“I’m not trying to argue with you,” Mulberry says standing in the doorway as I brush my teeth.
I turn to him, my mouth full of foam. “That’s not a great opener,” I say, my words garbled.
Mulberry nods, agreeing. His arms are crossed over his chest, his mouth pressed tight. The man looks wound up. He may not want to fight, but his body expects one is coming. And it does not seem to think it can win. Why not just curl up into the fetal position and save some time?
“What about James and me staying here?”
I lean over and spit into the sink. “No.”
“Sydney.”
I meet his gaze. “No.” It comes out harsher this time. “He’s still nursing. We can’t be away from each other that long.”
“So maybe…” Mulberry trails off with a sigh. He looks over his shoulder where James is on the bed with Frank. They are playing “slap Frank in the face while he makes ridiculous sounds and James laughs maniacally”. It’s become a regular part of the nightly ritual.
I rinse my mouth out and wipe my face on a towel. Mulberry watches. “The thing is,” I say, turning to Mulberry. “Danger can find you no matter where you are, remember? Pirates are rare off the coast of Nicaragua. We were not doing anything dangerous there and we still could have lost everything.”
Mulberry glowers from the doorway. I’m basically parroting back his own words from when we were attacked by pirates while cruising with Lenox.
“Not living your life to the fullest does not protect you from tragedy. From loss. But it guarantees disappointment. It guarantees a life half lived.”
“You don’t need to stick your neck out,” Mulberry mumbles; it sounds like something his grandmother might have said to him. Some old programming coming back to haunt him as he considers his son’s mortality.
“If I don’t, who will? We can’t all be turtles. Someone’s got to do something different if the world is going to change.”
“But taking our son on a dangerous mission doesn’t do anything for anyone.” Mulberry’s arms drop to his sides in his frustration.
“He won’t be in danger. You will be there. We will have the dogs.”
“What if we all get caught? What if we end up in prison and he ends up in the foster system? What then?”
“My mom would come and get him. Or Robert would take charge of him.” I’m kind of teasing him. Because the most likely outcome is that our friends in Joyful Justice would swoop in and save him.
“Your mother and Robert Maxim, have you lost your damn mind?” His voice is low, but his tone is edging toward out of fucking line.
I step closer to him. Put my hand on his chest. “I get that you are scared.” He shakes his head as though I’ve missed the mark. “But I’m not leaving him, and I’m not going to start living a half life for the delusion of safety.”
Mulberry isn’t looking at me; his gaze is intensely focused on the bathroom wall, like if he looks at it hard enough, he can burn a hole through to the jungle. And maybe one of the wild creatures out there will be able to offer him advice on how to tame me.
“Hey,” I say softly, bringing my hand up to his cheek. I pull his face to look at me. “It’s not like we are necessarily safe here,” I remind him. “It’s been less than a day since our last assassination attempt.”
Mulberry rolls his eyes. “He wasn’t going after James, and our safety protocols worked. The assassin’s dead and none of us are.”
“Heather and Simon are in the infirmary right now, and what about those drones when we first got here? Who says they won’t be back, that they won’t drop bombs next time?”
“They were timber scouts.”
“Maybe. But our lives are in danger, no matter where we are. I trust me, Mulberry. Do you trust you?”
His jaw tightens, the muscles bunching. Mulberry’s hazel eyes hold mine, the ring of yellow like a sun burst in a mossy pond of green. “Yes.”
“Good.” I slap his cheek, and he flinches. I grin at him. He shakes his head. “Bedtime, Mister,” I call to James as I push past Mulberry into the bedroom.
James nurses and we slip into an easy sleep surrounded by our dogs and the hum of the jungle. I wake in a dream. My brother, James, sits across from me at his little table in his back yard in Brooklyn. Brownstones form a canyon with a streak of peachy sky above the summer sunset.
The air is warm and humid. The fairy lights in the tree that arches over his yard sparkle like they are a part of nature’s display. “Are you going to call Hugh and tell him you’re alive?” James asks pointedly. Hugh was James’s boyfriend when he was killed, and we grew very close after his death. Last time I came back to life, I promised I’d never scare him like that again.
James sips from his margarita glass, brows raising while he waits for my answer.
“Hello to you too,” I say. “Yeah, a drink sounds great. Thanks.”
“You promised him you’d never fake your death again. You owe him a phone call, Joy.”
I sigh dramatically. “I sent him that letter.”
“You sent him a cryptic note not to believe everything he hears.”
“I feel like he knows what it means.”
“Call him.”
“I will.”
James waves a hand, and a salt-rimmed margarita appears on the table in front of me. “Fancy,” I say.
“One of the perks of being a figment of your imagination.”
I pick up the drink and take a sip, reveling in the salty, sweet bite of James’s always perfect margaritas. Never too sweet or too sour and always heavy on the tequila.
The fairy lights in the tree blink out. The electric light glowing in the windows around us dulls to darkness. The back yard fills with long shadows. A trill of fear runs up my spine. A silence falls, all the televisions and radios suddenly off. Then the roar of voices rises. Fear and confusion leaches into the air, as electric as the power that lit up the city moments ago.
“Remember?” James asks.
“Yeah.”
We were in the city for a blackout. Not long after 9-11. But it wasn’t an attack, just an overwhelmed, aging system. James and I went to Hugh’s house and a bunch of friends came over. Hugh cooked food from everyone’s fridges and freezers on the grill. We ended up at a bar, the only light from candles, the only acceptable payment cash.
The dark streets thrived with joy. We were all alive. The city wasn’t under attack. We knew the lights would go back on. There was no looting. No fires. Nothing of the violence of the seventies. Nothing of the fear of 9-11.
But it was also mild weather. The blackout started during a summer day. The night wasn’t cold. Not like what just happened in New York. It’s winter now. People were freezing in the city while I slept in a warm bed.
“Hey,” James pulls my attention back to him. “It’s not your fault.”
“I should have killed that motherfucker Richard Chiles. Letting him live let this happen.”
James smiles at me, and it’s sad but also loving. “You’re still into taking responsibility that isn’t yours. When are you going to give that up?”
“You’re telling me the world wouldn’t be better off if I had killed that asshole as soon as we knew what he was.”
James sips his drink, mercury gray eyes holding mine. “I won’t argue the man is a waste of space. A dangerous psychopath with far too much power and a fucked moral compass. What I’m saying is that it’s not your fault that this happened. You didn’t do it.”
“Unless it is,” I counter. “Even if we pretend that letting him live wasn’t a huge mistake. What about the zero days? I had them—Simon took them. We don’t know that’s not how this all happened. We don’t know it wasn’t a zero day stolen from me that caused this.”
James laughs. I sip my drink, annoyance riding up my spine. Darkness creeps in from the shadows. “First of all,” James starts, leaning forward to put his glass down so that he can use both hands to gesticulate my ridiculousness. “You don’t think Simon did that.”
James tilts his chin down and raises both brows. I can’t deny it so continue to sip my margarita. “Second,” James holds up two fingers. “If that was the case, I’d put it on Dan.” James nods as if there is no other interpretation. I open my mouth to argue, but James puts up a hand to stop me. “You didn’t even know you had the zero days.”
“I knew there was access to huge amounts of money in that fob Dan gave me,” I blurt out before he can stop me.
“Losing money is very different than causing this.” James throws both hands up to indicate the city around us—cloaked in darkness, alive with sound and fear. “If someone had stolen all that money, so be it. You stole it to begin with.” James picks up his drink again as if that line of logic proves his point without any shadow of a doubt.
I chew on my lip but have nothing to say. “Fine,” I mumble quietly. “Fine.” I finish off the last of my margarita.
“So you’ll call Hugh.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll go see Mom?”
“James is going to wake up soon,” I say to sidestep the question.
“But he hasn’t,” James says with a smile. “He’s growing up. Not nursing as much.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess he is.”
“What are you doing for his birthday?”
“Simon says that the first year is about the parents. About surviving.”
“Well, I’m proud of you.”
Tears suddenly burn my eyes. “I wish you were here.”
James smiles back at me, his own eyes red. “Me too.”
I wake with the taste of salt on my tongue. My son is still asleep as the howler monkeys herald the coming day. Blue lifts his head to look at me. James didn’t wake at all to nurse. He really is growing up.