Blood in the Water (Kairos)

by Catherine Johnson

  She dried her hair and tied it sedately at the nape of her neck, only taking care with it for other people’s sake, and applied enough makeup to look presentable. There was no amount of foundation to disguise the hollows in her cheeks or the dark circles under her eyes. Her appetite had fled and although she was sleeping reasonably well she still had the appearance of a confirmed insomniac. She slipped her bare feet into black pumps and went to find Paul in the kitchen, since he’d finished dressing a long time before she had.

  A steaming cup of black coffee was waiting for her on the counter. It was the only way she’d been able to drink it in weeks, finding she couldn’t tolerate anything sweet without her stomach turning over. She wrapped her hands around the mug, trying to draw some much needed warmth from it, despite the fight that the air conditioner was having with the humidity.

  Paul was at the stove working with a spoon and a frying pan. The smell of cooking eggs penetrated the fog in her head, and Ashleigh had to take a moment to decide whether the smell made her nauseous or ravenous. Paul served up two plates of scrambled eggs and toast onto the small table.

  “You need to eat, beauty. It won’t do anyone any good if you pass out during the service.”

  He was all quiet concern, not pushing her, just speaking sense. She looked at the plate and decided she was hungry. She pulled a chair out and sat down. She relinquished her coffee mug in favor of cutlery and tucked in. She knew he was glancing at her as he ate his own breakfast, but his scrutiny didn’t unnerve her. He kept it low key. She enjoyed the feeling of being cared for, that someone was concerned about her well-being, and was thankful that he knew how to keep that dialed down to an appropriate level so that she didn’t feel smothered.

  She helped him take care of the dishes, but still couldn’t find the motivation for conversation. Her sadness lay heavily on her soul. He kissed her gently again before she opened the door to her SUV. He would be riding today, and she wasn’t dressed for a bike. He stayed behind her all the way to the clubhouse, watching. She knew there were charters and friends coming in from all over, but that knowledge hadn’t prepared her for the glinting sea of Harleys, spotted with a few cars, that had flooded the space in front of the clubhouse. She could see, though, that space had been left for her vehicle and Paul’s bike.

  She stopped dead at the clubhouse door. Her brother was inside, or at least the shell that had housed his spirit was. If she didn’t go in she could maintain the illusion, keep the hope that he might walk through the door one day. If she went through the door, if she followed the day on its course, Dean would be gone irrevocably. There would be no denying it after this. Paul’s hand at the small of her back reminded her that standing still was not an option.

  He pushed open the door for her and maintained the firm pressure that forced her, and gave her the strength to walk forward. Not a great lover of being the center of attention at the best of times, Ashleigh nearly bolted when a hush fell over the room and every head turned in her direction. Not knowing how else to proceed, she scanned the room, looking for her parents. Paul gave her a small nudge in the right direction, towards the Chapel.

  The room was crowded and heavy with people, but they parted as one to allow her through. Her mother and father were stood in the Chapel with the casket, with... she didn’t want to think it... with... Dean’s casket. Her mother looked, to her familiar eye, brittle. She was pale and drawn, but every inch the first amongst the Old Ladies. Her hair was neat, her spine was straight, and careful makeup was hiding the ravages of her grief. Her father seemed to have visibly aged years in the past few days; his hair seemed a little greyer, the lines on his weatherworn face a little deeper. He had lost some of the spark of vitality that had always lit up any room he’d walked into.

  She was sure that her mother and father had done their wailing and crying, but they had done it where no one could see. They weren’t the kind of people who tamped their emotions down, but neither did they believe in making an exhibition of their feelings.

  Dolly was standing next to her mother, and Terry next to her father. Dolly’s eyes were red-rimmed, and she was twisting a fabric handkerchief around her fingers. If Ashleigh’s heart hadn’t been numb, it would have gone out to Dolly and Terry. They hadn’t been able to have children of their own, and Ashleigh knew that they had considered her and Dean their offspring as much as her own parents did.

  The rest of the club members were arrayed beyond Terry in a familiar order, Dizzy, Kong, Fletch, Chiz, Tag, Crash, Sinatra and Morse. She wondered where Geoff was, but she didn’t look for him. Fletch was leaning heavily on a cane. Chiz looked somewhat lost without his crutches, she’d become so used to seeing them. He was favoring his right leg, but otherwise upright by his own power. Morse looked pale and tired, even so early in the day, but he was there. It was a somber Guard of Honor.

  Ashleigh went to her father first. She could tell by the stiff way that he leaned down to kiss her cheek, by the way that he didn’t even attempt to hold her, that he had made a tight fist around his emotions. She didn’t resent that, she was secure in his love and ready to support him in whatever he needed to do to get through this day. Her mother’s lips twisted into a sort of smile before she too kissed Ashleigh on the cheek. Her mother hadn’t been sure that she would come and was glad that she had.

  She allowed Paul to guide her over to the casket. She knew he felt the reluctance in her steps as they approached the long, black lacquered box resting on the massive table. She could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had entered this room, but she new the table was usually surrounded by chairs, which she could see had been pushed back along the walls.

  She hadn’t seen her brother’s body since the accident that had claimed his life. The last time she had seen him had been the Friday night before the accident. They had played a couple of games of pool before he’d disappeared into his dorm room with Tricia and Katie. It had appeared that he’d been coming around to her and Paul being a couple, even though he’d advised them both against it. He’d laughed and joked with them, although she noticed that he wasn’t completely relaxed. She’d put it down to brotherly petulance at having his advice ignored.

  She didn’t know what she’d been expecting. She’d been trying not to think about it. But she was almost as shocked by the fact that he looked as though he was asleep than if he’d been gruesomely injured. Paul had told her that Dean’s neck had been broken. She knew what a broken neck looked like, she’d seen her fair share of animals that had come off worse in an argument with a vehicle, but there was no evidence of that looseness or the awkward angle that was so telling. There wasn’t even a graze on her brother’s handsome face, she supposed his helmet must have been to thank for that, or maybe Little Mark.

  Little Mark was the owner and manager of Green Pastures Funeral Home and a friend to the club, being a distant relative of Kong’s. She had spotted him as he stood to one side of the main room. It was hard to miss him, even among the blurred sea of faces; he was anything but what his name suggested. He was possibly the only person in the room to truly rival Paul’s size, but his paunch followed Kong’s genetic line. He had played college football and had a bright future until a shoulder injury had forced him into the family business.

  Ashleigh felt awkward. Were people expecting her to throw herself over the coffin wailing and tearing her hair? Would they think she hadn’t loved her brother enough if she didn’t? Any gesture of affection she might have made, any word she might have said, she would not do or say with a room full of people watching and listening. She squeezed her hands into fists, every fiber of her being demanding that she turn and run. It was too hard to say goodbye. Just. Too. Hard. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t sit through the service and be composed and dignified, it was too big an ask. She needed air...

  Paul’s hand moved from the small of her back and slipped around her waist as he pulled her into his side and tucked her against his body. She turned into his warmth and bre
athed deeply of his scent rather than look at what had been her affectionate, protective, vivacious, life-loving brother. She bit her lip until she tasted blood as she fought a private war with her tears, but she was victorious. As she relaxed marginally, Paul helped her to step away from the casket and walked her back to her mother and Dolly. He released her to stand between the two older women and went to take his place in line with his brothers.

  Someone must have made a motion, but she didn’t see who or what. She only knew that the people from the main room began to file through, each stopping a moment at the casket. Some bowed their heads silently, some mumbled a few words, some touched Dean’s hands where they lay folded over his stomach. Ashleigh tuned out. She didn’t want to intrude on other people’s mourning as she didn’t want people to intrude on hers. She recognized the patches of Paul’s former club when those members entered. The sight of the club girls, their mascara already streaked, made Ashleigh feel sad in a desolate way. They reminded her that, to the best of her knowledge, her brother had never known true love, and now he never would, and that was such a bleak thought.

  An age passed before everyone else had paid their respects. She followed her mother out of the room because now it was the turn of the club, his brothers, to say their final goodbyes, and that would be done privately. She knew they would each lay a keepsake in the casket before they closed the lid. Crash closed the door behind them. Ashleigh, her mother and Dolly made their way to the main door to wait.

  Eventually the Chapel doors opened and the casket came out, borne on the shoulders of the members. A reverent hush fell, ending the muted conversations that had been rippling around the room. The crowd parted to allow them through. In silence they bore her brother through the room to the waiting hearse. As the last member stepped out of the building, Moira, Ashleigh and Dolly stepped out too. The blinding sunshine was somehow offensive, as if the heavens themselves were being disrespectfully bright.

  Ashleigh drove her mother and Dolly to the church, following behind the hearse and its escort of numerous thundering Harleys. Ashleigh knew that the sound of that many engines would have thrilled her brother. Chiz, Fletch and Morse forced themselves to ride. Fletch had tossed his cane into her car before they had mounted up. He took it with a relieved word of thanks when they got to the church. Morse was pale and shaking, but upright and looking grimly determined to remain so.

  It was the first time she’d stepped foot inside the First Baptist Church since her wedding day. She remembered the proud smile that Dean had sported all day. He’d hated wearing pants and a dress shirt. He’d looked like a GQ model, a fidgety one that couldn’t stop tugging his collar or shucking his cuffs, but still. Ashleigh still felt guilty that he’d had to be so uncomfortable for that day. They took their seats on a front pew at one side of the aisle. The club would sit on the other.

  The mourners poured in behind them until the majority of the pews had been filled. Only when the last person was seated did her father and the other members bring Dean to the front and set the casket on the trestles in front of the altar. Ashleigh found that space in her head that was filled with white noise and stayed there for the ceremony. She made the appropriate responses, mouthed the appropriate words to the hymns, but she wasn’t truly there. She roused only enough to drive safely as they escorted the coffin back to Green Pastures. Dean had always said that he wanted to be cremated and for his ashes to be scattered along the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, one of his favorite rides. She retreated into her head again for the short service at the funeral parlor. They would collect Dean’s ashes and take them on their final ride in a day or so. For this day they would all return to the clubhouse.

  Once all the mourners had arrived at the clubhouse, there was a respectful silence as all the patches in the room threw back a shot of Jack Daniels to toast Dean. The rest of the day passed in a blur of sympathetic faces and muttered condolences. After the toast had been made, Paul had returned to her side and hadn’t left it. She knew he was concerned that she didn’t eat any of the food that had been prepared by friends of the club; but she felt that if she opened her mouth to eat, that the sorrow would come flooding out and that she wouldn’t be able to rein it back in.

  She felt a subtle shift in him during the wake. Although Paul hardly left her side, Ashleigh was convinced that she could feel him pulling back from her, withdrawing a little. It was nothing that she could define, but by the end of the night there was distance that there hadn’t been in the morning. Ashleigh was too heartsick and too exhausted to question him about it. Instead she filed it away to worry about if it was still there in the morning. She let him escort her home, to his house. She let him undress her and was glad when he didn’t try to make a move, she was empty, spent and used up by the day. They climbed into what she now thought of as their bed, rather than his bed, and she fell asleep cradled against his chest, listening to the beat of his heart. She hoped that Dean had found such peace, wherever he was.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Paul slipped from the bed in the early hours of the morning. He couldn’t take it anymore. The weight of the guilt he carried was making it hard to breathe. He could feel it corroding everything he touched. Every trusting look that Ashleigh gave him, every unconscious gesture of acceptance and comradeship from his brothers added to the burden.

  Ashleigh was deeply asleep. He was glad for her sake. He knew the day had been hard on her, as had many days before that. He was worried about her. She wasn’t eating properly and her spark had dimmed. He very much wanted to take care of her, to be able to nurture that spark back into the blaze it had been, but he couldn’t stay. There was only one way to solve the conundrum that had been presented to him.

  She didn’t wake as he dressed. He paused before he slipped his kutte on. What had once been a balm, as much a piece of him as his own skin, now felt like acid being dripped across his back. He wasn’t worthy of it. He had earned the ‘Redeemer’ patch which now graced it. He had tortured and killed for his club, and the patch was a message to others of what he had done, but he didn’t deserve it.

  The ride to the clubhouse only strengthened his resolve to do what he felt was right, but it did nothing to assuage his regret at what could have been. He would have given much to be able to relax into life with his brothers, to make a life with Ashleigh. He was giving everything because he couldn’t do any of that with a clear conscience.

  During the day he’d wanted to scream a thousand times that he shouldn’t be there, that he didn’t deserve their sympathy or their friendship. He’d made sure to keep Ashleigh close. He didn’t want Jimmy anywhere near her. He wanted to be the one to protect her, he wanted that so badly he could taste it, and this was the only way to do that. He was glad that they’d had the time that they’d had together. Those memories would sustain him, and he would need all the strength that he could gather.

  The clubhouse was silent and mostly dark by the time he got there. The main room was empty, only the lights behind the bar were still glowing and a faint light came from the kitchen. It was all illumination for a brother in need of food, water or alcohol in the early hours.

  One of the Chapel doors was slightly ajar. Paul headed in that direction, certain for no reason that he could say that what he sought was in that room. Sure enough, he found Sam slumped in his chair at the head of the table, nursing what had probably been a glass full of whisky. It was now only half full. There was no bottle in sight. Paul hoped that was a good sign, that his president hadn’t drowned his grief in alcohol. Sam appeared to be staring into space and did not stir when Paul stepped through the doors.

  “Pres?”

  Sam blinked several times before he lifted his head to look at Paul. Maybe he’d been asleep with his eyes open. “Paul? What’re you doin’ here, brother?”

  “I need a word.”

  Samuel’s brows drew down in confusion and concern. He motioned at a chair with a steady hand. “Have a sit. What’s up? Is it Ash?”

&nbs
p; “No. She’s good. Well, as good as she can be. She was asleep when I left.” Paul pulled out his usual seat and dropped into it. He would have liked to have done the brave thing and stayed standing, but the enormity of what he was doing was beginning to hit him and his knees were suddenly weak.

  “What’s up then that you come find me at this time?”

  “Need to speak to you.” He saw something, a light, maybe something hopeful, flicker in Samuel’s eyes. “No. Not that. I wish it were. It’s not that.” He felt like the worst kind of bastard for crushing a father’s hope. He truly did wish he’d been on a mission to request permission to marry Ashleigh. If only that was the reason for his visit, but it wasn’t.

  “Shark, Paul, brother. You’ve got me worried. What do you need?”

  Paul took a deep breath, leaned his elbows on the table to brace himself and looked Samuel directly in the eye. “When I patched into the club, when I came to the Priests, I was on a mission to kill you.”