Broken Wings (A Romantic Suspense) (78 page)

"No. I'm laying out the way it is. This is dad's town now. Meet the new boss."

"Noted."

I stride away, then stop.

"Hey, Lance."

"Yeah?"

"If I push hard enough, I bet I can fit those sunglasses up your asshole."

He flinches as I turn a way from him again. In a dark shop window, his reflection turns and he says something into the radio mike clipped to his shoulder. I chew on that as I walk at a more leisurely pace, the hot July sun baking on my skin. By the time I'm walking across the bridge, there's a heavy sheen of sweat on my skin and I can feel it running down my legs. A shower would be welcome. It would be welcome anyway; talking to my father makes my skin crawl.

I wonder if Lance has any idea, or if he just accepted it like anyone else.

My mother, thirty-seven years old, dropped dead in the garden. Dead before the ambulance got there. Massive stroke.

That's when the first cruiser rolls past me. Going about twenty miles an hour, the cop, a local, watches me the whole time he passes, his head on a swivel, then speeds up. The limit on the bridge is fifty. I look right back at him and keep walking, throw my head back. On the other half of the bridge it's all downhill, but I'm thirsty as hell.

I never got my hot dog, either.

It takes me maybe another hour to walk back to the motel. By then it's mid-afternoon. I stop at the vending machines, snag an Orange Crush and walk back into my room. I close my door behind me and find my father and two Paradise Falls cops inside. Dad sits at the little round table, his folded hands resting on the scuffed, scratched surface, the cocoa color of dried up coffee, his skin pale by contrast. His two friends stand, in that power pose with their thumbs hooked in their duty belts and ready to go for their guns.

"Fancy meeting you here."

I crack open my soda and chug half of it.

"Howard," he says, as he stands.

I wince.

Okay, that might be the one thing he can do that's going to get to me.
 

Stop. Fucking. Calling. Me. That.

"Lance tells me our conversation wasn't sinking in."

"What conversation was that?"

He paces closer to me and appraises me, looking me up and down.

When I was, say, fourteen, I would have been intimidated. Now I just stare back, and let the shitty air conditioning sour the sweat on my back.

My father steps around me and looks over the bed where I have my clothes laid out. He lifts a shirt and shakes his head, and tosses it back on the bed.

"What are you doing here? What's the point of this?"

"I've got my reasons."

He snorts. "Right. Howard, you're not stupid. You realize this is a mistake. You're not wanted, or needed here."

"I've got nowhere else to go."

He turns and meets my gaze. "You have everywhere else to go."

"I don't think so."

"I thought I made myself clear the last time," he says, a tired edge to his voice. "Boys, step out and give us some air."

The two cops nod and walk out of the room. The door swings shut behind them on its creaky hinges and closes with a soft clap. Inside there's only the now softer rattle of the air conditioner and the drip of the faucet in the bathroom. My father is tall, but not physically imposing or threatening, but there's something off about him and always has been. I never trusted him even when I was little. Feared. Lance too, as much as I hate to admit it. He has a kind of presence that other people shrink from. If there wasn't another political family cemented in charge of this town he'd be running the place. Now they're gone and he is. The whole world here is against me.

"She's mine now," he says, very calmly. "There's nothing for you here. Nevertheless you’re my son, so you have twenty-four hours. If you're not gone by then, I won't be as gentle with you as I was the last time."

"Is that it?"

"That's it," he says.

He turns and steps out without looking at me. The streaked window distorts him and the two cops as they climb into a black Mercedes and drive off, peeling out of the parking lot in a squeal of tires.

Yeah. I remember the last time.

Hawk

Then

Two-thirty in the afternoon and I watched the second hand on the clock stutter a slow circle around and around, waiting for two-forty five, when I'd be free. It was the last senior day- last Friday we went on a quote-unquote field trip to Dorney Park, and now there we were sitting out one final Monday. Graduation in two weeks, the whole world open before us. I was in Mrs. McCarthy's math class. Alex had gym at the same time, her last period of gym ever. I'd already had mine.

Final exams were over, our grades were decided. So there I was sitting there fucking around on my phone, leaning up against the wall at the back of the room. Four other students sat in the room, doing much the same. It was a kind of quiet anarchy, no more rules, not that anybody cared to break any. Marking time. It should have prepared me for government work. Marking time is an essential skill when you've signed your ass over to Uncle Sam. Lots of boredom.

I last saw Alex in English that morning. I didn't know it would be the last time I'd see her for over four years.

It was almost exactly a year before, on a day much like this one, when the phone on the desk rang and the teacher sent me down to the office. I figured I was in trouble, but my father was waiting in the lobby. He was standing on the school crest tiled into the floor, looking at nothing. His eyes didn't light up when he saw me, they just changed focus from some distant point to my face and I shuddered. I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw it was him. My father had nothing to do with school. No field trips, no activities. My mom did all that, even chaperoned the prom before I was old enough to go. She came to all my conferences, and spoke to the principal when I was in trouble.

Seeing him there was like a giant red flag. Something was wrong.

I walked up to him and he said to me in a dull monotone, "It's your mother. Come with me."

He signed me out and we left. He was driving his work truck- he owned and still owns, presumably, the biggest construction company in the area. Real ‘man of the people’ type guy, my father. Except the work truck never saw any work unless someone else was driving it for him. It felt huge and cavernous inside, as if some unseen hand had cracked open the gulf between us even wider than ever before. I felt like I was riding in the car with a hostile stranger. Not a word was spoken until we arrived at the hospital and then it was, "Follow me."

I followed. Lance was already there. He looked like he'd been shot, just staring at nothing. It was just us in the waiting room, nobody from my mom's family.

The rest of the day was something of a blur. Hours in the waiting room, long after the place emptied out. We were allowed to stay.

I didn't see her until it was dark outside. The windows in her room were black.

It wasn't my mother I saw in that bed. She looked so tiny, so frail and small. I'd seen her only that morning, as full of life and bright as ever. She stayed at home, she packed lunches, she tended her garden. She was the perfect little homemaker housewife and, while I'm not sure if my father even cared about her at all, she never seemed unhappy. It was there he told me the story: Around nine in the morning she called him at work and sounded delirious and her speech was slurred. He called an ambulance, drove to the hospital.

By the time he saw her she was like that, lying in the bed with a breathing tube down her throat, her eyes glazed over. The lights were on, as they say, but nobody was home.

He took me up to see her and calmly, slowly told me that her brain function was gone, she was already gone, and he signed the order for her to be taken off life support. They would remove the breathing tube that night.

It took three more days.

Alex was furious the next time I saw her: She wasn't allowed in at the hospital, my father left instructions to keep everyone out, even my mom's family. When I saw Alexis I just cracked, I lost it. Full on wailing, crying into her stomach for hours. Thinking back it still gives me a twinge of embarrassment, but she never said a word, never complained, she just put her arms around my head and we laid there on her bed and for once her mom didn't throw me out when it got dark. In fact, that night, I didn't get home until almost eleven, and no one seemed to care. I didn't talk to Lance for a month and my father…

There was something off about my father. There was always something off, but then I was sure of it. I could smell it. Something in the air, in my house.

A year later I was ready to get this all over with. I was supposed to meet up with Alex that night, and I had something important to talk to her about. She was getting ready to leave town; she had a scholarship at the University of Delaware and all her ducks in a row, everything paid for but her books and even a living stipend. She was going to move out of the shitty little apartment she shared with her mother and sister above the shoe repair place on Commerce Street.

I had something really, really important to tell her. Thinking about it now I feel awkward and stupid. Why didn't I just say it?

The bell rang a minute late, or the clocks were off. At the time, I really didn't care. Alex would be on her way home. Normally I'd walk with her and then head home myself, but that day I left the high school for the nearly last time (there was still a graduation ceremony in two weeks) and went straight home. The whole way I fretted over what I was going to say, how I was going to say it.

The Friday before we went to the water park something was different.

I remember it perfectly, even the smell. The air smelled like ozone behind the school, like the calm before a storm. Two-thirds of the seniors were going on the trip on nine busses, an almost four-hour ride to Dorney Park. It's not there anymore. Everyone was looking forward to it all year. We left at seven in the morning, and I was there at six thirty. Alex met me halfway to school and we walked together like we did almost every day, not really saying anything, not really needing to. She had a backpack and she was wearing shorts and a loose t-shirt, and the knot of her bathing suit top poked out behind her collar, a big blue bow tied with thin strings. She was tanned up as usual from spending every free moment outdoors, her skin a rich honey color, almost the same shade as her hair.

"You ready for this?" she asked.

"I was born ready."

There was something odd and coy in her voice, a hint of a smirk that wasn't there before.

Alex was always upbeat, but the last two years had been hard on us. First she lost her father, then I lost my mother.

I think we both needed a day like this. I know the last year school was almost a haven; for the first time in my life I
wanted
to go, or at least wanted to go for reasons beyond seeing Alex.

It hit me as we were checking in with the chaperones and picking up our bus assignments. Alex had swapped hers to make sure we were on the same bus.

We were both… adults. We'd both turned eighteen not long before, me in May and her in January. I felt weird looking at her. It was like I could see her as she was and all that she had been, back to the first time we met in third grade, in Mrs. Vanderburg's class. Standing out in the blazing heat of the morning waiting for the bus doors to open so we could rush inside, it hit me for the first time really how beautiful Alexis is. She was awkward when she was a teenager, long coltish legs, always scratched up and bandaged because she was so clumsy, skinny and lean, but in the last year or so she'd… changed. Flowered, maybe.

I'm a real warrior poet here.

We were among the first to get on the bus and we took a seat to ourselves at the back. It was blessedly cool inside. When I was a kid they took us on field trips on regular buses, no air or anything, but they must have changed a law or something, because we rode fancy motor coaches on any longer trip from then on. I settled up against the window and Alex slipped in next to me.

It was a long ride. They had a movie playing on a tiny monitor up front but we couldn't hear it.

Alexis fell asleep on the way up, and her head fell on my shoulder.

For some reason, I was mortified, but nobody cared. There was something else I noticed, like it was the first time ever.

It was, ah, cold on the bus that day.

Alexis didn't wake up until we got off the interstate, and we chatted about rides and things until the bus came to a stop at the park and we got off.

The next thing I remember the most vividly is when we went to the wave pool. There was a water park there but we spent most of the morning on the other rides- roller coasters, and such.

We changed to swim. For me, it was easy. I just took off my shirt. Alex went into the bathhouse and had to lock her stuff up and wear a key on a little elastic band around her wrist.

When she walked out into the sunlight it set off something in my head.

I'd seen Alexis in a bathing suit before. Lots of times. We used to swim at the pond up at the game lands, swim at the pool at the YMCA before it closed, swim in people's pools. I'd never seen her wear a two-piece before. A bikini. It wasn't particularly risqué or anything, it just bared her midriff and showed a lot of cleavage, more than I'd ever seen her show before, even at the prom. I stared at her. Then she went into the water. It was one of those big, artificial wave pools. She ducked under the first wave and came up sopping wet, water running down her back in big drops and streaming from her hair, and she turned around and swam back into the water and looked back at me.

I bolted for the water and ran in after her, chased her, splashed her. Our bodies collided in the water. Nothing feels like soft, smooth skin underwater. Her legs slipped around me once and she gave me an odd, almost confused look before she wriggled away and swam deeper into the waves, and I followed.

There were water slides and all that but we spent the entire day in the wave pool, just swimming around and circling each other like the world's most confused sharks. The only time we separated was to head into the bathhouses and get changed and dry off. Alex just put her t-shirt and shorts on over her bathing suit and her hair was damp. Even now, if I smell chlorine, it reminds me of the smell of her hair as she sat next to me on the back of the bus and put her head on my shoulder.