[February 18, 12:00]
Flack straightened his coat and checked his watch. He knew he ought to wait for Stella. She was on her way, but she had called to say she got caught behind a car crash on the Upper East Side. That was fifteen minutes ago, and it would be at least another fifteen until she made it here. Besides, he had an apology to make and if he asked for the room to do it, she would have given it to him. Probably. Taking a deep breath, he knocked on the door and let himself in.
Juliana looked up, her expression one of polite curiosity. There were faint dark circles beneath her eyes that hadn't been there before, but at least her scrapes had been healing well, the gauze squares swapped for large band-aids. Her features rearranged themselves to bitter distaste once she realized who had entered her room. Her eyes dropped hurriedly to the book in her lap, a different volume than last time. She dog-eared her page and closed the book, wordlessly indicating that she was listening.
"I was wrong," Flack began hesitantly, he didn't like being wrong, "to assume I... knew your story." His lips hardly moved, as if he could only just force the words out. "And to treat you... the way I did."
She said nothing, waiting.
He swallowed. She wasn't cutting him any slack. Not that his behaviour had earned him any. "I was..." A total jackass. "... rude... and I'm sorry." Flack finished, the syllables muddled and half-formed.
"Thank you, Detective." The air in the room cleared. Mostly.
The man took a cautious step towards the hospital bed. When she didn't tense up or try to stop him with a glare, he took another. "But I told you, you didn't stand a chance."
Now, she tensed. The fiddling with the book began, just as it had last time. Nervous habit. "Did the Finest live up to their name? Or did you just get Grayson to tell you?" she inquired, sounding distinctly underwhelmed with the latter.
The man hung his jacket on the back of the chair and sat, leaning back, trying to ease the lingering tension in the room. "I'll have you know, there's a lot of good police work that goes into a proper interrogation," he informed her light-heartedly.
Without a speck of humour, she said flatly, "Is that what this is." She trained her sharp blue eyes on him, on his chest, rather, too shy to look him straight in the eye.
"I thought we said last time, we're telling stories," he said absently, looking across the bed and out the window. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Juliana relax as she exhaled and sank into her pillow a little further.
The woman tipped her head towards him. "You first."
"Well," he scooted the chair closer to her, "Grayson and Ruby met in college." Flack pulled out the first photo he had borrowed from the vanity, turning it to face her and setting it down on the blankets by her knee. "They've been together ever since. Their anniversary is June 2nd, and they spend it at the Bronx Zoo every year." One of the many zoo gate pictures joined the one lying on the bed. "Grayson didn't meet you until he and Ruby went on vacation in the Netherlands two years ago." The happy couple smiled up at Juliana, the tulips of her home country filling the fields behind them. The little, damning orange date stamp sat innocently in the corner. Flack watched as the rate of book-fidgeting increased. He was right so far.
"Now the paperwork says that by the time he went on that vacation, he'd already been running Translatie for a year. I'm guessing he met you and found the perfect employee. You could speak four languages and that was too good to pass up." He shook his head in wonder. "So Grayson married you. On paper. Then you got your green card and came here to work for him. This whole time we thought Ruby was the mistress, but he had it all backwards. Definitely puts a whole new perspective on the phrase 'work wife'." Flack heard the ghost of a laugh chase the remaining tension from the room. "That's why you wouldn't say anything when we came by. You didn't want us looking into the attack. Into you. Because if anyone found out about your fake marriage, your green card would get revoked, and you'd get sent home." Flack paused and for a moment, the only sound was Juliana thumbing through pages, as well as she could with band-aids on both hands. "How did I do?"
She picked up the vacation photo, thinking back to the chance meeting that had set in motion an overseas move. "It's three and a half languages," she corrected him.
He raised an eyebrow in curiosity. "How do you speak half a language?"
"With a lesser degree of fluency, Detective," she said simply. Flack opened his mouth but she kept going. "I translate between Dutch and English for work. Sometimes German if Fabian is busy and needs some help. French is the half. Not good enough for translation work but I can hold a conversation and connect clients with our French-speaking staff." She smiled at his surprise. "Everyone always wants to know which three and a half."
"You forgot to mention Greek," he pointed out.
Juliana shook her head. "I don't know it well enough to count it yet. But I have been trying to pick it up in my spare time. I chose Greek because it's not like any other language. Dutch, English, and German are all Germanic languages. French comes from the Romance family, with siblings like Spanish and Italian. The Slavic family, Russian and so on, is even bigger by comparison. But Greek uh- isn't closely related to anything else," she finished hurriedly, realizing she was rambling.
He smiled. It was refreshing to hear her speak so passionately after her reticence last time they'd been in the same room. She was still too timid to really look at him, but he was willing to bet her eyes were bright with excitement. Excitement was good. He needed her to be comfortable with him if he was going to get a statement today. "How did you learn it all?"
The way anyone started formally learning anything. "I started in kindergarten," Juliana said bluntly.
"I wasn't meaning the Dutch."
"Neither was I, Detective," she countered. "We had our Dutch vocabulary sheets and our English vocabulary sheets." Like tulips and the colour orange, bilingualism was a point of national pride. Taught from the cradle in most households, and reinforced from your first day at school.
"That young?" he said, amazed. He met full grown adults every day that had a hard enough time grasping English alone. "Isn't it… hard?"
"I don't remember it being hard, but it's all I have ever known." The idea of only teaching one language was quite alien to her. So many countries were so close together in Europe, it was a matter of practicality. Learning English had come easily to her. German as well. Her teachers were always impressed with the speed that she grasped new languages. "But I do seem to have a knack for languages so maybe you're asking the wrong person."
"Three and a half languages is more than a knack. That's definitely talent territory." Flack's grin spread a little wider as she turned away in an unsuccessful attempt to hide her blush. "How do you keep it all straight in your head?"
Juliana laughed, a rich, throaty sound. "I don't. If I had a euro for every time I could only think of a word in the wrong language," she rolled her eyes. "And then there are lexical gaps."
"What gaps?" He jabbed a thumb at himself. "I was a gym class kind of kid."
"An untranslatable word or phrase."
"Like?"
"Plaatsvervangende schaamte." Always her example of choice when discussing lexical gaps. An amusingly long phrase, that illustrated how, despite all the complexities of language, it was still impossible to express everything.
He stared at her dumbly. "What?"
"Plaatsvervangende schaamte," she repeated, trying not to take too much enjoyment in his confusion.
Digging around in his pocket, he pulled out his pen and memo book. "You're gonna have to write that down for me."
The woman obliged, the first word in her precise handwriting taking up the width of the entire page. She repeated the phrase again, her finger sliding along the letters to show him where she was. "It's the feeling of shame you feel for someone else due to their embarrassing actions. The closest you can get in English is... vicarious embarrassment? But it still doesn't quite capture the meaning."
"You're a leftie too," he noticed, taking his things back and putting them back where they belonged.
Juliana tucked her hair behind her ear and eyed him disbelievingly. "'Too', Detective?"
"What, you won't take my word for it?" he gasped, pretending to be offended. "And call me Don." He had no interest in lording his rank over her. It was too formal anyway.
"You carry your gun on your right hip," she said, in the way of explanation. She had noticed the weapon he removed his jacket. "Don," she added belatedly, trying the sounds of his name on her tongue.
"Ah." So he could add 'observant' to the list of her attractive qualities. "I'm cross-eyed."
Her eyebrow quirked up. "I don't understand. Then you would have a hard time hitting anything at all, regardless of which side you carry your gun on."
The chuckle escaped him before he had the chance to stop it. "No, no, I mean cross-eye dominant. It's a shooting thing. When your dominant hand," he held up the left, "and your dominant eye," he pointed to the right, "are on opposite sides, you have to make adjustments."
"A dominant eye?" Juliana asked, intrigued. She had never heard of that before.
"Yeah. Here, I'll show you." He pulled the chair right up against the bed, leaning over the little safety rail to point out the window. "First, pick something far away. Like that office window with the sticky notes. See it?"
She looked around outside. The office window had the light lit, and a multitude of different coloured squares of paper stuck to the window. "Yes."
Flack saw the edge of a large square of gauze, peeking out from the neckline of her hospital gown, hiding the nasty wounds she had somehow survived. That's why he was here, Flack reprimanded himself. He still needed to get a statement out of her. His hand curled into a fist, trying to hold his goal in the front of his mind. "Take your thumb and cover it."
With her left hand, she did as he instructed. Gingerly, as her wounds still ached.
Though his fist hadn't loosened, his resolve slipped slightly. He had been the only one in his academy class to use his left hand for this exercise. Flack smiled. Lefties unite. "Keep your focus on the building out there. You should be able to see past your thumb. Now take your other hand and cover one of your eyes."
Juliana covered her right eye obediently.
"Do you see the window?"
Was she supposed to? It was still blocked by her thumb. "… No," she murmured uncertainly.
"That's okay," he reassured her. Now cover the other eye." Once the woman had done so, he asked again, "Do you see the window?"
"Yes." Her thumb looked as if it had jumped to the side and she could see the colourful squares on the window again.
"Then your left eye is your dominant eye. When you look with your dominant eye, you see the same thing you do with both eyes open," Flack explained. "That's why you aim with your dominant eye. It's the one that's accurate. For you, you can shoot with your left hand because your dominant hand and eye are on the same side. For me, I had to learn to shoot with my off hand, so it would line up with my dominant eye." Quiet fell in the room, a natural break in the conversation. "That's my story done," Flack said cautiously, "and I think it's your turn."
Juliana let out a sigh, disappointment in every line of her body. She was really hoping he had forgotten. "Could I tell you about the time I nearly drowned when I was 16?"
"I'd like to hear that one another time," he answered. He meant it too. The pool staff at Messmore Aquatic Centre had told him that Juliana was the fastest patron in lane swim by a long shot. How she had nearly drowned, he would like to find out one day. "Right now, I'm trying to lock up the guy who attacked you before he hurts anyone else." Flack watched her bite her lip as she weighed the possibility of having the investigation disappear versus her desire to tell him what had happened that night. No, not him. Anyone. "You haven't told anyone," he realized.
Juliana stared at him in shock. "How did you know that?"
All his usual wit vanished from his tongue and he coughed, feeling like he'd choked on his own breath.
She frowned, wondering if he was sick, until the realization dawned on her at the same speed of the blush slowly colouring his cheeks.
"Card," he blurted in an attempt to interrupt her train of thought.
"What card?" she asked, looking away. A bashful smile lingered on her lips.
Make that a failed attempt. "Card, the - the uh, international calling card," Flack stumbled. The man cleared his throat. Dear God, what was wrong with him? "You had one in your wallet and no cell phone. So you call home on a landline. Hospital's not gonna let you make expensive calls without paying and you can't. Because we have your card."
"You would give Beertje a run for his money," Juliana murmured to herself.
"Sorry?" Who?
"It doesn't matter," she brushed it off.
"Okay..." Guess she didn't want to talk about Berty. "Most people vent when they have a bad day at work. It must be killing you to have no one to talk to." He winced. "Bad choice of words."
"Well, yes." She was responding to both the former and the latter, but he understood without her needing to specify.
"If you need to get it off your chest," he suggested. "Off the record, of course."
The woman sighed. "What are you trying to say, that I should talk to you? I can't do that," she said hopelessly. He was with the police. The less she volunteered, the faster the investigation would go away.
"You," he stood and strode to the window, "can't talk to Flack from the NYPD." He pulled his badge off his belt and his gun followed. "What about Don from Queens?" he asked, turning back to her with his kindest smile.
"You're the same person," she said skeptically. If her injuries had permitted it, she would have crossed her arms for effect.
He put his hand over his heart. "As if. Flack can't keep a secret. He's gotta put everything down on paper. Me, on the other hand, I'll take it to the grave. Pinky promise." He held out the finger in question.
Juliana tried not to snort. He was funny, she would give him that. "Is a pinky promise a joke in America?" As if that was the real sticking point in this, not the notion that Don and Flack were different people. "Back home they are serious."
"They're very serious," Don reassured her gravely.
She flashed a smile but it disappeared again just as quickly. This was absurd. The confidentiality of whatever she said, riding on his word and a child's game.
"I mean it," he said, approaching her bedside. "Off the record. The department won't hear it from me." He offered his extended pinky, blue eyes honest.
She wrapped her finger around his, and as soon as the promise was made, Juliana burst out, "I was glad I had worn my boots." It seemed so trivial, given everything that had happened, but the memory stood out vividly.