Miller was the reason Danny had been working every night since he’d started at the Legal Aid office, trying to stay one step ahead of his memories. It was too depressing, too fucking lonely, to go back to his quiet apartment and eat cold cereal on the sofa. He didn’t even have canned TV laughter to keep him company because he couldn’t afford cable and couldn’t get any reception without it. He hated sleeping, too, because Miller was always waiting behind his closed eyelids, and waking up alone after having Miller with him in his dreams was an agony Danny could hardly bear.
He’d thought the longing, the need for Miller, would lessen with each day that passed. But the opposite had proven true. With each sunset he wanted Miller more, missed him with a fierceness that came from his soul, a bone-deep ache of wanting. That Danny’s feelings for Miller grew stronger by the day went against all logic. They’d been apart now for longer than they’d ever been together. But Danny had discovered that logic wasn’t a part of loving someone, and he was slowly coming to accept that being without Miller was an unhealed wound he’d carry for eternity.
“Hey, anybody here?” a voice called from the front of the building, rising above the bell that notified them they had a visitor.
Danny stood in the doorway of his office as Jill escorted her client down the hall; he wanted to let the man know Jill was not alone. The client was young, startlingly so, greasy hair pulled back into a ponytail, his thin body cloaked in teenage swagger.
“How are you doing?” Danny asked as he passed.
The kid gave him a quick up-and-down glance, his eyes distant and cold. “Just fine, man,” he said, with a knowing little grin. Danny recognized his posing for what it was: a way to push back the fear and pretend this was all part of his master plan, as though going to prison was only a tiny bump in the road instead of the pothole that would sink him. Danny had been this boy more than once.
It was after eight o’clock when the kid finally left. Danny could hear Jill talking to him in the lobby and then the jingling bell as the front door opened and closed. “So, what’s his deal?” Danny asked as he pulled on his jacket in anticipation of the snarling Chicago wind.
“Drugs. What else?” Jill looked tired, her energy down to a low boil. “It’s his first offense, but he had quite a stash. It’s going to be a tough introduction into the system for him.”
“How old is he?”
“Almost twenty. It’s always a deadly combination: young, cocky, and desperate to please.”
They both moved out onto the sidewalk. “You need a ride?” Jill asked as she locked the door behind them.
“No. I’m going to take the L.”
“Okay,” she smiled. “See you tomorrow.”
Danny waited until Jill was behind the wheel of her tiny Toyota before he turned toward the train station. He could see the kid sauntering along in front of him, probably headed to the same destination.
It was hard to believe he’d been even younger than this kid when he’d fallen in with Hinestroza. The boy seemed hardly older than a child, more a product of his youth than of his own choices. It didn’t seem right that someone so unformed could be held solely responsible for his bad decisions. He wanted to catch up to the kid and tell him it wasn’t too late, that with someone like Jill in his corner and a change of attitude, he might avoid making a train wreck of his life. Danny saw his own reflection in every inch of the boy.
It hit Danny suddenly that he felt compassion for this kid that he’d never offered himself, that maybe some of his own bad choices had sprung, at least in part, from having been little more than a child when he’d made them, from having no one in the world who gave a shit about helping him do better. And maybe it would be okay if he started to forgive himself for the boy he had been. He would always have to live with the consequences of his choices, even the ones made in the haste and ignorance of youth, but maybe he could try forgiving himself for the choices themselves. Maybe it would be all right with Ortiz or God or whoever was watching if he showed himself just that little bit of mercy, allowed himself to believe that forgiveness might be something he deserved after all.
ELLIS CAMPBELL had been using the same desk for fourteen years and it showed. Danny had volunteered to empty out the lower right-hand drawer, and so far he’d thrown more stuff into the trash can than into the banker’s box Ellis had placed on his chair.
“I thought you were neat,” Danny commented, pointing to the clean desktop Ellis took such pride in.
“I am. It all goes in that drawer.”
Danny smiled, shaking his head as he tossed a mangled paper-clip chain into the trash. He fished out four staplers from under a pile of ancient telephone books and lined them up on the desk. “Are you going to miss this place?”
“Sure. I’ve been here for a long time. It will be strange to wake up and not have anywhere I’m supposed to be,” Ellis said, heaving himself up with a steadying hand on Danny’s shoulder. “But Rita will be glad to have me around the house more.”
Danny had met Ellis’s wife, Rita, a couple of times at the office. She was a regal-looking woman with a fluff of black hair and a quick laugh. Every time Ellis saw her, his eyes burned bright like charcoal on a fire, and his face left a decade behind.
“Hey, Danny, can you come in here for a minute?” Jill called, her voice carrying easily across the narrow hall.
“I’ll be right back.” Danny wiped his dusty hands on the seat of his jeans as he picked his way gingerly across Jill’s land mine of a floor. “What’s up?”
Jill pointed to a three-inch-thick stack of paper perched on the corner of her desk. “I need you to read these cases and give me a memo on them. I want to know if any of them are helpful on the Lawrence suppression issue.” Just as Danny had predicted, Jill had lost the battle to keep the gun out of evidence at the Lawrence suppression hearing, but she wasn’t conceding the war.
Danny picked up the cases, testing their weight in his hands. Jill hadn’t asked him to do anything like this before. “I’ve never read a case,” Danny reminded her.
“Oh, yeah.” Jill bit her bottom lip as she scanned her crowded workspace. “Ah, there it is.” She tossed him a Black’s Law Dictionary. “You can look up any words you’re not familiar with in here.”
Danny didn’t move, his eyes on Jill’s shiny hair as she returned to her work, her head bent over whatever she was reading. “Jill? Maybe somebody else should do this. I mean, I never even went to college, I’m not sure—”
“You’re smart, Danny. You’ll figure it out.” She didn’t even look up, not giving him any room to argue or back away, expecting more from him than he would ever have dared to expect from himself.
Danny returned to his desk, stopping for another cup of coffee first—gritty, black sludge they made every morning in the small kitchen at the back of the building. As nasty as the stuff was, he figured this assignment required more than his usual dose of caffeine. He sat down and took the first case off the pile; his heart hammering in his throat reminded him in some small way of those early days with Hinestroza, when the fear of fucking up had been a looming giant breathing hot fire down his neck. After a solid hour of reading, Danny’s brain hurt, his mind so overtaxed he swore the roots of his hair were throbbing with the effort of trying to make sense of the words in front of him. He’d made it through one page. One page of a seventy-page Supreme Court opinion. The pure hell of it made him want to punch something. Couldn’t these fucking people speak English? He’d never felt so stupid or out of his element.
Danny tossed down his highlighter, blowing out angry puffs of air, fighting his body’s urge to simply slam out the door without looking back. He didn’t need this shit.
“I see she’s got you reading cases,” Ellis said from across the room, his voice mild.
Danny looked over his shoulder. “Yeah.”
“It’s hard, I know. Took me a long time before I could figure out what they were saying.”
“I think I’m giving up,” Danny
said, rubbing his forehead.
“Nah,” Ellis chided. “You’ve barely started. Keep at it. By the end of this week it’ll be easier.”
Danny couldn’t imagine it would ever get easier, any of it: being the dumbest one in the room instead of the man Hinestroza counted on to help run things; being so poor he couldn’t afford a pizza instead of having money to blow on motorcycles and leather jackets; being alone instead of with Miller. Miller, who never left Danny’s thoughts, only circling above when Danny was busy, landing with a life-consuming thud the moment Danny let down his guard.
“I won’t make it to the end of the week.”
Something in Danny’s voice gave Ellis pause. He stopped packing up his desk and crossed to Danny’s chair. “She believes you can do this, Danny, otherwise she wouldn’t ask. Jill doesn’t waste her time, you know that.”
“I know,” Danny sighed. “But why me? There have to be people here who can do this in their sleep.”
Ellis clucked his tongue impatiently. “Because she wants you to see what you can do. You’re not here to get coffee and staple papers. She wants you to use your brain.” Ellis tapped his own temple in demonstration. “Keep at it,” Ellis repeated, this time not urging but commanding.
“Okay,” Danny agreed wearily. “But how about a five-minute break first?”
Ellis nodded. “Let’s make use of those young arms of yours. Come on and help me carry a couple of these boxes to my car.”
The bright sunshine when they opened the back door was deceiving, failing to cancel out the bitter late-January wind that swirled around Danny’s head, turning the tips of his ears to numb bands of flesh within seconds. “Damn,” he muttered as they hurried to Ellis’s car.
Danny deposited the boxes into Ellis’s trunk and stuffed his frozen hands into his pockets, waiting as Ellis slammed the trunk lid.
“Ellis, who did you kill?” he blurted out, his curiosity finally getting the best of him now that it was Ellis’s last week before his retirement. Danny’s time for answers was running short.
Ellis shot Danny a look he couldn’t decipher, his steps falling into time with Danny’s as they turned away from the car. “How long have you been wanting to ask me that?”
Danny shrugged. “For a while.”
“Not many people have the guts to ask flat-out like that.” Ellis hunched his shoulders against the wind. “It was my wife. I killed my wife,” he said after a heavy beat of silence.
“But—”
“My first wife.”
“And you managed to get a second one?”
Ellis glanced at him sharply, a short, surprised laugh exploding from his belly.
“Sorry,” Danny said, embarrassed. “I didn’t mean—”
“No, it’s okay. I’ve been married to Rita for seventeen years, and there are days I still can’t believe she was willing.”
“What happened with your first wife?”
“We were both young, messed-up kids, not even close to being adults, not in any way that counted. I was a junkie when I could afford it, an alcoholic when I couldn’t. Just bulldozing my way through my life and through my marriage. We had one of those relationships that’s doomed from the first moment you lay eyes on each other.” Ellis let out a strangled sigh. “I came home drunk and drugged-up, and she wasn’t in much better shape. We started fighting. To this day I can’t remember what the fight was about.” Ellis’s voice sounded old for the first time since Danny had met him.
“Christ,” Danny murmured.
“I was sorry the second it happened; couldn’t believe I’d done it. But it was too late by then. Too late to change any of it.”
Ellis held open the back door of the building and they both ducked inside, escaping the stinging cold. Ellis didn’t head straight for their office, instead leaning up against the wall, his eyes on Danny.
“Do you ever….” Danny looked down at his feet, shifting nervously from side to side. “Do you ever think about her, what she would think knowing you’ve got a life now when you took hers away?”
Ellis smiled, a small, pained curve of his lips. “All the time, Danny, all the time. But her forgiveness is something I’ll never have. Probably don’t deserve it anyway.” Ellis’s voice dropped, low and soothing. “What do you want to hear? That someday you’re going to be able to look in the mirror and not see every bad thing you’ve ever done, every mistake you’ve made, staring right back at you?”
Danny’s eyes met Ellis’s across the small hall. He could feel the pleading in his own without even needing to see.
“’Cause that’s not going to happen,” Ellis said, not softening the words. “It’s always our mistakes, the things we aren’t proud of, that are the first ones to stand up, ready to be counted. That’s human nature and it’s not going to change, not for me or for you, either.”
“Then what’s the point?” Danny demanded. “What’s the point of trying to do anything different?”
Ellis took off his glasses, hiking his sweater up to polish them with the white T-shirt he wore underneath. “The point is….” His voice trailed off, his eyes focused somewhere distant, like he was trying to pull a memory out of a thick fog. “It’s like this old patchwork quilt my momma used to have. It came from her grandma or maybe her great-grandma, I can’t remember; anyway, it was sort of a family scrapbook, I guess. Each piece on that quilt meant something. And some of those pieces were the damn ugliest things you’ve ever seen—old brown corduroy worn to the nub or stained pieces of cotton you wouldn’t want to use as a rag to clean your bathroom floor. But some of the pieces were so beautiful they almost hurt my eyes to look at when I was a kid. White silk from a wedding dress or the red velvet from a baby’s first Christmas coat.” Ellis paused, perching his glasses back on his nose. “That’s the best you can hope for, Danny. That your life turns out like that patchwork quilt. That you can add some bright, sparkling pieces to the dirty, stained ones you’ve got so far. That in the end, the bright patches might take up more space on your quilt than the dark ones.” Ellis stared at Danny, making sure he was listening. “That’s the point.”
When Ellis had started talking, Danny had almost tuned him out. He didn’t see what a quilt had to do with the question he was asking. But the thing was, as he listened, he could see his quilt, the inky black and bruised purple patches spreading out like some dark and treacherous ocean. But tucked in among all that swallowing darkness there was a tiny speck of silver, from an essay contest he’d won in tenth grade, so proud of his cheap, plastic plaque; a small crimson patch from those first months with Amanda, when her laugh had sparkled with joy; a crisp flash of yellowy-green that marked his friendship with Griff; and the brightest piece of all, shimmering golden silk threaded with starlight… Miller.
“Yeah,” Danny said quietly. “I think I get it.”
Ellis nodded, then reached out and patted Danny’s shoulder with a gentle hand. “Come on. Time to get back to your cases.”
DANNY HAD made it through a whopping ten pages of the Supreme Court case when he finally hung it up for the night at nine o’clock. He was the only one left in the building; Jill had given him her key to lock up with when she’d left at seven. Danny turned off lights as he went, making sure the coffeemaker was unplugged and the back door was locked before he left through the main entrance.
As he fought the wind, heading toward the L station, his stomach gnawed at him, reminding him he’d skipped dinner. He mentally reviewed what he had at home in his kitchen, resigned to the fact that it was probably going to be another cereal night, unless he went all out and made himself some macaroni and cheese.
“Hey, you,” a voice called from a shadowy doorway as he passed.
Danny glanced to his left, his eyes picking up a skinny figure beckoning him closer. He kept on walking, hoping to make it to the station just as a train pulled in; he wasn’t in the mood to wait.
“Hey, you want anything? I got some good stuff,” the doorway-lurker urged, leaving his
position to walk alongside Danny, his smile revealing a row of rotted teeth.
“No, not interested,” Danny responded, keeping up his quick clip until he left the man behind on his patch of sidewalk.
Danny wasn’t tempted to buy any drugs. That had never been his weakness. But he felt like an addict all the same, shot through with sharp, electric cravings when his thoughts turned to walking into his cold, quiet apartment at the end of this long day, his fingers itching to make the call. Dial the number he still had memorized and probably always would—his insurance against the future, his own dark and terrible safety net. Maybe Hinestroza would be glad to hear from him. Maybe he could fall right back into the slot he used to occupy, all these months just a hiccup in his rightful life. There would be such relief in being the Danny he knew so well, the one who let people down and didn’t have a future and knew exactly what tomorrow held because it was never anything better than the day that had come before.
But it was more difficult to disappoint people when they expected something of you, expected more from you than to show them your worst at every turn. Danny didn’t want to betray Jill’s trust, her matter-of-fact faith that he had it inside him to change. And if he returned to his old life, what would that say to Miller about the sacrifice he’d made—that he’d given up everything for a man who didn’t give a damn, a man who, after everything they’d been through, would still choose Hinestroza and a life in the shadows.
Danny stomped his feet against the concrete platform, trying to keep warm as he waited for his train, listening for the distant rumble that would carry him home. He wanted to make a promise to himself, to Miller, and to Jill that he would never make that call, never jump into that safety net riddled with jagged holes. But such a promise felt too big for him, beyond what he was capable of giving. Its very vastness made him feel smothered and weighed down with leaden expectations.
Dreamspinner Press Year Three Greatest Hits Page 70
