Andrew Gross: Reckless

He had seen this so many times, he thought he could just put it aside.

But he couldn’t. Everything always came back.

In the clash between memory and forgetting, memories always won.

“Ty…?”

He recognized her as soon as he turned. After all these years.

At the back of the line behind him at the dry cleaner’s on Putnam. The soft green luminous eyes, the midwestern drawl bringing him instantly back. The pleased surprise so radiant in her smile.

“April?”

“Oh my God, Ty…” He stepped out of the line and she hugged him. “God, it’s been years…Four?”

“Maybe five!” he said, drinking in the sight of her. “How are you?”

However many years had passed, she looked the same. Better. Years had blossomed on her. Confidence shone in her face. With her honey-brown hair and freckles still dotting her cheeks, you could have mistaken her for a fairer Julianne Moore. She had on patched jeans and a long, gray sweater under a large down parka. Looking quite the country girl. There was something that sparkled in her.

“I’m fine, Ty. We’re fine. I heard you were in town here. On the force. You don’t know how many times I meant to come in and say hi.”

“So, hi,” Hauck said, grinning.

She giggled back. “Hi!”

It was like when you see someone you haven’t seen in years and you’ve forgotten just how much that person once meant to you. And then it rushes back, all at once. He took her hands and studied every line on her pretty face.

She said, “You know, I think about you a lot. I ran into Doctor Paul last month. Believe or not, we bumped into each other at the movies in Stamford. Sorta like we are now…Some art film. You ever see him anymore?”

“No. Not in years.” He shook his head. “Not since…” They moved away from the line. “So tell me how you are.”

“I’m fine. Really,” she said as if he needed convincing. “I am. We all are, actually. Marc’s still at Wertheimer. Doing great. Becca’s twelve now. She’s into ballet. She’s actually pretty good. She’s trying out for The Nutcracker at SUNY Purchase.”

He grinned. April had danced as a kid. “Why am I not surprised?”

She smiled at him. “Always the good guy to have around…So what about you?”

“Well, I’m here. Two years now. I’m living in Stamford. I’m head of the Violent Crimes Unit on the force.”

“And your wife? It was Beth, right?” He nodded. “Did things ever work out?”

“No.” He shrugged resignedly. “We never got back together. Split up for good around three years back.”

“I’m so sorry, Ty.”

“It’s okay. Jessie’s getting big now herself. She’s ten. A bit more into soccer than ballet.”

“Who would’ve ever guessed that?” April smiled knowingly.

There was a lull. Hauck realized he still had her hands in his. Finally, without drawing his eyes to them, he let them go.

“You look good, Ty. All that stuff seems like such a long time ago. Another life. We both turned corners, didn’t we? We made it through. That’s what he always said.”

“We did.” Hauck nodded. Her face brought so much back to him. “We did.”

April glanced at her watch. “Ugh. Becca’s probably waiting for me at school. Doing the high-class chauffeur thing. We ought to get together. I’d really like that, Ty.”

“Yeah, we should.” Hauck knew it was one of those things that would probably never occur.

“I should go.” Then suddenly her eyes brightened. “Hey, c’mon, out here…There’s someone I want you to meet.”

She looped an arm through his and took him outside. A silver Mercedes SUV was parked in front of the store. She led him around and unlocked the rear passenger door. There was a boy in back. Four, maybe five. A mop of straw-colored hair. Eyes as lively and moss-green as his mom’s. Maybe it was the sunlight that shone off his face, or the light that fell on April’s, radiating from her, as if she was showing him a snapshot of her own heart.

“This is Evan, Ty…”

Hauck stood up, his gimpy knees emitting a crack. A pressure built up in his stomach, the sweats coming over him. He pressed back against a sensation of tightly coiled anger and the feeling of being sick.

Memories always won.

A young CSI tech he had met once or twice named Avila came up behind him, startling him. “Bad scene, huh, lieutenant?” The kid blew his cheeks out like some twenty-year veteran who had seen this a hundred grisly times.

“It’s not ‘lieutenant’ anymore. I’m no longer on the force.”

“Still, it’s hard to put it away, isn’t it, sir? I guess it stays in the blood.”

“What stays in the blood, son?” Hauck looked at him.

“I don’t know.” Avila shrugged. “What we do.”

He looked back at the kid with his black crime kit, barely six months into his career. He gave him a wizened smile. “No, you can’t,” Hauck said. He patted the kid on the shoulder and left.

You can’t put it away.

You can’t put what’s inside behind you.

No matter what corner you turn.

The Talon Group, Hauck’s new employer, was a worldwide security company doing business in thirty countries.

Most of their revenue came from the corporate division. Background screening for key employees and directors. Forensic accounting. Data recovery. Protections against internal theft. Another division handled crisis management-PR, media training. And there was another side of the company, GTM, Global Threat Management, that specialized in providing protection for diplomats and contractors in the Middle East and on dangerous posts abroad, and acted as a consultant to various foreign governments.

Hauck had joined the company as a partner in the firm’s new office in Greenwich.

Leaving police work was a big shift in his life. He’d been in law enforcement for twenty years, rising rapidly out of college through the NYPD’s detective ranks and ending up in their Office of Information. Then, after his younger daughter was killed and his marriage fell apart, he eventually found his way back near the place he had been brought up, in the drab, working-class section of Byram on the Greenwich-Port Chester border. Slowly, he built his life back up, taking over the Violent Crime division in town, graduating to head of detectives. Solving two high-profile murder-conspiracies got him on the TV crime shows and made him a bit of a celebrity around town. Put him in line for chief when Vern Fitzpatrick retired.

But rubbing up against that same established power base, he knew he could never fully be happy there.

Now he had a corner office with a fancy view of the sound. A pretty secretary out front. Access to important executives. Right off the bat he had brought in two new pieces of business: High Ridge Capital, a hedge fund-he coached one of the partners’ kids-and the town of New Canaan, which was looking into security screening on new applicants. A lot of the work had been pretty mundane. Compliance issues. His bright spot was the mortgage thief.

That afternoon, around one thirty, Hauck’s boss, Tom Foley, senior managing director of the firm, knocked on Hauck’s door. “Ty, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

Foley was tall, Princeton-educated, wore suspenders over his pinstripe shirt, and he came in with a stylish, blond-haired woman Hauck pegged as being in her midforties. She wore a white cable-knit sweater over crisp beige slacks, her hair pulled back into a re-fined ponytail. Pastel-pink lipstick. She also wore one of those fashionable white Chanel watches on her wrist.

Foley said, “Ty, say hello to Merrill Simons.”

Hauck stood up and came from around his desk. Merrill Simons looked like she could’ve been on the cover of Greenwich Magazine, hosting a garden tour at her Town and Country-style twenty-million-dollar estate. He shook her hand and motioned to the couch. “Why don’t we sit over here?”