? ? ?
The toffs who went slumming south of Houston might have thought that Chinatown was where the opium dens in the city were, but in reality, joints were hidden all over town. Knowing his mother, it wasn’t a surprise that the address on the paper led to one of the worst he’d ever seen.
When he found her on a low platform in a dingy basement on Broome Street, he was already too late. She was barely conscious, her head supported awkwardly by a small wooden stool and her hand loosely clutching the long pipe. Scattered on the floor nearby were three shells, their curved bowls containing the dark evidence of her latest binge.
He had his suspicions about how she’d obtained so much of the sickly sweet drug, but he didn’t really want to know. It was bad enough that he had to see her like this. And to realize he still cared enough to be disappointed.
Still, even as her cracked lips moved in some silent conversation within her drug-induced dream, she was alive and mostly safe. Whatever she’d done to him—what he’d driven her to do—pieces of the woman he’d once known remained beneath the years of disappointment and madness. Part of her would always be the fairylike creature who had spun tales of a distant land for the small boy he’d once been.
It was his own fault she’d chosen to leave him. His own fault for driving her away.
Her hair was gray now, and he couldn’t stop himself from cringing as he pushed the greasy strands away from her face. “Ma,” he said gently, trying to rouse her. “Come on. It’s time to go.”
She opened her drowsy eyes. Her light irises were glassy, her pupils large and vacant-looking from the effects of the drug, but she smiled at him before her eyes drifted shut again.
“No, Ma,” he told her through gritted teeth. “You have to wake up. We have to go.” He had to get her out of there. He needed to get her somewhere safe before Kelly or his men found her again. Or before she ran up an even bigger bill he would end up paying.
A soft moan gurgled from her throat in response, but her face remained slack, her breath shallow. ?Then she opened her eyes again, and for a moment they focused on him. “No,” she whispered. “Please, no . . .”
“I’m not going to hurt you, Ma,” he said, pulling his hand back from her.
“Leave me alone,” she told him, her voice ragged with fear and disgust. “Unnatural boy. You made him go. ?You took him from me.”
“I know,” he said tightly, because it was easier to agree than to argue. “It’s all my fault.” Which was the only truth that mattered anymore.
He’d only been a boy. He hadn’t known what he was capable of or how to control what he could do. When she found out he’d made his father, a drunk who’d rather use his hands to beat them than to make a living, leave, his mother had turned on him. She’d risked everything to try crossing the Brink to find his father.
She didn’t get through it, though. Even her desperation to find the man she loved wasn’t enough to push her past the terrible boundary. But she’d tried. She’d touched its power, and it had certainly changed her. There were days Harte wondered if death wouldn’t have been a kinder fate. When he found her again, years later, she wasn’t the woman she’d once been. Instead, she spent her days chasing anything that would take away the ache of the emptiness the Brink and his lout of a father had left behind.
Maybe Harte should have hated her for abandoning him. Maybe there was a small part of him that did. But in the end, he reserved his true hatred for the father who had deserted them long before he’d actually left.
And for himself. For driving her away.
She raised her hands slowly and gazed at them with unfocused eyes, as if noticing them for the first time. “These used to work miracles. The women used to come to me even when I was a girl,” she said, her voice still carrying the soft notes of his childhood. Then her expression turned sour. “But you took it from me.”
His jaw tensed. “You can blame me later. Right now we need to get you home.”
She looked up at him, her pale green eyes lost in her own memories. “Little Molly O’Doherty can make you pretty enough to win any man, they’d say. I can’t anymore, and it hurts—” Her voice broke, and she closed her eyes again. “It aches so terribly, and I wanted it to stop, if only for a little while. I needed—”
“You don’t have to explain it to me,” he told her, his throat tight with regret and shame for what she’d become. What he’d pushed her to. “Can you get up?”
He didn’t want to have to touch her again. The rank sweat—or worse—was overpowering enough from where he was. It reminded him too much of what her leaving had cost him—of nights spent in trash heaps trying to get warm, the stink of unwashed bodies that had hunted him because they could.
Because no one had been there to stop them.
Because deep down, he had known he deserved it all.
He cursed when his mother wouldn’t move, and wondered if maybe he could pay the man at the door to keep her until the drug wore off. He could collect her then—or maybe send someone else for her.
He needed to go. He’d moderated his breathing, but he was still starting to feel the haze of the poppy’s smoke wrap around him, leaching out the frantic energy that the girl and Kelly’s note had left him with, and he hated it. Hated the way it dulled who and what he was. Hated the way that part of him wanted to stay for a while and allow the quiet emptiness to fill him up. Just for a little while . . .
“I’m going now, Ma,” he said, shaking off the temptation. “I’ll be back in the morning, when you’re feeling better.”
Standing to leave, he looked at her one last time, hating her and loving her just the same. She was yet another thing tying him to the city, his duty to her like a straitjacket holding him against his will. A locked box he couldn’t find a way out of.
He was barely out the door when he heard frantic shouts and realized that a crowd had gathered down the block. The smell of wood smoke and something else, something harsher and more chemical, hung in the air, and he saw that buildings nearby were on fire. On either end of the block, the blaze raged toward the center—toward the building where his mother was.
It couldn’t have been an accident, two buildings burning like that. Two buildings bookending the room where his mother lay half unconscious. Not with the note he had still crumpled in his pocket.