Free We Were Kings by Thomas O'Malley

be good for them to get out before they both went stir-crazy. She knew he was worried about being alone with Maria for the first time. She’d tried to soothe him, telling him, “You’re a natural.”
    To keep busy as the baby slept, he cleaned up the kitchen, towel-dried the dishes and cups and put them in their proper places. Then he sat on the couch flipping through one of Claudia’s magazines and seeing nothing but women smiling, teeth flashing white, and men looking too dapper for their own good. He heard Maria cry out, and he tried to ignore it, but when she began to shriek, he got up quickly and ran into Claudia’s bedroom.
    Maria’s face was pink and pinched as though in pain. Even before he could smell it, he realized she had shit her diaper again. Dante wanted to reach down and console her, but something had a hold of him, some invisible grip that clamped down on his muscles and even deeper, into his nerves, so that he felt paralyzed. Barely able to get any air into his lungs, he watched as the baby twisted and tried to turn over. From the edge of her cloth diaper, shit trickled out and spread across the thin mattress; the patchwork blanket and once-white sheet were soon soaked through with brown. His nostrils filled with the stench coming off her, and there was a moment where her eyes opened and focused on his, and in that look, beneath the desperation, he saw the eyes of Michael Foley, of Bobby Renza, even of Sheila and himself.
    Nauseated, he felt his stomach spin. He broke free from the invisible grasp and stumbled down the hallway and into the bathroom, where he filled the sink with bile and the half-digested remnants of his lunch. The hoarse cries of Maria sounded throughout the apartment, and no matter how hard he pressed the heels of his hands against his ears, he couldn’t block them out.
    Claudia came home and found Dante sitting in the bedroom, head between his knees, crying softly. The baby still wept, but with her throat so raw and sore, she mewled like a small, wounded animal. Claudia shook him by the shoulders and told him she couldn’t trust him anymore, cursed him out and said that he was still a junkie mess and that he wasn’t, and would never be, suited to take care of the child. He tried to convince her that he was clean, that this was something he couldn’t control, but she ignored him and took the baby to the bathroom to clean her up.
    He left, and for a full day and night, Dante walked the frozen and desolate streets of the South End, moving from one flophouse to the next. Eventually he met up with his old friend Lawrence and tasted the junk for the last time. In the hazy half-slumber between dream and nightmare, he had neither revelation nor remorse for the awful thoughts that had come to him as he watched Maria turn in her own feces, but once the sun climbed into the sky, warming the flophouse room with its amber glow, he woke up, walked back to Scollay Square, and strangely calm and clearheaded opened the door to his apartment.
    Claudia was sleeping, and carefully, he took the child from her crib and carried her to the living room. He reclined back on the couch with her laid upon on his chest, her soft breaths warming his neck. With his heart beating wildly, he held the child to him, feeling the spittle from her mouth wet his shirt through to his skin. He stroked her back and whispered in her ear, telling her that he was sorry and that he would never let it happen again.

10
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    Fort Point Channel, South Boston
    CAL WAS TIRED of killing and tired of fighting; listening to Owen had sparked his interest at first, that need to know and discover—there used to be a pleasure in that and in the need for revenge, to make things right. He understood those things; they made sense to him. Payback for a wrong was as old as the Bible but it was the question of the wrong that interested him most of all—what deserved what manner of retribution, what manner of death, and