Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

“None,” Luther said.

“Drop my other two thousand at the pool hall tomorrow afternoon. Give it to a man named Rodney. He’ll be the one handing out balls to the customers. No later than two o’clock. Clear?”

“It ain’t two thousand. It’s one.”

Smoke stared back at him, his eyelids drooping.

Luther said, “Two thousand, it is.”

Smoke thumbed down the hammer and handed the gun to Luther. Luther took it and put it in his coat.

“The fuck out of my house now, Luther.”

Luther stood.

As he reached the kitchen doorway, Smoke said, “You realize, your whole life, you’ll never get this lucky again?”

“I do.”

Smoke lit himself a cigarette. “Then sin no more, asshole.”

Luther walked up the steps to the house on Elwood. He noticed that the railings needed repainting and decided that would be his first order of business tomorrow.

Today, though …

There wasn’t a word for it, he thought, as he opened the screen door and found the front door unlocked. No word at all. Ten months since that horrible night he’d left. Ten months riding rails and hiding out and trying to be another person in a strange city up north. Ten months of living without the one thing in his life he’d ever done right.

The house was empty. He stood in the small parlor and looked through the kitchen at the back door. It was open, and he could hear the creak of a clothesline being pulled, decided that’s something else he’d need to tend to, give that wheel a little oil. He walked through the parlor and into the kitchen and could smell baby here, could smell milk, could smell something still forming itself.

He walked out the back steps and she bent to reach into her basket and lift another wet piece of clothing from it, but then she raised her head and stared. She wore a dark blue blouse over a faded yellow house skirt she favored. Desmond sat by her feet, sucking on a spoon and staring at the grass.

She whispered his name. She whispered, “Luther.”

All the old pain entered her eyes, all the grief and hurt at what he’d done to her, all the fear and worry. Could she open her heart again? Could she put her faith in him?

Luther willed her to go the other way, sent a look across the grass freighted with all his love, all his resolve, all his heart.

She smiled.

Good Lord, it was gorgeous.

She held out her hand.

He crossed the grass. He dropped to his knees and took her hand and kissed it. He wrapped his arms around her waist and wept into her shirt. She lowered herself to her knees and kissed him, weeping, too, laughing, too, the two of them a sight, crying and giggling and holding each other and kissing and tasting each other’s tears.

Desmond started to cry. Wail actually, the sound so sharp it was like a nail in Luther’s ear.

Lila leaned back from him. “Well?”

“Well?”

“Make him stop,” she said.

Luther looked at this little creature sitting in the grass and wailing, his eyes red, his nose running. He reached down and lifted him to his shoulder. He was warm . Warm as a kettle wrapped in a towel. Luther had never known a body could give off such heat.

“He okay?” he asked Lila. “He feels hot.”

“He’s fine,” she said. “He’s a baby been setting in the sun.”

Luther held him out in front of him. He saw some Lila in the eyes and some Luther in the nose. Saw his own mother in the jaw, his father in the ears. He kissed his head. He kissed his nose. The child continued to wail.

“Desmond,” he said and kissed his son on the lips. “Desmond, it’s your daddy.”

Desmond wasn’t having any of it. He wailed and shrieked and wept like the world was ending. Luther brought him back to his shoulder and held him tight. He rubbed his back. He cooed in his ear. He kissed him so many times he lost count.

Lila ran a hand over Luther’s head and leaned in for a kiss of her own.

And Luther finally found the word for this day …

Whole.

He could stop running. He could stop looking for anything else. Wasn’t anything else he wanted. This right here was the full measure of every hope he’d harbored since birth.

Desmond’s wails stopped, just snuffed out like a match in the wind. Luther looked at the basket at his feet, still half full with damp clothing.

“Let’s get those clothes hung,” he said.

Lila lifted a shirt off the pile. “Oh, you gonna help, uh?”

“You give me a couple of those clothespins, I will.”

She passed a handful of them to him and he hoisted Desmond onto his hip and helped his wife hang laundry. The moist air hummed with cicadas. The sky was low and flat and bright. Luther chuckled.

“What you laughing at?” Lila asked.

“Everything,” he said.

Danny’s first night in the hospital, he spent nine hours on the operating table. The knife in his leg had nicked the femoral artery. The bullet in his chest had hit bone, and some of the bone chips had sprayed his right lung. The bullet in his left hand had entered through the palm and the fingers were, for the time being anyway, useless. He’d had less than two pints of blood in his body by the time they got him out of the ambulance.

He woke from a coma on the sixth day and was awake half an hour when he felt the left side of his brain catch fire. He lost the vision in his left eye and tried to tell the doctor something was happening to him, something odd, like maybe his hair was on fire, and his body began to shake. It was quite beyond his control, this violent shaking. He vomited. The orderlies held him down and shoved something leather into his mouth, and the bandages on his chest tore and blood leaked from him all over again. By this time, the fire had raged all the way across his skull. He vomited again, and they pulled the leather out of his mouth and rolled him onto his side before he choked.

When he woke a few days later, he couldn’t speak properly and the whole left side of his body was numb.

“You’ve had a stroke,” the doctor said.

“I’m twenty-seven years old,” Danny said, though it came out, “I’b wenty-vesen airs awl.”

The doctor nodded, as if he’d spoken clearly. “Most twenty-seven-year-olds don’t get stabbed and then shot three times for good measure. If you were much older, I doubt you would have survived. In truth, I don’t know how you did.”

“Nora.”

“She’s outside. Do you really want her to see you in your current state?”

“She I mife.”

The doctor nodded.

When he left the room, Danny heard the words as they had left his mouth. He could form them in his head right now— she’s my wife —but what had come out— she I mife —was hideous, humiliating. Tears left his eyes, hot ones of fear and shame, and he wiped at them with his right hand, his good hand.

Nora entered the room. She looked so pale, so frightened. She sat in the chair by his bed and took his right hand in hers and lifted it to her face, pressed her cheek to his palm.

“I love you.”

Danny gritted his teeth, concentrated through a pounding headache, concentrated, willing the words to leave his tongue correctly. “Love you.”

Not bad. Love ooh, really. But close enough.

“The doctor said you’ll have trouble speaking for a while. You may have trouble walking, yeah? But you’re young and fierce-strong, and I’ll be with you. I’ll be with you. ’Twill all be fine, Danny.”

She’s trying so hard not to cry, he thought.

“Love ooh,” he said again.

She laughed. A wet laugh. She wiped her eyes. She lowered her head to his shoulder. He could feel the warmth of her against his face.

If there was a positive outcome to Danny’s injuries, it was that he didn’t see a newspaper for three weeks. If he had, he would have learned that the day after the shoot-out in the alley, Commissioner Curtis proclaimed all positions of the striking police officers to be officially vacant. Governor Coolidge supported him. President Wilson weighed in to call the actions of the policemen who left their posts “a crime against civilization.”