First, Last, and in Between Page 11

  “Am I? I remember you telling me your name. You said that most people called you Izzie, and you made a funny little frown, like it hurt or something.”

  “How do you remember that?” I asked, but he just shrugged. “I don’t like that nickname,” I agreed, “but it stuck on me.” “Izzie” sounded like a stupid child, the kind of girl who other kids had make fun of and called “Whizzy Izzie” because her clothes were smelly and stained with what they claimed was pee. But “Isobel” was an adult. A lady, like Rella always told me to be. “I prefer Isobel, like how you say it,” I said.

  “Isobel,” he repeated. “It’s a beautiful name.”

  “Is it?” I shifted to look at his face, and I came upon the fact that I had been leaning against him as I stared into the sky. I stepped away.

  “Let’s walk,” he told me. We went along the river, and he showed me more stars, and no one bothered us at all. At one point, he put his arm around me to turn my body to look at something, and I let him leave it there, heavy over my shoulders as we walked and he smoked, talking to me quietly about the constellations. It felt nice, like he was holding me to him, almost. I didn’t feel scared at all, not of anything.

  “Hey.”

  “Hm?” I responded.

  “You’re tripping over your feet,” Rory said. “You’re not talking anymore, either. You tired?”

  “Pretty tired,” I admitted. We had swung in a circle a while before and were nearly back to where we’d parked, but it had to have slipped into the next day by now. I had been up since six to get my houses done and yes, I was tired. Sore, too, because of Kash coming over in the afternoon. I always hurt some, afterwards.

  “Here we go,” Rory said, and I climbed into his car, settling into the comfortable seat. No springs to poke me at all. “Hey, Isobel?”

  “Yeah?”

  He turned on the heat, because the night had gotten pretty chilly, even with my big coat. “You should sleep while I drive.”

  It wasn’t like me to close my eyes in front of someone. I hadn’t ever slept when Kash and I were together, not once. But I was really, really tired, and right now, it seemed like such a good idea. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I will.” I leaned back as Rory started the car and turned the vent away from himself and onto me.

  “You can put the seat back,” he said. He leaned over me suddenly and I froze, all my muscles locked. But he only reached and messed with something on the side of my chair that made the back tilt until I was almost lying down. Gradually my body relaxed again, and I watched the buildings pass by out of the top of the window. It felt like it was taking us a long time to get to my apartment, but it didn’t bother me. I was so warm and comfortable in this smooth-riding car, listening to the engine purring. Rory was there, too, and I liked that a lot. It felt very safe.

  “Is that the one you wish on?” I asked him. I didn’t bother to open my heavy eyes.

  “What’s that?” He spoke very quietly.

  “That one you showed me. The bright one. I used to wish at night and I think it was that one.”

  “Maybe,” Rory answered. “Did it work?”

  “No.” I sighed, very content. The car was more comfortable than my bed. “I don’t know if I like the stars,” I mumbled.

  “I don’t know if you can blame them.”

  “I want to blame something,” I told him. “Things aren’t fair. It’s just not fair.”

  “I know,” Rory said quietly. “I’m sorry.” I heard him sigh. The car rolled along the road and I must have fallen asleep.

  I woke up the next day because the sun was pouring into my apartment window. I was lying on my sofa bed, the spring digging into my ribs, having no idea at all how I’d gotten there.

  Chapter 6

  Rory

  I checked the area carefully then nodded at the driver. “It’s all clear.” I kept an eye out, scanning the other cars and watching the few pedestrians on the wet street. The driver opened an umbrella and I waited on the sidewalk for my new boss, Leopold, to get out of the car. It was going to be my job to stand inside the restaurant as Leopold ate with his friends, to ensure that no one bothered them. Bothered, or maybe worse. The “maybe worse” was why my boss was happy that I’d been in prison, because he thought I wouldn’t have a problem dealing more harshly than other people. That was probably true.

  Leopold wasn’t so big in this city that we had to worry about those types of problems too much. But he liked to see and be seen, which meant that we were out a lot, and I didn’t care for that. And he had a routine, which was also bad news, because it meant that people could know where he was going and when he’d be there. Today, for example, we were at a restaurant near Eastern Market so he could have breakfast with old friends, like he did every Saturday. The neighborhood was already full of people and sticking to a pattern like this was a terrible move, showing a lack of basic self-preservation which pissed me off.

  It made me think of Isobel, too, and the risks she’d taken with me, in rooms alone together, getting in my car. She had been careful, though, when we’d walked at night to look at the stars—careful of threats that weren’t coming from my direction. That was good, but not good enough, because if she wasn’t protecting herself from me, she probably wasn’t protecting herself from other people, either. And the thought of someone hurting her…

  The driver, Ronnie, was staring at me and I adjusted my expression. “What,” I said flatly, and he looked quickly away as Leopold finally stepped down from the car and we walked him across the wet sidewalk.

  I checked around the restaurant before Leopold entered and it was clear. All this going out, all these routines, meant I was on guard all the time, not just for my new boss but for myself as well. Because I might have let Isobel think that things were fine now in my life, but that wasn’t true. They weren’t going to be fine until I paid back the money that I owed for the drugs, and that meant I had to find my old friend Memphis, the guy who’d cleaned it out of our safety deposit box.

  And then I’d make him pay.

  I stood near the door of the restaurant, ready if anyone came in through the front, and flicking my eyes to the back as well, just in case. Just in case, because you couldn’t be careful enough. I looked at the table with my boss yakking and laughing loudly with his friends. “Careful” was something Leopold just didn’t seem to get. Despite his life of skirting the law, he’d never had any real close calls, and that had made him complacent. Leopold enjoyed making a big entrance, getting the best table, joking with the pretty waitress. He enjoyed the spectacle, putting on the show of being the guy with power and money, but he didn’t understand the problems that could come with it.

  But today the breakfast went without any incidents besides his coffee refills not coming quickly, and soon enough we were on the way back to his gated compound, where his whole family had homes on a huge piece of land.

  Leopold being social meant going out a lot, and it also meant that he didn’t often shut up. As soon as the driver closed the car door, my boss started talking to me. “Rory, tell me something about yourself,” he called from the back seat.

  “Not much to tell,” I answered without turning around.

  “Married? Girlfriend? Kids?”

  “No.”

  He laughed, like I had said something funny. “I have all three!”

  I knew that, because I’d had to drive the girlfriend back to the apartment where he had her set up, and the whole way over she’d talked on her phone to a friend about how much she hated Leopold.

  “My wife has me by the balls,” he noted.

  Not tightly enough, apparently, since there was also the girlfriend.

  “The balls,” he repeated, “the bitch that she is. But, you know, that’s marriage. Jesus, I gotta take a piss. Too much coffee.”

  I ignored his urine problems and looked in the side mirror. “How long has that car been behind us?” I asked Ronnie, the driver, and his eyes went to the rear view.

  “
I got it,” he said.

  Leopold kept on talking to me anyway. “You take your girlfriend out in the new car I gave you?” he asked.

  “No girlfriend,” I repeated. But yeah, I had taken Isobel out in it, the first chance I got. I’d wanted to show off like I was a little boy, to let her know that I had something as good as her real boyfriend in his piece of crap car that was all flash and had no engine behind it. I had watched him a few times, pulling in and out of his apartment building. He never had Isobel with him, but he’d had a few other women riding beside him.

  I thought that one day, he and I might have a problem.

  “Good for you,” Leopold was telling me. “Stay away from women. Nothing but trouble.” He lapsed into a story about what he thought his teenage daughter was up to with her idiot boyfriend Wilder and her stupid friends, all the money she blew through and her terrible grades, how he was going to have to buy her a spot in some expensive college. Finally the ride was over as we pulled into his compound and he got out, still talking as he walked away. The driver and I looked at each other when Leopold was out of earshot.

  “You met her. What do you think about Jourdan?” the driver asked.

  “Leopold’s girlfriend? I don’t think about her at all.”

  “But you know she doesn’t give a shit about Leopold, right?”

  I glanced over at him. “You’re with her, too?”

  “Not really,” Ronnie assured me, but whatever way it was, being with his boss’s girlfriend was a mistake.

  I got into my gifted car and went over to the woodshop to work on a side project I had going and to clear my head from all of Leopold’s stupid noise, and the constant strain of watchfulness that I felt when I was with him. I looked at the seat next to me, remembering Isobel curled up there in the jacket I’d given her so long ago. She was just so damn cute in that big thing, lost in all the material, and when she was sleepy, her face was so sweet. I considered that her face was always sweet, but softer, maybe, when she was out like that. I had driven around for an extra twenty or so miles just so I could watch her, just because she looked peaceful next to me, before I’d carried her to her apartment. She curled up in my arms and I’d had a hard time putting her down on that old sofa bed.

  I was working, covered in sawdust, when I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. Isobel. “Hello?” I answered quickly.

  “Rory? Hi. It’s me, it’s Isobel.”

  “Hello,” I said again.

  “Do I hear a saw or something? Are you at the woodshop on a Saturday? Are you busy right now?”

  “I’m just working on something, yeah. What’s up?”

  “My car broke down, again. I think I just need a jump, but—”

  “Yeah, I can do that,” I said immediately. “Hang on. Cal, do you have jumper cables in your truck?” I called, and he nodded. “Where are you, Isobel?”

  “I’m on Mount Elliot, right next to the cemetery. I can’t get my car out of the lane and—”

  I heard another voice, a woman whining in the background, saying that she wanted to leave, and Isobel paused in talking to me. “Mom, the car won’t start,” she said away from the phone. “It’s a tin can and it broke down. Someone’s coming to help us.”

  “Kash?” I heard the other voice ask excitedly. “Is Kash coming?”

  “I’m on my way,” I announced loudly, suddenly so pissed off that I wanted to break something against the wall.

  “Thank you,” Isobel said, her voice full of gratitude. “Thank you so much.”

  “Stay in the car and lock the doors,” I said, and I got there within ten minutes by driving ninety across the city on the Jeffries and the Fisher and then treating Vernor like it was track on the stock car circuit. I saw her crappy tin can but Isobel wasn’t in it. She was standing on the sidewalk in the light rain with her arms out, and it looked like she was trying to keep another woman from darting into traffic. I swung a U-turn to park facing them, hood to hood.

  The woman with Isobel gaped at me as I got out. She looked like Isobel, pretty—no, beautiful, but definitely older, and definitely with more miles. She was dirty, as in she wasn’t physically clean, and she had some weird turquoise pieces of hair sticking up from her head. Both of them looked at me with big blue eyes of the exact same color.

  “Rory, thank you so much for coming,” Isobel called.

  “Told you I would.” I pointed at the woman, who had taken advantage of Isobel’s lapse in concentration to put herself into the lane of traffic on Mount Elliott. “What are you doing in the road?” I asked her. “Get back.”

  “I’m hungry,” she told me, but she listened some and stepped into the bike lane. “I’m going to get something to eat. I don’t want to be here.”

  “Sit in the car and wait for a minute,” I said. “Get out of the rain and I’ll try to get you going.” She frowned at me, but she listened again.

  Isobel sighed once the passenger door of her car closed the woman inside it, and I looked through the windshield. “Is that your mom?” I asked. “She looks just like you.”

  “Yeah, that’s my mom.” She stared at some trash in the gutter. “I was trying to take her to get something to eat and…” Her mother had rolled down the passenger window and was waving her over. “Yeah, she’s my mom. I’ll pop the hood.”

  “Izzie, he’s so big!” I heard her mother stage-whisper, and I walked away to get Cal’s jumper cables.

  When I came back, the woman was out of the car again and she stood close to me as I put on the clamps. “What’s your name?” she asked me.

  “Rory,” I told her, and she repeated it, smiling as she looked at me.

  “I’m Jade,” she said. “I’m Izzie’s sister. She’s told me so much about you, Rory.”

  “Has she?” I asked in surprise.

  “Jade, why don’t you get back in the car where it’s dry? We’ll get the engine started in a minute,” Isobel suggested, but her mom stood at the side of my car and kept yapping to me. And no, we did not get the engine going. Nothing happened the numerous times we tried to jump it, and Jade finally sat back in the tin can after whining to her daughter that she was hungry and now wet, since she had chosen to stand in the rain.

  “How old is this battery?” I asked Isobel.

  “New,” she said. “Practically new. I had to pay a bunch of money to replace it when I got stranded on the freeway a few months ago.” She kicked her car’s little tire angrily. “I guess I need another one.”

  “No, I’d say it’s probably more than that. Maybe your alternator, but you’re going to have to have it towed.”

  Isobel chewed on her lip. “Great. Great, yeah, that’s wonderful. Perfect. I was just dealing with her finances and—” She shook her head. “Never mind. Thank you for trying.” She pulled the cables off her engine and handed them back to me. “You should get back to your project at the woodshop.”

  I stared at her. “You think I’m leaving you here? Get in my car and we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  “Izzie, what’s happening?” her mom yelled out of the window. “Are we leaving yet?”

  “In a minute!” Isobel told her.

  Jade opened the door and got out, standing way too close to the lane line. A car swerved and honked. “No, I want to go, now!”

  “Mom—” Isobel started to say, exasperated, but her mother furiously cut her off.

  “Jade! I’m your sister, Jade.” She flipped back her hair and one of the turquoise pieces skittered loose and fell to the wet pavement. “Do you want to drive us somewhere, Rory?” She pushed her chest out toward me and I saw Isobel flush. “You could take us to lunch,” she suggested. “We’re so hungry.”

  “Uh, sure, I could do that,” I said, glancing again at Isobel. She rubbed her eyes.

  “Great!” her mom said, and went over to get herself into the front seat of my car. She wriggled her hips as she walked.

  Isobel’s face was now bright red. “You could drive us back to my apartment. That
would be perfect,” she told me. She shoved back the sleeves of her baggy sweatshirt and I caught a glimpse of her arms.

  I reached and took her wrist. “What is this?” I asked her sharply. Her skin was sliced by red lines and angry gashes. “What are all these cuts?”

  “My mom got a bunch of stray cats and I had to take them out of her apartment earlier. They didn’t want to go.”

  “Is that a bite?” I asked, turning over her arm. It looked to be one of several.

  She shrugged. “It’s ok.” She pulled out of my grasp. “Um, about her,” she said, tilting her head toward my car. “It’s true that her name is Jade, but she’s definitely my mom and not my sister. She’s going to act really weird with you because that’s how she deals with people. With men, especially. She tries to get what she can out of everyone but also, she’s, um, she’s mentally ill. She’ll say a bunch of stuff, embarrassing stuff.”

  “I don’t care what your mom says to me.” But I didn’t want Isobel to be embarrassed. I picked up her hand and let it rest in my palm.

  Her fingers gripped into a fist. “You will care after a while,” she told me. “Seriously, she has a lot of issues, and she’s on all kinds of medication, and she has to go to counselors all the time. I don’t do as good a job as I should of monitoring her, and today I found out that she somehow got ahold of a credit card, and she ran up a bunch of charges. Her apartment was a total mess, too, like a tornado went through it. And she does stuff like using Spam to lure six cats to live with her, and then not cleaning up after them.” Isobel stopped suddenly, shaking her head. “She shouldn’t be on her own and I know it. I just wanted to get out of that place today and get the cats out and now my car broke down.” Her voice was tight, strained. She took a breath. “You don’t have to take us to lunch. I’m sure you have better things to do.”

  My fingers tightened around her hand. “Don’t worry about me. I don’t mind helping you.”

  Isobel shrugged, unsure.