Chapter Six
Pax leaned back in the squeaky swivel chair behind the metal desk in his office and sighed. Before Number Five stopped working, this office had been elegantly furnished except for the beer hat and dartboard Manny had left behind.
It hadn’t suited Pax—luxury. In fact, he’d found it distasteful.
Even now, his former troops—those who survived that last battle—were living in barracks or out in the field, eating what they could catch, some of them having to deal with menstruation during weeks-long campaigns while sleeping on the ground in oilcloth tents. Pax, meanwhile, had left them behind.
What if Number Five was reacting to his guilt?
Was he responsible for Number Five’s illness?
Leaving the office, Pax crossed the lobby and wished for an enemy he could see, a place to put his frustration. Bert was asleep in his niche.
Ernie, however, was missing.
This was Pax’s fault as well. He’d delivered too fierce a scolding after Amos and Josie had left the courtyard. Ernie’s defense—Amos had tickled him until he had to beg the boy to stop—had fallen on deaf ears.
Pax considered the notion of apologizing when he heard the door to 3C open. The soft shush was too quiet to register in a human’s ears in the silent lobby, but not Pax’s. He took the stairs so fast he almost knocked Josie over in the hallway right outside her apartment.
“You must be a mind reader,” Josie said. “I was going to see if you were in your office. You know, I don’t have a number for you.”
She’d wound her hair into the shape of a cinnamon bun and stuck it on top of her head. Most women he knew were soldiers and kept their hair cut close to their skull. In his world, the only women who created shapes with their hair were noblewomen who had maids and time to spare.
Josie did not have a maid nor time to spare. Should he compliment her cinnamon bun because it took work to create, or should he hold his tongue because it looked ridiculous?
“What number?” he asked, deciding to skip the subject altogether.
“Your cell phone,” Josie said, raising her eyebrows and tilting her head.
“I don’t have a cell phone.”
Cell phones were abominable creations unique to this world.
They had an unhealthy hold on people’s attention.
Even worse, they had the disconcerting effect of draining magic from whoever held them.
Since every human he’d seen had one in their hands at some point, it might account for the dearth of magic here.
This might also account for why they refused to work for most of the residents except for Maddy.
“No phone?”
Pax shrugged. “I am almost always here. You are welcome to come and knock on the door to my office at any time.”
“Can I knock, knock?” she said, her voice rising and falling in that way folks used when they told a joke.
Her shy half smile when she bit the side of her mouth right after confirmed Pax’s guess.
She had stepped outside her apartment but still held tight to the door handle and had to look up to meet his eyes.
“You are referencing Mr. Amos’s joke from before. When he knocked into being a banana again.”
When she laughed, Josie covered her mouth and stepped away from him, leaning back into the door, and Pax tensed. Had he mistakenly made a ribald joke? Said something embarrassing?
“You were nice to humor him.”
Pax shrugged. “Being kind is the simplest of pleasures. It takes no effort and the rewards are infinite.”
“That’s a lovely sentiment,” she told him, a dimple appearing to the left of her mouth.
A wave of warm pride washed through him, and he fought the satisfied smile buoying up from his chest.
Imagine, a woman thought The Butcher nice and lovely.
Was it pride keeping him from smiling or years of training himself to appear tough and emotionless kicking in? Pax was no longer at war. Perhaps it was time to lose his wartime habits.
Something heavy fell to the floor in her apartment and interrupted them. Josie’s shoulders bent inward as if the sound had snapped whatever willpower was holding her upright.
“I would like to help.” Pax meant help with whatever had gone awry inside the apartment, but the words came out thick with intimacy. He hadn’t meant to use that voice.
Strange things happened when Pax was with Josie. She might even have a drop or two of magic in her blood and it did something to his brain.
Josie nodded once, then looked up at him with a worried gaze. “Thank you.”
The words fell into a soft shape between them. He reached out to catch them but turned the gesture into a pat on her elbow at the last second.
Whatever lay between her and Pax included recognition of a kindred spirit and the gift of appreciating a fellow soldier in whatever war they may be fighting. An intimacy not necessarily tied to attraction but certainly paving the way for friendship.
If he wanted to be Josie’s friend.
Except…
Number Five would somehow refuel and resume its travels. Soon the birds would fly again, and he would leave this world and this friendship behind.
“No thanks are necessary,” he said overbrightly, tapping again at her elbow as though there were a button there. “This is my job.”
One of the ceiling lights in the hallway burned out with a loud slap.
“Right,” she said. “Of course.”
The bitter black licorice taste of disappointment coated his tongue as Pax followed her into the apartment.
He admired the newly painted entry hallway and peered closely at the photos hung along the wall: vibrant pictures of produce in a farmers’ market, magnified shots of multicolored spirals at the center of a petunia, a riotous bed of jewel-toned nasturtium.
Josie stopped when they got to the kitchen and crossed her arms over her body.
“I did this,” she said. “Didn’t take me long, but once again, I managed to ruin a good thing.”
· · ·
My God, Josie could be a dramatic bitch when PMS collided with stress. Her brain thrilled to the moment, its raspy voice berating her so violently she could smell Pall Malls.
“I meant…I don’t know what I did, but I can’t fix this.”
This was the hole in the wall, the multiple half-inch nails fallen on the top of the oven, and a battery-operated clock from the hardware store that had fallen from its perch—again.
“I hung this clock yesterday using a picture-hanging kit, and everything seemed fine. Tonight, the clock falls off the wall. When I put it back up, it falls again. Like the wall turned soft. Whenever I hung it back up, the hole from the previous nail grew larger. The whole mess got bigger and bigger the more I tried to fix it.”
Josie didn’t need a clock over the oven. She was looking for comfort. Craving assurance. There were only so many mantras Josie could repeat or tasks to perform before the lady with the Pall Malls sounded less and less like her grandmother and more like her mother-in-law, Gloria.
Pax moved the oven to the side—holy moly, how did he do that so effortlessly?—and ran his hand along the wall near the hole as though he were stroking a wounded animal.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “After the third time I had to stop because I felt…”
Josie bit her bottom lip and her stomach flipped. The sensation she’d felt each time the hole got bigger had freaked her out.
“What? What did you feel?” Pax asked, still examining the wall, not looking at Josie like she was a nutcase.
“Like I was hurting her. It. Something.”
“It’s mostly cosmetic,” he said. “You didn’t do any lasting damage.”
The sleeves to his gray henley were pushed up past his elbows rather than rolled neatly.
Small scars stood out on the knuckles of his large hands and a swath of fine dark hair beginning at the knobby bone in his wrist covered his forearm.
She imagined there would be calluses on the fingertips examining the wound.
Wall. Examining the wall.
The light over the sink was dimmer than usual and the sensation of standing in the only safe place intensified with the encroaching dark in the rest of the apartment.
Josie forced her gaze down to the blue flowered pattern on the linoleum floor until his toes appeared at the edge of her sight.
What did she care what her building super thought of her?
So what if she got a reputation as the crazy tenant?
He was only here to do his job.
“You have a watch,” he said. “Does it keep time?”
“He’s late,” she said.
If Josie’s brain had hands, she would have smacked herself in the forehead.
She’d delivered a soliloquy on how hard it is to parent to the poor man the other night and he’d brought her kid cake.
Was she going to subject him to another cascade of her boring anxieties?
He had things to do and places to be large and reassuring.
“Mr. Amos is late,” he said.
On Saturdays, Dan’s parents took Amos out for pizza and arcade night. Because he had Sunday school the next morning, they always promised to bring him home by nine p.m. While Josie bit her tongue when they showed up early to get him, in the past few weeks they’d also brought him home late.
At first it had been five minutes. Then ten.
Last Saturday, they didn’t bring him home until nine forty-five.
Amos’s bedtime was nine thirty, and when Josie remarked she’d been worried when they were late without calling first, Gloria had smiled as though she’d told them a joke, then patted Josie on the shoulder, the stench of Givenchy and gin wafting from her neck scarf.
“He was with his grandparents, Josephine. This is safer than him being with strangers all day at his nursery school.”
Amos’s nursery school buddies didn’t smell like cocktails and bitterness.
“Is he in trouble?” Pax asked, his gaze sweeping her body. Not in a creepy way, more like he was taking stock of her messy bun and ratty sweats and lips chapped where she chewed when she was nervous. As if he was assessing her readiness to handle whatever came next.
“Not trouble, exactly. He’s with my in-laws. They run on their own time.” She set her hands on her hips, as if by looking like a grown-up, she could act like one and cast a glance toward the front door. If he hadn’t been here, Josie would have checked her watch. Again.
Pax said nothing, loudly.
“Amos’s father’s parents,” she said, when she caught sight of his expression, one eyebrow raised. When his eyebrow remained raised, Josie told him the rest.
“His father died. Dan.”
Not like this was a secret. Still, whenever she said it out loud, Josie always felt as though she was defending herself.
“Ah,” he said. “They lost their son, so they hold on tightly to their grandson. Grief can make you selfish.”
What a kind way to think about it.
If only she believed Gloria held tight to Amos because she loved him, not because she thought he belonged to her.
Josie debated whether to tell Pax about Gloria and confide in him her fear she was skirting close to the edge of losing Amos to his grandmother but the sudden scent of roses distracted her.
Josie looked around, and her blood ran cold.
There, on the kitchen table, a small vase held three cabbage roses. With the shushing sound of a sigh, one large petal the color of a ripened peach fell to the table.
Those roses hadn’t been there ten minutes ago and there was no way Pax could have brought them in without her seeing them.
“Can you fix this tomorrow?” Wiping her now sweaty palms down the sides of her pants, Josie forced a smile and stepped out of the warm light, breaking the circle. “Sorry, I…he will be home any minute, I’m sure, and he needs to go to bed.”
“Of course,” Pax said, putting the oven back into place, chin down and eyes averted. “Tomorrow.”
The muscles holding her smile in place trembled until he left. Josie turned the lock and put her ear to the door until she couldn’t hear Pax’s footsteps anymore, threw the flowers away, and turned on every light in the apartment until Amos came home.