12. Kai #3
The conversation is easy because it has been repeated in different forms for years.
She asks about the safe house while she pours wine, and I tell her the roof is apparently attempting to bankrupt me.
She reminds me that I inherited enough money to survive the emotional devastation of roof replacement, then listens more seriously when I mention that one of the rooms is being converted so a mother with limited mobility can stay there comfortably with her children.
Mara knows what the place means. She also knows better than to turn it into something sentimental simply because she understands.
Connor finally appears by the time we sit down.
I hear him before I see him, a sequence of dramatic thumps from the hallway followed by the unmistakable sound of a child deliberately making breathing noises louder than any human respiratory system requires.
Then Spider-Man rounds the corner or, more accurately, Connor wearing Spider-Man pajamas and a plastic mask that sits slightly crooked across his face because one elastic strap appears to have lost the will to live.
He plants himself beside my chair with both hands on his hips.
I look at him for a moment. “You seem shorter than the last Spider-Man.”
Behind him, Mara mutters something about not encouraging him.
Connor pushes the mask onto the top of his head, revealing hair flattened against his forehead and the deeply serious expression he reserves for conversations he considers important.
“You wear a mask too.”
“I do?” My eyebrow rises.
“When you ride your motorcycle.”
Understanding arrives. “The helmet.”
“Yeah, but you can’t see your face when you wear it, so that’s basically a mask.” He climbs into the chair he was standing next to. “Does yours have powers?”
I glance at Mara. She is very deliberately concentrating on carving chicken, shoulders already moving with silent laughter. Traitor.
“No. Unfortunately, motorcycle helmets come with considerably fewer superpowers than advertised.” I tell him, propping my elbow against the table.
Connor considers this with the solemn disappointment of someone discovering fraud. “But it makes you look like a superhero.”
“It makes me look like a man with an appropriate concern for head trauma.”
He stares at me.
Mara finally laughs. “He’s seven, Kai. You’re going to have to translate that out of psychiatrist language.”
I reach for my water. “It means helmets stop your brain from becoming mashed potatoes if you fall.”
Connor’s eyes widen behind the mask he has pulled halfway down again. “Cool.”
“That was not supposed to make falling sound cool.” I sigh.
“It did, though,” Mara says as she carries the platter to the table. “Excellent parenting assistance. Thank you.”
“I’m not his parent.”
“No, which is why he listens to you.”
Connor has already moved on. He pulls the Spider-Man mask completely over his face, then turns toward me. “You should get one like this and wear it under your helmet.”
“I’m fairly certain that would interfere with peripheral vision.”
“You can see.” Connor points out.
“Not particularly well.” I shake my head, feeling my lips pull into a smile.
“You just have to use your spider sense.”
I glance toward Mara again.
She points the carving fork at me. “You got yourself into this. I’m staying out of it.”
I lean toward Connor and lower my voice as though sharing classified information. “The problem is that bikers don’t have spider sense.”
He studies me through the white plastic eye panels. “You could.”
“I’m thirty-seven. I think if superpowers were coming, they would have arrived by now.”
“Maybe they’re late.” Something about the certainty in his voice makes me laugh.
Not the dry sound I use at work. A real one.
Connor grins behind the mask as though he has personally accomplished something significant.
Across the table, Mara looks at me in the same irritatingly knowing way she always does when her son manages to pull a reaction out of me other adults have to work harder for.
I point at her before she can say anything. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“You were about to.”
“I was thinking.” She smiles and starts serving dinner.
For the next hour, I let myself exist somewhere uncomplicated.
Connor explains a school project in enough unnecessary detail that by the end I know more about volcanoes than I did after medical school.
Mara tells me about a woman at the grocery store who apparently attempted to start a fistfight over the last rotisserie chicken, which she narrates with such unnecessary dramatic embellishment that Connor nearly chokes laughing.
By the time I stand to leave, Connor has fallen half asleep on the couch with the Spider-Man mask still pushed onto his forehead, one sock missing for reasons no adult in the house can explain. Mara walks me to the door and hands me my jacket.
“You going straight home?” The question is casual.
My answer almost is too. “That’s the plan.”
Her eyes linger on me as I slide the jacket on. For one uncomfortable second, I wonder whether she can somehow see the outline of the black envelope through leather. Obviously, she can’t. Still, her expression changes.
“What?”
Mara leans one shoulder against the wall. “Nothing. You’ve just had that look lately.”
“What look?”
“The one where you’ve already decided something and you’re waiting for the rest of the world to stop inconveniencing you with objections.”
I stare at her when she smiles slightly. “I’ve known you for six years, Kai. You’re not as mysterious as you think you are.”
For several seconds, the warning she gave me weeks ago returns with uncomfortable clarity.
“I’m going home,” I tell her.
Mara studies me for another second before apparently deciding not to push. “Text me when you get there.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“Connor makes me say that now.”
“Of course he does.”
Her smile softens. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Mara.”
The cold catches me the second I step outside.
My motorcycle has been sitting beneath the porch light for several hours, dark metal reflecting the glow from the house. I pull on my gloves, fasten the helmet and start the engine, waiting until the vibration settles beneath me before easing away from the curb.
Home is west. I turn east. At this point, there is no internal debate worth documenting.
Julia’s neighborhood has become familiar enough that I no longer need navigation.
The black envelope presses against my chest every time I lean into a turn.
By the time I reach Julia’s street, it’s after eleven.
I kill the engine before the last turn and coast as far as I can before using my feet to guide the motorcycle toward the familiar line of trees.
Her house is quiet. A light remains on in the hallway downstairs, and another softer glow comes from somewhere deeper inside, but the living-room television is dark.
I can’t see Julia. I stood beside the bike for a while anyway.
For the first time since I began coming here, I don’t need to see her.
I know she’s home. Her Ford is in the driveway.
I take the envelope from inside my jacket.
The black paper looks almost blue beneath the weak spill of light from the street.
My thumb passes over the raised red seal on the back before I turn it over.
Two words are written across the front. Little Ember.
I stare at them for a moment. The name still feels like hers in a way Julia doesn’t.
Not because Julia is wrong, because Julia is the woman everybody else sees — competent, controlled, funny when she wants to be, helpful almost to the point of self-erasure.
Little Ember is the thing underneath. The heat she keeps banked so low she has convinced herself it barely exists.
I know better. The letter says more than I should know.
Not enough to expose me, but enough to frighten her, and I’m aware of that too.
There is no medical justification tonight, no vulnerable patient I’m worried about getting safely home, no concern I can stretch until it almost resembles ethics.
I am standing in the dark outside a woman’s house with an anonymous letter in my hand because I want something from her.
I want to enter her life somewhere Dr. Blackwood can’t.
The honesty of that should stop me. Instead, I slip the envelope inside my jacket again, leave the protection of the trees and cross the road.
Her porch light reacts to my movement before I reach the steps, spilling warm illumination across the path and forcing me to pause until I’m certain nothing inside the house changes.
No footsteps, no upstairs light, no shadow moving behind the glass.
I continue to climb the porch slowly. Her house looks different from here than it does from the woods.
More personal. The swing at one side still carries cushions she hasn’t taken in for the season, and a pair of shoes sits near the door beside a planter that probably should have been declared dead several weeks ago.
For a moment, I pictured her standing here tomorrow morning — hair still damp from the shower, work bag over one shoulder, already thinking about something waiting at the office.
Then she’ll see it. I crouch and take the black envelope from my jacket.
The red wax catches beneath the porch light.
I step away from the door, cross the porch and disappear back toward the darkness before the motion light has time to turn off. Behind me, the envelope remains where I left it.
The first thing I have given her that she never asked for. And as I wheel the motorcycle far enough down the road to start the engine without making my presence known, I realize I’m no longer wondering whether there will be a second.