Chapter Text
One day Chris goes to the shooting range and when he comes home Isaac is in their lives.
He wasn't gone long. His new favorite range is in Wisconsin. He found it two weeks after Victoria died. Better lighting. The clientele is less extreme. No one there had ever seen him in an emotional state. Even with the drive he's gone before Allison wakes up and home by two.
He expected her to still be asleep.
Allison held up well until school ended. She woke up at six every day and went on her normal run. Their new apartment was closer to the lake and she came home with her sneakers caked with sand. She only missed two days of school, and Chris was proud of that, though he tried not to show it. If she was snappish with her teachers or threw her planner book at a girl Chris had never heard of, everyone understood it as "understandable under the circumstances."
No one knew what to say in the principal’s office when Allison started laughing and gasped out "You're okay with me assaulting someone because my mom died? Do you realize how demented that is?"
When they were a week into summer, Chris could no longer choose to understand Allison sleeping past noon every day as normal teenage behavior. The day before, Allison caught Chris watching her poking through the kitchen in her pajamas before dinner and demanded to know what he was looking at.
"When is that camp starting?" he asked, "Where you'll be teaching archery?"
Allison shook an empty box of cereal and put it back in the cabinet. "I quit."
"When?"
"The camp started Monday and I wasn't there, so," she said, using the light uncaring tone that Chris had become too familiar with in the past month.
"Allison," he said, "The responsible thing to do is give two weeks notice." Allison just shrugged. "Do you have any plans?" She shrugged again, took out the same box of cereal and discovered for the second time that it was empty.
That night Chris came by her room and let her know he was going to the range in the morning. Allison had spent most of the week sitting crosslegged on her bed watching Victoria's Designing Women DVDs, and Chris noticed that she'd started over at the first season. He tried to spend as much time as he could in the apartment with her, but polishing the furniture did not offer the same release as a morning at the range.
"Would you like to come with me?" he asked.
"I would not," she said deliberately, not taking her eyes off the TV. Chris considered stepping in front of the television but decided against it.
"Lydia hasn't been around for a while." Not that he particularly missed her, but children needed to be social.
"I'm busy," Allison said, gesturing vaguely at the screen.
"Allison. Hey--Allison." She dragged her gaze off the screen and managed to look in his direction. "I expect you to leave the apartment and do something before I get back. Socialize."
Allison rolled her eyes. “Allison,” Chris started again.
“Socialize. Not that I’m sure how I’m going to do that since my only friend is always busy and I have no other friends because you make me move every five minutes. But yes, I’ll socialize.”
“Just getting out of the house would be enough,” Chris amended.
“Got it,” Allison said, not taking her eyes of the TV.
In the morning Chris went to the shooting range and he did not cry in the car and when he came home Isaac was sitting on Allison's bed. At the time though, he wasn't Isaac, he was a strange teenage boy who Chris had never seen before. He was sitting on the edge of her bed with one foot drawn up, not touching Allison but he easily could have. Chris found that he was almost more disturbed that he was wearing shoes on a bed than the fact that it's his daughter’s bed.
Almost.
When they saw Chris in the doorway, they had the good sense to immediately jump off the bed and shrapnel to opposite sides of the room.
"Dad!" Allison said. She smoothed her hair off her face and tugged on the sleeves of her black sweater. "Hi," she smiled sheepishly at him. "How was your trip?"
Out of the corner of his eye Chris saw the boy turn away from him, and for some reason pick up a necklace off Allison's dresser and start toying with it. He was taller than Chris and possibly older than Allison.
"My trip to the gun range?" Chris said, locking eyes on the boy. He dropped the necklace and frantically picked it up. "My accuracy has improved."
Allison, bless her, looked frustrated at best by her father's veiled threats and actually sat back down on the bed. The boy leaned against the dresser, eyes pinging between him and Allison.
"You told me to do something so I did," she said, gesturing towards the boy.
"It wasn't like that," the boys said quickly. Chris spared him a glance before focusing back on Allison. As far as Chris was concerned, he was a prop that only existed at this stage of Allison's grief playing out and would be out of their lives in the next hour.
"Allison would you join me in my office please," Chris asked, "while I put away my guns."
Allison got up easily and told the boy, "You don't have to leave," though judging by the look his face he'd be gone by the time he closed the office door. Allison watched with cool disinterest as Chris secured his firearms and ammo in their respective safes. "You told me to leave the apartment and socialize. I don't know why you're unhappy right now."
Chris turned around. For a moment he reflected on how Victoria would have handled this. While neither of them were happy when Allison started dating that insipid water polo player, named Jake of all things, it was Victoria who Allison blamed when they banned her from seeing him. She snuck around with him for months, and they spent more time looking for Allison than speaking to her, right up until the day Victoria died.
Chris lifted the ban on Jake, only for him to leave their house five minutes after he came, tearfully spitting "She broke up with me, happy yet?" at him. And yes, Chris was. He did not expect to have to contend with another teenage boy this soon and found himself unprepared.
"I am disappointed," he said carefully, "because there is a stranger in my house. There's a reason we asked you to introduce us to your friends before they come home."
"Isaac isn't casing the apartment," Allison said, "Not that anyone I have ever brought over were the master spies you and Mom are afraid of."
"How do you know him?"
"We met at the antique mall."
"Allison."
"That's where I went this morning. We need a dinner table. If I were to lie I'd say we met at Starbucks."
That was true, though sometimes it alarmed Chris how good at lying Allison was. "And how did that lead to him sitting on your bed?"
"He hasn't seen Designing Women."
"So you invited him over to sit on your bed and watch Designing Women."
"Yes."
"Does he go to your school?"
"I don't know. It didn't come up."
"Last name."
"Dad."
"Allison."
Allison threw her arms out with exasperation. "You're right Dad. You were right all along. Isaac is a pawn for a local crime family. A crime family that hates you and wants to take you down from the inside. He tricked me into inviting him over with his knowledge of vintage tea kettles."
It didn't escape either of their notice that no doors had opened or closed while they spoke, meaning the house guest in question was still in Allison's bedroom.
"It's not me I'm worried about."
Earlier in the year statements like this induced meltdowns as Allison pleaded with Victoria and him to treat her like an adult. Now, he was met with nothing but a stony look. Allison squared her shoulders, "I can take care of myself."
The truth was, she most likely could. He compartmentalized any amount of shame he felt as he acknowledged this truth.
Chris considered what appropriate rules would be for the situation but, for what felt like the hundredth time in the past month, came up short. "Did you find a dining table?" he asked, which as much weight as he intended for the rules he couldn't come up with.
"No, we were going to go to South Elgin to look. If that's fine with you," with as much irritation as if she was responding to a list of rules.
They did need a new dining room table. Nearly all of their furniture sat in their as of yet unsold house a mile away, and Allison never showed any interest in bringing anything to the apartment. She was used to change. With every move Victoria spent months meticulously choosing furniture and trinkets that fit their current home's theme. They left her pieces behind with each move not because it would be too difficult to move, but because Victoria wanted a new challenge. Their house in Briarwood was a cookie cutter five bedroom that Victoria loathed. She never stopped looking for ways to "Hide that it was built with painted cardboard." She lay in bed every night with her glasses and a stack of decorating magazines.
The day of her funeral a cylindrical Ethan Allan package landed on their doorstep with her name. Victoria Sylwia Argent. Even after Allison and Chris moved, just a few days later, packages continued to pile up on the doorstep. When he found the time, Chris went back boxed their photos and trinkets, but the furniture stayed behind. The only thing Allison took interest in was Victoria's DVD collection. Allison never expressed interest in outfitting their previous homes, and Chris didn't see a reason to stop her.
Somehow Allison walked out of his office with his black Master Card in her pocket. Isaac was lurking outside the door and skittered backwards when the door opened. He stopped when his leg hit the coffee table, sticking his hands in his pockets, failing to look nonchalant. Chris mentally downgraded the kid's threat potential.
Before they left Chris gently demanded to know how old Isaac was and his last name. Isaac supplied "Sixteen, and it's Cahen, sir," and with enough speed that Chris didn't feel the immediate need to check the veracity of his answers.
"Do I need to tell you what will happen if you take my daughter anywhere but the store, Isaac Cahen?"
Isaac's posture shifted. His shoulders rolled back and he tiled his head like he was amused. "Yes," Isaac said, his voice hard. There was a clear challenge in the way he looked at Chris. A far cry from the panicked way he'd provided his name a mere second ago. Chris was struck by the feeling that he was suddenly dealing with a different person.
"Don't listen to him," Allison said from the doorway where she was pulling on a pair of boots. Isaac's shoulder twitched towards her but he didn't break eye contact. Chris would have said something momentarily, as he was not easily surprised by a teenage boy, but Allison strode over in three easy steps and took Isaac by the wrist. "Bye, Dad," she said forcefully, dragging Isaac out of the apartment.
He heard Isaac say, "Your dad better not shoot me" before the door closed, and Chris was alone.
Two weeks later a compact mahogany table was delivered to their apartment while Chris was home checking emails. He kept the delivery people in the hallway while he waited for Allison to answer the phone.
"I told you about that," she insisted. In the background Chris heard overlapping voices and what sounded like an intercom. "We ordered it from the South Elgin store."
Chris made quick work of verifying that before letting the delivery men in. Allison tried multiple times to get off the phone during this process. "Where are you?" Chris asked. The table had carved detail around the lip, and would fit perfectly in open space behind the living room.
"Uh, the beach."
"Which beach?" Allison conveyed the question to someone else and came back with "The one by the Dairy Queen." Sycamore Beach. A half mile from Allison's high school. The lackluster answer meant that Allison was not with Lydia, who would answer offer to text Chris the latitude-longitude coordinates if asked.
"You're with Isaac?"
She agreed, "We're going to swim."
Since the day Isaac showed up in his home, Allison left the apartment nearly every day. She came home just before dark, leaving sand piles in the doorway. He hadn't seen Isaac since the day after the gun range. While Chris wasn't surprised, he did feel the need to address it. He was not interested in spending another year with Allison hiding her life from him.
When she came home from the antique store--she did tell him about the table, he now remembered--she made a show of telling Chris everything she knew about Isaac. Made it clear that she was doing so under duress, even though Chris never asked a question abut Isaac, and certainly was not pursuing in the level of detailed he received. Isaac Cahen, Allison said, moved to town a few months ago and was living with his cousin or uncle or "something similar." Isaac probably would be going to her school after the summer. He was obsessed with the antique post cards at the South Elgin shop. He didn't have a car, or a bus pass or a job. And he thought that Chris was "psycho," which Chris had to admit was more of an indication of self-preservation skills than anything else. "But I'm sure you have already conducted a background search," she said, after detailing the neighborhood she dropped Isaac off in.
Chris did not clarify that he had absolutely no more access to information about Isaac Cahen than a google search could provide. If need be, Chris could find a tectonic survey of Waterlow, Nebraska in 1981 in an afternoon. But Victoria was the one who handled people. His attempt at research turned nothing but dead French Cahens on Jewish geneology sites. Despite having no hard evidence that Isaac wasn't a drug dealer, Chris did not feel the need to stop Allison from going around with him. For one, she was out of the house which even better parents would agree was an improvement. Beside that, any teenage boy who hung out at antique malls must be gay.
Any remaining reservations he had about Allison spending time with a stranger, and so much time with him, was helped by Allison's new transparency. While he sometimes had no idea where she was, she answered texts within minutes.
Without Allison at home, Chris found that there was no hiding that he had no idea what to do with his time. When he was focused on getting her out of bed, he had something to do, and now he just watched delivery men install furniture his daughter ordered.
"You can't swim at the same time," Chris said, watching the men touch his furniture to make room for the dining table.
"We can't?" Allison asked with some impatience.
"Unless you want your purse stolen."
"We rented a locker," she said, "We're not stupid."
Well.
"Come home for dinner after," he said, "both of you."
"Dad."
"Allison."
She came home alone at five. Chris ran out of emails to answer and was occupying himself with the arduous task of lying on the couch with a tumbler, reading the spines on the books across the room. The apartment's living room had white painted built in shelves, an attribute Victoria would have been pleased with. The books were the first things Chris brought over after the move, but he only managed to fill a shelf. The rest of the boxes sat under the empty shelves.
"There was a car crash down the street," Allison called from the door. He heard her kick off her shoes and drop her bag on the floor. She padded down the hall. "Traffic is backed up a mile. I had to park at the Whole Foods and walk here."
Chris sat up and put his feet on the floor, and Allison collapsed on the couch. Her wet hair was contained in a bun on top of her head. "Did you have a good day?"
"I got a thousand bug bites, but it was fine."
"You're spending a lot of time at the beach. I don't know that you ever went to the beach in San Francisco."
"It's better here. The water is a bit disgusting, but it's warmer here than the ocean. Once you get used to it you can stay out there for hours." Her cheeks were pink from the sun, and he thought of the similar photos of her as a child.
"Do you remember those weekends we spent at the lakes, back when we lived in Boston? You used to spend all day floating in your back. We had to bribe you to come inside."
"I remember that," she said quietly, "You came in the water once and carried me out. You were fully dressed, I think even your shoes were on."
"More than once." He left his shoes off, after the first time. Allison delighted in her father drenching himself to get her out of the water, she giggled and swam to him, clinging to his chest as he carried her out. She talked about it non-stop after every time. If he did everything else wrong for the rest of her childhood, she would remember her father making a fool of himself just to get her inside for dinner.
They sat in the memory. Chris suspected that they were both thinking of the part of the memory that wasn't said. Victoria, who didn’t swim, leaning over the edge of the dock to talk to Allison, her black sunglasses picking up the reflection of the water.
"What did you do today?" she asked abruptly.
The moment popped like a thin soap balloon. Chris paused. "I would prefer you change out of your swimsuit before getting settled in."
Allison twisted to look at the marks that her wet shirt already left on the couch. "You weren't planning on keeping this, were you? It's just the one that came with the apartment."
"If it's damaged we won't get our deposit back."
Allison fell back against the couch and closed her eyes. "Take it out of my college fund," she said, despite knowing that Chris most likely would if it came to it. "It's my turn to order dinner.”
"Are we taking turns?"
Allison hummed. "That's been the pattern so far. If you call for burgers, I'll pick it up. I have to get my car anyway."
Chris was not thrilled that they had any sort of new pattern. "Where's Isaac?" he asked.
Allison shot him a disbelieving look. "Dad, you didn't really think he was going to come here, did you?"
"He was invited."
Allison let her hair down and sighed. "I had to spend a massive amount of time convincing him you weren't going to shoot anyone. I mean, the whole drive to South Elgin. If it took any longer I would have called character witnesses."
“Are you two dating?” Chris asked.
Allison wrinkled her nose. “Dad. We’re just friends. It’s a little soon for me to be dating someone. With—because I broke up with Jake.”
“What about Lydia?” “
“I still see Lydia.” Allison twisted around and pulled their small pile of take out menues out of the side table drawer. “She’s taking summer classes at Northwestern. Besides, you don’t even like Lydia.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Chris said. Allison sorted through the menus, lying the ones she didn’t want on the coffee table. “I don’t want you to leave all your routines behind. Consistency is important.”
Allison laughed and stood up, “You should have thought of that before you made me move three times in the last year. Or you know, failed to tell me what was going on with Mom.” She dropped the remaining menus on the table, sending them cascading onto the floor. “I’m just gonna leave now to pick up dinner.”
“Allison,” Chris stood up and followed her to the door.
She picked up her shoes and opened the door. “I’m coming back,” she said, and closed the door behind her.
His sales man for Argent Arms, Bennett, called a few days later and made it clear that he had to shit or get off the pot. "You can't run this kind of business in your jammies" he said. Chris was silent long enough for Bennett to remember that Chris was his boss and add, “sir.”
Bennett was right. He’d already lost one major client. If he wanted to avoid using family money, he had to keep his business alive. Bennett identified which relationships were most precarious, and in need of a in-face with the big boss. Chris booked two sets tickets to Albuquerque and Orlando. He couldn’t remember if he and Victoria had ever left Allison home alone before. He suddenly couldn’t remember if they had let her go out for an entire day alone before, or even leave the house. Without thinking, he found himself parked at Sycamore Beach.
He had only been to the beach once, the day they reached Briarwood and drove up to an empty house. The moving truck was still two days away. It was January. There was no snow on the ground but it was twenty degrees below freezing. Chris shoved down the feeling of horror when he realized that Victoria and Allison's warmest jackets were nowhere near warm enough. Allison didn't say a word, just pulled her jacket close around her as the wandered through the house. In hushed tones Victoria insisted they were fine, they would be at the hotel soon and could have jackets delivered. She was reasonable as always. Chris thought he was too, even as he turned up the heat in their empty house to 75 degrees, and corralled the three of them into his SUV and drove to the mall.
Later, equipped with weather appropriate jackets, scarves and gloves, they drove to a beach near Allison's new high school. The "beach near Dairy Queen," Sycamore Beach. It was down a steep unplowed hill and their car was the only one on the gated pier. The sun was setting, but they couldn't see it over the water. The beach was a quarter mile wide, with rocky sand and a shuttered shelter with lockers and snow capped trash cans.
"It's like an ocean," Allison said, "I thought I'd be able to see the other side of it." The water was iced over for nearly a hundred feet off the shore and waves crashed over the ice before receding and crashing again.
"It's a great lake," Chris said, though he was also surprised by the magnitude of it. Victoria put her arm around Allison, pulling her close, "In the summer it will be like bath water. We'll come here every day."
Today, parked in his car, looking over the beach Chris felt sure that Victoria would have detested this place. It clotted with families who brought coolers and umbrellas and noise. Swimmers walking down to the shore had to weave through sunbathers. He picked up on at least three speakers blasting music. Why did Allison even like it?
He wasn't sure Allison was there and nearly gave up looking for her when his phone started ringing. Allison was calling. “Hi Dad,” she said cheerfully, “Whatcha doing?”
Chris reached for the compact binoculars in the glove box. “I’m talking to you.” He scanned over the beach one more time, starting from the shore and moving up.
“What else are you doing?” she asked sweetly.
There they were, sitting on a bright pink towel. Isaac has half hidden by Allison, sitting elbows on knees craning his head around her to look in his direction. Allison sat crosslegged in a giant black hat and oversized sunglasses. She waved at him.
“Thought I’d visit one of our beaches,” Chris said. He tried in vain to find a bottle of sunscreen on her towel, but could only find two oversized soda cups. Both Allison and Isaac had wet hair, but were fully dressed.
“I’m at the beach too!” Allison said.
“Are you?” Chris said with mock surprise. He buckled his seatbelt.
“I am! Which beach are you at?”
“Sycamore. Where are you?” He started his car.
“Such a shame, I’m at Crestwater.” On the towel, Allison reached behind her and produced a bottle of sunscreen and waved it in his direction. “I guess I’ll just see you tonight.”
“Five o’clock. Bring your friend.”
“What are you talking about,” Allison said, “I’m completely alone.” She hung up the phone and Chris put the binoculars away before pulling out of his space and driving up the hill to the street above.