Take the Edge Off

by TA Moore

  Joe went to text him again but thought better of it and swiped between windows so he could call Bea.

  She must have been sitting on the phone. It barely got half a ring out before it cut to her sleep-husky face.

  “Joseph,” she said, her voice soft. “What do you want?”

  He let himself out of the suite and headed to the elevator. “That house in Reading,” he said. “Can you meet me there?”

  There was a pause, and then she cleared her throat. “What? I don’t know what you mean. I… had a late night.”

  Joe snorted. He could hear the shower in the background, and the off-key warble of someone singing along to Adele cut in and out of the call. It sounded like Bea’s night wasn’t over yet.

  “The house in Reading that the company bought,” he said. “I’m meant to be divesting us of all our UK holdings, including that one. So I need to have a look at it. Can you make that happen?”

  “It’s the weekend,” she said.

  “It’s important.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “I’ll make it happen. You know where it is?”

  Impatience flicked at Joe’s mood. He squashed it with the reminder that he had asked for a favor, a precarious one too, since he knew that the property was one that Harry had never expected him to find. He’d been given a list to work through, and Reading hadn’t been mentioned.

  “I have the files you gave me,” he reminded Bea. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  The shower stopped, and Bea took a quick breath. “Me too,” she said. “Let me get out of here. I’ll meet you there.”

  She hung up.

  Joe shook his head and flicked to the Uber app so he could check the car while he pressed the Ground Floor button. He couldn’t judge. His first meeting with Bea had been delayed because of a shower, muscles, and a smirk.

  The thought of Cal, and the memory of wet, clean skin under Joe’s mouth made him lick his lips. He texted a quick update as the elevator opened and Uber reminded him they were already outside.

  Most of Joe’s life, he reminded himself as he tucked his phone back into his pocket, had been navigated without Cal. He should probably get used to it again. The car outside was a navy blue sedan that smelled of upholstery cleaner and children’s sweets.

  “Reading?” the driver checked as he looked over his shoulder at him. “That’s a way, mate.”

  “Is it a problem?” Joe asked coolly as he put his seat belt on. “I can call another cab.”

  “Not a problem,” the driver said. “It’ll be expensive. You want me to drive you back too?”

  Joe leaned back against the freshly cleaned upholstery. “No,” he said. “I’ve a car arranged to pick me up later.”

  He wasn’t ready to let Cal go yet, whatever he should or shouldn’t get used to.

  THE UBER dropped Joe off at the end of the street, eager to be on his way back to London. It was easy enough to find the house. It hadn’t changed at all in the five years since the surveyor had snapped a photo of it. The flowers in the garden were still pink and yellow and perfectly lined up in rows. The curtains in the windows were still blue, and the mat at the door still said Welcome, although the bristles had worn down to the nubs.

  Joe hesitated on the path up to the front door. He wondered if he’d ever been there before. It didn’t feel like he had. There was no sense of déjà vu, no familiarity. Of course he’d been a baby. How old did you have to be to form memories?

  Joe waited on the street for a while as he paced down to the chalk scrawl of flowers, faces, and impermanent graffiti about who wanted to kiss who. There was no sign of Bea, and no texts from her to update her time of arrival.

  There was a missed call from Cal.

  Something tight in Joe’s stomach relaxed as he saw it. He tapped it with his thumb as he gave up on Bea and headed up to the front door. It couldn’t hurt to speak to whoever still lived there, or try to. If they slammed the door in his face, at least he knew his lawyer was, supposedly, on her way.

  It was a voice message. Joe hit Play and lifted it up to his ear. He caught the heavy growl of traffic and the tail end of a muttered curse as he pressed the doorbell. It bing-bonged inside the house.

  “I found the kid from the graveyard,” Cal yelled into the phone. “Someone hired him to beat you up and give you a scare, and they told him you were an abusive ex. It weren’t Kristen, though.”

  A horn blared through the recording, and Cal told them to fuck off. Joe tilted his head away from the noise and flicked his attention back to the door as it creaked open. A slim woman in black jeans and a gray T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, smiled at him as she held out her hand.

  “Joseph,” she said as he accepted the handshake out of habit. “I’ve been waiting.”

  “I know you,” he said as the familiarity slotted into place. He’d been thrown by how she held herself, the twitchy mannerisms and ducked chin abandoned for new confidence. “You’re the girl from the bar, Bea’s girlfriend. Rosie.”

  “Yes,” she said as she waved him into the hall past her. It was small, most of it taken up by the stairs, and had the faintly musty smell of somewhere not used much. “Bea asked me to meet you here while she crossed some Ts. I made us tea.”

  Joe hesitated as she pushed the door shut behind him. There was something wrong, he realized, even before the recording of Cal’s voice warned from the phone, “It was Abigail’s assistant. Daisy something. She claimed she was Abigail’s daughter.”

  Joe ended the call and turned to look at Rosie. Or Daisy, he supposed.

  “They’re both flowers. It didn’t feel like a lie,” she said. The butcher’s knife in her other hand glittered in the morning light as she lifted it. “Go into the kitchen.”

  He lunged at her instead and grabbed for the wrist. They struggled back and forth between the white-painted banisters and the neatly lined up striped wallpaper. Joe was stronger than she was, but Rosie refused to let go of the knife. She leaned forward and sank her teeth into his wrist.

  Joe had been bitten before. The occasional lover had left a crescent-marked bruise on his skin, a blue-tinged souvenir that lasted longer than his memory of the man, and he’d been nipped by dogs and cats. This was different. The blunt pressure as she clenched her jaw made his bones ache, and her teeth tore instead of pierced his skin. He pulled away from her in surprise and his fingers loosened on her wrist. Rosie wrenched her hand free and lashed out with the knife.

  The point of it, ground down to a scratched, uneven point over the years, caught him under the ball of his thumb and sliced him open to halfway up his wrist.

  It didn’t hurt. For a moment there wasn’t even any blood, all he could see was his skin peeled back to flash wet meat and the struts of white bone and cartilage that was his thumb. He had enough time to suck in a startled breath, and then blood filled the injury and spilled down his arm onto the floor.

  A sick dizziness hit Joe as he grabbed his forearm and dug his fingers down into the bloody sleeve. It hurt now—a sullen throb of pain that kept time with his heartbeat. He staggered back a step and leaned against the stairs. His feet had left bloody marks on the floor, worked the blood down into the soft nap of the carpet.

  “I didn’t mean to do that,” Rosie told him in an oddly prim voice. When Joe looked up at her, he saw that her face matched the off-beat tone of her words. She’d stabbed him, but her face was set in purse-lipped disapproval, as though he’d walked mud into the carpet instead of his own blood. Only her eyes seemed to realize the seriousness of what was going on. They looked tight and twitchy as she kept the knife on him. “Why won’t you ever do what you’re supposed to Joseph? If you’d gone away, then none of this would have happened. Now it’s all ruined.”

  She poked him in the chest with the knife to underline her point. Joe clenched his jaw at the small, smart pain as it dug into his skin. He swallowed, his mouth dry and sticky, and tried to pretend this was another business meeting. How many times h
ad he sat down at the table to negotiate a deal where tens of thousands of dollars hung in the balance.

  This was just a bit of blood and a ruined shirt.

  “Why?” he asked. “You contacted me. You tracked me down. What did I ever do to you?”

  “What you always do. Ruin everything. Take everything.” Her voice was shrill and cracked as she singsonged her mockery at him. “Joseph needs to talk, go outside and wait. Joseph needs some paperwork, I can see you afterward. Joseph loves the bear, give Joseph the bear, Daisy.”

  The blue bear, charred and blinded by fire, popped into Joe’s head. He still didn’t remember it, but the thought of it made his stomach knot with sick tension and made pressure fill his head.

  “If you loved it so much, why did you burn it?” he asked. Blood oozed between his fingers. It soaked his sleeve and had soaked the carpet under his feet. “If it was yours.”

  Rosie reached up and thumped the heel of her hand against her temple in exasperation.

  “It wasn’t mine, it was yours. Everything I wanted, you got. Everything I loved, you took away. It was my life. I never wanted you to come in and ruin it. I never wanted you. I never wanted to go and live with Harry. I wanted to stay with my dad, but no one listened to what I wanted, did they? Everything was about you, about what you needed. If you’d never been born, Joseph, my life would have been perfect. It would have been happy.”

  Joe wasn’t in charge of his legs anymore. He tried to lock his knees, to stay on his feet, but he didn’t get a say. His knees folded, and he slid gracelessly down the wall.

  “You’re my sister,” he said.

  She flinched away from that, or maybe it was the puddle of blood she stepped back to avoid.

  “Half sister,” she said defensively. “And that doesn’t count. Everyone knows that. That’s why Dad got me and Harry took you away. You should have stayed away. Everything was fine.”

  With a hollow thump, Joe leaned his head back against the painted wood. He swallowed and worked his tongue around his dry mouth.

  “You emailed me,” he reminded her.

  She rubbed her eye with the back of her hand. The knife caught strands of her red hair and clipped them short.

  “I was angry,” she said. “Dad had died, and I hadn’t seen you in so long and then I saw your name on Twitter, your photo. You looked happy—in love. Like you still got to have everything, and I got nothing. It reminded me of everything that happened. I’d wanted to forget about it. I needed to forget some of it, but how could I when you kept lying.”

  Joe’s ears had started to ring. He worked his jaw from one side to the other to try and relieve the pressure. His ears popped, but he could still hear the bells. It was only when Rosie crouched down next to him and reached into his pocket that he knew what it was.

  “Cal.” She turned the phone and showed it to him. “He’s worried about you.”

  Joe laughed bitterly and raised his arm. “He has a point.”

  Something soft passed over Rosie’s face. It thumbed away the tension lines around her eyes and softened the brackets around her lips.

  “Bea worries about me,” she said. “I only wanted to delay you that day in the pub, so the courier could get there. Maybe I’d met her before, but I didn’t remember it. I really like her.”

  “I like Cal,” Joe said. He peeled his dry lips off his teeth and tried for a smile. “They’re both going to worry today.”

  It was a joke. Not a very good one. Rosie sighed.

  “I know,” she said. “But… I realized something today, when you called. You’re my Moby Dick.”

  Joe laughed raggedly. “That’s what he said.”

  She gave him that prim look again. “Don’t be crude. You’re never going to go away. Neither of us will ever, ever be really happy.”

  “I was happy,” Joe said.

  “No,” Rosie said. “And neither will they be. Bea and Cal. We aren’t meant to be here, you and me. That’s why it always goes wrong. That’s what I wanted to explain, until you made me….”

  She gestured at Joe’s filleted hand and pursed her lips in distaste.

  “If you wanted me to go back to California, all you had to do was wait,” Joe rasped out. The phone rang again, a persistent chime from Cal, and Joe supposed that he might be lying… or not. He didn’t know if he’d have stayed a while longer for Cal, and—more importantly—neither did Rosie. “My tickets are booked, and you’d have never heard from me again.”

  Rosie put the knife down on the sideboard and walked over to drag Joe back up onto his feet. She squirmed under his arm and grabbed the back of his jeans with one hand.

  “It wouldn’t have made a difference,” she said calmly. Once he was up, she grabbed the knife again. “You’ve already spoiled everything. All Abigail could talk about last night was you—how handsome you looked, how she wished she’d have been able to let herself be your mother. I spent years with her, Joseph. I was the daughter she never had, and now she doesn’t care about me anymore. And when Bea finds out, when she realizes I lied to her…. No. Children should have a mother, Joseph. We grew up wrong without her—selfish and broken. I think maybe you were right, that we need to find her.”

  Joe leaned on her shoulder as she walked him down the hall and into the kitchen. The table was set for two, but there was a layer of dust on the cutlery. The fridge hummed and rattled, but from the dead cartons of takeout stacked by the fridge, it wasn’t used much. It didn’t feel like a memorial, more like a squat—someplace you came and stayed but tried to leave no trace.

  “I thought our mother was dead,” he said.

  Rosie nodded distractedly. “For years,” she said as she tucked the knife into her jeans and unlocked the back door. “You wouldn’t remember, even though it was your fault, because you were only a baby.”

  Had Harry, somehow, been responsible, Joe wondered? The thought stuck in his throat like a bone, but Rosie’s conviction that this was all Joe’s fault somehow made him wonder.

  “Are we going to her grave?” he asked. The words slurred on his tongue, and he tightened his grip on his bloody arm. “I need to go to the hospital first.”

  “It’s fine,” Rosie said blithely. “It’s only a scratch.”

  She pulled him out of the back door and down into the garden. A swing creaked gently as it swayed, and music played tinnily from behind one of the fences.

  “Hey,” Joe yelled, or tried to. “Help. I’m hurt!”

  “Stop that,” Rosie hissed. She pulled the knife and pressed it against his thigh, so close to his balls that he flinched. “Nobody is going to hear you anyhow. They’re all old around here. Old people who mind their own business. But if you don’t shut up, I’ll cut you open. Then you won’t ever see Mum again.”

  Joe bit the inside of his cheek.

  There was a car parked at the bottom of the garden, parked on a half-crumbled concrete slip that let out onto a narrow alley. Rosie dragged him to it and opened the boot.

  “Don’t,” Joe protested. The old fear hit him, sharp as knives and hot enough to burn, as he tried to pull away from her. She dragged him back, stronger than she looked, and shoved him awkwardly into the narrow space. An old pair of muddy boots dug into the small of his back and he couldn’t breathe. He grabbed at the edge of the boot to try and pull himself out, but she rapped his knuckles with the butt of the knife. “Rosie. Daisy. Please, you don’t have to do this. Okay? I won’t tell anyone.”

  “That’s what Mum said,” she told him as she folded his legs in and up. “After we drove off the road, she told me that she wasn’t angry at me, that nobody ever had to know I’d grabbed the wheel. That’s what mothers are meant to do—protect their children. Except then she told on me when that policeman went to hand you to me, told him it was my fault. It was an accident, Joseph. That’s what everyone said, a tragic accident.”

  “Please?” he begged raggedly as his chest tightened up. “Rosie. Daisy. What did you do?”

  She reac
hed in and stroked the side of his face. “Nothing, didn’t you listen? It was an accident,” she said. “I never meant to hurt Mum. That’s not why I grabbed the wheel. All I wanted was for her to listen to me for once. But then she couldn’t even hear me because you wouldn’t stop screaming. You always had to have all the attention—from Mum, from Harry, even from that policeman in his big car. If you’d shut up, maybe he would have saved Mum instead of you. Did you ever think about that? I could have grown up with a mum and been normal. Instead she died, and look at us. We’re awful. That what I’ve realized, Joe. We should have both stayed in the car, with her.”

  Joe grabbed at her arm and left bloody prints all over her neat white blouse, but he wasn’t strong enough to hold on. She pulled free and slammed the boot down.

  “I was too scared back then,” she told him through the metal. “But this time, we’ll both go. Together. Mum will like that.”

  Panic closed in on him like teeth, a pressure against his ribs and hips, and he screamed as the car started. He kicked at the metal walls and sucked in lungfuls of air that couldn’t be as hot as the claustrophobia tried to tell him it was.

  It turned out Rosie was right. No one on her small, neat street wanted to get involved. Joe eventually—quickly?—ran out of steam. He rolled onto his side, the old boots tucked against his stomach, and tried to keep up the pressure on his arm.

  Although he wasn’t sure if that was a good idea or not. Maybe he should let it bleed out before Rosie lit the match.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “ANSWER THE phone,” Cal muttered as the Bluetooth rang dutifully in his ear. He clenched his jaw as though frustration could reach down the line and complete the connection on its own. It couldn’t, and Joe’s voicemail cut in for the sixth time.