Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

I slid my arms around her waist and pulled her up on top of me, leaned back on the couch and slid my hands up under her sweater, ran my palms along the edges of her breasts. She bit down on her lower lip and her eyes widened slightly.

“You said something to me the other morning,” I said.

“I said a lot of things to you the other morning,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh God’ a few times if I remember right.”

“That wasn’t it.”

“Oh,” she said, clapping her hands against my chest. “The ‘I love you’ phrase. Is that what you mean. Detective?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She unbuttoned my shirt down to my navel and ran her hands over my chest. “Well, what of it? I. Love. You.”

“Why?”

“Why?” she said.

I nodded.

“That’s the silliest question you’ve ever asked. Don’t you feel worthy of love, Patrick?”

“Maybe not,” I said as she touched the scar on my abdomen.

She met my eyes and hers were kind and warm, like benedictions. She leaned forward and my hands came out of her sweater as she slid down my body until her head was at my lap. She tore open the rest of my shirt and laid her face on the scar. She traced it with her tongue, then kissed it.

“I love this scar,” she said, resting her chin on it and looking up into my face. “I love it because it’s a mark of evil. That’s what your father was, Patrick. Evil. And he tried to pour it into you. But he failed. Because you’re kind and gentle, and you’re so good with Mae and she loves you so much.” She drummed the scar with her fingernails. “So, you see, your father lost because you are good, and if he didn’t love you, that’s his fucking problem, not yours. He was an asshole, and you are worthy of love.” She rose on all fours above me. “All of mine and all of Mae’s.”

I couldn’t speak for a minute. I looked into Grace’s face and I saw the flaws, I saw what she’d look like when she was old, how in fifteen or twenty years many men would never be able to see what an aesthetic wonder her face and body had been, and it was just as well. Because it didn’t mean shit in the long haul. I have said “I love you” to my ex-wife, Rence, and heard her say it, and we both knew it was a lie, a desperate want perhaps, but far removed from a reality. I loved my partner and I loved my sister and I’d loved my mother, though I never really knew her.

But I don’t think I ever felt anything like this.

When I tried to speak, my voice was shaky and hoarse and the words were strangled in my throat. My eyes felt wet and my heart felt as if it were bleeding.

When I was a boy, I loved my father, and he just kept hurting me. He wouldn’t stop. No matter how much I wept, no matter how much I pleaded, no matter how hard I tried to figure out what he wanted, what I could do to be worthy of his love instead of victim of his rage.

“I love you,” I’d tell him and he’d laugh. And laugh. And then he’d beat me some more.

“I love you,” I said once as he rammed my head into a door, and he spun me around and spit in my face.

“I hate you,” I told him, very calmly, not long before he died.

He laughed at that one too. “Score one for the old man.”

“I love you,” I told Grace now.

And she laughed. But it was a beautiful laugh. One of surprise and relief and release, one that was followed by two years that dropped off her cheekbones and landed in my eyes and mingled with mine.

“Oh my God,” she groaned, lowering herself to my body, her lips grazing my own. “I love you too, Patrick.”

14

Grace and I weren’t quite at the point yet where one stayed over at the other’s house long enough for Mae to find us in bed together. That moment was coming soon, but it wasn’t one either of us was going to approach lightly. Mae knew I was her mother’s “special friend,” but she didn’t have to know what special friends do together until we were sure this special friend would be around for a long time. I had too many friends growing up who had no fathers but an amazing supply of uncles parading through their mothers’ beds—and I’d seen how it had fucked them up.

So I left shortly after midnight. As I was fitting my key into the downstairs lock, I heard my phone ringing distantly. By the time I made it up the stairs, Richie Colgan was talking to my answering machine:

“…name of Jamal Cooper in September of seventy-three was—”

“I’m here, Rich.”

“Patrick, you’re alive. And your answering machine’s working again.”

“It was never broken.”

“Well, it must not like taking messages from the black man, then.”

“You haven’t been getting through?”

“I’ve called you half a dozen times in the last week, got nothing but ring-ring-ring.”

“Try my office?”

“Same thing.”

I picked up my answering machine, looked underneath. I wasn’t looking for anything particular, it just seemed like what one did. I checked the jacks and portals in back; nope, everything was hooked up properly. And I had received other messages all week.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Rich. It seems to be working fine. Maybe you misdialed.”

“Whatever. I got the info you need. By the way, how’s Grace?”

Richie and his wife, Sherilynn, had played matchmaker between Grace and me last summer. It had been Sherilynn’s theory for the past decade that all I needed to straighten out my life was a strong woman who’d kick my ass on a regular basis and take none of my shit. Nine times she’d been wrong, but the tenth, so far, seemed to be working out.

“Tell Sheri I’m smitten.”

He laughed. “She’s gonna love that. Love it! Ha-ha, I knew your ass was done the first time you looked at Grace. Cooked and smoked and marinated and hung up in strips.”

“Mmmm,” I said.

“Good,” he said to himself and clucked. “Awright, you want your info?”

“Pen and paper are at the ready.”

“Case of Heinies better be at the ready, too, Slim.”

“Goes without saying.”

“In twenty-five years,” Richie said, “there’s been one crucifixion in this city. Kid name of Jamal Cooper. Black male, twenty-one, found crucified to the floorboards in the basement of a flophouse in old Scollay Square in September of seventy-three.”