Forget Me Always

  And that is a sick, twisted comfort.

  The sounds of the basement deafen me the second I walk in. Bull’s Tail isn’t a nice bar or even a tolerable one—sawdust and piss and vomit crusting in the corners—but it’s exactly what I’m looking for.

  It’s exactly the place people’s hopes go to die.

  On a Saturday night, it’s as packed as it can be. Men swagger and guffaw into their beer and whiskey, the smell of BO and stale peanuts overpowering. Rock music blares from the creaky jukebox in the corner and the flickering LED TV above the bar shows a game only a fraction of the patrons seem to care about. The bartender is an older woman with once-bright blond hair and beauty to spare, but years of wolf-whistles and ass-grabbing have worn her to a pale mockery of that.

  “What are you having?” She flicks a half-second strained smile in my direction.

  “Two shots of your best whiskey. And a gin and tonic. On the rocks.”

  “ID?” she asks. I fish it out. Fake IDs are a necessity in the escort world—many of us working are under the drinking age. Blanche secured one for me as part of our contract.

  The bartender studies it, nods, and goes to the bar. I wait. I’m the only one here without a potbelly, and the women are starting to notice. Good. That’ll make this much easier.

  The bartender comes back with my drinks, and I down them as quickly as I can.

  “Whoa there,” a man to my left says. “You’re awfully young to be drinking that hard.”

  “You’re awfully nosy for someone that old,” I counter.

  He laughs, but it’s not an offended laugh. It’s amused. I look over at him and realize it’s the man who was watching me in the crowd during the fight with the boxer. A tweed suit covers his considerably hefty frame. He isn’t fat—in fact, quite the contrary. He has broad shoulders and muscles gone slightly to pasture. He sits perfectly straight, but with an easy demeanor to it. His right index finger and the tendon attaching to it in his arm are very well defined, classic indications of trigger finger. Military, without a doubt. His hair is white-streaked and sparse and his mustache faint. Dark eyes glitter at me.

  “People only drink like that for two reasons—to remember something or to forget something,” he says.

  “Aren’t you just full of tautologies,” I scoff. The gin and tonic burns on my tongue. The women are moving, and I’m picking my target carefully. It has to be someone stupid enough to assume the worst of me. And that means any drunk man will do.

  “It’s a girl, isn’t it?” the military man asks. I don’t dignify him with a response. “Is she pretty?”

  I swirl the leftover ice in my glass and remain silent.

  “So she’s ugly. Must be absolutely hideous.”

  “No,” I snap. “Not that it matters, but no.”

  “‘Not that it matters’?” he presses. I pause. He’s goading me into talking, but the alcohol is hitting me fast and I have nothing left to lose.

  “She’s pretty. I suppose.” I wince. “It’s not that she’s pretty. She’s pretty, but that isn’t all she is.”

  “Of course not. Otherwise she wouldn’t have you here, drinking and tongue-tied.”

  I slide my glass back to the bartender and face the man. He’s faintly smiling, hands wrapped around a bourbon ice. His silence is somehow more irritating than his words, so I break it.

  “Men like to categorize women.” I curl my lip. “Into convenient little boxes like ‘hot’ or ‘cute’ or ‘beautiful.’ It’s easy for them. But it’s never been easy for me.”

  “So this particular girl,” the man leads. “She’s none of those?”

  “She’s all of those,” I say, a little too quickly for my own liking. “And more than those, and at the same time she’s none of those. She is exactly herself, no more and no less. But saying that now is pointless.”

  “Did she dump you?”

  “She told me to stay out of her life.”

  “And so here you are, stumbling into a backwater bar to start a fight with someone just to vent all that out.”

  I narrow my eyes at him. His smile remains.

  “I’ve been alive long enough to know the face of someone looking for a fight. And I know the face of someone who knows what it’s like to fight.”

  The man’s dark eyes suddenly become unreadable.

  “And most of all, I know the face of someone who, deep down in a part of himself he won’t admit to, enjoys fighting.”

  I glare at the bar top, the polished wood reflecting my face. The man stops smiling at me and takes a sip from his bourbon before speaking again.

  “You see it sometimes, in the guys. Most of us in the army don’t like what we do, believe it or not. We join for the camaraderie, the sense of belonging, of order. Not for the blood. But every once in a while, you see a real piece of work come through. And he likes the blood. Some of them are better at hiding it than others, but it always comes out.”

  “What are you saying?” I snarl.

  “I’m saying, son, that you’re a monster,” he replies evenly. “And you hate what you are.”

  My fist connects with his jaw before I can stop it. The ice is gone. The poise and calm, rational demeanor I’d kept myself leashed with vaporizes in an instant, and he’s pushing back, shoving me by the shoulders outside, and the bartender is yelling something, and the drunk idiots are hooting and hollering, taking bets, following us as we stumble into the night air. I step in a puddle as I duck under the man’s right hook. It’s so powerful the air trailing behind it makes an audible thump noise. He’s huge. He’s taller and wider than Leo, and I don’t have a bat. He lunges for me, and I throw a trash can between us. He kicks it aside, and it crumples against the wall like a tin can.

  And for the first time since I saw Isis on the floor with blood around her head, I feel fear. Real, true, cold fear that reaches into my lungs and pulls them up through my throat.

  I put my fists up and step around another right hook, but he slams his knee into my chest and I can’t breathe, the world reduced to flashes of white and red and pain. I can barely hear the crowd whooping over the sound of my own surging heartbeat. Someone tries to break us up, but the man shoves him away and lunges for me, and suddenly my feet aren’t touching the ground, his fist in my collar as he lifts me above the cement. Our gazes meet for a split second, his curiously empty of emotion, and he throws me aside. Stars pop in my eyes, and my back hits the brick wall with a sickening thud. I try to scrabble to my feet, but my legs are pained jelly.

  The man leans in.

  “No one can tame the monster for you, son. Not your parents, not a girl. Not a college or an institution. Only you can do that.”

  I spit at his feet, the saliva bloody.

  “What do you know about me?”

  “Blanche told me a lot about you.”

  “Should’ve figured you were one of her goons.”

  “Don’t mistake me. I’m not one of hers, and I trust her as far as I can throw her. Which isn’t far, with the way she drapes herself in that tacky jewelry.”

  We both dislike Blanche, and that alone saps the heat from our fight. All of a sudden he drops his stance, his will to fight gone. The man offers me his hand up. The bar crowd departs, the excitement over for them. I glare at his palm and ease up onto my feet by myself. Every bone in my body screams for me to stop moving, to inject morphine, to roll in bandages, anything to stop the pain. The man dusts off his suit and smiles at me.

  “I heard about what you did for the Blake family. Word travels fast in the criminal justice circuit.”

  “So?”

  “So you beat up a grown scumbag, kid.”

  “It’s nothing special.”

  “No, it’s not. You’re right. Beating someone up isn’t special. Beating someone up three times your size is. You’ve got a ferocity in you, a ruthlessness. You’ve got the bloodlust in you. And you’d just be letting it go to waste on civilian life. More than that, if you don’t get it trained right, it
’s gonna backfire on you someday. You know that. You’ve always known that.”

  The bastard is spouting half nonsense and half searing truth. Of course I’ve known. He reaches into his jacket and hands me a card.

  “When you’re ready to use it constructively instead of destructively, you come see me.”

  He’s gone before I can snipe at him, and I’m alone in the alley with my aching body and bewildered mind. The card is simpler than any I’ve ever seen—simpler than the Rose Club cards, even. And that’s how I know it’s seedy, underworld business.

  Gregory Callan

  VORTEX Enterprises

  I nurse my wounds long enough to get up the energy to make it back to my car, and then I collapse. I welcome the warm relief and quiet. I drank too much. I took too many punches. I went looking for a fight. And now I’m hurt, and buzzed, and my mouth tastes like blood, and all I want to do is go back to that night at Avery’s, to that absurd sea-themed room, to the bed with Batgirl in it, to Isis, to an Isis who confessed to me with tiny, stuttering, shy words that she liked me, to a moment when everything was simple. Her and me. Her and me in a room, alone.

  My phone rings. I wince as I answer.

  “Hello?”

  “Jack!” Sophia’s sunny voice says. “Dr. Fenwall says the last payment for the surgery came through! Thank you. Thank you so, so much.”

  I push out the vestiges of the memories of that night and smile.

  “Don’t thank me. It’s the least I could do.”

  “You worked so hard. I’m really grateful. Remember when I said you could choose the place next time we went out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Dr. Fenwall said he’d let me have a few days out next week. So.”

  “I’ll see if I can’t find something fun for us to do.”

  “Yeah! But Avery wants to throw me a surprise party. For my birthday.”

  “That’s in March.”

  “I know! But if I only have a few days out, she can only plan it then.”

  “I thought we hate Avery?”

  “We do! I mean, we don’t like her, but she’s trying really hard. And it just seems unfair. And plus, if I don’t make it—”

  “Don’t talk like that,” I snap.

  “If I don’t make it,” she says more sternly, “I don’t want things between us to be bad when I… You know.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Just, please. I really want to go.”

  I sigh. “All right. I’ll ask her about it.”

  “Okay. Thank you. I know it’s hard for you, but thank you.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Say hi to your mom for me. Or, I guess I’ll say hi. It still feels weird, though, just popping up on Facebook and being like, ‘Hey Dahlia! It’s me!’”

  “Don’t worry,” I assure her. “She loves you. She always will. You can say hi whenever.”

  “Okay! I’m going to try to get some sleep.”

  “Good. Good night.”

  “Good night, Jack.”

  When we hang up, Isis’s words ring in my head.

  She’s dying, Jack.

  Why haven’t you told her what you do?

  I put my head on the steering wheel and pretend I’m somewhere else. Somewhere warm. Somewhere like that ridiculous sea-themed little room.

  Chapter Nine

  3 Years, 27 Weeks, 2 Days

  Since the trial, Mom’s been getting better.

  I don’t know if “better” is the right word. She had to be so strong for so long, just for me, and now that I’m back, she’s leaning on me again, and I don’t mind—it’s the norm for us—but I can’t help feeling sometimes like I’m a cane instead of a daughter, but then I get guilty about thinking that and make her dinner and bring her tea and tell her it’ll be all right, instead. Love is being there for someone. If there’s one thing I learned from Aunt Beth, it’s that family means being there when no one else is. That’s why she took me in when Mom couldn’t handle the divorce and me.

  Mom’s going to twice as many shrink appointments after the trial, but they seem to be helping. I see Avery at the office sometimes, and she gives me a passing sneer before flouncing out the door. She’s bitchier lately, and that means she’s happier, and that means Sophia’s probably talking to her again. Avery’s basically her yo-yo, and Sophia pulls her back and forth for her amusement. I don’t understand it, but I can see it happening the way you see a train approach a car on the tracks in slow motion. Avery is desperate to atone for whatever she did to Sophia, and Sophia pretends it’s possible. But at the very last moment, she’s going to pull the rug out from under Avery and crush her hopes once and for all. Fucking up is the worst. Not being able to make up for fucking up is absolute hell. And Avery’s been living with that this whole time. No wonder she has depression.

  I feel sorry for her. I pity her. And pity’s not healthy, but after everything Avery’s done to me, to Kayla, to Jack and Sophia and Wren, I can’t bring myself to feel something better toward her. And it’s shitty of me, and it’s not very Isis Blake-like. The old Isis would’ve tried harder to be friends with Avery again, even through all this bullshit. The old Isis would’ve soldiered in with a smile and taken all the blows, because she knew how hard it was to keep living after being broken.

  After seeing Tallie, a portion of the puzzle came together. Avery is terrified of people seeing Tallie’s grave. Sophia misses Tallie, demands to see her in the midst of her fits. Wren said it happened at Lake Galonagah. The grave is at Galonagah, too. Tallie was so young. Tallie couldn’t have been Sophia’s baby sister—her parents were long dead by then.

  Logic dictates Tallie was Sophia’s baby.

  Sophia was in eighth grade at the time. Thirteen or fourteen is right around the time everyone else started having sex at school, for better or worse, and much to the stubborn, oblivious denial of their parents. I looked it up—a baby’s skeleton begins developing in the second trimester. Ossification, the process of bones forming, is quick. It lasts from two months pregnant to about five months pregnant. The skeleton I saw was tiny, but whole and intricate. Sophia must’ve been about four months pregnant when she miscarried.

  Miscarried. The word rings hollow in my head. When I was enduring the tortures of Nameless, Sophia was pregnant and then losing her baby. She’s experienced so much loss and pain—so much more than me. She deserves happiness. She deserves to live. But the world won’t let her.

  Something in the back of my mind writhes, whispering: who slept with Sophia to make her pregnant?

  I had sex with Jack.

  I push her echoing voice from that time on the rooftop out of my head and keep moving. The hospital is quiet. Like the grave. Except people here are trying extremely hard not to be in graves. Very hard. At least four morphine drips and two crappy hospital food trays worth of hard. Being back here always makes me feel claustrophobic—the smell of antiseptic, the people in gowns wandering like ghosts from room to room, the nurses and interns all staring and trying to decide where I belong in their mini-ecosystem of healing. Naomi isn’t on duty, which I’m grateful for. I don’t want this to be any messier than it has to be. For Sophia’s sake.

  I poke my head into the kids’ ward for just a second when the guard steps away to pee. Mira and James wave frantically, and I wink and put down the plastic bag of presents inside the door. They come rushing over in their little cartoon-character pajamas with big smiles on.

  “Mira said you’d never come back!”

  “Did not!” Mira sticks her tongue out at James.

  I laugh and ruffle their hair. “I can’t stay long, but I’ll come back in the daytime this week, okay? For now just open the presents. But don’t tell Naomi where you got them. Just say it was from…uh, Jesus.”

  They nod frantically, and Mira hugs me around the neck so hard I think she’s trying to merge with me on a cellular level. I manage to pry off her fingers and sneak out just as the guard rounds the corner. The sounds of
tearing wrapping paper and squealing reverberate behind me. I made some spawn happy. And that definitely does not make me feel all gooey and happy inside.

  Sophia’s open doorway looms before me. It’s dim, and the usual flower vases line her window. I can see her feet under the blanket.

  I stand there for what feels like years. And then I take a deep breath and walk in.

  She’s not asleep like I’d hoped. She’s very much awake, blue eyes staring at me over the cover of a romance novel. This one has a knight on it and a very lost-looking busty lady.

  “Yo!” I smile.

  “I thought I told you to leave me alone,” she deadpans.

  “Uh, yeah, I’ve never been very good at following directions. Or respecting people’s wishes. Or anything at all, really. So here I am. Doing…here stuff.”

  She shoots me a withering look. “You’re annoying.”

  “That, my dear, is nothing new!” I sit on the end of her bed. “In fact, ’tis ancient knowledge. The Egyptians foretold of my coming. Actually they mostly told stories about how Isis the goddess of fertility got it on with her brother. Incest was big back then. So was not living past thirty.”

  Sophia doesn’t crack a smile, eyes set and hard like blue-black flint.

  There’s no avoiding it. Whatever tenuous friendship we once had has been tainted by our mutual insecurities. It was easy when we didn’t know anything about each other, and now it’s hard. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. Sophia’s presence was always calm and gentle, but heavy, and I feel the weight of it now more than ever.

  “I met Tallie,” I say. There’s a half second of silence, and then Sophia puts her book down slowly. I can’t stand the quiet. “I found her. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry for prying. I’m sorry for meeting her. I’m sure you don’t want many people to. I’m sorry. I’m sorry it happened to you in the first place—”

  “What happened to me?” Sophia interjects viciously. “Please, tell me exactly what happened to me, since you seem to know so much already.”

  “Whoa, hold on, that’s not what I meant—”

  “Then why are you apologizing? Do you think that’ll make anything better? Do you think that will help at all? Words don’t help. They never have. And they help even less coming from your mouth.”