War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (54 page)

“Don’t blame them, Smokey.
They needed help. They’re little more than children, and they thought you were going to die.”

“I said you couldn’t die,” Jimmy said. “I
lied
.
I said you were too stubborn to die.”

“If it had been life-threatening, they wouldn’t have let me out of the hospital,” I said, and then realized that sentence wasn’t as comforting as I meant it.

“You were in the hospital?” Jimmy’s voice went up. “And you left?”

“Because I couldn’t call you,” I said.
“I’m just bruised.”

“And stitched,” Gwen said.
“Something got you but good.”

I closed my eyes again.
The conversation was tiring.
“Is there a paper?”

“Food first,” Gwen said.
“Malcolm’s cooking up some eggs. He says he’s good at it.
You’re going to eat if I have to stuff the food down you.”

Old flashback: too many nights drinking, Gwen beside me, giving me hair of the dog, making me eat, holding my head while I puked.
Poor thing.
She always got the worst of this relationship.

“I’m sorry, Gwen,” I said.

“I always figured you’d get your life together, Smokey,” she said.
“I never figured on this.”

That took enormous faith on her part, figuring I would get my life together.
By the time I’d moved in with her after I finished my master
’
s, the nightmares controlled me.
Sometimes I lost touch with reality; I thought I was in Korea.
I was convinced of it.

I often slept on the couch so my shouting wouldn’t keep her awake.
If I drank, I slept, but I could still be startled.

I woke one night with her son’s arm in my hand, the thought in my mind that a simple snap of the wrist would give me the information I needed.

He had been six.

I moved out the next day.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said.

I opened my eyes.
She was sitting beside me, her figure fine and full. The extra weight looked good on her, made her seem more like a woman than the girl I remembered.

Jimmy was standing beside us.
“So you do know her.”

I nodded, then wished I hadn’t. The dizziness was lurking there, waiting beneath the headache.

“Old friend,” I said. “I’d called her from New Haven, asking for help finding a place to stay.”

“When you didn’t call,” Gwen said, her tone light but forced.
“I figured you were too shy, so I would contact you.
Had to wait until yesterday when the office reopened.
Then I learn that you don’t have a phone.
What’s with that?”

“I didn’t think we’d need it.
I wasn’t expecting this.” I moved my left arm to indicate my injuries and wished I hadn’t. The stitches pulled.
That awakened all the aches and pains and the throbbing in my thigh from the other stitches.
“How bad do I look?”

“Like it was one hell of a fight,” Gwen said.

“It wasn’t a fight.” I scooted up.
There were a pile of pillows behind me, and one on the floor, along with a blanket.
Someone had slept in here, keeping an eye on me.

“Is he awake?” Malcolm stood at the door.
His eyes were sunken into his face.
He hadn’t gotten much sleep.

“Yes,” I said.

“Jesus, man.
You said you were going to talk to someone.
What happened?”

I wouldn’t be able to hide it from them, so I supposed there was no point in trying.

“It was why I didn’t want you along.
What I was worried about from the beginning.”

“Daniel,” Malcolm said. “He hurt you.”

I shook my head once, and stopped, the dizziness growing fiercer.
“He wasn’t anywhere near me.
It was an accident.”

“You got hit by a car?” Jimmy asked.

Such a simple lie, but it didn’t go with my injuries.
And I had promised him, more than once, that I’d never lie to him.

“A bomb,” I said.
And oddly enough, it wasn’t Daniel’s.
It had been Jervis’s.

“The bomb in the Village?” Gwen said. “The one that’s all over the news? The one that killed the cop?”

It was on the news? Did they report the names of all the victims? Or did they wait, pending notification of relatives?

“Yeah,” I said.

Gwen frowned at me.
The panic must have shown on my face.

“What?” she asked.

But I couldn’t tell her.
I glanced at Malcolm.
He was watching me.
Somehow I had to let the boys know that we were leaving.
We had to get out of town now.

“You’re one of the survivors?” Gwen’s voice went up.
“What were you doing there?”

“Trying to join the cop.
I wanted to talk to the guy who lived in the apartment.”

“For heavens’ sake, why?” she asked.

“Because I thought maybe he would know who was shooting young people on the streets of New York.” That sentence sounded too harsh
,
too.
I obviously wasn’t myself.
I wasn’t usually that blunt.

“You thought he was the guy who was going after Daniel?” Malcolm asked.

I almost nodded, but caught myself.
“I’m convinced of it now.”

“But the police are handling it, right?” Gwen said.
“There’s nothing more for you to do.”

But there was something.
I just couldn’t remember it.
Something that they probably wouldn’t figure out.
Something that I had seen.

I knew better than to force it.
The blast had blown away bits of my memory, and I had to trust that those bits would return.

“How about lunch?” Malcolm asked.

Lunch.
I had been out a long time.

“Do we have a paper?” I threw the covers back, trying not to wince as the stitches pulled in my left arm.

“Yesterday’s,” Malcolm said as he hurried to my side.

I waved him away.
I was wearing only boxers.
The wound on my leg looked red and angry.

“We’re going to need some hydrogen peroxide,” I said.
“And some cotton balls.
Would you mind getting that along with a paper?”

“What for?” Jimmy asked.

“I don’t want to go back to the hospital with an infection,” I said. “I’ve still got things to do.”

“You don’t gotta do nothing,” Jimmy said. “They arrested Daniel.”

I looked at him.
“How do you know that?”

“Radio news,” he said.

I glanced at Gwen. She seemed somewhat oblivious to the conversation.
She had moved to the side of the room and was looking through my pile of clothes for something for me to wear.

I had seen her do that a hundred times.
Having her here was a flashback, an unpleasant one.
I hadn’t treated her well.

Malcolm vanished into the hallway.
“I left the eggs on the stove,” he said. “There’s toast, too.
I’ll be right back.”

“Do you have money?” I asked, but the door closing was my answer.

Gwen had found a shirt that was still folded. The pants I had worn yesterday were ruined.
They were in the garbage, along with the remains of my shirt.

“I can get it, Gwen.
Thanks.”
My tone was gentle.

She smiled at me.
“I’ll set the table,” she said, and left the room.

“I’ll help,” Jimmy said, and followed.

I put on the shirt she found, moving my left arm cautiously so that I wouldn’t reinjure it.
My leg was sore, but I managed to get pants on over the wound.
The cotton rubbed against the stitches, making them hurt.

My ears still rang, but my balance was back.
I got up slowly, feeling the blood rush to my head. The headache was fierce.
I had to use the wall to support myself.

Before I went into the kitchen, I used the bathroom.
I washed up, careful to avoid the stitches — it helped having had them before; I knew how to take care of them — and then I looked in the mirror.

My face was covered with scrapes and scratches.
A thin cut ran across my right eyebrow — too small for the doctors to do more than tape shut.
Another cut ran under my browline, and still another along my right ear.
No wonder I had felt so much blood.
A lot of it had been mine.

I left the bathroom and walked slowly into the kitchen, feeling like an old man. The headache combined with seeing Gwen in a Harlem kitchen felt like a flashback — a moment from my past that I didn’t want to relieve again.

Flashback.
Something floated across my brain and vanished again.
Close.
Almost there.
If I didn’t push, the memory would return.

“I’m sorry, Gwen,” I said as I sat at the table.
“This couldn’t have been what you expected when you came here last night.”

She set a plate of steaming scrambled eggs in front of me.
My stomach growled. They smelled fantastic.
Two pieces of heavily buttered toast rested on either side.
Malcolm’s days as a short-order cook had served him well.

“I had hoped for more,” she said as she went back to the stove.
“You always had so much potential, Smokey.”

She sounded like my adopted mother.

“I been telling her, Smoke, that you’re not always like this. That we got a home and a job, and that you take real good care of me,” Jimmy said.

“He’s been quite the defender,” Gwen said, setting a place in front of him. “You have a wonderful child here, Smokey.
I hope you realize that.”

“I know it,” I said.

“He’s homesick, and trying valiantly to live with whatever crazy idea you got into your head this time.” Gwen took a small plate of eggs for
herself and sat across from me.
“Going after murderers and bombers? What were you thinking, Smokey?”

“I work as a private detective, Gwen,” I said.

“And bringing your son along—”

“Gwen, you haven’t seen me in a long time.
Don’t pretend to understand my life.”

Jimmy raised his eyebrows at me.
I had just done something I always yelled at him about: I had snapped at someone, seemingly without provocation.

But the provocation — and the embarrassment — with Gwen was more than a decade old.
We fought a lot, mostly about me, and she had mostly been justified.
I had been a mess in those days.
The war still haunted me, and so did some of the work I had done afterward.

I wasn’t sure if I had been entirely sane in those days.
Anything could make me slip back into the past.
Korea was more real to me than New York had been, than Gwen had been.

Add to that the fact that I hadn’t known how to use the varied skills I’d gained from my education, my military service, and my unhappy childhood.
It took years, and some extra training in Memphis
,
before I found that I worked best alone, on my own schedule, and in my own way.

“I just look at the evidence I see,” Gwen said. “You’re badly injured, that new scar on your cheek, some other scars I don’t recognize.
You’re doing dangerous work, and you brought a child into the middle of it.”

“I’m fine,” Jimmy said.

“Gwen,” I said.
“I owe you a great debt for what you’ve done here, but my life has changed a lot in the past fourteen years.”

“I see that,” she said, giving Jimmy a sideways glance.
She wanted me to explain him.
I wouldn’t.
I was glad he hadn’t.

“You scared him, you know,” Gwen said, as if Jimmy weren’t there.

Jimmy
bowed his head and dug into the eggs.

“I know,” I said. “It would have scared him worse if a police officer had come here to tell him I was in the hospital.”

All the color left Jimmy’s face.
“You wouldn’t’ve done that.”

“I considered it.
The hospital wanted me to do something like that, since I was so stupid and didn’t get us a phone.
Speaking of which,” I said to Gwen, changing the subject, “didn’t you tell me Alex was home? Does he know where you are?”

Jimmy’s hand was shaking. Even the idea of having the police show up had terrified him.