Fishbowl Prayers, Ocean Answers 1
“WHA—!”
Jackson’s entire body twitched as Ellery pulled the Lexus into the garage, and Ellery tried not to jerk the wheel. He’d known Jackson had been quiet, but he hadn’t realized he’d been nearly asleep.
“If I’d known the car was the trick,” he said, lifting one corner of his mouth, “I would have been driving up and down California like new parents with an infant in a car seat.”
“Very funny,” Jackson muttered, scrubbing his face with one hand. “Changing my diaper would be a bitch .”
Ellery was too tired to snicker, but his one-sided smile cranked up a little. “Let’s go inside,” he murmured. “You can hit the shower. I’ll make you some food.”
He’d showered at Jade’s before changing, and his suit was in a garment bag in the back of the car. He was tired, yes, but it wasn’t desperate at the moment.
Jackson was desperately tired. He was organ-shutting-down-immune-system-compromised sort of tired, and he needed the shower and the food so he could sleep.
Ellery had seen him through these moments before.
“Believe it or not,” Jackson said with dignity, “Cody talked me into eating after we left the office.”
“So a snack,” Ellery retorted, not put off in the least.
“With coffee,” Jackson added.
“But a snack.”
“But I’m not starve….” The last of the word was swallowed in a yawn.
“Sure,” Ellery agreed as they both walked through the garage door. “Get in the shower now… oh my fucking God, Mom !”
His mother was sitting calmly at the table, Lucifer in her lap, Billy Bob curled on the table next to her laptop as she worked assiduously away.
“Holy Lucy Satan,” Jackson said blankly. “Ellery, I… I can’t—”
Ellery’s mother turned calmly toward them. “Jackson, go shower. Ellery will bring you food.”
“Yes’m,” Jackson muttered before fleeing.
“You broke his brain,” Ellery said, staring at her. “You broke my brain. We were on the phone ten hours ago . How does that even—”
“I had a friend with a private jet flying to Denver to ski,” she said pleasantly. “Not that I approve of that much conspicuous consumption or the waste of resources, but it was damned convenient. From Denver, I caught a commuter flight to Sacramento. They do run all day.”
Ellery blinked. “So you’ve been here—”
“For about an hour,” she said. “I didn’t know you’d gone full lumberjack out here in the West, Ellery. What on earth are you wearing?”
Ellery glanced down at his flannel shirt and sweats and shook his head. “Have you eaten?”
His mother’s delicately arched eyebrows made an exquisite little V . “You know, I don’t remember,” she said, and he found himself growling.
“Soup,” he said. “We have lots and lots of wonton soup. And some leftover bread.”
Her face—a perfect oval with expressive brown eyes, perfect makeup, and all—lit up with genuine appreciation. “That would be lovely,” she said. “Thank you, son.”
“My pleas—”
“And while you’re fixing that, and Jackson’s in the shower, perhaps you could update me on your current situation. It sounds fascinating .”
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES later, his mother was eating, the cats had been displaced to the couch after—apparently—having been petted into twin comas, and Ellery took it upon himself to wonder where Jackson was.
He’d made it through the shower and into his briefs. And one leg of his pajama bottoms.
And then, apparently, he’d sort of melted over to the side and fallen asleep.
Ellery paused in the doorway and marveled at him for a moment. He was battered and bruised—there were always bruises somewhere, he might as well have been a longshoreman—and his body showed the signs of hard, hard use in a relatively short amount of time.
Visually, Ellery traced the scars he’d been there for, and then the ones that had happened before Ellery had arrived in his life, and he wondered, as he always did, about the scars within.
And at the same time, he gave thanks.
How this amazing creation, this stunning human being, had become the perfect lover, the perfect friend, the perfect mate for him , plain and practical, awkward and meticulous Ellery Cramer, was really one of the wonders of the world.
It was a miracle.
Ellery didn’t need to have passed his Bar Mitzvah to understand that miracles didn’t always last. Sometimes they were transient. They should be celebrated.
Jackson could be—and almost had been—taken from him at any time. He was trying so hard—witness his half-intelligible story of a four-thirty snack—to make their time together as long as possible.
Ellery would cherish absolutely every quiet moment.
“Shwhyruwookingadme,” Jackson mumbled, and Ellery could tell he was trying to open his eyes and failing.
“Sweats on or off?” Ellery asked crisply, moving into the room.
“’Weats?” Jackson mumbled.
“That’s off, then,” Ellery decided, putting a warm hand on Jackson’s thigh before stripping the pant leg off.
“In’t your mom here?” Jackson asked.
“Yes, but she understands you need to sleep.”
“So do you.” It was the most articulate thing he’d said.
“I’ll be in shortly,” Ellery told him, his own yawn working its way up from his toes.
From the dining room, his mother’s clear call came. “Ellery, I’ll clean up. You two get some sleep.”
“Heh heh heh—ears like a bat . Prolly turns into a bat at night. Lucy Satan Bat in the Satan Bat trees.”
While he was speaking, he helped Ellery by pulling his foot out of the pantleg and rolling onto the comforter curled up into a little ball, probably cold.
“Jackson, stand up,” Ellery ordered, and like a surprised cat, Jackson’s long body uncoiled. He rose to his feet in a giant splang and windmilled his arms with his eyes at half-mast.
Ellery ripped the covers back. “Now lie down again.”
He collapsed like a marionette with a cut string, resuming his curl with disgruntled, catlike movements until he gradually grew still.
Ellery tucked the blanket around his chin, relieved to see his eyes had gone back to fully closed.
“Evil man,” Jackson mumbled. “I’ve got a heart condition, you know.”
“It was either that or go out and get extra blankets so we could cuddle,” Ellery told him, smoothing his hair from his forehead. “I need to hold you tonight.”
Jackson’s eyes finally opened naturally, the sleep still solid under the lids, and he smiled.
“And just like that, my heart is fine.”
Ellery smiled and stood, stripped Mike’s clothes off, and laid them on the dresser to wash in the morning. Outside their bedroom he heard his mother loading the dishwasher and talking to the cats, something about how Billy Bob forced Lucifer to run into walls, which Ellery thought was flat-out favoritism. In Jackson’s words, Lucifer did that shit all by himself.
He slid into bed behind Jackson, shuddering as he pulled that miraculous, healing body against his own. He was dimly aware of the door opening, and there was one plop on the bed and then three unsuccessful tries before Ellery reached down with one hand and scooped Lucifer onto the bed as well. Most days he made it fine on his own, but sometimes he needed help.
Just like sometimes even Jackson needed sleep. Ellery tucked his arm under Jackson’s so he could hold him closer, and Jackson laced their fingers together.
“I love you,” Jackson whispered. “So very, very much.”
“Oh God. Me too.”
Darkness, comfort, and sleep.
“SHE’S CRYING! Somebody make her stop! Oh God, she’s crying—make her stop!”
Ellery struggled to wake up. Oh God. Jackson was shouting and flailing, pushing himself up and screaming into the darkness of the bedroom, and Ellery squinted at his phone on the charger.
Three hours. Ellery wasn’t sure he could cope with this with only three hours of sleep after the day they’d had.
“Baby,” he tried to soothe. “Baby, c’mon, calm down.”
“ Somebody get the fucking baby !”
The scream was ripped out of Jackson’s throat, and Ellery recoiled for a moment, stunned and disoriented and, yes, a little afraid.
This was tearing from Jackson’s soul , and Ellery thought he knew where, but the memory was fleeting, a casual confession—as so many of Jackson’s worst confessions were—of another atrocity he’d managed to survive.
“Jackson Leroy Rivers!”
Ellery’s mother’s voice snapped through the air like a whipcrack, and Ellery sat up in bed straighter, his senses whirling from another emotional assault.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jackson said, sounding woozy and hoarse—but lucid.
“Why are you making all this noise?” Taylor Cramer demanded, slamming on the lights. Ellery’s mother was wearing blue silk pajamas, with her hair pulled back into a braid for sleeping, and Ellery had a muddled moment to wonder how she managed to look like she was wearing a business suit at two in the morning.
“She’s crying,” Jackson said earnestly. “Can’t you hear her crying? She won’t stop….” He trailed off in confusion, glancing around, orienting himself, his consciousness catching up to inform him of reality after the dream’s terrible lies.
“I’m sorry,” he said in the remote voice of an apologetic schoolboy. “I-I didn’t mean to bother everybody.” He made to stand up, but Taylor’s glare held him in place. “If… if you let me go, I’ll play some video games to calm myself down.”
Ellery’s mother looked to him. “Son, does this happen often? I mean, you spoke of dreams but….” She gestured helplessly.
“Something’s been riding him,” Ellery told her, grateful to have his mother there to talk to—or even simply witness. “For a while this only happened once a month or so.” He let out a shuddery breath. “It was nice,” he said plaintively.
Jackson turned to him, remorse written all over his face. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice wobbly. “Listen, I’ll go get a hotel room or—”
“Oh, don’t you fucking dare!”
Both of them stared at Ellery’s mother in shock.
“What?” she demanded crankily. “You two use the word like you breathe. How often is this happening now?”
“Almost nightly,” Ellery said when Jackson glanced away.
“Absolutely not,” she said, and Ellery saw fury—and worry—bubbling under her controlled expression like a volcano under an ice floe. “No. No, you two need to be working at optimum levels, and you absolutely cannot do that if this is what your sleep looks like, Jackson.” Her voice altered perceptibly from drill sergeant to the thing Jackson probably feared the most.
A mother.
“Son, what’s on your mind. What baby?”
Jackson squinted at her in confusion. “Baby?”
“Yes.” Disregarding all propriety, Taylor sank down at the side of the bed, and Ellery yearned to go put on his own pajamas but figured now was not the time. “You were begging us to get the baby. What is riding you, son?”
Jackson swallowed and shook his head. “I—”
“What are you worried about right now?”
He lifted his head, and Ellery thought for the umpteenth time that his mother was a genius. Not the old hurt, not whatever had haunted a boy or young man that he might not have had words for. What was the trigger? What was the current hurt that the mature, able man could articulate?
“The wedding,” Jackson said, and right when Ellery’s heart thought it would drop through the bed and bury itself in the core of the earth, he added, “I’m worried I won’t measure up. I’m… you know.” He gave Ellery a weak smile over his shoulder. “You know your son’s a catch,” he said, some of his roguish charm surfacing. “I… I don’t want to let him down.”
In one of those gestures that were the core of Ellery’s mother, she smoothed the hair back from Jackson’s forehead. “You are everything I’ve ever dreamed about for him,” she said, and Ellery’s eyes burned. “But I want your heart whole and well. From what I can see, you’ve spent your entire life doing nothing but caring for other people. And not just caring, doing for them. Often at your own expense—witness tonight’s unexpected rescue.”
Jackson glanced away sheepishly. “You told?” he asked Ellery, sounding like a child.
“Yes, Jackson. My mother shows up on our doorstep to help us with a case, and I briefed her on current events. This is all obviously my fault.” He kept his voice sarcastic on purpose. He needed Jackson to feel normal.
“I love you like a son,” Taylor said primly, “but that doesn’t mean that Ellery isn’t the good son.”
Ellery was draped practically over Jackson’s shoulder, and he saw the tiny corner of his mouth turn up.
Bless his mother. God bless his mother. Okay, God, I get it now. How we see you in everyday works.
“Understood,” Jackson said, some of the defensiveness bleeding from his posture.
“Good.” She had both his hands in hers now, and Ellery knew from experience that they’d be freezing. “So you’re worried about letting Ellery down. That’s a place to start. Impossible, I think, because you work your heart out for him, but it’s a start for what we’re doing here. Now think. When was the first time you felt like this? When was the first time you were afraid you weren’t enough?”
The silence was four thousand, three hundred and eighty-two years too long.
“This is stupid,” Jackson said after a breath hitch. Abruptly he stood and slid off the bed, ducking smoothly out of Ellery’s hug and Taylor Cramer’s grip. He went to the dresser and began to rifle through clothes.
“Sit down,” Ellery’s mother said, and while she sounded affronted, she didn’t sound shocked.
Ellery was shocked. Nobody— nobody —defied his mother.
“Look,” Jackson said, and Ellery could hear the fine edge of desperation in his voice. “Lucy, I appreciate the effort, but—”
Taylor Cramer made a bored sound. “You may put on your pajamas, but you are sitting back down.”
“I was, you know, thinking of going out for a run,” Jackson said, a rather green conciliatory smile on his face.
“And I was thinking of having you restrained,” Ellery’s mother said, “but I rather decided I respected you too much to do that. Kindly show me the same consideration.”
Ellery stared from his mother to Jackson and back, not sure who would win this contest of wills but on one level absolutely fascinated. In his entire memory, he couldn’t recall a single human being ever gainsaying his mother the way Jackson had, and given that Jackson was terrified of Ellery’s mother, Ellery had to give it to him in the balls department.
Jackson Rivers would face down any demon.
Except his own.
And that’s where Ellery’s fascination ended and his terror began.
“Jackson,” he said, his voice shaky in the silence. “Jackson, baby, I’ll back whatever you do. If you go running, I’ll run with you. If you decide to hop on a plane to Rome, I’ll go there too. But….”
Jackson had glanced at him and then away as Ellery had first said his name, but now, as Ellery faltered, he gazed at Ellery more fully, a stricken expression on his face.
“But what?” he asked, like the words had been forcibly ripped from his chest.
“But this thing,” Ellery whispered, “that’s keeping you up at night. That won’t let you go. This thing you’re so afraid of. It’ll get you in the end, baby. Unless you talk about it. You almost passed out tonight, you crashed so hard—because you hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in a month . Please. We’ve gone through so much. You’ve done so much to make yourself healthy. Don’t let whatever this is destroy it all.” Ellery’s eyes stung, and he thought crying in front of his lover and his mother while in his underwear in bed must have been one of the big things he’d feared in high school, but right now it didn’t even hit his top ten. “I’ll follow you until you shrivel up and fade away, but I’m telling you, that’s not what I hoped for when you asked me to marry you.”
Jackson made a sound like he’d gotten thumped in the liver. “What are you hoping for?” he asked.
“Sunshine,” Ellery said, wiping his cheeks with the back of his hand. “Flowers. Our friends and family there to wish us well. Many more years doing what we love. Hope. New plans. New people. Old friends, old family. All of it, together. Don’t you understand, Jackson? I see all these things in you .”
“But I’m not worth it,” Jackson said, his voice cracking. “I told you that from the beginning—”
“You have never,” Ellery hissed fiercely, “not once ever , let me down.”
Ellery could hear Jackson’s swallow from the dresser, and he slid the T-shirt in his hands over his head as though his body was functioning without his brain.
“Who is it you think you did let down?” Taylor asked, and Jackson swung around to face her as though he’d forgotten she was there.
“Lots of people—”
“Bullshit,” she replied evenly. “Young man, you do not have desperate nightmares like I just heard for an amorphous ‘lots of people.’ Now I am tired , and I am irritated , and I need for this to be over. You will tell us now what is riding you, or I shall bind your wrists and ship you off to the nearest psych ward—”
“You would not,” Jackson retorted, obviously shocked. “You sort of like me.”
“ I love you, you infuriating child. Now sit down !”
Her voice cracked. Ellery’s mother’s voice cracked. The only time he could ever remember that happening had been… been… oh my God. In the hospital room, after Jackson had saved Ellery’s life as he lay in recovery and had nearly died himself.
“Jackson,” Ellery said, appalled. “You are breaking my mother! Now sit down and help us out!”
Ellery hadn’t been aware he’d held his breath until the mattress sank under Jackson’s weight and he sucked air into his lungs.
Jackson was staring at his hands. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I—”
“Whatever you’re about to ask me, no,” Taylor Cramer snapped. “Spit it out, son. Nothing is worth all of this. Who do you think you let down?”
Jackson scowled at her. “It’s stupid. It happened forever ago—”
“ Who !” Ellery and his mother both shouted, exchanging surprised glances before the word stopped echoing in the bedroom.
“My baby sister,” Jackson snarled, his shoulders hunched defensively. “Are you fucking happy now?”
“You have a sister?” Taylor Cramer asked at the same time Ellery said, “Jackson, that wasn’t your fault.”
“You will explain,” Taylor said—hopefully to both of them because Ellery was the one who answered.
“His mother had a child when he was fifteen. It was how he got out of the house. She kicked him out so he could live with the Camerons because she had another source of welfare income.”
“Oh, son….” Ellery’s mother put her hand over her mouth, and Ellery didn’t even want to tell her the worst part.
He didn’t have to. The explosion had been detonated. The dam had no choice but to crumble around their ears and let the deluge cleanse them raw.
“Kaden and I,” Jackson whispered. “We stayed up. All night, that night. Listening to the baby cry. Celia had stayed in the apartment for a month—trying, I think. But after about four weeks, she… I don’t know. Left. Took off. Got high. Whatever she did. And the baby just… she was born addicted. Her screams—they made your heart pound and your palms sweat, and Kaden found me on the couch, crying. And… and I couldn’t do it anymore. I was going to run down the stairs and break down the door and get her, but Kaden tackled me. He said, ‘Jackson, my mom can’t feed anyone else. What can we do?’”
“Oh God,” Ellery whispered. He hadn’t known this part. The bare bones, but not the… the sheer desperation of the moment.
“And he was right,” Jackson gasped. “They…. Kaden and Jade and Toni. They gave up food so I could live there. Toni was holding on by a thread as it was. So we called CPS. We told them we could hear the baby through the walls, and the mother had abandoned her. And they came and got her. And they never knew that I was upstairs. I was her brother, and I… oh God. I couldn’t. I couldn’t take care of her. I… I’d barely gotten used to eating myself. So I gave up. I… swore I’d never give up like that again. I’d find a way. I’d keep all my promises. I’d… I’d….”
He paused, breath coming in painful pants as he made a Herculean effort to keep all of it—the pain, the helplessness, the terrifying regret, all of it—tucked inside an increasingly fragile body.
Ellery and his mother met horrified glances, and Ellery was suddenly fiercely glad she was there. This was so big. It was so awful. No one person could bear it, not if they loved this man like they did.
“You’ve done all that, son,” Taylor said, venturing close enough to reach out to him again.
He recoiled at first. “I’m a mess, Mrs. Cramer,” he said roughly. “You keep saying I’m good enough for your son, but I don’t see how—”
Ellery wrapped his arms around Jackson’s shoulders and buried his face against Jackson’s neck. “Shut up,” he said, for once out of words. “Oh God, Jackson. You are so much better than your weakest moment. You were a kid —”
“But she was my family,” Jackson said, his voice thin and thready. “Ellery, she was my family, and I let her go so I could have….”
He flailed for a moment, and Ellery’s mother reached out with both hands this time to cup both his cheeks in her hands. “Food,” she said simply, and Ellery heard tears in her voice too. “Safety. Love. You need to have them to give them, Jackson. And you didn’t have them then. You did what you could. You did an incredibly brave thing—don’t think I don’t know what consequences you could have dragged down on your head with that phone call. And Kaden was brave too. The two of you were in an impossible place, and you did the best you could. It’s time to let it go now.”
“But I failed,” he said, his face crumpling, and as Ellery held his shoulders, his mother drew his face against her stomach, wrapped her arms around his head as though he was Ellery himself, or Rebekah, or Ellery’s father. Somebody beloved to her. Somebody she would hover over, protect, and love.
“You were a child,” she said, her own voice trembling. “You were so young, son. You did the right thing, Jackson. You always do the right thing. And the more power you have in your life, the more good you do with it. It’s okay, Jackson. You can let it go now. We still love you, even though you were young and impoverished and powerless. None of that was your fault back then. You are loved now , do you understand me? You are loved now .”
She might have said more after that, but Ellery lost the thread of it, because they were sobbing, all three of them, the raging tide of the past tumbling them about in an icy torrent until they were left, dry and frail husks, on the sands of the now.
ELLERY WOKE up at 7:00 a.m., his internal clock ignoring the shocks and stresses of the past few days.
Uneasily, he looked to where Jackson slept, eyes closed, chest moving in and out evenly, like the storms that had rocked them all had never blown.
For a moment he expected Jackson to say something—he almost always did, somehow knowing that Ellery was awake and watching him before Ellery had even detected a change in breathing, but Jackson’s exhaustion the night before, mental and physical, had been complete. One moment he’d been sobbing in Ellery’s mother’s arms, and the next, he’d slumped sideways, asleep so abruptly Ellery had almost taken his pulse to make sure his heart hadn’t simply stopped beating with the stress of being bared to the world.
With a soft kiss on his temple, Ellery slid out of bed and put on some (thank God) pajamas, before following the smell of coffee out to the kitchen.
His mother was there, and it was a testament to how rough the night before had been that she was still wearing her own pajamas and not dressed in a Chanel pantsuit with her hair in its usual chignon.
“Is he still asleep?” she asked, peering over the coffee mug that Jackson had chosen for her especially for her stays at their house. It was enormous and featured a tail-twitching black cat, contemplating mischief with slanted green eyes.
Except for the color of eyes, it was very like Taylor Cramer.
“Yes,” Ellery said, heading directly for the coffee pot.