I SPENT THE day sleepwalking through my job, tied to my desk composing reports, answering e-mail, and nursing a headache induced by sleep deprivation. I only talked to Jacob long enough to explain what was going on with me and IA, and not to expect me to do anything beyond paperwork until they finished their investigation.
That caused a glance at Whedon, who was standing back and waiting for us to finish our conversation. He sighed and whispered to me, “Almost makes me wish I had to shoot someone.”
“You can handle one lawyer.”
“I’m sure I can, but if I do, I think it would get me arrested.”
Even though I felt like crap, I couldn’t help smiling. “It’s justified force, self-defense.”
“Yeah, but is it ever a good idea to piss off a lawyer?”
My smile went away as I thought of my outburst yesterday. “I guess I’ll find out.”
He squeezed my shoulder and tried to be reassuring. “It will all work out, Dana.”
I watched him walk away. He had a self-assured stride that reminded me of a panther. A panther that has no idea what he’s talking about.
AFTER an interview with Internal Affairs officers, I was officially put on administrative leave. The IA officers were refreshingly free of bullshit, which was a relief after days of dealing with Whedon. They didn’t think I’d be on leave for more than 48 hours, given the facts of the case. However, they also didn’t want me doing any more paperwork since, technically, that was still working.
At three in the afternoon, I had nothing left to do. I wasn’t ready to go home, so I went to the gym. When I walked in, I had the room pretty much to myself. There was one other guy, someone I didn’t know, a curly-haired kid who looked barely out of high school. He was on the weight machine, doing bench presses. I noticed him glance at me when I came in, but I was in no mood to talk, so I went to the opposite side of the room to the treadmills.
I warmed up slowly, but soon I was going full out. I found the rhythm of it comforting, pumping my legs, my lungs, my heart. It allowed me to switch off my brain for a while. One of the reasons I felt like crap most of the day wasn’t just the lack of sleep, but the fact I’d slept in too late to do my morning run. My body was used to two miles a day, and it became cranky if it didn’t get it.
The kid moved to various stations on the weight machine, and he took longer than he needed to set the weights on the leg press—looking at me while he did so.
It was almost amusing watching his attempt at being so self-consciously macho.
I tweaked the controls to angle the treadmill up. If I was going to run inside, I might as well take advantage of it for the workout. My normal run was mostly on the flat, without any significant hills. Here, I had the chance to run up a twenty-degree grade. I attacked it almost as a response to the kid, who was doing leg reps with something like two hundred pounds.
I think he might have done fifteen.
The readout treadmill told me I had reached my second mile, and I decided to do another mile up the grade. I pushed myself up a nonexistent mountain as the kid stopped his weight training and looked at me without even trying to hide the fact he was looking at me.
He seemed to want to say something, and I wondered why. I wasn’t the greatest looker even when I cleaned myself up. Right now? I was pushing myself, wearing a gray sweat suit that was practically soaked black with perspiration, and random strands of hair had come loose from my ponytail to stick to the side of my face. I could catch a glimpse of myself reflected in the windows on the other side of the weight machine. I looked as if I had just climbed out after falling into a swimming pool.
I wished I could follow up my workout with a swim, but I had yet to find a swimsuit that completely covered the Mark.
The kid never said what was on his mind. He left without talking to me. I didn’t know if I was disappointed or relieved.
The treadmill beeped at me; my last mile was done. I lowered the grade and gradually slowed my pace for another quarter mile to cool down before stopping.
I had moved on to punching the crap out of the heavy bag, pretending it was Whedon, when Jacob entered the gym.
I didn’t notice him enter until he said, “Aren’t you hot in that getup?”
I dropped my fists and stepped back from the heavy bag. Jacob stood in the doorway, watching me. In his hand was a manila folder. I shrugged and said, “So?” I walked to a chair where I’d thrown a towel and a bottle of water. I wiped the sweat off my face and said, “You know I’m off duty until IA dots all their ‘I’s and crosses all their ‘T’s?”
“I know.”
I threw the towel down and picked up the water.
He continued. “They’re probably being more anal than usual with our little Justice Department lawyer running around. It’s not like you hit anything.”
The way he said it, I knew it was a bit of gentle ribbing. I couldn’t even bring myself to smile. I had hit something.
“I brought you this,” he said. “It’s a copy of the file on your John Doe from last night. You were asking for it, weren’t you?”
I had. Not that I had mentioned it to Jacob. I had asked the guys in charge of the investigation. “Thank you,” I said quietly.
“Why did you want to see this?”
“Are you serious? I had a man die in front of me—” My voice caught and turned into a pained whisper. “He came to me. I tried to stop the bleeding.”
“Dana?”
“My hands were inside him. . . .” My voice trailed off and I was panicked that I might start crying again, but somehow I held that back.
“Dana, are you okay?”
I was quiet for several seconds before I said flatly, “No.”
“What’s going on with you?”
“Do they have a picture of the victim in that file?”
He nodded.
“His back?”
“Yeah. He’s got an elaborate tattoo, a full back piece—”
I turned away from him and began sucking in deep breaths. I had been alone for too long, and I had no idea if I was strong enough to do what I was thinking of doing.
“Dana?”
“Shh, give me a moment.” I think I was shaking a little bit. I still had no real way to articulate what was wrong. Everything was wrong. Ever since Mom died, I had felt as if all my carefully arranged life had begun sliding into something I didn’t know, something I couldn’t control. Not only was I torn up from losing the last family I ever had, I was aching over the loss of this complete stranger who shared my Mark. A stranger . . .
I wasn’t reacting as if he was a stranger. I felt as if he was family. The Mark on him, like mine—what if he was a lost connection to my “real” family. Was that really what I was thinking? The idea hit me almost as hard as my mom’s death.
I felt alone, abandoned—and I’d done all I could to push away the one person who cared. Why couldn’t I talk to Jacob?
I didn’t understand myself anymore, if I ever had.
“Dana?” he repeated quietly.
I held my hand up without turning around. He said nothing more. If I did not start telling him what was happening, who would I tell? Everything that happened lately told me that the life I was pretending to live existed on borrowed time. Was I going to wait until it collapsed around me and just slipped away?
Didn’t he deserve something before that happened, some sort of explanation?
If things were going to fall apart, wouldn’t it be better if it was on my own terms?
I bit my lip and said, “Jacob? I don’t show anyone this.”
“What?”
I sucked in a breath. Not everything, not all at once, but I could start. I grabbed the zipper on my top and yanked it down before I had a chance to reconsider. Then I shrugged out of the soaked top of my sweat suit, allowing it to fall down and drop to my waist. From there up, all I wore was a black sports bra. I heard him suck in a breath.
Despite the bra, I felt as naked as I had when I’d been discovered in the shower by a Michael Rohan who had not been my father. I felt his gaze tracing my Mark, my secret scars, as if he was looking into the most intimate part of my life. As if, with the swirls of the Mark, he could see the way it rooted inside me, the way it made me feel.
I could feel a flush burn across the breadth of my exposed skin, its surface going from chilled to burning in a wave of something that was almost shame.
A small, terrified part of my mind screamed, What are you doing?
My answering thought was only half-convinced. If I don’t start trusting someone, I will always be alone.
After an eternity feeling his gaze on my back, Jacob said, “That is amazing work.”
You have no idea how amazing. I pulled the top of my sweat suit back on. The damp fabric now felt frigid against my skin. I turned around to study his face, looking for signs of some sort of reaction. I don’t know what I was expecting, if I was expecting anything.
I think I saw puzzlement.
“You can see why I work out dressed like this.”
“Yes.” Then he shook his head. “No.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s such an elaborate back piece. Why . . .” He trailed off, studying my face. I realized he didn’t know how to go on. He didn’t want to upset me, but I had opened the door to so many questions that he would have never dared ask me before.
I asked for him. “Why would I get such a dramatic tattoo, only to spend all my life hiding it from people?”
“Yes.”
“Because I didn’t put it there.”
Jacob looked at me, puzzled for a moment, then his expression darkened. “Someone did that against your will? What happened?”
I opened my mouth and stopped. I was suddenly paralyzed again, unable to reveal my secrets. What was the matter with me? I had exposed myself to Jacob; he had seen the heart of my mystery, and he was still here. . . .
He was still here.
I realized that, on some level, I had expected that seeing the Mark on my back would drive him away. I had expected him to react cruelly, like the children who mocked me in grade school or the teachers who thought my markings were disruptive. I could still hear the chanting, half the words I didn’t know because I had still been learning English. Tramp, ho, slut . . .
I could deal with mockery. I didn’t know what to do with concern.
“Dana?”
“It is a long story,” I said. I turned away from him again. “Damn, that’s a weak cliché.”
“I have time.”
“I—”
“Why don’t you tell me over dinner? You can talk as long as you want.”
“You’re asking me out?” I said in slow disbelief.
I looked across at him and saw no trace of mockery in his face. In fact, the lines of his face softened just enough to make him look vulnerable. His smile wasn’t forced, but it was tentative, almost as if the words represented a risk on a par with revealing the Mark. “You look like you need to sit down and have something to eat.”
As bad as I was at understanding people on a personal level, I knew then that I could hurt him badly by withdrawing again. “I . . . Thank you.”
“Over dinner, say as much as you need to,” he said. “All of it, none of it. I see how hard it is for you.”
“I need to go shower,” I turned to face the locker rooms because I didn’t want him to see my eyes tear up. “I’ll meet you downstairs; I’ll follow your car.”
“I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
“Yeah.” Thank you.
EVEN though I was the only one in the women’s locker room, the way I moved in that environment was second nature. I stripped with my back to a wall, and a large towel was over my shoulders before I stepped away from the corner of the room. I stood under the showerhead farthest from the entrance, by the tile wall. Again, my back faced the wall as if I was expecting an attack.
It was how I survived gym in high school. Somehow, I had managed to eke through the minimum PE requirement without drawing attention to my back—though I think the Mark was smaller then. It had been years since I had worn only a T-shirt in public.
When I shut off the shower, the towel went over my shoulders again.
I was still alone in the locker room. Exiting the shower, I passed a full-length mirror. I stopped a moment, glancing at myself. My oversized towel covered everything, which was why I had bought it. I saw nothing of the Mark in my reflection.
Something made me unwrap the towel. I dropped it like I had dropped my top in front of Jacob, shrugging it off my shoulders so that it dropped in a deep arc between my elbows, sagging to just between my hips, revealing everything from my shoulders down to the small of my back.
I stared at myself, turning away from the mirror. I could see about half of the Mark crawling across my skin, thick black lines emerging from a twisted spiral heart six inches above the small of my back to embrace shoulders and hips without ever crossing themselves, branching and rebranching to echo the whole mazelike pattern in repeatedly smaller scales; like a black, leafless vine growing across my skin, twisting into elaborate spirals.
It resembled a tribal tattoo, and it also resembled a Celtic spiral pattern, and it resembled neither. It could have been a representation of the tree of life if the tree did not distinguish between roots and crown or the spaces in between.
In the end, the Mark resembled nothing so much as itself, which is why I knew the old man was somehow connected to me. His Mark was the only thing I had ever seen that bore the same style as my own Mark.
I thought I heard a noise and quickly pulled the towel back around myself. I stood a moment, heart racing, but I was still alone.
I went back to my locker to get dressed.