by Meg Gardiner
For years I had wondered why Jax and Tim chose me as their dead drop. To help write their memoirs? A pretext. Because Jax was a fan of my fiction? I wanted to believe it, but couldn’t—Jax had an affinity for lies, guns, and Prada, and she didn’t strike me as a science fiction fan. To provide a safe harbor for stolen secrets they kept as self-protection or blackmail? Now you’re talking.
Because Jax had worked with my father? That was what I wanted Dad to tell me about, and what, despite his promise, he refused to divulge.
Maybe Jax would. Maybe today. I neared the courthouse and turned the corner, heading toward the Spanish-style building that housed the law firm. At the entrance, sunlight bounced off the windows. Inside, a man was crossing the foyer toward the door. When he saw me he stopped dead.
My heart would have dropped, but it was already flat on the floor. He stared at me, mouth pinched white. Traffic slurred past on the street.
Finally I opened the door. “How are you, P.J.?”
He was lean and had put muscle on his shoulders. His brown hair was shorn, his blue eyes distant. He looked so much like Jesse that it stole my breath. I hadn’t seen him since he got out of jail.
He pushed past me through the door, turning sideways to avoid any chance of touching me. “My brother isn’t here.”
“Yes, he is.”
“You’re wrong.”
He stalked away, pulling his motorcycle keys from his jeans pocket. I held the door, cheeks burning, thinking, Say something. Now, before this gets worse. He reached the corner of the building, and his gaze caught on something out of sight in the parking lot. Abruptly he rushed around the corner, calling, “What are you doing?”
Behind the noise of traffic, I heard voices arguing. I hurried after P.J. When I rounded the corner my pulse quickened.
In the parking lot Jesse stood in the open doorway of the truck. A Volvo had screeched to a stop behind it and the driver had climbed out, a big man, gray and unshaven. He was two feet from Jesse’s face, waving a sheaf of papers at him.
“What were you doing, bringing Buddy out here at two a.m.? The cops thought you were escapees from a home.”
I stopped near P.J., my eyes wide. Jesse saw us and shook his head.
“And the cops left, because we were minding our own business. Mr. Stoker, last night Buddy was drowning. I got him out of the rehab center so he could breathe.”
It was Big Bud Stoker, father of the injured kid Jesse counseled at the rehab center. He looked like a wrecking ball on the downswing.
“And took him out to practice wheelchair tricks—like that’ll help? I don’t want him learning to hop curbs in a wheelchair. I want him to walk again.”
“I know you do.”
Jesse had undoubtedly pulled himself to his feet so he could impose himself on the situation physically. But though the crutches gave him his height, they took away his balance and ability to maneuver. And Stoker looked ready to punch him in the mouth.
“I know what you think,” Stoker said. “Buddy should accept this. Bullshit.”
“He has to deal with what’s happened. I’m sorry, but that’s the brutal truth.”
“I knew this was your doing. Buddy told us to quit trying to cure him.” Stoker poked him in the chest with the papers. “You think a cure is fantasy? How do you know?”
“Don’t do that.”
“What’s your problem? You so bitter about getting hurt, you want others to give up too, so you can have company?”
“Back off. I talked to Buddy about pulling himself up from the void because I’ve been there,” he said. “Man, I know ten ways to let go, and a few ways to hang on. Give up? No way. I told him to stay strong and dig in.”
Stoker spread his arms. “Can you even remember being in Buddy’s shoes? Wanting this so much?”
“Of course I can.”
“Then tell me that’s changed. Look me in the eyes and tell me everything’s beautiful, you’re just great. Tell me you don’t want to walk again.”
Jesse’s voice sharpened. “I lost my legs, not my mind. Of course I do.”
“Then don’t you dare tell Buddy to accept this blow. Not until you go to the end of the line yourself.” He waved the sheaf of papers. “Here’s what Buddy’s giving up on. Take a look at what he could have. What you could have, if you’d just take the chance.” He tossed the papers at Jesse. “Tell me that’s not worth the fight.”
The papers swirled to the ground. Stoker stalked back to his car, got in, and squealed out of the parking lot. Jesse stared at the pages flicking on the asphalt, his jaw tight.
P.J. picked them up. He dusted them off, held them out, saw that Jesse didn’t have a hand free. I reached to take them, but P.J. tossed them onto the front seat of the truck and turned to his brother.
“That sucked,” he said. “And it isn’t even lunchtime.”
“It’s okay. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. What are you doing here?”
“Never mind, I’ll come back later.” P.J. looked at him sideways. “The cops showed up?”
“It was a misunderstanding. No harm, no foul,” Jesse said.
“Sure. Just another Blackburn getting nailed. Who turned you in?”
He glanced at me, quick as a slap, and walked off before Jesse could grab him.
“No, it’s absolutely not okay. P.J. was beyond rude,” Jesse said.
“It’ll take time; I know that.”
He paced me along the flagstone path to my door. “He needs to grow up. I’ll talk to him.”
His voice was solid, but a twinge of pain crossed his face. He was walking a tightrope between me and his brother.
“Let it go,” I said, knowing that neither of us could do so.
What could I say to P.J.? “Sorry you confessed to me, and I told the cops the truth?” He had set out to commit identity theft and ended up an accessory in a college girl’s death. If he couldn’t admit that his own actions sent him to jail, if he still thought I was the source of his problems, his world was going to spin off-kilter for good. And yet I felt like garbage.
My little house sat chilly behind its trellis of star jasmine, shivering under the live oaks at the back of the property. I unlocked the door with a headache pounding beneath my skull. The kitchen smelled of scorched coffee and huevos rancheros. I tossed the manila envelope containing Jax Rivera’s dossiers on my desk, sat down, and rubbed my temples.
Jesse checked his watch. It was early afternoon, and he had a three-o’clock colloquium at the trial advocacy conference.
“You need to go home and change, don’t you?” I said. He was wearing a Blazers Swimming shirt, hadn’t shaved, hadn’t been home since before Dad left yesterday.
“I have clothes here.” He rolled his shoulders. “Mind if I hit the shower?”
“Go ahead.” He spun toward the bedroom door. I snagged his arm. “About Stoker.”
His face was halfway between pensive and driven. “Later.” He headed off, nodding at the envelope. “Dig the spiders out of there, then shred that thing.”
When I opened the flap, my nose filled with the musk of old papers. It was close to two years since Jax had delivered the envelope and vanished. I pulled out the contents: notebooks, photos, reports time-stamped with the notation D.O.—Directorate of Operations. Photocopied memos from Vauxhall Cross, where Tim North once worked for British intelligence. A hand-drawn map. Tim’s sharp pen strokes, listing his contacts in an Asian operation.
Until now, this was as far as I’d gone. The first time I opened the envelope, I gaped in distress at all this information and couldn’t rip my eyes from it. Jesse had torn the papers from my hands, stuffed them in the envelope, and said, “Send it back.”
“I can’t. There’s no return address.”
“Then get some lighter fluid and matches. Torch it.”
And, alarmed, I nearly had. But I decided that doing so would be equally dangerous, because someday Jax and Tim might come asking for this stuff. And I never k
new whose side they were on, including mine. Jax once told me that she’d drugged a lover and shot him in the head for betraying her. I considered that an admonition.
Feeling rattled, needing a gut check, I pulled up an old computer screen grab—the single photo I had of Jakarta Rivera and Tim North.
Jax was a sinewy black woman in her forties. Her gaze was as sharp as a two-way mirror: She could see out, but you never saw in. She was wearing Caterpillar boots and fifty thousand bucks’ worth of diamonds. Behind her, Tim stood half-shadowed, cool and grim and as hard as the barrel of an M-16.
I found her note: Read up, and let us know your price. Come on, you know you want to.
I hadn’t wanted to write their memoirs. I hadn’t contacted them. But now I found the phone number she had written down, a voice mail with a Los Angeles area code. There was no message, just the tone. I cleared my throat.
“It’s Evan. Get in touch. Dad’s missing.”
When I hung up, I stared for a moment at Jax’s image on the computer screen. A knock at the door made me jump.
Through the French doors I saw Thea Vincent bumping her little fist against the glass. She smiled, bouncing on her toes.
When I opened the door she hurtled in and hugged my legs. “You left your door open before.”
She was the color of molasses and built like a brick. I picked her up. Nikki came in behind her, face sober.
“You took off like a shot earlier. Was that gal with you the sheriff’s detective who...” She put a hand on my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
I told her about Dad and she put a hand to her mouth. She’d known my father for more than sixteen years, since the day she and I moved into our dorm room as college freshmen. Tears rose in her eyes. Normally she was feisty and prone to tell people off, but these days, swelling with her new pregnancy, she was tender.
“But the U.S. Attorney thinks he’s alive?” she said.
“And on the run.”
“That’s baloney. But alive is good.”
Thea smiled at me. I took her little hand in mine. Nikki gave me a poignant look and quickly banished it.
“You planning to do something about the situation?” she said.
“Yes.”
She raised an eyebrow and, when I acknowledged that, took a breath.
“Tell Jax hello for me. And watch yourself.”
When they left I felt the old ache. Beautiful as Thea was, and happy as I was for Nikki and Carl, seeing the Vincents still revived the pain of my miscarriage.
My pregnancy had been wild luck, like catching lightning with my bare hands. SCI screws up a lot of things, having kids among them. Even months later, loss, desire, and fear that Jesse and I might never again get so lucky rang through me like a gong.
On the coffee table I found the sheaf of papers that Big Bud Stoker had thrown at Jesse. It was an application to join a clinical trial at UCLA Medical Center. It was crumpled and dusty, but Jesse had smoothed it out.
I went into the bedroom, locked Jax’s dossiers in my fire safe, kicked off my shoes, and pulled off my heavy sweater, feeling antsy and at sea. And puzzled about the man in my life.
Never once in the years since he’d been run down, through all his grief and struggle, had I heard him say aloud: Yes, I want to walk again. Until today.
When I knocked on the bathroom door, he said, “Yeah.”
The air inside was steamy. In the shower, water beat down on his head and shoulders. I stopped in the doorway.
I’d recently had the bathroom remodeled. The gleaming new fixtures included a huge walk-in shower with a bench seat and a grab bar, for a twenty-nine-year-old who had been a world-class athlete, whose freedom of movement had been stolen from him, and who needed to look at his feet to know whether they were on the floor. He ran his face under the shower spray and shook the water off.
I’d been aware for some time that he had turned a corner. The hit-and-run, the miserable attack that had split open his world, no longer held emotional sway over him. The flashbacks were gone. He had relinquished his anger. The things that kept him so busy—working, coaching, peer counseling—he did not to stave off despair, but because he cared. He had freed himself from the nightmare.
I shut the door, steam swirling around me, and sat down in the wheelchair. “Stoker wants his son to join an SCI trial at UCLA?”
“Stoker needs his butt kicked. Buddy’s not strong enough yet, and he doesn’t even fit the clinical criteria. They want people with incomplete injuries, at least two years post.”
“You didn’t throw away the application.”
He grabbed the soap and ran it over his chest. “Nope.”
“Are you thinking of applying?”
He ran his head under the water.
“Blackburn? You’re going to have to tell me, because your Jedi mind trick isn’t working.”
He looked my way. I felt a jolt.
He was long legged, with swimmer’s shoulders, and had always been lean, lithe, and tan when he’d been training. His hours in the pool were a journey along a pure shore, and in the past few months he’d been training hard. And I had not appreciated the results.
He was ripped. Under the lights, the water shone against his skin. The planes of his back and arms were sharply defined. I realized that I was gazing at him with a kind of awe.
A crooked half smile spread across his face. But this time there was nothing lost or broken behind it. Nothing wistful, no regrets, no worries, other than for me.
How long had I been taking him for granted?
A lump formed in my throat. For so long I had seen his scars, had watched him battle himself, his demons, and a world that considered him invisible. I had missed, somehow, a victory.
He pushed open the shower door, held the grab bar, and stood up. He reached out a hand to me.
“Come here.”
He hauled me up and pulled me straight into the shower. His grip was intense.
The water hit me, hot, soaking my camisole. He tugged me against him and pressed his mouth to mine. I closed my eyes and kissed him, putting my hands against the sides of his face. My jeans clung to my skin. I felt my heart thrumming.
Lips close to mine, he lowered his voice. “Fucking Fact of Life Number Two: Don’t think. Let go.”
“I’m not letting go of you.”
His skin was hot. I ran my arms around his back, closing my eyes and kissing him again. Then I tilted my head back and let the water pour over my face, and he kissed my neck. His free hand slid around my ass and he pulled me up, harder, and he was sucking on my skin. I tried to speak but raw longing flowed through me. I raised myself up on my toes and grabbed the showerhead and said, “God Almighty,” when he worked his way down my neck to my chest and to the thin wet cotton of my camisole, and I didn’t have time to pull it off before his mouth closed around my breast.
Getting wet has never thrilled me. Getting dirty is something else.
Later, sitting on the bed hugging my knees, I watched the clouds tumble by outside. Beside me Jesse sat cross-legged, barefoot in jeans. The clouds split and for a moment the sky turned cobalt, shining all the way out, beyond time, beyond peace. Again I thought of the baby we had lost, the spark that flared before dimming beneath the background glow of creation. Gone, beyond.
I turned my head. “Are you going to do it?”
His eyes were the startling blue of the sky. “You think I’d be running down a blind alley?”
To a dead end, where he could tear open his wounds all over again. “What does the clinical trial involve?”
“Gait training. Intense physio, walking with your weight supported by a harness. It’s about finding what mobility you really have and taking it to the end of the line.”
I held his gaze. God, I yearned that this whole reality could be swept away, that he had never climbed on his bike that day, that he had worked late or gone running and never had to learn how to get in and out of a wheelchair.
“I only wish .
. .”
I stopped myself. If only was a phrase he rejected, forcefully. Fucking Fact of Life Number Three: Might have been will make you insane.
“Ev, I’ve been up against the wall for a long time. Maybe it’s time to see if I can break it down.”
“Just tell me you aren’t thinking of doing this because Stoker goaded you. Or the cops last night.”
“Let someone goad me? Never. If disability’s taught me anything, it’s patience and humility.”
I gave him a look.
“Okay, forget humility,” he said. “But I have patience to spare.”
This was a reference to our wedding, which I still hadn’t planned. I mock-kicked him off the bed. “Get it in gear. You’re going to be late.”
He got up. “And gratitude. I’m a grateful person.”
I stood up, planning to head for the shower. He pulled on his shirt, checked his watch, and started moving faster. He took some papers from his wallet and muttered, “Shoot, I left my notes at home. I have to go get them.” I walked past him and he caught my hand.
“I am grateful, you know. For a hell of a lot,” he said.
“But it’s not enough, is it?”
“It may have to be. But I’ll never know unless I take the chance. If you can’t face the possibility of loss, you end up hiding from life.” He froze, chagrined, realizing how that sounded. “I didn’t mean . . . Damn. Your dad’s going to turn up. Forget what I just said.”
I touched his face. “Done.”
But I couldn’t forget it. I would never forget it.
“Peaceful city. I hate places like this.”
It was two p.m., and the white Mercury was parked at the curb on a sleepy Santa Barbara street.
“You have more chance of getting laid in Disneyland than this town,” Christian said.
Boyd Davies grunted. “People like downtime.”
“Downtime makes me no money. Home on the couch with wifey.”
Behind the wheel, Davies slouched against the headrest, biting down on a toothpick. He didn’t know why Christian was complaining, so nervous he was actually grinding his teeth. The house up the street was quiet. Quiet was good. It meant the target had no clue.
