Crash Lights and Sirens, Book 1

by Unknown

  Nick nods. Mikey seemed unsure at first, what with Atlas being nearly the same size as he is, but now he’s rolling in the mud like a boy who isn’t afraid of anything. “His eye’s looking better,” Nick observes quietly. It isn’t, not really, and the side of his freckly face is still a sick, bruised yellow, but it seems like the thing to say.

  Falvey shrugs, sitting down and tucking her knees under her chin. She’s got giant fuzzy socks on, pulled up clear over the calves of her jeans. Nick loves her all over again. He’s just about to ask if the boys are allowed ice cream this early in the day, but Falvey speaks up first.

  “She wants to see them, you know,” she mutters to the table, confession-voice apropos of nothing. Nick freezes where he’s standing. “My mom. She asked when I visited her yesterday.”

  Nick turns around slow, smooth like fishing or lifting a patient on a spine board. “Oh yeah?” he asks. “How’d that go?” After so many weeks of trying to get her to open up, each new glimpse feels like a miracle. She’s got temporary guardianship of the kids, she told him when they got here, ordered by the court.

  Taryn shrugs again. “She didn’t remember. Blackout drunk, right?” She laughs roughly, fishing a banana out of the enamel bowl Maddie made back in high school. Nick takes a careful seat across from her, leaning in close. “Didn’t believe me when I told her. Jess had to explain.” She cracks the banana stem, peeling with more focus than necessary. She likes them green. “Mom always listens to Jess.”

  Nick wants to take her hand, but it feels too contrived. He’s surprised when Taryn slips her feet off the chair to tangle with his under the table, warm and purposeful. “What are you gonna do?” he asks, accepting the banana half she passes him.

  Taryn twists up her sharp face, like she’s embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I know this is all—” Her hands flutter. “Heavy, or whatever. We don’t have to do this now.”

  Nick shrugs. “Just me,” he promises. He wants to hear everything, wants to know every secret and untangle every knot. “Go ahead.”

  “Yeah.” Taryn fusses with her banana, peeling off a stray bit of pith. “There’s a program the state runs at a hospital outside Boston that her doctor thinks she’ll qualify for,” she tells him, glancing out the window at the kids in the yard. “She’d go at the end of the week, stay thirty days. If she does that, then maybe we could work something out, but I’m not letting her near them again till after.”

  Nick nods. “Probably smart,” he agrees. It’s more than smart, he thinks—it’s the only sane way to do it—but it can’t be easy, to have to make such tough decisions for so many small people. His own mother never drank anything stronger than tea. “Sucks though.”

  “Pretty much.” Taryn smiles. “Caitlin’s dad’s getting married again, apparently. That’s what set her off. He sent her a note with Cait’s child support, and…” She stops there, holding her hands out like she’s scattering something into a stiff wind. “Here we are.”

  Here they are. The boys troop in from the yard, red faced and runny nosed. It warmed up close to fifty today, but the afternoon sun’s disappeared behind the clouds. Atlas trots over to his water bowl, slurping noisily. Mikey squirms out of his coat. “Atlas kept licking me,” he announces, like he can’t decide if he’s grossed out or delighted. “All over.”

  “Looked like you were liking it to me,” Taryn tells him, sliding an arm around his skinny back and pulling him close. “How’s the face, runt?” she asks, pushing his hair back off his forehead. “Still attached to your head?”

  Nick grins. He and Maddie never talked about kids, not really—no way in hell, she always said, and that was when she was feeling calm about it—but Nick likes ’em. He looks at Connor, the kid’s oversize ears and serious expression. “How do you guys feel about some ice cream?” he asks, taking a chance. Connor’s eyes light right up.

  They all clear out before dinner, Taryn promising them they can watch some Pixar thing when they get home and sneaking Nick a goodbye kiss as they’re scrambling ahead of her down the walk. “Thanks for today,” she murmurs up against his mouth. “A lot of guys wouldn’t be so cool about me bringing them, so—” She shrugs, butts her face at his. “Thanks for today.”

  Nick nods. Thanks for Thursday night, he thinks about answering.

  Once they’re gone he rinses the dishes and flips through the channels, thinks about calling Bill for a beer and doesn’t. He walks around the house for a while. Over the past three years he’s gotten so used to the quiet that he hardly even notices it anymore, but tonight it feels real empty in here to him. “Just you and me, buddy,” he tells Atlas, and grabs the mutt’s leash for a walk through the woods.

  That night when he goes upstairs he stands in the doorway of the bedroom for a long time, taking in the heavy furniture and the ruined, patchy carpet, the old drapes hanging on either side of the picture window. It occurs to him that he could use some new sheets. He picks at a loose seam in the cabbage rose wallpaper, pulls a bit without entirely knowing he’s going to do it. A long strip of the stuff peels off easily, the paste dry and brittle with age.

  Nick stares at the ribbon in his hand, then back at the wall. He expects to feel guilt or regret, all the echoey ghosts he associates with this room, but the only thing that bubbles up is an odd sense of physical satisfaction. Like a kid picking at a Band-Aid, no more, no less.

  So he strips another piece, bigger this time. This one is harder coming up, leaving behind a papery residue on the wall. Nick scratches at it with a thumbnail, but it’s stuck solid. The rest will have to be steamed before it’ll come off cleanly, no question. If he’s really going to take advantage of the room’s natural light, he’ll need to rip it all out and paint everything over in one of those bright HGTV colors, like cloud white or a soft, dove gray. Hardwood floors to replace the carpet, same as he originally planned. A lighter grain than downstairs, probably, and—

  It’s then that Nick realizes he’s already picturing it.

  Rosemary qualifies for the state-run program, four weeks in April. Taryn packs up her stuff in a haze, blouses and jeans and the old chenille bathrobe Caitlin borrowed but gave back. All of it is hanging in the master closet, freshly laundered, the evidence of how well Rosemary was doing like a final fuck-you. The whole process takes ten minutes. No outside toiletries are allowed, but Taryn folds up the starburst wedding quilt that belonged to her grandparents—she and Jesse used to take turns wearing it like a cape—and places it on top, closing the shitty plastic suitcase. Then she sits on the end of the bed and cries.

  One good thing about the whole disaster is it allows Taryn to write another hardship letter. This time, she bites down her pride and uses Rosemary’s alcoholism—now a matter of public record—to claim reduced income, even though technically her mother has been out of work for years. It works, buying them another thirty days to get current before the bank refers the loan to its foreclosure department. But there are more late fees, another month’s payment heaped on top of the original balance, and the calls to the house don’t stop.

  “You really aren’t going to let me say goodbye?” Rosemary demands at the hospital. She means the kids, of course. She isn’t interested in a bitter send-off from her adult children.

  The aides are watching, so Taryn doesn’t say anything about who beat whose face in. “No,” she answers. “I’m really not.”

  The hardest thing is explaining it to the boys. She tells Caitlin separately and gets a slow, sad nod of understanding, but Mikey and Connor are so little. Taryn parks them at the kitchen table and asks them if they know why Mom gets sick sometimes.

  “She drinks,” Connor says, flat voice and one sneakered foot kicking at the table leg. Taryn breathes.

  “Yeah,” she agrees, dropping the gentle, kindergarten-teacher voice like a ton of bricks. She doesn’t know why she thought that would work. “Pretty much. And it’s hard to stop. So she’s going to go somewhere to get help.”

  Mikey furrows
up his little-boy brow. His face is looking better and better, less domestic violence victim, more scrappy kid playing street hockey. Taryn didn’t want to tell him to lie at school, but she did. She drilled him until he had the story right. “Can we see her?” he asks.

  Jesse is standing by the fridge, drinking orange juice from the carton and watching. Normally Taryn would have him tell the boys, man-to-man or whatever, but he’s taking the whole thing harder than Connor—same late nights, same punk-ass attitude, only now with a world of hurt behind it. He never truly gave up on Rosemary, Taryn knows. “Sorry, buddy,” he tells Mikey. “You can’t. You can write to her though.”

  So. Later that day Taryn drops a construction-paper card with Crayola hearts off at the hospital, Mikey’s sloppy penmanship reading “Get well soon!” on the inside. The nurse at the front desk says Rosemary will get it before she heads to Boston in the morning.

  The worst part? Connor refuses to make one himself, or even sign his name.

  “You think they’re gonna be fucked up forever?” she asks Nick a couple days later, stretched out naked on the couch in the living room one sunny afternoon before shift. Even after everything she can’t quite bring herself to take him upstairs to her bedroom, her and Caitlin’s stuff scattered all over the place and Justin Bieber watching like a floppy-haired Canadian pervert. School’s back in session, so they’ve got the full run of the house for a change. Jesse, of course, is off God knows where. “Like, when they’re grown up,” Taryn finishes. “How are they going to remember all this shit?”

  “I mean.” Nick rolls to look at her more closely, one long finger tracing along the side of her jaw. “I think they’re gonna remember that you loved them, and you protected them however you could.”

  Taryn bites her lip. “Yeah.” He’s right, maybe, but it doesn’t feel like that right now and she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, so she kisses her way down his body instead, low across his chest and stomach, nipping a bit at the line of hair underneath his navel. Nick lets out a quiet groan. They only finished a few minutes ago so he’s still soft and sensitive, and when she takes him in her mouth and sucks, the noise he makes isn’t entirely pleasure. She likes the secret taste of herself on his cock.

  “Gonna kill me,” he mutters, only one hand drifts right down to the back of her head so it’s not like he’s complaining. Taryn hums. She keeps at it until he gets all-the-way hard, his hips shifting like they do when he’s concentrating real seriously on not thrusting. He’s still shy about blowjobs, is the truth. She uses her teeth on him, scraping lightly over the ridge and then soothing with her tongue. She’s reaching one hand up to cup him when the doorbell rings three times in a row.

  Taryn pulls off right away, looking up at Nick with alarm and grabbing her jeans off the carpet. “The hell is that?” she asks shrilly, police and social services all bouncing around in her nervous head. “Wait here.”

  She yanks a sweatshirt on and heads into the foyer, opens the storm door but leaves the screen latched. There are two guys about her age on the other side of it, all slouchy jeans and cargo jackets. Taryn doesn’t recognize either one. “Jesse here?” the skinnier guy asks, hands shoved deep in his pockets. “Jesse Falvey?”

  Taryn crosses her arms, plants her feet. They’re different than the two who came looking last time. Right away she gets the feeling they aren’t his friends. “Who’s asking?”

  Exchanged glances, complete with Skinny shaking his head. Taryn feels her heart rate trip, then start over again twice as fast. “He knows us,” the broader one promises, propping a hand up on the doorframe all casual-like. There’s an unfamiliar truck behind them in the driveway, what looks like a couple more guys in the back. “It’s cool.”

  It isn’t. Taryn swallows. “Well, he isn’t here,” she says, switching tactics. Skinny raises his eyebrows, surprised. Taryn doesn’t like the expression on his face at all.

  The other one raps the doorframe though, a friendly little shave-and-a-haircut. They’re just kids, Taryn reminds herself. Just her age. She can still see the acne scars. “Huh,” he says. “Well, okay. If you say so, but—”

  Nick picks that moment to materialize behind her, apparently tired of sitting on the couch. He pulled on his clothes in a hurry, messy hair and long, bare feet. Taryn can imagine how it must look, the both of them together in similar states of undress. It’s why she wanted him to wait.

  She’s never been more relieved to see anyone in her life.

  “There a problem here?” he asks, propping his hand up on the inside of the screen, a deliberate copycat. Skinny’s friend drops his own mirroring stance in a hurry, taking a step back. “Falvey, you know them?”

  His hip is right up against hers, solid. Taryn shakes her head.

  “We were going anyway,” says Skinny, shuffling back across the stacked porch. His hands come out of his deep pockets, palm-up in surrender. Belatedly, Taryn wonders what he could be keeping hidden in there, drugs or cash or worse. “No need to be like that.” Both guys clomp away down the stairs with the parting shot of, “Tell Jesse we said hello.” As soon as the truck is out of sight, Taryn sags.

  “Wow,” she says, leaning her whole self back into Nick. “You get a weird vibe from that too?” She feels stupid now that Skinny and his friend are no longer darkening the doorway, like maybe she overreacted. She didn’t, she knows she didn’t—Christ, it’s not like she ran for a shotgun—but still. Her first instinct is to play it down, like maybe it won’t be a big deal so long as she doesn’t treat it that way.

  Nick’s arms come around her, skating underneath the loose sweatshirt. It’s his, now that Taryn’s paying attention. “They said they were looking for Jesse?” he asks. “Any idea why?”

  Taryn shrugs. She does have an idea, actually—more than an idea, the way Jess comes and goes at all hours, the random handfuls of cash he sometimes hands her with no explanation—but she’s not sure, on top of which she isn’t dying to throw another member of her family under the bus quite so soon. “Oh, who knows,” she says, trying to recover. She feels shaky and unsettled, like her bones are jangling around inside her skin. “Jess probably fucked that guy’s girlfriend or something.” She slides her hands down Nick’s back, pinches his ass. “We should get ready to go, yeah?”

  For a second Nick gets that expression like he knows she’s full of shit but isn’t going to push her, sad and curious at once. Taryn hasn’t seen it on his face since everything unraveled with Rosemary—hasn’t had occasion to, she guesses, how she’s basically been bombarding him with her every unfiltered thought and feeling. It’s a step backward, maybe, but right now she can’t bring herself to confess to anything else. “Yeah,” Nick says after a moment. “Probably should.”

  Jess is predictably vague when she brings it up with him later that night, cornering him in his drafty attic bedroom, complete with a ladder that pulls down from the ceiling on the second floor. The roof’s pitched so sharply that even Taryn can only just stand up straight. “Are you dealing?” she asks, once she tells him what happened earlier. “Forget dealing, Jess, are you dealing out of this house?”

  Jesse’s expression darkens. “No,” he says loudly, getting up off the bed. He’s lost weight, Taryn notices, sharp cheekbones and hollows underneath his pretty eyes. “I’m not—I would never—you think I’d do something so stupid with the kids here?”

  “I don’t know!” Taryn explodes. God, she’s so frustrated with him. She’s frustrated with her whole life. “I don’t know what the hell you’d do, honestly, because you don’t talk to me. You just turn up whenever you want, and—”

  “I was here all night!” Jesse fires back. “I’m here while you’re at work, and while you’re with your fucking boyfriend—”

  “I’m allowed to have a boyfriend, Jesse!”

  “—and I’ll be here, probably, for the rest of my goddamn life.” Jesse shakes his head. “Don’t act for a second like you’re the only one stuck, Tare. ’Cause you aren’t rea
lly, are you?” He knocks his knuckles off the ceiling, low for Taryn but ridiculously low for him. He looks like that hunchback king out of Shakespeare. “Some guy has a nice house, a nice dick? You’re good to go.”

  “Wait a minute,” Taryn protests. Jesse knew who those guys were, she saw on his face that he did, but now he’s trying to turn it around into something else. “That’s not what I’m—”

  “We’re broke, Taryn!” Jesse shouts. “We were broke when you were gonna move out with Pete too, but it was okay then since you weren’t gonna be here anymore, with the shitty heat and the shitty water. You were scott fucking free.”

  Taryn pulls herself up to her full height, feeling her head brush the ceiling. When she and Jess were little and it was just the two of them, they used to hide up here whenever Rosemary was on a bender. “We talked about this, Jess. I said I was still gonna help—”

  “No, you talked.” Jesse crowds her, his skinny boy presence hulking and pathetic all at once. Taryn remembers when she was taller than him. The boyfriend between their dad and Caitlin’s called him squirt, made him cry. “You had this stupid plan, Taryn, maybe to make yourself feel better, I don’t know, but it was never going to work. There just wasn’t enough money. Isn’t.” He sags, thudding back to the bed. “I read the bank letters too.”

  Taryn rubs at the bridge of her nose. “That’s—that has nothing to do with drug kids running around our property looking for—”

  “Why don’t you mind your own business and concentrate on making sure we aren’t homeless come the end of the month, huh?” Jesse interrupts. “If you need something else to worry about so bad?” He brushes past her then, disappearing down the ladder with a quick, vulpine agility. Thirty seconds later, the front door slams loud enough to rattle the house.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Once Nick commits to getting the bedroom done it doesn’t take a lot of time to do it. He moves the furniture out and spends a sweaty afternoon ripping up the carpet, another couple of days steaming the walls. At the last possible second he tucks a square of cabbage rose into the top drawer of the dresser, then shoves the rest of the mess into giant Hefty bags. He considers calling Bill or Ioanna’s husband Joe over to help him paint, but in the end it feels like something he needs to do himself.