David Hosp - Among Thieves

“No thanks,” she called back.

“Beer?”

“Nope.”

They were a mismatched couple. She’d grown used to the quizzical stares that greeted them wherever they went. He was nearly twenty years her senior, and despite having been off the force for a few years he would always look like a cop. Not the Hollywood variety, with their silk suits and their styled hair, but an old-school cop-the kind of wash-and-wear, just-the-facts-ma’am kind of cop who still viewed the world through a two-toned lens. She would never change him. Fortunately, that had never been her goal.

It was ironic. She recognized that when people looked at the two of them out on the street, they wondered how on earth he had managed to catch her. And yet she had chased him. Everything about him had captured her from the beginning. Her psychiatrist no doubt still tied the attraction to a troubled past and unresolved parental issues. Maybe he was right. On the other hand, she seemed to have less need for her psychiatrist these days.

In her heart, she knew that the attraction was more than just repressed childhood insecurity. Deep down he was smart and decent and kind, and something about his rough features, scarred and uneven, stirred a base passion in her. The past year with him had been the best of her life.

Now, in all likelihood, it was about to end.

He walked into the room, beer in hand, and sat down into an overstuffed chair cornering the sofa. “Long day?” he asked.

She shrugged. “You were there for most of it.”

“How’d it go at the doctor’s?”

“Fine.” She opened her mouth to say more, but nothing came out. “How did the meeting go with Ballick?”

He shook his head. “Not very well. Safe to say that he won’t be helping us out. On the other hand, we didn’t get shot, which is always a plus.”

“That’s good. I mean the not getting shot part.”

He looked at her and she turned away. “You sure everything’s okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. Why?”

“I don’t know. You seem weird.”

“How so?”

Kozlowski’s face twisted. He was still a novice at deciphering her moods, and he approached conversations like this the way an apprentice animal trainer approaches a tiger for the first time-carefully, and with a healthy amount of fear. “Don’t know,” he said finally. “I can’t put it into words.” It was a catchphrase he’d picked up somewhere in the past year, and he used it as a fallback defense. It was usually effective.

“Well, I’m fine,” she replied.

“Good.”

She said nothing for a while, and the two of them just sat there as he sipped his beer. “There is one thing we need to talk about,” she said finally.

“Sure,” he said. “What is it?”

“I’m pregnant.”

She had planned to say the words gently, so they would land with the weight of a feather. Instead she blurted them out, the consonants exploding in her own ears. Kozlowski looked as though he had been slammed over the head with a toaster. He sat there, his beer dangling midway between his mouth and the side table.

“I found out today,” she continued. “I was expecting the doctor to tell me that I had the flu, but, nope, turns out I’m pregnant.”

Kozlowski still said nothing.

“Well?” she said, looking at him. “You wanna join the conversation?”

“I think we should get married,” he said at last.

“Fuck you,” she replied, getting off the sofa and storming out toward the kitchen.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“You really don’t get it, do you. You don’t understand that this isn’t the 1950s, and you and I aren’t Ozzie and Harriet. I’m not some fucking damsel in distress you have an obligation to. You don’t even know whether or not I want to keep the baby.”

“Do you?”

“Of course I do, asshole.”

“So, what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that I don’t know whether I want to be married. I’ve never seen myself in that role. And I sure as hell don’t want to be married to someone who’s only asking because he knocked me up and he thinks he owes it to me.”

“Who said anything about owing?” Kozlowski’s voice was raised, though it wasn’t quite at her decibel level. “I love you, and you love me-at least it seems like you do when you’re not acting like a crazy person. You’re pregnant with my kid. I’m sorry if it seems to me like these are all good reasons why we should get married.” He got up and walked over to the window.

“I don’t care about should.”

“It’s not about should! Not in that way. But I am who I am.” He turned and looked at her. “I’m fine with what we’re doing now-this thing between the two of us-when it’s just us. But you start adding a kid into it, then, yeah, I want to be married. I want my kid to have real married parents.”

“Parents are real whether they’re married or not.”

“That’s great-for other people. But not for me. Not for us. I love you, and I’d want to be married with or without a kid, but if we’re going to have a child together I need to be married.”

“So are you saying you want to be married, or you need to be married, or you should be married? Which is it?”

“Jesus Christ! I don’t know!” he yelled. His face was turning red now. “I don’t parse every goddamned thought I have out like that! Tell me which is the right answer, for the love of God, and that’s the answer I’ll give you!”

They stared at each other for a few moments. “You want to get married.”

“Fine,” he said, “I want to get married.”

“Fine.” She walked back and sat on the sofa.

“Good,” he replied, walking over and sitting next to her. They sat there, next to each other, both staring straight ahead, not saying anything for several minutes. Then he picked up his beer and took a sip. “So, we’re gonna have a baby,” he said, still not looking at her.

“And we’re gonna get married,” she added.

“I’ll be in my seventies when this kid graduates college,” he said, his voice flat.

“If you’re expecting me to wear some big frilly white dress and walk down an aisle somewhere, you can forget it,” she replied.

“My seventies,” he repeated. He took another sip of his beer.

She looked over at him, studying his face. Then she reached over and slid her arm under his, grasping his hand. “You’ll be a better father in your seventies than any other man I’ve ever known at any age.”

He squeezed her hand, then turned to look at her. “You’ll look beautiful no matter what you wear,” he said.

They sat there for a long time, both of them struggling to adjust to the sudden, tectonic shift in their worlds. Neither of them was particularly comfortable with change, and Lissa knew that this was a bigger change in Kozlowski’s life than he could ever have anticipated. But she also knew that he would handle it. As much as he hated change, he was the most reliable man she had ever met.

As she considered the changes to her own life, a strange feeling came over her. It was a feeling with which she had little experience, and it overwhelmed her as she tried to put her finger on what it was. It took several moments, but at last she figured it out: for the first time in her life she felt totally, utterly happy.

Sally wasn’t used to the quiet. She’d spent her life in neighborhoods where the noise never died. There was a constant stream of yelling and slamming doors and sirens. There was always a bar nearby that violated last call, and her mother was always one of the last to leave, often just coherent enough to find her way home. Sally couldn’t remember a night when her sleep wasn’t interrupted.

In Finn’s apartment near the top of Bunker Hill at night, though, there was no noise. Every once in a while a car would drive by, but the cars on the hill had decent mufflers and never backfired, so she had to strain to hear them. There was no screaming, and people kept their televisions low enough that their neighbors didn’t have to listen to the show on next door. She found the silence disconcerting. Left alone with her thoughts she felt physical discomfort, as if she were lying in a pool of insects crawling over her skin, around her eyes and ears, into her skull.