First, Last, and in Between

by Jamie Bennett

  I watched him walk to the kitchen sink at the other end of the room, next to the front door, my exit point. Slowly, I sat up, swinging my feet to the floor. He really had asked me about his bag. It hadn’t been a dream, and I had passed out.

  “Here.” Rory gave me a glass of water and I thought of him handing me orange juice when I’d been in his apartment all those years before. “Drink it.”

  I took the water and held at it for a moment, the glass cool against my palm. I remembered the straps of his bag in my hand as I’d watched him duck into the squad car. I’d slept that night in the corner of the sixth-floor hallway, under the window. The next morning, I’d woken to find myself curled around the duffle bag, cuddling it with my arms and legs, and resting my head on a hard bump under the canvas.

  Eight years before, I had stretched a little after I’d opened my eyes in the weak sunlight entering through the dirty window. My limbs had been cramped from clutching the bag to my body so tightly. Then I had snuck up the stairs and through the broken door to the roof, where I’d huddled in the blue cold of the morning and slowly tugged at the zipper to see what he had wanted me to guard for him.

  “Are you wondering if I poisoned that water or are you thinking about smashing the glass over my head?” Rory asked me now. I looked up from it guiltily. Yes, the smashing thing, but in his face, just enough to break the glass into shards, to hurt him a little so I could run. I wasn’t sure how he’d known. “You’ve been scared out of your head since you saw me walking toward you on the street,” he explained in answer to my unspoken question. “You just passed out in fear, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s not you. I just faint sometimes,” I started to explain. I had always done it, since I was little. In a way, it had been an escape.

  “I’m not going to hurt you.” He still stood over me as I huddled on the couch, so much bigger than I was. So much bigger than almost anyone else on the Earth, and utterly terrifying. “I’m not, Isobel.”

  I’d heard those words before, and they weren’t ever true. I nodded and took a careful sip from the glass instead of hitting him with it.

  “I’m assuming you’re scared because you don’t have my bag anymore,” Rory stated, his voice low and even. “My stuff is gone.”

  I heard my own breath panting out of my mouth. “I kept it for a while. But then—”

  But then I had been hungry and cold, even with the jacket and the shirt he’d given me, even after the spaghetti and the sandwiches from his cupboard in my pockets and the jar of peanut butter I’d taken. And even at thirteen, when I’d seen what had been inside the bag on that cold morning, I’d known that he’d handed me a windfall.

  “What did you do with it all?”

  “I sold the guns first,” I said. I remembered holding them in my hands, heavy even after I’d tried to take out all the bullets. They’d had the same scent I remembered on Rory the night we’d met. I’d smelled it when he’d leaned down after he’d tripped over me in the hallway, and I’d realized that he smelled like his guns because he’d been shooting them.

  His eyes narrowed. “Who did you sell them to?”

  “The guys on the corner. Where we used to live.”

  Rory nodded, like he knew who I meant. “How much did you get for them?”

  “Fifty each.”

  His mouth dropped open. “Fifty dollars each.”

  I didn’t know if that was good or bad, but that money had taken me pretty far. I had hoarded it away for months.

  “The coke? What happened to that?” he asked.

  That was what had been under the guns. Layers of bricks of wrapped and taped white powder that I had recognized immediately.

  “I sold some of it,” I said reluctantly. The drugs were going to have been the real money for me, after I divvied up the bricks into smaller portions and peddled it bit by bit. I hadn’t been organized enough to weigh it and figure out a good price, but I had been smart enough to start to move around the city as I off-loaded it, so that no one knew that I had a big stash.

  In the end, none of that had mattered, because most of the cocaine had disappeared. I had used a penny to unscrew and open up an old grate in the wall of the living room of the apartment I’d shared with my mom, and I had hidden Rory’s duffle inside the small space there. The vent had been part of the heating system, but I knew that we wouldn’t have the heat on that winter, so I had thought it would be safe. Not safe enough. “I sold some,” I said carefully. “But my—somebody took the rest and used most of it with, uh, friends,” I finished, and waited.

  Rory didn’t answer and his face didn’t tell me anything, like if he was going to throttle me or throw me out of the window that didn’t have a fire escape to stop my descent to the sidewalk. Or if maybe he had another gun and would risk the noise to shoot me.

  I gulped more water and took a breath. “I don’t have the money anymore,” I admitted. Might as well let it all out. “Not any of it. I can’t pay you back.”

  Rory shook his head impatiently. “What about the key in the bag? Did you find the key?” he asked sharply.

  I froze and I held the glass so tightly that it might have broken in my hand. “The key?” I repeated. I thought quickly. This could be what would save me. I could use this knowledge to bargain with him, maybe for my life.

  “No? You don’t have it?” He looked at me for another moment and then shook his head and rubbed a palm on his forehead. He sat down heavily next to me on the couch and leaned back, sighing deeply. His eyes were closed and I tensed, ready to run.

  But just as I raised the glass to bring it down on his head, he reached and patted my back, his palm barely brushing my shirt. “It’s ok. I understand what happened. I figured you would get rid of it all.”

  “I—you did?” And it was ok with him, that I had sold some of it and lost the rest?

  “When I realized how long I was going to be away, I knew you would. I figured you would have to.”

  I still couldn’t really believe it. “You’re not angry?” I asked hesitantly.

  Rory shrugged. “I got how things were for you. You ate like an animal. I never saw a kid so dirty and hungry before. And sleeping out in the hallway, on that piss-covered floor…” He trailed off.

  I looked down at my water. The surface showed little ripples as my hand trembled.

  “I was almost glad you were going to sell it and get some money,” he said. “At least someone was going to benefit from it. But you could have gotten a lot more for the guns. The Glock alone was worth—” He stopped. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  I watched him carefully, because this had to be an act. There was just no way that he was really this calm about me selling his guns and spending his money. And his losing his drugs, especially not losing his drugs.

  He pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you care?” he asked me, but I quickly shook my head, no. I would have let him do practically anything that didn’t involve beating me to death. “I got out two weeks ago,” he mentioned. “It’s so strange to be back here, you know? Like I expected time to stop or something, but so much changed.” He shifted his eyes to look at me. “You sure did. You grew up a lot.”

  “I’m twenty-one,” I told him. “I was a kid back then and now I’m an adult.”

  “I guess so. I was kind of a kid myself,” Rory said. “I was younger than you are now.”

  Sure, a kid who was a giant. A kid who had guns and cocaine and had killed someone.

  “Do you know what I got sent away for?” he asked, like he read my thoughts again.

  I nodded slowly. “I got your last name from the landlord. I had to trade him a baggie for it,” I said. He’d wanted other things from me too, the disgusting old man. “Then I looked you up on a computer at school when I was there. I followed your court case and then I saw you got sent to prison.”

  “That must have been interesting for the administrators, if they tracked the searches on that computer.”

  “I don’t thin
k anyone at that school cared what the kids were doing. Except one secretary who worked in the principal’s office. She told me…” I stopped. Why was I saying this to him, that some woman had told me not to drop out, to stay and fight to graduate? It didn’t matter now. Things were how they were.

  Rory seemed to be waiting for me to finish that thought but I just drank the rest of the water. “What did you think I was going to do to you when you told me the truth about what happened to my stuff?” he asked me.

  “I mean, you killed someone, right?” I blurted out. I bit my lip but it was too late to stop the words, so I cringed down, protecting my face with my shoulder.

  “I did,” he said calmly, and expelled a cloud of smoke. “I served my time for it, but that’s not going to change what I did.” He closed his eyes again.

  I didn’t know what to do next so I stayed very still and waited for him to speak, but he didn’t. It felt like we sat there quietly for hours. Rory finished the cigarette and his breathing was very slow and even, almost like he was sleeping. I realized that I was taking breaths along with him. My heart stopped pounding and my back slowly curved against the cushion as I relaxed. But then someone banged on my front door and I jumped up from the couch.

  “Iz. Izzie, open this shit up!”

  “Oh, no!” I blurted out. I turned in a panic to Rory. “You can—” What could I do with him? There was no place to hide in my apartment.

  “Who is that?” he asked me. He had gotten up too, and he stretched out his long fingers, cracking his knuckles as he clenched them back into fists.

  “It’s my boyfriend. I was supposed to text him after church and I forgot. I was supposed to make plans to meet up with him later. Damn,” I muttered. Kash was going to kill me. I was suddenly more scared of him than I was of Rory.

  “You going to make him stand in the hallway? Let him in.”

  I had to, so I walked to the entry and slid back the bolt. As soon as I did, the door flew open, hitting me.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Iz?” Kash demanded as he stepped into the apartment, closing in on me. “Where have you been?”

  I backed up, rubbing my arm. “Here. With Rella, I mean, and then—”

  “Who the hell are you?” Kash asked, staring across the small room to where Rory towered over the couch.

  “I’m a friend of Isobel’s,” Rory answered him.

  “A friend,” Kash said. “A friend?” His eyes swiveled to stare at me and I saw that I was in huge trouble. His hand stole to his waistband where I knew he carried his gun.

  “A friend from when I was a kid,” I said quickly. “Rella and I ran into him this morning and we got to talking. She invited him for tea.”

  “And then you brought him up here, to be alone with you in your apartment,” Kash continued. His body twitched a little and my heart sank further.

  “Not alone,” I said. “Well, alone, but Rory is like a brother.” That was a stretch, but I was grasping at straws. “A big brother,” I continued. A very, very big brother. “That’s all he is to me. Nothing else, he and I would never, because that’s gross, a brother, and then there’s you,” I stammered, and made myself stop talking by biting down on my lip.

  “We’re old friends from when she was a kid,” Rory agreed. “Is there a problem?” He hadn’t moved, but somehow, his body looked ready—tense or something, like he was expectant, waiting. I jerked my head between him and Kash, back and forth, back and forth.

  Kash stared at Rory, sizing him up. Kash was strong, but Rory was so huge that he made my boyfriend look almost like a child. Kash’s eyes came back to me and he reached and grabbed my arm where the door had struck me and squeezed there, hard. He used his grip to pull me over to him and he held me against his side. But he smiled pleasantly at Rory. “There’s no problem at all,” he said. “Iz has bad judgment about people and I have to look out for her. You understand. I’m sure she told you about me.”

  “I did, Kash,” I said quickly. “I told him I had a boyfriend.” I looked at Rory and tried to plead with my eyes for him to agree with that.

  “Right, her boyfriend,” Rory said slowly. “Isobel’s boyfriend.”

  “Exactly.” Kash looked at me and I shrank a little inside. “Iz and I don’t get to spend enough time together as a couple. So you could go now,” he said to Rory, and the smile was gone. His hand was back at his waistband.

  Rory also looked me, his eyes meeting mine for a long moment, then he walked past us to the door. “I’ll be seeing you around, Isobel,” he told me.

  I swallowed and bobbed my head a little. “Maybe. I’m really busy. Kash and I are really busy,” I told him as my boyfriend gave my arm another squeeze. I tried not to wince. Rory shut the door behind himself and Kash let go of me to fasten the locks.

  “Iz.” He sighed as turned back to look at me and he shook his head sadly. “Is that the story you’re going with? An old friend?”

  I closed my eyes and waited for it.

  ∞

  Rory

  I had practiced in the mirror and I thought I saw what was making Isobel scared. When I had smiled at her, it didn’t look much like a happy face. It looked more like a snarl, an expression an animal might make if it was going to bite or claw, going to attack. I practiced the smile more when I went to my job interview, but no one there gave one single shit about how I showed my teeth.

  “You know what you’re doing around the machines?” the owner of the woodshop asked me, and I shrugged.

  “I do, some. We didn’t have all this stuff in the prison shop,” I told him, looking around at all his equipment. Most of it I had seen in the books I’d gotten and read, but I’d never used those tools myself.

  “Hold up your hands,” he told me.

  “Huh?” I asked, but after eight years locked up, I was used to people telling me what to do, so I held up my fingers and spread them wide.

  “You still got ten of them,” Cal said, and sniggered. “You can’t be all that bad with a saw.”

  I realized I was laughing too, more out of surprise than humor, but it had been a while since that sound had left my mouth. “I’m not that bad,” I agreed, and I walked out of his woodshop with a job.

  I had some money in my pocket so I went to get food before I headed back to Isobel’s place. I felt the need to check in with her, to see if she was ok. That boyfriend, whatever he pretended his name was, was bad news. I had seen it in how he dressed, how he had his gun stuck down his pants like he was some kind of gangster. I could see it in how he hurt her with the door and casually grabbed her arm like he owned her. She hadn’t looked at him like she was happy to see him. No, she had finally been relaxing some with me, but when he showed up, she got scared again. Terrified.

  Doors had never been anything to stop me, so I let myself into the front of her building, but I hesitated before I went into her apartment. She probably wouldn’t like to walk in and find me there. She’d probably get scared again, and I realized that I hated to see it on her face: her wide, blue eyes with the dark pupils so big in them, her pale cheeks where there should have been color, like pink or something. And Jesus Fuck, I didn’t want her to faint again. I’d almost had a heart attack myself when I’d seen her mouth go slack and she started to crumple.

  While I was standing in front of her apartment, debating how not to scare her, the door to the stairwell pushed open and there was Isobel herself. She looked exhausted, dragging her big bucket thing of cleaning supplies, and she stopped dead when she picked up her head and saw me. And she got that damned look again, like she was just about to bolt.

  “Isobel,” I called, and calmly walked toward her. That was how you dealt with scared things. With scared dogs, scared rabbits, you took it slow and steady. Maybe it would work with her. She stayed frozen, ready to run, but she didn’t do it. “Did you eat already?” I held up the bags of food to show her why I was there. “I brought dinner,” I said.

  “What is that?” she asked suspiciously. “Wh
at do you have in your hand?”

  “It’s take-out from Roma’s. I spent eight years thinking about the things I missed, and their lasagna was one of them.”

  She leaned forward and sniffed a little, testing to see if she could actually smell it. I tried another smile, no teeth this time. “You hungry?” I asked. “I thought we could share pasta, like we did before. The night we met.”

  But Isobel still hesitated, biting her lip, so I made the decision for her.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and I reached and took the bucket of cleaning supplies out of her hand. “That’s heavy for you to carry up all those flights.”

  “I’m strong,” she told me, but I saw her shake out her fingers and then rub her arm. I walked back to her apartment and she followed me, her steps slow and hesitant. She shot me one last, wary look before she opened the door and let us both in. Then she swallowed and nodded at the table, and I took a seat. I put my hands up on the top of it so she could see that I didn’t have anything in them, and I smiled at her again. No teeth.

  Isobel kept watching me out of the corner of her eye as I unloaded the food from my bags and she got plates and forks. Then she opened up the fridge and brought out a bottle of beer and put it in front of me before she sat down.

  “No, I don’t drink,” I told her, and pushed the bottle back towards her. “I quit everything about seven years ago.”

  “I thought you were in jail for eight years,” Isobel said.

  “Eight years, three months, four days,” I corrected. “But I didn’t have to quit right away. You can get most of what you need in prison.”

  “Like what?”

  “Drugs. Phones, weapons. Cigarettes,” I said, and patted my pocket where I always kept my pack. “You name it, you could get it.” I opened the containers and leaned down to inhale the aroma from the food. “Jesus, it smells even better than I remembered.” I dished out a serving for her and then started in on mine, forgetting that I didn’t need to eat as fast as I could. I could take my time and enjoy it, this lasagna that I had been thinking about for eight years, three months, and four days, but it was gone much too soon.