Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

His father looked up at the ceiling, as if he saw cobwebs there that needed tending. He pursed his lips, then looked at his son, a slight quiver in his chin. He said nothing.

“Who got you the list of the Letts once I was out?”

“As luck would have it,” his father’s voice was barely a whisper, “we took care of that yesterday in the raid.”

Danny nodded. “Ah.”

“Anything else, son?”

Danny said, “Matter of fact, yeah. Luther saved my life.”

“So I should give him a raise?”

“No,” Danny said. “Call off your dog.”

“My dog?”

“Uncle Eddie.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Call him off just the same. He saved my life, Dad.”

His father turned to the old man in the bed. He touched his cast and winked at the man when he opened his eyes. “Ah, you’ll be fit as a fiddle, as God is my judge.”

“Yes, suh.”

“Indeed.” Thomas gave the guy a hearty smile. His eyes swept past Danny and the windows behind him. He nodded once and then walked out the same door as Connor.

Danny found his coat on a hook against the wall and put it on.

“That your pops?” the old man said.

Danny nodded.

“I’d stay clear of him for a while.”

Danny said, “Looks like I don’t have much choice.”

“Oh, he’ll be back. His kind always comes back. Sure as time,” the old man said. “Always wins, too.”

Danny finished buttoning his coat. “Ain’t nothing to win anymore,” he said.

“That ain’t the way he sees it.” The old man gave him a sad smile. He closed his eyes. “Which is why he’ll keep winning. Yes, sir.”

After he left the hospital, he visited four more before he found the one where they’d taken Nathan Bishop. Bishop, like Danny, had declined to stay, though Nathan had slipped two armed policemen to do it.

The doctor who’d worked on him before his escape looked at Danny’s tattered uniform, its black splotches of blood, and said, “If you’ve come for your second licks, they should have told you—”

“He’s gone. I know.”

“Lost an ear,” the doctor said.

“Heard that, too. How about his eye?”

“I don’t know. He left before I could hazard an informed diagnosis.”

“Where to?”

The doctor glanced at his watch and slipped it back into his pocket. “I’ve got patients.”

“Where’d he go?”

A sigh. “Far from this city, I suspect. I already told this to the two officers who were supposed to be guarding him. After he climbed out the bathroom window, he could have gone anywhere, but from the time I spent with him, I gathered he saw no point sacrificing five or six years of his life to a Boston prison.”

The doctor’s hands were in his pocket when he turned without another word and walked away.

Danny left the hospital. He was still in a fair amount of pain and made slow progress up Huntington Avenue toward the trolley stop.

He found Nora that night, when she returned to her rooming house from work. He stood with his back against her stoop, not because sitting down was too painful but because getting back up again was. She walked up the street in dusk yellowed by weak streetlamps and every time her face passed from dark into gauzy light, he took a breath.

Then she saw him. “Holy Mary Mother of God, what happened to you?”

“Which part?” A thick bandage jutted off his forehead, and both eyes were black.

“All of you.” She appraised him with something that might have been humor, might have been horror.

“You didn’t hear?” He cocked his head, noticing she didn’t look too good herself, her face drawn and sagging at the same time, her eyes too wide and empty.

“I heard there was a fight between policemen and the Bolsheviks, but I …” She stopped in front of him and raised her hand, as if to touch his swollen eye, but she paused and her hand hung in the air. She took a step back.

“I lost the button,” he said.

“What button?”

“The bear’s eye.”

She cocked her head in confusion.

“From Nantasket. That time?”

“The stuffed bear? The one from the room?”

He nodded.

“You kept its eye ?”

“Well, it was a button, but yeah. I still had it. Never left my pocket.”

He could see she had no idea what to do with that information.

He said, “That night you came to see me …”

She crossed her arms.

“I let you go because …”

She waited.

“Because I was weak,” he said.

“And that kept you now, did it, from caring for a friend?”

“We’re not friends, Nora.”

“Then what are we, Danny?” She stood on the sidewalk, her eyes on the pavement, so tense he could see goose bumps in her flesh and the cords in her neck.

Danny said, “Look at me. Please.”

She kept her head down.

“Look at me,” he said again.

Her eyes found his.

“When we look at each other like this, right now, I don’t know what that is, but ‘friendship’ seems kind of watery, don’t you think?”

“Oh, you,” she said and shook her head, “you were always the talker now. They’d have called the Blarney Stone the Danny Stone if they could have—”

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t make it small. It’s not small, Nora.”

“What are you doing here?” she whispered. “Jesus, Danny. What? I already have one husband, or haven’t you heard? And you’ve always been a boy in a man’s body. You run from thing to thing. You—”

“You have a husband ?” He chuckled.

“He laughs,” she said to the street with a loud sigh.

“I do.” He stood. He placed a hand to her chest just below her throat. He kept his fingers there, lightly, and tried to get the smile off his face as he saw her anger rise. “I just … Nora, I’m just … I mean, the two of us? Trying to be so respectable? Wasn’t that our word?”

“After you broke with me” — her face remained a stone, but he could see the light finding her eyes — “I needed stability. I needed …”

That brought a roar from him, an explosion he couldn’t stop that erupted out of the center of his body and, even as it punched its way along his ribs, felt better than anything he’d felt in a long time. “Stability?”

“Yes.” She hit his chest with her fist. “I wanted to be a good American girl, an upstanding citizen.”

“Well, that worked out tremendously well.”

“Stop laughing .”

“I can’t.”

“Why?” And the laugh finally reached her voice.

“Because, because …” He held her shoulders and the waves finally passed. He moved his palms down her arms and took her hands in his and this time she let him. “Because all this time you were with Connor, you wanted to be with me.”

“Ah, you’re a cocky man, you are, Danny Coughlin.”

He tugged on her hands and stooped until their faces were at the same level. “And I wanted to be with you. And the two of us lost so much time, Nora, trying to be” — he looked up at the sky in frustration — “whatever the fuck we were trying to be.”

“I’m married .”

“I don’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit about anything anymore, Nora, except this. Right here. Right now.”

She shook her head. “Your family will disown you just like they disowned me.”

“So?”

“So you love them.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” Danny shrugged. “But I need you, Nora.” He touched her forehead with his own. “I need you.” He repeated it in a whisper, his head against hers.

“You’ll throw away your whole world,” she whispered and her voice was wet.

“I was done with it anyway.”