“Oh dear,” I murmured, rethinking, if this was his lot since schoolyard days, of using that very same thing to annoy him (even if it was deserved).
“Yeah,” Noc confirmed. “It wasn’t fun, but they learned and eventually word got out and it ended. So I got a brother named Dashiell, known only as Dash or he gets even more pissed than I do when you call me Noctorno.”
“Right.” I kept murmuring.
“And our youngest brother is Orlando, we call him Orly. He got the short end of the stick because Noc isn’t great but it doesn’t totally suck. Dash is actually kinda cool. Orly is just bad.”
I squeezed his hand as a soft chuckle escaped me.
I didn’t chuckle long.
This was because he said quietly, “Same for our moms.”
I clutched his hand because I knew the wretched story of King Ludlum and the loss of not one, but three loves of his life.
Noc went on with his own story.
“Mom died in childbirth with me. Dash’s mom died of pneumonia. And Orly’s mom was with us longer than the Orlando of your world’s mom made it, but she eventually died of breast cancer. She was the one who got pissed about Dad teaching me how to drive.”
I turned to him as best I could with the obnoxious, but apparently mandatory, belt restraining me to the seat.
“I’m so sorry, darling.”
“Yeah,” he muttered.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have brought it up,”
“Nope,” he said on gentle shake of my hand, “you wanna know, ask.”
I looked out the window in front of me. “I shall, my dearest, but we’ve had a lovely night. Knowing the way of our two worlds, I should have assumed that would be the case and picked a better time.”
“Babe, she was great,” he declared. “Only mom I had and she was a good one. She’s gone and I miss her. Think about her every day. And she deserves that. She deserves me talking about her. Keeping her alive that way. She took on my dad and two boys. Gave my dad another son. Gave us a brother, good kid, grew into a good man, proud he’s my baby bro. She made our family better and Dad didn’t suck at lookin’ after his boys. I was little but I remember he did it all and gave it his all. But when Judy showed, we really had it all.”
I looked to his profile. “Even if her time with you was cut short, I’m pleased you had that.”
“I am too,” he replied quietly and kept sharing. “Only thing I’d change was the way we lost her. Dash’s mom, Christina, I was too young, don’t remember much. Seemed like one day she was there, next she was gone. I know now it took a while, by that ‘while’ I mean a couple of weeks, but truth was, her pregnancy was a difficult one, she never recovered from having Dash, so when she got pneumonia, it was the worst thing that coulda happened. But I was a little kid, all I felt was confusion and a lot of bad shit I didn’t get and then it got worse. Judy, Frannie…” he paused, and through it the air in his vehicle became heavy, “fuck.”
He suddenly stopped speaking and I didn’t start. I just held his hand, turned my eyes from him to give him his time and stared at the road ahead of us.
He eventually continued, his voice thicker so I held his hand tighter.
“She fought it. She gave it her all. Kept strong the whole time. Still amazes me how she’d come home from treatment, her and Dad would disappear in their room but we heard her puking, crying. God, the way she cried, Frannie, I can still hear it. So exhausted. Never heard anything like that, like she didn’t have the energy to do it but still couldn’t stop. Fucking hated hearing her cry like that. Wouldn’t want Judy to cry ever, but never like that.”
After gifting this awful beauty to me—awful, what had happened, beauty, Noc sharing the depths it made him feel—he took another moment and I did too, swallowing against the sadness that seemed to coat my throat in a layer of acrid dust.
“Next day, she’d be over it,” he eventually carried on. “Even on the days she actually wasn’t, she was in the kitchen giving us shit and making us some of the magic she made there. The cancer kicked her ass in the end, though, and that pissed me off. It still pisses me off. She fought so fuckin’ hard, she shoulda won. But it beat her and that wasn’t right. It wasn’t how it should go. Not for Judy.”
His last was hoarse.
He cleared his throat and finished softly, “Not for her.”
I didn’t have any idea what “breast cancer” was, but in my world we had terrible illnesses that were prolonged, nightmares for those who fell to them, much longer nightmares for those who had to watch them struggle and carry on with those memories.
Apollo’s first wife, I’d been told, had such an illness. Many believed it was the reason he mourned her so tremendously after she was lost. He’d been marked not simply by her passing but by being forced to experience, at some length, the excruciating torture of how she’d passed.
I was one who believed just that.
“Your father now?” I queried gently.
“Lost three good women, he’s not gonna try again. He’s got a lady friend. He says it ‘isn’t like that,’ but the only way it’s ‘not like that’ is that he refuses to marry her. Like having Lud Hawthorne’s ring on your finger is a curse, and I get why he thinks that and it’s none of my business so I don’t go there. She’s down with that. She loves him. She’s good with taking him as he feels he can give himself to her. They live together. Her name is Sue. She makes him happy. She’s a good cook. She’s smart enough not to try to be a mom to three grown men who lost their real moms in an ugly way. But she doesn’t hide she cares about our dad, likes it when we’re around and wants us to quit dicking around because she loves kids and she wants grandkids. ‘Even if they aren’t blood, the more the merrier,’ she says. Seeing as she has two already from her own kids, it’s just me, Dash and Orly who are taking our time. Last, she’s wicked funny. You’ll meet her. You’ll like her.”