Hold Me in the Dark

by Newbury, Helena

  I usually loved it, on the roof. I could see it all without being in it. No one kicked me in the ankles or tripped over me, no one’s ass was in my face, no crowds were surrounding me and making me claustrophobic….

  No one was looking down on me. There’s a reason I chose a penthouse.

  But for the first time, being so high felt isolating because I was up here and he was down there.

  I couldn’t figure Calahan out at all. He wasn’t like any fed I’d ever met and in my old line of work, I used to meet a lot. He was a rule-breaker in an organization that was all about the rules. He’d brought me that laptop to decrypt even though it might cost him his job, all to save a woman he’d never met. There was something about him that made me feel we might be kindred spirits, that he might understand….

  And he hadn’t looked disappointed.

  There it was. Right there in my mind, the thing I’d been trying to avoid thinking about. I cursed and tried to push it away, but it was too late, I had to acknowledge it. Okay, yes. He’d been shocked when he saw me. But he’d made sure I knew that he wasn’t disappointed.

  Now all the other thoughts started rushing in. The way his suit jacket stretched across his back when he squared his shoulders. The glossy black stubble that I could hear rasp whenever he rubbed his chin—did he even realize he did that? The scent of his cologne, when he leaned right into me. It was amazing: sharp and clean, sort of old-fashioned, but then underneath there was a softer smell, like vanilla and cinnamon.

  His arms. Big and heavy with muscle as they’d rested on the desktop. His hand, so big and warm when it had covered mine. His voice, so aggressive and firm. He had that authority thing nailed. If he said put your hands up, you’d just do it instantly. But when he was talking quietly, he changed completely. The volume dropped, the voice softened and that bass growl became a magical harmonic that made my whole body buzz and throb, the energy pooling in my groin.

  And. That. Ass. Every time he’d turned away from me, my eyes had swiveled to look at it like they were magnets and it was a hunk of sculpted, rock-hard iron. You could write poetry about that ass. I’d never seen one so hard and perfectly shaped and I’ve spent enough time sitting, while men around me are standing, that I think I qualify as an authority.

  He didn’t look disappointed.

  Crazy. Maybe he would have wanted the Before me, the one who could jog and ice skate and dance—badly—and one day maybe push a baby stroller. Not this After version.

  You’re assigned a therapist, after something like this happens. Almost a year on, he’s still telling me that I’m adapting badly. I point to my lowered kitchen units and customized desk and how fast I can get around in my chair, but I know that’s not what he means. He uses words like acceptance and reaching an understanding with my situation.

  But I can’t.

  Every morning, I forget.

  I get up how I’ve always gotten up: a bad-tempered groan, eyes still shut, then a twist and roll towards the edge of the bed. Except now, nothing happens. My upper body twists and my legs just sit there, holding me in place. And the reality of it crashes down on me: that cold gray blanket, suffocating and inescapable. My therapist tells me that I’m not really forgetting. How could I forget, after 427 mornings? What’s really happening is that I haven’t fully accepted it.

  And he’s right. I still want it to be undone. I want to turn back the clock to the day it happened. I want to tell my brother that I don’t want to go out for a run, and keep him home and safe. I want a time machine or a brand new medical treatment or, hell, I’d take a magic lamp at this stage. I just want to be back how I was.

  I’m from Beaverton, Oregon, right on the other side of the country. Greener, wetter, slower than New York. My mom is a midwife, my dad a history teacher. When she gave birth to twins, no one was expecting us to be anything special. But my brother Josh and I had a weird, quiet manner. Both of us were obsessed with building blocks: sorting them and stacking them and taking pleasure in how four blocks could become one big block, and four of those could become one even bigger block, and, magically, that bigger one contained just the right number of blocks, when you put them all in a line. We didn’t have a name for what we were doing because we didn’t have numbers yet. But we understood the satisfaction, deep in our hearts, when things added up.

  It wasn’t long after we started school that someone first used the G word. Josh and I found that funny because neither of us felt like geniuses. Maybe that’s why the bond between us was so tight: to each other, we were normal. Numbers just made sense to us. They split apart in my mind: I see 12384 as twelve 1032s the same way most people see the word moonlight as a combination of moon and light.

  Our parents encouraged us and we loved them but my brother and I needed each other. We both knew what it was like to get into a problem and go deep, sitting silently as our minds bathed in quiet, mathematical calm. Once, I did it for sixteen hours and that got me in trouble. A child psychologist came to the house and interviewed me and then talked to my parents. Listening at the door, my brother and I heard, “Minds like theirs can be fragile. There’s always a danger of them... snapping.”

  I don’t know if my parents knew that I had overheard this conversation. Certainly they never mentioned it. But for the rest of my life, the psychologist’s words stuck with me, and I started to visualize my mind as this hugely complex, hugely delicate glass structure that was placed atop a high ledge... and could fall and shatter into a million pieces at any time.

  After the conversation with the psychologist, our parents made a big push to get us outdoors more, to play with other kids, to ground us. Josh and I reluctantly took up running. Neither of us really liked it but, as long as we were together, it was okay.

  Inseparable, we both applied to Princeton and got in on math scholarships, aged sixteen. We were geeks even amongst the geeks, but Josh, always the more sociable one, helped me meet people. After our degrees, we both stayed on to do PhDs, me in encryption and programming, Josh in pure mathematical research. Shortly after we got our doctorates, I wrote an encryption algorithm that wound up becoming the standard for protecting digital movies from copying. The license fees from movie studios paid for my first apartment in New York and I was offered a job with a tech company that wrote encryption for financial companies on Wall Street. They paid me a lot of money, but I had no idea what to do with it: I was in it for the math. So I just let the money build up in the bank.

  I’d started hacking so that I could see how people might try to attack encryption, but when I saw a plea from a female hacker for help, I got talking with her. It was Lily, and when I found out it was human traffickers she was trying to hack, I joined her and along with Gabriella we formed the Sisters of Invidia.

  I was happy. I had a good job, a nice apartment and I even had a boyfriend, a guy called Ross, who I’d been seeing for about a year and who was starting to hint he might pop the question.

  And then, one day, I lost my brother and my body was broken beyond repair.

  Josh wasn’t just my twin, he was my best friend and the only one who really understood me. Losing him was like losing part of myself. And it made no sense: he was the good-looking one, the confident one, the more normal one. It should have been me who died.

  When I woke up in the hospital, afterwards, my boyfriend Ross was there. My legs were circled by metal rings, with pins projecting deep into the bone. The surgeon told me how the bones had been broken in countless places by the weight of the concrete slab. The blood flow was compromised and I’d come very close to having both legs amputated, but eventually they managed to repair the blood vessels and pin the breaks.

  What they couldn’t fix was the damaged nerves. My spine was fine and I could feel things down to my upper thighs. But below that, nothing. I’d never walk again.

  As the room swam behind hot tears, I squeezed Ross’s hand. He squeezed back, but... there was a delay, before it happened.

  He said he’d be back
the next day, but he didn’t show. Worried, I called him but he didn’t pick up. I left messages, emailed him. Nothing. I finally tracked him down at two in the morning, catching him as he came online on a messaging app. What’s going on? Are you okay?

  It’s over, he typed back.

  My brain just didn’t go there, at first. What’s over?

  No reply. And then, when I tried again, I found he’d blocked me.

  It was worse—much, much worse—than when the surgeon had told me. I could cope with not walking, as long as I had Ross. I was still me. But now I wasn’t that girl anymore. I was subhuman, not worth being with. I lay there in the darkness of my hospital room with tears flooding down my cheeks.

  My parents wanted me to move back to Oregon: it was all they’d talk about. I knew they were just worried about me and that they were still grieving for Josh. But I also knew that if I went home, I’d never leave again. And giving up on Manhattan would feel like failing. So I stayed where I was and started calling my folks less and less.

  A month later, I went back to work. Work, I figured would be a relief. Normality. Except it wasn’t normal at all. People talked to me in this slow, patronizing voice until I wanted to scream at them that my brain was just fine!

  At first, it seemed like my boss was going out of his way to help. There’s no need for you to do that foreign trip next month, he told me. Someone else can handle it. I wanted to say that airlines could cope just fine with wheelchairs, these days, but I nodded and thanked him because I didn’t want to be difficult. The next day, he told me: travelling to other companies, to discuss their security—we’ll pass that off to someone else. I blinked at him. I could drive just fine using hand controls and I could handle getting from the car to a meeting room. But he was insistent. A week later: it seems silly to have you come all the way up to the fifth floor just for the daily meeting. We can conference you in by phone.

  Eventually, I was working in a tiny, downstairs office with virtually no contact with anyone. They thought I wasn’t capable of meeting clients or contributing ideas, anymore. I was an embarrassment. And then, inevitably: Now that you have reduced responsibility, we’ll need to look at reducing your salary accordingly….

  They were pushing me out. I saved them the trouble and quit. Spent the money that had been building up in my bank account on the penthouse and had it adapted so that it suited me exactly. When I moved in and got back online, there were messages from Lily and Gabriella. They were worried sick about me, wanted to know where the hell I’d been. I typed out a reply, explaining I was now in a wheelchair….

  And then I sat there staring at it, without pressing send.

  With my brother dead and Ross gone, Lily and Gabriella were all I had left. What if they didn’t want me anymore, or treated me differently?

  I’m fine, I typed. Got a really nasty bug, laid me out for weeks, had to be on an IV in the hospital. But I’m all better now.

  A little voice at the back of my head told me that this was a bad idea, but I crushed it. I hit send.

  And over the next few weeks, I discovered something. Out there in the real world, I was broken. But on the internet, I was still whole. No one had to know.

  So I curled in on myself like a porcupine protecting itself from danger. Other than occasional physiotherapy appointments, I didn’t leave the apartment. Without Josh to ground me, I lived more and more in my own head, going deep as often as I needed to, with no one to regulate me. As long as I stayed behind closed doors, as long as no one saw me, it was like it never happened. I’d been that way for the last year.

  And then Calahan showed up. He didn’t react like other people. And just for a second, I’d thought….

  But now he was gone. And I was never going to see him again.

  4

  Calahan

  Three Weeks Later

  THE WORSE the mood I’m in, the more I slouch. Everyone in the New York FBI office knows this. If I’ve just pulled an all-nighter on a stakeout, I’ll sit low in my seat, wincing at the sunlight. If I’ve had a case thrown out of court and some scumbag I caught is back on the streets, I’ll go further: slumped down, legs kicked out under my desk, almost hidden behind my monitor.

  Today, I was close to horizontal. Chair reclined all the way, head barely above the level of the desk, only my hand moving as I scowled at my screen. As people approached, they saw my expression and quickly changed course.

  I was meant to be reading through a report on organized crime in the city. A year ago, we’d scored a victory when we’d prevented a gang war erupting. But part of the fallout had been that Hailey, an agent I’d worked side-by-side with for years, had left the FBI because...well, because she’d met a guy.

  And I know what you’re thinking because it’s just what lots of other people in the department were whispering. Hailey found someone and now Calahan’s pissed off. Were the two of them….

  The answer is no. Sure, I was attracted to her and sure, there were moments when we both wanted to. But I never let anything happen. We were just friends.

  But I miss her. I don’t have many friends and she was the closest. It’s okay when I’m on a case but when I’m spinning my wheels, like right now, I wind up thinking too much. The memories start waking, the pain and guilt starts and I find myself in a bar, unsure if I’m drinking to forget or to work up the courage to do what needs to be done.

  And these last three weeks had been harder than usual because there was something new in my head, something iridescent and vivid, impossible to ignore. Her.

  I kept seeing her face, hearing that gentle accent. The essence of her was in my head and it wouldn’t leave me alone. She was the soft to my hard. Soft skin, soft lips, soft shining hair. She was pine fronds brushing your bare arms, rain on your face, nature. I was concrete and busy streets and shoving people out of my way.

  Her mind was incredible. She was smart in a way I could never be and yet she didn’t lord it over people the way some of the eggheads at the FBI did. I suspected they weren’t half as clever as her. And that moment when we’d looked at each other and neither of us could look away….

  I wasn’t just attracted, I was fascinated. I felt like a huge, lumbering dinosaur, hypnotized by a fluttering butterfly. Someone once told me there are air people and earth people. They said I was definitely an earth person and thinking about how I used to pile into someone in a tackle in high school, or how I only really trusted stuff I could touch and feel, that sounded about right.

  But air people...they were the creatives, the thinkers. They didn’t really belong to our clumsy, physical world—that’s why they always felt a little out of place. Their minds were off in a place that the rest of us couldn’t see or reach and they brought glimpses of it back to us through art and music... and math.

  Yolanda was the most air person I’d ever met.

  And I didn’t even know her real name. I could probably do some digging and find out who was paying rent on her penthouse, but this was a woman who had to hide her tracks from the crime bosses she hacked: her friend Gabriella had already had a hitman sent after her. I was pretty sure I’d find that the penthouse was owned by a company in the Cayman Islands and that would be the end of that. I could call Lily, but even if she knew Yolanda’s real name, she wouldn’t share it. Even if she would, it would feel wrong, like invading her privacy.

  “Sit up, Calahan,” said my boss right in my ear.

  I nearly fell out of my chair. I hadn’t even heard her approach. I struggled up to something approaching sitting while Carrie perched herself on the corner of my desk.

  “I’m still waiting for your report on the Catskill kidnapping,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I mumbled. “Just working on that now. Writing you a report. An email. I’ll email you a report.”

  Carrie pinned me with a look. She has long silver-blonde hair, a sharp suit, and she can do a good impression of a school principal when she wants to. Not a week goes by without her calling me up to her of
fice to bawl me out for breaking the rules and I’ve been this close to being fired more times than I can count. But she’s stuck her neck out for me more than once because we both want the same thing: to get the job done.

  “You look like hell, Sam,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “You sleeping?” Her face softened a little. “It’s October.”

  That wouldn’t mean anything to most people, but Carrie knows. An anniversary was coming up. A really bad one.

  “I’m fine,” I told her.

  She passed me a slip of paper. “Well, go be fine somewhere else. NYPD wants us to take over a case.”

  I snatched the paper from her hand, feeling my heart soar. Finally. Something to lose myself in. With luck, it would keep me busy till the end of the month. No more thinking about Yolanda, no more feeling sorry for myself. “What is it? Mafia? Drugs?”

  “Murder. Happened less than an hour ago.”

  I frowned at her and rubbed at my stubble. Police work has a strong vein of pride running through it. Once a case is yours, you don’t give it up without solving it. Usually, it’s a whole screaming match to get the cops to let us take over, even when it’s obviously an FBI matter. I couldn’t imagine the NYPD arriving at a crime scene and just straightaway calling us in.

  Not unless….

  My stomach tightened into a cold, hard knot. Not unless it was something really bad.

  The crime scene was in Harlem and as I drove over there, I shook off my worries. The city was enjoying an unseasonably warm day, probably the last we’d get before winter took hold. The sky was blue and it was pleasantly warm.

  The address was an old but classy apartment building. Three patrol cars were parked in its shadow and a couple of cops were mooching around, along with one guy not in uniform. I showed my badge as I walked over. “Detective Giggs?”

  He nodded.

  As I stepped out of the sun and into the building’s shadow, the temperature dropped enough to make me shiver. Maybe that’s why Giggs looked so pale. “What’ve we got?” I asked.