Salt and Iron (8 page)

The door to the rooftop is open again. The air is breezy and cool with onrushing autumn.
This too shall pass away
, he thinks, and then he thinks,
at least I have Gabe
, and between those two things he’s okay, and he crosses the rooftop toward the rail and leans on it, arms crossed, pretending to take in the view.

“Yuko said you wanted to see me,” his dad says. “She said it was something personal.”

He nods. “Yeah. It is.”

His dad sighs and shakes his head. “Is she willing to take money and go away?”

He looks at his dad, blinks. “What?”

“The girl. The girl, James.”

“What girl?” he echoes.

“Don’t parrot, James. The girl.”

He feels the heat rush to his face, as much anger as embarrassment. “There’s no girl.”

“Well, if you haven’t knocked a girl up, why make an appointment as if it was all cloak-and-dagger business?”

“It’s about me.”

His dad laughs, head up, loud, almost barking. “Of course it is.”

James’s face is getting hotter, his hands starting to shake. He should have had a drink before this. Just one. Just enough to calm him down. Because his heart rate is climbing and he’s starting to feel light-headed and his hands are starting to feel like they’re stranger’s hands, palsied, shaking.

“Well?” his dad says.

He scrabbles for what they talked about, him and Gabe. “I want to be honest with you.”

“James, I have a meeting with Judge Robertson in fifteen minutes.”

“About… those tarot cards.”

His dad makes a small noise, and all the terror and tension in his back and his chest unknots just a little.

“James, listen. Your mother and I have been talking about this, and, well, we’d like to not talk about it for a while. I know the cards upset you. You’ve always been oversensitive. Just let yourself forget about it.”

“No, Dad, it’s not about that. Well, it’s kind of about that. It’s….” His dad is looking at him, cold and narrow eyed. Olive branch extended and rejected, James realizes. “I mean, I appreciate what you’re saying. I seriously do. But it’s not about that. It’s… they scared me because I could see they were affecting time.”

“You
what
?”

“I could see it. It’s a thing I can do. Since I was fourteen. I—”

Abraham flushes a violent, bloody red. “Since you were four— James, you get
headaches
. You are oversensitive. Your mother and I have been making ourselves sick over the brittle state of your mental health—”

“Dad, Dad, listen—”

“—and letting your brother carry you—”

“Dad, please. Please.”
Don’t yell
, he tells himself, trying to muster the certainty he’d felt with Gabe.
Don’t yell. Try not to get mad. They’re going to be as scared as I was. Maybe more.
“Please, Dad, listen to me. I know this is going to be hard, but I… I’m not like Abe. I….” Here. Now. This is it. He sees the way time breaks before him, and whatever he does now is going to fix something. There’s nothing he can do about it. “I fix the future. Since I was a kid. I did it with the cards. I think when I touched them I made something happen. But I don’t know what. I don’t know how to control it. That’s what scared me.”

Stillness and silence and the wind cooling the already-cold sweat on the back of his neck, on the palms of his upraised hands.

“I don’t understand,” his father says.

Of all the myriad things he expected, all the situations he and Gabe had rehearsed, this was not one they prepared for. “I-I’m a fixer,” he says, because he’s not sure how else he can say it. He thought he was being pretty clear. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to be. I can’t help it.” It seems like the kind of thing worth apologizing for.

“This is a stunt,” Abraham says.

“Dad—”

“You want to go away for a while? You want a vacation? You want me and your mother to send you off somewhere nice where you can pretend to be in some kind of therapy while your brother and your mother and I do our duty to the family? To the country? Is that what you want?”

“No, Dad—”

“Well, then what brought this on?”

He stares, shakes his head. “What brought it on?”

“Don’t
parrot
, James,” he shouts, and James steps back, steps away, mouth dry, words all gone. “You want everything. You want to be young forever. You want to avoid your duty. You want me and your mother and your brother to carry you, while you keep the family name and the privileges and the fame, but you’re not going to, not with me as your father. You’re lazy. I understand that. You always were. You were lazy and you had problems and your mother and I, God forgive us, we indulged you. But I never believed you were a bad seed. I never imagined you’d stoop to lying to me. Lying to
me
. About something like
this
.”

Cold. He goes quite cold. It’s not just the wind and the sweat, it’s like something’s sucked the blood right out of him. “It’s not a lie, Dad.”

Abraham fixes him with his eyes, jaw forward, frowning, mouth moving like he’s got something in his teeth he can’t get out. “Fixer,” he says.

James hears himself swallow. “Yeah.”

“Then you know how this”—he gestures between the two of them—“ends.”

“It’s not like that. I don’t know how things end. I just, I see the places where time comes apart, and no matter what I do, it fixes a destiny. I don’t know how—”

The blow stings. It knocks his senses around, and then another and then another, so the world is a blur of gray and white, and when his brain catches up he’s looking far to his left and the rooftop is freckled with red. He gasps, then feels the pain come rushing through his face.

Abraham grabs him by the shoulders, pushes him so that he has to scramble backward until the sharp bar of the rail makes a line in the small of his back and he’s back as far as he can go. For a moment his father keeps pushing, and he has an instant of scrabbling, animal terror, grabbing at his father’s arm, the suit coat, fine material all slippery-smooth, his broad wrist, gnarled hands. He’s going to go up and he’s going to go over and he’s going to go down onto the concrete below and splatter on someone. No, no, no. “No, Dad, please, Dad,
please
, Dad—”

“You have
problems
, James. I know you have
problems
, but don’t you
dare
make up stories like
this
.”

“I’m not. I’m not lying, Dad. Please.” He’s bleating. He can hear himself making terrified little noises. The rail hurts, his face hurts, hot blood running from his nose into his mouth, and all he can taste is thick saliva and blood, and all he can say is
please, Dad, please
.

“Don’t you ever tell your mother. You hear me? It’ll kill her. Don’t you ever tell your mother. Don’t you ever tell
anybody
.”

“I won’t. I
won’t
.”

All at once he lets go. He stops speaking. He turns and walks away from James, and James has to grab the rail for a moment to keep himself upright. He rubs his hand over his face, feels the blood smear, wipes at it with his sleeve to clean it away. They’re practically in public, after all. Abraham turns and comes back. He raises his hand, but this time he points at James, doesn’t hit him.

“You can’t even imagine what this is doing to me. You can’t even imagine what it will do to your mother. I’m disgusted with you.” He stops, shaking his head. “The Marquez family put you up to this, didn’t they? Gabriel? I hope he’s happy.”

He fists the front of James’s shirt, and James lets himself be pulled forward, keeps his head back, already cringing even though he knows it’s useless.

“You don’t speak a word of this. You don’t breathe a word of this. You’re a van Helsing. For better or worse,” he adds. “Since I can’t get rid of you now.”

He’s so terrified it doesn’t matter anymore. He’s so terrified he’s calm. “I’m a van Helsing,” he says, mouth twisting, voice struggling, “monsters are in my blood.”

Abraham jerks back as if he’s been burned and lets James go. He stares at him for a moment, and James stares back, head still ringing with the blows. Then Abraham takes the pocket square from his suit and begins to clean the blood from his hands.

“I want nothing to do with you, James. Get out of my sight.”

He has to walk past his father to get to the door, and then he has to have his back to him until he gets through the office and out into the hallway and there are walls between the two of them and he can breathe again. He steps into a washroom and washes the dried smear of blood from under his nose, then pulls out his phone and dials Gabe’s number. It goes right to voice mail, and he hangs up. He checks the time. He checks his wallet.

When he steps out of the washroom, he sees Yuko coming up the hall toward him. “If anybody needs me I’m downtown,” he says. He makes it convincingly cheerful.

“Don’t get into trouble,” Yuko tells him.

She’s not smiling, and she’s not joking, and she can just go fuck herself.

James forces himself to smile at her. “Who, me?” he asks. He’s going to get fucked.
Trouble
won’t even begin to describe it.

HE STARTS
at Bonnie’s. Then he makes the rounds and ends at the Gory Locks. He banters with Brett as if Brett doesn’t know he’s already drunk, as if he doesn’t know she’s a Dullahan. He drinks ’til closing time.

HOT, STUFFY
air. Smells like asphalt and deep fry and barf. He’s sitting on the curb, on a side street. On one side there’s a run-down rental house, and on the other it’s the parking lot for the pub. He’s sitting. Feet flat on the concrete, butt on the yellow-painted ledge. Probably smart, because the world is lurching forward and snapping back like a second hand on a stuck clock.

“Jamie?”

He looks up. In the still moments between the lurch and snap, Gabe’s face resolves, looming like a moon above him.

“Gabe, hey!” He smiles. “When’d’y. Whatar you doinere?”

Gabe frowns down at him. James knows that look.

“Mm in trouble, aren’t I?” he asks.

Gabe doesn’t answer, or maybe he does. Hard to say, since James is throwing up again.

“Good-bye, sandwich,” he says. Always was good at ID’ing a corpse.

WHITE DOORWAY
with brass numbers on it, up a couple of steps. Why do people
always
put doors up steps?

ROB’S SQUASHED,
flattened, grumpy face between the door and frame, blinking, bleary. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

“The press have camped out at the Firm since Uncle Abe’s death. I can’t take him back there like this.”

Gabe smells like aftershave and soap, and if James could get his fingers working he’d be unbuttoning that pale blue dress shirt. If he felt better he’d be horny, standing here like this, with Gabe, with his arms around him. Too bad he feels so sick.

“Jesus Christ,” Rob says and rubs his forehead.

Oh man, James does not feel good.

Gabe shrugs under James’s arms. “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t know where else to take him.”

Rob sighs. “Yeah, you did right. You’d better bring him in.”

James figures if he pukes he’ll feel better. He gives it a try.

HE WAKES
up because a baby is crying. Not on the TV, not far away. Close and uncontrollable. It’s… horrible. It starts off crying and goes to screaming, and the screaming makes him want to panic, makes him angry, furious, desperate to shut it up, whatever it takes.

He lurches upright in bed, and the world jerks and spins around him. He is aware in a sort of factual way that if there was anything left in his stomach he’d throw it up, but there’s nothing.

The crying goes on and on and
on
. He staggers out of bed and then has the presence of mind to ask himself how the hell he got into a bed in the first place. He doesn’t remember getting into bed, and he’s never seen this particular bed before, and he maybe deliberately gave Gabe the impression he was fucking around with Brett, but he’s pretty sure he’s not actually. Pretty sure.

He goes to the window and looks out, but the tree-lined street isn’t familiar. He doesn’t remember anything except…. Except Gabe showing up. He remembers that. And the car, the warm heated seats, and something about needing to get him
somewhere safe
and—

The crying stutters and stops like a car stalling out. Thank God.

He looks down at himself. Still in suit pants. No socks. The bed is still mostly made. His shirt and shoes are over on a cheap chair in the corner, under a cheap lamp beside the windows, which are closed and covered with a brightly patterned shade. He catches a glance at himself in the free-standing mirror wedged between the low bookshelf and the door. His face is ashy, eyes baggy and red, pants rumpled, hands dirty. He looks like hell.

He feels like hell. Mouth tastes like hours-old vomit. Eyes feel like they’ve been sandblasted. Stomach an acidic knot right down to his bowels. He lurches out of the bedroom and hears someone saying “
Shhh, shhh, shhh
” as he staggers down the hall, looking for the bathroom. Praise be, it’s not that far away.

He uses everything. Toilet, shower, sink. He only throws up a little. When he’s done in the shower and toweling off, just as he’s thinking he’s going to go back to the room he was in, get properly dressed, and phone Gabe and find out what the hell’s going on, someone knocks on the door. Quiet, respectful.

“Just a sec,” he calls, finishes with the fly of his pants, and opens the door.

Rob’s flattened face looks back at him. “Up and about?” he asks.

James can’t think of anything to say.

“Can you eat?” Rob asks. “Or are you too hungover?”

The thought of food is enough to knot his stomach up and threaten his throat with vomit. “I… I could probably do coffee,” he says softly.

Rob nods and steps away from the door, and that’s when James sees he’s holding a child in his arms. He stares. Rob looks back at him.