Lisa Unger - Smoke

In the locker room she changed into black baggy pants, wrestling shoes, and the school tee-shirt. She was one of three women at the school, which could be annoying. Sometimes it felt like she was fighting her way through a jungle of adrenaline and testosterone, with everyone several inches taller and many pounds heavier than she was. But she figured if she could hold her own with these guys, highly trained fighters with the boundless energy of people in extraordinary shape, she could handle herself with most of the out-of-shape street fighters she ran into on the job… and the criminals, too.

On the floor, they did forty minutes of killer calisthenics, endless push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks. It could be longer or shorter depending on what kind of mood whoever was teaching the class was in that day. Then there was a half an hour of drilling and stances. Once you learned a technique, the philosophy was you had to throw it a thousand times before you would begin to get it right. Drilling forced your head and your muscles to remember the techniques, and eventually they became more instinct than thought. By the end of the first hour, most of what she was wearing was soaked through with sweat. Then it was time to spar.

They fought without guards, avoiding shots to the head, the groin, and the breasts. The principle was that a fighter had to learn how to take a hit. You had to condition your body to endure blows and understand what it feels like to be hit. Someone who had never been hit would be shocked if on the street a blow was delivered. It’s painful, it’s shocking, and it’s very upsetting. So for the rest of the class, they basically just beat the crap out of each other… but with discipline, technique, and control. So pumped with adrenaline, they never felt a thing while sparring. It was hard play, fun in a way she could never explain to someone who hadn’t experienced it. It was only after that all the aches and pains would set in, the bruises would bloom.

When she left, she was clean. All the stress and negativity of her day had drained from her. She felt light and relaxed, happy and confident. Even though she would be two hours later getting to Benjamin, she was a better person when she got to him; not wound up from the job, not tense and snappish.

“Hey, ass-kicker.” A sexy male voice she didn’t expect surprised her when she stepped onto the sidewalk.

“Mom. You’re a badass .”

She turned to see Dylan put a hand on Benjamin’s head. “Hey, little dude, I told you no swearing around your mom.”

“No swearing, period,” she said, kneeling down and taking Benjamin into her arms. His little body always felt so good.

“But you swear all the time,” he said into her hair. He wrapped his arms around her neck and squeezed.

“Never mind that,” she said, standing and taking his hand. She smiled at Dylan, hating herself for how happy she was to see him. “What are you guys doing here? I thought you were going to the movies.”

“We saw Spy Kids . Benj was so impressed that I thought he might like to see his mom in action. I can’t believe you never brought him here.”

“You were like, pow! And like, wham!” said Benjamin, imitating her techniques. He was pretty good.

“I figured I’d start him up next year. I thought he might get scared seeing me fight.”

“No way, Mom! You’re like Jackie Chan.”

Dylan shook his head but gave her a smile. You baby him too much . That’s what he was thinking but he didn’t say it. “How ’bout some pizza?” he asked.

“Sounds good. I’m starved. There’s a place around the corner on Broadway.”

They walked up the street together, Benjamin just a few feet ahead of them throwing kicks and punches with sound effects. Dylan took her hand and she didn’t pull away. Normally she didn’t like Benjamin to see them holding hands or being affectionate with each other. She’d quashed the hopes he harbored that they’d be together again, live under the same roof. She didn’t want him to be confused. But there was something about the three of them together, walking on the street. It just felt right. It didn’t mean anything, she told herself. Just that their relationship was easier; they could be together with Benjamin, be kind to each other and not fight, not get ugly with each other. It was progress. That’s all it was.

Jeffrey had taken off to go talk to Christian’s jeweler and Dax sat in a spare office among the trainees trying to find out what he could about the specialized security system installed at The New Day. Lydia did something she thought she wouldn’t do. She went into her office and closed the door, got on her computer, and entered a name into LexisNexis. Arthur James Tavernier.

Most of the listings were not related to her father. But one of the early entries was his obituary. Short and simple, it said only that he had died and when the services would be. Would she have gone if she knew? Maybe. Out of curiosity. Maybe not. It did lead her to wonder however who had held the services. She didn’t have to read far.

The next entry was a brief article on her father’s death that had run in a small local Nyack paper. He died of an apparent heart attack in his small two-bedroom home. He was found three days after the incident when neighbors complained of the smell. At the bottom of the article, which she almost skipped, there was a single sentence that felt like a blow to the solar plexus. “Arthur Tavernier is survived by his wife of fifteen years, Jaynie, and their daughter, Este, from whom he was estranged.”

She put her head in her hand and exhaled deeply. She’d always imagined him as alone in a single-room apartment, with no one in his life. But he’d had another family. And unless Este was his stepdaughter by marriage, Lydia had a sister she never knew about. She wasn’t sure what to do with that information. She searched for some kind of feeling about it, about the way her father died, about the fact that she might have a half-sister somewhere, and came up with a kind of emptiness, a numbness that she was afraid wasn’t normal. What kind of person felt nothing when faced with these types of things?

From the leather bag at her feet she fished out the business card that Patricia O’Connell had given her when she and Jeffrey picked up the box.

“Ms. O’Connell,” said Lydia when she finally got the woman on the line.

“Yes, Ms. Strong, what can I do for you?”

“I need to know, is there a way for me to get in touch with Mr. Tavernier’s wife or his daughter?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line and Lydia heard her moving papers around.

“Well,” she said. “I’m not sure it’s my place to give you their contact information. There was nothing in his final instructions to that effect.” She hesitated, then added, “As I understand it, they were also estranged from Mr. Tavernier.” She said it like a woman who had made judgments about things she didn’t understand.

“All right,” said Lydia. “Well, did they all share my father’s last name?”

Another pause. “Ms. Strong, there was nothing about them in your box?”

Now it was Lydia’s turn to go silent. She looked across the hall through the glass wall that separated her office from the hallway; she could see the entrance to Jeffrey’s office. The box was in there waiting for her to get up the courage to open it.

“I haven’t had the opportunity to go through it yet,” she said.

“Well, perhaps there’s something in there to help you find out what you want to know.”

Lydia sighed. She hated people who didn’t easily give things that were easy to give, people for whom rules and procedures were more important than other people.