Jane was still alone in the house when Maura finally called.
"Hello?"
"Hi, Jane."
She sat up straighter at the girl's voice, and was already over-analyzing everything she could from just two words. "Maura? How'd it go, is your house still standing?"
"It…went well enough, I suppose."
"…and? C'mon, Maura, you can't leave out details at a time like this!"
Maura groaned, and Jane was bursting to know if it would be all right for her to go over there. She hated the thought of Maura being as alone as she was herself right now. "Jane, you understand this isn't just a one-and-done conversation, right?"
"What happened then, how'd it end?"
"I don't know. It's still all sort of up in the air. I…I had to leave," Maura whispered. "We were all hashing it out, but it reached a point where my mother thought I should step outside so I wouldn't hear them arguing, but I wanted to stay. I thought I'd earned the right."
"Sure," Jane said earnestly.
"And my father said, 'she doesn't want to get treated like a child anymore, let her stay, let her be grown-up and hear whatever it is you have to say.'"
"So what'd she say?"
"She said…she said if it came down to a choice, if father wouldn't bend and he insisted that I—that I be hospitalized and change, or if I wasn't permitted to see you anymore …my mother said she'd leave him. She'd take me over him, because she has the financial means to do it and doesn't want me raised in a—in a t-toxic environment." An audible sniff came over the line, and Jane's insides curled at the feeling of not being right by Maura's side. "She said that was one of the reasons they had adopted me in the first place, so I wouldn't be in a dangerous environment, and that's more than I've ever heard either of them say about my adoption, and I think that's part of why my mother wanted me to leave the room. So they could talk about it more freely, I mean."
Jane was struck dumb, feeling useless in not being able to come up with something to say.
Maura went on: "I get what you meant now, Jane, about not wanting to let down your father, even though he's said awful things to you. Until just now, I've never heard either of my parents say anything against each other. Even if I wasn't as close to them as I'd have liked, they were still my rock, you know? Seeing their relationship so strong was always really, really important to me. My dad… he's just like most any other dad in the world, you know, not wanting me to be this way. He just wants me to be normal and have a happy life where people don't bother me."
"People? What about him? What about him bothering you, or worse?"
"Please, Jane, this is hard enough."
"I'll say. I got rung up by your gentlemen caller a while ago."
"My—do you mean Garrett?"
"Yeah, Garrett. You're still in the clear as far as he's concerned. He thinks I tricked you into going to that club with me, or something like that, and he wants to be your big knight in shining armor."
"What're you talking about, what do you mean?"
"Oh, he just said that if I didn't leave you alone and didn't persuade you to go date him that he'd tell everyone where I spent Valentine's Day." She sighed and Maura could barely draw breath for her heightened concern. "Don't worry about it, though, I think it's being taken care of…"
Maura listened on as Jane explained how Officer Korsak had come over to return her mother's bracelet, and how that had somehow led to him explaining that he'd had a feeling Jane might've shared the inclinations of Betty and the others. How he had assured Jane of his desire to serve and protect them all, and how that had led to their construction of a plan to, hopefully, keep Garrett's mouth shut in an effective manner. She assured Maura that at no point in the conversation had her or the Isles name come up, and Maura wasn't sure if she felt more relieved or upset with herself for feeling that relief. It must have taken a tremendous amount of bravery for Jane to have felt like she could talk to Korsak about it.
When she voiced this observation, Jane just scoffed, "You would've done the same if you'd heard him. I bet it's like how you felt when you first talked to your mom. I just—I couldn't not ask him for help. And…"
"…yes?"
"Frost kinda knows, too."
"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given that he walked in on us twice in his house," Maura sighed. "How did he respond?"
"Pretty sure he wants to act like I just never said anything, but at least he's not gonna talk, right? Actually, he said he'd help me out with Garrett, too. He works at Brahman Brothers, and he said he'd help me try and dig up something."
"What does Brahman Brothers have to do with Garrett?"
"C'mon, are you kidding? Garrett's dad and uncle own the company!"
"They do?"
"Yes! Everybody here knows that. How is that not something Garrett bragged about when he was trying to date you?"
"I don't know, maybe he assumed, like you, that I already knew. I've never shopped there; their line isn't really my aesthetic."
"Too conservative for you these days?" Jane snorted.
Maura was about to answer, but was distracted when she heard a car pulling out of their driveway. She leaned over to look out the window, and sure enough, there went her father's Bentley. A glance in the other direction showed her mother standing in the doorway, the light from the hallway providing almost nothing but a silhouette. The darkness outside had crept up on Maura, and she hadn't realized that she'd never turned on the light in her dim room.
Constance's voice was calm: "Please ask Jane to hold or tell her you will call her back."
"Jane? I'm sorry—can I call you right back? My mother's here…"
"Oh, uh, sure. Of course."
As soon as Maura hung the phone back on its cradle, Constance flipped on the light and walked inside. Though her stride and her posture were as perfect as ever, this was the first time she had looked to Maura anything less than ten feet tall. Perhaps it was the way her expression looked exhausted and defeated as she sat down on the bed next to Maura, and the way she couldn't quite meet the girl's eyes when she spoke:
"First of all, please do not be alarmed. Your father is spending the night in a hotel at my request."
"At your—?"
"Yes. He didn't storm out in a huff, never to return. We had just reached a point in our conversation where I really—I really needed us to be separate." Her voice broke a little, but she was determined to keep this conversation free of tears. "You think I'm infallible, Maura, don't you?" It was a rhetorical question, and Maura sensed as much. "I will admit, I've worked long and hard over the course of my life to give off that impression. I faked it until I made it so. But please, you must understand …I am so thankful that you feel able to talk with me, and be honest with me. I am more than happy to help you when I can. But I am human. And keeping this from your father has been difficult, and I ought to have been more prepared than I was to talk this out with him." There was a short silence, as Constance tried to get Maura to look at her; the girl's eyes flicked in her direction for a moment, but just as quickly moved back to her bed. "Your father and I both decided we needed some time to regroup."
That got Maura to look her way again, panic increased. "How much time?"
"Just the night. He's going to sleep on it, so to speak. Okay?"
A longer silence followed now, with Maura drawing her knees up to her chest and putting her arms around her legs. "Did you mean what you said?"
Constance didn't need to ask for clarification. "I didn't marry your father for financial stability, Maura, you know that. I married him because I loved him and want to spend the rest of my life with him. He's my best friend."
"I couldn't live with myself if I—if you split up because of me," Maura said, the sentence broken up by a sudden, loud sob.
"Maura, darling." Sensing that this was one of those instances where Maura would not be receptive to a hug, Constance reached over to the spot on the bed where Maura's hand was resting, and laid her own on top of it. "I couldn't live with myself if, after deciding to become your steward, I kept you in a home with a man who wanted to erase a key part of what makes you who you are. Can you understand that?"
Maura wished that Constance had used the word "parent" instead of "steward," but nodded anyway.
"I realize you must be feeling very anxious right now. If you'd like to call Jane back and invite her to stay over tonight, you're more than welcome to do so."
"Tomorrow's Sunday. I don't think Jane's allowed to sleep over when they've got mass the next morning."
"No harm in asking, is there?"
"I suppose not…"
Much as the thought of Jane was always comforting, Maura would have liked more time to talk—or not talk, just sit together in silence—with her mother. But it seemed that Constance had reached her capacity for emotional output that evening, and was falling back into her old habit of self-isolation. It occurred to Maura that after everything they had been through together, her relationship with her mother had radically changed: she didn't need to wait and hope for a scrap of attention. She was allowed to ask for it.
Constance was surprised when she'd reached the end of the hallway and heard Maura calling out for her. "Yes?"
"Where are you going?"
"The studio." She saw Maura's face fall. The studio was a place of solitude, the only area she ever entered where her husband was not welcome without express permission. "Would you like to come with me?"
Somehow, the response felt like a throwback to the formality their relationship used to hold: "I would be honored."
It was about this time that Frank and Angela got home from their dinner date, and Jane almost fell off her chair at the loudness of the front door slamming shut. She switched off the television in time to hear Frank say,
"…this conversation is over, and if I hear another word about it—"
"You'll what, cut my allowance?" Angela interrupted sourly.
Jane stood up but felt rooted to the spot when Frank slapped Angela's cheek. "Don't you dare talk back to me like that. You paid off your Christmas debt a few weeks back, and I let you keep going on, but enough's enough." At that moment he noticed Jane was standing in the living room, and his face did not break into the easygoing smile that she was accustomed to receiving. "No wonder Jane's got such a mouth on her these days," he muttered. "She must get it from you."
It didn't take much to make Angela cry, and Jane had often rolled her eyes at how easily her mother would shoot the waterworks. But it wasn't hard to blame her for bursting into tears at this moment before racing up the stairs. Frank just scowled in the direction of her retreating figure before shrugging off his jacket and throwing it over the back of his chair in the living room. He pulled out a cigarette and lit up, eying Jane.
"God's honest truth, Jane, you know I think you're a smart kid. You've got more sense and more brains in you than most females, you know that?"
He shook out the evening paper and sat down to read it, and Jane continued to stare at him in confusion. He had always made a point of saying how smart she was, of admiring how tough she was. She'd overheard him boasting of her accomplishments to his buddies, saying that he wanted as much for her as he did for his boys, how he believed very much in her future as her own, strong-willed person. How could he possibly feel that way about her while being so disrespectful of his own wife? If he professed to want Jane to grow up and be in many ways the opposite of Angela, why did he work so hard to curb Angela's attempts to change?
After years of laughing at jokes at Angela's expense and finding little to respect about her, Jane wondered for the first time whether her attitude had less to do with Angela herself than the way Jane had observed Frank treating her.
She didn't have it in her to fight with him right now, so Jane satisfied herself by throwing a dirty look in his direction and going upstairs. Angela's crying was somewhat subdued now, but Jane could still hear it from the hallway, and she threw caution to the winds by knocking on her parents' open bedroom door. She hated to be comforted by anyone but Maura when she was upset, but knew that Angela was the opposite—hence her many attempts to engulf Jane in a hug when the girl was distraught. If that was her response to seeing other people grieve, that must be how she wished other people would respond when she was grieving.
Why had that taken Jane so long to figure out? How many times had Angela come up here to be emotional while her husband just waved her off and the kids either innocently or willfully ignored it?
When Angela heard Jane in the doorway, she said nothing but attempted to further get her crying under control. As she hadn't been shooed away, Jane figured it would be all right to step inside. Still, she kept a safe distance from the bed, hands shoved in her pockets when she spoke.
"Ma? What was that about?"
In the past, Angela would have responded to any such inquiry from one of her kids by deflecting. Mothers could cry, because that is what women do, but part of the job of a Mother is somehow to also be invincible, at least to a degree. You could be hurting but they could never know why, because then they might hurt, and you didn't want to inflict that on kids. But Jane wasn't a kid anymore; that was becoming more and more obvious with every passing day. Maybe that was why Angela didn't hesitate to answer her.
"Your father has asked that I quit working at BPD."
"Didn't sound like he was asking," Jane mumbled.
"No, I suppose not," Angela sniffed with a mirthless laugh. "Jane? You and your brothers are always going to be my proudest achievements. I know that raising you was and is a sacred calling, and you'd better believe that I'm not gonna stop being your mother when any of you turn eighteen, understand?" Another hollow laugh. "But now that my baby's old enough to be dating and doing all that, it doesn't seem like any of you needs me the way you used to. And that's a good thing, it is! I wish I could keep you all my little kidlets forever, but that's not how it works, and that's fine. I suppose it's just been harder to find fulfilling work when none of you need me as much as you used to. And it's not as though I'm saving lives over at the café or anything. It's not changing the world, it's not all that important. But I love it, Jane, I do. I love getting to bake. I love how appreciative and polite the officers are to me."
Jane recognized the implied sentiment that she and her brothers did not vocalize their gratitude often enough, which was probably true.
"They're nice guys. They're nice to me. And it's interesting to hear the sorts of things that go on—they're careful about being delicate when I'm in earshot, but still, the things I hear are pretty darn interesting!"
"Why's Pop want you to quit?"
"I know that tone, Jane Clementine, you drop it right now. Don't question your father."
"Don't question him? You're up here crying, Ma! He oughtn't have slapped you like that! Why can't you two just talk this out and—"
"You asked me what was going on and I told you," Angela said, suddenly severe. "Sometimes we don't always get what we want, Janie. That's what marriage is. It's about compromise. It can't go our way all the time."
"How come Pop always gets his way?" Jane asked, raising her voice over the ring of the telephone. She was so enraged at how this conversation was going that she'd completely forgotten the possibility that it might be Maura calling her back, and when Angela got up to reach the phone, the ringing had already stopped. "Ma, it's not fair to you! What's working at BPD hurt anyone?"
"I don't need to work there. We don't need the extra money anymore."
Jane wanted to push it further, but heard her father yelling for her up the stairs. Seeing Jane's brief distraction as her window of opportunity, Angela got up from the bed and went into the bathroom. Her unwillingness to talk about this when she was usually so vocal about everyone else's problems irritated Jane, and she hurried over to the stairs to keep her father's anger from boiling over more than it already was. He gestured for her to come all the way down as he pulled his jacket back on.
"That was Rogers on the phone. Wanted to know if I could play a little pool. Tell your mother where I've gone, okay?"
He did not wait for a response, and Jane was furious with herself for just standing there and letting him walk away. She had already deeply resented her father from the moment he'd walked in that night, as if he was wearing a huge scarlet letter pinned to his chest. It would've been very easy to make a scene of it, to ask how the hell he could preach to his kids and then go around seeing other women; she could have brought it up to her mother just now as a legitimate reason to question her father.
But it had been too hard, and was it cowardly not to have said anything? Her mother had already been so upset, it would've felt cruel to add another log to the fire. Was it more cruel to just keep silent?
It had been an emotionally exhausting day, and when Jane went to her room to stew about the burden of choosing whether to talk to her mother or not, to call Maura's house or not (was it too late?), she fast surrendered to sleep.
She woke up an hour or so later when she felt somebody trying to get into bed with her. Jane bolted up, heart hammering in fear and too scared to yell until she heard a familiar voice whispering anxiously, "it's me, it's me, it's me!"
"Maura?"
"Eleanor Roosevelt."
Jane managed a weary chuckle as she tried willing her heartbeat to go back down to normal. "Hey, that was mine, remember?"
"Um…it's Mamie Eisenhower?"
"There you go." Jane managed a deep breath, resting her hands on Maura's shoulders. "Maura, what're you doing here? It's after eleven o'clock."
"I know, but this is the only way I could see you when your father said—"
"My father? When did you…"
"I called earlier, and your dad picked up. He said you weren't allowed to come over, and when you didn't call me or sneak out, I figured he mustn't have told you."
With a scowl, Jane lay back down and Maura followed suit. "That bastard. He said it was a friend of his who'd called. I'm sorry, Maura, I should've gotten the phone, I should've been thinking—I was just kind of in a tense conversation with Ma, and I didn't even…" She shook her head, even as Maura whispered that it was okay. "How'd you get here?"
"I was calling you because my mother said I could invite you to sleep over, and I just really, really wanted to be with you. When your father said you weren't allowed out, I asked my mother if it would be all right if I stayed over at your house instead and she said yes. So I drove over here, parked on the next street, and came in through your back door."
"Holy Moses," Jane chuckled. "What if you'd woken someone up? What if my Pop got home at the same time you were sneaking in?"
"I guess that was a risk I was willing to take, but now that you mention it, I realize it was rather reckless. I could have gotten you into trouble. Should I go?"
When Maura shifted to get up, Jane reached an arm over her stomach and pushed down. "Don't you dare leave!" she whispered, and Maura was eager to snuggle back in. "You know… you coming in here, stealing away into my room after my dad told you to stay away? Kinda romantic."
"Really?"
"Yeah." She reached over Maura, grasping around for her alarm clock. "I've just gotta make sure we get you out of here before anyone else wakes up and sees you."
"They wouldn't just barge in if your door was closed, would they?"
"Ha! Yeah, privacy is not given much value in this house."
"How do you stand it?"
"Barely." Jane set the clock back down and resumed the position of having her arm under Maura's neck, with Maura resting her head on Jane's shoulder. They lay in silence for a while, hands finding each other in the dark and staying clasped together. "Do you think it's dumb to be an optimist?" Jane eventually asked.
"My mother always said it was better to be a surprised pessimist than a disappointed optimist. Why?"
"I dunno. I feel like everything is awful, and I should be terrified. But after I talked to Korsak, I just got this weird feeling of hope. And you …I always feel so calm around you. Like everything is going to be okay, because you make me feel okay. More than okay. And I just wish that people like Pop, or those cops, or Ma or Frankie—I wish they understood how this felt. Not the stress, but just how happy you make me feel. I mean, I know our first kiss wasn't ideal and I'm sorry that it was such a mess at first—but after we got to a better place, and I knew where you stood and I wasn't afraid to stand there with you, that's the happiest I've ever been in my entire life. I mean," she said with a small laugh, wiping away a tear that had slid out when Maura squeezed her hand tighter. "I always thought it was so cheesy when I'd hear people at school say 'I love you,' because I'd think to myself they don't know anything. They're just kids, we're all just kids and we can't know… but it's some kind of miracle, I think, that you can just make my heart about ready to burst with three little words. And I wish I could bottle that feeling up, because every time I get it, I just feel like everything is going to work itself out. Maybe it won't be perfect or what it should be, but we'll survive. You know? That's the feeling I get, and I wish I could have it all the time. You're smart, Maura, tell me. How can you make me feel so much by doing so little?"
"I don't know about the words, but I'm sure there is a scientific relation between my actions and what you might call a heart bursting," Maura whispered. "And I know you can't bottle up the feeling, but maybe you could store up?"
"Hm?"
Maura brushed some of Jane's hair aside and started a leisurely trail of kisses down her neck. This got the expected response: a low hum that could be taken for a groan, Jane shifting in an unconscious effort to direct Maura's lips where they were most needed. When Maura got to the juncture of Jane's neck and shoulder, she whispered, "I love you." She gasped a little when Jane's hips jerked up and Maura engaged her in a real kiss, whispering her sentiment again.
"I love you too," Jane breathed between kisses, hands coming up to cradle Maura's head as the girl rolled on top of her. "Oh God, Maura… so much."
And there went something else Jane would put in a bottle if she could—those sounds Maura made, the sighs that melted into whimpers that were punctured here and there with soft moans. It was a thrill that was beyond description, no matter how much Jane tried to articulate it, like a slow shock to her entire system that took its delicious time taking her over.
They went on like this for some time when Maura finally pulled away to ask, "Should we talk about things?" About my father, my parents, your parents, Garrett…
"Mm-mm." Jane leaned up and offered a small kiss to the corner of Maura's mouth. "I think we should just lay here. That's all I want to do with you right now, Maura. Just stay here with me, please."
"I think I can accommodate that."
