Page 11 of Take the Fall
The Inspector grunted, unsurprised. “I won’t have him written up if he doesn’t show for a few days. Off the record. A man gets handed that kind of news, you don’t measure him by whether he’s at his desk at eight the next morning.” He turned a page. “He’ll sit on his hands and hate it and call in sick with something he doesn’t have, and that’s fine. I’d think less of him if he took it standing up. Tell him that, if you see him before I do. Not in those words. He’d hear pity in those words.”
I didn’t tell him I might not see Carlson before he did. That I had no more idea than he did where the man had spent the night. Only a worse reason for the not-knowing. The Inspector thought Carlson was somewhere across the city licking the wound of the desk duty. He was right that the wound was real, and wrong about which wound it was, and I wasn’t in a position to correct him about either.
“He signed the same paper you did,” the Inspector added, mild, already back in his reports. “He’s got nowhere else the law lets him be. He’ll turn up.”
It was meant as comfort. It landed as the truth it was, which was a colder thing. He’d turn up because the contract made him, not because anything in that apartment was pulling him home. I stood, thanked the Inspector, and went out through the glass door into the noise.
The bullpen had filled while I was inside. The morning noise was up, phones and printers and Saunders holding court by the coffee about something that didn’t concern him. I moved through it the way I always did. Like weather other people had to mind and I didn’t.
Reid was at his desk near the front, head down over a form, working too hard at looking busy. He caught me coming and his face did a thing. Started toward a sentence. Thought better of it. Settled on a look I couldn’t fully read except that it had Carlson in it somewhere. The kid was bad at hiding anything, which made him restful to be around and, this morning, a problem. He knew something about last night I didn’t. Where Carlson had gone, maybe. What state he’d been in. I felt the pull to stop at his desk and get it out of him, and I didn’t. A man who starts asking the room about Carlson is a man telling the room something about himself, and I’d learned in the hardest possible school what the room does with that. I filed it to ask Reid later. Alone. Somewhere with no glass walls. Kept walking.
My desk was where I’d left it. The empty chair across from it too, tipped on its two back legs against the divider, waiting on a man who hadn’t sat in it since the world came apart. I sat. Squared my files. Put my hands flat on the surface.
The folder was in a drawer down the room and its weight was in my chest. I was going to carry it past him every day and say nothing. And somewhere in this city he was deciding whether tocome back to a place that only held him because the paperwork said it had to.
It was a strange thing, to want a man back so you could lie to him better. That was the shape of it now, stripped down. I’d asked for the work because I couldn’t stand to watch them take him apart. The work came with a condition. The condition was that I look him in the face every day and keep the one thing from him that might let him fight. I’d told the Inspector yes without weighing it, because the alternative was doing nothing, and doing nothing was the thing I’d sworn off in a hallway years ago. But sitting here with the weight settling, I understood I’d traded one kind of helplessness for another. Before, I couldn’t help him. Now I could, and the price was that he could never know I had.
I’d do it anyway. That part didn’t need deciding. I’d carry it, and lie when lying was the job, and be there in the apartment tonight if he came, and say nothing about any of it. Because the only thing worse than holding this back from him was letting them win the way they’d won before, on a man who’d done nothing but his job and trusted the wrong room to be fair.
I picked up the top file. Read the first line.
This time I made it take.
Chapter 5: An Item on an Agenda
Ryan
I had to borrow a key off the super to get into the apartment. Mr. Almeida looked me over in the smell of his lunch, the slept-in shirt and the bad bandage, and didn’t ask how a man locks himself out of the only place he’s got. He pressed a spare into my hand. “Bring it back whenever.”
I climbed the flickering stairs and let myself in like a guest.
The apartment was clean.
That was the first thing, before I had the door shut. The living-room floor where it happened was swept and dry and bare. No glass. No water. No scatter of beige paper. I crossed to the kitchen threshold and crouched and ran two fingers along the grout between the boards. Nothing in the seams. No grit, no stain. Somebody had got down on his knees on these boards and cleaned my blood out of the floor so I wouldn’t come home and find it.
And then it had me. All of it, at once. The way a wave takes you when you’ve turned your back on the water.
The floor. His weight coming down beside me. His hand at the back of my neck, warm and certain, the last thing on earth I’d have looked for from a man who never touched anyone. The way I leaned into it before I knew I was doing it. My mouth on his. The low sound he made in his chest, the one I hadn’t stopped hearing from the moment I left.
I came up off my heels too fast and the room tilted and the memory came up with it. Total. Vivid. My body remembering ahead of my head. The heat of him. The give of his mouth. The wanting that came from nowhere and took the top of my skull clean off.
It made no sense. That was the wall I kept walking into and couldn’t get past.
And then a big silent difficult man knelt in my mess and saidyou don’t have to pretend with me, and I kissed him like I was drowning and he was the air, and every certainty I’d carried my whole life came loose off its footings at once. Standing in the clean lamplit quiet of everything I’d been so sure of, I couldn’t have told you what I was.
The longing was the worst of it. Not the confusion. Confusion I could file. Manage. Wait out like weather. This was that some part of me, right now, alone in the emptied apartment with his kindness scrubbed into the floor under my feet, wanted him back in the room with a sharpness that scared me worse than anything the family or the police had in them. Wanted his hand. Wanted the weight of him in the doorway. Wanted, plainly, in a register I had no words for and had never needed words for,Luke. The whole impossible fact of him.
I shut it down.
No. Not this. Not on top of a folder marked INDEFINITE and a file being dug back up across the city by men who wanted me gone for good. That was load enough for one man. Whatever this other thing was, it had to be a symptom of that, the same lieI’d fed myself on the bar stool the night before. Once the case cleared, it would go back to being what it had always been.
I made myself believe it. For whole minutes at a time I managed it.
I showered because I couldn’t sit in yesterday’s shirt another hour. Held the bad hand out of the weak stream. Did not think about his hands on me. That lasted until the water hit the back of my neck and then it didn’t last at all.
I changed the gauze. The cut underneath was already closing. Smaller than it had felt going in, the way they always are. Clean shirt. I reached for the cologne out of an old reflex and stopped with my hand around the bottle and set it down unopened. I wasn’t going to walk out into that kitchen smelling like I’d dressed for an occasion. He’d have known. He knew that smell the way he seemed to know everything about me I’d never told him.
Then I sat at the counter in the dark and waited. I didn’t let myself rehearse a word. Rehearsing was how I stayed up on the surface, and the surface was where I’d spent my whole life hiding.
