A/N: I apologize for any typos or inconsistencies, for some reason my beta still doesn't watch Peaky Blinders.
Truth
Truth is: he told May he did bad things.
He told May he did bad things and he told Grace that he was scared. Shouted at the walls and talked with her stare piercing through his skin all the way to the back of his head. "It's unfamiliar to you, but not to me. I can fucking be scared and carry on."
(Weeks later, he let Tatiana wrap her hands around his neck and squeeze until he thought she was going to kill him. He thought she was going to shoot herself too.)
.
Truth is: it was Ada's hands, back then. Ada's hands on his forearm. The first thing that he felt when he couldn't speak, abruptly stopped in his tracks, shoes tainted with the white dust from the gravel grounds. "Tommy," she said and he barely heard a whisper, lower than the sound of his own breath. Ada has their mother's eyes: he'd always thought that was what sanity was supposed to look like. "Tommy, look at me," she insisted, her palm against his neck, his lost gaze hovering between the stars and his toes (like a boy who's broken in through the window.) He remembered his wedding night and the races, and the dancing, and the look on Grace's face when he promised. He pushed Ada away and she slapped him across the cheek, hung onto the fabric of his coat.
"Let me fucking go," he wrestled against her arms, glared at her sad smile, her features so close his vision was blurred. "I need to see my fucking wife!"
(When they were kids, Ada would stand in the way and they would pull at her hair and stomp on her feet, and she would scream as loud as she possibly could but never move away. "You listen to me, Tommy," she said. "She's dead. Grace is dead.")
.
Truth is: he sees her in his dreams. It's not always bloody and messy, sometimes, it's just the edge of consciousness, sometimes it's just the memories of when Charlie was born and she wouldn't let anyone but the both of them touch him. He'd get up in the middle of the night and find them asleep on a chair, his tiny body snuggled up against hers; his son would stir and look at him. "Come on, Charlie," he'd whisper, "Mama needs some rest."
(One night, Tatiana started taking off her clothes in front of him, layer after layer; he thought: how so very chic, and how so very not. Reached up to cup her breasts; she slapped his hands away. Her voice had stopped sounding appealing, back then.
"That's unfair," he'd smirked, sitting against the back of the bed.
She'd taken a finger to his mouth, whispered in his ear, "what in life ever is?")
.
Truth is: what Tatiana does, it's addictive. He learns how to do it to himself by asking Lizzie about it — well, asking but not really asking — just as something he saw someone do at the Russians'. "I had a client once who would tie a rope around his neck and pull as we had sex. Probably did it when he touched himself, too." She'd stopped speaking, for a moment, looked over at him. "I never wanted to do it for him," she'd added, faking an afterthought. "It's fucking sick, Tommy."
(He finds what's left of the powder that Grace delicately applied on her face every morning and uses it to hide the bruises that form against his skin. He finds it fits, somehow.)
.
Truth is: he doesn't have a plan.
A plan is blowing powder on a fucking horse and waiting for the bets to come in. A plan is certainty, a healthy dose of it at least, like a bet on a racehorse. You see, horses, they get ratings. The money that you make depends on two factors: whether the horse wins the race, and how likely the horse was to win the race in the first place. It's all about detail. If you see something that others don't and success turns on that tiny, little factor, your bravery and foresight are rewarded. A plan is calculating the odds and weighing in the risks, and deciding that the outcome most favourable to you is the one most likely to occur. A plan is formulating another plan in case that most favourable outcome is challenged.
You don't formulate a plan with your back against the wall. You scour for an exit road that's lined up with armed vehicles on each side while you beg your own soldiers not to open fire at you.
(And still, it looks like they might.)
.
Truth is: when he lies in bed at four o'clock in the morning and watches the sun come up, Charlie sleeping soundly on his chest and a gun within reach of his right hand (his son's seen it once, so he guesses that's yet another broken promise), he imagines making a run for it. "Fuck these people," he told Grace and, "I need you," he said, affirmative, like a lifeline (I love you). There was liquid burning the inside of his throat that night, a liquid that said this was all supposed to be about you and me. She, the girl who warned, 'I'll break your heart,' and he, the boy who caved, 'already broken.' Lizzie deserves a medal, he thinks, for agreeing to try and help fix the unfixable.
(He'd make a run for it, but not like Esmee offered. He'd make a run for it and find a house, a haven in the countryside, with horses and land, and a river. He'd teach Charlie how to ride once he was old enough, watch anxiously as the horse stepped out on its own. "Don't go too fast," he'd say, "Mama's watching.")
.
Truth is: there are plans that he makes, and there are things that happen. A few days after everyone is arrested, he hears gunshots, fired from the cemetery near by, a soldier's funeral. In France, he used to think of his body wrapped up in a Union Jack as a form of salvation, and 'don't burry me anywhere there's mud, Tommy,' Danny had asked. It's early morning that day and the noise rings in his ears like the keys that lock a jail cell, he looks at his son and packs Charlie's bags; they're out the door faster than he thought was ever possible with a two-year old.
"We're going to see Mama's horse," he half-lies.
('Make us safe,' Grace's voice had ordered — Major Grace, the only one who outranks a Captain.
"I'm trying," he says. I'm sorry, he thinks, and apologies come off like the bricks off a fucking wall.)
.
Truth is: May greets him as you'd expect: with her arms crossed and a death glare, standing outside the fortress of a house that she lives in (it looks much like his, these days). She doesn't say a word but her gaze drifts from him to Charlie when she hears him, playing gently with his toys in the car. 'You get him too many of those,' Pol had said, once, wooden stick figures of men and animals, his own little farm.
'He likes them,' he'd said.
"We're here to see the horse," he says, now, but May doesn't look like she acknowledges his words, ignores the sound of his voice and walks directly towards the boy. His heart skips a beat, out of habit. She isn't a threat, he has to remind himself, she isn't going to kill him. Every time he blinks, Charlie gets taken away by the bad boys who do bad things — different bad things. He tries to think of something else, counts the months – years — since he's last been here. He kept sending money for her to train the horse, race it, but never showed up. For Grace's sake as much as his. He'd promised though, 'I'll come find you,' and never did.
May squats down a little to face his son and there's something about it, it's oddly comforting.
"Hey, big boy," she smiles, shakes his tiny hand. "What's your name?"
"Ah-lie."
There are very few words that he can say correctly and "mama" is still a huge part of his vocabulary. May turns to Tommy for clarification: it's the first time he a shadow of something that looks like friendliness on her face since he got here. "Charlie," he says and she nods, grabbing the boy's hand.
"Of course you can see your horse, Charlie." She takes him in her arms like she's done that her whole life, walks by, hardly looks up. "He looks exactly like you," she says.
(They spend the afternoon with Grace's Secret, watch her run out on the gallops. Later, he teaches Charlie how to brush the horse. "Gentle," he whispers, as the animal sighs, a sound loud and strong. Charlie tries to imitate it, grumbles in his young, baby voice; it makes him laugh, it makes May laugh, she turns and looks at him, takes the brush from Charlie's tiny hand. His son fits here, Tommy thinks, the way he, himself, has never really fit anywhere.
"Goodness," she whispers, to herself almost. "I wish I'd won.")
.
Truth is: he stays over, that night. It's funny how they all think it comes easy to him, when all he does is fight to accept a better solution isn't always available. Charlie gets tired and May offers, just like that, "you can put him to rest in one of the guest rooms, if you'd like." It's a gift of God, he thinks, the one that allows you to delay the unthinkable.
She's asked for tea from one of her employees when he comes back. "Will Mr Shelby be staying the night, Ma'am?" He hears the maid ask, knows sick curiosity from genuine solicitude when he hears it, "I could make dinner for two if you'd like?"
Before he even has time to consider it, May opens her mouth, as she lets a dash of milk drop into her cup. It colours the liquid, a cloud forming and spreading in the water. "That would be perfect, thank you," she says, doesn't look at him.
"Shall I also prepare the guest wing, Ma'am?"
Tommy's own mouth opens, this time, but her actions keep him from speaking. There is something wholly fascinating about the way she brings the tea to her mouth, takes a sip, and holds her cup with two of her long, delicate fingers. In that moment, he wonders if she holds a secret kind of strength, a noble one he couldn't ever grasp. She stares at him for a long moment. "That won't be necessary, thank you, Bonnie."
("You're being presumptuous," he tells her, when the both of them are left alone. He turns down her tea, accepts her whiskey.
She turns around, hands him a glass. "Am I?")
.
Truth is: he kisses her, later, after dinner, when they've both drunk what he thinks is the appropriate amount of alcohol. He runs his hand in her hair; it's wavier than in his memories, wilder, perhaps. "You don't have to do this, you know?" He says, breaking from her lips.
She looks at him, a hand on his knee, stills like she doesn't understand the way he's come to think of sex as a toxic addiction, these days, something that always warrants retribution. He slips dirty money to Lizzie that might or might not clean up by the white touch of her fingers, lets Tatiana enjoy that power hungry high that killed his wife. Grace, he sees her face every time he shuts his eyes, her face in a war zone. He remembers how she became reassuring, after a while, home-like: he would look into her eyes and would feel like she knew, like he knew, what to do, who to trust; she became that fine line that defined what right and wrong meant, because she'd seen him at his worst, and because he'd seen her, too. He looks up at May and her large, gipsy-like dark brown eyes and it looks like an empty shell behind her, like she never understands, but knows the rules of a world that Shelby boys will always be banned from.
"I don't have to do anything, Tommy," she tells him, her voice clear like the first heavy drop that hits a window before a storm. "It's one of the benefits of not having a reputation to maintain, anymore."
(As she takes his hand and walks him to her bedroom, she whispers in his ear, "now kindly behave like a gangster again.")
.
Truth is: he doesn't tell May about Grace. Not again. Today, there's nothing left to say.
He lies in bed after spending half an hour in Charlie's room trying to lull him back to sleep, so May does ask, though, one thing. She's tracing the line of his spine with her forefinger, her chin touching the back of his shoulder when she says, "was it your fault? That she died?"
He turns around to face her, touches her cheek and looks into her eyes.
"Yes," he says.
She nods, silent, and he thinks about how foreign this world must have seemed to her, back then, how much further it must feel now. She must have read about it in her issue of the Telegraph, 'gangster's wife shot dead in Birmingham' the headlines read, because that's all his son's mother was, wasn't it? A gangster's wife.
(That's all he is, anyway.)
.
Truth is: even in the bleak mid-winter, the sun rises, and rises, and rises again every fucking day. Sometimes, he dreams of things on hold, quiet, a moment, his lips against Grace's that night. If Hell is an eternity, he thinks that's his, the moment before all the others, knowing what's about to happen with no means to stop it.
When the sun finally rises that morning, May is sound asleep and he sneaks out for a while, tiptoes in the silence of dawn down to the stables, steals one of the horses for a ride, like he used to as a kid. He'd got caught, once, lifted by the coppers and brought back home in the dark, cold streets of Birmingham; the paint in their house was coming off the walls. "I'm not going to jail?" he'd asked, incredulously, a genuine question in the mouth of a twelve-year-old — Dad had been to jail for stealing things that didn't belong to him, after all, or so Aunt Polly had said.
He remembers the officer's smile, how he ruffled his hair with his hand, "Not this time, kid. Not yet."
They'd knocked on the door and Polly had made her apologies, promised to talk some sense into him. "They've just lost their mother," she'd explained, her words muttered out of the neighbour's earshot. "You're getting careless," she'd added, finally, when the doors closed.
He wonders what his mother would say, now. What common sense would suggest in the face of the bleak mid-winter. After the van left, after the shouting and the screaming stopped, he sat on the floor of Charlie's bedroom as he slept, listening to the clock, the minutes ticking by. 'I heard the black birds sing,' Arthur had said. Well, it's a nice song they have, the black birds, one he hadn't heard in a very, very long while. He listened to them and he listened to the wind as it hit the windows, how it came in bursts. Closing his eyes, for a second, he could almost feel it against his skin, hear the sound of the waves, the Ocean, back in Galway, Grace's hand in his. They'd walked down the streets to the entrance of the canal, the seagulls cawing away as the tide went out, boats standing dry on the riverbed. He hadn't told Grace, back then, how obvious it was to him that if anybody lived in a country beautiful as this, they should have a right to declare it their own. In the house, in Birmingham, he listened as the floor creaked when he pressed his bare toes to it, echoing in the emptiness, covering Charlie's regular breathing.
Let Polly take charge, his mother says, now, as he rides on. In his head, he's a boy; her arms are wrapped around his shoulders. She wears that perfume she always wore, it smells like the grass in the Black Country. Run, his mother's voice repeats, over and over again to the beat of the horse's steps against the earth. Save Charlie. Run.
(When he gets back, May's waiting for him on the stairs outside the door, her arms crossed across her chest like the day before. "I thought you'd stolen my horse and given me a baby as payment," she says, smiles but the smile's off, like the one she had in her eyes when she took off his shirt last night and noticed the burn marks at the base of his neck. He'd thought of telling her he wouldn't do it like that, if he had to, that Morphine would be his way to go. He's been told it's like falling asleep.
"That wouldn't be stealing then, now, would it?" He replies, kisses her lips when he reaches the step below hers.
She holds on to him longer than she needs to, her lips against his. Another moment, he thinks.)
.
Truth is: they tell you there are things that money can't buy, and they are right.
He enters the tearoom with May, watches his son as he plays, sitting on the wooden floor. As far as he can see, Charlie has acquired new property. The farm animals are now stationed next to a big, large dollhouse, with a garden and flower pots. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, dining hall, a large attic under a pretty convincing fake slate roof. It's fully furnished but cut open in half, a fourth wall missing in all the rooms and for some reason, one of the cows had made its way up the stairs and into one of the bedrooms. Tommy smiles as he retrieves it, sits down and hands it back to his son. "Animals don't go inside the house, Charlie."
"Dada," Charlie just says as he catches the cow in his tiny hand, and puts it back immediately, in the kitchen this time. May watches, from the back of the room; Tommy could feel her stare on him even with his eyes closed.
"It used to be mine," she tells him, a bit later, pointing at the house. The white winter sun softly grazes the room, hits the side of Charlie's face, his hair a lighter shade of brown. "From when I was a child," May pointlessly clarifies. "I'll admit the furniture's a bit out-dated but he seems to like it, so —"
"Mmh," He nods, lights up a cigarette, puffs out smoke to the ceiling. "Thanks."
When he turns to look at Charlie again, the cow, the horse and a chicken have all made their way inside the kitchen. His son looks content, Tommy thinks, mumbles to himself stories he alone would ever be able to tell. He feels May's thigh against the fabric of his trousers as she sits next to him, their backs against the wall. Still, though, animals don't go inside the house, Charlie, the voice in his head insists. He reaches out to grab the toys and put them back down, his son's tiny fingers grab his, with a stern look on his face. "No," Charlie's childish voice says in what Tommy realises is an attempt to stare him down. His son's blue eyes reflect his and he loosens his grip on the toys, pulls his hand back. Wonders if children are just born to know that rules are meant to be broken, and if the ones who never stop breaking them ever get to grow old.
"I think there's a new rule," May says gently. Her shoulder bumps against his in what he doesn't think is a real accident. "I think fake animals are allowed into fake houses."
He sighs, puffing out smoke, bending one of his legs, his foot flat against the floor. At home, Polly had insinuated, once, that he'd created a pattern of always handing Charlie back to Mary, Ada or herself whenever he happened to throw a tantrum. He'd denied it, of course, but truth be told, as much as he knows children need to push to test the limits, he doesn't really ever want to be the one in charge of pushing back.
He shakes his head as Charlie continues to play, discreetly stubs out his cigarette on May's expensive wooden floor. "Fake animals are allowed into fake houses, eh?" he repeats, coldly, avoids May's concerned look. Adds, in a whisper, to himself almost, "by order of the Peaky Blinders, eh, Charlie?"
"What?"
"It's a phrase that —" He begins, feels her trying to catch his look, stares ahead in front of him. It's a phrase that we say, he thinks; that started out as joke, he remembers; that means something, or used to mean something, at least. In the bleak midwinter, for friends; by order of the Peaky Blinders, for enemies. (But then, bullets get fired either way, now, don't they?) "Fuck it," he says like he did when walked to his own death, out there on that field. "It's just words, May."
She's silent for a while, seems to think about what words to choose next. "I always meant to ask, Tommy," she starts, dares. He's expecting something else, anything else, but then she says, "why the 'Peaky Blinders'? Why the name?"
It makes him laugh. Not a big, loud, frank laugh from before the war, but a laugh nonetheless, a real one that seems to wake up the muscles in his jaw, one that makes her look up instantly in surprise, like she's done something terribly wrong. "What so funny?" She asks and he can hear the offended undertone in her voice. Why are you laughing at me?
"I'm not –" It's just – "Of course, you —" Of course you wouldn't know, he thinks, doesn't say though, scans the room with his eyes for his cap instead. He spots it, on a table a few feet away from her, points at with his head. "Bring it to me, I'll show you," he says. She looks sceptical at first. "I swear, I'm not mocking you, bring me it to me and I'll show you."
So, she does, and as she gets up, he takes advantage of his vantage point to watch her body as it moves, her dress tighter around her hips, if he squints he can distinguish the shape of her arse, the narrowness of her waist, her heels enhancing the movement as she walks. She turns around suddenly and catches him looking, sits back down next to him with a smile on her face and hands him the cap. With his fingers, he pulls at the peak while holding the back in his left hand, shows her the blades sewed in the gap.
"See?" He says and she nods, leaning a bit closer to him. He takes her forefinger in his hand, has it carefully running against the woollen edge. "My father, he," he starts, stops, wonders for a moment if the story's worth telling. He thinks yes, he thinks he's going to be honest. "My father, he used to get into fights. Bar fights, robbery fights. And he was a useless, violent, drunk so, obviously, he'd lose. So, one night, when he came home, he asked my mother to sew razor blades into his cap, 'to defend meself,' he told her. And so, she did. And the next time he was in a fight," his hand sizes the back of the cap and repeats the familiar motion against the air; he hears the sound of flesh being cut when he blinks. "Well, you get the gist of it," he says, putting the cap down next to him. "Peaky fucking blinders."
("That's rough," he hears her say as he lights up a cigarette, and she lights one for herself, too. He scoffs, shakes his head, sighs, his voice freezing the air.
"That's what gangsters do, Mrs Carleton."
"That's not what I meant," she says, quietly, brushes a strand of hair off her face.
"Ah," he breathes, nods, wonders what her own childhood memories must look like. "That's who gangsters are, then."
Because of who we fucking are, he hears himself say, because of where we're fucking from.)
.
Truth is: when he formulates plans, he likes to think of alternative scenarios. Sometimes, he beats them up until only one survives. Sometimes, they all lose, and that's when it depends what way the coin lands. The coin sent him to war, once.
Tomorrow, when the prison gates open and they all get out:
- Stay, fight, trust no one, the first plan says. In this one, sometimes, he manages to save them all, sometimes he dies trying.
- Stay, fight, trust the family. In this one, he comes back to accusations of betrayal and Polly, fucking Polly and her fucking wisdom that tells her there's a right time for everything. She puts the leadership up to a family vote, and Mrs. Compromise elaborates a clever plan to cut through the business like it's a fucking cake. In this one, they all die, but at least, there's no more blood on his hands.
- Leave, never come back. In this one, well, he's got a lot of blood on his hands, Polly's, and Arthur's and John's, but at least, he keeps whatever's left of his wedding vows to the one person who's ever loved him.
After lunch, Charlie naps for a bit in his bedroom upstairs; when he wakes, Tommy takes him on a walk in the park. They play, and run, and look for snails. May doesn't come, says it's too cold out, but the bleak mid-winter is on its way out, that afternoon, and he even picks a daisy up from the grass. When they get back, she laughs when he puts it in her hair. Her lips are warm against his, her fingers cold beneath his coat.
("You came back," she whispers in his ear with a smile on her face, standing on tiptoes.
"Where else would I go?" He asks.)
.
Truth is: when he puts him to bed, Charlie doesn't ask for Mama, that night. In the early days that followed Grace's death, he'd got into the habit of trying to distract his attention with stories of horses and magic, with tickles and hugs. He guesses it worked, in the end, because 'he asked for me,' he'd told Mary, and after all, it was true.
You're all he's got, Grace's voice tells him, her blonde hair delicately grazing her shoulders. You're poison, Polly spits in his face.
He needs a drink, he thinks — many, many, drinks. He touches his son's forehead, resists the urge to hold him in his arms one more time. "I love you," he says, hears May standing quietly in the doorway, tries very hard to keep his voice from breaking. "You know that, right?"
(By dinner, he's already so drunk he lets his wine glass fall to the floor.)
.
Truth is: they make it upstairs, eventually. May's not happy, to say the least, as the house spins around him. He figures he needs to sit down, somewhere, anywhere, and Charlie's bedroom seems as good as anything. He opens the door but May grabs his arm immediately, shuts it back. "You'll wake him," she says, her voice cold as a dagger in his back.
He mumbles something unintelligible; she drags him to her bedroom. She'd told him a story, once, about how she'd learned, at fourteen, from a senseless doctor, that she wouldn't ever get pregnant, how mortified her father had been, how they'd wanted to make her a nun. "And then I met James," she'd said, her voice calm and loving, clutching at a space near her heart. "He knew, but he married me anyway. 'We'll grow old together,' he'd said," or so she'd said, "and I was so focused on my own happiness at finally finding someone who understood, that it didn't even occur to me that he could —" She'd stopped herself, then, trailed off at the war that took the boy she loved away from her. "I'm boring you, you wouldn't care, anyway."
He'd interrupted her as she sighed, kissed her lips with a hand on the small of her back. "I do."
(He cares a bit too much about everybody, he knows, that's always been his issue.)
.
Truth is: she instructs him to sit on the bed but he drunkenly runs, stepping over his feet and goes for whatever's left of the whiskey they were drinking earlier. It's not his most glorious moment but the truth rarely ever is; his legs shake and he falls over, sits on the floor with a glass in his hand like his father used to.
"You've had enough," May tells him and watches as he swallows the liquid that doesn't even burn his throat anymore, a disapproving look on her face.
"Fuck you," he replies, without thinking. "I'm a gangster," he mumbles, thinks of throwing the glass across the room to prove his point, but can't really muster up the strength. "I can say whatever I want."
She looks down at him from where she sits on the bed, sighs. "You think that's who you are?" She asks, shakes her head. He laughs, here we fucking go, he thinks. "It's not," she insists. "Not with me, not with her, not with Charles."
Charlie, he thinks, says, something. Dada, he hears his son's voice say, but when he closes his eyes, he sees the Priest, and the diamonds, and the police.
"No," he tells May, downing another shot. "I'm worse than that."
"Of course, you are," she says, shaking her head, sarcastic as women often are, and he scoffs again, because really, how the fuck is it so easy for her to say these things like she doesn't really mean them. He remembers New York and the loud sound the trains made when they entered the station, remembers Grace's husband who jumped in front of tracks. "Tommy, look, —" May starts, doesn't get a chance to finish. There's a thought, a true thought behind all of this, and it hits him now and again, like Arthur seems to want to off himself.
"They took him, May."
He's gone over it thousands of times now, a few seconds, dissected, cut wide open like a corpse. They didn't take him, he knows, the voice in his head repeats. He gave him to them, handed Grace's baby boy to that girl in the dress and the apron, and every second of every fucking day, he wonders why, why, why. Why he didn't see it coming, didn't think it would really happen, didn't think they would ever dare touch him. "Who?" May asks, when she finally looks like she understands; he runs his hands over his face, feels like he's going to choke.
"Does it matter?" His head spins even as his eyes close; it's like falling at the bottom of a well. "I blew up a train to get him back. People died, May," He says, staring into her eyes. For what? For this? He hears himself, shouting at the top of his voice, Polly's blank look taking him down from the witness box. He's starting to understand, now what Arthur meant about being fucking mad in the head, thinks about telling May about the fifteen thousand ways he knows his own life could end, about how he's always hoped for a bullet to the back of his head (quick, painless), how he'd never thought all those options could also apply to his son. He wakes up in the morning and it makes him want to vomit, like he did on that day when they took him. "It's got to stop," he tells her, because the more he thinks about it, the more it sounds like the only scenario in which his son gets to live, so it seems like the only truth worth mentioning, really.
"So, stop. Leave."
His mouth painfully twists into a smile, he feels a knife cutting deep into his stomach. "America?" He says, has heard that song before.
"Or anywhere else," she says, "Tommy, you don't have to –"
"I can't. If I leave, they all die, May." He hears himself say it before he hears himself think it, has turned it around so many times in his head he hasn't got the energy to go over it again, anymore. He's not sure she understands, really, what it feels like to have a gun pulled to your head by someone who might actually shoot, asks you to choose between the people you love most.
"So, why are you here, Tommy?" She breathes. "What do you want?"
He remembers his father, beating Arthur senseless before the words began pouring out of his mouth, the money he'd stolen, the sweets he'd bought from Mrs. Maloney. 'See,' his father had turned away, wiped the blood off his hand. 'Words always come out, Tom, remember that.'
"I want her back," he tells May, listens to the words as they come out before he can stop himself. Before he can stop his voice from breaking: painfully, like the splitting of his own skull; softly, like Grace's heart when it finally stopped beating. Before he can stop the strangled sobs from consuming his face, his lungs, from tearing his insides apart. He doesn't scream, just curls up against the wall, knees to his chest like a wounded animal. "I want her back," he repeats, like a madman, "I want her back." May doesn't try to help, just sits there, listening, and there are words, more words, strangled in the back of his throat. If he could, he'd tell her about how he misses Grace like he would miss a piece of his heart, how the sound of her voice feels like water slipping through his fingers, how he fears one day he'll forget what the touch of her hand really felt like, the way her familiar accent rung in the telephone.
May comes to sit next to him on the floor when his breathing finally evens out, her hand settling on the skin of his cheek. "I know," she says. "It goes away after a while," she adds when she knows he can hear her over the sound of the voices in his head; her thumb tracing an invisible line under his eye. Her fingers slide down to his chin and neck, he feels the wet trail that they leave against his skin. "Trust me," she says.
Trust me, he thinks, is what he told them when the police went, claws first, down for its prey, and he didn't even trust himself. 'I made a mistake,' he'd said, so fucking many mistakes that he counts them at night when he can't sleep. 'I had things to do,' and 'This is my fucking wedding day,' and 'I have a racehorse.' May has this look in her eyes; he hears a drop of rain hit the window. The sun's long gone, now.
"Why are you here, Tommy?" May asks again, pleads. Her voice is shaking like she's about to step on broken glass. His does, too.
"I thought," he mutters, stops, stares into her eyes. She touches his cheek.
"Talk to me, Tommy," she says.
His eyes shut. Truth is, he thinks, counts. One, two, three. She's still there, and so he begins to talk. "I'll kill him, May,' he tells her, thinks his heart stops beating, for a moment. "I'll kill him like I killed his mother. I can't walk out on my family, and I can't walk out on him," he breathes. Pours everything he can into the way he looks at her, and finally tells the truth:
"I need someone to save him."
(Her silence become comforting, in the dark, after a while. She takes him to bed, eventually, rocks him to sleep. They're lying face to face, he's brushing curls of hair off her face when she murmurs, "promise me you'll live, Tommy."
"I can't."
A tear rolls down her cheek. "Promise me anyway."
In the dark, he thinks of Grace, of broken promises and of the ones he hopelessly tries to keep. "I promise," he says, his voice sharp, before he can take it back.)
.
Truth is: truth is a liability. He used to think there were truths that he'd never tell. Not under the weight of a gun to the back of his head, not under the questions of a man pulling out his nails one by one, but he's grown past that, now, past that self-confident, ignorant notion that he'd be the only one above that. Everyone has a tell, everyone has a tipping point, and many truths are better left unsaid. Which is why he never goes looking for them. Not when he finds her note, the next morning, her promise (We'll be back, she wrote. Stay alive.), not when, months later, when he thinks he's safe and he's not, because that's what truth is, isn't it, admitting that it doesn't exist, that it isn't absolute, and that all you can do is trusting someone else, someone better than you, to know when to do the right thing? Trusting someone else to understand what safe means.
Sometimes, she writes him letters, telling him about their day, telling him that they've been to the beach this morning, and it becomes that much harder, the following week not to send someone after them, not to know what beach, not to know what house, not to know where. And every once in a while, he indulges in the thought of going to get him back, before a car blows up, or shots get fired, and he remembers she had the courage to do something he couldn't. He imagines Charlie running in the sand, the wind blowing in his hair; when people ask, he says he's safe, he's somewhere safe.
(It takes him another three years to tie things up, to find a balance between establishing power and inciting revenge. It's not perfect, yet, and they'll never be respectable the way he wanted to them be, but the local public school hypothetically agrees to take Charles in without him having to threaten anyone, so it's definitely a start.
When he comes home, Charles is five years old, and he holds him in his arms stronger than he ever did.)