Chapter 3: Backed Up
I want to tell you I hesitated. That I stood there in my bathrobe and weighed my freedom against hers like a grown-up, like the person the parole board thought they were letting out.
I didn't hesitate. I lied so fast it was practically a reflex.
"She was here," I said. "All night. We were repotting the snake plants. It's very involved, there's a whole thing with the rhizomes. You wanna see? I can show you a rhizome."
Montoya looked at me for a long time. She had a cop's face, flat and patient, but there was something underneath it that wasn't unkind. She'd been in Gotham long enough to know that every one of us was somebody's worst day and somebody else's last hope, sometimes in the same afternoon.
"Repotting," she said.
"Till three. At least. Maybe four. Time flies when you're up to your elbows in perlite."
"Cobblepot says it was her."
"Cobblepot also says he's a legitimate businessman."
That got the corner of her mouth. She glanced over my shoulder again, at the shop, at the bat still lying on my counter where the pothos had put it down. I watched her clock it. I watched her decide not to ask.
"You've been doing good, Quinzel," she said finally. "Your PO says so. The block says so. Ozzie says you're the best neighbor he's had since the shoe-repair guy who died." She tucked her notebook away. "Don't make me come back here."
"Officer, I would never."
"Detective."
"Detective, I would extra never."
She left. I shut the door, leaned my forehead against it and stood there breathing, and then I went out the back.
I found her two blocks away, sitting on the edge of a concrete planter outside the laundromat's loading door, where some city contractor had planted a sad little row of boxwoods in 2009 and then abandoned them to God. She had her coat on and her sunglasses off and one hand resting on the nearest boxwood, which, I noticed, had put out a ring of fresh green leaves around her fingers.
"Poison oak," I said.
"It's native."
"Floor to ceiling, Pam."
"He had a bar made of ice in a building with no insulation. Do you know how much energy that wastes?" She didn't look up. "Nobody died. Nobody will. He'll itch for a week. His men will think twice about walking into a florist's with a bat. Everybody learns something."
"I just lied to a cop for you."
That made her look up. Her face did something complicated.
"You shouldn't have," she said. "If she checks, if anybody saw..."
"Nobody saw." I sat down next to her on the planter. The concrete was cold through my robe. "And I'd do it again. That's the problem. That's the whole problem, Red. You told me I'd handle it, and I thought, she means bodies, she's gonna go full Swamp Thing on somebody and I'll lose everything. And you didn't. You went home, you waited till I was asleep, and you gave a gangster a rash. That's practically therapy. That's growth. I'm so proud of you I could throw up."
"Please don't."
"And I lied for you without even blinking, because when it comes down to it, it's not the shop I can't lose. It's..." I stopped. The word was right there. It had been right there for about eight years, and I kept walking around it like a hole in the sidewalk.
She was watching me. I could feel it.
"Go home," she said softly. "Open your shop. Be the person Montoya thinks you are."
So I did.
The fire started at two in the morning, four days later.
I want to be clear that I didn't hear it. I'd taken a sleeping pill because my brain wouldn't stop running laps, and I was out cold under a pile of hyenas when Lou started howling. Not his laugh. A real howl, high and wrong, the kind that comes up from the bottom of an animal.
I woke up coughing. The air was gray. The smoke detector in my apartment was screaming the way the hydrangeas used to.
I don't remember the stairs. I remember the boys, one under each arm, sixty pounds of panicked hyena apiece, and I remember the back door, and the alley, and the cold. I remember turning around in the alley in my socks and seeing orange light behind the shop windows, and the pink sign with the cartoon hyena smelling a daisy, lit up from underneath like a jack-o'-lantern.
Somebody had poured something through the mail slot. I could smell it from the alley. Somebody had wanted me to know exactly who it was.
The fire department came. The block came. Ozzie came in a robe with ducks on it and stood next to me with his hand on my shoulder while I watched the windows blow out. Montoya came, and didn't say anything, and wrote things down. By the time the sky got light it was a black hole with a sign over it, and the sign had melted in the middle so that it only said BUD & L.
I sat on the curb with both hyenas pressed against my sides and thought: well. That's that.
I'd done everything right. I'd kept my hands folded. I'd talked to the bad men like they were people. I'd let Pam make a choice and she'd made the right one, mostly, and I'd made the right one, completely, and it didn't matter. Gotham had found out where I lived and lit a match. That was the lesson. That was always the lesson. You can try all you want, sweetheart, but this city eats the people who try.
I didn't cry. I want points for that. I sat there dry-eyed until Ozzie went to get coffee, and then I cried so hard Bud started licking my face in a panic.
She found me like that.
I don't know how long she'd been standing at the end of the street. When I looked up she was just there, coat open, hair down for once, a mess of red over her shoulders like she'd come straight from bed. She looked at the shop. She looked at me. She crossed the street without checking for traffic, which is a very Pam way to cross a street, and crouched down in front of me on the wet pavement.
"Are you hurt?" Her hands were on my face. Turning it, checking. Her thumbs were rough with soil. "Harleen. Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine. The boys are fine." My voice cracked straight down the middle. "The plants, Pam. The plants are all..."
"Get up."
"What?"
"Get up. Bring the hyenas. I want to show you something."
The greenhouse was hidden in the middle of Robinson Park, past the boathouse, past the bit of woods where joggers don't go, behind a wall of hawthorn so thick it should have been impossible. The hawthorn moved for her. It just leaned aside, branches folding back, and closed up behind us with a sigh.
I'd been here before, years ago. It had been wild then, a jungle in a glass box. Now there was a whole new section in the back, long tables under grow lamps that hummed in the morning quiet, and on the tables were rows and rows of pots.
Small pots. Clay ones, every one hand-labeled in green ink.
I walked down the first row. Hydrangea, front window, #1. Hydrangea, front window, #2. All the way to eleven. Each one a little cutting, rooted, green, a single blue flower head starting to form on the biggest.
Then the ferns. The orchids, set in proper bark. The snake plant, split into four, each piece in its own pot with an actual drainage hole. Calathea, folds up at night, NOT DYING. The gardenia. The monstera. Even the pothos from the hanging baskets, the ones that had held a gangster by the throat and then let him go because I asked.
At the end of the last table was a ficus. Not a cutting. A whole young tree, a foot tall, with a lime-green new leaf at the top.
The label said: Ficus. Has heard Hamlet. Prefers comedies.
I turned around. She was standing in the aisle with her hands in her coat pockets, looking at the floor like it had said something interesting.
"How long?" I said.
"Since the first week."
"Since the first week," I repeated. "Pam. That was before Cobblepot. Before anything. You've been sneaking into my shop and stealing cuttings off every plant I own since the first week?"
"Not stealing. Backing up." She lifted one shoulder. "Gotham burns things down. Gotham floods. Gotham gets taken over by a man in a scarecrow mask every eighteen months. I wasn't going to let you lose them. I wasn't going to let you lose anything else."
"You said you were only there for the plants."
"I was there for the plants." She finally looked up. Her eyes were wet, which I had seen maybe twice in my life. "I was there for the plants because the plants were yours. Because you tried. Do you understand? You took a place in Burnside and filled it with things that need looking after, and you were so bad at it, Harley, you were so bad at it, and you kept trying anyway. Every single day, you kept trying. And I couldn't stand to be across the river listening to it."
I didn't say anything. I couldn't. Something huge was coming up my throat and I didn't know if it was a laugh or a sob or both.
"I should have called," she said. "Fourteen months. I should have called the day you walked out of Arkham. I was angry, and then I was proud, and I didn't know how to be both at once. So I sat in this greenhouse and told myself you were better off. And then the hydrangeas started screaming, and I thought, there it is. There's my excuse."
"Pammy." It came out a whisper.
"I'm in love with you." Like ripping out a weed, roots and all, all at once. "I have been for years. I'm sorry. I know it's not..."
I kissed her.
I didn't plan it. It was the most unplanned thing I'd done in nine weeks, maybe nine years, and I'd once improvised a getaway on a unicycle. I just crossed the aisle in two steps and took her face in both hands and kissed her, and her mouth was warm and surprised and tasted like the cheap rosé from the other night and something green underneath, like cut grass, like the first day of spring.
Everything in the greenhouse bloomed.
I heard it before I saw it. A soft sound, like a hundred people exhaling at once. When I opened my eyes, every cutting on every table had flowered. The hydrangeas had gone full blue. The orchids had opened. The gardenia filled the whole glass room with that warm-hand smell. Even the snake plant, which I'm fairly sure isn't supposed to do that, had pushed up a stalk of little white stars.
Pam stared around at it with her mouth open. Her skin had gone pink under the green, which I'd never seen, and which I wanted to see every day for the rest of my natural life.
"That wasn't me," she said. "I didn't do that on purpose."
"Sure, Red."
"I didn't."
"I believe you." I was laughing, and crying, and holding onto the lapels of her coat like the floor might fall away. "It's okay. They're happy for us. They're individuals."
She laughed then, really laughed, the sound I'd been chasing for nine weeks, and kissed me again, slower this time, her hand coming up into the back of my hair like she'd been thinking about it for years. Somewhere behind us, Lou made a disgusted noise and lay down on the floor.
When we finally came up for air, her forehead stayed against mine.
"We'll rebuild," she said. "Better location. Better light. Proper drainage."
"And security?"
"I'll handle security."
"Pam."
"Legally." Her thumb traced my cheekbone. "Mostly legally. I'll be there every morning at eight. To protect the plants."
"Only the plants?"
She didn't answer. She just reached into my bathrobe pocket, where I'd stuffed the little dark seed she'd given me and forgotten all about it, and pressed it back into my palm and closed my fingers over it with hers.
"Plant it," she said. "Then you'll know."