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He doesn’t wear black, when he goes out. Black’s great for cutting an intimidating figure, but bad for urban camouflage. There’s no pure black in the city – too much light, too much haze, even in the worst of the wee hours – so it makes a trackable silhouette. Black pops.
Dark blues, greys, browns, patterned when he can find it cheap. No actual camo, that’s giving the game away, but anything that breaks up the clear shape. He imagines Maria gently mocking him for all the plaids, and after five years it hurts like church bells ringing the hour, dolorous and clear, so familiar he barely notices.
This sweater is done for; one slice across the carotid is quiet but messy, high-pressure spurts of blood hosing down anything in the vicinity until the heart wears itself out. There’s something reassuringly primal about it, the fundamental animal commonality. Even in sleep, every person has this force waiting inside them, this inexorable final violence, the same drumming count that rages and fades. Blood soaks through his layers, drips under the vest, sticky-warm, and for a second he’s back in the jungle, breathing as much steam as air, the rich green-and-iron lull of it, the silence of scattered wildlife and eardrums still reeling from automatic bombardment.
This is the last one, the ringleader. Frank could have gone around the other side of the bed, cut his throat from behind, kept himself mostly out of the main spray. But he let himself have this instead, before he peels out of the clothes for bag and burn and washes as much of the night away as he can. Death is a river, he learned once. Death is five rivers, or one with five tributaries: fire, hatred, lamentation, sorrow, forgetfulness. When he does this, he steps back into the river. It all washes over him, and he does not drown, and Lethe is the last, soothing, numb.
“Long night?” Lisa asks when he gets home. She’s still in pajamas, hair loose, shadows under her bright young eyes that say she slept poorly, grating cheese into a bowl of not-yet-scrambled eggs. There’s bacon popping gently in a pan, almost covering up the lingering smells of blood and plain soap he’s tracking in, even after two showers.
The street is still winter-dark outside, sky muddy with halogen streetlamps, only one overly ambitious bird tweet-tilting at the huffing churn of pre-rush traffic, even though she and Junior need to be on the bus inside the hour. Frank is loose-limbed when he slumps at the kitchen table, peels off the regular coat he swapped for at his storage space, relaxed in spite of the bruises that will bloom in the next few days from lucky shots that punched him where they hit the vest. None of the blood he scrubbed off was his, but he might have a cracked rib. When he breathes too deeply the raw crackle-ache of it is like lightning, then thunder: sharp, then low and dull and encompassing. Momentum is momentum, even distributed.
“Yeah,” he admits, trying to sound weary instead of sheepish, or satisfied. Fourteen hours, three safehouses, thirty-seven men dead. Five months of research funneled down to one inexorable, clockwork operation. There’s a great persistent quiet inside him now, like the approaching pre-dawn grey that that turns the sky flat and still, like the way a room echoes after ragged breathing seeps into silence, like cool smooth stone. Peaceful.
(He should stop.)
This should be enough, he thinks, watching her bustle in the small kitchen. She’s coltish with adolescence that sits strangely on her, chipped blue sparkly nail polish and sharp elbows and bunny slippers with cutesy posable ears, a child who learned to be her own mother and her brother’s besides, fingers steady on the whisk, on the knife when she chops tomatoes and mushrooms, plucking a few basil leaves from the windowbox. Lisa gets this from him, the need to keep her hands busy, the rhythm of work.
Frank Junior is still sleeping, safe and warm. He barely remembers the day in the park. Lisa has eyes to match the messy fading scars over her clavicle and chest, sometimes strained and aching with wreckage, but strong underneath, healing, healed. He loves them so much he thinks his heart could burst in his chest; he is so grateful. He knows he should stop, that no matter how careful or how quiet he is, he can’t keep his lives separate forever.
But it’s not enough. Love is not enough. Gratitude is not enough. He sees things that need to be done, and -
(There is an amateur philosophy question which goes: what happens if an unstoppable force encounters an immovable object? The question itself is broken, because the two cannot coexist. By definition, only one thing can be the only thing to never give way.)
There is a need. He wonders, sometimes, if he would still be the one filling it if they’d done something else that day, gone to Coney Island or Brighton Beach. Would he be sneaking around, killing behind Maria’s back, would she notice his absences and wonder about lesser and more terrible sins? Would he have told her? Would she have understood? Or hated it, would she have cried, screamed, taken the children away? He shoves away a shudder, because the idea is unbearable.
(A broken question. The two cannot interact.)
He puts the consideration out of his mind. It doesn’t matter. He’ll never know.
If she hadn’t died, maybe he wouldn’t see the need, even though it would be there. Maybe it would be someone else. But it isn’t, so he must. If he were a better man, he suspects, it might feel like a burden, or a curse, but it doesn’t. It feels inevitable and right.
He isn’t going to stop.
“Long but good,” Lisa says, not a question, because she knows him too well. He ducks his head a little. She’ll see the grin, but hopefully nothing else. Not the things in his eyes tonight. “No DOA’s tonight?” she asks, because she doesn’t know him that well, because she thinks he just had an overnight double shift, and that he smells faintly of other people’s blood from trying to save them.
“Not a one,” he lies, and it’s only sort of a lie: everyone he put down tonight was alive when he found them.
Lisa threw herself on top of Junior, that day. He still doesn’t know how the fuck she learned that, where the instinct came from, whether it was just terror and luck. He never quite knows how to be grateful for it, one child hurt to spare the other, even though it probably saved her too, taking bullets in the scapula and clavicle instead of her abdomen. Three years of PT to get her shoulder back to full range-of-motion, and her left lung was punctured, collapsed, will never be quite the same. She would have died her brother’s keeper, if the paramedics hadn’t come as fast as they did. They saved her when he couldn’t, bleeding out in half a dozen places, too woozy to crawl three paces closer and desperate to hold Maria together.
He came home from his last tour planning vaguely to be a cop, but it didn’t work out that way. The cops couldn’t do shit for his family, in the end. So he took his GI money for EMT training instead, and joined the people who could, who had. Four months after that, he found every one of the cowards who touched his family, and there was no one who could help them. No one at all.
He heaves himself up while Lisa flips the bacon, stifles a groan at that rib, goes to Junior’s room to cajole him awake. It seems like it ought to be Lisa, grumping and groaning and shoving a pillow back over her head, like a proper teenager, but she’s always been an early riser. They’d go into her room when she was tiny and find her wobbly but standing, clutching the bars of her crib, eyes bright, just waiting for them to get a move on.
(“Cookie?” It wasn’t her first word, but it was close.
“No, silly goose.” Lift, toss, kiss the top her head while she squirmed and shrieked happily. Every morning. “You can’t have cookies for breakfast. How about pancakes?”
“Cookie!” It wasn’t until kindergarten that she discovered the ‘dots’ in real cookies were usually chocolate chips, rather than blueberries. Which is a story she loves to tell, pulling an innocent face, somberly confiding that she was so deprived, she didn’t even know about chocolate chips. It used to make Maria laugh, rapid-fire inelegant wheezing.)
Junior’s hair is a dark stormcloud on the pillow, past normal bedhead and getting to downright shaggy; Frank makes a note to himself that he needs to give the kid a trim soon. “It’s time to wake up in the morning,” he sings, to the tune of for he’s a jolly good fellow, soft but getting louder with each repetition of the line. Junior makes a very put-upon “Aauughg” sort of noise and throws his pillow at Frank’s face, which he catches, and does not break rhythm to laugh, though his mouth twitches with it.
“It’s time to wake up in the mooorniiiing! Which nobody can deny.”
“Daaaaaad,” he whines, arm thrown over his determinedly-scrunched face. “You’re a dirty liar, it’s like the middle of the night.”
“It’s six thirty-eight, scout. And if you’re not up by the time your sister finishes breakfast she’s going to come tickle you, you know she’s not as nice as me. But I might eat all your bacon.”
“Noooooo.” This double threat is apparently enough to get his eyes open, and he steals his pillow back with a scowl while Frank laughs quietly.
“Come on, King Arthur, England is in peril, up you get.”
“I’m up, I’m up!” Junior insists, batting Frank’s hand away with muzzy ill-coordinated motions, and the same jaw-jutting independence that he’s also had since he was a toddler, walking shakily and clinging to the edge of the coffee table while Maria hovered and Frank wrestled with a clunky secondhand camcorder, swearing he could do it “All. By. My. Self!” He’s stumbling almost that much now, half trips on his own dirty laundry, and let that be a lesson to him.
Frank really ought to be stricter with him about tidying, but it’s just – it’s hard, is all. Junior is the baby, the least scarred out of all of them, and it feels like scraping a little more of his childhood away to make him keep the marine fastidiousness that still feels as natural to Frank as breathing. Maria would have been able to find a middle ground, probably, between quarters bouncing off sheets and letting him leave things all over his floor, but Frank isn’t good at that, at doing anything part way. So for now Junior gets to leave his own space as messy as he likes, as long as there’s no actual trash anywhere.
Frank leaves him to it once he reaches the dresser without further incident, though he hums a reprise on his way out just to hear the faint thwack and disappointed uhg when Junior throws his comb at the door a few seconds too late.
When they’re all at the table, dressed and mostly conscious, they take hands. Frank’s are still cold from the long trip back from his safe house; he squeezes tighter for a moment. Their fingers are brands, and he can’t let go, he can’t, he can’t.
“BlessusOLordandthesethygiftswhichweareabouttoreceivefromthybountythroughChristourLordamen.”
By long unspoken arrangement, it’s Junior who says grace, and at breakfast it’s always one single liquid recitation. He’s the one who kept saying it, in his squeaky kindergarten voice, when every word felt like a stone that had to be hacked and quarried from Frank’s lungs, hauled up his throat, when Lisa was still in the hospital and when she came home full of a sullen, shattered ambivalence for prayer. She went through with her confirmation last year after all, but this is another thing she and Frank have in common, that some days her faith comes clear and strong and some days not at all. Junior, though - the ladies of St. Stephen’s took care of him when Frank was insensible, paralyzed with grief and fear, shut down into something more reflex than person, who bustled and cooed and brought casseroles and drew up rotating babysitting schedules. And it was the Father Bennedetto that told him everything would be okay when Frank could only hold him too tightly, who could take a child’s inarticulate desperate tears and confusion and say things about heaven without cracking all the way open.
At six, seven, it was the one way Junior could carve out strength for himself in the wake of death, one thing he could do to help hold their fractured family together. He could say prayers for mommy when Lisa couldn’t mention her without crying - (he could cry, too, shameless and messy and wailing, and she would hold him, one-armed, and cry silently in his hair, and he’d promise softly after not to tell) - and put on his best jacket every Sunday and put his little hand in Frank’s and by sheer dint of being too young to walk to mass alone, force them both to spent a few hours breathing in song and candlelight and the familiar rhythm of sermons, force them to accept the handshakes and well-wishes of whoever sat on the pews around them, drag them through the comfort of a congregation around them under the dappled colors of stained glass windows, however they did or didn’t feel about God.
(He didn’t think about it this way, of course. But he must have felt it, the way children often know large things they do not understand.)
So he says grace, and they bow their heads and listen, and the gratitude is real.
Lisa crosses herself left-handed, one of dozens of little things she never thought to switch back after her recovery, and Junior puts enough honey on his toast to put a normal human being into a diabetic coma, Frank is pretty sure. He gulps down his own breakfast and he feels warm all the way down in his bones, like now he’s the stone-and-lead window with the sunlight seeping through, and all the clean hollow peaceful places he scoured out inside himself tonight are suddenly filled, and instead of starlight and echoes, it’s footsteps and murmurs and organ chords resonating up through the floor.
The feeling simmers as chairlegs scrape the linoleum and Lisa attacks a smear on Junior’s cheek with a napkin, tutting like someone twice her age. Frank starts to clear the table but Lisa is too quick, whisks plates and glasses out of his hands, stacks them in the sink with tetris-esque acumen while Junior gets a hand on his shoulder, tugs him back down to his chair like a trainer gently chastising an eager dog for jumping up.
“I can at least rinse -”
“No, dad, you’re exhausted,” Lisa insists, iron-fisted and fond, in the tone that means she hasn’t even considered not getting her way, and he’s just being silly, but he’ll come around. “You’re going to go to sleep, we’ll take care of it after school.”
“Yeah,” Junior echoes, pulling their coats out of the closet, and if they’re going to present a unified front he really doesn’t have a chance.
“You don’t always have to take care of me, you know,” Frank tells her ruefully, which is basically surrender.
Her expression turns ruinously tender, and he feels guilty and unworthy and blessed. It isn’t all down to him that she learned to parent her own parent - Frank understands coping by taking control, by building strength, as much as anybody, and it would be churlish and cruel to stop her - but it isn’t fair to her either, and it’s at least partly his fault, for all the times he’s needed it too badly not to let her. None of it is fair - but he hopes that doesn’t mean none of it is right.
Lisa ducks in to hug him where he sits, and he braces himself for pressure against his damaged rib, but the surge of pain overtop the low throb of shallow breathing never comes. Her arms wrap only around his shoulders, hold him tight there, with no weight against his chest at all.
“Yes I do,” she whispers near his ear, not choked but maybe like she might be if she stopped too long to think about it.
And then she’s gone again, donning her coat, slinging on her backpack, making a shooing motion presumably meant to herd him to bed, as though if he’s simply in the right room when they leave, he’ll be prevented from getting up again to do housework by the same magic that lets quilts repel monsters. Then again, he’s probably going to be unconscious within thirty seconds of swallowing asprin and lying on anything vaguely horizontal, so they aren’t actually wrong. He allows himself to be shooed in the correct direction.
“Don’t forget your scarves,” Frank chides to cover his retreat down the hallway, the one thing she always forgets, and then yawns with his hand on the doorknob, turns his head futilely as if to hide it against his shoulder exactly like Junior does when he doesn’t want to go to bed yet. He ignores their brief smirks. “Do good in school. Love you.”
“Love you too,” Lisa answers by rote, grabbing her scarf from the hook with a ‘so there’ demonstrative flourish, and Junior manages something like “Mmmhmyeahluvya,” as he stuffs the bag lunch Frank made yesterday into his backpack, which is about as articulate as can be expected of him at this point. Then the door swings and clicks, and they’re on their way.
Frank still closes the bedroom door before he gets the aspirin out of the bedside drawer, because it feels reflexively safer to have as many barriers between them and any evidence of his hobbies as possible, though he gulps them dry under the watchful eye of Maria’s picture, looking out from her spray-painted turquoise macaroni frame, like an iota of confession, and about as cathartic.
Long but good, Lisa said, and it is, a very good night and a good morning; he even manages to get his boots off before he collapses. He tells himself he’ll wake up before they get home and take care of the kitchen, and maybe he will; but when he falls asleep he sleeps very deeply, and is spared from any dreams he is not already living.