No one ever gets enough safety (Cai, Zoe & the Finches)
There was no one else home when Cai and Zoe arrived at Casa Rosa. He let himself in, same as always, turned the key in the lock, kicked mud off his shoes, dodged automatically around the coat rack because it always used to try and grab him. Yet today it felt different, like he had to be careful. All the actions in coming home were the same, except for the feeling that he was home. Casa Rosa felt infiltrated by the fire.
Zoe was behind him, waiting. Her head was feeling worse after the drive back here, sore, a little sick. The adrenaline had worn off and the great plodding creature of dread had caught up with her.
He’d warned her things were tense, but he hadn’t expected things to be tense even with no one else home. He took a deep breath, “Come with me,” he said, and started upstairs.
Could he still smell charred carpet, or was that his imagination?
It didn’t look so bad, up on the second floor. The vase and the money plant were gone, of course, and the space created by their absence seemed much larger than the space they had filled. The curtains were gone too, replaced by new ones. Cai had hung them this morning. They were technically nice, but they weren’t right. Too foreign and new against the old wallpaper and the old carpet.
Little bits of the carpet were black where the branch had fallen, but it had grown so much bigger and darker in his imagination. He tried to see it through Zoe’s eyes, through the eyes of someone who hadn’t lived on this carpet every day of their lives, but it was too much of a stretch right now. All he could see were the burn marks.
The white of the bandage around Zoe’s head caught his eye as she moved past him, and crouched down to poke at the burn on the carpet. “The girls were playing with matches,” Cai said, before she could ask. Zoe didn’t need to be psychic to know there was more to the story than that, nor to be able to see that he was super wary about talking about it. But she was a little too exhausted to push for more story right this second and that was part of the reason why Cai thought it would be okay to tell her. She was too tired to start a crackdown on his sisters, and he felt a little guilty for worrying that she would.
The main reason was – keep a secret from Zoe? Cai wasn’t even sure how he’d go about doing that, even if he ever wanted to.
“Some of these bits of carpet are okay,” Zoe said, picking at a bit that was burned and black and hard, but came away from the rest if she picked hard enough. “You could probably shave it off. Get a razor?”
“Really?” But he went to get one anyway. He knelt down beside her with it, and she took it from him, carefully shaving off the worst of the burned bits while he watched her face concentrating. Her face under the bandage, where her skin was grazed. Cai thought: Everything is awful. Her poor face.
“Are things tense because the girls played with matches, or were the girls playing with matches because things are tense?” Zoe asked, encouraging a mostly-severed burned bit of carpet away from its unburned friends.
Cai just shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, flatly. “They were tense. Then there was fire. Now they’re worse.”
Zoe didn’t know what to say to him to make it better. So she brushed away the fluff she’d created and sat back on her heels. The carpet didn’t look too bad now; if you didn’t know to look. The 1960s pattern of it disguised the damage well. Thin patches kinda went with the aesthetic.
“You’re brilliant,” Cai said. He could hear the exhaustion in his voice.
“There’s no need to sound so devastated about it,” Zoe looked at him, over the frayed bits of carpet that showed hints of brown underlay. His face. Whatever it was doing, there was part of her that was still not over his face. He pulled half his mouth up into an attempt at an apologetic smile and she couldn’t handle it.
Sometimes it hurt to look at him – but no, not hurt, not pain but – this was so frustrating. Zoe had no vocabulary for this. It pulled at her.
She’d once had a thought that he made all the evil in the world harder to believe in. Looking at his face, even now, it was still true. It wasn’t an optimistic face, not after everything that had happened recently. Not after hearing the defence against Greg at Danny’s trial; not after the poultrycide next door; not after Rachel’s crash after her father told her she killed her family, then her refusal to stay at Casa Rosa after the demon and the vampire at her work had got her and instead she went back to her father; not after one of the girls set the money plant on fire, and their little covenant of silence about who was really at fault; not after Roe crashed his bookcase down and spat on his bed; not after Zoe calling him up only a couple of hours ago with the words ‘I don’t have concussion’ as her opening line.
Not after all of that. No, it wasn’t an optimistic face.
It was still Cai’s face though.
There was still something about it that made impending doom harder to believe in. That made hope the easier choice.
Cai wasn’t thinking about hope. Distantly, he was supposing he should get the hoover out. Why was everything so awful? “I’m sorry,” Cai said, not even sure why, just sorry that everything was so messy, that he wasn’t finding it easy to be cheerful, that he didn’t know how to fix his family or his future or her face, “I should go get the hoo-” she interrupted him by kissing him.
It was a solemn kiss. She started out on all fours but soon wrapped one hand around the back of his neck, and he stayed where he sat on his heels, but slid a gentle hand against the arm that was holding him. It started solemn, but grew into more than that, still slow, still sad, till Zoe’s hand tightened into a fist around his shirt, till Cai pushed forward on his knees to be closer, till Cai’s heart was swallowed up by a low almost desperate need to keep going because this kiss this promise was building something strong around them and so long as they both held on, the world might stay out there getting worse but they’d be safe in here.
Zoe felt the distance she had been trying to keep between them begin to dissolve, and was a little surprised not to feel the ground beneath her dissolve with it.
She made a yes noise deep inside her mouth and he wrapped his arms around her as tight as they would go, and then her hands were under his shirt and pressed up against his back. The skin on skin felt good, and he did the same to her, until neither of them was wearing a shirt any more, and the carpet felt alien against his back, but Zoe was warm and heavy against his front, the skin of her stomach pressed against his. He wrapped his legs around her hips because that was what they were doing now, wrapping around each other because that was how they were going to survive, and his arms were around her bare back and his hands caught against her bra as he stroked up her skin into her hair. It was so good – but at the same time Cai felt like he was going to burst into tears from the weight of it all.
Zoe didn’t want it to stop, but knew that it must, because this was – was playing with fire the right idiom, considering they were making out on charred carpet? Even though she’d told Cai she would keep her mind open for more visions, the ride back to his place with her head constantly aching had turned her off the idea - she’d had too many visions today already, and this was a sure-fire way to spark another one. But she didn’t want to stop. It wasn’t fair that she had to stop. She just wanted to stay here shirtless on the floor in the hall with his arms around her, kissing him. It didn’t even need to go any further, she just wanted to… keep this. Couldn’t she just keep this?
She pulled away from his mouth, an action that physically pained her. No she couldn’t, because if she had another vision she would end up in hospital, and then would have to explain to Liz why she had waited for three visions in one day before telling her.
Zoe had promised Liz that she would be more open about her visions, and she was taking that promise seriously, so she would explain when she got home, she would. But she wanted to get home on her own time. Not via a hospital. The bandage on her face was going to cause enough fuss. Upsetting Liz was horrible, no matter how much Liz re-iterated again and again that Zoe shouldn’t shoulder the weight of all of this on her own.
Bitterness swamped her. Some days she hated being a psychic. But at least if she was going to be a psychic, let her be one with an ounce of control.
Today Zoe felt so helpless. A puppet of her visions and not even a very effective one.
When Cai leaned up to kiss her again, slowly enough to give her a chance to back off if she needed to, and gently and warmly enough to reverse her feeling of helplessness, she let him. She let him, she embraced it, she kissed him one more time and then stopped, again, before she let herself sink into him any deeper.
“I love you,” she said, whispered. No more helplessness. No. It was time for decision making, for action and for clarity, and well – sinking was a choice too.
She’d been skirting round these words, or any words like it, for months – maintaining a carefully crafted wall to protect herself, as if speaking about emotions, instead of feeling them, was the more dangerous activity of the two. She had refused to put any kind of words to whatever kind of relationship she and Cai had, and Cai had given her the space to build the walls and moats and set the booby traps she needed to protect herself while waiting faithfully on the other side of the drawbridge. And she loved him for it. And for all the other reasons. And it terrified her.
He made hope the easier choice.
Zoe never could have imagined that anyone would have the power to do that.
She loved him for it.
And Zoe hadn’t planned to say it – ever – so she hadn’t considered what his reaction might be, but even if she had, he would have surprised her: Cai burst into tears.
“Oh,” said Zoe, softly, and crawled backwards to get off him.
Cai flapped his hands in front of his face in a sort of ‘it’s not you!’ gesture, rolling himself to a sitting position. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, pulled his hands down his face and his fingertips wiped the tears away and then remained resting on his temples, as he looked at her, and breathed in deep, then out. “I love you too,” he said, the end of his voice cracking a little.
Zoe smiled softer than he thought it was possible for her to smile. “Okay then,” she said, as his words re-built all of her walls and re-dug all of her moats and re-set all her booby traps, but this time with Cai on the inside.
She never could have imagined this feeling. A swirling mixture of giddy-safe-grateful. She was both incredibly nervous and overwhelmingly relieved at the same time. Her heart and stomach had swapped places and both were protesting about the sudden flip.
But Zoe didn’t know how to… how to get herself back to normal after something… good. She took a deep breath. Her lungs were still in the same place, and together they bullied her heart and stomach back into line. Another deep one settled them back in. The giddy-safe-grateful remained.
“I really want to kiss you again,” she said, plaintively. “But if another vision…”
“I really want to kiss you again too,” said Cai. No buts. He just wanted to say it. He wanted to say so much. Could he tell her he loved her again already? He didn’t feel like he’d done it right the first time. But maybe it was too soon, maybe it would cheapen the first time, maybe if he said it too often it would sound like he was trying too hard. But when had Cai ever worried about trying too hard before? Trying too hard was great! “I love you,” said his mouth again, without go-ahead from his brain. Dammit! This was not how he’d expected this to go. He wanted to be smoother. Could he try it a third time and see how that went? He wanted to. Saying those words out loud felt so good.
Zoe smiled again, almost as soft as the first time but with a slight twist which made the smile even more Zoe. The first time she’d kissed him, she’d avoided looking at him for days afterwards. She wasn’t avoiding looking at him now.
“Hey Cai,” Zoe said, and Cai’s stomach flipped in excitement that she’d said his name, even though they were so far past that.
“Yeah?” he asked, and crept his hand forward on the carpet. She did too, automatically drawn in even under the threat of more visions, and linked their fingers together.
“Wanna be partners?” she breathed, and completely forgot about visions as he lunged forward and kissed her again.
~
Cai and Zoe had managed to calm down, at least a little, by the time the rest of Cai’s family got home. They were sitting on the stools at the kitchen counter while vegetables roasted in the oven behind them, Zoe’s vision book out on the counter in front of them, and Cai’s arm around Zoe’s waist. She hadn’t had another one; but there were two others today to go over. Zoe was trying to concentrate on the visions, and not the warmth of his arm, but she wasn’t so invested in concentrating that she was about to ask him to move it.
The vision of Zoe and Rachel wearing running shoes felt much, much more hopeful now than it had earlier today. They’d made a change. Somehow they’d made a change. They just had to figure out what other changes needed making – like how to prevent a funeral in the first place. Something more than make-Dom-go-to-the-Doctor. With Cai’s arm around her, Zoe didn’t feel like this was an impossible task.
She noted this feeling silently. It should have felt cheesy and over-the-top. It didn’t.
The vision of darkness bleeding into her vision till she could see nothing at all – that was something to put aside and untangle another day. It was something to do with the terrifying vision she’d had at Christmas, but there were no specifics with that one, and she could continue to be frustrated (and terrified) or she could focus on change.
The front door clicked open and Zoe slid her vision book into her bag and replaced it with a Chemistry textbook before voices filled the hall. “Zoe?” Faye’s voice called up the stairs, as she pelted up to meet them in the kitchen. “Cai said you were here!” She was beaming as she ran through the kitchen door, but her face fell instantly when she saw the bandage on Zoe’s face.
“It’s okay,” Zoe reassured the younger girl, touching the gauze. “I tripped over when I was running this afternoon, it isn’t that bad.” It was true enough.
Roe appeared in the doorway behind Faye, who turned to watch her older half-sisters reaction. Roe stared at the bandage suspiciously. Her eyes flicked to the rest of Zoe’s face, but came back to the bandage, which she continued to stare at with deep distrust. Faye turned back to Zoe, unsure.
“Honest,” Zoe said, holding out her little finger for a pinkie swear. Faye still hesitated a moment, but the pinkie drew her in, and she was smiling again by the time their little fingers hooked together. Faye looped her arms around Zoe’s neck and kissed her on her good cheek, and Zoe hugged her back, utterly delighted. This family!
Nonnie appeared next, said something quick in Spanish and swept Zoe’s face into her hands for a proper inspection. “Look at this face!” she tsked. “You need some of my salve.”
“Um,” said Cai. “Actu-“
“Nonsense,” Nonnie interrupted, before Cai could fill Zoe’s head with unwarranted caution. “It’s an old family recipe, fixes everything.”
Cai caught Zoe’s eye and gave her a wide-eyed warning shake of the head. “Thank you Nonnie,” Zoe said diplomatically. “I’ll take some home.” Zoe was regarded with another suspicious stare, though this one was administered with a heavy dose of fondness, where Roe’s had come with a heavy dose of… Zoe wasn’t sure what. She smiled at Roe, because Zoe was quite sure that a younger version of herself would have looked at people with that exact same expression.
(Okay, maybe not that much younger.)
Roe did not reciprocate Zoe’s smile. She turned to Cai instead, and the look she gave him was so dirty and distrustful that Cai felt all the tension between them come rushing back. He swallowed hard, wanting more than ever to fix whatever he’d done to upset her. “Hey everyone,” he said. “Zoe had a great fix for the carpet, wanna see?”
From the look on Roe’s face, she did not, but since she was in the doorway, and so standing between Cai and Zoe and where Cai and Zoe wanted to go, she moved. She moved quickly, keeping a good arms distance away from anyone else. “It’s just a bit shaved,” Zoe explained, as Dom, who had joined them in the hall, crouched down to touch it.
“Cleverly done,” Dom said, straightening up with a smile to take in the whole new look of the hall.
“The curtains look good too,” Cai said, though this was a blatant lie. He did not like the curtains. “Good as new, like nothing ever happened.” He smiled at Faye and Roe, especially Roe. Even if the fire had been deliberate, he wanted them to know that it was forgivable, that they could all put it behind them and move on without the weight of blame and secrets hanging over anyone. He didn’t like being suspicious of his foster sisters, and especially now, after making out with Zoe on that exact patch of carpet, he couldn’t really remember why he’d been quite so upset about it. It was just carpet and curtains and an old plant, nothing was broken forever, and it had been silly to get so upset.
Faye had flushed a deep red as she looked at the carpet, at the empty space where the money plant had been, at the new curtains. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, eyes dropping to her shoes.
“Nah,” said Cai, “No harm done, right?” he looked to his grandparents.
“Of course not,” Nonnie said, warmly. “No harm done, and no one is angry.” Faye edged closer to Nonnie, almost imperceptibly, and Nonnie wrapped her arm around her and gave her a little squeeze.
“Cai is,” said Roe, darkly.
Cai swallowed again. “No,” he said, gently. He had the urge to crouch down to talk to her but he almost didn’t need to anymore, she was definitely starting to grow. Not as fast as Faye, who was creeping up to Nonnie’s height at an alarming pace, but still enough that she looked much less of a child than she used to. Her thirteenth birthday was on the horizon. You couldn’t crouch at thirteen year olds.
Roe continued to stare, holding her whole body still. She had a little of the look about her that she’d had during Lent, when she had stolen the remote from Faye, terrified that they would get in trouble for breaking the rules and watching telly, whatever Cai had said to try and convince her that wasn’t the way it worked.
Cai wanted to take her by the shoulders and tell her ‘Look, I’m in love with Zoe, everything in the world is freaking amazing, and I absolutely do not care about a small fire or who started it because it was probably just an accident’. “I’m not angry Roe,” he promised. “I was upset, yeah, but I was overreacting. Just, you know, it was a bit of a shock especially after what happened to the chickens. Really. I’m not angry.”
Roe continued not to react. She continued not to react very, very deliberately. Cai tried a page out of Zoe’s book, and held out a pinkie. “Promise?”
Roe stared at it like it was a snake. Cai’s face fell a little. Zoe watched it all with a pang and thought – I gotta get a chance to talk to Roe.
“Smells like dinner’s almost ready,” said Dom, with a very deliberate cheerfulness that broke (or at least dented) the spell, and sent everyone towards washing up for dinner.
~
Zoe didn’t have any success talking to Roe. She tried, after dinner, when Faye was helping Cai with the washing up and Zoe had been instructed to Sit Down and Rest Her Face. “You alright, Roe?” she asked. Roe said nothing, regarding Zoe with caution. Zoe fought the urge to say something reassuring like ‘I’m not going to hurt you’ because it would have come off like she was going to hurt her.
As little a vocabulary as Zoe had when it came to describing how much she wanted Cai, she had even less when it came to this. How did you get messed up kids to trust you? “It’s been a really horrible couple of weeks, hasn’t it?”
It was obvious to Zoe that Roe was scared of something, but it was a fear that was coated in a very hard shell. Zoe knew all about shells. Roe seemed like such a reflection of her angry, younger, broken self. How had Liz coped? What would Liz say? “If there’s…” Zoe said, scrambling. It was hard to have a conversation with a brick wall, even if you totally understood that wall. “Can I help, Roe? Can I help at all?”
With the slightest twist of her eyebrows Roe gave Zoe the most cynical, bitter look, it was like the universe had created her purely to point out how difficult Zoe herself was. Zoe couldn’t help it; she understood that look so deeply that it became painfully funny, and she closed her eyes and snorted in laughter at the irony of it.
Roe leapt to her feet, bristling. “Oh no,” said Zoe, pressing a hand over her mouth. “I’m laughing at me, not you, I’m sorry.” But Roe vanished, in everything but a puff of smoke.
Cai stepped into the room in her wake, having witnessed a brunette streak whip past him. He was wearing floral marigolds, which were dripping slightly. “What happened there?” he pointed after Roe, a bit of dishwashing foam falling to the carpet.
Zoe slumped backwards on the couch and swore under her breath. “I tried to help,” she said, despairingly. “It didn’t work.”
“You’re supposed to be Resting Your Face,” Cai said, folding his arms like Dom which meant getting his sleeves wet. “That doesn’t look like face resting, that looks like you’re making Facial Expressions.”
Zoe jutted out her chin and made a Facial Expression at him. Yeah sure – it yanked at the skin on her face and it hurt, but no one was going to question Zoe’s ability to make Expressions, not even Cai with his impossible face. Besides, the Expression helped mask the awkward disappointment in herself.
“Hey,” said Cai, closing the gap between them. The Expression hadn’t covered up her real feelings very well, or at least, he could see straight through it. “Nonnie says she just needs time. Buckets and buckets of time.”
He poked the smooth part of her cheek with a wet gloved finger. She swatted him away, but she was smiling with the good half of her face. It was the promise… that’s what it was about his face – it was the promise of every good thing he had to offer the world, every act of kindness and every joke and every outpouring of love he was going to send toward anyone in the world who needed it – that’s what she saw when she looked at his face. And the impossible ridiculousness of the fact that she was part of that world in front of him, that he wanted her to be part of that world and that she wanted it too.
God, but love was such a tiny word; you needed paragraphs even to hint at the way she felt about him. “She’s so lucky to have you as a brother,” Zoe said, thinking I’m lucky I’m lucky I’m lucky.
Luck scared her, though. Zoe had a very fraught relationship with luck.
She remembered how angry she’d been at herself for being nothing more than lucky, the day she’d saved Ellie from falling down the stairs. The visions were luck, weren’t skill or earned or chosen.
I’m not lucky with Cai, thought Zoe. I’m chosen.
The giddy-safe-grateful feeling rushed her again, accompanied by the thought that he was making her think so many sickening things she could never say out loud.
“I’m trying to be a better one,” Cai said, and put his lip between his teeth. Chasing Roe down the hall the night she crashed his bookcase over hadn’t been the most patient move. “There’s just no quick fix, I think.”
“To be a better brother,” Faye interrupted, sticking her head around the corner. “You should get Nonnie and Dom to let us watch Frozen.”
“Again?” Cai turned, his hands on his hips.
“Roe likes it,” Faye said, with all the assumed innocence of a girl passing off her own desire to watch a movie by pretending it was all for her sister. It wasn’t that Roe didn’t like Frozen, it was more than no one could like Frozen as much as Faye did. “It would be a quick fix, I think.”
“I dunno, it is a school night…” Cai said, and even though there was nothing serious or stern about his voice, Faye groaned, and sunk to the floor in the most impressive drama-queen move, knees bent, body almost bent backwards.
“Look what you’ve done,” Zoe said, pointing at Faye, who had completed the look by throwing one arm over her face. “You’ve melted her.”
“Oh no, oh no,” said Cai, clapping his still-gloved hands to the sides of his face. “What do I do??”
“Ice. Quick.” Said Zoe, deadpan. “Look, she’d going fast.”
Faye, delighted at the attention, flung her other arm over her face and gargled. “Meeeelting,” she moaned.
“Now that’s the wrong witch movie entirely,” Zoe critiqued.
“Meeeeellltiiiiiing,” Faye squirmed, undeterred, and then shrieked blue murder as Cai upended an ice tray over top of her. “CAI!”
“For Pete’s sake!” cried Dom from downstairs, barrelling up them. “What is going on up here?”
“Cai ICED me!” protested Faye from the floor, holding up a rapidly melting ice cube in her hand. Cai surreptitiously hid the ice tray behind his back.
“She was melting,” Cai explained. “It was an emergency.”
“Things were pretty dire,” Zoe nodded.
Dom closed his eyes. “We don’t,” he said, in the strained manner of someone explaining something they thought should have been blatantly obvious, “need any screaming in the house at this point.”
“Oops,” said Cai, with a look towards Roe’s (closed) bedroom door.
“Oops,” said Faye, a lot quieter.
Dom sighed. “Yes oops,” he agreed.
“I’m not really melting!” Faye called across the hall, helpfully. “He just gave me some ice! The cold never bothered me anyway!”
“Faye, please don’t talk to your sister through a closed door.”
“Okay!” Faye jumped up, wiping her wet hands on her leggings. “Can we watch Frozen, Dom?” she smiled, and added the magic words. “As a family?”
They worked, too. “Hmm,” said Dom, and looked at his watch. “If,” he said, but Faye’s face had already lit up with the light of a thousand suns in winter. “If your sister wants to, and if you are both in your pyjamas, with your bags packed for school tomorrow, in ten minutes.”
“Five!” Faye beamed, bouncing across the hallway. “Love is an open door!” she sung, swinging open the door to their shared bedroom, and disappearing into it. Well, she disappeared from sight – everyone could still hear her, putting her plans to Roe in song form. “Do you want to watch a movie?”
“Do you mind?” Cai asked. ”I could drop you home if you wanted.”
“No way,” said Zoe, too quickly. “I mean. I don’t. Mind, that is.”
“Neither does Dom,” said Dom. “Not that anyone in this house minds what Dom minds.”
Cai looked at his grandfather. "Sorry, did you say something?"
"The barefaced cheek of you," Dom scolded, but Cai was grinning ear to ear. "Get back to the dishes."
~
In all of London’s turmoil, there were evenings like this, Zoe thought.
Evenings that smelled of years of homecooked meals, and Faye’s hair as she lay her head against Zoe’s arm. Evenings of Cai looking up facts about reindeer and interrupted the movie at crucial points to share them with the girls – “did you some reindeers knees click when they walk, to help them stay together during blizzards?” and Dom being overly interested in reindeer facts and asking Cai to elaborate, “do those reindeer have a higher rate of arthritis than others?” which he did, every time, even if he had to make up the answer “Yes”.
“Do you know why reindeer are better than people?” Faye demanded. “Because they don’t interrupt the movies!”
And outside the world was populated with cruelty and tragedy and bigotry and sadism, a tide of it too big for Zoe to hold back on her own.
Inside, Faye had managed to extract Roe from their room and she was sitting in the corner of the couch wrapped in a large duvet, her small face keeping an eye on all of them but on Anna and Elsa most of all. Faye had her legs flung over Roe’s lap, and her head against Zoe. Nonnie had fallen asleep in her chair. Zoe had used her free hand, the one not grasped in Faye’s, to talk to Danny who needed protection at uni, either from future threats of the resurgence of past ones.
Outside there were unstable fathers, imprisoned uncles, and bosses that tried to drain their employees of blood before getting their heads ripped off by unknown demons.
Cai smiled at her from his own armchair. She smiled back, leaning her head against Faye’s curls, soaking in this evening of the Finches and their strays. Faye was a brilliant heater, and the combination of her body heat and the crochet blanket with a hole in that Zoe had draped over her legs made her feel perfectly toasty.
Outside, it was starting to rain. Inside, Zoe had never felt warmer.