Chapter 10 #2
Beckett looked at Hayes with a surprisingly steady gaze.
Grief and consuming sadness were now noticeably absent.
There was only—decisiveness? No, that wasn’t quite right.
He’d seen that flash of something in Beckett’s eyes before.
He’d seen it while restraining Beckett in an alley more than a year ago, and again when Chase had gone to the police behind Beckett’s back.
Anger. That was what he was seeing. His boyfriend was seething with suppressed rage.
Hayes wasn’t sure why, but somehow he recognized what made Beckett embrace his anger.
Beckett was familiar with anger. He wore it like a cape at times—and just as he knew how to wear it, he also knew how to shrug it off eventually.
That was an emotional state that was far easier to manage than grief ever was.
Hayes released Beckett’s arm and watched him climb into the passenger seat with the same stony expression he’d seen a countless number of soldiers wear heading into battle. He sent up a silent prayer that this situation wouldn’t turn into a bloody battlefield as he slid into the driver’s seat.
By the time they returned from the grocery store with food to make breakfast, the entire Thérault family was back in the living room, no longer crying, but continuing to look fragile.
Beckett, on the other hand, maintained his role of stalwart team leader.
Ordering everyone to finish their breakfasts and cut the yapping, Beckett kept them in line. Surprisingly enough, it worked.
Hayes was secretly amused by the bossy, take-charge attitude that Beckett had displayed to great success, especially considering the normally feisty, independent attitudes of his family members. Around 9:00, Beckett granted everyone permission to resume speaking.
“We have to have the same story,” he informed them as he sat down at the kitchen table. He’d declined to sit next to Jackson on the bench of the breakfast nook.
Hayes remembered the story Cynthia had shared the year before about how Beckett, as a child, had been forced to sit there between his two brothers. Hayes was positive that it was a difficult memory for him to deal with now.
“The same story?” Jackson looked haggard.
The bags under his eyes had not been reduced by taking a shower.
He and Katerina had left their daughter with a friend while they dealt with the aftermath of Franklin’s death, and Maggie had followed suit.
It was a child-free house until midday, which no doubt further contributed to the somber atmosphere.
“The cops will want to know how he’d been doing recently. If he was depressed, or if he was acting weird. They’ll need to make sure it was a suicide and not a murder,” Beckett explained.
“They didn’t mention anything about that!” Cynthia exclaimed, looking distressed.
“We should make sure they still investigate both scenarios,” Beckett said resolutely.
“Investigate? Franklin jumped off a bridge,” Maggie exclaimed angrily, slamming her fist down on the table. “There’s nothing to investigate!”
Hayes could see tears pooling rapidly in her already red-rimmed eyes.
He didn’t know much about Beckett’s older sister.
He knew that she wasn’t as close to Franklin as she was to Jackson.
But she had been closer to Franklin than Beckett had.
Which still wasn’t saying much. She’d been nothing but warm and genuine the few times they’d interacted previously.
It was obvious now that anger was the driving force behind her emotions, and whether Beckett deserved to be the target of it was debatable.
Nevertheless, he could certainly handle it.
“What if there is something to investigate? Franklin wasn’t depressed. He wasn’t weird. He wasn’t—anything unusual. He was just good old Frank, and now he’s dead,” Beckett stated without inflection in an effort to calm her.
“How the fuck would you know?” She snapped back. “You’re never here. You never spoke to him. You barely talk to us, and you hated Frank so—”
“Maggie!” John shouted her name, and hearing his raised voice stopped both siblings in their tracks.
But Maggie wasn’t done. Hayes could see it in her eyes, and braced himself for the next round.
“I’m right, and he knows it. They never got along, and Frank was always on his case because Beckett refused to get help after—”
“Enough!” Beckett roared, launching himself out of his chair, slamming both hands on the table and staring down at his sister with an intense, focused anger that Hayes had rarely witnessed.
“Fuck you! You don’t want to believe he killed himself because then we’re all responsible!
There’s nothing suspicious about it. Just leave it the hell alone!
” She screamed at him and then collapsed, harsh sobs cutting off anything else she might have wanted to say.
Her husband who’d been looking back and forth between the two siblings like a tennis referee, reached for her, whispering soothingly as she cried against his shoulder.
Beckett looked momentarily dumbstruck but was still wound up. Hayes reached over with his right hand to encircle one of his wrists, squeezing gently. He snapped out of his stupor and turned to Hayes, eyes wide, like he didn’t quite understand what he’d done.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Hayes suggested softly.
He saw the fight in Beckett’s eyes, that automatic urge to resist and do the exact opposite.
But Hayes didn’t press him to comply. He just waited until the fight had drained out of him and he sat back down.
For a moment, it looked like he might resume his argument with Maggie.
His jaw clenched, and just as Hayes readied himself to intercede, Beckett’s face was suddenly wiped clean of expression and he straightened his shoulders.
“Maybe you’re right, Mags. Maybe I just don’t want to shoulder the guilt—I don’t know. I don’t—” he stopped to take a deep breath. “Truth is, I don’t know what I’m feeling. The only thing I know for sure is that there’s no harm in making sure the cops check it out, right? Just in case—”
Maggie pulled away from her husband, and studied Beckett’s expression carefully before giving him a brief nod.
“Who was the last person to speak with him?” Hayes asked.
Ma Thérault hesitantly raised her hand. “He called me when he came back from vacation a few weeks ago. Said he’d be by for Sunday dinner, but then he texted me that he wouldn’t be able to make it,” she said, her voice trembling slightly.
“I’m sorry to ask this, but did Franklin sound—different?” Hayes asked gently.
She shook her head and wrapped her cardigan tighter around herself. “He sounded perfectly normal.” Her husband rested his hand on her shoulder in a silent show of support.
“Then we stick with that story,” Jackson said out of the blue. “Right?” Jackson asked, turning to Beckett.
“Right,” Beckett agreed, though he didn’t sound nearly as resolute as he had a few minutes before. He reached for Hayes’ hand and gave it a squeeze as he took a deep breath to center himself.
Hayes wanted to wrap the man up and take him away.
He wanted to remove all the pain and the guilt from Beckett’s shoulders.
He ached from the intensity of feeling so helpless, but he knew there was little he could do.
He was intimately familiar with grief, and it had to be faced head on.
Otherwise, it would eventually destroy everything that was worth living for.
“The main thing is that we remember we’re family, and family sticks together. No matter how difficult these times might be—we have each other,” John said, giving his children a fatherly look of warning.
Hayes waited patiently for Beckett’s family to respond, knowing that message couldn’t have just gone over their heads and—
“Jesus, Dad, what do you think this is? The Godfather?” Beckett whined, in a tone not unlike that of a disgruntled teenager.
“Please all rise for Archbishop Thérault,” Jackson mocked, putting his hands around his mouth to form a megaphone.
“We are all the children of the Lord,” Maggie intoned in a deep, dramatic voice.
Hayes tried to hide his smile behind his hand. Even Ma Thérault began to chuckle.
“Did I mock any of you assholes?” John asked, looking insulted.
“That’s two dollars in the swear jar!” Maggie said, pointing towards her father, smiling mischievously.
“In this family, we swear, goddammit!” Beckett exclaimed authoritatively, mimicking their father.
“That’s enough—” John grumbled as he started to move around the kitchen, his usual limp more apparent now.
He seemed annoyed, but if Hayes had to guess, he’d have put money on the fact that John had done it on purpose to lighten the mood.
“Cops are gonna be here, any minute. We should clean up around here before—”
“John Jeremiah Thérault, are you lecturing me about cleaning up?” Cynthia demanded in outrage.
Immediately, all the siblings and partners jumped to their feet, picking things up from the table and busying themselves with the breakfast cleanup.
Hayes placed a hand on Beckett’s forearm to still his movements.
“That was rather clever of him,” Hayes said, nodding towards John.
Beckett’s familiar grin eased Hayes’ tension. “In this family, we laugh at the shit we probably shouldn’t laugh at.”
“Yeah—I noticed.” Hayes smiled, relieved that everyone’s mood was beginning to shift back to normal.
But he also knew that it wouldn’t last. The cops would be here soon, and grief would return with a vengeance.
But if there were occasional moments of peace and laughter amidst the hurricane of hurt, they might just get through this relatively unscathed.
“What can I tell you—” Beckett said, shrugging, then, fanning his hands out, as if miming a rainbow. “Our new motto might be live, laugh, toaster bath,” he suggested with a playful smirk before spinning around and shouting at his mother to toss him a dish towel so he could help dry the dishes.