Chapter 4

JACKIE

It was the afternoon after graduation night that Jackie finally saw the numerous calls on her phone. They were all from her father. On her phone, she had saved his name as Big Jack, the moniker everyone knew him by. It was amusing sometimes, how the name made him sound impressive and colossal, but it was she, a six year old with eyes like white oil and lips like cramped petals, who started calling him that. Suddenly, everyone they knew took up the name, and it stuck. If she was Little Jack, then he was Big Jack. It made sense at the time.

Her mouth tasted of vileness when she awoke. It was bright outside, a watery, egg-yolk sun hovering above, its light spilling through the shutters weakly. Her eyes were still swimming from all the liquor she had drank the night before when she saw them, the missed calls lighting her phone. She had picked the device to check what the time was. Jackie made to toss the phone back onto the mattress before she noticed the notifications. 

She ran to the toilet to throw up, and afterwards when she had flushed the swirling yellow down the bowl, she sat in the toilet and called him back, and immediately, her father took the call. 

'Jackie?' His voice filtered through the line, hard and big. 

'Dad,' she said, tiredly. 

'Little Jack,' he said, 'How I have missed your voice.' When he said little, he made the word sound like a contraction, like the ts and es had been taken out and replaced with pockets of air. 

'You know what else you missed Dad?'

'Your graduation.' He sighed. 

'That, and my valedictorian speech, Dad.' She ground out, very annoyed. 'Or should I say Big Jack.'

As usual, he seemed apologetic. 'I couldn't make it,  Jackie. Something came up.' 

'No shit.' Jackie said automatically, dispassionately.

She pushed her hair out of her face and padded into her room. She flopped on the bed and propped herself up by her elbows. Joaquin was sprawled across Cindy's bed, his face pushed into the fluffy mattress and sheets. Cindy would flip out if she saw him that way. For all her terrible hygiene habits, her ever-existent piles of dirty laundry, her untidy toenails, she took particular importance to her bed. No one but her came anywhere near it. Jackie only hoped she would not storm in now, while she was on call with her absentee father. He would flip out. 

Big Jack had wanted to rent her an apartment off campus, an intimidatingly huge house, as towering as their mansion back home in New York, the home she rarely ever visited. The apartment he showed her had wine coloured floorboards that spoke of regular scrubbing, red brick walls and a sweeping garden outdoors. A place she could fall in love with. But she refused it all. She did not want his Mafia money. It was blood money. Tainted. That was what she said to him. But she still let him pay the tuition fees, and it felt like a miniscule betrayal of herself. 

Her father had joined the Mafia when she was young, quite young, just emerging from the phase of strollers and diapers, and it was the one thing her mother had never quite forgiven of him. She died before she could. But her absolution was of just as little consequence as Jackie's was. It was his blood money that had bought them the gigantic mansion in Brooklyn. It was, again, his blood money that had paid for her mother's chemotherapy and medication when she started going wiry and bald, her body thinning like a herd of cattle in drought, her hair coming off in enormous clumps of pale yellow when she brushed it. 

Jackie often found herself wondering if her mother ever felt like she was betraying herself, allowing him take care of her, knowing what he did for a living. She did not even know what he did herself. She only knew it was dirty work, gang affiliated, and he had always kept her out of it, pushing her away even further after her mother passed. It was a small kindness. But it was also a great price to pay, because for all the money, all the new cars parked in their garage, bodies shining from burnishing, all the tailored black suits in his closet, he had somewhere along the line lost the more simple, most essential parts of him. The parts of him that cared about things such as graduations and weddings, and daughters.

Now, he told her over the phone it would be best if she remained in San Diego for the time. It was safer, he said. Brooklyn was getting wilder by the day, he said. 

'Things are not what they used to be, Jackie. Everywhere you look now, there's fighting, killing. It would be sensible if you stayed out there for a while, at least until things cool down here.' He said. 

Jackie had never  been in a hurry to return to New York. Ever. She spent most of her holidays in San Diego, taking up menial jobs that would have made her father's jaw drop if he saw her so them. Brooklyn, its red bricks and gray walls, its cold wind and sparse trees, everything about it reminded her of her mom. Certain memories, she had discovered, were not meant to be relived. The tears only brought more tears and so did the laughter. Big Jack had never protested her absence, but now, there was a new property in his voice. An emotion that was entirely alien to Big Jack: fear. 

Jackie sat upright in bed. 'Dad? Did something happen?' She knew something had. She could hear his voice tell it. But she also knew was that he would deny it. 

And he did exactly that. 

'It is fine, Jackie' he said. 'Everything is perfectly fine. Though, I will be leaving town for a while. Just a little while. Until things cool down a bit, like I said.'

'If everything was fine, why are you skipping town, dad?' She asked, dubious. Then without waiting for him to give a reply, Jakie added, 'Is someone after you? Are you running?'

Her heart was between the walls of her mouth, palpitating painfully hard. But he chuckled. 'Still the same old Jackie with the million questions, huh? I told you, everything is just fine.'

As much as she did not completely believe him, Jack felt better at the reassurance in his voice. He always had that effect on her. It was not relevant how many birthdays he missed. How many Christmases, how many graduations, whenever there was news of shooting in New York she worried about him, even if it was miles away from Brooklyn. There was always a chance he was in the thick of it, fighting, or dying, neither of which she felt  particularly comfortable with. 

Now, she realized she missed him terribly, the musical baritone of his voice, the perpetual smell of garden on him, regardless of how many tall bottles of overpriced perfume he bathed in, the smiling with only a corner of his mouth. 

'I have missed you, Dad.' She admitted.

A corner of his lips would be twitching, slicing across his face in a smile, she knew. 

'I know, child,' he said. 'I know.'

There was a small moment of silence on the line, and then he began to say something before he was interrupted by a loud, hollow sound. The echo of a gunshot. Then two. Then more. 

'Dad!' Jackie cried, jerking out of bed. No answer came. 

Joaquin stirred. The line went static. Then it died, leaving the ringing noise of phantom bullets in Jackie's ears.