“Why would you even think that?” she demanded.
“Do you really need to ask that question?”
I watched a hundred different responses, neurons firing in her brain, while her hazel eyes glinted from welling tears. It made the subtle flecks of gold and green shimmer.
“So, why didn’t you?” she asked finally, returning to her eggs. I could tell she wasn’t interested in them anymore, though. She just sort of shoved them around on her plate as a way of avoiding eye contact with me.
“Apparently, I’m too good at playing hero. It’s not my time yet.”
“I…” She exhaled. Her fork clattered on the table and she dropped her hands into her lap. Then, she looked at her daughter in the next room and said. “Maybe it’s time you talk to somebody, Reese.”
“I’m talking to you.”
“I mean someone that can help you. With all the things I’ve given up asking you about because you never say anything.”
I scoffed. “They’d run right out the door.”
“There are people—”
“No,” I said firmly. I knew all the questions. Where did I come from? Who was I before the Roach? Why did I do what I did? Blah, blah-fucking-blah. I was grateful she’d stopped pressing for answers to things she’d never want to know.
“Well, I… I don’t know what to say,” she said.
I reached across the table, and took her soft hand, gaining her full attention. “You’ve never had to say anything,” I whispered. “You’ve never had to take care of me or keep checking in. You can stop wasting your time with a relic like me.”
“You really think I’m wasting my time?” She yanked her hand free and pushed away from the table. “I come every week because, somehow, I care about you. I know who you are, even if you’ve forgotten.”
All I could manage was a feeble laugh.
“It’s not funny,” she bristled.
“I know. I know.”
“What then?”
“You,” I said. “Still so stubborn.”
“And you’re not? You spend so much time locked in here wallowing that you’ve forgotten about all the people who’d be dead in an alley, if not for you. Sure, you made mistakes. But haven’t we all?”
“So, you’re telling me I shouldn’t kill myself?”
She threw up her hands in exasperation. “You do whatever you think you need to, Reese. Go ahead. But I’m going to be here next week like I always am. I hope I see you.”
I bit off another piece of charred bacon-ash. “Was it something I said?”
“Everything’s a big joke to you.”
“Laura, I’m not—”
She stormed out of the kitchen.
I turned, bumping the corner of the table, spilling more than a little of her water, then followed at a distance. Our visits ended this way more often than I’d probably care to admit. I really could be an insufferable wretch sometimes, but more than anything, in that moment, I wanted Laura to be mad at me. To not care when I returned to the river and finished what I already should have. With her around, I knew I’d never go through with it. I could blame poor Isaac and his bullies all I wanted, but I know me better than that.
No, she and her daughter kept me going. Laura couldn’t realize how much better off her whole family would be with me out of the picture. She mostly only got to hear about all the people I'd saved. About the kids, beaten by their stepfathers or sold smack by gangbangers wearing matching bandanas.
It was different being out there.
Eventually, after you wipe enough filth from the streets and it keeps bubbling back like a sickness, it’s all you can see in people. A roll down the street and I wonder which man in a prim suit struck his wife last night or is screwing his secretary. Which woman is seducing a man to steal everything he’s got? Which harmless, glasses-wearing civilian doubles as a serial killer or is cutting coke in his basement?
The dark side of humanity clings to you like wet sand from the beach.
“Come on, Michelle. It’s time to go,” Laura said, mustering her stern, lawyer-like tone. Her daughter was busy bouncing her SuperBall rather than finishing her meal. Her mother grabbed her arm to stop her. The ball fell, but Laura snatched it out of midair and forced it back into Michelle’s hand.
“Let’s go,” Laura tried again. “Say goodbye to Uncle Reese.”
“Kay…” Michelle replied in her tiny voice. She glanced at me momentarily and offered the slightest wave. I hovered in the doorway, waving back with the bottle of Jack and putting on a goofy, crooked smile. She immediately averted her gaze and clung tight to her mother’s hand with her free one.
They went for the door, but a hard knock stopped them in their tracks.
“Laura Garrity, I know you’re in there!” someone shouted.
I raced over to my covered window and drew back the tattered drapes just enough to peek outside. A skinny fellow holding a notepad stood on my porch.
“Not this asshole again,” I grumbled. “Laura, go to the back. I’ll deal with him.”
“He’s harmless,” she said.
“So am I. Now go.”
She spent a few seconds considering it before finally listening, taking a confused little Michelle with her. I rolled up to the door and stretched my fingers around the handle. That article in my basement about the dead girls and me being to blame? The man outside wrote it.
Chuck Barnes used to write for the Iron City Bulletin but he’d had such a hard-on for revealing who the Roach was behind the mask, that he destroyed his credibility. Asking too many questions and stalking the Mayor’s daughter will do that. He’d disappeared for a bit after getting fired, but he was recently back to chasing the truth like a dog after a mailman.
In my prime, I would’ve broken into his apartment to convince him to back off. More for his sake than mine. Chuck was ruining his life over an obsession with questions whose answers he’d never get. But he lived in a walk-up across town, and I couldn’t very well get up that high in a wheelchair and manage to remain intimidating.
I tossed my bottle onto the couch and then swung the door open.
“I know she’s in here, Roberts,” he said and immediately tried to stick his head inside. He was literally the epitome of working himself to the bone. Skinny everywhere with a five-o-clock shadow that never seemed to go away or even grow longer. When I’d first encountered him, he had a thick head of hair. Now, he was bald as a Q ball.
I blocked him with my chair and said, “How many times do I have to tell you to keep off my damn property?”
“Until you tell me why you’re hanging around a much younger woman who also happens to be our mayor's daughter.”
I gave him a nudge with my chair, forcing him down the ramp a bit. “What can I tell you? We’re in love.” I stroked my ragged beard, straining out a few droplets of liquor and licking it off.
He jotted down a note. “Last time, you said you were her babysitter.”
“And how sweet a romance that kindled.”
Footsteps echoed from inside my townhouse.
“What was that?” Chuck leaned over me again, so close I could see the crumbs in his disgustingly thin mustache. I smacked the notepad out of his hand. It landed in a puddle adjacent to my front stoop, and he quickly jumped down to retrieve it. Ink bled through the wet pages, rendering his mad scrawling illegible.