had broken in half. My hands were shaking; I cut my finger on a broken plate and barely felt it. I felt my heartbeat in my eyeballs. I imagined the baby in my stomach, turning circles without knowing this nightmare.
I forced myself to laugh. To smile even as I turned to face these three men. “Everything is fine, guys. Margaret,” I yelled over my shoulder. “I
’m taking a break.”
The stool where she perched back there creaked, and she shuffled to the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. “Go on then. I got it.”
She was a version of Mrs. Claus with her white bun and her bright cheeks. But she cursed like a sailor and drank from a bottle of hooch she kept over the fryer.
The Hardt brothers watched me with their runny brown eyes, their age-spotted hands clenched into fists that would be ineffectual against Jack’s razor-sharp edges.
“It’s all right, really,” I said, patting their shoulders as I squeezed between them. I tried to smile at them, but it felt like a grimace.
“You stay where we can see you,” murmured Dale. “You don’t go nowhere with this guy.”
“Don’t worry,’ I said, facing Jack. “I’m not going anywhere with him.”
Jack nodded as if he understood my warning and he held open the door for me. I grabbed my sweater from the hook by the door and walked past him, refusing to feel him, or smell him. Denying my body’s demands for just one small taste of him, in any way.
My body had no sense when it came to this man. It never had.
Out on the main street, things were quiet. But they usually were in Bloomfield. It was why I liked it. Why I picked it. I felt safe here. I felt completely invisible.
I’d gone to Silver Falls first, but when my sister texted that he was coming for me, I’d run. Found this place. This job. Remarkably like the old place. The old job.
Apparently, I didn’t run far enough.
“How did you find me?” I asked when the door shut behind us. I wrapped my sweater closer around my body—not that it was cold, but it made me feel more protected against him. Like my ten-year-old Gap sweater could stop his bullets. Or the brush of his eyes against my skin.
“I went to Silver Falls first,” he said. “Followed you from there.” He shrugged like it was nothing.
A car drove past, a kid in the passenger seat watching us as he went by.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, my mouth dry. My throat closed. I watched that car until it turned out of sight.
“Can you look at me?” he asked, stepping closer so I felt the heat of him through the weave of that Gap sweater.
I glanced up, all my bravery mustered and at the sight of his weary smile, I looked away. At my feet. The Converse I’d worn the night we met. The never-ending wind blew the pieces of my hair that had fallen out of my braid across my face and I left it, not wanting to see any part of him.
“Just tell me what you’re going to do,” I whispered. “Are you here to threaten me? Kill me?”
He reached for me, for the bulge of my stomach revealed by the wind blowing my shirt against me, and I flinched away, stumbling backward.
Behind me there was a knock on the glass and I turned to give Doug and Dale my best “it’s all right” smile because they’d seen me flinch.
“You’re pregnant.”
“No,” I said and shook my head.
“Abby…I can see you.” Again he reached forward like he would touch my stomach, and there was no way that was going to happen.
“Don’t,” I all but hissed, looking right at him so he could see how serious I was. How much I meant this. He had no right to me anymore. “Touch me.”
His face was so thin. So broken. The same but painfully different at the same time. Did he look at me and see the same thing? See all the ways I was different inside my skin?
“You didn’t take the money,” he said. “At the bar.”
“Why would I?”
He gaped at me. “Abby…the baby. Your future—”
I couldn’t take it anymore. The not knowing. His weary grin combined with my bloody memories. Daring him really to just get on with the business of silencing me, I put my chin up.
“Do I have one?”
Chapter Seventeen
JACK
AFTER
She thought I was here to kill her.
She was pregnant—it was obvious despite her denial. And she still expected me to kill her. That it surprised me was strange. For the last two years of my life, everyone upon whose doorway I landed expected me to kill them. Or hurt them. Intimidate and silence them.
How quickly I’d shed that skin. In searching for her, I’d stopped being anything but this man looking for a woman. Every other part of me shaved off by my efforts.
But here she was, screwing those parts of me back to my body. Reminding me of the monster I’d been.
“I’m here to tell you you’re safe,” I said, wishing I could be anything but what I was. Wishing I could do anything to take away that look in her eye of fear and distrust. “No one is after you. No one is after your sister.”
“I don’t believe you,” she spat. Her eyes shooting out sparks. She wore no makeup, and her hair was braided in a long tail down her back, and she looked so beautiful it hurt. It squeezed me, her beauty, and I glanced away.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, staring into the window of a dress shop across the street with unseeing eyes. “I’m sorry you don’t believe me, but it’s true.”
She laughed, humorless and dry. Wind pushed stray pieces of hair across her face and I jealously watched as she pulled them away from her beautiful eyes.
I want to touch you. I’m so cold and you’re so warm and I have no right to ask. No right to even want it. But God, I want to touch you.
“It’s funny, isn’t it? How relative that is? True.” She said the word like it tasted funny in her mouth. Like it tasted bad.
“You’re having my baby,” I said. “That’s true, isn’t it?”
“I’m having my baby,” she answered staunchly.
She stared up at the endless pale blue sky and I stared at her—her swollen belly.
My baby. Our baby.
There was a reaction in my body to this news. To this truth. But I couldn’t feel it now. Or make sense of it. Or understand it. My goal… my only goal was to make her feel safe.
“Do you believe me? That you’re safe? No one—including me, especially me, is going to hurt you.”
“It’s a little late for that kind of promise isn’t it?” she asked, reminding me so clearly of that awful morning when I kicked her out of my condo.
“There are so many things I want to tell you,” I said. “So many things I should have told you.”
“It’s too late,” she said. “It’s so past too late. You told me the truth, that you were a bad man. I even knew that to be true. But I wanted to believe something else. I wanted to believe the economics student. The little boy at a diner with his mom. The teenager who joined the wrestling team just to spend time with his brother. I chose those things to be true, when I knew better.”
“I was those things,” I said.
“But you’re not anymore, are you?” Now she looked at me, her eyes bullets straight into my chest. “I saw the truth that night.”
“I’m out of the organization,” I said. “I don’t work for Lazarus or Bates anymore.”
She laughed, but nothing was funny. “Did you kill Bates too? Is that how—”
I stepped closer because she was talking too loud. She was being too reckless. Her mouth shut fast and I watched her throat bob as she swallowed. She tried to step away but I wouldn’t let her. This wasn’t a conversation she could run from.
“You’re safe,” I whispered. “But not if you talk like that. Not if you’re reckless, Abby.” I begged her to understand that, that this wasn’t a goddamned game. “Do you get that?”
Her neck and cheeks red, she nodded and the wind carried her scent to me, coffee and fried potatoes and her, beneath it. Roses and sparkle.
“I didn’t kill Bates,” I murmured in a low voice that didn’t carry past us.
“Is that supposed to change what I saw?” she asked. “Erase it?”
“No, I just hoped it would make you feel more…” I didn’t know how to do this. How to make anyone feel comfortable around me. Those three d
ays we spent together had been such an anomaly. I’d put down all my walls. All my armor. “…at ease.”
“You told me your fucking gun wasn’t loaded,” she said with a laugh.
“It wasn’t my gun,” I said like it mattered. Like those little details meant anything. “Bates knew I didn’t carry it loaded. He always knew it.” Which made my little protest, my clinging effort to remain at some level the me I needed to be, a joke. A charade.
But I looked at her face, resolute and calm, and I knew it didn’t matter. Not to her. Not anymore.
“I never killed anyone,” I said. “Not until that night. And it doesn’t change anything. But that is true. And I’ve wondered over and over again in the last three months if I’d told you why I was the person I was, if it would have mattered. If I’d told you about my father and his debts and what they would have done to my brother, if it would have made this moment not happen.”
“Nothing can change what happened, Jack.”
“Except you’re pregnant,” I said. “And that changes everything.”
ABBY
AFTER
I swallowed back my childish denials. Because who was I kidding? I was having Jack’s baby. We both knew it.
“You went to the doctor? Is everything okay?” he asked, like he wanted to see an ultrasound.
“How do you know that?” I asked, chill sweeping over my body. “That I went to the doctor.”
“Because you were talking about it on Facebook,” he said. “That and other things you shouldn’t have talked about on Facebook.”
Right. The murder.
“Is that how you found me? Facebook?”
“That’s part of it, Cheetara.”
He was teasing me. Oh, how sweet that was, that he was teasing me over that name, and I suddenly wanted to tell him all about my sister and me playing Thundercats when we were kids. I wanted to make him laugh with the story of how my sister made me a lasso.
But I swallowed all of that. All those words.
“I thought I was being so careful,” I said, feeling ridiculous. The Cheetara code name. The fact that I’d tried to keep my secrets to myself in order to not burden my sister any more than I already did, only to fling them out into the world for her to handle. Honestly. If it wasn’t so terrifying it would be hilarious.
