The Book of Daniel (19 page)

* * *

I let the machine pick up, but seconds later my cell rang. When I finally got up and found where my phone had dropped between the cushions, it had stopped ringing too. I looked at caller ID and saw it was Jake, so I called him back.

Without preamble he said, “You need to come down here.”

I shook my head to clear it. Not only was he brusque, he sounded pissed. “Where?”

“Bêtise.”

I was about to say, “Give me a minute to take a shower,” but he’d already hung up.

I made brief ablutions and ran out the door, worried. What the hell was that all about? Had something happened to the bakery? Was one of the workers hurt?

I checked to make sure my phone was charged enough that I could make some calls if I needed to. It was my lifeline to lawyers, insurance agents, and medical professionals. I feared the worst when I walked into Bêtise and I didn’t see Jake behind the counter or through the windows into the kitchen.

Muse wasn’t working; in her place was my brother’s partner, Mary Catherine. She didn’t say hello but glanced over from where she was ringing up a customer. I must have looked hungover, because she frowned and pointed to the table by the front windows. I looked and found my brother sitting in the corner of the restaurant with a woman. Her back was toward me, but I could see his face clearly. He seemed upset, and when I got closer, I could tell he’d been crying.

Crying?

“Jake?” I hurried over. “What’s going on?”

He glanced up at me and then down at his hands, which were clasped tightly in his lap. The woman turned, and I knew who she was immediately. There was no mistaking her resemblance to our father, or to Jake. But she was just a girl. Really, hardly more than a teenager. Suddenly I felt vile for ignoring her letters, for forcing her to come up all this way to deliver something, for making her track me down in person.

In a million years, I never imagined Joyce Livingston would come to St. Nacho’s.

In my defense, I’d tried to find a way to tell Jake our father had been in touch with me. My time was obviously up. I couldn’t tell if Jake was more upset by the news or by how he received it.

He seemed devastated, and he was looking at me like this was somehow all my fault. How was that fair? I wasn’t the one who thought a note every so often could make up for an abusive childhood. I wasn’t the one who’d left my family behind and started another.
I
wasn’t the one who’d chosen to write to one of my children and ignore the other.

I swallowed down my anger. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“I’m Joyce.” She stood and held out her hand. I gave it a perfunctory pump while I looked her over. She had our brown hair and eyes. Jake’s were wider set than mine, and in hers I could see their echo. She was tough. I could see that. In that new Livingston family, this was the protector. But she was so very
young.

“So I assume you told my brother who you are? Everything?”

“Yes.” She bit her lip. “I didn’t realize—”

“I guess that’s just another thing I’ve fucked-up lately.” I sat down and patted my pockets, looking for my pack of cigarettes and lighter to stall, the first of a number of nervous gestures I’m likely to exhibit when I feel fear.

“What?” she asked. Maybe she disapproved of my language.

“Nothing.” I turned to Jake. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“How long?’

“How long what?” I didn’t want to tell my brother that his father had been writing to me and only me, for years. That I’d kept that fact from him,
for years.

“Never mind.” He turned to her—to Joyce, our
sister
—as if he already liked her and she would be able to make things right. Because obviously
I
never had. “If you give me the address, I’ll make time to come down in the next couple of weeks.”

She nodded.

“Of course,” I said. “By all means, let’s just drop everything and run because the man who beat our mother, terrorized us as children, and then left without a single word is asking for us.”

“Dan,” Jake’s lip curled in a way I knew meant he was losing his patience. But I couldn’t help it. This was simply
wrong
. Maybe it wasn’t okay for me to withhold the information from Jake, but just because our father wanted us didn’t mean we had to jump when he called. As far as I was concerned, he’d lost the right to ask me for anything except the not insignificant financial support I’d given him over the years.

He did
not
have the right to suck up to my brother. He didn’t have the right to hurt Jakey again. I’d always protected Jake from him, and I always would.

Jake said, “I can’t believe—”

“
No
,” I barked. “Have you forgotten everything? I know you were young, but—”

“What about when he contacted you the first time? I wasn’t young then.”

It was then I realized Joyce brought along a shoebox full of mail with her. That seemed damning, all those letters, but they were mostly just cards that Bree sent and a few terse notes from me. I’d only really written in the beginning, acknowledging I’d gotten his letters. Bree was brilliant at those kinds of things, though. She was organized and thoughtful. She sent cards several times a year, signing both our names, Love, Bree and Dan Livingston. She sent long, newsy letters at Christmas with a quick handwritten note at the bottom. Very efficient, but hardly personal. I don’t believe she even knew my erstwhile siblings’ names. But the end result made it look like I had cared a hell of a lot more than I actually did. It made my father look like yet another thing I’d lied to myself and everyone else about.

And Jakey—he was looking at me like I’d stolen the sun from him. Like I’d taken all its warmth and its light and hidden it so he’d had to live in darkness.

That wasn’t the first time I discovered that lies come home in really unpleasant ways. Given the way I’d kept my mouth shut on my dad’s whereabouts, that shoebox full of holiday greeting cards sat on the table between us like a smoking gun.

I could almost hear Cam ask me if I ever told the truth about anything.

“That’s not what it looks like.”

“What it looks like,” my brother said, “is you’ve been hiding the fact that our father has been in touch with you for years. You’ve hidden the fact that we have half siblings, and you didn’t bother to tell me that our father is dying and this might very well be the last chance I will ever have to confront him about—”

“Wait.”

“For what?” Jake stood abruptly. “For you to bend the truth some more? For you to make up some excuse?”

“Jake—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Jake told me. “Go home. I just wanted to see you to tell you… Go home.”

My mouth dropped open.
I was home
. I mean…what passed for home. Right now, for better or worse, St. Nacho’s was home because Jake was home. There was nothing in the world I cared about more than Jake. And Jake was telling me to leave. The thought filled me with blind panic.

If I fucked St. Nacho’s up—if I fucked things up with Jake—everything I cared about was gone.

I went back to our place and cleaned up properly. I had some calls to make—things I’d put off for too long. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to reach my attorney, but it turned out to be much harder than I’d planned. Apparently he was participating in a triathlon, and wouldn’t be home until much later in the day.

He was nearly fifteen years my senior. He must be fit like a god to do that.
Shit.

I could hardly lift my vodka shots. The afternoon crawled by. I had a fleeting thought of Jordan in Izzie’s gym, helping me relearn to use my hand, and Cam offering to get me in shape. In fact, I took stock of everything I had and everything I’d lost, mentally putting little pluses in the win column, and little minuses in the loss column. It was so much to think about I couldn’t grasp any kind of unified concept of what I’d become. For once, the figurative spreadsheet in my brain failed me.

Eventually, my brother would forgive me, but it would be painful in the interim.

Physically, I wasn’t that far gone, but the accident put paid to most of my usual workout routines—biking, rowing, lifting weights, even jogging jarred my painful arm. I flexed my hand a few times and got out the little bag of balls and webs and the tiny trumpet-button machine that Jordan had given me.
Maybe if I kept them in the console of my car and used them at red lights…

Spiritually, I had turned some kind of corner and sure enough, there were awful growing pains to experience, and—just as I’d suspected all along—everything I’d done lately had gone all to hell. My life was going to hurt a lot before I could make it right.

If
I could make it right.

Last but not least, romantically, I… Well. That hurt too. That hurt more. I probably couldn’t fix that. Because in the end, Cam loved St. Nacho’s, and I couldn’t wait to leave.

* * *

In the late afternoon I spent a while with some coffee at one of the tables on the patio at Nacho’s Bar, watching the beach. It was a place I could smoke and think, and—my new conscience told me—it was a place where if I was lucky, I would get a glimpse of Cam. I’d seen him at the firehouse when I drove by. He’d been talking to one of the guys out front, but when he saw me, he headed back inside. That was a direct hit, but it didn’t stop me from sitting at Nacho’s for a while longer, toying with my coffee and smoking one cigarette after another, hoping to get another glimpse of him. The firefighters who were off shift stopped for beer at Nacho’s in the evenings to hang out with one another. Cam drank there pretty regularly because he lived within walking distance.

Just when I’d gotten to the point where I considered giving up, he came into the patio area and headed right for me. I held my breath when he sat down. Maybe there was hope after all.

Without much in the way of warning, he said, “What were you thinking?”

“What do you mean?”

“I talked to Jake and JT today. They told me everything. Isn’t it Jake’s decision whether he should contact your father? What if you’d waited too long and your father died?”

“You don’t know the situation.”

“Of course I don’t. But I know what you said just yesterday about making assumptions.”

“Aren’t you assuming some things? Pop could have contacted Jake if he’d wanted to get in touch with him. Jake could have googled Pop’s name. He hasn’t changed it. A private detective could have found either one of them in less than an afternoon. So please don’t act like it’s all on me.”

Cam’s face registered anger. “Why the hell wouldn’t he get in touch with Jake? That’s…”

“Our dad was a bastard, Cam. I’m not making that up.”

“Okay, maybe your dad was a bastard, but you and Jake have siblings, and you don’t know them. And you won’t until you step up and take a risk. You said yourself that sometimes the risk is worth it, and you took that choice away from Jake by not telling him.”

Cam was genuinely trying to help. His gentle face had tightened with worry, and his hands, which lay flat on the table, clenched and unclenched with emotion. This was obviously important to him. I guess maybe I understood why.

“I know you don’t understand why I might keep this from him, but—”

“You’re ignoring your own advice.”

“Cam, it’s not that simple.”

“It
is
simple. He needs to know whether his family wants him, one way or the other. If it goes badly, well, that’s when you can be there for him. But it might not. They might care about him. How could you cheat him out of that?”

Ah,
fuck
. I wasn’t cheating Jake out of anything. Well, maybe I was. Joyce looked nice, and if she hadn’t been poisoned by our father, it was possible having a sister would turn out to be a really good thing. I could see getting to know Joyce and her brother. I could see taking a chance that whatever had affected our father’s behavior didn’t also affect them. For all I knew, our dad was the father of the year with them. What if he had just needed a different family. A better family… That was like an abscessed tooth I didn’t want to probe.
That
fucking hurt.

But no. This was
Pop
we were talking about. I knew Pop.

“I am not cheating Jake. I swear to
fuck
I am trying to protect him. You know I love him. He’s the one person I”—
but maybe not anymore
—“I’d lay down my life for him. And you have to know—I’ve let you see more of me than I’ve ever let anyone see, so you of all people
have to know
—that I would never do anything to cheat him.”

“Then what gives?” Cam leaned toward me urgently, his blue gaze tender but resolute. “Make me understand, because it just isn’t right. Explain it to me, Daniel. Practice on me so you can tell him.” His words embodied his faith in me and burst my heart into a million little pieces at the same time.

“My dad nearly killed him, Cam. He had Jakey in the bathtub. He was holding him under the water. I swear to God Pop nearly killed him. Jake doesn’t remember, but I-I snapped and nearly killed Pop that same night. The next day Pop was gone like he’d never existed. My pop acted crazy where Jake was concerned. Pop nearly killed him, and I will never, ever let him get that chance again.”

Chapter Nineteen

Cam stared at me incredulously. “You can’t be right about that.”

“What I can’t do is make shit like that up.”

“Jake really doesn’t remember?”

I shook my head.

“What does he think happened?”

“He thinks Pop hit him hard enough that he blacked out for a bit and fell into the tub. My mom grabbed him out of the water, and I went after my dad like… I don’t know. A maniac. Jake
thinks
I grew a pair and finally stood up to our pop, which I did. But he doesn’t know why. I clocked Pop so hard, I broke his nose and kept on beating on him even after that, until a neighbor pulled me off him. My dad left the next day. Jake thinks it was his fault. He always has. But is that worse than knowing your father actually tried to kill you?”