Night Owls (14 page)

We’d been right about that, at least. It
was
Jack’s mother. “Is she . . . okay?”

“The meds help with the hallucinations and the panic disorder. Without them, she gets stressed and confused, and starts to hear voices, and all of it will eventually build until
she’s completely agitated and has a violent episode. When she’s coming down from that, she’s emotionless. Like, just staring at the walls, completely flat.”

“Sounds bipolar or something.”

“They thought she was at first. Then the voices started.” He shook his head, as if he could erase the thought of it. “But anyway, she’d been doing okay recently. They
experimented with a new antipsychotic, and she had a bad seizure. That was when I saw you at the hospital. She almost died.”

“Oh, Jack.”

“She’s all right now. Things are under control. She’s got good doctors, and there’s not really much we can do but trust them. She does. She feels better staying there.
The routine and boundaries help. And the people working there care, you know? They aren’t just doing a job.”

I thought of my mom and all the worrying she did for some of her patients. Their families, too. She brought them food. Listened to them. Sometimes even went to funerals.

“How often you do see her?” I asked.

“Family therapy is once a week. And she has a private room, so the orderlies have been letting me see her a couple days a week after visiting hours because she sometimes paces at night. I
hang out with her while the other patients are asleep. Keeps her occupied. My dad gives massive amounts of money to the hospital, so they’re lenient with us.”

“That’s how you ‘fixed’ things for me in the anatomy lab.”

He nodded. “Would be much better if you’d continue to think I’m just that cool, and that it wasn’t the influence of my family’s money and name.”

I gave him a soft smile. “I still think you’re just that cool—don’t worry.”

“Do you?”

I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, so I just kept staring up at the sky and reached between us to curl my pinkie around his. His chest deflated as he blew out a long, slow
breath through his mouth.

He threaded his fingers through mine and murmured, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier. Part of me wanted to. I almost dialed your number a hundred times. But it’s a
black cloud hanging over our family. My dad has to keep up appearances, so I’m forbidden to talk about it to strangers. Not that you’re a stranger, and not that I give a damn about what
my dad would say if I told you. It’s just . . . I don’t know. I was worried you might cut your losses and bail if you found out. You wouldn’t be the first.”

“Do I need to shiv someone with a pencil? I might be small, but I’m sneaky.”

His laughter rippled down his body. He sat up on one elbow and pushed his sunglasses on top of his head to peer down at me. “How do you that?”

“What?”

He lifted my bent arm and untangled our fingers to press his big fattened palm against my small one. “I’ve spent the last three days at the Zen Center trying to get back on my feet,
and you just pull me up like it’s nothing.”

I stared at our hands, unable to think of a witty comeback.

As he folded the tips of his fingers over mine, the sun burnished tiny hairs on his forearm. For two people who’d mostly spent time together after dark, seeing him now, stretched out
alongside me in warm daylight, was a luxury. Here, I could freely inspect all the small things, like the white half-moons at the base of his thumbnails, and the freckle on his elbow at the bottom
of his lotus tattoo. And maybe the sun shone on other things I didn’t really know were there, like the fierce knot inside my chest that had been tightening since the last time I saw him. But
as I lay there with him in the grass, it unwound and relaxed, and the sun lightened all the heavy things he’d just revealed.

“I’m so glad you came looking for me,” he murmured.

I remembered what he’d told me in Alto Market. “If you leave vague hints about where you are, I
will
find you.”

“Did I really say that?”

“You did,” I confirmed.

He groaned. “You should’ve punched me.”

“It’s not too late.”

His gaze roamed over my Roman orgy shirt and lit on my mouth. Everything inside me fluttered. Was he going to kiss me? Was he still staring at my lips? I couldn’t tell, because I was
staring at his, and they were parted, and he was breathing heavily, and I could feel his leg against mine, and
mother of God
, this was happening. This was definitely happening, and I could
hear—

Scandinavian black metal.

Jack arched away from my hip as my phone buzzed inside my pocket.

Ugh. It was Heath. He’d changed my ringtone to play something that sounded like a screaming subway accident whenever his number came up. “Sorry,” I mumbled, sitting up and
frantically fishing out my blaring cell, which everyone and their brother could probably hear through the trees. So much for our private hideaway. I finally managed to mute the phone, but not
before my pulse cranked up to a zillion beats per minute.

“Wow. I’d never pictured you as an angry-shrieking-vocals kind of music fan,” Jack said with a bemused look on his face.

“It’s my jackass brother.”

A text popped up from Heath:
Where the hell R U?

“Something wrong?” Jack asked.

“It’s already five? How did that happen?”

“I thought you didn’t have to work.”

“I don’t. It’s worse than that. It’s”—I lowered my eyebrows—“family dinner night.”

“Oh,” he said, pulling his hand away from mine. Was he disappointed our near-kiss moment was kaput? I certainly was. “Do I need to drop you off?” he asked.

I didn’t want to leave, not when I’d already spent more than a week away from him, and not when I’d just learned all this stuff about his mom. I remembered how cold his father
had seemed outside the hospital, and wondered if Jack would go home to an empty house that night.

I leaned back on my hands. “What are your feelings about lasagna?”

JACK PULLED GHOST NEXT TO THE CURB IN A PRIME
spot almost directly in front of my house.

“You can change your mind,” I said.

He stowed his sunglasses on the visor and stared at our front steps like a monster might come storming down them at any second. “And turn down a free meal? Never.”

“You say that now, but you haven’t met my family yet.”

As traffic sped behind us, we headed up to the front door. On the other side of it, a trio of laughs floated from the kitchen on a fragrant cloud of tomato and melted cheese. It smelled freaking
delightful. And Mom was in a superior mood, laughing it up and practically singing her curiosity when I called from the park to find out if I could bring Jack along. Now, if she just wouldn’t
put two and two together about the graffiti in the museum, and if Heath would keep his mouth shut about everything I’d told him about Jack, this might not turn disastrous.

I signaled Jack to follow me through the living room toward the chatter. Our kitchen wasn’t fancy, having last been updated in an ugly 1990s shade of pale mauve, complete with fake
butcher-block countertops. But it was pretty big for a city kitchen, with a long peninsula counter that separated a round four-chair breakfast table from the rest of the room. Mom was standing on
the other side of that peninsula, and Heath was lounging at the table. And right as I walked under the archway from the living room, an African-American man as big as a professional wrestler
stepped in front of me.

And when I say wrestler, I mean bulging muscle—beefy and corn-fed, with a few extra pounds of cushion, and tattoos snaking up both arms. He was dressed in a T-shirt with a fiery metal
logo, and he had one of those wallet chains looping from the back pocket of his black jeans. To go along with all that, he had a full-on bad ass beard, like one of the big S&M dudes who walk
around with nothing but a bullwhip and leather chaps at the Folsom Street Fair.

The whole package announced
You do not want to screw with me
, but the beautiful smile curving his lips was all sunshine.

“Beatrix?” he guessed.

“Noah?” I guessed back.

His rumbly laugh echoed around the kitchen as he scooped me up into a hug. “Damn, you’re a little thing like your mama, aren’t you?”

“And you’re apparently made of mountain. Are you sure you’re an engineer and not a lumberjack?”

“Last I checked.”

When he pulled out a chair, I widened my eyes at Heath, who was beaming so much he nearly blinded me.

“Well, I’m glad to finally meet you,” I said, moving into the kitchen to make room. “And while we’re on introductions . . .” Jack stepped under the arch.
“Jack, this is my family. This is Saint Noah, my brother’s boyfriend. And that’s my brother, Heath, and over there is my mom, Nurse Katherine the Great. Everyone, this is
Jack.” I refrained from adding
the Vandal
.

Jack extended his hand to Noah, and then to my brother, who looked Jack over like he was a piece of cake as he purred “Hello, Jack” in a voice an evil cartoon cat would use on a
doomed mouse. “I’ve heard
all
about you.”

Ugh. Kill me now.

“But I haven’t,” Mom said, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel. “Come closer and let me get a better look at the person my daughter’s been hiding under a
bushel.”

Uh-oh. She was strangely cheerful and teasing, but it didn’t stop my neck muscles from clenching. And poor Jack had no idea what he was walking into, but he strolled around the counter and
shook my mom’s hand, too.

“Thank you for having me. Hope it’s not an inconvenience.”

She made a sweeping gesture toward two pans of lasagna cooling on trivets. “If we can eat all this, we should get some kind of prize. It’s no inconvenience whatsoever. Do you go to
school with Beatrix?”

“Your daughter and I met on the N line a few weeks ago,” he said. Which was pretty much true. “And I’ve seen her at Alto Market.” Also true, just not quite
the
Truth.

“What’s your last name?” she asked.

“Vincent.”

“Jack Vincent,” Mom said, leaning back against the counter to peer up at him. “Why does that name sound familiar? Oh, Mayor Vincent.”

“Yes,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “That’s my father.”

His father . . . What?

A chorus of “oohs” swirled around the kitchen. Except from me, because
his father was the freaking mayor of San Francisco and he didn’t tell me.
Sweat pricked my scalp
under my looping braids. Jack coughed into his hand and sneaked a fear-filled glance my way. I did my best to keep my face blank.

“Well, well, well,” Mom chirped. She grabbed his chin and angled it for her inspection as though he were a patient; sometimes Mom forgets normal physical boundaries. “I knew
you looked familiar. Handsome like your daddy, huh?”

Jack chuckled nervously.

“First a saint, now a prince,” Mom said, letting go of Jack’s chin to grin at Noah across the counter. “God’s finally listening to my prayers.”

“I don’t know about that,” I mumbled. “Jack’s a Buddhist.”

“O-oh,” Mom said, like it was the coolest thing she’d ever heard.

I suddenly felt like I were in a David Lynch movie and there was some bizzaro, surreal plot I didn’t really understand unfolding all around me. I quietly had a heart attack while Mom and
Jack and Heath and Noah all chatted about Buddhism and about how funny it was that Jack had shown up for dinner, because Mom had made meatless lasagna to appease Noah, who was apparently a
pescatarian—which just meant he was a vegetarian who cheated and ate fish. And they talked about Jack’s superstar father, who was serving his second term as one of the youngest mayors
in the city’s history, not to mention one of the most popular, but, no, Jack had no idea if the rumors were true that Mayor Vincent might be entering California governor’s race in the
near future. Blah, blah, blah.

For the love of Pete, how flipping stupid was I? To be honest, I always tuned Mom and Heath out when they started talking politics. Yet I’d known his last name sounded familiar. I
couldn’t believe I hadn’t connected the dots when I saw his dad, but if I tried to picture him without the dark shades and the baseball cap, yeah, I supposed it was him, all right.

Everything made more sense now, like how Jack said his dad lived for his job. And the mayor was notoriously private about his family life, which was probably why I couldn’t dig up much
about Jack online. No doubt they lived in one of those six-million-dollar houses near Buena Vista Park—
not
the six-hundred-thousand-dollar ones. And the car that was waiting for Jack
and his dad at the hospital that night? That was the freaking
mayor’s car
. No wonder the man had been cooler than ice with me. He was the king of the city.

Which was why he’d forbidden Jack to talk about the schizophrenia. I vaguely remembered seeing pictures of the mayor and his wife together, but maybe I hadn’t seen any recently
because, you know, she was in the hospital. Keep up appearances, Jack had said. His father was worried it might hurt his political career. Pretty crappy attitude, if you ask me.

“You feeling all right, babe?” Mom asked, rubbing my back.

“Oh, I’m one big bag of sunshine and puppies.”

She squinted suspiciously at me and then spoke to Jack. “How are you at grating cheese, Prince Vincent?”

“My cheese-grating skills are second to none. I’m a fully licensed grate master.”

“Excellent. I’ll need enough Parm grated to cover those baguettes. Bex will show you where the grater is. And, babe,” she said, talking to me, “do the garlic butter thing
you did last time. Noah, I need your height to get an extra chair down from the hall closet. It’s stuck sideways on the top shelf, thanks to your boytoy’s inability to follow simple
instructions.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Heath said drily. “You’re a real hoot.”

The three of them chatted their way into the hall. I pulled out a block of Parmesan and some butter from the fridge. Jack stepped behind me as I unwrapped it on the counter.