Every Other Weekend

by TA Moore

  She lifted a hand to wave that away. “Your brother’s been hurt.” She sounded anxious. “He’s in the hospital. Your dad asked me to come get you.”

  Fear hit Kelly in the gut, almost like a punch. He should have known. There’d been two calls like this when he was a kid. Dad had been shot and three years later Dad had been caught in a fire—same knock on the door, same wet, sympathetic eyes on the cop outside.

  “Who?” he asked.

  She pulled a sympathetic face at him. “Byron. He was, ah… it was a hit and run. We were…. He called me to ask for help with something. The case he was working on had gotten complicated. He thought someone might have made him. We were going to meet, but before we could, the car hit him. I saw it happen. They took him to Cedars-Sinai.”

  Claire. That was her name. She rubbed her hands nervously on her thighs, and Kelly wondered how much blood had been on them earlier.

  In his ear, Larry snapped his name. “I need you to come and deal with this.”

  Claire pointed to the car. “I’ll drive you to the hospital.”

  “Give me a minute, Larry,” he said.

  “I just gave you one,” she snapped. “Look, I didn’t mind you using the safe house, but this is your case, not the company’s. I can’t—and don’t want to—deal with this tonight.”

  “I know. I just… shut up for a minute.” He hung up on her. Later on he’d pay for that, but he couldn’t deal with so many voices in his ear. “Was he badly hurt?”

  There was a pinched bracket on either side of Claire’s mouth. “He was unconscious. There was blood. I… should have checked, but it… it wasn’t like in training.”

  Kelly rubbed both hands briskly over his face as though he could scrape away the cobwebs in his brain. As she glanced at his bruised chest, her surprise and suspicion reminded Kelly that he had an excuse to take his time.

  “I need to go get dressed,” he said. The hiccupy fury of Maxie’s wail from the second floor reminded him that wasn’t all. “Get Maxie sorted. I’ll meet you at the car.”

  He closed the door in her face—which wasn’t going to help the suspicion—and headed back up the stairs. His phone rang as he reached the landing. It had probably taken Larry that long to find out where she threw it.

  “Sorry,” he led with. “Something happened with—”

  Clayton stepped out of the bedroom, his shirt open at the collar and sleeves rolled back as though he’d been at work late and not just fucked. He plucked the phone out of Kelly’s hand.

  “Larry, Clayton Reynolds,” he said. “Daniel called me. Kelly has a family emergency. One of his brothers has been rushed to the hospital and…. Yes. I will. I appreciate that.”

  He hung up and handed the phone back.

  “Go to the hospital,” he said. “It’s your family.”

  “What about Nadine?” Kelly asked. “If her husband or his ‘friends’ found where she was….”

  Clayton sighed and rubbed his hand through his hair. Still a tangled mess of short cherub curls, it was the only thing that resisted being cool and collected.

  “If they did, she probably told them where she was,” he said. “Baker said that there was no sign of forced entry. She left Harry there, told him that she had to go and see someone. Harry set the alarm off by accident.”

  Kelly frowned and ducked past Clayton. He grabbed an old T-shirt from the dresser and dragged it on. “I can’t see her going back to Jimmy,” he said. “She made up her mind.”

  “And I hope she hasn’t changed it,” Clayton said. “But it’s not always that easy. He’s had a long time to learn how to manipulate her. She hasn’t had long where she felt in charge of her own life. I’ll call you when I know more.”

  “You could just call anyway,” Kelly said. “If you wanted.”

  Clayton flashed one of those rare smiles and leaned in to skim a kiss across Kelly’s mouth. He casually, intimately brushed his hand down Kelly’s arm. “I’ll remember that.”

  He left, but the warmth of his hand lingered, and the room still smelled like him.

  Kelly rubbed his arm. It was weird to feel like you missed someone who’d only—right at that moment—left. He and Clayton hadn’t even been—something more than nothing but less than something—for long enough to justify missing him at all.

  “Don’t make yourself into a liar,” Kelly told himself. “No fairy tales here.”

  It took him a couple of minutes to find his spare eye. At some point he’d decided the safe place to put it was under the cap from an old eyewash. He gave it a dust and popped it into place and gritted his teeth against the ache of his bruises. It would have been easier not to bother with the eye, but there was a chance his mom would miss the bruises. The patch was a bit more in your face.

  He grabbed his sneakers, pulled them on, and scrambled down the stairs. He was at the door when his brain registered that Maxie was still crying.

  Shit. He’d forgotten.

  Kelly went back up the stairs two at a time despite the ache of bruised muscles. As Kelly bent over the cot, Maxie stared at him as though he realized he’d nearly been abandoned.

  “Sorry. We’re going to go and see your dad,” Kelly said as he lifted Max up. “That’ll be new, won’t it?” Maxie sneezed a bubble in answer, which Kelly supposed he could take either way.

  Downstairs the door creaked open, and he heard Claire take an uncertain step into the house. “Mr. Kelly?” she said. Her voice had the brittle edge of trauma. “I really want to get back to the hospital. Are you….”

  Kelly wiped Maxie’s nose on a bib and tucked him into the crook of his arm. “Coming.”

  But not in the way he’d planned.

  IT WOULDN’T be fair to say that Kathleen enjoyed crises, but she was good at them. Maybe it was just practice. As a new-minted mother when Cole and Worth were young, she might have gagged at open wounds and panicked over broken bones. But by the time Kelly came along, she’d slapped a dressing on what was left of his eye and drove him to hospital because it would take too long for the ambulance to get there.

  A simple car accident wasn’t enough to rattle a woman with that sort of pedigree.

  When Claire and Kelly found her, she was red-eyed but composed. She’d abandoned the waiting room in the ER for a seat in the cafeteria, and a cup of nursed coffee was going cold at her elbow as she ran her family’s life through her phone.

  “…tell him to drive safely,” she said as they reached her. A strained smile acknowledged their arrival without interrupting the call, and she nodded to the chair opposite. “Last thing we need is someone else in the ER. Okay. I love him too and you too.”

  She hung up and set the phone down.

  “Dad?” Kelly asked.

  Kathleen wrapped both hands around the plastic cup and nodded. She had her pajama top on over her jeans—cartoon kittens caught midpounce on robin’s-egg blue satin. Her face was bare and shiny, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth harsher than Kelly remembered them.

  “Jim was at a training seminar in San Diego. Thank God, I talked Worth into going down with him.” She fretfully checked the top button of her pajama top and first undid and then redid it. “Thank God I made Worth go down with him. He thought I was being paranoid, told me he was fine, but he’s not up to the drive, not after a shock like this. Claire. Thank you so much for coming.”

  That was what she said. Kelly mutely translated it to what actually happened. Out from under Kathleen’s healthy regime for the day, Jim had gotten legless in a bar—there was always one—with other old cops.

  Kathleen held her hand out and clutched Claire’s bony, freckled fingers tightly as she murmured how it would be fine, that Byron had a strong will and so many people cared about him. It was almost a prayer—two gingery women standing in front of a shadowy, plate glass window.

  Kelly let them get on with it. It was the lie that bothered him. Maybe that was unfair, but his dad was a drunk, the life and soul of the party, u
ntil he’d got to America and people tutted “alcoholic.” He never beat anyone or broke anything. The worst he’d ever done was try to book them all on a flight back home after a particularly bad year. The only one he hurt was himself.

  So why lie about it to two people who probably knew better?

  “What about Wilde?” he asked. “Cole?”

  Kathleen shook her head. “They have to work. I told them to come in the morning. They can sit with Byron while I go home to change,” she said. Her eyes fell to Maxie, his blanket hung half to the ground as he unraveled it one overheated squawk at a time, and her mouth trembled.

  “There’s my boy.” She held her arms out. “Give him here. He wants his granny, doesn’t he?”

  “He’s tired,” Kelly said as he transferred Maxie. It was the truth, but it felt like an excuse, a reason for Maxie to sniff and whinge as his grandmother cuddled him and tucked his blanket in.

  “Look at this? What has your uncle done to you, sweetheart?” Kathleen tutted as she swaddled Maxie up again and twisted the blanket and folded it around him like a straitjacket. He was tucked in so tightly that Kelly wasn’t sure if it was internal pressure or frustration that turned his face bright red and made him wail. “That’s better.”

  “He really hates that,” Kelly said.

  Instead of listening Kathleen gave the end of the blanket a tuck to tighten it further. She half turned to Claire and shook her head in mock dismay.

  “He’s a good boy. He tries,” she said. “But he’s not…. Well, Kelly’s never been interested in getting married and having a family. He prefers the bachelor life, don’t you, dear?”

  Kathleen sat down and nursed the furious Maxie with a fingertip instead of a pacifier. Behind her back Claire grimaced awkward sympathy at Kelly, her pretty face surprisingly elastic and mobile.

  “This is how he lost his mom,” Kathleen said as she slowly rocked Maxie in her arms. She patted his bottom in a slow, almost hypnotic rhythm. “I drove up and sat with him while we waited for news. Do you think he remembers? So much tragedy for such a little person.”

  Claire frowned, ginger eyebrows twitched together. “I thought…. Byron said he was there. That he sat with Maxie while his wife died.”

  “Oh, he was there too,” Kathleen said. “That was later, though. At first it was just me and Maxie. Just like today.”

  She took a shaky breath, and a tear fell on Maxie’s blanket.

  “I’m so sorry,” Claire said as she hugged Kathleen’s shoulders sympathetically. “I didn’t mean to remind you of…. It’ll be okay.”

  It was habit to let Kathleen have her rose-tinted version of history, to reframe Wilde’s drug problem as him being a layabout when he was a teen, that Byron was hyperactive, that they’d moved because of Dad’s job… that Kelly was just a committed bachelor, not that he dated bachelors.

  Her memory wasn’t just a cockeyed optimist’s take on events, though. It was an outright lie. Kelly remembered the calls from Mom to him and Cole and to Dad as she harried them to get Byron to the hospital. Every call had expressed relief that they’d fixed the last insurmountable obstacle that stopped Byron getting into a car to see his wife die and frustration that they hadn’t fixed the next one.

  Not once had she listened to “He just doesn’t want to go.”

  Kelly bit the inside of his cheek in frustration. His teeth caught on the raw graze from earlier, and he tasted copper and salt.

  “I’ll go check in with the doctors,” he said as he swallowed the blood. “See what’s going on or if they’ve got any updates on how Byron’s doing.”

  Kathleen pressed her lips together, took a shaky breath, and nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “They, umm… they said he was still unconscious and they wouldn’t know more until he wakes up. And he will. He’s got his boy here. He’ll wake up for him.”

  She looked down at Maxie while Claire awkwardly patted her shoulder and asked about tea. Kelly left them to it as he dumped Maxie’s bag of stuff on a chair and headed out to look for information. He ruefully rubbed his thumb over the edge of his bruised eye as he nudged the door open with his shoulder.

  Kathleen probably wouldn’t even have noticed if he left the eye patch on.

  Chapter Twelve

  IT WASN’T often that Byron came out worse in anything. A fight with a car was apparently the exception that proved the rule. He lay on the bleached-white hospital sheets, bruises stippled from his jaw up to his temple and his leg slung up in the air and held together with a cage of pins and struts.

  His toes were swollen and purple where they stuck out of the dressing. It reminded Kelly of a corpse he’d found once—a missing person turned suicide who got dressed to go to the beach and hanged themselves in a derelict store instead. It took them four days to track down the hole in the bucket where all the family money had dripped out, and the woman’s feet had been that color when they finally got there.

  Despite all his issues with Byron, Kelly felt a jolt of relief that his brother was still breathing. At the end of the day, he was family, and blood was thicker than water.

  The doctor in charge of the ward was a middle-aged woman with tired eyes and shoes that squeaked as she walked around the bed.

  “Your brother was in and out of consciousness when he came in, and he does have a hairline fracture of his skull,” she said briskly. It wasn’t that there was no sympathy in her voice, but it had to wait its turn. “That can cause a traumatic brain injury, but at the moment, we’re hopeful that there’s been no bleeding in the brain. He was in surgery…”

  She paused as she bent over to check the IV plugged into Byron’s arm and the stand he was hooked to. Then she picked up the thread of her sentence as though she’d never dropped it.

  “…due to complications from his broken ankle. There was significant internal bleeding, and it was necessary to operate immediately to ameliorate the pressure. It went well, and, for now, there’s no reason to be pessimistic about his outcome. Detective Kelly is doing well, Detective Kelly.” She delivered the last line with sharp irony.

  “Sorry,” Kelly said. “Only one in the family who isn’t.”

  The doctor raised a perfectly arched eyebrow and tapped a tooth-dented pen against the soft crescent of bruised skin under her eye.

  “That’s a prosthetic?”

  Kelly rubbed his eye again. He didn’t remember binocular vision—he imagined it was like being a chameleon—and it didn’t bother him that one was glass. But experience had taught him that most people found the naked socket weird, and the ones that found it hot weren’t for him. Yet it still felt strange when someone pointed out that he only had one. It was like being naked, only not in a good way.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  The doctor squinted at him and nodded her approval. “It’s nice work. Your ophthalmologist did a good job.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Your brother is doing well. He’s young, he’s strong, and he’s got excellent doctors,” the doctor said. She pushed the pen behind her ear and checked her pockets for a mint. The red-striped sweet crinkled as she unwrapped it. “For now, there’s no reason to expect the worst. Stay with him. I’ll send a nurse to let your mother know he’s doing better.”

  She popped the candy into her mouth, patted his arm, and walked away as she crunched. Left alone with his brother, Kelly took a deep breath and let it out. The taste of it lingered on his tongue—bleach, antiseptic, and pain.

  There wasn’t a lot Kelly remembered about what happened after he lost his eye—mostly stories from the rest of the family, repeated until it was like a memory—but he remembered that antiseptic and blood tang on the air and Byron’s voice in his ear to keep him company in the dark.

  Now it was Byron in the dark, and Kelly the one by his bedside.

  “Mom’s downstairs,” he said aloud. “She’ll be here in a minute.”

  Behind bruised lids he saw Byron’s eyes flicker as though he’d heard him. Kelly dragged his hand down
over his mouth. The stubble was rough against his fingers. He wished he’d told the doctor not to worry, that he’d go and get Kathleen. If it was Cole, he could have held his hand and talked about the beer they’d get once he woke up.

  It wasn’t that easy with Byron. Nothing ever was.

  The minutes ticked by, and the silence settled on Kelly’s shoulders like a weight. Somehow it felt more oppressive than if Byron had been awake. He’d just started to think that he should go and find his mom when Byron coughed and licked his lips.

  “Wha’ the fuck?” he mumbled as he opened his eyes.

  He tried to lift his arm and flinched at the rattle of the IV. Kelly reached out and pressed his hand on Byron’s shoulder. The skin under his hand somehow managed to be hot and chilled at the same time… clammy.

  “You’re in the hospital,” Kelly said. “It’s okay.”

  Byron blinked and registered the pain somewhere down under the drugs they’d hit him with. He twisted his mouth awkwardly. “No.”

  “Just relax,” Kelly told him as he got up. “I’ll get someone.”

  THEY LOOKED like a nice little family unit once the doctors were done. The slim red-haired girlfriend on one side of the bed, the doting mother on the other, and the injured hero in the middle with his baby cradled lovingly in the crook of his arm. The only thing out of place was the extraneous uncle in the doorway.

  Maxie made a fretful sound and squirmed. He kicked his legs and covered his eyes with his hands, palms out and fingers starfished. In about five minutes, he’d start to wail, inconsolable at being a baby. Habit made Kelly push himself off the wall, but before he could say anything, Kathleen plucked Maxie up off the rough blankets.

  “One silver lining is that you’ll have time to bond with Maxie now,” Kathleen said as she cradled the baby against her shoulder. “You can stay with me and Dad. We’ll sort out Wilde’s old room over the garage until you’re back on your feet. Your dad’s right. It’s not fair to expect Kelly to take on a baby. He’s got his own life.”