I came in the apartment door, ignored the smell of mold from the ceiling that no amount of scrubbing had done away with. It didn’t much matter anyway. The black-green of it matched the carpet. “We start the new school tomorrow. Have you been catching up on what you missed?”
Cal looked up at me from the same math book from a table with the same wobble and, terrifyingly, wearing the same casual expression. The déjà vu was a punch in the stomach. “Mrs. Kessler is a cannibal.”
Mrs. Kessler? Who had painted her door cotton candy pink, who was seventy at least and baked cookies for everyone on the floor? That Mrs. Kessler? Yet, she did eat a lot of what looked like pork sandwiches in that rocker on her tiny balcony. I headed immediately for the scarred baseball bat propped in the corner.
Cal laughed. “Sucker.” It was his first real laugh since Junior’s attic. His first true laugh, first true grin, and it was worth being fooled for that. Of course he still had to pay. That was how brothers did it. I chased him out the door and down the hall. I echoed his laughter, my first too, and continued racing after him out of the building and down the sidewalk. Of course I let him think he could outrun me, giving him the glee and the hope.
Hope is the second most important thing in the world.
Trust is the first.
When Sophia finally caught up with us, the bruise from her thrown whiskey bottle had almost faded from Cal’s chest. I was checking it for the last time, the pale tinge of yellow, and smiling, relieved. That’s when I heard the first door open. I recognized the particular click of our mother’s picklock at work. “It looks good,” I told him as he pulled his shirt down. “I’ve got a new Wolverine comic book I’ve been saving for you. It’s under my sleeping bag. Have fun.” While he dived for it, I went to meet Sophia.
I met her in the living room with her last full bottle of whiskey I’d brought with us when we packed. It was poetic justice. I liked poetry and I liked justice. I hefted the bottle. I didn’t say anything. What was there to say? I’d made a promise to myself. It was time to keep it.
Cal was my line, I’d told Junior. This was what happened when you crossed it.
I swung the bottle and broke her arm.
As she screamed, I did regret one thing . . .
That I hadn’t done it sooner.
17
Cal
Present Day
“We should’ve done this sooner.”
“I think waiting until you could use your hands was the better notion,” Niko commented. “Not that I didn’t enjoy unzipping you every time you needed the bathroom.”
“Did you enjoy it?” Robin had his chin propped in his hand at the table.
“No,” Niko replied with a sigh that he made far grimmer than it had to be. “I would’ve paid you a hundred dollars a day to do it if I’d thought Cal wouldn’t have sooner pissed his pants at the thought.”
“You’ve seen Goodfellow naked. Hell, we both have.” Accidentally or catastrophically, both adjectives applied to that occasion. “I don’t want him or the Godzilla that doubles as his dick mocking Cal Junior and he would, the bastard.” The Ninth Circle was closed, empty . . . of patrons and peris. I was behind the bar, pulling two bottles of wine and one of Scotch. The Scotch was for me and the wine for Goodfellow and Nik. Normally Nik didn’t drink. This was not a situation anyone could define as normal. I tossed him a corkscrew. “I don’t think we need glasses. Buckets maybe, but glasses are too small for what I have in mind.”
I turned the chair, straddled it, and sat with them at the table in the far corner. It had been three weeks, but it was always a night where “back to the wall” was an adult monster-killer’s security blanket. I opened the Scotch with only some awkwardness with my healing hands and took a swallow. It wasn’t the cheapest Scotch in the place but it wasn’t the best either and I didn’t bother to savor the taste. It would be good on stubborn household stains though.
Taking a look at Robin’s shirt, a radical departure from his Italian suits that cost more than the gold toilets in the Vatican, I groaned at the eye-searing colors and slick polyester blend. “Disco is dead. If it hadn’t died before I was born I would’ve killed it myself. Burn the damn shirt.”
“This is vintage, I’ll have you know,” the puck said, the wounded pride evident in the way he ran his hand down the front of an era that rivaled the Dark Ages for inventive tortures: visual and auditory. “I have a friend in Miami, Saul. He sends me only the best. I save them for special occasions.”
“This is a special occasion?” Niko inquired, appearing more relaxed than he had since Jack had shown up.
“I thought Ishiah and the others cleared out to give us a night to finally decompress and, I don’t know, not rip them a new one for being lying dicks every day since we’ve known them?” I took another swallow.
Robin spread his arms wide, the wine bottle swinging in punctuation. “Angels. Please. It was a white lie. Barely a lie. If you both weren’t so naïve you would’ve immediately caught on and it wouldn’t have counted as a lie. Basically you have no one to blame but yourselves.”
“It was for our own good,” I snarked in an echo of my brother, not happy with it yet, but then again I did love my grudges and putting Nik in his place as it happened usually only once a decade.
“Yes, we’ve both been hearing that quite a bit lately,” Niko said wryly. “Let it go, Cal.” He was looking down his nose at the wine he’d just tasted. I’d tried to pick something expensive, but when your palate is accustomed to grass clippings and soy husks there isn’t much a person can do. “We know why they lied. Why Robin did as well. They had their reasons. We have issues.”
I snorted at that and drank again. Issues. That was a word for it, but not the right one by a long shot. Our issues should’ve come with radioactive warning labels, sealed in hazardous waste drums, and tossed into the Mariana Trench or Mount Doom if anyone had the upper body strength to carry them that far.
“Yes, they had their reasons. I had my reasons. We were trying to protect two babes in the woods. We were watching out the best we could for our friends.” Goodfellow drank half his bottle in one long swallow. It was an impressive and kind of filthy skill if you thought about it. I didn’t want to think about it.
“And, yes, Cal, this is a special occasion. To friends. Value them.” He lifted his bottle. He had an oddly indecipherable glint in the mossy green of his gaze. His bottle was held stiffly as if the toast was almost ceremonial. “They go and they come.”
Nik’s fingers clenched around his bottle as his face went blank. He echoed slowly, “They go and they come. That’s what you said before. I remember you. You were at our house. You were the man with the flat tire.” As he said it, I remembered it too, in a barely there haze, but I remembered Goodfellow . . . no, Goodman he’d called himself, standing on our porch and no doubt looking absolutely identical to how he looked now. My memory wasn’t clear enough to see it, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know it.
“Yes, the first time we met—this time around. I’d always thought of myself as unforgettable but six years later you show up at my car lot, which was your idea by the way, Niko—I opened one at your suggestion, and neither of you remembered. But considering what happened after that with Jack’s apprentice, I cannot say I’m surprised that you did everything you could to forget that entire year altogether. Now, toast for the love of Priapus’s ever-upright phallus. This is the first time I’ve been able to tell you, in all your lives, without being beat over the head with a club or the jawbone of an ass or a wine amphorae for blasphemy against the gods. Leave it to Niko to be a Buddhist before Buddha himself. To be that for all his lives and not know it.”