There was a music box playing. According to Mrs. Leeser, the song was from her son's favorite cartoon. How she had found the custom music box, she hadn't said, but since her son Hunter had opened his eyes and quietly said, "Momma.", all he had wanted was to hear the music box. It had been playing ever since.
The whole floor had gone silent, listening enraptured as the sounds of fifteen thin metal tines pinged without resolution in the narrow hospital room.
It had reminded Jack of the two music box/jewelry boxes his wife had purchased for their daughters one Christmas.
"Both boxes had this plastic figurine in it, wearing a fluffy tutu and turning endlessly. For a year I had to wind up both of those things or my girls wouldn't go to sleep."
Curled up once again in the easy chair Celia smiled softly, her eyes lost somewhere between the floor and the mattress of her father's bed. "I had one. It was my Gram's. It had those Japanese dragon things on the cover and it was just the metal wheel on the inside. It played something classical I think. Over and over..."
"And over and over..." Jack smirked, gesturing vaguely toward the hallway.
Celia took in a breath. "There's a guy.." She began, pausing mid-sentence the way every teenager Jack had ever met did when they were sharing something they really cared about. "...he's got a shop in Brooklyn. He repairs watches. Like...really old watches. And also music boxes. He'll take in old ones...find 'em in dumps or state sales..."
"Estate sales?"
"Yeah, and fix 'em up." Celia dawdled a bit, picking at the lint on the blanket. "I found one. It was set inside one of those big rocks that look like diamonds on the inside..."
Jack watched Celia's hands mimic the size and shape of the rock, then guessed, "A geode?"
"Yeah! I think. Anyway...it played this song, Space Oddity." Celia went back to the lint and sighed. "When I was little I used to listen to that one every time I visited the store."
"Sounds like you went there alot."
"My Dad and I were together then, before Mom came back." Celia turned and watched the still face of her father. "When he wasn't rehearsing for a show he had a lot of free time." When Celia looked back at Jack she looked guilty. Jack had seen the same look coming from his youngest and it tore at his heart.
"Came back?" He asked gently, schooling his voice so that the question had little weight to it.
Celia gave him a guarded look, then pursed her lips together thinking long enough that Jack figured she wasn't going to answer.
"I don't really know what happened," She said finally, barely above a whisper. "I was too little. Dad just said..." There was a sniffle, then a tear that Celia hastily wiped away. "He said, Mom was different. That she was an angel and that somebody else had needed her for a while."
"This was...after 9/11?"
Celia nodded.
"And when she came back...what did she say?"
"S-she was sorry she left. She hadn't meant to be gone that long. That she loved me. She wanted to be my Mom."
"You live with just her now?" Jack asked.
Celia nodded. "Mom said Dad was cheating on her. Dad said it wasn't true, but Mom said he was obssessed with some woman and she kicked him out."
Jack expected to hear anger, but what he heard was resentment. Pain, a little fear, but mostly regret and maybe shame. Shame, he realized, that was partially directed at her father.
"And how long ago was that?"
Celia swallowed hard, breathing rough around the emotion that was tightening her throat. "When he started making the movies." She said, her lips and jaw so rigid that neither moved as she spoke.
"The movies about me...and Samantha Spade."
Celia nodded. "I helped him put them online...and then Mom saw them...she didn't believe that it was Dad, just with a lot of makeup on. She said it was sick." Celia's face pinched and she watched her father, tears spilling over her cheeks. "That he wasn't fit to be my Dad. But he was just acting. It was just acting!"
Jack didn't say anything. He reminded himself that it wasn't his case. This wasn't an interrogation. She wasn't a witness. The truth was important, but not in that moment.
Jack let her calm down a bit then asked, "Does your Mom do any acting?"
Celia's damp hazel eyes met his. She blinked away the last of her tears then shook her head, rubbing her nose with her sleeve. "Mom's a singer, and a dancer."
"She's in a show?"
Celia hedged, "Sort of."
Jack nodded and let it drop. "And what about you?" When she gave him a blank look he added, "Any acting?"
She gave a shy smile and shook her head, blushing. "I'm too scared. And my memorizing stinks. Dad wanted me to act in one of- with him in a show, but I got so scared I couldn't remember anything."
"You like being..behind the scenes." Jack offered.
Celia shifted and for a split second Jack got a glimpse of the woman Celia was to become. "Yeah. I like getting to decide how the background is gonna look, and where the lights go and how long each scene is going to be. Y'know, up close and personal or from far away."
Jack nodded. "It's an important job."
"Have you ever done any acting?"
Jack hesitated for a moment before he said, "In a manner of speaking."
He thought about the last time he had gone undercover. Only a year ago. His cover hadn't lasted long, but it hadn't needed to. He'd gone in with Sam, disguised as a husband and wife seeking help from a fertility clinic. During the consultation they'd found and talked to a missing clinician who had moved out of her husband's home without informing him.
They'd established that the woman was safe, healthy and had left the home of her own freewill. They'd strongly admonished that she should tell someone close to her the next time she chose to leave and save the tax payers some money. Then they had left.
Gone for Italian take out.
Eaten half of it. Gone to bed early.
The next morning foreplay had somehow turned into a fight. Sam had left, proclaiming she wasn't angry, just tired. Eventually Jack ate the rest of the take out cold.
Life was like that.
The end of Jack's shift coincided with the change of the nursing staff creating a hum of energy and commotion around six am. That hum energized Jack as he collected the scatter of files he'd eventually worked on through the night. It also woke Celia.
Jack offered to buy her breakfast in the hospital cafeteria before he left. Celia, after checking her cell and finding three texts and two calls from her mother, declared she had to get home. Jack offered to share a cab with her, to save her the fare.
They left the hospital together, blinking at the summer sun already rising in the sky. It was going to be a hot day.
With the cabbie waiting at the curb Jack insisted on walking Celia into the building. Grandiose chivalry aside, Jack was doing everything in his power to avoid falling asleep with a cabbie willing to take advantage of a sleeping passenger. The more movement and the fewer long gaps of time sitting, the better.
They climbed three sets of stairs before Celia stopped at a landing, stuck her key in a rickety door lock and ducked into her apartment. Before she could get the door shut again Jack heard an angry voice on the other side demand, "Who is that man?"
Jack groaned and waited, listening to the exchange as it escalated, ending with the apartment door sweeping wide open. When Celia's mother's pale face appeared, Jack's badge was dangling a few feet in front of it, Jack's tired face behind it.
"Jack, this is Dee, Dee, Jack..." Celia's voice came from deep in the apartment laced with an attitude that Jack forgot the teenager could have.
"Mrs. Macy-"
"Delano, I dropped the Macy. Is my daughter in trouble?"
Her voice was deeply accented, Boston, Jersey and New York rolled into one. Her pale skin wasn't unhealthy, just the result of working inside and at night most of the time. Jack couldn't see tracks, scabs or any of the other easy-to-spot indicators of drug use. Ms. Delano was tired and strung out, but she wasn't a junkie.
"She's not in trouble. I'm part of a twenty-four hour rotation of security at the hospital. My shift had ended and I offered to share a cab with her."
The words did nothing to reassure Ms. Delano. Jack could see she was struggling to connect the dots. That told him two things. One, that Dee Delano nay Macy wasn't going to trust Jack, no matter what he said. And two, Celia didn't really have her mother's permission to be at the hospital.
"I wanted to make sure she got home safely. Now that she is, I'd like to get to my home. If you'll excuse me."
Brevity, that was the key, Jack told himself. He turned to leave and was most of the way down the first flight of stairs when he heard the apartment door slam shut, hard. The silence that followed made the click of the deadbolt even louder.
Jack shook his head and finished his descent, stepped into his cab and asked that he be dropped off at a coffee place a block from his apartment. He managed to stay awake long enough to pick up a smoothie (after a night of coffee he figured he should try and make amends to his abused stomach), walk to his apartment door, open and lock it again, and collapse on his couch.
The smoothie never made it out of the cup.