Beautiful Lie the Dead. Barbara Fradkin
guy today. Conceding defeat, he cut another slice and listened while Tony chattered on about the show. Through the chatter he heard Hannah switch off the television. She came to stand in the kitchen doorway a minute, watching them, then turned to head upstairs. She looked unusually worried. He wondered if her mother had already been working on her.
It was almost an hour before he gave Tony his final goodnight kiss and shut his bedroom door. Barely five years old, the little boy seemed to need less sleep than most grown men and had devised a remarkable repertoire of stall tactics. Half an hour of bedtime story was essential, despite the fact that Tony was beginning to read for himself. Then came a dozen questions about the chapter they had read and what was going to happen to Tom Sawyer next.
Hannah’s door was closed by the time Green finished, and he went down to pour himself a glass of wine before facing her, fortifying himself not for his daughter but for the tricky foray into the mother-daughter minefield.
To his surprise, she was standing in the kitchen doorway when he turned around. The worried look was back. “That missing woman. That’s where you were tonight?”
He nodded.
“Any luck finding her?”
“Not yet. But she may just have taken off.” Green didn’t like bringing his work home. He needed some walls, not only to shield his family but himself. There had to be a place in his life where evil was barred at the door. He took a deep breath, preparing to change the subject. “Want some wine?”
Hannah’s smile grew wary. “Uh-oh.”
He grinned, hoping to ease the path. He had no worries about the example he was setting. In her wild eighteen years, Hannah had done far worse. “Your mother called.”
“I figured something like that.”
“She wants you home for the holidays.”
“I am home.”
It was three simple words, but it packed a punch. For a moment he couldn’t speak. As if she feared she’d strayed too far into mushy land, she shrugged. “Christmas in Lotusland isn’t the same. It rains, everyone gets hammered and Mom gets the whole thing catered with the weirdest food. Peking duck, Pad Thai, seaweed soufflé. She and Fred get in a fight, he goes off to see his kids and I have to listen to Mom say I’m all she’s got.”
Green smiled at her sadly. It sounded so like Ashley; she’d always had the brains and maturity of a two-year-old. “Maybe things are different now.”
“Yeah, maybe she’ll have had so much botox and nip and tuck that I won’t recognize her. Maybe she’ll have dyed her hair black.”
“She misses you, honey.”
“She doesn’t even know who I am!” Hannah shot back. She had joined him at the kitchen table, and he noted that she’d already drained her wine glass. He didn’t offer another, suspecting that even the first had been a mistake.
“Honestly, all those years I lived with her, I never felt like I belonged. I kept thinking there was something wrong with me, because I’d look at Mom with her bleached blonde hair and her pretty dresses and her little girl oohs and ahhs, and I’d feel like a big, ugly lump!”
Green suppressed his astonishment. Hannah was barely five-foot two, as petite and delicate as a pixie. “You’re gorgeous!” he said, feeling like all fathers the inadequacy of the praise. As he expected, she snorted in dismissal.
“Why couldn’t I love her, why couldn’t I be what she wanted? I thought she must have messed with some alien from outer space. Until I met you.” She looked across at him and reached for the wine bottle, daring him to disapprove.
He held his tongue. “The alien from outer space?”
She grinned. “Yeah, I know. It took me a long time to realize I was staring in the mirror. But I feel more like me here, with you and the Ritalin kid and Zaydie than I ever did in fifteen years with her.” She took a hefty slug. “And in case you start getting ideas, that just means you’re as edgy and crazy and angry as me. You don’t look at the world through this lacy film of superficiality. Mom doesn’t live, she floats. She’s got no anchor, and the minute she bumps up against something ugly, she bounces off into sparkly waters again. I couldn’t stand going back with her, Mike. Not after—”
“But she’s your mother.”
“Is she?”
Startled, Green laughed. “Of course! Of that I’m sure. I wasn’t sure of much else back in those days, but I remember your birth. Your mother was as far from pretty dresses and perfect hair as you can imagine. She sweated and cursed and howled in pain to have you, and when you finally decided to come out—ass first, I might add—she loved you from the first second she held you in her arms. We both did.”
Hannah stared into her wine glass. She was still, as if the air was too thick to breathe. Green waited, understanding her well enough now to know she was hard at work behind the stillness.
“Fuck,” she muttered eventually.
“It doesn’t have to be for long,” he said. “A week, maybe?”
“I don’t want to miss Hanukkah,” she said, still not looking at him. “Who knows how long Zaydie...”
There was no need to finish the thought. It was one he himself thought almost every day. His father was eighty-eight, with a feeble heart and failing lungs, facing each cold winter even frailer than the last.
“Well,” he said cheerfully, “that’s the great thing about Hanukkah. It’s eight days long.”
Only the faintest blush of pink smudged the horizon up ahead as Green drove eastward along the Queensway towards East Division Station. Traffic was light, but he winced at the long line of headlights inching into town in the opposite direction. He would be coming back that way in less than an hour.
He held a coffee in his right hand and balanced a bagel against the steering wheel with his left, trying to avoid smearing cream cheese or spilling black coffee onto his pants. He’d left home at this ungodly hour because he was determined to catch Adam Jules before he got busy with his day. Before his old mentor could dodge him one more time. He knew Jules lived alone in a high-rise condo downtown, but in all the twenty-five years he’d known the man, Green had never been privy to his home address or phone number. As far as Green knew, no one in the police department knew, except the senior brass.
Green had had a restless night interrupted by dreams of his ex-wife spiriting Hannah away from him just as she had eighteen years earlier, smashing the fragile affection that had been building between them. Adam Jules was in the dream too, much younger and new to the department, still possessed of his slight French Canadian accent. He had been chastising Green for neglecting his baby daughter and lecturing him that a police officer who was not grounded in family love would ultimately crash and burn on the punishing front lines of Major Crimes.
This was a peculiar sentiment coming from Jules. Even more peculiar, Jules was animated, even passionate.
Green awoke from the dream unsettled and confused. After a quarter century picking up the detritus of mankind’s more brutal clashes, he’d grown used to bizarre dreams. His subconscious at work, cleansing his soul. Vicious criminals resurfaced in his dreams along with poignant victims and unlikely heroes, all intermingled during sleep in startling new ways. He’d learned to accept the wild rides through his subconscious without questioning. Actors in his dream dramas were seldom who they seemed.
In all those years, though, Jules had never been anything but quiet and still, a ghost-like constant in the emotional chaos around him. In reality, Jules had never admonished him for neglecting Hannah. They had barely known each other back then, Jules a new sergeant in Major Crimes and Green an undisciplined young uniform grappling with his first undeserving death, a naked toddler drowned in the family