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There is a wooden frame full of soupy, smoothed-out concrete where Holly’s childhood home used to be.
Holly had left the rental with a book and a flashlight purely out of muscle memory, walking down the street to the empty lot, and she hadn’t remembered that it wouldn’t be empty anymore until she was right up on the chain-link fence, staring at it.
She and the Nice Guys had been out of town for nearly a week, all the way up in the Bay Area for a case Healy had caught wind of through a friend from New York. They’d packed into the convertible and headed north along the coast, Healy driving, Holly riding shotgun, Dad’s long legs folded up disgruntledly into the backseat. Dad had got them two rooms at a decent hotel in the city, presenting one of the key cards to Holly with a flourish.
“You could’ve just got a room with two queens,” Holly had pointed out, and then widened her eyes innocently. “Or are you guys not at the sharing-a-bed stage yet?”
Healy had put his face in his hands, and Dad had flushed a deep, unflattering red. Somehow, among a stream of unintelligible, indignant stuttering, Dad got out, “I just didn’t want you to have to share a room with two adult men!” And then, because he’s still Dad even though he’s slightly reformed, he added, “So there!”
Holly stuck her tongue out at him, and he flipped her off. Healy rolled his eyes.
In retrospect, it’s becoming obvious that taking a case that far away in the exact week that they were breaking ground on the new house wasn’t exactly a coincidence. More of a distraction technique, if anything. Well, it worked. Holly, in the midst of touring Alcatraz and taking stupid pictures of Dad and Healy on the little camera she’d gotten for her last birthday while Mom was still alive, had completely forgotten that her fenced-in memory palace would no longer be available to her upon their return to Los Angeles. Only the future would remain.
She’s so busy just staring, standing stock-still on the sidewalk like a cartoon who’s walked over a cliff’s edge and hasn’t thought to look down yet, that she doesn’t even hear the rumble of a familiar engine driving past on the road behind her, braking about ten yards up the road, slowly backtracking, and shutting off with a click and the pops of the engine cooling under the hood. She doesn’t hear the door open and shut, doesn’t hear the footsteps approaching her. The first thing she is aware off other than her completely unjustified shock is a heavy, warm hand landing on her bare shoulder and squeezing, inquisitive.
“Doing alright, Hol?” says Healy’s voice behind her, rumbling like the engine.
What else is there to do but look down, and see what height she’s about to fall from?
“Oh, Jesus,” Healy mutters, which Holly recognizes distantly as a reaction to the fact that she has started to cry. “Come here, kid, let’s get you inside.”
He tucks her gently into the passenger seat of his car. She doesn’t feel any of it. Her chest and stomach feel strange, her heart light as a feather in her chest, fragile and flighty, the wrong kind of weightless.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” she tells Healy — begs him, really.
“You’re gonna be okay, kid, almost there,” Healy reassures her, reaching a hand out to pull her into his side on the bench seat as he drives. True to his word, they’re parking on the cul-de-sac in front of the rental in the next moment. Instead of leaving and coming around to her, Healy just reaches across her — barrel chest radiating warmth onto her face — and opens her door, then gently prods her out of the car and scoots across the seat to follow her. He puts both hands on her shoulders as he walks her inside.
“Hey, Jack!” comes her dad’s voice from what sounds like his bedroom. It gets closer as he calls, “You seen Holly?”
“I got her!” Healy calls back.
“Oh, good,” Dad says, much closer, and then rounds the corner. He does a bit of a double take as he takes in Holly’s shaking shoulders, the tracks down her cheeks, her trembling chin. “Oh, Jesus.”
Holly laughs a little, and then starts to cry harder.
“Oh, come on, kid, Healy’s not that bad,” Dad’s saying, light but with a pressing undercurrent of concern, as he approaches her. He kneels down in front of her like he used to do when she was a little kid, and he pulls her into his arms. She collapses into him, tucking her face into his shoulder. She can practically feel the panicked look Dad must be sending Healy over her shoulder.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Holly gets out. Talking is getting increasingly difficult; she can’t seem to get a full breath in. “I think it’s my heart or something.”
“You are not having a heart attack,” Dad says firmly. She can feel his voice in his chest. “How’d this start, huh? Who’s Jack have to go beat up?”
Holly just shakes her head, starting to gasp. Dad smooths a hand up and down her back, shushing her, apologizing softly.
“Found her at the lot,” Healy provides from behind her. His hand lands on her head, smoothing her hair back.
“I told you we shoulda just up and bolted to San Francisco or something,” Dad mutters.
That sends a bolt of something through Holly, and she jerks her head up, staring at him wide-eyed. “No! We can’t —”
She cuts herself off. Dad raises an eyebrow.
“Can’t what?” he asks, patient. “We don’t have to stay here, if you don’t want. Jack’s not from here, my parents are gone, we’re freelance. Nothing’s keeping us here.”
Holly gives up completely on being a cool, put-together teenager and just says, voice small, “We can’t leave Mom.”
Dad’s face softens, and he lifts a hand to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. He wipes the tears from under her eye with his thumb, even though she’s still producing new ones at a steady rate. “Mom’s with us, no matter where we are. You know she never put too much stock in cemeteries or a headstone; she told me she’d haunt that emerald necklace she always wore.”
“It’s malachite,” Holly corrects, voice thick.
“Malachite,” Dad parrots. “So as long as we bring that, we’re good.”
“I don’t want to leave L.A.,” Holly sighs.
“Okay,” Dad says easily, and then gestures at her face. “So what’s all this, then?”
“First thing that comes to mind,” Healy suggests, when Holly hesitates, floundering. “Doesn’t have to make sense.”
“I can’t read on the empty lot anymore,” Holly blurts out.
“Okay,” Dad says, nodding slowly. “Now, I’m not — I guess I can’t decide how important something is to somebody else, but —”
“I don’t think it’s really about her reading spot, Hol,” Healy points out.
“Yeah, that makes more se—”
“I can’t — sit on your bed anymore!” Holly interrupts, because Healy’s comment was actually very helpful to her. “I can’t count my steps and say that’s the bedroom, and that’s the rug, and that’s Mom’s library, and here’s the kitchen, and Mom would be standing right here —” Holly’s voice is going again, her breath coming in gasps, but she can’t stop now — “and Dad would be here, and I can still be here and just pretend — and I can’t pretend anymore and I wasn’t ready to stop pretending and I’m not ready for the future, I’m so stuck back there and I don’t know how to get out, it feels like everything just stopped and now it’s starting again and I’m so — I’m so far behind, Dad, I don’t know how to catch up!”
And she bursts into renewed tears, chest heaving, her hands coming up to cover her face. Dad pulls her in again, and then stands up with her in his arms, lifting her off the ground.
“Okay,” he murmurs. They’re moving; Holly can’t tell where. Her world has narrowed down to the warm, wet space between her face and the crook of her dad’s shoulder, his day-old stubble scratching her temple, the smell of smoke clinging to his clothes. “Okay, Hol, you’re okay. Come on.”
Dad carries her into the living room, she thinks, and sits down on a soft surface, pulling her legs up to sling across his lap, her upper half still tucked into his side. She feels someone remove her shoes. She tries to focus on her breathing, to slow it down, but she can’t stop sucking in these awful, shuddering gasps, can’t make it all smooth out. She feels Dad’s chest start to vibrate again, and it takes her far longer than it should to realize he’s singing.
“You are my destiny,
You are what you are to me,
You are my happiness
That’s what you are.”
His voice is soft, low, just loud enough to share between the two of them and no louder. Holly recognizes the song. It was her parents’ first dance. Not their last, either — Mom used to love to swing Dad around the living room until he tripped over his own feet, which never took long.
“He does have rhythm,” Mom had informed Holly once, her hands on her hips as she stared down at Dad spread-eagled on the floor, panting. “I think it just takes too long to travel from his brain to his feet.”
“That was almost a compliment,” Dad had pointed out, and reached up his hand for a high-five. Holly obliged, giggling.
Dad pauses for a while after the first verse, and for a second Holly thinks he’s not going to continue, but then he picks the song back up.
“You have my sweet caress,
You share my loneliness
You are my dream come true
That’s what you are.”
With each line, to her intense relief, Holly feels her lungs tug themselves back into working order, feels the unstable thud of her heart begin to slow. She doesn’t dare leave her hiding spot in Dad’s shoulder, but she allows the warmth of it to soak into her, allows the wash of his voice to even her out.
In the pause after the second verse, Holly says, apropos of nothing, “You’ll remember.”
Dad makes a soft noise, inquisitive, inviting her to continue.
“The house won’t remember,” she adds, voice muffled in her hiding spot. “But you will.”
She feels him take a big breath in, and then let it out, the edge of his exhalation ghosting past her ear. His arms tighten around her waist.
“I’ll remember,” he says. “I promise. That’s the one thing I can always do, is remember her.”
“Okay,” Holly agrees. “Deal.”
“Deal,” Dad repeats, and one of his hands comes off her back.
Without even looking, Holly removes an arm from around his neck, and locks her pinky with his.
Dad finally gets his cast off the morning after the concrete foundation has fully set. She goes with him to the doctor’s office; when the plaster saw cuts all the way through and the doctor cracks the cast apart, the smell that radiates from his arm is the worst thing Holly’s ever experienced, including almost dying four times in less than three days. Dad keeps wafting the cast air at her, making her gag, and she gets the feeling he would’ve got up and chased her with it if it wasn’t for the doctor’s disapproving look. Thankfully, the doctor does not let him keep it; that doesn’t solve the fact that his arm also smells insane.
Two days after that whole fiasco — his arm still smells, even though he’s showered like eight times and scrubbed it with soap and everything, and as a result Holly is boycotting hugging him for the foreseeable future — Holly walks into his bedroom and finds, rather than her father, Healy, sitting criss-cross on the floor with a sewing needle, surrounded by Dad’s shirts and jackets and several different-colored spools of thread.
“Uh,” Holly says.
Healy looks up at her. “Hey, kiddo. Your dad’s out taking pictures for the Haywood case.”
She blinks. “You didn’t go with him?”
Healy shrugs, looking back down at the needle he’s trying to thread. “He didn’t want to leave you alone. Normally we’d just go while you were at school, but that doesn't really work over summer break.”
Holly frowns, entering the room fully and sitting down across from him. She picks up one of the spools of thread — dark blue. She realizes it matches the jacket on the top of Healy’s pile.
Healy is sewing all of Dad’s sleeves back together. Holly fights a grin.
“You don’t have to — I mean, I’ll be fine on my own, you know,” she says.
Healy successfully threads his needle, and holds it up triumphantly. She laughs, and he picks up a shirt, working the needle into the seam.
“You’re going through a lot right now,” he says. His tone is matter-of-fact, light. “It’s okay to need someone around.”
Holly fidgets with the spool in her hands. “Dad’s alone right now,” she points out. “He’s worried about the house, too.”
“Yeah,” Healy agrees, “but he already went through a lot. He’s — I mean, some days, I’m not so sure, but mostly, he’s coming out the other side of it now. I think he’s worried you never really took that plunge because you were too busy raising yourself.”
There is nothing in the world Holly can think of to say to that. She thinks about her routine, her desperation, her instantly-regretted foster home dream. She thinks Dad’s probably right. He has a surprisingly good track record for being right — certainly a better one than you’d think, just looking at him.
She thinks about the fact that sometime around two weeks ago, underneath her notice, all of the alcohol in the house just up and vanished, even the emergency stash in the bathroom, and the one in the hall closet underneath the towels, and the 24-pack in the attic. She thinks about the fact that she hasn’t had to make a wake-up call in over a month.
“I don’t really want to take the plunge,” Holly admits quietly. “It sounds like a nightmare.”
“It’s not gonna be rosy,” Healy agrees. “But I can’t imagine the past few years have been particularly rosy, either. Gotta get worse before it gets better.”
“Hmm.” Holly watches as Healy finishes the sleeve he’s working on, lifting it up to snip the thread with his teeth. He sets the shirt down on the pile to his right, and picks up the dark blue jacket to his left. He looks around, confused, until Holly says, “Oh,” and hands over the blue spool of thread she’s been fidgeting with. Healy thanks her, and shoots her a wink.
“And besides,” Healy adds, “I get the feeling you’ll make your way through it cleaner than your dad did.”
“The bar is so low,” Holly says wryly.
Healy grins.
“And,” Holly adds, impulsive. “I won’t be alone for it.”
Healy looks up at her, smile gone soft. “Yeah, kid. We’ll take care of you. You don't have to worry about that.”