by M. O'Keefe
I hit the icon for Fern’s phone.
The phone rang once and then was answered.
“Olivia?”
“Yeah—”
“I’ll be right there.”
And then she hung up.
Right. I hung up and looked down at the other two phones on the counter.
One was my detonator phone. I need to smash that and throw it in the ocean, fast.
The other one must have been Max’s. A cheap burner flip phone from a gas station. I flipped it open and the screen lit up.
Oh God. My heart leapt into my throat. Maybe I didn’t need Max after all. Maybe I could get the number for Lagan off his phone and take it to the cops. Or have it traced. Or maybe I could…
It was passcode protected. Of course.
I tried the basics. 1234. Nothing. 1111. Nothing.
I closed the phone and set it back down. I guess I had to keep Max around a little bit longer.
There was a knock at the door, and I crossed the room in my bare feet to unlock it and let Fern in, as well as a gust of hot hallway air. She was in full nurse mode—stern-faced and carrying her old army medical bag.
Totally terrifying, if she wasn’t also wearing a green and purple tennis outfit, with a little skirt and everything and a visor tucked into her red curls.
Rosie the Riveter does Wimbledon or some shit.
Affection swamped me. A wildflower in my chest. Uncomfortable and unfamiliar.
“Hey,” I said, “I can’t thank you enough—”
“Is he all right?” She talked right over my thanks. Put her hand right through my gratitude.
I blinked. Unsure of why I was thrown. This was exactly the Fern I was used to.
Suddenly chilled, I put my arms over my chest. “I think he’s getting a fever. He woke up not too long ago a little delusional.”
“I’m not surprised.” She put her bag down on the counter and began to pull out sealed big pharma bags. My crazy, black market first aid supply was always generic Chinese shit.
She had contacts high up somewhere.
“Where do you get all this stuff…?”
“I know a Canadian guy who goes to Cuba a few times a year. He brings it back.”
“Wow.” That was the power of my brain at this moment. Wow.
“You get the food in the fridge?”
“I did. Thank you.”
“I remember you don’t like that tuna, but it was all I had on short notice. You can go across the street and get those frozen burritos you used to live on when you were here.”
“I forgot about those burritos.”
“You ate so many, I thought you were going to turn into one.”
I did. I did eat so many. Gross gas station food instead of the weird healthy stuff she made with her own two hands.
“The tuna will be great,” I said.
“Your sister always liked it.”
“Dylan!” The shout came from the bedroom, and after one startled look at each other, we ran back to see what was happening now.
Chapter 8
Max
Ho.Ly. Fuck.
Something was wrong. Really really wrong. I felt like shit.
When I was a kid, I’d had the mumps. Or Dylan had had the mumps. One of us had had the mumps. I can’t remember because I’m so fucking hot. But the mumps…the mumps were bad. I remember Mom and Dad fighting about it on the other side of our bedroom door. Dad was mad because we were supposed to have gotten shots that prevented this shit from happening.
And she had spent the money instead of taking us to the clinic.
Classic Mom.
“Dylan?” I cried. Because that was Dylan saying that. Dylan was in this room. I lifted my head and peered into the shadowy corners. There was a low dresser right across from me. One of those double deals, like a his and hers kind of thing. Behind it was a sliding glass door covered with blinds.
Was Dylan out there?
I pushed up to get to my feet, but my hand was caught on something.
I glanced back at it and I couldn’t lift my hand away from the headboard. It was made out of iron and painted white.
I lifted my hand and the handcuffs rattled.
Handcuffs.
“Dylan!” I yelled. “This isn’t funny!”
God. There was something raging in my leg just under the surface of my skin.
I glanced down at my feet half-expecting there to be an actual fire burning in the bed. No fire, but there was a gigantic white bandage on my leg.
Fuck my ribs hurt. So did my head.
“Dylan!” I yelled. Because this was probably his fault. “Dylan!”
Two women came rushing in, and I jerked back away from them. One of them…the brunette with the tits…My gut said watch out for her. Be careful. She was trouble.
There were memories—important ones, things I needed to remember…but Jesus. It was too hot.
“Fever,” said the redhead. She was older. Stacked. She wore reading glasses and an expression I recognized because I’d seen it on on my own face.
I am the boss, her expression said. And you do not fuck with the boss.
The redhead—she might be trouble, too.
“Max,” Tits said. “You’re awake.”
“Where’s Dylan?” I asked and Tits and Boss-lady shared a long look. “He was just here. I heard him.”
“Dylan’s not here,” Tits said. “You’ve been shot. You have a fever…an infection.” She reached for me and I grabbed her wrist before she could touch me.
Her eyes—wide and green met mine. But she didn’t flinch. She didn’t hiss and try to tug away.
I squeezed her wrist harder, the bones rubbing beneath my grip. I was hurting her. Trying to hurt her but she didn’t seem to care. Something about that face—so still despite what I was doing to her. It rattled my cage.
“Do you remember who I am?” she asked.
“Joan,” I said. The name bobbed up from the murk in my head. The strip club. But was that right? Joan? Seemed wrong. “I wanted to fuck you.”
She smiled, or at least she gave the appearance of smiling. “Likewise.”
“You’re a dancer.”
I had a rule about the girls. I didn’t touch them. Not even a little. Just to keep a lid on the drama. But I’d wanted this woman. Bad. I almost broke my rule for her. There’d been a night. A dance?
I couldn’t remember.
“Yeah, well, you’re a violent criminal,” she said. “We were not meant to be.”
She had a chip on her shoulder so big and so hard it was like armor, hiding something so hot, so fucking needy, I could barely stand to look at her and not bend her over something.
Her wrist was still in my grip. It had to hurt. But she gave me nothing. Not one sign that my touch—brutal and mean—did shit to her.
Kudos to her.
“Dylan’s not here, is he?” I asked. She shook her head.
If Dylan wasn’t here, someone else had to be. One of the boys. BLJ. Clock. I blinked, something was rising up out of the dark that I really didn’t want to look at.
Rabbit.
Jesus.
He shot me.
I tried to sit up but my body felt like it had the weight of a bike on it.
“Calm down,” she said.
“Rabbit—”
“He got away.”
“The rest of the guys…?” They’d all been in on it, all those “brothers” standing there ready to mow me down.
“I don’t know. But they’re far away. You don’t have to worry about them.”
The redhead—wearing some kind of tennis getup, with the little skirt and everything, came at me with a syringe.
“The fuck!” I cried, lifting my leg like I would kick her. “What is that?”
“Serious antibiotics to fight the infection which is causing the fever.”
The gunshot. All of this came back to the gunshot. Some memories settled down around me and I put together the pieces. Crazy
fucking Joan with the bombs had saved my life.
And tennis star over here was helping.
I could thank them. But I wouldn’t.
Not while I was chained to a bed.
“What’s with the handcuffs?” I asked giving them a rattle.
“You tried to kill me,” Joan said. Tennis star jabbed me with the needle but I still had Joan’s hand.
“I still might.”
She grinned with half her mouth and I felt the dark echo of how badly I’d wanted her. That was powerful shit if I could still want her as fucked-up as I was. Trouble. She was so much trouble.
“Then the handcuffs stay.”
“I need to get back to the club.”
“They tried to kill you!”
“That’s why I need to go back.”
“I’m not even sure there is a club left.”
I shook my head, because there was always something left. That’s how we were…that’s who we were. Cockroaches after the nuclear blast—guys like me. Like Rabbit. We come scurrying out of the destruction when you think the world has ended.
And I was going to find him.
And kill him.
I felt a sticky fog coming up around me—some kind of poison from that needle she had stuck in my thigh.
“There’s nothing there for you,” she said in the way women had when they couldn’t quite understand the insanity of my world.
There was always something there for me.
Revenge.
I made a fist around the idea and I held on as tight as I could.
Revenge.
They wanted to kill me and they couldn’t.
So I would take them all down. Every last one of them.
Joan
Aunt Fern followed me out of Max’s room, surrounded in a dark cloud of all the things that Max had said.
I wanted to fuck you. What a charmer.
“I should have taken the bullet out in Atlanta,” I said, before she could start with whatever uncomfortable questions she had piled up in her head.
“You couldn’t have done it.” She shook her head, pursed her lips. “You would have made it worse. And he’s going to be fine. The antibiotics will knock that infection right out.”
Her dismissal was comforting, absolving me of guilt. And familiar.
She shoved her medical kit back together. “He’ll be himself by tomorrow.”
“Lovely,” I joked. It was safe money that Max doped up on pain medication and out of his head with fever was a whole lot easier to handle than Max as he usually was. Healthy and whole Max was a straight up killer.
And now he had revenge on the brain.
She didn’t smile and I was reminded of how not funny she’d found me as a teenager. They’d been awful years for both of us, which made her kindness now seem miraculous.
“Why is he calling you Joan?”
“Because that’s the name I’ve been using for the last few months.”
I knew she was dying to ask me more questions about why I was living under a different name, but then I saw her put all those questions away. Just roll them up and tuck them out of sight.
“Should I call you Joan, too?”
“That would be helpful.” The less Max knew about me the better. And, frankly, I’d grown used to not being Olivia. It had been a sweet fucking relief not being Olivia.
“Aunt Fern,” I said. “I…don’t know how to thank you. What you’ve done—”
“Stop.” She held up her hand and my words died on my lips.
From the inside of the tennis shirt she pulled out a wad of money that had been tucked into her bra. A giant roll of bills. “Here.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s money.” Her tone indicated her estimation of my intelligence had not gone up at all in the last few years.
“Yeah, I get it, but what’s it for?”
“For you. I’m assuming you don’t have any.”
I had fourteen bucks. And whatever coins were in the ashtray of that old Buick. That’s it. “I don’t…I don’t want your money. You’ve already done so much.”
“Take it,” Fern shook it at me. “I…I need you to take it.”
“Why?”
She grabbed my hand and shoved the money in my palm. Forcing it on me. I stood there, dumbstruck.
“I’ve been thinking about this all night,” she said. “At first I thought you coming back here was a way for me to try to make things right between us. To make up for how badly I screwed up when you were kids.”
“You didn’t screw up,” I lied. Or maybe I didn’t. I couldn’t tell anymore who screwed up. All of us did. It was a screwed up situation.
“Listen to me, Oliv…Joan. For once in your life, just listen.” She was all military again and I shut my mouth so fast my teeth clicked.
“I could ask you a lot of questions right now. About the police, and the kind of trouble I think you’re in, but you know something, I don’t want to know. You…you are not my business anymore. You made that clear that you didn’t need me to care about you. You didn’t want me to care about you. So, you don’t owe me anything and after this…I don’t owe you anything. Clean slate between us.”
She was washing her hands of me. That’s what this was. The wad of money in my hand suddenly felt like it weighed seven hundred pounds.
“I’ve carried around my guilt about you for years. For years. But I’m done.”
Oh, why did this hurt? I had no business hurting like this. I’d done the same to her seven years ago. I put my hand to my chest, the thin skin over my heart.
But there was nothing I could say, because she was right.
She deserved to wash her hands of me.
“I remember when you moved in with your sister.” She was not looking at me. Her eyes were somewhere between our feet and I was staring into the top knot of her hair. The red curls all swirled together. “After Derrick died. I had no clue what to do for you two. And there’s a woman down here, Nancy—”
“I remember her,” I said, and she blinked at me like she was surprised. “I did live here for four years and she was nice. Had all those grandkids here all the time.”
“Right. Of course. Well, Nancy told me to make you food. She said food would tell you that you were safe. That you were going to be cared for. I couldn’t believe it would be that simple. I mean…I had no idea you even existed. And suddenly you were going to live with me? Food seemed…ridiculous. But I didn’t know what else to do so I made this big dinner. Nancy helped me. Macaroni and cheese and brownies and this fruit salad thing she said her grandkids loved. I even made Jell-O. I made all this food because I didn’t know what else to do. And then when I picked you up at the bus station…God, you looked like wild animals. Thin and dirty and…angry. So angry. I knew better than to hug you. If I tried to hug you, you would have bitten me. But instead I brought you here, to my home and this table full of food and said—I’ve made dinner.”
I remembered it so well. The smell of the macaroni and cheese—it had sausage in it. It would have been delicious. I knew it then. I knew it now.
“There were a thousand things I could have said. Should have said. About how sorry I was about your dad. How sorry I was that I’d never written or called.” She turned her face sideways, like it hurt to look at me. Like I was too bright a light. That’s how I felt, too. Like I was burning. “So all I said was…I’ve made you dinner.”
“And I said we weren’t hungry.” In her kindness, she gave me something I could reject right away. Something I could hold in disdain and refuse. Something I could insist I didn’t need.
It had been the end of us and we hadn’t even gotten a chance to start.
“But you were hungry,” she said. “You both were. Jennifer almost argued with you, but she followed your lead—she always followed your lead. And instead of feeding you I showed you to the second bedroom. And you shut the door in my face.”
“I didn’t know what to do, either,” I said. �
�I was just a kid.”
“I know. And I think about how your father died. And the time you spent alone out there. You must have been so scared—”
I didn’t want to talk about that fear and the months I’d lived with it.
“He loved you, you know.” I was twisting the knife, because that was the kind of thing I did with her. She was hurting me, so I had to hurt her back. “He talked about you all the time. His heroic older sister who went off to the army. Jennifer and I thought he’d made you up. You never wrote. Never visited. Never called. He had one picture. One picture of his first day of kindergarten. He was standing there all proud with his lunch box and his big sister. Jennifer and I used to joke that you were just some kid he pretended was his sister.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I know. When I left, I left for good and I didn’t look back because there was nothing for me in that place. Nothing that I knew about anyway. And I’m sorry for that.”
Fern was older than my father. I didn’t know by how much or how old she was now, but at this moment, she looked as if every second she’d lived had been a hard one.
“And maybe if I had known about you, maybe things would have been different. Or maybe if you’d sat down at that table and ate the food I made—maybe things would have been different. But those things didn’t happen and so here we are. You owe me nothing, Joan.”
“That’s…that’s not true,” I felt compelled to say. “Me and Jennifer would have been split up. And you prevented that from happening so for that I will always be grateful. And I’m sorry I was a such an ass to you.”
“Take the money,” she said, cutting off my apology like she didn’t want it. Like it meant nothing to her. “I’ve told the Genslers that the condo was rented by a couple on their honeymoon. They’re fine with that. I’ve covered the rental fee. And I got your car detailed. So that’s taken care of. I’ve told the rest of the tenants that you two are on your honeymoon and don’t want to be bothered. So, no one is going to stop by with a cheese ball and a bottle of champagne.”
“That happens?” I said like I wasn’t dying inside.
“It’s Florida, honey, all kinds of stuff happens.” She tugged on the tennis skirt she was wearing. Fern still had killer legs. Killer. It was funny when Jennifer and I moved in here, I took one look at her and I’d known she was family. I looked just like her. That seemed ironic now. Painfully ironic.
