They didn’t call the cops. They called James. He was waiting on call near the house with several other police officers that he personally deemed he could trust. The last thing they needed was Isabelle pulling something on them all, managing to swing it her way one last time. She’d already proven she was more than capable of swaying cops before. Roarke was not interested in a repeat incident when he finally had her.
Hanna went upstairs to retrieve the scared boy.
“Hi,” she said, carefully, quietly, from the doorway of the room, lingering in it like a folkloric vampire waiting for an invitation.
He was in the corner. He had headphones in his ears and his hands slapped over on top of that. His eyes had been squeezed shut when she first entered, now he was looking at her with wide, terrified eyes. She felt terrible for him. This wasn’t his fault, he didn’t ask for it. His father was lying unconscious out in the hall in a small pool of his own blood from his broken nose, his mother was downstairs, staring down the barrel of a gun that his uncle was pointing at her. Maybe by now she was even in handcuffs.
Those were not images he’d be able to get passed or banish from his mind with any real ease. That would stick with him forever. Hanna remembered her own time, watching her father get attacked by police officers or thugs to whom he owed money. Those images were a tattoo on the inside of her skull like a graffiti mark her brain would constantly be trying to wash away. It turned her hard, made her a cop. But James had been her softness, her friend. That’s what this boy needed. He needed proof that adults could be kind, that there could be good in the world.
“Can you hear me?” she asked, pointing to his headphones. He didn’t stir. “I want to talk to you, but I it won’t do much good if you can’t hear me, huh?”
He blinked. His hands slowly slid down, off the overly large headphones. She guessed that was as much as she was going to get. He could hear her, enough anyway. It was a start.
“My name is--”
She paused. Had she really been Laura? Had she been that person since the moment she walked into the bar and told Roarke her name was Hanna and she wanted in on his gang? Hanna wasn’t quite that woman she was going to pretend to be when she first entered into this mission, the woman Hanna was now was something different entirely. She was a blend of Hanna and Laura, she was uniquely the woman crouched there, looking at a scared boy, hoping to make a connection.
“My name is Hanna,” she said. “But do you want to know a secret? My real name is Laura.”
It felt good to say it. She hadn’t even told Roarke her real name. She didn’t want to give a face and label to that other side of her, the person she was before she met him. She didn’t want to encourage that dissonance by making the lie, the other person, the girl she was real. But it felt good to tell this boy, this boy who had no notions about her or her name. She wanted him to trust her, both sides of her and the person they combined to become.
“What’s your name?” she asked. “You don’t have to tell me. But you know both of mine.”
He didn’t say a thing. She smiled and shrugged. She still stayed in the doorway. She wouldn’t break this momentum they had so far. She got him to listen to her at least, despite the sounds of the police downstairs, his mother shouting loudly, Roarke shouting back. It wasn’t helping her situation. She rolled her eyes, huffed, and stepped into the room, shutting the door behind her. The boy flinched.
“It’s okay,” she said. “They’re just loud, right?”
The sounds of shouting died to a muffle through the wood of the door and she sat down on the floor, crossing her legs and holding her knees like she used to do in preschool.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I am. I think we’re going to get food. I hope we are. Would you like to go with us?” He didn’t say anything. “You have an uncle you know. His name is Roarke and he looks mean but he’s actually a huge softie. He’s going to take us to get food because we can’t stay here.”
He blinked. His tiny brow furrowed and set in. He breathed heavily like trying to look bigger and angrier than he was. She could see the seeds of Roarke in him and couldn’t help but smile. She was looking through a time machine into a small version of him from years and years ago. She wondered if he was ever this small, ever this scared. It was hard to imagine now, with the big man he was but maybe there was hope for this boy as well.
A bang at the door interrupted the silent calm of the room and she tried not to glare too hard.
“Give us a minute,” she shot back and turned back to the boy who had put his hands back over his ears again, curling farther in on himself. She was going to kill Roarke when she got out of the room. “Sorry about that.”
The boy, slowly, took his hands away from his ears again. This time he also removed the headphones covering his ears. He was a cute kid, she’d give him that. He was small, quiet, and his face was a picture of bright eyed innocence. It was impossible to think he came from Isabelle and her psychotic boyfriend. This boy was far too good to be wrapped up in their world. He was also far too good to get wrapped up in the world of the Pharaohs.
Isabelle had been nuts, she was a vengeance crazed lunatic, but she had a point. Her anger at her family was justified, even if her actions were not. They stole her identity from her, her independence, her ability to choose for herself. Her lashing out, harboring resentment, that could have been predicted by any therapist of anyone in the family took a moment to ask her if she wanted to talk. This boy would be the same if the Caracals got a hold of him or Roarke got too eager at the idea of turning Clark’s own son against him. Maybe the boy was a gifted musician or painter. Maybe he’d be a math whiz.
Isabelle had a future that was snapped away from her and in that moment Hanna realized it was not a younger Roarke she was looking at in that boy but a younger Isabelle before the conditioning and control set in. He was still free, he could do anything. And she’d be damned if anyone, even Roarke, took that away from him.
They sat together for another half hour with Hanna making one-sided conversation with him before he finally agreed to be taken out of the room and into the hallway. By then, his father and mother had been taken away, the blood and debris cleaned up. Roarke and James had sense of mind enough to prevent any unforgettable images. The boy held her hand, clasping at her fingers like a lifeline. He didn’t let go the entire time. He insisted on sitting next to her in the back of the cop car.
“We’ll get the bikes later,” she whispered to Roarke.
Instead they drove to get that food she promised him. They settled for crappy Chinese takeout and took it to a park where birds were chirping and the sun was out. The boy ate in silence.
“You get a name out of him?” Roarke asked, picking at what was left of the four pack of eggrolls.
“Jason,” she said. “Don’t know about any nicknames or anything. But he answers to that name at least.”
Roarke nodded. He was watching the boy with unreadable eyes. Hanna couldn’t tell if it was with suspicion, with anger, or with pity. It seemed to be a mixture of all those things. She couldn’t blame him. The day was a lot to process, the entire situation was a lot to process. The past months had been hectic, a rollercoaster, and they ended bombastically. It was hard to admit to themselves that it really was over. It really was done. Isabelle wasn’t waiting around a corner to try and get one last jab at them. She was behind bars. The head had been cut off the Caracal snake. They’d find out in the coming weeks how the rest of the chips would fall.
***
“You’re way too small to understand any of this, but this is a 3/8ths wrench and crap like that--sorry, stuff like that matters,” Roarke said to the small boy staring up at him.
Hanna had been with Jason for most of the past few months. Roarke filed for temporary custody of the boy when a social worker appeared and attempted to take him on as a ward of the state. Hanna, who had nearly been victim to the same fate, nearly panicked at the possibility and Roarke stepped in. He was the boy’s next of kin, his biological uncle. They awarded him foster care and until further notice, Jason was part of the family they were building.
They watched him learn how to smile. He was quiet, a wallflower by nature it seemed and made even shyer in the presence of people he didn’t recognize. He was most comfortable with Hanna and Roarke couldn’t blame the kid. She was kind and soft and, despite his genetic relationship to him, she was probably the one who understood the boy the most.
He liked video games, he was good at them. It had the practical skill of some excellent hand-eye coordination they discovered while playing a pickup game of soccer with him in the park. He could be quite the athlete someday though Hanna warned Roarke several times not to push him, to let whatever was going to happen do so naturally. Despite his annoyance at her constant nagging, he couldn’t blame her, considering how Isabelle turned out.
“One day you’ll be able to get in here and get your hands dirty,” Roarke said
The boy said nothing.
Okay so maybe he wasn’t a natural born mechanic. That’s okay. He could work with that. He could handle it. He didn’t need to be a carbon copy of Roarke, he didn’t need to fit in perfectly with the idea of what the family should look like. He was learning to be okay with that, to let this kid out and do whatever it is he needed to do with his talents. That was the freedom that Isabelle had been denied.
He wouldn’t learn his likes and dislikes and hobbies in one afternoon. It would take year to get to know this boy fully. He was talking more but he was still quiet, reserved, and wanted to remain as anonymous and silent as possible. Roarke was certain at this point it had less to do with him being shy and scared of his new surroundings (after all he had a year to adjust) and more to do with his natural inclination to simply be a quiet, observant kid.
He’d nurture that too. He was learning all about being nurturing and helpful and things from parenting books that said made good fathers.
“Alright, well this has been informative and boring,” he said. “Should we find Aunt Hanna?”
His face lit up at that and nodded. Roarke rolled his eyes but smiled, placing a hand on the back of the boy’s shoulder and giving him a nudge towards the door. He skipped out. He was beginning to think the kid had a little bit of a crush on Hanna. He smiled, he could put up with some competition.
He saw Isabelle sometimes. They took him to the jail once a month or so. He really didn’t like ferrying a kid in and out of a state penitentiary. But Isabelle had rights, she was allowed to see her son, even if she was behind bars. They never took him to see his father. Isaiah wanted nothing to do with his son, too busy trading cigarettes and smuggling coke in and out of the jail to care what his boy was up to. Those visits with Isabelle were often incredibly hard to get through. Hanna was often the one to take him since Roarke wanted little or nothing to do with the entire thing. Isabelle was gone, as far as he was concerned.
“She asks about you,” Hanna said, the third time she returned from a visit with Jason in tow.
“I don’t care,” he said, cranking the bolt on the bike he was working on.
“Are you sure?” she asked, sitting across from him. Her stomach had still been huge then, carrying a nearly full grown baby inside, ready to greet the world.
“Yes. It’s better for everyone if I don’t go, stay here, call it a day on the whole thing.”
They didn’t have conversations about it after that and Hanna never asked him again, silently tugging Jason along when the time came to see Isabelle again.
He did overhear Hanna talking to Amber about it one day, claiming that Isabelle was better, was getting much more human as the days went on. He ignored it, pushed it to the back of his mind. He didn’t need to deal with it. One day he might reconcile with his sister. But as the days went on, it became clearer and clearer that day wasn’t anywhere close.
***
Hanna was holding their child and it never stopped taking his breath away. Rick made fun of him often for practically swooning at the sight of the mother and child in the kitchen every time he came home. Roarke told him if he kept it up he’d take away his godfather status.
It had been a girl, like they both wanted. The named her Jasmine because it had nothing to do with either of them. No mothers or aunts or sisters had that name. They wanted this child to have a completely fresh start in life; there was no expectations, no names or legacies to live up to. There was only life and everything that waited for her.
“She’s been fussy all afternoon,” Hanna said, turning to the pair as they walked into the apartment. She was lightly bouncing the cooing child with a messed burp rag over her shoulder.
Sometimes he felt bad for the way she was left home alone throughout the days. She claimed she preferred motherhood to her badge. Her last official act as a police officer had been testifying on Roarke’s behalf when the rest of the charges against him were dropped and Isabelle tried to bring up new ones. She also had signed off on the paperwork that disbanded the Caracals and liquidated their assets to the public and back to the government. Then she went off and had a baby and became the strongest woman that Roarke had ever known.
Her willingness to walk away from that life, to put down the badge and the gun and work for their child, was inspiring to him too. So one day he woke up and handed over the presidency of the organization to his sister. Amber always had a head for things like this; she was a natural leader, an organizer. She kept the bar afloat while he was playing petty games with Isabelle and so far she was doing better than him at virtually every aspect of it. He was overjoyed to know he was a better father than he had been a gang leader. It was his greatest accomplishment.
“If you want dinner you’re going to need to make it yourself,” she said. “This kid will not let me live.”
He smiled. “What are you thinking, Jay? We try our hand at dinner or we order a pizza?”
“Pizza!”
Hanna rolled her eyes and huffed. She always insisted they needed to eat healthier but Roarke shrugged and kissed her cheek, his hand grazing the engagement ring sitting on her finger knowing that everything was exactly as it should be.
THE END
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