Page 6 of Take the Fall
The kitchen came up the back of my throat. Fingers in my hair. The name Reid said was Hawley. The one going off behind my ribs wasn’t. Somewhere in the last weeks, without my deciding it, he’d stopped being Hawley to me and started being Luke. The whiskey had loosened it the whole way to the surface where it had no business being. The small uneven sound he’d made when I leaned in, a man caught dead off guard by the last thing he’d braced for. All of it one drunk inch behind my teeth. One loosened word from spilling into a rookie’s back seat where it could never be put back.
I swallowed it whole.
“Yeah,” I said, to the window. “Well.”
That was all. One word and a half of nothing. But it sat there too long after, and the silence behind it had a shape I couldn’t smooth out in time. I felt Reid notice the shape of it. He turned his head and looked at me a second longer than the conversation called for. He didn’t ask. Whatever crossed his face, he folded it up and put it away, the same way he’d put away the row of empties and the missing wallet and the no-I-won’t-go-home. Filed under things-the-detective-isn’t-saying-tonight. But he’d seen it. I was too far gone to cover. He’d seen there was something live under the name I couldn’t make myself say back.
I shut my eyes and let the cab take the rest of me.
I must have gone somewhere, because the next thing was his hand on my shoulder and the cab not moving.
“We’re here,” Reid said. “Hey. Home base.”
I came up out of it slow. The cab had stopped outside a low brick walk-up on a quiet street. Three stories. A bike chained to the railing. A window lit warm yellow on the second floor,somebody still awake at this hour. Somebody waiting, maybe. Somebody who’d left a light on. Ordinary. A whole stacked-up ordinary life behind those windows, people who came home to the place they lived and didn’t have to brace themselves in the stairwell first.
He paid the driver. Of course he did. Came around, got my door, got his hand under my elbow again. I came up into the cold and stood there swaying, looking up at a building I’d never seen, in a corner of the city I had no business being in, my whole weight half-resting on a kid I’d known a month.
And the count of it landed all at once. A condo across town with my name on the lease and a beaten stranger hiding in it. An apartment back in Cabbagetown with my keys on the counter where another man set them down, and that man on the other side of a wall. A family with a house that had more rooms than it ever had warmth to put in them. Four places in this city a version of me belonged. And the only door open tonight was a bad couch in Riverdale. Because the one of those four that had started to feel like mine was the exact one I couldn’t make my body walk into.
He stood there a second longer than he needed to, looking up at his own building like he was seeing it the way I’d see it. Small. Honest. A bike chained to a railing because that was the kind of street where you could leave a bike chained to a railing. Then he caught himself and went brisk again, the way the young do when they realize they’ve let a feeling show.
“Stairs are a bit much, I know,” he said, fishing his keys out. “Second floor. You good to do stairs?”
“Detective Carlson does not do stairs,” I said. “Detective Carlson is conveyed.”
“Right.” He got a shoulder under my arm anyway. “Up we go, Your Highness.”
He took my weight like it was nothing. He was stronger than he looked, the way the eager ones always are, all that effort going somewhere. We went up slow, one stair at a time, my hand on a stranger’s railing, his arm around my back, and I let him do it. Let myself be hauled up into a life that wasn’t mine by a kid who’d come across a whole city because I told him where I was and let him decide.
If only he knew, I thought.
And we went up.
Chapter 3: A Home That Works
Ryan
The blanket wasn’t mine.
My hands knew it before my eyes were good for anything. A thick navy fleece, smelling of a detergent I didn’t use, tucked up under my chin. Not my blanket. Not my bed either, when I cracked an eye and got a couch instead. Narrow and honest about being one. In a room I’d never been inside before.
For one bad second none of it had a name. Then the headache arrived to collect what I owed it, and the night came back in the worst order. The bar. The count I’d quit keeping around the fourth. Reid in the doorway in a puffer jacket. A cab. The river going by black. A name I’d almost said into the back seat and swallowed instead.
My body filed its report and the report was grim. My skull had a pulse of its own and it didn’t match the one in my chest. My mouth tasted like the bar had closed inside it. Light came from somewhere it had no business being this bright. Every degree of it cost me.
I’d done this on purpose. Gone the wrong direction on purpose. The on-purpose was the part I couldn’t dress up this morning. I hadn’t been drowning the suspension. The suspension I could have sipped at one beer at a time. I’d been drowning a kitchen floor, and the weight of him coming down beside me, and the sound the door made when I pulled it shut. There was no number of beers that got a man under that.
The apartment wasn’t mine. My eyes settled on that much and were sure of it. Too bright. Too clean. The light lying across the floor in a way ours never did, where everything came secondhand and gray and the place stayed dim at noon. Somebody had decided to live here, on purpose, and it showed. I was on the wrong side of the city on a stranger’s good couch. The stranger was Reid. And the dim box I couldn’t make myself walk back into was the only place in this city I’d started to think of as home. Which made no sense at all, the morning after I’d run out of it.
A kettle clicked off behind my head.
“You’re alive!” Jordan Reid said it like good news. Far too much voice for the hour. “I checked on you twice. You snore like a screen door in a wind. I’ve got coffee on. Do you do eggs? You look like an eggs man. I’m doing eggs.”
He was up and dressed and scrubbed and moving around the kitchen with an energy it took me a second to place through the jackhammer behind my eyes. When I placed it I almost wished I hadn’t. He was happy. Helplessly, transparently happy to have me laid out on his couch on an ordinary Tuesday. Working hard to play it down. Losing all over the kitchen.
“That’s slander,” I managed. My voice came out wrecked, a stranger’s voice, lower than my own by a register. I got upright by degrees. The room swung once and settled. My back had a complaint to file about the couch and I let it. “All lies. I’ll deny it in court.”
He laughed from the kitchen. A real laugh, easy, the laugh of a man at home in his own place on a day off, and I lay there a second longer registering how foreign the sound was. Not the laugh. The ease in it. I’d spent thirty-one years in rooms and never once been at ease in one the way this kid was at ease in his own kitchen at eight in the morning with a hungover detective bleeding gray onto his couch.
