Softer Than Steel (A Love & Steel Novel) (24 page)

It Takes a Village

Sidra paced the floor of her father’s living room. It was after nine, yet he still wasn’t home. The hour could be considered early for those who went out to drink socially, but since Jack made a summer career out of it, he was usually tucked in bed by now to get an early start on the stool the next morning. She had had a quick dinner at Molly’s with him, and he had been in good spirits, claiming he’d be heading home after the next round.

“We put him in a cab a couple hours ago, gave the cabbie the address. He ain’t home yet?”

Sidra hung up with Molly’s and paced some more. It felt better to do it up here in his quarters than down in hers. She didn’t want to bring the worry and the loneliness down to hers, with no Seamus and no Charlie down there.

Did I just say Charlie?

Setting aside his many obvious faults, Charlie had a knack for dealing with her dad. Or maybe, since he himself had grown up in the tavern setting, he had a knack for dealing with drunks. Her dad had loved Charlie like a second son. And Charlie had always treated Jack with respect. When the doorbell rang at three a.m. because Jack was locked out or the cops had given him a ride home, Charlie would handle it. Better than Seamus could ever handle it. Shay had the brute strength to get Jack up into bed, but his inner emotional strength was still that of a scared little boy, hiding behind the couch from his dad’s demons. It collapsed upon itself quickly.

Sidra paced back to the phone. She called all the usual hangouts she could think of. Finally, she got a lead.

“Oh yeah, he was here. Left maybe a half hour ago? I offered to grab him a cab, but he wanted to walk. Don’t worry, Sid. He had another patron looking out for him.”

“Thanks, Marco.” She slowly hung up, shaking her head.
Great. Freaking drunks.
Walking all the way from the Whiskey Ward? And with company? It takes a village of idiots to stumble home, apparently.

She sat out on the stoop of the brownstone to wait and watch for any sign. Sure enough, two hobbling specks materialized from the direction of Cooper Union. They had obviously taken the scenic route. Sidra stared, elbows on knees, palms on cheeks, waiting for her eyes and her memory to mold one of the stumbling shapes into the man on her mind.

She got two for the price of one.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Popping up from the top step, she bounded down to help Rick. Her father sagged against her lover, arm propped over the younger man’s shoulder for support.

“You know this guy?” Rick asked, looking about as shell-shocked as Sidra felt.

“He’s my dad.”

She picked up her father’s other arm and wrapped the dead weight around her shoulder. Together, with minimal shuffling on Jack’s part, they got him upstairs, into the house, and to his bed.

“So do you live here, too?” Rick asked, now standing and watching as she wiggled Jack’s shoes to loosen them.

“Downstairs apartment.” One shoe fell with a thud. “I moved there when I was twelve.”

“All by yourself?”

She set the other shoe down and glared at him. How dare he ask questions when he had left her to stew on her own all evening! Leaning, she yanked the wastepaper basket from the spot near Jack’s desk and plunked it by the bed, in case he needed to get sick in the night. With that thought in mind, she gently rolled her dad over on his side. Nothing more for her to do, she thought, standing quickly. Too quickly. Rick’s arms were there as she swayed from the head rush.

“What happened to you?”

“There was a bloke to the right of me at the pub who took slight offense to one of your father’s recitations. I just happened to be the unfortunate middle man.”

“I didn’t mean your eye,” she said through gritted teeth, although before she realized it, she was gingerly fingering the bruise blossoming along his right cheekbone. She was glad it hadn’t been her father’s doing. “Let’s get some ice on it.” Ice was one thing Jack made sure was fresh and plentiful in his otherwise empty freezer. Sidra wrapped some in a towel.

“I swear I had all good intentions. I came downtown and my hand was even on the door and—”

“Intentions?” Sidra’s fuse sparked hot. “You talk of
intentions
like they’re an excuse! Do you know why I ask you to set intentions before yoga?” His gaping mouth registered with her, but she didn’t let him answer. “It’s more than just a connection between mind and body. It’s a vow that has been birthed in the very core of your heart—the place of your deepest truth.”

“I was scared, okay?” he shouted. “That’s my deepest bloody truth.”

“And you think I’m
not
?”

Patience.

The memory of her mother’s voice echoed in the long hall. Their shouts may not have been loud enough to rouse a drunk, but they had raised the dead.

What if she didn’t have the time to be patient?

Patience is bitter. But its fruit is so sweet.

She wanted to move forward, to see where time might take them. To reap the fruit and savor its swollen sweetness. To love, and to be loved. A surge of emotion tumbled over her, timeless and nameless. It rendered her spent and calm, like a crying jag in her mother’s arms used to, after all the tears had been shed.

Rick’s arms held her now, like she was a treasured thing. She took the ice pack and gently applied it to his bruised cheek. He kissed the inside of her wrist, nuzzling against the thin skin there. She reveled in the solidness of him. He was strength and vulnerability as he murmured apologies and reassurances.

“Any news?” he asked quietly.

“I saw my doctor today. We’re starting with a diagnostic mammogram.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow. She’s hoping it rules out anything serious, but . . .” Core needle, fine needle aspiration . . . Her brain had stopped processing during the biopsy discussion. “One step at a time.”

Sidra wasn’t quite ready to stay indoors. Especially not in her father’s apartment with Rick, with this conversation hovering stale and scary above them. “Do you want to take a walk?”

It was a beautiful night. The breeze was a gentle reprieve from the heat. Sidra thanked the garbage gods that it was not collection night; no roaring trucks or sour-smelling cans on the streets. Rick kept one hand on his eye with the ice and kept the other holding hers.

“You came up Bowery? There are shorter ways to get here.”

“Hey, it’s not like old Jack was much help. I’m just a tourist in your town. I stuck to the streets I knew. Or at least I thought I knew. When did CBGB become a clothing boutique?”

She gently tugged him down her block. “A while ago. We’ve had to make our peace with it. Better that than another Starbucks or a bank.”

“You think?” His expression closely resembled someone in mourning, Sidra observed. “CBs was my first music experience in the States. I was fifteen. You can imagine the impression it had on me.”

It gave Sidra a funny feeling to think of Rick in her neighborhood without her. She had always been proud of and territorial about her Village. Yet she knew New York and all its landmarks belonged to everyone, day-trippers and city dwellers alike. It was all here before she arrived and would most likely be here long after she was gone.
But for now,
she thought, sliding her arm through Rick’s,
relish the moment. Show him your New York.

As they turned onto First Avenue, Rick’s eyes widened. “What is that place?” They were approaching a storefront lit by hundreds of tiny chili pepper lights. “It’s a bit over the top, isn’t it?”

“It’s two places, actually.” Sidra could see the red lights reflecting in his spellbound stare. “Rival restaurants. They’ve been there for years.” She laughed, thinking of their identical interiors, with their gaudy lights dripping down like red-hot icicles and their similar, competing Indian menus. “Keep walking,” she warned, not making eye contact with either of the gentlemen standing in their respective doorways at the top of the shared staircase. “Or they will begin to fight over us.”

She steered him onto the next block, tentatively watching for his reaction. She wanted to see it through his eyes. New eyes. Capturing that feeling of seeing something for the first time. When you grew up in a place, you saw it, but didn’t really
see
it, day after day.

Rick’s steps slowed. She gazed around as he did, eyes drawn to more twinkling lights, although not as manic or abundant as those they had just passed. “This is Little India.” She sighed. “Or what’s left of it. Isn’t my village pretty?”

Rock Steady

Rick turned and rested his lips gently on her forehead. “No,
you’re
pretty. Your village is magical.” In his head were a hundred words to describe what he saw before him, but he wanted to keep it simple.

She smiled, bumping a hip against his leg to get them walking again. “It’s like carnival meets curry. There used to be thirty different restaurants on this one block. Now there are, like, nine.” She pointed out a red awning on the opposite side of the street. “My grandparents owned that restaurant for years. It was the jewel of Curry Row.”

“What happened?”

“Rents kept going up. Insurance after 9/11 skyrocketed. The novelty wore off.” Sidra bit her lip. “And the city never was the same for them after my mother died. They’re retired now, down with my great-aunt in Florida.”

Rick thought of Jack’s rant about women leaving via a pine box. “Oh, luv. I’m so sorry.”

“She was only thirty-five. Pregnant at the time.”

“How old were you?”

“I was ten.” She paused by one of the merrily lit shopfronts, reaching up to finger a single bulb on the strand that had burned out before the others. “A young Indian woman dying in childbirth . . . that’s something you think would only happen in Third World Calcutta or something, not here. Not in the eighties in the United States of freaking America.”

Rick detected bitterness beneath all the sadness, but her eyes—all shades of tiger iron—revealed fear and guilt as well. He collected her to him, and her head found his shoulder. He pressed the towel, damp and cool from the long-gone ice, against her cheeks, dabbing at the tears.

“Aortic dissection. It’s rare, and almost always fatal to mother and fetus. The doctors didn’t know if it happened during that pregnancy, or . . . one before. And it went undetected.”

Rick stroked her hair off her face and gently kissed her temple. “I know,” he began gruffly. “The loss feels . . . unending.”

He couldn’t tell her about Simone’s stomach cancer, not now, with her own health in question. But her eyes were searching his face, seeking out something: assurance, acquittal? Her words sunk into his thick skull and embedded their guilt-tipped talons:
She
had been the prior pregnancy; she thought she was to blame. Maybe someone had told her she was, or had implied it in a rash moment of sheer grief and utter despair. The enormity of that notion slammed him sideways, like a wave on the Na Pali coast. His own children came to mind once again, clinging to his legs and arms like barnacles in the bubbling surf. Simone bending to peel them away from him, her laughter carried with the wind as the waves slammed the backs of her knees, almost taking her down. You want to protect your children forever, even when you cannot protect yourself. Who had been protecting Sidra?

He was aware of his own breath roaring in his ears, like in yoga class. “Stay in the present.” The words were ones Sidra had shared in class, but he heard them leaving his lips in a soothing mantra as he held her close.

“But what if . . . what if I brought all of this on myself?”

“Shhh, no. Let’s get you home.” Rick threaded his arm behind her and led her back around the block. As they rounded the corner, he had a queer feeling of déjà vu. Compared to the deadweight burden of her father, Sidra was featherlight. Rick allowed himself to dig deeper in the comparison. Jack blotted the pain by getting blotto. Sidra masked her pain by flitting above it all, like a bird tending to her various nests: her father, her brother, her yoga studio. Him. He had thrown himself at her mercy, had thrust himself into her life as another project.

As she sagged against him, he heard Thor’s words about not knowing a sure thing when he saw it and fucking up every good thing that’d come into his life. The thought of the blueprints and his involvement flashed before his eyes.
Am I the predator, destroying her nests one by one?
In the past, such thoughts would have dripped cold panic until it froze into a sharp icicle that needled at his nerves until they were frayed. But the heat of her body in his arms, the warmth of her breath against the hollow of his neck, caused all anxiety to dissipate.
She needs a rock. She needs you. To hell with everything else right now.

“Stay the night?”

“Of course, luv.”

She led him through a bottom door, tucked under the brownstone’s stairs. “It’s small,” she explained, “but it’s all mine. And Seamus’s, too, when he’s home.” Rick took in the cozy nook of a living space. “I know, I bet it’s the size of one of your walk-in closets,” she mumbled. “You’ve probably got something modern and sprawling on a cliff overlooking a beach, right?”

Rick gave a chuckle. “You’ve got the beach part right. But no, it’s . . .” He thought of his bungalow back home, which had been an old Buddhist mission before being converted into a house. How he and Simone had fallen in love with it upon first sight. How she had insisted it had chosen them and not the other way around. It had been compact, for the five of them.

And then there were four.

Then three. Then one.

All alone, he had felt like the walls were closing in around him.

Being with Sidra in her place, as tiny as it was, didn’t feel like that at all. More like an extension of the lounge space of her yoga studio, warm and peaceful.

The first thing he noticed was a small statue of a dove with its young nestled under its wings. With a gentle steady hand, Rick reached to stroke the small smooth head of the mother dove. Its glaze had crackled over time, but the cool solidness was a comfort.

“My mother was a sculptor.” There was pride in Sidra’s low voice.

He turned to her and looped a thick lock of hair behind her ear with a smile. “She had amazing models to work with.”

Sidra picked up the small bird and brought it to her lips, kissing it with a tenderness and grace that completely blew Rick away. “I’ve studied up on its symbolism,” she explained. “Trying to get to know the woman who was my mother. The dove represents sexuality in Indian culture. Lust and life. But look at its wings.”

Rick’s hands eclipsed hers, bringing the sculpture closer to inspect it. The pattern on the feathers took on a familiar shape.

“It’s a
triquetra
 . . . the Celtic knot.” She gazed up at him. “And the Celts say the dove coos to the softest sides of our awareness. She pays a visit after a time of suffering because she recognizes our need for sanctuary.” Her voice was barely above a whisper, and her hands shook beneath his. Together, they placed the mother dove back where she belonged.

Gathering the woman before him into his arms was a wholly new experience. He felt her hands, warm on his back, her chest expanding to fill the space left when his contracted.
Life, lust, sanctuary . . .
How could the universe grant him another glimpse at the greatest gift, then threaten to take it away?

Over her shoulder, Rick spied an open doorway leading to her bedroom. Sidra squeezed him. “Come this way.”