Bang (15 page)

“I'm not a fry,” Sonya informs him, but she takes it and they make it up the walkway, which is studded with paper-bag luminarias with cutouts of witches and ghosts. Sonya gamely rings the doorbell, but when a short redheaded woman answers it with an equally redheaded baby in one arm and a basket full of Twix bars in the other, Sonya only stares at her mutely, eyes wide. According to Mari, this is her first big-girl Halloween.

“What do you say, hm?” Jack prompts her quietly after a moment—she's not a shy kid, as a general rule. She takes after her mother that way. “Sonya?”

“I love Princess Jasmine,” the redhead puts in when Sonya still doesn't answer, bouncing the baby a little. A dog barks somewhere inside the house. “That's a great costume.”

Nothing out of Sonya. Jack tries again. “Hey, Sone?” he asks, acutely aware of Mari watching from a little ways down the walk, taking it all in. “Can you say trick-or-treat?”

“I…” Sonya trails off, looking terrified.

“Should we try together?” he asks, and Sonya nods. “On three?”

Another head bob. Jackson counts them off and then they say it, a refrain that makes him feel equal parts stupid and pleased. He and Terry and Meredith all used to go out together as kids. Once, when they were real small, they went as Alvin and the Chipmunks. “Please,” Sonya adds primly at the end.

The redhead grins and deposits what seems like an especially large handful of chocolate into Sonya's bucket just as the dog Jack heard comes careening into the foyer from a side room. “Atlas!” is the last thing the redhead says before she closes the door with a wave goodnight. “Easy!”

“Nice work, ma'am,” Jack tells Sonya as they rejoin Mari on the sidewalk. It's possible he could get used to this, he thinks. They're making for the next house when he feels his phone vibrate inside his jeans, insistent. He figures it's his brother and he means to send it to voice mail and call back in the morning, but when he pulls it out of his pocket he feels his eyebrows shoot up in the dark.

“It's work,” he says to Mari.

Then Mari's phone rings too.

Mari frowns. “Sonya, baby,” she says as she looks at it, but Jack doesn't hear the rest because he's already sliding to answer, thumb moving of its own accord and mouth opening to say hello, and that's when Leo tells him that Brandon Carlson was shot dead by Sara Piper's rookie near the slide at the Webb Park playground about an hour ago.

An hour ago, Jack was putting on his fucking Halloween costume. He doesn't know why that's what he thinks of first.

He can feel his mouth filling with saliva, and his second thought is how Sonya laughed at his barf joke. By now she's trotted up the front walk of the tidy colonial they're standing in front of, screaming “Trick or treat!” when an old man answers the door. Jack guesses the shyness was a one-time thing.

“—thought he had a gun, turns out it was a Taser,” Leo is saying. From the stricken expression on Mari's painted face somebody on the other end of her phone is telling her the exact same thing. “It's a fucking cluster, honestly, the rookie's a fucking mess, but that's not your problem. We'll handle it. I just wanted to be sure to tell you myself. I'm sorry as hell, Jack, I know I promised you we'd get him. It's a hell of a thing.”

“Okay,” he hears himself saying, in a voice that doesn't sound like his regular voice at all. “I—okay. Thanks for letting me know.”

He hangs up and slips his phone back in his pocket without really telling his hands to do it. There's a noise like a locomotive inside his head. Jack always tells people—he tells himself—that he doesn't remember the day of the shooting, but in reality that's not how it is at all. The truth is he can call up all three separate moments of impact whether he wants to or not, the burn of the bullets ripping through his skin and organs and the sick certainty that he was about to die.

He kind of thinks he might be about to die right now.

Jack glances around, trying to calm the kettle drum in his chest, the sweat that's prickling along his back and shoulders inside his ridiculous shirt. Down the street is a kid dressed as Sonic the Hedgehog and another like the Joker, his face painted bright, gruesome red. Jack's vision is getting blurry at the edges. The whole scene feels like a bad trip.

“Jack,” Mari is saying, and something about the way she's looking at him makes him wonder if it's not the first time she's called his name. It sounds like she's calling to him at the bottom of a well. Down the walk, Sonya's turned back to face them, trotting along the slate looking pleased with herself.

“I gotta go.”

Mari shakes her head, reaching her arm out. “Jack, wait—”

Jackson pulls away. “Tell Sonya to save me a Mounds bar,” he says vaguely and heads down the road toward his car.

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck.

Mari shepherds Sonya around the neighborhood in what seems like a poisonous fog, so green and noxious she's honestly baffled by the idea that nobody else can see or feel it. Her heart is pumping double speed. Other parents smile at her as they pass and she forces herself to smile back. It feels like she's just baring her teeth.

Finally the bucket is full and they head back home, where Patricia is waiting in the family room with the empty M&M bowl by her feet. She shut off the front lights, the international sign for no more candy. “Where's Jackson?” she asks, looking back and forth between the two of them.

“He got sick!” Sonya reports, parroting the pitiful lie Mari told her. “Just like me!”

Patricia raises her eyebrows. Mari shakes her head.

Once Sonya's stuffed full of fun-size chocolate bars and the resulting sugar high has worn off, Mari shuts her sleeping daughter's bedroom door and gets a baby wipe from underneath the sink, scrubbing the stupid eyeliner off her nose.

Then she gets into her car and drives to Jackson's.

He gave her a key back when he bought the place years and years ago, for lockouts or emergencies. His parents lived too far for it to be convenient, he said, but Mari teased him anyway,
does this mean we're going steady?
“Shut your mouth before I take it back,” Jack warned her, and she did because she wanted to keep it in a fierce, awful way that she never let herself examine too closely. He had a girlfriend at the time because he always did, a girl named Emily who lasted over a year, but Mari was the one who got the key. She's never actually used it until tonight.

Tonight, she lets herself in.

“It's me,” she calls, making her way down the hallway and trying not to feel like a total interloper. “You here?”

“Yeah.” He sounds far away.

She finds him in the darkened kitchen, sitting at the table with an ashtray and a lit cigarette. There are already two butts in the tray, no matches in sight. Mari wonders if he's been using them to light each other.

“Thought we quit,” she says quietly, flipping on the overhead light and sliding into the chair next to him.

“We didn't do anything,” Jackson snaps, but he passes over the pack when she holds out a hand for it. Pall Mall Lights, his old standby. Mari starts to get to her feet, intending to throw them out, but she changes her mind halfway through and lights one off the end of Jack's instead. Together they puff into the silence. Mari has always hated Pall Malls.

“Sorry,” Jackson says finally. “I just…had to not be there anymore. Is Sone okay?”

Mari shrugs. “She's fine. I told her you had the flu.” She reaches into her jacket pocket and sets a full-sized Mounds bar on the table. “No one was giving these out, as it happens,” she says at Jackson's look. “I stopped at CVS.”

Jack sighs. “Candy was better when we were kids.”

“Yeah.” Mari looks out the window where she can see a few costumed teenagers still going from house to house across the street, collecting any leftover goodies in big garbage bags from tired parents.

“He was their age,” Jack says, following her gaze.

“Jack, no,” Mari says right away. “No, he wasn't. Those kids are fourteen. Brandon Carlson was twenty-two.” She rubs at the bridge of her nose. Her skull hurts where the cat ears were sitting. “Fitzgerald is still in heaps of shit, though.”

Jack is silent for a minute. “Think it'll hit the news?”

Mari shrugs again. “Probably. Maybe not for a few days.” She gets up to open the window, leery of the smoke detector in here. Already the two of them are turning the air blue. “Listen, though, talk to me. How are you feeling?”

Jackson laughs. “I feel fucking fantastic, Mari,” he says, which she guesses she should have expected. “Never better.”

“It wasn't your fault,” she tells him. “We weren't even there.”

“You think I feel guilty?” Jack looks absolutely incredulous. “Seriously? You think I feel sorry for this kid?”

“I—” Mari blinks. She certainly feels guilty as all hell, Brandon Carlson and his good-boy school picture, how she has to keep reminding herself he really was a grown-up no matter what she told Jackson. She feels horrible about Fitzgerald too. Four weeks Mari rode with that kid, and she doesn't think she contributed to the girl's training one bit. “Sorry, I just— Sorry.”

“I don't feel fucking
guilty
, Mari,” Jack spits, shaking his head in the smoky darkness. “Jesus, I'm pissed. I'm pissed he got himself killed before I could look him in his shit face, I'm pissed he left this earth before having to answer for what he did, if he even fucking did it, and most of all I'm pissed at this fucking incompetent police department, who can't get it right no matter how many goddamn chances it gets.”

Mari flinches like he's hit her—at the
fucking incompetent
but mostly at the
if he even
. “He did it,” she says stubbornly, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray, trying to convince him or maybe herself. “Jack, come on. Carlson was our guy.”

It's the wrong thing to say. “How the fuck do you know?” Jack explodes. “Because you decided maybe you saw him?” He shoves his chair out and stands up. “That holds zero fucking water and you know it, Mari, not without a living suspect to question. The case is closed now, inconclusive. We'll never know.”

Mari feels her body filling up with cold terror. “That's not true.” She shakes her head. “We'll re-interview the parents, we'll talk to his friends—”

“I don't want to talk to his fucking friends, I want this to not have happened!” Jack stalks to the window, glaring out with an unseeing expression on his sharp, handsome face. At some point he took off his costume too. “Don't you get that? I want to not have been shot, and I want you not to have disappeared off the face of the planet for four months while I was lying on my back contemplating my own fucking mortality, but I can't have those things, so instead I want to sit here and smoke my fucking cigarette in peace. Can I have that? Possibly?”

Mari holds her hands up in surrender. “I'm sorry,” she tells him quietly. God, how many times can she say it, how she can she ever undo what she did? They're never going to make this work, never. “Of course you can. I'll go.”

But Jackson shakes his head again. “No, God, I don't want you to go,” he says. “I know I'm being an asshole, I just—” He breaks off, scrubbing his free hand over his face. “I'm sorry.”

“You don't have to apologize,” Mari tells him, feeling raw as if her whole body has been dragged along the asphalt. His posture has relaxed enough that she feels like she can go to him, though, so she takes two tentative steps forward, puts her hands on his solid shoulders. “It's okay.” She feels so hugely, achingly guilty.

Jack lets her get closer, his forehead falling forward against hers in a gesture that feels like a concession. He smells like cigarettes and like Jack. “Do you ever think we waited too long?” he asks out of the blue. “Like, that it's too late now?”

That throws Mari off as much as it stings. “Waiting?” she says tentatively, rubbing her nose against Jackson's collarbone. “That what we were doing?”

Jackson shrugs. “I guess. You got married.” There's something simplistic and hard in his voice that makes her spine curl. He's still holding his cigarette, and he turns his head away to take a drag.

“Yeah,” she tells him firmly. “I did.” Because Andre wasn't a quick stop on the way to Jack, he was a person and she loved him and they made a beautiful baby together, and Mari regrets exactly none of those things.

When Jack exhales, the smoke curls around them like a fog. “You knew I liked you,” he says, and yeah, this time he definitely sounds accusing. “You said so yourself.”

Mari draws herself up. “You were
dating
,” she tells him, because oh no, this particular failing she isn't taking the fall for. “Jack, you were dating someone else literally every
second
of us knowing each other, and then some. For nine years.” She pulls back and looks at his face, cupping his shoulders in both hands. “One white girl after another. You'd break up eventually, sure, and there would be a couple weeks breather, or a month, and I'd think—”

“You'd think what?” Jackson interrupts. He's holding his body away from hers now.

“I'd think maybe you liked me enough to date me,” Mari says, resigning herself to having this fight too. “But you always found someone else. And I figured maybe not. So yes, I started dating, and yes, I did get married. And you didn't say a damn thing about any of it.”

Jackson is silent. “One white girl after another, huh?” he asks finally.

Mari lets go of him before he can pull away. “Yeah,” she says bitterly. “Really makes a girl feel loved.”

For a moment she thinks he's going to yell again, but instead he just sighs. “I'm sorry,” he mutters, and he sounds completely scooped out inside. “I really did want you.”