Jane sat with her hands in her lap. The room was full of silence, Jane could feel the unsaid words building up beneath the surface of the skin on her forehead. She crinkled her eyebrows together in a scowl as old as herself. Angela breathed in heavily, blew her nose loudly into a kitchen towel she had happened to be holding. Frankie startled suddenly next to her, kicking Jane in the leg as he did so.
"I have to clean this up, you kids go outside", Angela urged Jane and Frankie out of the door. Jane was confused, Angela never asked them to leave, she usually wanted them around at all times. "Who was it, just now, on the phone?" Jane asked. Frankie chimed in, "yeah, ma, what was that all about?" as Angela finally just plopped down in the chair opposite them.
"I can't talk about it, it's…too…", Angela began to sob heavily again. Jane tried to hug her in a half hearted sort of way, patting her gently but awkwardly on the arm as she did so. Frankie was more readily able to hug his mother, and did his best to calm her down. They both had an ulterior motive, as much as they loved their mother. Something had happened with dad, who neither of them had heard much about in a long time.
Frankie managed to get Angela's voice a notch or two quieter before the neighbors called the cops, and Jane had to remind them of her ever-present badge. Jane felt around in her pocket for it absent-mindedly, a habit she had more and more these days. She found it with the corner of her thumbnail, and rubbed it between her fingers. The room was silent again, the feeling Jane hated was back, her eyebrows crinkled together again.
"Janie, I'm so sorry", Angela began, but failed to finish her sentence. Jane leaned forward, her hand on her knee, feigning a patience she didn't know she could pretend to have. "What's going on? Tell us", Jane tried to treat her mother the way she would any other person in distress, the way she would if she were at work. Angela just shook her head, too many years the mother of cops.
Jane and Frankie met eyes over their mother's sobbing body, both well aware that they wouldn't be getting much out of ma tonight.
Jane wrapped herself up in a coat she found by the door. Ever since her mom had moved back in she'd had a hard time keeping up with the mess. Somehow, her mother seemed to have gotten worse at housework over the years. The labeling of Maura's entire kitchen had been nothing compared to the disorganized messes she left all over Jane's house. While Jane had her slobbish tendencies, she had never been this messy on her own, she was sure of it. Also, she was sick of taking out the trash every five minutes. Angela had been baking up a storm, and the garbage and dishes went on for days.
As Jane left her apartment and walked out into the street, she thought about how much hated her life right now. Once, she may have called Maura and they would have attacked the dishes. Maura would have made doing the dishes fun, she would have gone on about some gross or weird thing and Jane would have splashed her and they would probably have both ended up covered in water and bubbles.
Jane's phone was sorely missing recent calls from Maura, however. They'd been separated after the horrible mess of things that had occurred in that warehouse. Jane had barely seen Maura since then, especially since she had left the station. Nobody answered at her house, and Jane drove by regularly looking for Maura's car, to no avail. If she weren't so terrified of what would happen when she found her, Jane would have been more worried about what had happened that took Maura away for so long.
Jane tried to imagine where Maura would be. Probably somewhere halfway around the world, some fancy place with people who pamper you, and mud baths with cucumber eye masks. Jane remembered how much fun they had that day, even though she had protested and pretended to hate it. Maura had laughed so hard at her, but Jane had gotten her back pretty well. It had been a good day despite what followed their mud bath. Jane remembered what they had been wearing and blushed when she thought about how intimate they had once been. She couldn't imagine them being that close again now.
"You worried about ma?" Jane jumped two feet in the air and spiraled around with a roundhouse kick. "The hell?" she said as she recovered from her shock at seeing Frankie standing so close to her without her noticing him walk up. "Woah, calm down! I was just making sure you were okay out here, it's late", Frankie explained. Jane pointed to Frankie's chest, "LITTLE BROTHER", she said firmly. "BIG SISTER", she said as she pointed to her own chest. Frankie tried to come up with some witty thing to say back, but stopped once her saw her face. Jane hated being scared, and he should probably have known better.
"Okay, okay, I'm sorry. Really, though, aren't you kind of worried about her?", Frankie asked. "Yeah, I don't even know where she is, I haven't heard from her really since the shooting, actually", Jane admitted to her brother and to herself for the first time. "What? What are you talking about?" Frankie asked, confused. "Oh, what were you talking about?", Jane tried to deflect.
"I was talking about our mother, the woman crying her heart out upstairs right now. Who were you talking about?", Frankie asked, a bit more knowingly than Jane would have liked or appreciated. "I can't remember, just thinking", Jane said. "Yeah, right", Frankie shot back tentatively.
"We can't make her tell us anything", Jane said suddenly. "Who?", Frankie was finally truly puzzled. "MA", Jane said, annoyed, as if Frankie could somehow follow her convoluted train of thought. "So I guess we're just nice or something, and she'll tell us when she's ready", Jane said finally.
"I thought you'd be more worried," Frankie was genuinely shocked by Jane's mild acceptance of her mother's secrecy. The women were more alike in some ways than either of them knew, but Frankie saw it. "I've got other stuff to deal with right now", Jane said in a rough voice that seemed caught between anger and pain. Frankie was shocked at her admittance, and accepted her answer readily.
The door opened to the apartment building and Angela poked her head out, the light from the hallway shining through from behind her. Jane looked at her and remembered her childhood, so many nights being welcomed home to that light. She had feared it, however, sometimes. Why? Something had haunted her in bed at night. She had believed there were monsters under her bed, in her closet, in the shadows of her room's treasures that she delighted in during the day. Didn't every child fear those things?
Why was she thinking about that now? She had gone away somewhere for a second when she remembered it, and her mom and Frankie were both heading inside now. Jane came back to reality and remembered her mother's tears, she rushed to her side now in a way she rarely did, and took her hand. Jane's other hand reached for her badge, but edged away to her phone, and the number she missed seeing on her caller ID, the one person who could make everything okay again.
'Because Dean was a total asshole,' Maura put her book about anthropology as a religion. She couldn't concentrate on it anyway, the pool was too noisy. The man to her side was sunning himself, he had a beautiful torso, but she couldn't remember his name at all. Maura felt like she was forgetting things more these days, her brain felt so scrambled. Her thoughts veered away from Dean to the real culprit, Jane. How angry she was at Jane.
Jane's eyes had been so wide in surprise when Maura had yelled out at her not to touch her father. Maura herself had been startled by the sound of her own voice. It was as if some other part of her was speaking. She remembered how angry she felt in that moment, the way it had worked up her arms and thighs, a heat not unlike lust. It was equally as hard to control, and because Maura had never felt its unique rush before, she had no idea how to when it happened. The rage had come, and had not stopped coming.
She had, though. The young man next to her was gorgeous from an artistic standpoint. The Golden Rule, his symmetry, was perfect; it indicated healthy genetic code and youth. He was not so young that he did not know what he was doing, but Maura still felt nothing when she was with him. She felt only a slight annoyance and some guilt that made her keep him around….which she suddenly realized wasn't very ethical of her.
"I have to go", Maura said, picking up her towel from the seat she had been laying on. "Where?" the man asked. "I have to go back," Maura said. "To the room?", the man asked. "No, back home, sorry!" Maura tried to gather her things as quickly as she could, "Sorry! I'll leave the room in your name for the next two nights. Take care!" Maura ran off in the direction of their resort room.
She was ready to catch the next plane in less than half an hour. Her ritualistic organizational patterns were cast aside in favor of the frenzied packing she now took part in. Off with her bikini, on with her skirt and blouse, and out the door, into the nearest limousine headed to the airport.
No matter how hot Boston was, it would never be Fiji. Maura climbed out of the limousine she had taken back from the airport. She'd usually catch a ride with Jane, but there was no chance of that now. Maura felt a sudden rush of fear when she realized that she couldn't just call Jane now. It wasn't like she'd forgiven her enough to, but still, she didn't know what to do without her.