Chapter 11
The drive north took an hour and ten, and Nate had made it enough times that his hands knew the turns without him.
He stopped at the gas station two exits out, the way he always did, and got the roll of quarters from the machine and a coffee he would not drink, because the visiting room ran on quarters and the coffee was a thing he could hold.
License in the tray. Belt and watch in the gray plastic bin.
The pat-down from a guard named Reyes who knew him by now and still did it right.
The stamp on the back of his hand in ink that showed up purple under the light at the door.
He had been coming up here for five years. He had started the month Easton went in and had not missed a month since.
The visiting room was cinderblock painted the color institutions believed was calming and no one found calming.
Bolted stools. Bolted tables. A wall of vending machines down one side that took the quarters and gave back coffee and honey buns and the little bagged sandwiches that were the closest thing to a gift the room allowed.
A guard at the desk. Cameras in the high corners.
Nate bought two coffees and a honey bun, because Easton had a sweet tooth he'd had since they were sixteen, and sat at the table they always got if they got there early enough, the one near the window that did not open onto anything but a yard and a fence and more sky than the inside of the place otherwise allowed.
Then they brought Easton out, and Nate stood, the way he always stood, and for a second it was just the two of them and five years and the whole long friendship under the fluorescents.
Easton Davros was a big man, bigger than he'd been in school, the weight room being one of the few honest things to do with the time.
He had his mother's face and his father's hands and the careful walk of a man who had learned which parts of a room to keep his back to.
He saw the honey bun on the table and something in his face eased before the rest of him did.
"You remembered the honey bun," Easton said. "Five years and you still get the honey bun."
"You'd give me hell if I didn't."
"I would. Sit down, you're making the desk nervous.
" Easton sat. He moved the honey bun a quarter-inch toward himself, claiming it, and looked at Nate across the bolted table with the easy attention of a man reading a friend he'd been reading for half his life.
"You drove up off-schedule. You come the first Saturday.
It's the third Tuesday." He cracked the coffee lid.
"So either somebody died or you've got something stuck in your teeth.
And you'd have led with it if somebody died. "
The years inside had not touched this part of him.
Easton had always read Nate faster than anyone, faster than Marcus even, because he'd been doing it the longest, since they were two kids at a kitchen table with a textbook open between them and Easton learning every tell in Nate's face the same year he taught it to read.
He could still do it through prison glass and a bolted table.
He'd done it just now, off nothing but an off-schedule visit and the set of Nate's shoulders.
"It's about Jude," Nate said.
Easton went still in the particular way of a man whose little brother's name had just been said in a room like this one. The coffee stopped halfway up. "Is he hurt? Nate, is he-"
"He's safe." Nate said it fast, because the alternative had lived in Easton's face for half a second and Nate would not let it live there a second longer than it had to.
"He's safe. He's at the safehouse. Marcus's house.
He's eating, he's sleeping, Scarlet's looked him over and the worst of it's healing.
" He had not meant to say the worst of it. He watched it land.
"The worst of what?"
So Nate told him. Not all of it, not the parts that were Jude's to tell, but the shape: that Rand had been bad to him for a long time, that it had gotten physical, that there'd been a night in an alley, that Jude was out now and staying out.
He told it flat and complete, the way he'd tell Marcus a case, because Easton was not a man you softened things for and would not thank you for trying.
Easton listened with his big hands flat on the bolted table and his jaw getting harder by the sentence, and when Nate finished he was quiet for a long moment, looking at the purple stamp on the back of his own hand like it was something that had been done to him.
"Five years," Easton said, low. "Five years I've been asking you how he is. And you've been telling me fine. Every month. Fine, Easton, he's fine, the band's good, he sounds good." He looked up. "He was getting beat in an alley and you've been telling me fine."
"Yeah," Nate said. "I have."
"Why?"
"Because there was nothing you could do from in here but lose your mind, and a man losing his mind in here gets himself another year.
" Nate held his eyes. "I made a call. It might've been the wrong one.
I told myself I was protecting you. Maybe I was just making it easier on me, not having to watch you not be able to do anything.
You can be as angry about that as you want. You're owed it."
Easton's hands closed slowly into fists on the table, and then, with visible effort, opened again. Three years had taught him that, too: what closing his fists in this room cost.
"Okay," he said finally. "Okay. That's a thing we'll come back to." He took a breath. "But that's not what's stuck in your teeth. You'd have written me about Rand. You drove up to say something to my face. So say it."
Here it was. He had built the sentence on the drive and discarded every version, because every version sounded like a man asking permission for something he'd already done. He was not going to dress it up.
"I'm in love with him," Nate said. "With Jude.
I have been for years. I didn't do anything about it the whole time he was with Rand, or the whole time I was lying to you about how he was.
I'm doing something about it now. And I wasn't going to take one step further with him without driving up here and telling you to your face, because he's your brother and you've been trusting me to look out for him, and I'm not going to be a man who took what he wanted out of that trust in the dark. "
The room did not change. The vending machines hummed. A guard shifted his weight by the door.
Easton looked at him for a long time.
"You, of all people," Easton said.
It was not loud. That was the worst of it. Nate had braced for loud and gotten this instead, quiet and flat and cut to size.
"You watched him grow up." Easton's voice stayed low and even and got harder underneath.
"You met him when he was nine. Nine, Nate.
He was a kid hiding behind my leg at the funeral.
You used to carry him on your shoulders so he could see over the fence at the games.
And now you're telling me, while I'm in here and can't do a damn thing about it, that you-" He stopped.
His jaw worked. "He just got out from under a man who used him.
He's got a hole in him you could drive a truck through, the same hole he's had since he was that orphaned kid, the I'll-be-good-if-you-keep-me hole.
And you want me to believe the next set of hands on him is just gonna be the gentle kind.
You. Of all the people in his life. The one I trusted to not be one more thing he had to survive. "
Nate took it. Every word. He did not defend himself; there was no defense that wasn't just noise over the true thing, and Easton would hear the noise for what it was.
"If you're another man who hurts him," Easton said, and the flat cracked wet at its edges, "I will do the rest of my time and however much more it takes and I will find you.
I need you to understand I mean that the regular way, not the prison-talk way.
You are my friend and I love you… but I will end you. "
"I know," Nate said.
"Do you?"
"I helped you bury your standards low enough to pass tenth-grade algebra," Nate said. "I know exactly what you mean and exactly how much you mean it."
And that, of all things, was what cracked it. The algebra. Easton let out a breath that was half a laugh and put his hand over his eyes for a second, one big hand, and when he took it away the hardness had not gone but something had loosened behind it.
"You read me the word problems out loud," Nate said, because they were here now, in the old country, and it could be said.
"Every night that whole year. You never once made me feel like the dumb one for needing it.
I was a seventeen-year-old who couldn't read a paragraph straight and you acted like it was the most normal thing in the world to sit with me till I could.
I never paid that back. I'm not sure a person can.
" He turned the coffee cup a quarter-turn on the table, the way Easton had moved the honey bun.
"Loving your brother right is the closest I've got. "
Easton was quiet. The yard outside the window had a man in it walking the fence line, small in the distance, doing his own time.
"Does he know," Easton said. "That you came up here to ask me?"
"I didn't come to ask you." Nate met his eyes.
"I came to tell you. I'd have done it either way, because it's mine to do.
But I'd rather do it with you on my side than not, and I think you know the difference between those two, because you taught it to me.
" A beat. "He knows I came. He said to tell you you're an idiot if you give me a hard time. "
Easton laughed for real then, short and surprised, and rubbed the heel of his hand under one eye, fast, like he could get there before Nate saw.
"That's him," Easton said. "That's exactly him." He shook his head. "Little brother sends his blessing through the convict. God."
"So?"
"So." Easton looked at him, and the last of the hardness went somewhere it could be put down, and what was left was just a man who loved two people and could not get to either of them with his own hands.
"You don't need my blessing. You said so and you're right, it's yours to do.
But you've got it. For whatever it's worth coming out of a place like this.
You've got it. Be good to him. Be the kind that asks.
" His voice thickened. "Be the opposite of every other set of hands he's known, including, apparently, the ones I trusted, so don't make me regret the math. "
"I won't."
"You already lied to me once for five years."
"I won't lie to you again," Nate said. "That one I can promise and keep."
They had twenty minutes left, and Easton spent the first five of them eating the honey bun and asking real questions, the small ones, the ones a brother asks: was Jude sleeping, was he writing, had he eaten anything green this decade, was the dog at the house good to him.
Nate answered all of them. It was the easiest five minutes he'd spent in the room in years.
Then Easton set the wrapper down and his face changed, and he leaned in a degree, and his voice dropped under the hum of the machines.
"There's a thing you should know," Easton said.
"About Rand. I didn't put it together till you walked in here and said his name out loud.
" He glanced once at the guard, a habit, not a fear.
"There's a guy two tiers up from me. In for moving people.
Not drugs. People. Young ones, across the bridge.
" He let that sit. "He runs his mouth the way guys do when they think they're untouchable.
And a few weeks back he was bragging about a feeder on the outside.
A music guy. Somebody who finds them the soft ones at the all-ages shows and softens them up and points them at the van, and gets paid in a way that keeps him liked by people he owes.
" Easton's jaw was tight. "I didn't think anything of it.
Music guy. Detroit's full of them. But you said Rand's name and his band plays those rooms, and the feeder this guy was bragging about, he called him by a tag. Said they call him the drummer."
The cold place opened, all the way, no crack about it.
Nate kept his face still. Years of keeping his face still in this room, six years of keeping it still in worse ones, and he spent all of it now, because the thing he had refused to let touch in the kitchen was sitting on the bolted table in front of him with a name on it, and the name was Rand, and the boxes were one box now and had always been one box, and there was a soft kid an hour south with a big voice who had no idea that the man who beat him was the same machine that ate Caleb.
"The drummer," Nate said.
"You know something," Easton said, reading him, because he always could. "Your face just did the thing."
"I know enough to find out the rest." Nate's voice came out level.
He spent the last of the level on it. "Easton.
This is the thing you can't do from in here.
So I'm going to do it. I'm going to get him all the way free, not just out of the apartment, free, and I'm going to keep him that way.
And I'm going to take apart whatever Rand is part of, down to the studs. "
Easton looked at him a long moment, and what was in his face was the thing Nate had driven an hour and ten to be allowed to see: not the hardness, not the grief, but a brother handing the one thing he loved most across a bolted table to a man he had finally decided to trust with it.
"Then I guess it's good," Easton said quietly, "that I taught you how to do the hard problems."
The guard called time.
Nate stood. He put his hand flat on the table, the most contact the room allowed, and Easton put his over it for the half-second before the guard's attention came around, his father's hand over Nate's, warm and certain and gone too soon.
"First Saturday," Easton said. "Bring the honey bun. And Nate." He was being walked back now, half-turned. "Tell him I said yes. He'll know what it means."
Nate did not know what it meant. He drove the hour and ten back south with it sitting in him anyway, that and the name on the table, and somewhere around the second exit he understood that he was driving back toward a man he was now allowed to love and a case that had just put its hand around that man's throat, and that the two were the same drive.
He had told himself, for a week, that the boxes had to stay separate. That had been the lie. He did not get to keep it anymore.
He drove south, both hands on the wheel, toward the house with the light on.