OUR SECRET BABY

by Paula Cox

  “I don’t. I’m going on instinct.”

  Palmer doesn’t like that at all, but it’s the best I can do.

  “Would you rather wait for them to start shooting at you first? That’s the only way you’re gonna be sure. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather take my chances getting a guy in the leg on accident than getting a bullet in my head and probably yours too because I was too cautious.”

  He chews over this for about a second. The big guys and their big coats lumber even closer. Seventeen rounds loaded. This thing’s ready to sing.

  “Kirill’t shoot to kill, Q. Take their weapons away, right? I don’t care if you’re afraid for your life—I’m not executing innocents.”

  “Neither am I.”

  ***

  I’d be running this whole scene through my head months afterward, to the point of me memorizing every tiny detail, including the ones that just seemed accidental then, looking at them through hundreds of different perspectives and what ifs. But saying this is getting ahead of myself. This whole situation of the last four weeks leading up to Palmer and I sitting in his Chevy drinking coffee, and trying to decide whether or not to make the hit, is getting ahead of myself and missing half the story.

  I haven’t breathed a word about Maya, and there are a few things that need saying to keep the story in order. Of course, she hadn’t been talking to me during any of this time. I got all of this later, some of it from Theo but most of it from her later in bits and pieces scattered here and there.

  So go back four weeks, when Palmer pulled up outside Theo’s mansion (I wasn’t getting loaned the Mercedes when I wasn’t watching Maya) and Maya goes clattering up the steps, convinced she’s had everything she’s going to have with me. If I thought the days went by slowly when I was with the Stitches setting plans for our hit, I could only imagine how slow they were for her.

  Theo had always looked after her like a prized pig—doting on her and spoiling her and never letting her out of his sight because he was afraid someone would just pick her up and take her away. Ever since the whole Kit situation, which was still being cleaned up and which was still a point of, what’s the word… contention between the Family and the Cuchullain’s, the mansion had been barricaded for war. Double the guards in the hallways and on the lawn. Guys with submachine guns slung over their shoulders even watched the swans on the lake and the gardeners watering the potted plants. No one was going for drives alone, and everyone was checking their mufflers for bombs before going anywhere. The list goes on. Days and days of SWAT team like surveillance for a threat that probably wasn’t ever coming.

  It wasn’t so much that the guys were afraid of someone else snapping and going to town on the place with an automatic Item. The fact is that while Theo and Mattias Kroll had agreed and shaken hands on what was to be done about Kit Holcomb, everyone expected retaliation. You don’t just go and kill another mob boss’s man like you don’t just go and beat the living daylights out of a rival crew member, no matter how much you may hate the guys.

  Lots of guys were expecting Mattias to call in from the outside—Sicilians or Venetians or other Irish from New York to put the hit on one of Theo’s guys to get even. Maybe even on Theo himself to put the Family down once and for all. But Mattias didn’t have any reason to get rid of the Family when after all these years they’d carved out a kind of peace for each other. More than that, having two cooperative mobs in the same city—the only in the state—was twice the threat to outside invaders than one. Mattias would be shooting himself in the foot, and he knew it.

  From the sounds of it, Theo already knew how dangerous his situation was. All it took was for one of Mattias’s hot-blooded men to get on the wrong side of one of his guards, and they would draw the risk of violence. It didn’t help that Kit had his share of sympathizers from both sides. Some of the guys saw him as a kind of damaged little brother who’d needed more counseling than what he was getting. Other guys thought it was a bullying thing and that since the guy had very clearly been experiencing problems for a long time, everyone had been in the wrong just to ignore it. The guys were surprisingly sensitive, according to Maya. But that wasn’t a good thing. It made justice that much more difficult to hash out.

  Unfortunately for Theo, the choice came down to reputation versus mercy. From the beginning, it must have been apparent that reputation would win out. All of the appeals were for nothing. Kit Holcomb was a damaged young man who’d messed with a mob boss, then tried and failed to take the easy way out of what he knew would come.

  They’d already been at it for almost an hour by the time I called her father, Maya told me. She hadn’t seen it happen, but she heard about it from others. The rule was that if you touch anything belonging to the boss without his permission, he gets to take the fingers that touched it. Medieval law with modern instruments.

  Kit was being plied apart piece by piece, finger by finger. Whenever he lost consciousness, they gave him twenty minutes, then sprayed his face full of water and continued clipping. Once the whole job was done, they packaged the fingers in a little box and gave it solemnly to Mattias. No one knows why this tradition is still around, except for maybe Mattias and Theo. Then, two of the guys roped a gunmetal bag over the kid’s head while another pressed a pistol up against it and did what Kit hadn’t been able to do himself, and that was the end of it. Three-four hours tops, not counting the drive to deliver the body and the remains of the head to the pier.

  Maya stayed in her room while all of this was going on. The chef brought her dinner up, but she didn’t touch it. The worst part, she said, wasn’t when the guards told her what had happened. It was when her father came up to try and make her feel better.

  He’d changed his shirt and washed his hands, but Maya could still see the stains of Kit’s blood in his leathery brown skin. She called them his ‘little nebulae.’

  “My dear,” Theo had said, taking his seat next to her on the bed, stroking her hair. “If things could have been handled differently they would have been. You know that, don’t you?”

  No response.

  “When a man is a danger not only to those around him—those who care about him and want to protect him—but also to himself, this is when it is necessary that we intervene and keep him from doing any more damage.”

  Still no response.

  When I think of Maya at this moment, under Theo’s cooing hand, I imagine the scene from Indiana Jones after Indiana’s been dropped into the pit of snakes, and is having a stare off with the cobra uncoiling in front of him.

  “Do you think I’ve been cruel to poor Kit Holcomb? My lovely, what do you think of your father? Do you think he is a cruel man?”

  The snake rears back its head and opens its glittering eyes a little wider. It gets smaller and looks less threatening, which is exactly how it wants to look before it strikes.

  “I’ve done a cruel thing, perhaps. I’ve ended that boy’s life. And I will carry the knowledge of what I’ve done for the rest of my life, Maya. Every day I shall ask forgiveness for the bad things I’ve done and the good I’ve left undone, and forgiveness for the difficult places people put you in, and for the impossible things they ask of you. For the things you are forced to do because of the foolish actions of others. You know, Maya, because you are smart, that it is not a blatantly evil action we must fear. It is others’ unwillingness to act with strength and conviction that forces me to act with cruelty. Yes, I’ll call it that. I haven’t any problems naming something for what it is. I will take responsibility for every single one of my actions, Maya, because I have acted manfully, promptly, and strongly. I have done all I can, and it is to God alone I look for forgiveness. I know you hate me, Maya—as I hate myself. I ask you to pray for me nonetheless. Pray for your poor papa who has been saddled with such responsibility. Pray for me, Maya, my love.”

  “Daddy,” Maya interrupts. The only thing she had said during the whole, unbearable spiel.

  “Yes, darling?”

&nb
sp; “Get the fuck out of my room.” She said it, she told me, manfully, promptly, and strongly, meeting the glittering eyes of the snake with the granite of her own.

  “Get the fuck out and never come back.”

  Theo got up silently and did just that. And for three weeks Maya sat in her room without hardly taking more than a few bites from the meals brought to her. Without seeing anyone, she thought about the life I’d forced her back into and how she could escape it forever.

  Chapter 20

  About this time our stories begin to take on a sort of mirror quality. I spend three weeks waiting in cars keeping a watch out for someone I’ve never even seen before, and Maya stays in her room keeping a watch out for someone she never wants to see again.

  She listens to music, reads magazines, and ignores Theo whenever he comes upstairs to ask about her. After a few days, she’s even fallen into a rhythm and doesn’t mind at all staying caged up in her room if it means she can avoid her father. She’s been caged up all her life—only difference now is that she doesn’t have to look at her captor through her bars. It’s better than before, in some ways.

  But only in some: not in all. She watches the snow come down outside her window. She thinks about taking a walk around the lake in the backyard and maybe even striking up a conversation with the old, Italian gardener who has been there all her life. She thinks about how nice it would be to see the greenhouse she hasn’t gone in for at least five years, and she even gets so far as to put on shoes before she sees one of her father’s goons doing his rounds and realizes she can’t. Any reminder of her father is a reminder of Kit. Any reminder of Kit is a reminder of all the other people her father’s killed as head of the Family, and a reminder of this is a rap on the cage she can’t escape from that makes her go dizzy.

  She takes off her shoes and leans against her bed. Instead of putting on the TV, she goes on to Spotify and finds the album “Kind of Blue.” She plays it over and over again, watching the gray slush of snow pile down on the greenhouse that she’s no longer considering visiting, watching it make little holes in the lake, which the swans float over and peck at like it’s food. She likes the way the music makes her feel—thoughtful and sad and a little wise all at the same time. Each time the record finishes she gives it a few minutes before pressing the button and going back to start the whole thing over again from scratch, again and again, and again. It’s better than that bubble-gum pop they play in the clubs. It’s better than Bob Dylan. By the fifth time she’s played the full album she’s pretty sure it’s the best thing she’s ever listened to.

  That’s when she realizes she misses me. Sitting at home and doing nothing for days and weeks on end was manageable before, as long as she didn’t have to see her father. But the music changes things. It reminds her of what she’s missing, of where she belongs, of an apartment complex a few hours up the road along the coastline. That’s the first place she needs to go to win her independence.

  For the first time in three weeks, she asks herself: why not? Why shouldn’t she try to do something about it? She begins to ask herself questions about what she can do about it but the more she asks, the more hopeless the situation comes. Her father has her kept under lock and key. And supposing she got out anyway and found herself a car, she didn’t know how to drive, and the roads were covered with ice. It came down to a decision between risking her life trying to get out or wasting her life staying in. But having this option brings relief.

  For all of two minutes, she considers her alternatives and then decides which was the better option. The forecast shows that later in the week higher temperatures are expected. And because there isn’t really that much snow accumulated on the streets, after a couple days of sun it should be more or less melted completely enough to allow her to escape. Sunrise Apartments—that was the destination. Maybe she was already thinking of coming to me at this point, but there’s no knowing for certain. There’s only the plan she’s at last set for herself.

  So she waits. One day. Two days. Waiting now that she has a plan in place is much more difficult than waiting when all she was doing was waiting. She puts on more Miles Davis and thinks about texting me, but doesn’t. She misses me, but it doesn’t stop her from being mad. She can wait. She’s learned a lot recently about how to wait.

  Friday. The sun peaks out. Sunday she’ll go. She’ll steal the keys from the guardroom to one of the Maseratis and just drive out with her daypack and some jewelry to sell and nothing else. Because she can’t drive, the keys don’t need to be hidden or even very carefully watched. A new life, she thinks as she lies down to sleep. A new beginning.

  Saturday afternoon is bright as the day before it. She opens the door of her room for the first time in weeks, dodges down the main hallways like a ninja, and slips into the guardroom. She knows their schedules—patrolling the halls, the front of the house, the lakes, the gardens—and knows no one is expected back for at least a few hours. A piece of cake. She untangles the keys from a small ceramic jar sitting on the side table and drops them into her pocket. Twenty minutes after she’s left she’s back in her room. The cook knocks on her door and delivers her steamed lobster with buttered mashed potatoes and fresh asparagus. It’s the first time in three weeks that she’s been hungry.

  When she’s finishing up, there’s another knock on her door. She doesn’t have time to say, “who is it?” or “come in” or “go away!” because her father has already poked his head in through the doorway. Maya’s heart sinks: he has found out about the Maserati.

  There are two ways to play this situation. Either she admits what she’s done, and bursts into tears, or she acts like she doesn’t know anything and remains just as hostile as she’s ever been. She chooses the latter.

  “What do you want?”

  Theo closes the door behind him as quietly as he can, but there’s still a squeak of the hinges that makes him flinch. “Can a father not see his daughter without being interrogated?”

  “Can a daughter not have five minutes alone in her own room without being interrupted?” This is a poorly constructed argument, and she knows it; it doesn’t keep her from holding on to it with everything she has.

  “It has been almost a month, Maya. You must come out at some point.”

  She weighs her options, her possible responses, her witty ripostes, and decides to use none of them.

  “I was hoping we could talk,” Theo continues on, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to bring up with you.”

  He has been hiding his hands behind his back to keep them from her, but now he brings them forward, displaying for her a small, gleaming jewelry case. Patterns of golden leaves are etched on the surface, and the wood shines with a rich, dull gleam like brass. Maya’s eyes glitter with curiosity and interest, but she makes no move to take it. Her father opens the box and reveals a slender golden watch, blazing with diamonds and platinum.

  “I’ve had this since your birthday, but with all that’s been happening recently I simply haven’t had the chance.”

  “It’s beautiful.” Maya can’t help herself. “Thank you.”

  Theo smiles, taking the watch from the case and unclasping it. “They put me on a waiting list to buy one, a little more than nine months ago,” he explains. “But I knew it would be worth the delay. Seeing it on you only makes me surer of it.”

  For a moment, Maya’s anger is almost completely forgotten. She looks at the dazzling thing and seeing the stunning piece of art draped on her slender wrist, she’s reminded of the life of beautiful things she’s been shutting herself away from. She begins to regret it—the fancy places she and her father went to, the extravagant clothing, the servants and the guardsmen waiting on her beck and call, the simple fun she could have as long as she was having it within the boundaries of her father’s demands. And so on and so forth, all of it reflected in the gleaming crystal face of the new watch.

  “Would you like to sit down, Maya?” Theo says with extreme kindness, taking the desk chair an
d holding it out for his daughter like one of his men would do.

  Maya sits without taking her eyes away from her new jewelry.

  “I know how you think of me and what I do,” he begins. “You’ve made it clear to me, my angel. Kirill’t think that for the past three weeks I’ve just been twiddling my thumbs.”

  “I don’t think that.”

  “That’s good. That’s very good.” His hand is trembling when it takes Maya’s. “I’ve played this conversation in my mind over and over again, and I still do not know how to say what I know I must say. Nevertheless, I will try. You see, my darling, I am a man of violence. It is not in my nature, but in my profession—yet understand that for years they have been one and the same. I cannot help it. I alone know what is required of me. I alone know the price of failure. If I am not a harsh taskmaster, then those I love will suffer. This is the burden of my knowledge, my darling.”

  “You’ve said all of this before, Daddy.”

  “Have I? Forgive me. I am old and preoccupied, and I repeat myself constantly.”