Two sides of the same coin
Chapter 6. Darkness before dawn
Few people were left in the office when Jubal went back into her office. The day was coming to an end, coloring the room with orange light. He found her sitting at her desk, still reviewing papers. This time he didn't lean in giving a couple of light taps on the door frame as he usually did; he simply walked over and, with a slow, deliberate movement, placed the tablet with the open file on the desk, before Isobel.
He stared at her.
She, her stomach turning to lead, read the cover of the file, although she already knew what it was about. The report of the Hazelton riot. Isobel went very still.
"You were willing to stay behind as long as the rest of us would get out of Green Haven," Jubal tried to provoke her.
Isobel raised her eyes and glared at him in a way that made him want to run.
"You've read it," she said in reply, with a tone of bitter reproach, almost spiteful.
"No. I was going to do it. I was about to," Jubal confessed flatly, "but I didn't."
He was just sure it was traumatic. He ached for Isobel only to guess what it could have been. She completely failed to hide how relieved she was, and that made Jubal hesitate at its implications. Nevertheless, in the end he decided to dare.
"Are you going to tell me?"
The long silence that followed, hard as a stone wall, spoke for itself. Isobel's stubborn expression was even more eloquent. It did not allow Jubal to even insist. He had to look away, his eyes wet; he swallowed hard and nodded, a rictus of deep disappointment on his mouth.
Isobel needed help, but she wasn't going to let him give it to her. Jubal didn't know whether he felt more hurt or angry. A part of him couldn't believe he had completely lost Isobel's trust, which he had treasured so fervently.
Maybe he'd never really had it before.
An abrupt thirst for a slug of vodka suddenly manifested itself inside him, like a sucking whirlpool. He took a deep breath to subdue it, but it remained there, growing by the moment.
So, more hurt, then. Much more.
"Isobel... I don't- I don't know what you think I'm trying to do, but I- I'm just worried about you."
He turned and walked out of the office, shaking his head in forlorn.
·~·~·
"I'm so sorry for your loss."
Isobel looked at Jess as if she didn't understand the words, numb inside as only that accumulation of different and overlapping pains can do. Jess was one of the few people who knew. Who could understand what it meant to have received that news, to now stand there dressed in mourning, but apart from the others.
'I'm so sorry for your loss'...
Kyle had said the same thing, four months ago, at her mother's funeral, who had passed away after many years of unsuccessful battle with cancer. Isobel had been surprised to see him there, after so long, although she knew Kyle was now working in the nearby Newark office. Apparently, he had wanted to stop by, at least, to pay his respects.
He was different. Calm but also more reserved. Isobel thought at the time that he seemed to be holding some disturbing secret. Furthermore, the flame of resentment and guilt no longer glowed in his eyes. Isobel wondered if it had something to do with the fact that her attackers had ended up murdered in prison within weeks of each other, after she had already been stationed in Alabama for some time, and that Warden Henderson had been killed in a car accident only a few months later.
To be honest, it had also surprised her that, less than three hours after the service, she'd invited him into her bed and Kyle had wound up moaning her name on her lips. It had been desperate and full of need, as it is whenever death has hovered near.
Isobel did not expect to see him again.
However, the next day Kyle called her and invited her to dinner. Bringing her flowers and being chivalrous, he began a slow, traditional courtship with her. Well, at least more traditional than the first time, years ago, when they ended up sharing a heated kiss in the locker room after an undercover assignment that had made them pretend to be more intimate than they actually were.
During those few weeks, Kyle's company had helped Isobel greatly in coping with the loss of her mother, even if she still carried an immense sadness inside. Just twenty-four hours earlier, Isobel had woken up next to Kyle and, seeing him still asleep in her arms, had felt a tenderness that brought a taste of happiness. Twenty-four hours.
Now Kyle was dead. Murdered by Antonio Vargas.
·~·~·
The image of Jubal's back walking away, abandoning her, stabbed into Isobel's chest like a dagger. Tears came uncontrollably to her eyes, sobs to her throat. She turned in her chair to hide and wrapped her arms around her body, trying to control them.
But what else could she expect from him when she repeatedly pushed him away from her?
When she finally managed to reach a certain but sickly calmness, for a while she tried to work. But to no avail. The four walls of her office –glass, concrete, it didn't matter– were suffocating her, just as had the walls of her home had done. Her nightmares and what she had seen in Jubal's eyes, which reminded her painfully of Kyle, haunted her.
It was already dark outside. She gathered her things to leave. Standing in the doorway with her coat on, she paused, her gaze fixed on the tablet on her desk.
The cane-assisted steps that led her to the bar had not been planned, but they didn't falter either. She felt her mind exhausted from trying to escape without success from the horror-ridden maze of her memories. His mother's absence, Jess's, were agonizingly apparent. How she wished she could have turned to them at that moment. If there was ever a day Isobel needed a Scotch without ice, this was it.
The place was almost empty. A couple of men drinking beers attending to the sports on TV, another in a booth, hunched over his glass with a bottle of vodka on the table. None of them paid any attention to her. Good.
She took off her coat and sat down at the end of the bar. She welcomed the familiar burn in her throat from the first drink. It was not enough. With a trembling hand, she lifted the glass to take a second... but she saw him there, in the mirror behind the bar.
At first she thought that the reflection and the light from the colored neons of the decoration of the place were playing tricks on her, but when she fixed her eyes Isobel had no doubt. The man at the table at the booth was Jubal. She froze, with the glass close to her lips but without touching it. Jubal's empty gaze stared deep into his as if he wanted to drown inside.
Very slowly, fearing to give way to hysteria if she did not exercise iron control over herself, Isobel set her glass down on the bar. She stepped off the stool with the difficulty her recent injury gave her, and approached him. She just called him by name, her voice hoarse.
His head jerked around, his eyes wide. "Isobel! What...? This... I don't-" Jubal stammered.
She didn't know what to say to him; she was there for the same thing. And, at the same time, the very idea of him drinking again was devastating.
Then she saw that Jubal's glass was empty, dry. The bottle still had the seal intact.
Relief made her knees give out on her, vision obscured; she leaned on the table and then sat down, facing him. "You haven't drunk," she sighed, her heart slowly dropping from her throat.
She was terrified of the implications anyway. She picked up the bottle and pushed it away until it was out of Jubal's reach. He barely looked at her; seeming embarrassed beyond measure.
"For goodness sake, Jubal, what were you doing?" Isobel didn't want to hide the anguish in her voice. She repressed a strong urge to grab him by his shoulders shake him.
This time it was his turn to remain silent. It was the open dismay in Isobel's huge eyes that pushed him to speak. "I don't know. The need was too much and... I don't know."
Actually, Isobel did know: Jubal had been deliberately leaning over the precipice of self-destruction, wondering if he would be strong enough to resist. And secretly wishing he won't. She knew... because she had been there, too.
"What are you doing here?" he muttered.
Isobel wanted to reply that she had come looking for him because she thought he was in need of her. The fact that it wasn't true unexpectedly tore at her insides. She hadn't even stopped to think about what all this might be doing to Jubal. So what? she thought to herself bitterly. He'll get over it. I do. She turned her head and saw her own glass, abandoned on the bar counter. Her nightmares danced briefly before her eyes, making it hard to breathe. Yeah, sure.
She studied Jubal's desolate face, glanced sideways at the bottle of vodka. A growing weight weighed down on her heart. He didn't deserve to be left to his fate; he cared too much. Least of all, she being the cause, being in her power to avert it.
She stood up suddenly. "Come on. Let's get out of here."
·~·~·
Outside the bar, Isobel had insisted on walking him home. Jubal suspected with mortification that because he didn't trust him not to turn around and go back inside.
It had recently stopped raining. They walked together in silence, only the sound of their footsteps –of Isobel's cane– on the wet sidewalk echoing in the lonely street. Truly, Jubal could not find words that would not embarrass him further. Isobel, however, seemed simply lost in thought.
Once at the door of the building, she had asked without actually looking at him if he invited her upstairs. Jubal didn't know which surprised him more, the question or Isobel's hesitant, almost shy tone.
When he opened the door to his apartment, he let her walk past him. They both hung up their jackets. Jubal offered her some tea, but she shook her head.
At a nod from Isobel, the two of them sat down, as they had done at the bar, on either side of Jubal's dining table. He gazed expectantly at her beautiful features, softly outlined by the single soft light, lit a little farther down the hall, which illuminated them. He could almost see the decision condense in her eyes.
Isobel pursed her lips.
"Here you go," she said, passing him the link to the file from her cell phone. "You can read it if you want. But nothing will ever be the same again," she added grimly.
His eyes became apprehensive, churning Isobel's guts, acutely aware of what she was risking to pull him out of the spiral of hopelessness in which he was mired.
Jubal's sudden impulse to promise her that it would not be so, nearly betrayed him, but fortunately he was wise enough not to make empty promises.
As overwhelmed by her show of confidence, as he was terrified of what he was about to find, he reached for his personal tablet and turned it on to open the file. The connection tested his mettle.
Jubal cast a brief glance toward Isobel. Her eyes looked so black... Finally, he took a deep breath, and began to read.
Isobel studied him throughout. Aware of this, of how much she disliked being exposed to others, he hid his reactions as best he could, but Isobel could pick up the slight frown on his brow, the slight tension in his eyelids, the fleeting twitch in his cheek.
Before she could do anything about it, it all came rushing back to her in waves. The tragedy of Elijah's death. The sickening, painful invasion of Strickler against her body. The desolation of Kyle's anger and abandonment. Helplessness was the element in which everything was diluted, in which Isobel struggled and drowned.
By the time he finished reading, Jubal felt like smashing things with his bare hands. No wonder the case of the Tri-State rapists had affected her so much. Jubal's stomach twisted at the thought of Isobel insisting on personally doing that undercover mission, what she'd had to go through and what she'd come close to.
Even worse, that she would have been forced to send OA and Maggie to Green Haven.
And he finally understood why every time her agents got hurt because of some decision of her, Isobel punished herself like that. It literally took his breath away.
He looked up to find Isobel clutching her arms around her torso, eyes squeezed shut, trembling.
That gave Jubal the precious seconds he needed to swallow the fury and horror in his throat. It made him realize the dimension of the trust she was bestowing on him. It almost made him dizzy.
"We were together, Kyle and I, at the time," she said quietly. "He wanted revenge." She sounded impossibly serene for the state she was in.
The moments she spent together with Kyle came back to her with a merciless bittersweet contrast. The sharp pain of his loss wounded her, at that precise time and place, as it did the first time.
'Were you two... close?' Vargas' taunting voice echoed inside her with a sinister reverberation. 'He was on my payroll for years'.
When, after releasing Vargas to save Elise, Isobel investigated the deaths of Strickler's buddies, she discovered that Durango men had been behind them. The Hazelton warden's accident was a dead end, but it definitely didn't seem like one. Of course, no one found the connection at the time.
The pieces had then clicked together for her with the rumbling of a slab closing a tomb.
"That was why Kyle ended up in Vargas' hands," Isobel added in a strangled voice. "I think- I think that was what destroyed him."
Heart pounding, Jubal barely could control the tears that assaulted him at the certainty that it had almost destroyed her too, at how damaged she had been. But even more so at the fact that, in spite of everything, she was still standing. Not emotionally, but actually morally whole.
The other side of the same coin.
Isobel was simply terrified to look at him, convinced that she would now find in his the same thing that plagued Kyle's eyes, that she would now have to add Jubal's gaze to the others that haunted her: the emptiness of Elijah's, the obscenity of Strickler's, the darkness of Kyle's.
However, she refused to let fear get the better of her. She braced herself for the devastating blow that would be. She raised her face.
To her utter surprise, what she found in them besides unshed tears, was an unexpected understanding and a grave firmness that said 'here I am, you have me, come what may'.
Without saying a word, Jubal got up, went to her, knelt down beside her and embraced her. He feared he would not be welcome, but it was what his heart told him he should do.
Just a few seconds before, Isobel would have sworn that sensing him so close, feeling his arms around her would have made things worse, but surprising as it seemed, it hadn't. His warmth, his scent… his affection, wrapped her up as if Jubal were trying to put all her broken pieces back together again. Suddenly, without even getting to think about it, Isobel clung to him desperately, not holding back her sobs for once.
Although he wanted to kiss her forehead, to stroke her hair, his intuition told Jubal that he shouldn't. Anything could break that fragile bubble of security he had managed to invoke so she could show her vulnerability.
Jubal's knees became sore, but they both stayed that way as long as Isobel needed.
~.~.~.~
Next chapter, "Armor of Excuses": Isobel did not reply, cursing herself for having asked him those questions, when it wasn't him who was supposed to answer them.