Chapter 6 Aoife #2
I do not know that address, and also I know it the way you know the corner you are not supposed to turn down alone. I slip the paper into my coat sleeve without knowing I have decided anything. It feels like a coin pressed into my palm by someone who did not want to be seen paying me.
Outside, Siobhan cries that sharp, angry cry kind cooks have when they are being stolen from, and Oscar is already calling a regular with a lawyer brother.
I give them the speech you give when you are the eldest daughter of a city and a kitchen and a dream that refuses to bend.
We will be fine, and I will call you, and do not let anyone tell you that you are less than because a piece of paper says so.
I tuck my knife roll under my arm and pretend the feeling in my legs is normal.
George’s Diner is three blocks away and always smells like bacon and the grease of a thousand breakfasts that made construction workers into heroes.
We huddle in the back beneath a framed Sox jersey.
I order pancakes for the table because sadness eats flapjacks and because nowhere on earth cares if you cry over maple syrup.
“Call him,” Siobhan says, glancing at my face like a news anchor who is better at reading a teleprompter than a room. “Call Declan if you’re seeing him. He knows things. Rich people always know things.”
“Rich people do not know about city inspectors who tape notices crookedly,” I say, which is not exactly untrue, and fork a piece of pancake I cannot taste. “Go home. Rest. I’ll text when I know anything.”
I do not call him. I walk east as the day unspools and the light turns the color of a dish towel that has been washed too many times, down to the water where the air has the mineral sting I always mistake for honesty.
The address pulls me like it has a string.
I let myself be pulled. Boston in winter is a series of small betrayals—black ice where you thought there was sidewalk, a wind that turns the corner with a knife in its mouth—and the piers are the worst of it, all open throat and no apology.
Pier 6 is a mouth of iron and old stories.
The storage bays are long and low and numbered like they belong to a disreputable school, the kind where boys learn to steal cars and then lawyer their way out of it ten years later.
Bay Three is half open, a mouth that forgot to close after dinner.
I stand for a long breath and listen. Metal settling, a gull with the voice of a heavy smoker, a distant engine. No human sound.
Inside, the light is cold and unkind and the smell is steel, wet wood, oil, and something copper that gets into the back of my throat. Pallets of boxed dry goods stand to one side, neat as a prayer. The other half of the space is empty enough to make me feel like I have stepped into a photograph.
Then I hear it, not words at first, only the way a voice holds the air when it has nothing left to bargain with.
I move toward the sound because apparently, my survival instinct took the morning off.
The next bay over is separated by a wall that does not reach the ceiling.
There is a gap where sound can tumble over, and I find the crack in the wall where sight follows.
Wallace is on his knees in a ring of light, his shirt untucked and dark at the collar as if someone pressed their fingers into it and did not wipe their hand. His hair is falling into his eyes and his face is the gray of overworked dough. He tries to talk like he still has something to sell.
“I can make it right,” he says. “I have a shipment coming in Friday, I can cover everything, I can—”
“No,” Declan says, and his voice is the low, even sound he uses when he tells a crowded room to sit down and they do.
He is sleeves to the elbow, forearms mapped with sinew and old stories, the line of his shoulders straight as a mast. The gun in his hand looks like it belongs there because that is how hands work.
They learn what they are given. He is not angry. He is not anything I can name.
“You took money from them, you moved our boys off the south pier so they could bring their parcels in clean, you used a restaurant I protected to wash what isn’t ours, and you did it with my name in your mouth,” he says.
“I do not forgive theft dressed as debt. I do not forgive greed that endangers my people.”
Wallace starts to say the word family, and I flinch because I know the way that word sounds when it is a plea, and Declan must too because his mouth tightens once.
“Look at me,” he says, and Wallace lifts his eyes and looks because a man like Declan carries gravity in his voice, and the small pistol rises in his hand the way a sentence rises to its period, and I cannot breathe because my body knows what the next breath will bring and does not know what to do with it.
The shot is not loud in the way the movies insist. It is quick and hard and then everywhere, it echoes in my teeth and the smell of powder is a metal flower opening fast. Wallace falls like a cord was cut.
The silence after is not silence. It is breath staggered by shock and the ring in my ears and the steady beat of the harbor against pilings that has always sounded like a pulse if you let yourself be quiet enough to hear it.
Declan lowers his arm and exhales and I think for a stupid half second that he will put the gun in his pocket and button his cuffs and walk away like he just replaced a light bulb in his kitchen and then he turns toward the wall where I am not breathing and sees me.
He doesn’t startle. Of course he doesn’t. He looks like a man who has found something he set down in a careful place and hoped he would not find there. Our eyes hook. Every minute since the gala folds into the room.
“Aoife,” he says, and there is apology in it and command and something that feels like grief from a distance.
I step back from the crack in the wall because the floor has forgotten its job and my face has forgotten how to be a face.
I do not run at first. I walk with my knife roll under my arm like I am leaving my shift five minutes early, like I have to catch a bus and don’t want to wait for the next one, like the sound in my ears is a kettle and not a shot.
Then I am in the open where the cold finds my lungs and the wind cuts across the pier with its clean salt knife, and I run.
I did not know I could run like this. My shoes are not for it and my coat is wrong but my body has made its own decisions.
My feet slap the wet boards. The smear of the city is ahead.
The gulls look surprised. I do not look back.
The world narrows to the space between my ribs where air is suddenly currency and the slap of my heels and the fact that I can taste pennies and the way my hands, traitors, are steady on the knife roll because training is a god.
“Aoife,” he calls once, far behind, because he will not shout like a boy who chases a girl who will not be caught.
I ignore the name like I have thrown it into the harbor and the tide has taken a liking to it.
I turn left where the pier meets the cracked asphalt and keep going because motion is the only thing that makes sense.
I hit a patch of thin ice where the puddle thought it could be solid and lose a step.
The roll slides from under my arm. I grab it and swear a word my grandmother would applaud.
A man with a hand truck glances up, sees enough to understand nothing, looks away, decides he is part of another story.
The chain-link fence around the far lot, the one with the rusty padlock and the sign that says absolutely no trespassing like a bored uncle, looms. There is a gap where the fence meets the post, just enough for a person smaller than her panic to slip through. I am not smaller. I try anyway.
His hand closes around my wrist, warm through the wool, and the thing in my chest that holds ribs in their polite arrangement goes white and then hot. He doesn’t yank. He holds. Enough pressure to say he has me, not enough to hurt.
“Let me go,” I say, and the sound of my voice makes me want to throw up. “Declan, let me go.”
“Come with me,” he says, a calmness that is a lie and also not. “Not here. Not with the water at your back and the world looking.”
I twist. He uses the hold to draw me in, not hard, controlled like a tango we did not rehearse.
My shoulder hits his chest. I smell powder and salt and the ghost of the cocoa we made three months ago on a night when I thought the world could be both cruel and kind if we brokered the agreement. My breath is a saw.
“Do not,” I say, and I am not sure what verb I am forbidding.
Do not lie. Do not touch. Do not make me a person who can watch a man die and then go home and zest an orange.
Do not be exactly who you are in front of me when the only way I knew how to love you was to pretend we were both someone else.
He lowers his voice so it does not carry. He steps us both out of the line of sight of the two men at the corner who smoke with their backs to us in a way that says they are watching anyway.
“He moved money for them,” he says. “Through your kitchen. Through your hands. He endangered you.”
“I make bread,” I say, like an idiot, and he flinches like I hit him with the flat of my knife.
“Yes,” he says, and it lands like a vow, and then, “Let me explain. Not here.”
“Do you have a room where the echoes are softer?” I say, and I laugh, a terrible, bright sound that does not belong to me. “Do you have a script where the part where you pull the trigger does not happen between the part where you finish your coffee and the part where you ask me how my day was?”
He swallows once, and for the first time since I have known him, he looks like a man who is not certain his hands know the way. He releases my wrist slowly and slides his hand to my elbow, gentler still, as if I am a pan just off the flame and he would rather burn himself than drop me.
“Let me get you out of here,” he says. “People are looking. There is a line I will not cross in public.”
“Let me go,” I say again, quieter, the words cutting their own path. “Please, Declan.”
He glances at the men at the corner, at the truck that just turned down the pier road, at the sky that is leaning forward with snow that is not ready to fall. His hand opens. He steps back once, making space like a gentleman in a century that does not deserve the word.
“I will not follow,” he says, which is not true in the way that is kindness. “Text me when you are home. Lock your door. Do not open it unless I am the one on the other side.”
“I will set the house on fire if you come,” I say, because my mouth has never learned restraint, and he does something with his face that is not a smile and not pain.
“Aoife,” he says softly, a benediction and a resignation at once, and then he raises his hands the way a man does when he knows he cannot win the next ten seconds, and I run.
I run with the taste of metal and smoke and winter in my throat, past the stacked lobster pots and the puddle that lied, past a boy in a knit cap kicking at ice like it insulted his mother, past a woman with a stroller who hums to a baby wearing a hat with ears, past the city that keeps its secrets even when they shout.
I run until my lungs are sandpaper and my calves are lit wires, until the bus stop appears like a benediction, until a bus arrives that does not care who I am as long as I have two dollars and the will to stand upright.
I slide into a plastic seat that has felt every sadness this city makes, press my forehead to the cool window, and watch the water slip away behind me like a story I will never be able to tell in a way that makes anyone understand the taste it left in my mouth.
My phone buzzes with texts I do not read.
My hands rest on my knife roll because it is the only thing I trust not to lie.
When I finally climb the stairs to my apartment, my hands shake hard enough that the keys sound like bells.
The fairy lights are exactly as I left them, stubborn and low.
I lock the door, then the chain, then the deadbolt, then the half-broken latch I told the landlord about twice.
I set the knife roll on the table with the care you use when you put down the sleeping cat of a friend.
I stand in the middle of the room and listen to my own heart try to climb out of my chest.
I go to the sink and scrub my hands until the lines in my palms wake up, then I put a pan on the stove and melt butter.
I tip in flour and whisk until it goes the color of toast, and I add milk in a slow thread and turn the heat down and keep stirring because this is what saves me every single time the city tries to tear a seam—heat applied with care, patience, and salt.
I throw in a handful of cheddar and the sauce sighs.
I pour it over noodles and send it into the oven and stand in front of the glass like a person waiting for absolution.
The oven ticks. The lights glow. Somewhere across the city a man I let into my life wipes powder from his hands and tells his men to stand down, and somewhere a shape of me is still running.
The timer rings and I jump and laugh at myself, a small bright bark in a quiet room, and I eat standing up because a chair feels too civilized and because I cannot sit with what I know and not know and have seen.
The mac and cheese is exactly what I need, honest and hot, and when I burn my tongue a little I feel almost human.
My phone lights once on the table, a rectangle of cold light in a warm room, and I turn it face down and lift my fork again.