the Sprawl

Jackie had been born a wee ginger, just like Dad and Bill himself.

He’d been a weak little thing. Ginger and rosy. The size of a football when tucked close against Bill’s chest. He’d felt somehow different from the three siblings Bill had cradled before him. Maybe it had been Bill’s size at the time that had made Jack feel lighter, or maybe it had been all the smokes and pints Mam had put away on the road to labor, but either way, Jackie’s tiny fingers had seemed smaller somehow, from Tommy’s or Mary’s or Emma’s before him.

Jackie was special.

Bill had loved him from the start for it.

Jackie’s rosy hands and feet and face had faded after the first six weeks or so into a lightness so pale that Bill could trace the veins at his temples. His eyes started off bluish, then turned to grey, then turned to hazel and stayed that way.

He got heavier, as babies were meant to, but Bill couldn’t help but notice that he wasn’t as tubby as the other kids on their street’s baby siblings. His pal Ivan’s baby sister, who was year behind Emma, looked like she was hauling around a stack of tires on every limb.

Bill asked Mam about it and she said that Jackie was just delicate. Some babies are just like that, she claimed, taking a drag off her cigarette.

Bill had looked down at Jackie’s veins in his temples and thought that Tom hadn’t been this little and he’d been born all kinds of sick.

It was a few moths before he realized that Jackie wasn’t delicate. He was just hungry. Half-drunk bottles littered the apartment’s counters and mattresses. Mam kept getting distracted with screaming at Daddy every time she started to feed the baby. She’d hand him off to the nearest non-screaming child to finish the job for her, but Mary was seven and Emma was two, and Tommy hated Jack from the bottom of his heart.

The baby never finished a bottle, it seemed. So Bill did an experiment to see if he could finish a bottle.

The answer, it turned out, was yes.

Bill decided that he’d do that experiment again, like they said in science class, you know. To make sure your hypothesis was correct and all that.

He did it a few times, but the results weren’t always super clear, so he figured that he needed to do it more until they started to make a pattern he could make sense of.

Jackie was a willing participant. He curled his tiny pale fingers around Bill’s every time, and afterwards, he fell asleep in Bill’s arms.

At some point, Bill decided that that was where he was supposed to be.

It was right. It was familiar. It was like how Emma was with Tommy, and how Mary had been all that time ago, back when it had been Bill’s job to keep her and Tommy apart so that Mam could hear herself think.

Jackie was quieter than those two had been, if a bit fussy when Bill left for school and came back home. And he smelled better than those other two, which might have been linked somehow to Bill changing his diapers and playing bath time with him more often than he had with those two.

It might have been.

Just maybe.

He didn’t blame himself for that, though. Mam was born during the war and was of the opinion that it was the eldest daughter’s job to help her with the housework and minding the children. It was her fault that she hadn’t had an eldest daughter until the third kid. Bill had taken on the brunt of the work in Mary’s stead until then, but he’d been 3 when she was born. That wasn’t his problem.

And then after that, it wasn’t his problem that Mam never punished Tommy when he teased the baby or when he made a mess on purpose that Bill had to clean up.

Bill didn’t have to blame himself for those two’s messiness and noise-making; he wasn’t the eldest daughter that Mam had wanted so badly to foist that responsibility off onto and anyways, he’d been barely old enough to look after himself.

Emma and Jackie were different cases.

Emma because she only wanted Tommy and would scream and scream and scream if anyone who wasn’t him touched or played or fed her. Jackie because, well. Jackie was special.

They started out by calling him Johnny, actually. Which Bill thought was stupid because clearly he was a Jackie, but Daddy called him Johnny, so everyone else did, too.

Except Bill and secretly, Mam.

Mam called Jackie ‘Jackie’ when Dad was at work. She cooed at him and bounced him and gave him kisses that he always seemed confused about, which made her laugh for some reason.

Bill knew that Mam knew that Jackie was special, too. He asked her about it once and she looked suddenly really sad and said that he looked just like her baby brother Jack who had died back in Ireland during the war. She said that Uncle Jack had been wee like Jackie was, with red hair and rosy, apple-like cheeks.

She thought that Jackie was her baby brother reincarnated, or so Bill suspected anyways.

Jackie was a slow learner, bless him.

He got distracted in the back of the queue when the rest of them were handing back family traits and so missed the all important one for volume control.

The boy could not yell for the life of him. His baby shrieking had always sounded slightly broken and hoarse and it didn’t improve as he got bigger. That was a death sentence in the Murdock family.

If you didn’t make yourself known, then you simply weren’t. It was easy as that.

Emma and Mary and Tommy were constantly bickering and talking over each other and screaming about this, that, and the other. As Mam faded further and further back into the kitchen to find solace in cigarettes and wine that, in her own mama’s time, might have been gin, Bill had developed a talent for listening to three things happening all at once.

He couldn’t do four, though. At least four voices from the little ones—Daddy’s voice would always take priority over theirs. That left no room for Jackie, however. So it wasn’t unusual for Bill to realize only after he’d tamped down the chaos that the baby was missing entirely from the room.

Jackie couldn’t stand shouting.

Never had been able to. As a tot, he’d burst into tears when Mam, Daddy, or anyone snapped at him, but as he got older, the tears dried up and instead, he started to hide from the sound entirely. Bill used to find him in closets and under beds and outside windows with his hands clamped down over his ears and his eyes squeezed shut.

Bill brought him little plates of food and the workbooks he’d left at the table. But once he was upset, Jackie never wanted to eat or do homework. He wanted to hide and be alone and just be still.

He didn’t learn to talk until he was three. He never learned to shout at all.

It should have been a sign, really, that Jackie wasn’t gonna make it.

Tommy had despised Jackie since the day he’s started growing limbs in Mam’s womb. Tommy liked to be the youngest brother. He liked how he had authority over the girls and how Bill got all the blame for everything he did.

He liked how Daddy petted at his hair and how Mam was forever giving in to his demands for food that they couldn’t spare, for toys that they didn’t have, for permission to go out with friends to places where no one could watch him in.

Tommy was destined for trouble from the start, and Bill would never say that he hated his brother, but when Jack was born, he felt something close to it.

That feeling grew.

The first thing Tom did when Jackie came home was hit him with an open palm. Mam was horrified. Daddy was furious and Tom got the lashing that he’d avoided until that point on account of being the youngest boy of the family.

After that, Tom worked out faster than anyone else in the family that Jackie was too quiet for his own good.

He was quick, Tom. Slick.

He learned that if he pinched the baby, he’d cry. But if he pinched him lightly, over time, the baby would get used to that, so that the pressure could be upped until the baby didn’t scream immediately when those fingers started traveling towards his thighs and neck.

Daddy caught him at it.

Tom didn’t do that ever again, but twice burned, he decided that Jackie was the reason that Mam and Dad hated him now.

That was rich, given how much Daddy hated Jackie after the first six months of his presence.

Daddy was disappointed with Jackie’s softness. He thought he acted ‘like a girl.’ Always cooing and fussing, not interested in any of the toy trucks or baseballs that Daddy shook in his face. Bill had never understood this man, but he did know that he, as a baby, had been wild about that baseball, which Daddy had thought was just the damnedest thing.

Tommy had been obsessed with trains and cowboys.

But Jackie?

He liked fairy tales. He was interested in nature, surprisingly. And in building things, Bill learned over time.

He loved dandelions. Bill used to pick them for him and blow on them to send the seeds all up into the wind and when he was old enough, Jackie would ask him to go on a walk with him. They would have to spend extra time checking the cracks in the sidewalk for yellow flowers and bugs, and Jackie’s fingers would pull hard in Bill’s own when he said it was time go home.

The neighbors noticed.

First, they noticed that James Murdock’s newest baby was kind of scrawny, and they talked. Then they noticed that Bill Murdock’s littlest brother wasn’t talking by two, and they talked. They noticed when Jackie was too shy to ask to play with their kids, and they talked, and then they asked Bill if everything was alright at home.

Bill lied and told them that they were. His brother was just especially sensitive.

He didn’t tell them that every day, Tommy seemed to be coming up with new ways to hurt Jackie or that Daddy had gotten fired from his job from being too drunk to operate the machine he was supposed to. He didn’t tell them that Emma still couldn’t read very well at seven and that her teacher kept calling at the door with questions that Mam refused to answer.

He didn’t tell them that Jackie had never been to preschool or kindergarten or anything like that and wasn’t ready to go to school yet because he flat out wouldn’t speak in front of other people.

The neighbors probably knew those things anyways.

It started when Bill was about eighteen, which put Jackie at eight, Emma at ten, Mary at fifteen, and Tommy at sixteen.

Tommy was sixteen when he started really ragging on the kid.

He saw Daddy do it. He saw Daddy start calling Jackie names when he brought him the bottle. He saw Daddy get enraged when Jackie brought the wrong one. Jackie’s eight-year-old arm had been mottled afterwards and Bill had picked him up then and there, even though he was too big for it, and had stared directly into Daddy’s eyes.

Daddy’s mouth had opened and closed as he realized what he’d fucking done. He was too proud to apologize. He was too proud to look into Jackie’s liquid hazel eyes—to look at the redness of his arm.

He got angrier instead and told Jackie that he wasn’t a fucking baby and he needed to act like a man. At eight years old, of course.

Jack’s fingers tensed against the back of Bill’s shirt and he wiped at his face and tugged a little, asking to be put down.

Out of the corner of his eye, Bill had seen Tommy duck out of the doorway. Daddy asked Jack to show him his arm, but Jackie told him he was okay and then ran away to go hide.

Bill had held his father’s eye.

He might have done it to Mary. To Mam, and to Bill. But he wasn’t doing it to the baby.

There had to be a line in the sand.

But Tommy saw Daddy do it, and he saw that Mam and Mary and Emma didn’t stop him. So he decided that finally, after all this time, he could really get his licks in.

So Daddy drank himself into cirrhosis as Tom turned Jack into his punching bag.

It got pretty bad. To the point where people on the street were grabbing Bill’s elbows and asking him what the hell was going on in his house when he was walking home from his girlfriend’s place.

He never knew until he got there. And usually by then, things had shaken out and the shouting had calmed down.

Emma, ever the tattle-tell, would rush him upon his entry and explain what had gone down. Usually, Tom had found some damn way to accuse Jack of having wronged him or having stolen something from him. When the fight kicked up out of the bedroom that Emma and Jackie shared and spilled out into the living room was when Mam and Daddy would start shouting. And since Mary got home earlier, she was usually the one to take off to go get a bucket of water or something to help separate the boys with.

Tommy, listening to Emma’s explanation from his room while Bill stood in the kitchen, would almost always storm out to correct her where he saw fit.

Bill would then have to shout over him to get him to understand that Bill literally did not care what Jackie did.

Tommy was eight years his senior.

Tommy called this favoritism and unfair and ignorant, and sometimes Bill would have to give him a dose of his own medicine for him to understand that the discussion was over. Then he’d have to go hunt down Jack and the kid learned every day how to hide better. At some point, Jack stopped hiding at home and around their complex, and finding him became an hours-long process.

It started with having to climb fences and roofs which turned into dragging Jackie out of little alcoves up way too high for comfort. Over time, Jack realized that Bill found him faster if he was outside than if he was inside, and he started making friends.

Well, ‘friends’ was one way of putting it.

The neighbors saw him scramble out his window or the door with intent to vanish himself into thin air and called him over. A constellation of them formed and they intercepted him on his escapes and brought him indoors to make sure the wounds weren’t life threatening.

It eventually came to pass that folks would step out of their homes when Bill came looking and stare him down like they’d kill him themselves if that the police wouldn’t find his body rotting under their floorboards.

It was exhausting living in that house as a referee 24/7.

Bill could admit that he wasn’t always graceful. Over time, he knew that Tommy got more wily and Emma started sneaking smokes and drinks when no one was looking. He knew that Mary was dating boys all over and skipping school and going to the clinic now and again.

He knew that there was no money, that Daddy couldn’t find work. That no one cooked or cleaned or did pretty much anything at all at home besides shout and drink and smoke.

And he knew that his baby brother was lost somewhere in all that, still too shy to shout and make himself heard.

Bill just pretended it wasn’t happening.

He moved in with a few girlfriends over time and came home on Sundays to check that things were still drearily normal. Tommy and Mary were usually out. Mam usually complained about Daddy. Daddy usually complained about liquor and sports and the damn unemployment office. And Jackie was often nowhere to be found.

Mam said he was out playing with friends.

He wasn’t.

Bless him, he wasn’t.

He was the only one in their family who still went to church.

The kids were fifteen and seventeen when the old man drank himself to death. Mam called in the middle of the night screaming. Mary was wailing with her. Tommy was trying to settle them down, but not successfully.

Bill came back from his and Mira’s place to a whole house throbbing with grief and the kids scared shitless.

He slotted back into oldest brother mode like it was a glove. Step one was to throw Tom and his shouting out onto the street until he calmed down enough to stop trying to pick a fight and blaming everyone along the way. Step two was to call people to come in and take the old man’s rotting corpse out of the living room recliner. Step three was to settle Mam and keep her from the bottle. Steps five through eleven flew by and he ended up on Step twelve at 11am the next day, when he went looking for the kids and found their room empty.

Emma had gone to her friend’s house. God knew where Jack had gone.

After Daddy died, Tommy decided that he was the man of the house. He was proud of it, always throwing Daddy’s wishes and authority into everyone’s faces until Bill came home and stood staring down at him, reminding him that he was not the oldest man in the house after call.

Tommy did decide somewhat usefully, however, that he was going to get a job that would help Mam out at home. She certainly needed it, what with being too depressed to go back to work answering phones at the salon.

The problem with Tommy was that he always thought that he was too good for shit.

Bill had a toddlr at that point—Mira’s girl. Her name was Eliza and she was everything. Always smiling and laughing and calling Bill ‘daddy’ even if he looked nothing like her real daddy.

He knew the moment he saw her that he was going straight. No more hunting around for a new job every six months. No more balling up aprons and throwing fits over stupid shit.

Liza and Mira deserved an apartment with clean floors and food in the cabinets. They deserved electricity that didn’t go out every other month and cable for kid’s cartoons and shit.

Tommy didn’t have the time to go through that kind of thinking, though. He wanted money and he wanted it fast and easy.

He did all sorts of stupid shit trying to get it.

He dealt. He gambled. He did jobs for folks that Bill wouldn’t have turned his back on at night. He skulked about, always asking people if they needed anything done. He worked a few brief stints in a few garages but kept getting fired for his piss poor attitude.

He decided around a year after Daddy died that he was gonna become a pro boxer and went skulking on over a few blocks to Fogwell’s place. Rumor had it that Fogwell had coached some poor schmucks of the Murdock caliber to success, and Tom, ever the vulture, wanted to get in on that.

He’d always been scrappy and scrapping, Tom had. Always fighting other boys and slipping around gangs. He thought that that was the kind of thing that made him a diamond in the rough, ripe for polishing under Fogwell’s nose.

Bill didn’t know what happened, but Emma told him languidly on the phone that Tommy had only lasted two weeks at the place.

Fogwell didn’t know what he was missing, Tom had spat.

It was funny, though, because Jack had gone missing again.

The last time Bill saw Jack out of bars, he’d been shocked at the difference in him.

He was taller than ever. Nearly five-ten at seventeen years old. Room to grow, both out and up. His hair had darkened. His eyebrows seemed thicker. That soft jaw of his was hardening into something solid and square.

He looked like Daddy, but with Mam’s eyes and a bevy of freckles.

He looked so good.

Aside from the bruises. The black eyes. The split lip and knuckles.

The puking. The paleness. The neighbors calling Bill to come ‘stop your brother, he just threw the little one head first into the pavement.’

Jackie’s instincts were always so good. He’d slipped off to hide. A concussion was sure hard to harbor on your own, though.

It took Bill two hours to learn that he didn’t hide with neighbors anymore. He went to church. When Tommy beat the shit out of him, he went to church and asked the Father to let him sweep the pews. He went to Fogwell’s and asked to clean all the equipment.

He’d been skipping school for weeks now. His teachers had assumed that he’d dropped out. No, they weren’t aware of him having any close friends there.

Bill found him in one of the old, old hiding places. Not too far from home after all. He hadn’t managed to get that far with his head like that.

He laid his jaw against Bill’s shoulder and it was like he was a baby all over again and Bill could have cried.

Emma had asked him once when she was twelve or thirteen if Tommy was going to kill Jack one day. Bill had been startled. He’d asked her what brought that on. She said that sometimes, Tom stood in the doorway of her and Jack’s bedroom when she and Jack were sleeping and just stared at their bed for a long time without saying anything, like he was in a trance.

Bill had told himself that Tommy was a fuckhead and a screw-up, but he would never go that far. Never.

He brought Jackie home with his black eyes and split lips and knuckles and blood drying on the side of his head. He laid him out on the couch with directions to Emma and Mary and Mam to wake him up every twenty or thirty minutes or so and to keep him on his side. He stood by and watched Tommy watch them watch him.

Tom didn’t dare get close.

Bill thought he knew then that he’d crossed the line.

This wasn’t fun and games anymore. He could have killed their baby brother.

He told Tom before he left for home again that Cain had killed Abel out of jealousy.

The next time Bill saw Jackie it was at his trial for having committed the sins that he’d spent his whole life trying to stave off.

His brother wore his church clothes to the trial. He came to every hearing and sat in silence by himself.

Bill wished he could hold him and stroke his hair and tell him that everything was going to be okay. But he couldn’t.

He wasn’t allowed to anymore.

He’d crossed that line before Tom. And Daddy.

Oh, what a devil.

Oh, what a darling.

Jackie visited him every week.

Every.

Week.

From age seventeen to twenty. He was there. Three years.

He got big. He got strong. Bill saw him on TV, fighting his heart out nothing like that quiet, scared little boy that he’d always been.

Jack looked huge on the tv in the dayroom. Enormous. And people routed for him and cheered his name.

He was twenty years old and had made more of himself than their whole family had in three generations.

He told Bill that he’s stopped going home; that he’d gotten an apartment of his own. That he’d opened a bank account with the help of his coach at the gym who had been scandalized to hear that Daddy had never trusted banks.

Jackie was damn near well-adjusted by twenty, if still quiet and shy to a fault outside of the boxing ring.

One day, he came in smiling in a different kind of way and Bill knew immediately that something had changed.

He’d met a girl.

Lord, had he met a girl.

God, he was stupid for her. He was stupid and then he was stupid, because he had no big brothers around to impress upon him the desperate need for condoms and birth control. Bill didn’t know how to work through the sense of impending doom in his chest when Jackie told him that he and the girl were getting married before the baby came, so not to worry.

He was happy for Jackie. So happy for him to have what Bill had had and then crushed under his very fingers like the monster that he was.

Jackie would be a better husband and father than anyone ever had in their family. He’d teach his baby to love nature and to build things. To admire the world and to walk through heart first, instead of fists.

Bill loved him for being so excited to be the person he was always meant to be.

But it only lasted until the visit was up. After Jack left, the cold sank in. And the dread. And the knowledge that things would never go right. They were right for now, but they would never stay that way.

It wasn’t in the stars.

Not for them.

Margaret Grace took their name and was infected immediately by the curse that turned everything that they touched to ash.

She escaped and Bill was heartbroken for Jack, but proud of her.

This girl wasn’t like the others. She wasn’t so naïve after all. She was smart and she was strong and courageous.

If her touch didn’t, then her genes would bring Jack’s baby up from the depths that he was born into.

And when Jack brought the little one for Bill to finally see, the relief was overwhelming.

Matty was the tiniest child Bill had ever held. Even smaller than Jackie. His mama had barely cleared five feet tall and she was young. He looked just like Jack but for the lips and the shape of his eyes. Their color, his rosy tinge, his feathery, soft baby hair—even the shape of his fingernails—it was all familiar.

Bill knew him without even having to search.

Jackie was exhausted. He was a single father just coming up on twenty-one years old and this baby was small, but round in all the right places. He was clean and smelled soft and powdery. He was dressed in warm, soft clothes, and Jack had handed him over wrapped up in a blanket that someone else had made by hand.

Matty had been loved since before he’d taken his first breath.

The guards let Bill hold him while he and Jackie talked about everything under the sun regarding babies, and Matt curled his tiny fingers into Bill’s jumpsuit and huffed little breaths softly against his neck.

He didn’t see much of Matty because it was a hassle for Jack to bring a toddler down to the jail and Bill didn’t want him to.

He didn’t want his nephew to see him like this and to think this was normal.

Jackie told him instead that Matty called his coach ‘Grandpa.’

Jackie told him that Tom had come and found him at his apartment and had demanded to see Matty. They’d fought. Jack was big now. And strong. He was an ox in the face of their reedy, weasel-y brother. Tommy wasn’t coming anywhere near Matty for now—he was too busy licking his wounds and damaged pride.

When Matt was five, Jack held his head and told Tom that he didn’t know how to make rent.

When Matt was seven, Jack held his head and told Tom that he didn’t know how he was supposed to feed both of them for the rest of the week.

When Matt was nine, Jack came in with tears pouring down his face. The guards let him hug Bill—but not for Bill’s benefit.

Matty was permanently blind. Irrevocably blind. He couldn’t see shadows. His eyes were burned and the skin around them warped. The surgeries that it had taken to at least let him close his eyelids and keep what was left of the eyes themselves were soul-crushingly expensive.

The hospital staff were working with Jack to reduce the costs. He had to deal with the insurance folks for the company which had nearly killed his son, and then he had to work with a lawyer to sue the company for negligence and to get a settlement that was enough to pay for Matty’s medical bills. And all that was on top of learning how to teach his boy how to live in a world without sight.

He said that Matty was scared of everything these days.

Jack had taken him to learn about guide dogs and the boy had had a meltdown after a single dog’s touch. He refused to eat half of his favorite foods. He vomited up his dinner and gave himself a fever, but then couldn’t sleep and so Jack was left having to let him to cry himself out like an overtired toddler.

This was starting to become a daily routine. Matty’s counselors and social workers promised Jack that things would improve with time. They promised him that Matty would start to learn how to cope with his new situation.

But they weren’t the ones who were sitting with Jack’s little boy day in and day out, trying to help him learn braille, trying to help him learn how to walk again, all while trying to pay bills upon bills that demanded that he go out at night to entertain the likes of an audience of old men just like Daddy in exchange for a few bucks that disappeared faster than a kite in a hurricane.

Jack didn’t know what to do.

Bill didn’t know what to do either, but that was his baby brother right here and he needed someone to tell him that everything was going to be okay.

So Bill lied and he swore to him—another sin for the road, what could it hurt at this point?—that everything would be okay.

Just give it time, Jackie. Just give it time.

Jack gave it a year.

He didn’t come for his monthly visit.

Instead, the warden came and asked Bill if he wanted to sit down.

He said that he was so sorry, but Jackie had been found three blocks from his apartment in an alley, on the ground with a bullet in his temple.

He’d died nearly instantly and all Bill could think about were the veins that he’d once been able to see through the skin there on Jackie’s heavy baby head.

He felt numb and heavy.

The warden told him that the police were investigating his brother’s murder. His nephew had been taken into care on account of no one in the immediate family being a suitable option for foster placement for him.

He was classified as a high risk case. And so was everyone else.

He’d be placed temporarily at St. Agnes’s, the children’s home attached to Jack’s church, until a suitable family was found for him.

And Bill was still just numb.

The warden bowed his head and said that Bill was being granted permission to attend the funeral.

The boy wanted his father. That was all that Matty wanted. No priest or nun or social worker or anyone could dissuade or distract him.

He wanted his daddy. He wanted to touch his daddy’s face. He didn’t understand why the thing before him was hard and cold and why no one would open it for him.

One of the nuns stepped forward and caught his little hands and drew him back into a hug.

He was too upset to stay for the rest of the service.

It was the last that Bill saw of him, and at ten years old, he seemed impossibly young. Impossibly small. He was far more articulate than Jack had been at that age. And bless him, he’d inherited the volume that had skipped over his father.

Bill saw Mary’s eyes overflow with tears at the sound of Matty’s echoing wails from the hallway.

“It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” she said, sweeping them away.

Her husband wrapped an arm around her waist. She’d come from New Jersey for the service.

Tom stared at the coffin in silence. His kids had been sent to another room. Unlike Matty, they didn’t understand the gravitas of what was happening to their uncle and cousin.

Emma had left them all to go have a shaky cigarette outside in the cold with shaking fingers.

Mam turned around and stared up into Bill’s eyes, then turned back slowly and sighed. Jack was probably the fifth or sixth man in her family that she’d laid to rest at that point. But Jackie was different because Jackie was her youngest child.

He’d looked so much like her brother.

She never came back from it, and she developed a scalding hatred of Margaret Grace. She seemed to believe that it was her fault that Jack had passed as horrifically as he had. She thought that Grace had failed in everything that she, as a woman, was supposed to be. She spat at the very name of the girl, which was unfortunate, because as Bill left the church, he caught sight of Grace around the corner of the chapel, sitting on the ground. Her habit had been torn off and thrown down beside her.

She held her face and shook all by herself as her love’s body lay cooling in her place of work and her son’s cries echoed through the halls.

Bill didn’t blame her.

She’d been brave. She’d done the right thing, but even that hadn’t saved her from the curse of their family.

Twenty years later, he was told that he had a visitor and he expected it to be his lawyer, but instead it was ginger hair and hazel eyes.

The scar of a bullet wound graced Jackie’s temple. It made lines like white veins there.

He looked exactly like he had before he’d died.

Minus the tears.

Jackie hadn’t died crying. And he wouldn’t—not this time. Not with his son standing huge and proud and brave like his mother at his father’s side.

Not with the benefit of hindsight.

The guards allowed them to hug for longer than usual, because the circumstances were truly extraordinary, and then Bill sat down and held the hand of his baby brother—a piece of his heart that had long since grown over with fibrous, gnarled flesh.

“I love you so much,” Bill told him. “I think of you ever damn day, Jackie. If I could do it all over, I’d—”

“I love you, too,” Jackie said. “And you did exactly enough with what you could. And I’m sorry that I made some stupid mistakes, but we all made some pretty stupid mistakes.”

When had he started talking unprompted?

When had he grown into this person—this good person—all on his own?

“I’m so proud of you,” Bill could only say.

And Jack took his hand and curled his fingers into it.

“You remember how I asked you that one time if Daddy went to hell?” he asked.

Bill nearly laughed.

“I remember.”

“Pretty sure he did. I ain’t seen him or Tom anywhere.”

He did laugh this time.

“Tom ain’t dead, yet, boyo,” he said.

“Now that’s a goddamn tragedy,” Jackie sighed. “Well, what can you do? He’ll get his own eventually. Hey, sorry, Billy. This is Matty, you probably barely recognized him. Here, let me re-introduce you.”

Bill knew Matt. He knew him from the papers. He knew him from the phonecalls from old friends here and there.

Matt’s lips had grown into his mother’s and his face didn’t quite find Bill’s.

He wasn’t a father.

He wasn’t a murderer.

He wasn’t cursed like the rest of them.

He was mild-mannered and horrendously suspicious of Bill’s hands. He was visibly prepared to tackle Bill over this table in defense of his pops.

That was perfect.

This kid was a star.

“Matt,” Jack prompted. “This is my brother, your Uncle Bill.”

“Who’s Tom?” Matt asked Bill instead of returning the introduction.

“Bill’s 6’4”. He looks like me, but meatier with blue eyes,” Jack said smoothly. “He raised me.”

Matt frowned.

“Fogwell said he found you in a gutter,” he said.

Bill surprised himself with the volume of his laugh.

“It might as well have been,” he said. “It’s great to finally meet you properly, Matty. You probably don’t remember me.”

Matt sniffed at him.

“Do not,” he confirmed. “My mother thinks you’re the gutter.”

That was more than fair.

“Your mom is one of the smartest people I know,” Bill said.

This pleased Matty much more than Bill thought it would.

“Does he pass inspection, your honor?” Jack asked dryly.

“He’s on thin ice. Pretend I’m not even here,” Matt said.

Jack’s expression towards his kid was a mixture of fondness and exasperation.

“So Tom,” he said at Bill.

Hoo boy.

“Settle in,” Bill said. “We’ve got a lot to cover.”