8. Joey
JOEY
"Shirt off," I said. "The sleeve's ruined anyway."
Here's what nobody tells you about kindergarten: it's a trauma ward with nap mats.
I've taped a scalp shut at recess with two inches of gauze and a calm voice.
I've held a seizing child on carpet squares while twenty-one others watched my face to learn whether the world was ending.
My first-aid kit is not a cute little box.
My hands do not shake on blood. So when six foot four of head of security sat down on my kitchen chair and bled on my beautiful borrowed floor, I did what I do.
He looked at me for a moment — measuring something, the cost of obedience maybe — then worked the buttons one-handed and peeled the black shirt off his shoulders, and I kept my face teacher-neutral, which was the hardest professional thing I have ever done, including the year I had two Mias.
The graze ran along the top of his left forearm, six inches, shallow at the ends and considering going deeper in the middle.
Clean edges — ceramic, he said, when I asked what the blade was, because I asked about the weapon the way I'd ask what the dog looked like, and something in him seemed to settle at being asked practical questions in a practical voice.
I irrigated it with saline. He didn't move.
I patted it dry and pulled the edges together with butterfly strips, one every half inch, a neat little fence — "You should get stitches.
" "No." "That was a statement of fact, not an opening bid" — and he almost, nearly, at the very edge of the visible spectrum, smiled.
The whole time, my hands steady, my breathing even, I was cataloguing the rest of him, because it was there and I am incapable of not reading a room.
He was a record of arguments won expensively.
A pucker on the right shoulder, old. A comma of white through one eyebrow.
A patch on his side where the skin went wrong, and low on his left ribs, small and deliberate, a tattoo — numbers, two neat lines of them, coordinates — and I did not ask, because his face lived somewhere over my head being carefully nowhere, and some things you file for the day they're offered.
And the scar. The one I'd been seeing the top of for five days.
It started under his left ear and went down — down the neck, over the collarbone shelf, ending in a hooked flourish like a signature, wide in places and badly healed, the kind of healing that happens far from hospitals.
As old, at a guess, as everything else nobody would talk about.
I'd read every letter Danny ever sent me, twice a year, and Danny had told me about Ronan — Sarge reads the whole map before he moves us, Josie, he's the reason I sleep — and never once mentioned anything that would do this.
My fingers were on it before I decided anything. Just the top of it, where it left his jaw.
Every muscle in him stopped. Not a flinch — an engine shutting down.
"The letters never mentioned this," I said, my voice barely above a breath. "Danny told me everything about you. Letters and letters, and you're all over them, and this isn't anywhere."
The pause went so long the tower hummed through it.
"The night Danny died," he said.
Four words. Then the door in his face closed, and I stood there with my fingers on the proof, and — this is the part I want on the record — I didn't push.
All this time I'd been demanding this story, and here was its edge under my hand, and what I found out about myself in that kitchen was that I didn't want it taken.
I wanted it given. There's a difference.
I teach it in September: things you grab break; things you're handed, you get to keep.
"Okay," I said, and finished taping the fence.
I should have stepped back then. The medical part was over. The part where my hand was still resting on his forearm, below the dressing, was not medical.
The kitchen was too bright and too quiet.
He smelled like antiseptic and clean sweat and something underneath — cedar, gun oil, warmth — and he sat very still on my chair, this man who had folded a professional killer into a wall in the time it takes to draw a breath and then said please to me in the same corridor, and I watched my thumb move once along the inside of his wrist, over the pulse point, which was not slow.
Mine wasn't either. I'd been running on the fumes of my own calm since the elevator, and somewhere under it a thing with my whole attention span had been waiting for the room to empty, and it stood up now, unhurried, and stretched.
I wasn't afraid of what I'd seen in the corridor.
That was the discovery of the night, bigger than the syringe, bigger than the fake note in the fake handwriting they'd built for my death.
I had watched Ronan Vane come all the way open — the speed, the mass, the total unhesitating violence of him.
The verdict arrived without consulting me: safer than anywhere.
All week the world had wanted me dead, and the one place in Nevada nothing could touch me was the wingspan of the most dangerous man in it.
Steady, is what I was. Steadied. And hungry — I'll say it here, where it's just us — hungry in a way that had nothing to do with the dinner I hadn't finished, a low sweet burn that ran from my sternum to my knees and had his name on it, years overdue and gathering interest.
"Josephine." Low. A warning with gravel in it.
"I know."
His hand came up and caught mine — engulfed it, careful as a man defusing something — and moved it off his arm, and then didn't let go of it. We both looked at that. Our hands, the failed evacuation, the fingers folding wrong, folding in.
"You should lock your door tonight," he said.
"Because of the maid service?"
"No."
The word went through the kitchen like current.
His thumb was moving over my knuckles — I don't think he knew; I'd have bet the deed to everything I owned he didn't know — and his eyes, that green the desert only does in January, from up close, were not silent at all.
The wall was there, sandbagged, lawyered, thick as a vault door.
And there was a door in it, standing open one inch, with everything behind it.
I leaned in. His breath went ragged on one intake — the only unguarded sound I'd ever heard him make — and for the length of a heartbeat his forehead dropped to mine, and we stood in the ruins of the first-aid kit breathing each other like it was a thing you could be arrested for.
"Give me one reason," I whispered.
"I'll give you three." His voice had dropped to the floor of itself. "Two of them have law degrees."
"And the third?"
His hand let go of mine, finger by finger — I felt him do it deliberately, a controlled demolition — and he stood, and stepped back, and put the kitchen and the wall and the whole state of Nevada between us, and the third reason stood in the room with us wearing my brother's face, unnamed, the way it had always stood between us.
"Goodnight, Josephine," he said, not steady.
Steadiness, it turns out, was mine to keep tonight. All of it. He'd handed it over with the rest.
"Goodnight, Ronan."
He crossed to the connecting door like a man wading upstream. It closed behind him, and he threw the bolt — deliberate, loud enough to be information: from you, from me, both.
I cleaned up the gauze wrappers. Washed the blood off my hands. Put the apple mug in the drying rack. Turned off the too-bright light and stood at the window a while, sixty floors above a carpet of lights that went on burning like nothing up here had teeth.
Five days ago I'd been a teacher with a letter under a fruit bowl.
Now there was a fence of butterfly strips on a man through the wall, holding closed a line that was meant for me. A dead king's ten percent in my name. A syringe in an evidence bag with my overdose pre-written beside it. And a bolt thrown on the west door that had nothing to do with any of them.
In my room, I locked my own door — same volume, same message — and lay down on top of the covers in the dark with my heart going like the last minute of recess.
The wall ticked as the tower cooled. Studs and gypsum and a fire block, he'd said once, when I asked what was in it. Nothing at all, compared to what it was holding back from both sides.
I put my palm flat against it, cool and smooth in the dark.
Soft as a confession through the paint, something brushed back.