Dani shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat, her arm clutching the beat-up messenger bag to her side as she stepped through the busted gate cut into the chain-link fence. It was a frigid morning, and Jimmy worked on the other goddamned side of town. Why he wanted to meet here was beyond her. She’d never expected to come back to this blighted corner of Roxbury again.
Still, at least the frozen temperatures and cutting wind kept the assholes behind the closed doors of the squat, ugly apartment blocks that surrounded what passed as a playground here. There were still a half-dozen swings that worked, too, which was better than what she’d remembered growing up. And there was no denying the hunched figure that sat in one of those swings, his big body too long for the low sling seat, his knees bent high as he pushed himself slowly back and forth.
Bending against the wind, Dani strode through the park toward her baby brother. He wasn’t so into his own problems that he didn’t hear her coming, and he looked up at her as she crossed the trash-strewn patches of brown grass, the brittle surface crunching beneath her boots.
He had come from work at least, she decided, taking in his decent coat and heavy scarf. And he was a hell of a lot bigger than he had been the first time she’d seen him in that swing.
The eyes that swung toward her, though, huge and terrified, might as well still have been those of that long-ago six-year-old.
“Jimmy?” Dani’s voice was hard. “Jimmy, what’s wrong? What happened?”
“What?” As if seeing her for the first time, Jimmy shook his head, the devastation wiped clean from his face just that quickly. He smiled at her instead, twisting a little in the swing to face her more fully. “Sorry, Dani. Just caught up in being here, you know?” He gestured a heavily mittened hand to the beat-up park. “Can you believe this place? You’d think it would have changed in fifteen years, but it’s still the same shithole it was when we met.”
Dani scowled at him. “You didn’t bring me halfway across Boston on the coldest day of winter to walk down memory lane, Jimmy. Why are we here?” She breathed out a long, frigid breath and peered at the apartment complexes. “Is this where the trouble is? You gotta pay off someone here?”
He shrugged. “Nah. I don’t know. It just seemed right to meet you here. We never come back to this neighborhood anymore. Hell, I didn’t even want Katie to know I grew up in this place. Like it was some sort of dark secret that made me less of a success.”
“It makes you more of a success. But it’s colder than shit out here.” Dani tapped the cover of the messenger bag. “It’s all here, but it’s a lot of cash, Jimmy. I think I deserve to know what you’re using it for.”
Jimmy wasn’t looking at her, however. He was staring across the empty park as if it were filled with screaming, laughing kids, all of them playing in tight knots for protection—except the few lonely outliers, transplants who might as well have had targets painted on their backs. Making friends back then was essential, and Jimmy hadn’t been great at it. “You remember the Wallace kid?” he said now, and Dani’s heart twisted, her cheeks beginning to warm despite the wind. Once again, Jimmy didn’t sound like a grown man in his early twenties, with a wife and baby girl. He sounded like he had that first morning, his voice a little too thin, a little too high. “You really did a number on him, you remember that?”
With a sigh, Dani moved to Jimmy’s right, settling into the swing beside him. The simple act sent a wave of her own buried memories surging, all of the old anger and pain nearly flattening her, making it tough to breathe. “I remember,” she said, even as Jimmy swung away, his eyes on people no longer there.
“You came up that morning and I knew you were new; everyone knew it. No one interrupted Matt while he was beating on some kid, even a kid as scrawny as me. His buddies were just warming up their comments at your clothes and you walked up and pushed him away like you owned his ass. I think I almost threw up.”
“You did throw up,” Dani said. Strange how the wind didn’t bother her anymore. Strange how she didn’t feel cold.
“Yeah, well, not until we got home. I can’t believe you even knew how to find me, or that Mama J gave a shit enough to send you.”
“Social-worker visit, remember?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right.” Jimmy’s voice sounded distant, but it wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation. It’d played out a few times over the course of the past several years. Never here, of course. They’d never come back here. But at Jimmy’s high school graduation, he’d brought up a variation on this story. Then he’d done so again, not five months earlier, at the birth of his baby girl. She’d always let him talk it out, never quite understanding why. Her own memories were safe enough where she’d left them in the past. For all she cared, they could stay there.
“He beat the shit out of you.”
Jimmy’s voice brought her back, and she turned just slightly to face him, only he wasn’t looking at her anymore. This part of the conversation they hadn’t had before, though he’d always acknowledged it with a look, even tears, the night Nell was born. Still, it was true enough; she wasn’t ashamed of it. “He did,” she said now, as the silence stretched between them.
“I never did understand that, you know? Not until—not until Nell happened. Even as much as I love Katie, I never really got what you did.”
Now Dani sharpened her look. “What do you mean, ‘what I did’?”
“You came flying out of nowhere and knocked him away, told me to go to Mama J’s, that she was expecting us both, and he came right back at you and flattened you against the pavement. He was twice your size, I think.”
“He wasn’t that big,” Dani said, shaking her head. And he hadn’t been. But he’d sure as hell been solid.
“You cracked your head on the concrete and there was all this blood, then he kicked and he kicked and you just grabbed his leg and pulled him down again, rolling over on top of him and whaling on him with your fists. All that blood coming out of your nose going everywhere, and he just started screaming and I started screaming and…man.” Jimmy shook his head. “That was something else.”
Dani had gone still in her swing at Jimmy’s words, hoping—praying—that he wouldn’t say anything else. The old days were meant to be the old days for a reason, and what was done back there was done. “Long time ago, Jimmy. And I know for a fact Matt Wallace isn’t the reason you need a bunch of cash. So what gives? Who you gotta pay off?”
Jimmy still wouldn’t look at her. “You really would’ve done anything for me, and you didn’t even know me. You’d only showed up at Mama J’s that morning and hadn’t said two words.”
“Well, it was a little difficult to get a word in edgewise with your motormouth.”
His smile was sad, seaming his wind-chapped face. “I just didn’t understand it, is all.” He glanced at her. “Why did you do it? And don’t just say because Mama J told you to. She was mean as a snake, but you wouldn’t have known that so quickly.”
Oh, yeah, she had. That was one thing you figured out pretty fast in the system. Who you could trust and who you couldn’t. Mama J had been decidedly in the second camp. Dani just hadn’t realized the true extent of the woman’s evil. She’d learned that the hard way, within just a few weeks of getting assigned to her. But that first day…
“Well, I’d never had a little brother before,” she said. The words came out strangely, and Jimmy looked at her, his large, expressive eyes big enough for her to drown in. She unhooked the messenger bag and gave it to him with a heavy sigh. “Whatever trouble you’re in Jimmy, I don’t care. You have to know you can tell me anything, though. Whether you’re using, or you’ve done something, or—”
“God, Dani, no. It’s—I just…” His hands tightened convulsively on the bag, but once again, he couldn’t look at her. “I can’t talk about it. I know that sounds like bullshit, but I can’t talk about it. If I do, it’ll make it too real.” When he finally glanced up, his eyes were red from more than the wind. “I promise that I’ll tell you when it’s all over, but right now…”
Dani leaned forward in her swing, wrapping her arms around Jimmy as he dissolved into tears. “It’s okay now, Jimmy,” she whispered. “You don’t have to tell me, I’ll help you no matter what. It’s all okay.”
If anything, her words seemed to rock him more, and he clung to her almost desperately, his broad shoulders convulsing with his sobs, as the rusted chains of the swing set twisted above them and the wind blasted across the empty playground.