Disclaimer: NBC and Wolf Films own them.
Summary: Post-episode piece to Loco Parentis, Season 10, from Jack's POV. It's not strictly necessary to be intimately familiar with the episode.
Author's Note: Beta thanks to jessebee, for a beta under stress. Second beta thanks to my loving wife, for encouragement and help with working out some of the more troublesome sentences. Third thanks to Cirocco (and a gentleman before her) for the fanonized Joanna, Jack's daughter. All other characters, not owned by Wolf Films, are my creations.
Copyright July 2004, Cassatt
Jack loosened the seat belt he had fastened five minutes before, wanting a bit more breathing room almost as much as he was craving room to stretch his legs. Even if a window seat had given him the sense of space and open skies, by the end of the three hour flight it was as claustrophobic as anywhere else in coach. He had been lucky to get the window seat; his reservation had been last minute. Cost had not been an issue, only speed.
He looked down at the approaching terra firma, at the Chicago suburbs blanketed with snow, penning in O'Hare as far as he could see. The vastness itself settled his stomach, even as it caused his heart rate to quicken. This place couldn't be more different than New York City. The contrast between the middle of the country and three islands wasn't only one of being surrounded by land versus water. One was home in a way the other could never be. No matter how many years he had spent living in Manhattan. No matter how satisfied or unsatisfied he was with that life.
He played his usual game of looking for recognizable landmarks. Seeing if he could pick out his sister's community among all of the others. Which toll roads came in where; how much traffic was on each. Downtown Chicago had already been passed, from much higher in the air, but he had seen the skyline and the lakefront. More sights to help him breathe, deeply and quietly. The runway was coming up fast, so he closed his eyes, and waited for the plane to bounce once or twice before settling on the concrete covered Illinois earth.
Jack headed up the jet way, his carry-on bag over his shoulder, his legs finally feeling some blood circulating through the muscles. As he approached the door, he looked over the small crowd of people lined up to greet their friends and family. He found a tall woman with shoulder length, greying hair and smiled as their eyes met, and her smile matched his. After a few more long strides, they hugged, and exchanged their hellos, and their how are yous, and began the trek through the airport arm-in-arm while Jack answered questions about the flight, and his level of hunger and thirst, and deflected all of the why are you heres until his sister Colleen smiled again and dropped the subject. He knew the reprieve would be short lived. That would be enough.
The kitchen table had a new scratch in its surface, from where, Colleen said, Jack's nephew Ian had taken out his frustration the week before, with a knife meant for gently cutting his sandwich. Ian was becoming more and more the handful, she told him. Jack commiserated and ate the lunch she had made, the usual corned beef on rye presented as his welcome back meal. He had to admit that he'd missed it, as garlic and mustard and the sharp tang of caraway seeds flooded his tongue.
Colleen sat almost sideways, with her arms folded and her legs crossed, in a chair caddy-corner from him. Her brown corduroys were worn at the seams; her cardigan was unbuttoned, its pattern bunched into a mass of color where her hands lay on her elbows. There was a stain on her pale green tee shirt. One of her hair combs was skewed. Jack thought she looked lovely.
"So," she said, "is it time now? Or should I tell you what your plans are going to be tomorrow night, since everyone knows that you're here? And I'm not going to make another comment on you missing Christmas four days ago, or how much you were missed in return."
"And I won't explain again how I couldn't get away. But let me guess," he said, "a big family dinner, here, or at Dick's."
She thumbed toward the dining room. "I expect you at that table at seven."
"You're assuming that I'm heading off somewhere tomorrow." He took a slow sip of his coffee.
"I've learned," she answered with a grin, "not to make any assumptions where you're concerned."
He finished the last bite of food and wiped his hands on a napkin. He met her eyes clearly and directly. Hazel, like his own, like their mother's -- so much like their mother's that he sometimes felt the tug of her loss deep in his chest looking at them.
Colleen's eyebrows knitted. "What the hell happened, Jack?" she asked in a soft voice.
He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. "I wanted to talk to you. In person." He shook his head. "I needed to talk to you -- about this case we just finished...." And he proceeded to relate the general details of the case of a teenage boy who murdered another teenage boy, with a weapon designed to do exactly what it had accomplished. Slice a neck with one swipe. Long handle, scythe-like blade. Illegal. Purchased by the boy's father. The father whom Adam had insisted they prosecute as being culpable for the murder due to depraved indifference. The legal definition of culpability. The legally correct reason to prosecute, even if Jack had disagreed with it, and with Adam. Jack found himself unable to stop telling her, rather than having the extreme difficulty that he had imagined he would. But he hadn't yet arrived at the crux of the matter, for him. The reason he had told Adam he was taking the rest of the week off with all of twelve hours notice. He paused, to wet his throat with the remainder of his coffee.
"So," she said, "you prosecuted a father for his son's crime. I understand Adam's perspective, but what I don't get is why you're having so much difficulty with it. Seems like that would be something you'd get satisfaction from -- pushing the law to make people take responsibility. Force them to be accountable." She shrugged, and held their eye contact. "That's what you should do."
"You agree that the father has culpability."
"Yes. I do. Why don't you?" She looked closely at him, and as he was about to answer she said, "This is about dad, isn't it?"
Faced with the direct question, he was forced to bypass what he had planned to say. He got up to refill his cup -- not for the caffeine, which he knew he didn't need and should forego, but for another minute of reprieve.
"I'm not getting the connection," Colleen said from behind his back. "Why you, of all people, wouldn't want that father to pay."
He stopped, midway between the kitchen counter and his chair, his heart beat quickening. "Me, of all people?" he asked, forcing himself to keep moving. He sat. If she--
"Jack--" Her voice was low, and she turned enough so she could lean on the table. Toward him, making a move to touch his arm, but she drew her hand back and rested both in front of her. "I didn't mean anything by it."
He shook his head. "Yes, you did." He had to take a breath; he had to consciously decide to fill his lungs because it suddenly felt like they wouldn't do that on their own. "You're right. This whole thing has to do with dad, it's why I came home, it's why this damned case--" He breathed again. "I need to tell you -- what happened to me when we were kids -- get it out in the open--"
Her eyes widened. "You thought we didn't know?" She looked down at the tabletop for a moment, then back at him. "Of course you would think that. I always assumed that you must have realized that we all knew exactly what he was doing down there, with you, and mom." Now, she touched him, grasping his forearm. "I'm sorry, Jack." Her eyes were filling, and she blinked rapidly a few times, and swallowed, and calmed.
He was glad that she had stopped herself from crying. He wasn't certain that he would have been able to hold his own emotions in check, and even at that very moment, analyzing his emotional state from a place so very far removed from it, he had to stay precisely there and come no closer. He knew this. He'd always known it. But he swerved, for a second, like sitting in a stunt plane while the pilot loops too near a mountain. The thought of his younger siblings completely aware of what he had endured at the large hands of their father sent him plummeting, alarmingly. He could only hold on and pray.
Colleen took a deep breath, and helped him, asking him to explain about the case, and his reaction to it. Again, the words tumbled out, and he supposed that was natural, given that the hardest was behind him. He told her about forcing the plea agreement, watching this family disintegrate in front of him, watching a mother tell the truth. Watching her uncover the family secret of what her husband had done to her son, for the record. For the world to see. How something had split open inside of Jack, after all these years.
She asked, "Did the father beat his son?"
There. The word was spoken. He swerved, and managed to stop himself. "Unclear," he answered. "But -- the boy was traumatised, that was obvious. He was being told to be a man, to stop sniveling, to learn to fight back...." He looked away, out the window. It was snowing, a gentle snowfall, with no wind to swirl the white around the yard. A wet snow, sticking to the panes of glass, and the trees. "He could have been me," he said in the silence. "His name is John, even." Jack met Colleen's eyes again -- soft, with a deep sadness clearly visible. He said, "He learned his lessons well. He killed a classmate."
Colleen cleared her throat. "And you wonder why you didn't?"
"No," he said without hesitation. "I know how I survived. By doing exactly what dad didn't want me to do; I just did it away from home. I hid out at the library, stayed after school, found places to read where I thought he couldn't get me. I managed."
"So -- I still don't understand," she said softly. "Why didn't you want John's father to be prosecuted? Why don't you think he was responsible?"
Jack was suddenly more unsure than sure. He knew what he had told Adam; what he had told Abbie. All of his well thought out legal reasoning about the dangerous precedent they could set. But looking back at it, remembering what he had said while allowing himself to remember how he had felt, he didn't have an answer for his sister. His feelings, he could say, had been a mixture of anxiety and discomfort. His thoughts had centered around one concept. "Because I've always known that dad's parenting, or lack of it, was irrelevant. I always took responsibility for my own life. My own choices--"
"But he was just a kid," she said, interrupting him. "You said it yourself -- he learned the lessons his father had taught him! Besides, how can you say that what happened to you was irrelevant? That's nonsense."
"It's not nonsense! I ignored everything he ever tried to beat into me," he said, his heart beginning to thud with the word spoken, again. "And anything else that came out of his mouth, too."
"Because he was irrelevant," she said with a touch of sarcasm, "and he failed, and you're nothing like him." She stared at him.
The thudding in his chest got harsher. "I'm nothing like him, damn it."
Colleen got up, this time, and retrieved a mug from the dishwasher to pour herself a cup of coffee. He looked at his own as she did it, but had no desire for more.
"Look," she said as she sat. "You came home because you wanted to talk to me. I'm going to take advantage of that and tell you what I think."
She waited, and he knew it was for tacit permission to proceed without interruption. Jack also knew she would tell him her version of the truth, and he could decide whether or not to agree with it. He slipped his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and crossed his legs. He wasn't defensive. He could prove it.
"You're not," she continued, "a brutal bully of an alcoholic. You didn't beat Joanna, I don't think, and you weren't abusive to your wife, or in any other relationship, at least as far as I could see. And one of my legacies of our stellar childhood is that I can usually pick up that crap a mile off. But -- and you can be as angry as you want at me for saying this -- there are ways in which you are very much like dad. You got a couple of his good qualities--"
"Good qualities?!" Jack looked hard at her. "He had none," he stated.
She drank her coffee, then set down the mug. "And that's my point, Jack. You don't see that he had any, because you can't, because you need him to be irrelevant. You think I haven't read everything I can get my hands on about growing up in an alcoholic family? I didn't want to end up like Dick, drinking half my life away, and I sure as hell didn't want to end up like Mary who can't say what's really on her mind to save her soul. She still goes to confession at St. Ignatius, every week, and the priest is probably the only one who'll ever know her." She paused, and took another sip.
Jack was reeling a bit, from the image of his youngest sibling driving halfway across the city to return to their childhood parish for confession. He hadn't known. He'd never asked. But to the pertinent issue? "I don't need him to be a bastard. He was one."
Colleen sighed. "I'm not arguing that. He was a bastard. But he was other things, too." Jack shook his head, and she waved a hand in the air. "Okay," she said, "you're the smart one in this family. Where do you think you got your -- tenacity? Stubbornness? Or how about the ability to think quickly on your feet? From which parent, exactly, did you get those?"
The stunt plane was veering too close again, but this time it was toward the solid ground no longer under his feet. He looked at his sister, gazing back at him, and tried to formulate a response. None was forthcoming.
Jack sat in the car with the heat on, soaking up another minute of it before stepping out into the cold. The sky above the stark, black tree branches was solid grey. The land here was almost equally a solid white, with chiseled markers breaking up the expanse of snow, and only the curving, single-laned roads cleared of it. Within the stone walls and wrought iron fences of the cemetery, the white was pristine. No places where exhaust and mud dirtied it, like it was along the streets, against the curbs, outside in the real world. The sound was different here, too. Even sitting with his windows up, Jack could hear the city way out there, beyond the boundaries. As if the place was domed. There was never any hope of being distracted from one's thoughts or feelings here. And that was just one of a number of reasons why he hated the place.
He pulled on his cap and got out, pocketed the keys, lifted his hood and headed into the snow. Borrowed boots saved his shoes and his feet. He had toyed with the idea of coming here, in the air somewhere over Pennsylvania, then had negated it by the time he saw Lake Michigan. Now, he felt that he had no choice. For the first time in an incredibly long time, his father was in control. What did it matter that Jack occasionally had dreams about the man's hands coming at him, or that voice in his ear -- he, and he alone, usually decided how and where his daytime hours would be spent. Usually. Not today.
The headstone was, not surprisingly, covered with snow, and Jack set to brushing it off. Clearing the curved top with long swipes of his gloved hands, then starting in on the more detailed work of the letters and numbers. His gut had been one giant knot since he left Colleen's, but as he cleaned his mother's name, he felt his stomach loosen and begin to let go. After he finished the stone itself, he pulled out from under the snow the wreath his family had placed there. He shook it off, wiping the red ribbon enough for the color to shine. He kicked an area clean in front of the marker and set the wreath back where it belonged.
"Merry Christmas," he said, and was going to keep talking, but the sudden thickening of his throat stopped him.
There was more, much more, that he could say. This was the reason he had considered making the trip in the first place -- to let his father know every single way Jack had defied him. From the small things he could actually remember, to the bigger ones. To speak them out loud, and tell the truth, to whatever was left of the man's body, in front of the monument erected to preserve his memory. To show the same courage that John's mother had shown in front of strangers in a DA's office.
Now, there were issues that had not even occurred to Jack, back in New York. But after twenty-four hours of thinking about what Colleen had said, he was no closer to accepting it, and he was certainly not going to give his father the satisfaction of hearing him even contemplate the possibility.
He shoved his hands into his coat pockets, and took a deep breath. "One thing, Dad," he said, "it's time I told my daughter what you did. No more covering for you." He stared at his father's name; his stomach was twisting again. "And I'm going to make damned sure that the rest of your grandchildren know, too."
He told his mother that he loved her, and that he'd be back in a year, and gave her a quick summary of how well Joanna was doing at her job, and how proud of her he was. The first flakes of another snowstorm floated down, onto the headstone, where they disappeared in the granite surface. After one last, long look, he turned and followed his footprints back to the road. His heart was pounding, gently, but if anyone had been there to question him, he thought he could honestly reply that he felt better. His legs weren't as heavy as on the walk in. The birds calling in the trees didn't annoy him. The quiet didn't disturb him.
Maybe he was as stubborn as his father, or maybe he was merely as resilient as his mother. Maybe there were a few good things he had learned from the man, like how to shoot a basketball, or fly a kite, or go after the bad guys. But if he did get his tenacity from him, then his father might finally learn to regret that particular set of genetic markers. Jack looked beyond the confines of the cemetery, to the familiar neighborhood of his youth. Holiday lights on buildings were getting brighter, as afternoon faded toward sundown. He breathed in the cold air, redolent of all that was Chicago. The stunt plane weaved through the mountain range with ease, and grace, snow capped peaks all around him. He smiled, and opened the car door.
End.