3MA

3MA | Chapter 32

32
BUSINESS

In a dreary shaft of moonlight spilling into our apartment's cracked window, Mag opens the lid to a rusty metal tool box labeled You Should See The Other Guy, a kit filled with medical equipment I used to use to help Dad patch up his injuries after fights.

Mag fishes out a needle and thread and begins stitching up the gash on my shoulder, just the way I taught him. Just the way Dad taught me. He seems to take great joy in my wincing and yelping as he goes about puncturing my skin and pulling the black suture through the flesh.

"How are you just quitting?" he moans, pulling too hard on the stitching string. "You've come so far. For what? To lie down and become a pile of ash?"

"I'm not quitting, Mag. Because it was never my fight to begin with," I say, studying my brother's furrowed brow. I place a hand under his chin and make him look at me. "Don't worry. After I'm gone, Sal will take care of you. I'll talk to him tomorrow."

"I don't need anyone's help. I'll be fine on my own," he grumbles, stabbing the needle into my shoulder with obvious relish. When he's finished I push to my feet and hobble toward an inflatable raft left over from Myrna's visit.

"Dad would never have given up," Mag says, slamming the medical kit shut.

If there was ever a time to tell Mag the truth, it seems like now would be appropriate. I part my lips, the truth anxiously teetering on the tip of my tongue.

My mouth snaps shut.

A memory comes rushing back of the day I learned that Dad was never coming home. I remember how that felt, to have a dream torn from my heart. I won't do that to Mag. He's better off never knowing the truth.

"Yeah. Well. I'm not Dad," I say, collapsing into the raft.

"Clearly," Mag mumbles, marching off to his own mattress.

I lay there for hours staring at the cobwebbed rafters, trying my hardest to wash the image of Carven's glaring yellow eyes from my memory; but the afterimage is permanently burned into my corneas, as if I had stared into the heart of an eclipse for far too long.

I brush an arm across the raft and reach a hand out, my fingers groping across the rubbery surface and finding nothing but air.

It isn't until a moment before I'm pulled into a dark and dreamless sleep that I realize I'm reaching for Amaris.

The next morning, Mag is splayed out on his stomach on the couch, snoring. A shaft of sunlight falls across one of his smooth cheeks, and it suddenly occurs to me that I'll never get to teach him how to shave that cheek. How to talk to a girl. How to survive as a man in this cruel city.

But I can use the remaining time I have to give him as much of a head start as I can before I'm gone.

I pull my hooded sweatshirt over my head and slip out onto the ice-encrusted fire escape. I limp through the howling alleyway and head across the street, toward a leaning shack covered in slabs of rotting wood. I step over a snoring drunkard splayed in front of the entrance and push through the dusty front doors of the Drunken Sailor.

It's nearly six in the morning, and the bar is a shattered, drowned remnant of the previous night's revelries; empty bottles and empty wallets and empty hearts.

Behind the bar, Sheamus Ludlow runs his one remaining hand through a greasy mop of hair and watches me with shock and amusement as I pick my way across the dark, body-strewn tavern.

"Well holy dragon shit. Never expected to see you again. At least, not here," he grunts.

"I'm here for business."