Legal counsel.
Who: Jasper Reynard (MR. FOX) and Gray Adams (BAGHEERA)
Where: His apartment, and her office.
What: A phone call, in which Reynard exploits some old connections to help win a certain woman's custody battle.
When: Evening, sometime after this exchange with Jess.
REYNARD: If Gray had spent some time idly knocking around Reynard's name in Google, he returned the favour doubly tonight. Not only did the man look up his old friend, but he pried into her firm, clicking through Featherstone & Janson's website on a vague quest for clues - before finally, in an unwavering hand, he copied down a certain string of numbers.
Reynard paused to take a long sip from the whiskey glass in front of him. The liquid loosened his tongue, warmed his throat and left little wet rings on the coffee-table, but at the moment, he wasn't one to notice. This woman had expectations of him, and that was dangerous territory when he had absolutely no inclination of living up to those expectations. She wanted them to be friends, like they'd been twenty years ago. She expected - probably even wanted - the gaps of decades to simply melt away and leave them where they used to be.
He, on the other hand, had no such intention. But for the sake of achieving a desired objective, well. He could play along.
When he dialed the number, his hand did not shake. When he spoke, his voice was like marked steel.
"Gray?"
GRAY: The call clicked through to her desk, a silent glowing flash on the base of the phone itself. Unobstrusive; being able to see that another client was waiting while her current sniffled into a handful of soggy tissue was invaluable when charging by the minute. Now the phone was almost buried beneath a wealth of papers, the yellow parchment colour of legal briefs and the crisp laminated card packets of official crime-scene photographs, their contents concealed with proper stamps as though the legalities of how to handle them would make the contents less shocking. It was seven o'clock according to the discreet clock that sat on the corner of her desk; an hour after the receptionist had left her desk.
The legal blotter lay to one side, it happened she laid down her pen, massaged fingertips against her temples hoping to relieve the oncoming headache of hard, clogging unhappiness, heart-sickness at this case's content. Her eyes felt raw and itchy with reading, she squeezed them shut, blinked. Noted the soft blare of the red bulb and picked up the handset, glancing at the clock automatically; note the time of the call, fifteen minute increments, $50 per fifteen minutes. Time expensive, even on a phone call. Paid for the lavish surroundings, the opulent comfort of a cell in which to imprison herself for daring to care about the rest of the world.
"Adams," she said, cold. Impersonal. Go away, was implied. Intruding. "I'm afraid business hours have concluded. You'll need to call back."
REYNARD: Off-hand: "What if this isn't about business?"
His voice wouldn't sound familiar, of course. There's those pesky twenty years to account for, and age and distance between them. Though he's just on the other line from her, Reynard is, in many ways, an entire world removed.
GRAY: She paused, confusion. This place, this office, has been clearly ordered. Life has been clearly ordered, into boxes and compartments of cases and notes and files and telephone calls. Truth be told, little in her life is beyond business. Work bled through into her personal life long ago, the two can no longer be separated. Gray looked at the phone again; deceptively mild for such a bomb about to detonate her carefully constructed, delicate reality. Tapped her pen in irritation against the cramped handwriting that covered her pages.
"I don't think I follow." Careful, but a low growl of annoyance only partly concealed. She disliked interruptions at the best of times, and now is not one of them. The intrusion has awoken her from the quiet absorption of work, stirred her from complete immersion and reminded her, both appetite and the grainy feeling as she rubbed at her eyelids, that she is not inhuman, capable of running on nothing. Without the quiet masculine voice on the end of the phone-line, inevitably, she would have returned. Now she cannot, and that discomfort spills into her voice.
REYNARD: There's something vaguely discomfiting about Reynard in general; it's hardly a surprise that her structure crumbles around him. He makes an art out of it, after all, and prides himself on the effect. So it was with a certain ease in movement that he paced his cold and inhuman living room (cushions carefully arranged on the sofa; television turned to the news but muted; lights lowered and dim); briefly, he glanced out of the window, looking down on New York sprawled out before him, all faint lights and emptiness.
It was an appropriate backdrop to the scene.
"It's me," he announced, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "Reynard. Jasper."
GRAY: The pen drops from her fingertips. Mount Blanc (she's done well. Well enough for the sort of pen to produce and hand to clients with the faint smile of earning more per annum than they do) and it rolled over the page, gold nib coming to rest against the word 'expired'. The jolt has loosened the ink (an old pen) and a pool of black engulfed her notes. With a phone-call, Jasper Reynard has managed to absorb both five minutes of bankable telephone conversation, and twenty minutes at least of reading notes. It's oddly apt. He managed to absorb a great deal more, the last time they spoke.
"Oh," she managed, with a strangled noise as her sanctum is invaded sharply by her own life, clouded by it like ink stirred into water. "Jasper." The stilted calm of her voice is something perhaps she ought to be proud of. It's better than the wild hysteria as to why he's bothered to phone. Blessed clarity comes a moment later; girl did manage the last twenty years without him, after all. Grown up. "How surprising. A phone-call?" Undercut with sharpness. Unrecognisable in the friend she used to be, but then, their friendship disappated long years before. "I merit that. Well well."
REYNARD: "Yes, well. Now that you've flounced back into my life again, I thought it might be worth a phonecall to check in."
It was a lie. Claiming that this was a personal matter had also been a lie. Reynard had gotten progressively better at those, until his entire existence seemed a subtle layering of them: a delicate construction of half-truths and deceptions and appearances. This call would, presumably, tax those skills to their utmost.
GRAY: "I'm working." Clipped, an echo of quiet tiredness in her voice, perhaps, behind the quick lack-of-words. Doesn't waste them these days. Doesn't waste her time either; Gray has been let down before, whenever reliant on someone else's good will, their benevolence. Those walls of hard-constructed time and futile railing still crumple in the face of someone who was there before the rot set in. Gray leant back against the back of the chair, closed her eyes against her cynicism, took a breath. Caution.
"Really. Got the impression my presence was no longer welcome. Impression." Voice dry as bone. Not impression. More blunt, pressing fact. But there's hope, hovering - gossamer thin and frail in the background. Hope, Gray normally quashes in light of actual understanding. Way the world works, the failure of hope in the face of everything against it. Still. He has the upper-hand. He pre-dates that understanding.
REYNARD: There was a bit of a pause now. Some might have taken it for an emotional stagger, and in the old Jasper, it might well have been. Reynard, on the other hand, simply needed time for the cogs to turn: to think and assess, and to judge the best course of action. He was playing a dangerous game here, in which other people were his ivory pawns. It was a game he was used to.
"I may have a problem on my hands, Gray. You know how difficult it is for me to admit that."
His words were delivered carefully, each one dropping into place like puzzle pieces, eggshell-fragile. There was an exquisite battle of choice behind every last syllable, and Reynard was entirely in control throughout. "And I had the impression you may be able to help."
Beat.
"For old time's sake."
Ouch.
GRAY: "Oh." Flat, dead tone. It is surprising how many old friends have crawled out of the woodwork since her name has been in the press. Gray was flushed with champagne and congratulations on a successful result, a high profile case in which the settlement was vast and fair when the first phone call rang through to her assistant. An old college friend - acquaintance. Oozing flattery as she begged a 'little favor'. The requests for 'little favors' have exponentially increased against the square meters of her office-space.
How unlike Jasper to conform. A favor. Help. She'd never managed it before. Why would now be different?
"What is it you want." It's not a question. More a resigned understanding that someone else wishes to take. She's keeping whether or not she'll give, to herself. "I'm very busy, Reynard."
REYNARD: He barely suppressed a yawn, pressing the heel of his hand against his mouth before continuing. "I thought it might be the first step towards reconciling our differences, and seeing one another in a new light. For example, I'm not used to this new lawyer side of you, and you're unacquainted with the- Jas who goes to medical conferences."
Reynard was still keeping some of the cards to himself. He hadn't yet openly said what he wanted.
GRAY: "Oh." Uncertain now; none of them began that way. It was always heavily unsubtle congratulations, followed up by a 'I don't suppose...?' Pregnant pauses abunded in Gray's life these days. She rescued the edge of a photocopied statement, the information deemed unsuitable for the prosecution, scored out in startlingly heavy black marker. It was dripping ink now; like blood, she thought oddly, and shook her head to clear it.
"How do you intend to go about this?" She doesn't need to use finely crafted phrases, laced with tact in this phone conversation. It is almost a relief to be rude. "A new light." The tone drips something close to sarcasm.
REYNARD: "I looked at your firm's website, but one can't expect their own self-praise to be accurate. Tell me, Gray, are you a good attorney?"
GRAY: "No," she says, sharply. Correcting misapprehensions, and the idea that the firm would flatter her. Pander to the ego like that. "I'm the best." Said simply.
REYNARD: I'm the best. Reynard absorbed those words for a moment, ruminating and rolling them over his tongue-
"Is that some swagger I detect? I must admit, I like this new side of you, Gray."
GRAY: Swagger? She doesn't like that; the intimation that her pride is undeserved. She shakes her head, and there is a moment's disconcertion as she realises she's arguing with the telephone, where no one can see.
"And you? Are you a good doctor?" Throwing the challenge back on him.
REYNARD: "Well, I've made mistakes. I'm only human, after all." The failure with Vi came to mind, but Reynard brushed the memory aside just as easily. "But I am a damn fine surgeon, and vascular surgery takes several extra years of specialisation. It seems we make quite the successful pair, eh?"
There was a tight-lipped non-answer somewhere between the lines there. Success, unfortunately, is sometimes relative.
GRAY: Successful in what. Her life has become a filing cabinet. A pile of manila folders. The agony and the ecstasy of other people's lives, neatly ordered into the alphabet, and grateful women who send photographs of smiling children. And yet. It is a measure of success the young Reynard would recognise, Gray thinks. Wealthy enough to afford New York real estate, and to buy (with a mortgage) the biggest property in their home town. By children's measures, she is successful indeed. And there is something he is not-saying with his pride at being a surgeon.
"Apparently so," she agrees. "Making a difference. Both of us."
REYNARD: "Very true."
Making a difference. Right. Those words tickled a faint memory nestled somewhere in the deeper recesses of his mind; it reminded him of old dreams and ambitions that he'd discarded long ago. When the man's tale realisation came (a decade ago now - had it really been that long?), it had not been quick. It had not been pretty. Blood and knives never were.
But he had adjusted. Not only had he dragged himself raw-boned and tight-lipped through med-school, but to the very top of his class, even while he made peace with that dark and troublesome pit inside him (or so he believed), and Reynard did, yes, consider himself a resounding success.
"Now I'd like to harness that ability to make a difference. I'm making this call for someone else. She needs some legal help. Custody issue."
Heartbeat.
"She means quite a lot to me."
GRAY: Ah. The request comes, after the 'catching up'. She has expected something; rarely do people call without something on their minds beyond collective admiration of achievements, after all. Even Jas. Still, there is a blunted sort of stab of disappointment, and a moment in which to shake herself. It doesn't matter. Jasper is different, he always has been. And this is a request, rather than a do-or-die determination to help him; it has a beginning and an end. It can be done. She can do it, she can help.
The word 'custody' is like a bell; Pavlov's dog. The legal pad is drawn across the desk, pen poised, hovering. And the small pause, that means a world. A reminder that she holds only a few puzzle pieces of Jasper's life now, when trying to make sense of the picture he presents these days. Someone who means something.
"Details, please," she says, all business. Shutting down the possibility of being hurt that these reminiscings possibly made her believe this phone call had another purpose. "You say custody. Father? Family? State?" No possibility whatsoever. All business, all the time. That's right, that's familiar.
REYNARD: He stopped his pacing, briefly, to flick the off-switch for the television. This conversation had just become a hell of a lot more interesting than the muted news.
"The father died last March. There's a mother-in-law-" Abruptly, Reynard cut himself off and chuckled, with a gravel voice and a laugh like crackling cinders. It was jarring. But then his voice flattened out again, all back to crisp and painful sombreness: "Sorry. It's just so ironic. Evil stepmothers and mothers-in-law seem a dire concern in this community. Either way, she would be the one jostling for custody of the son. The mother-in-law is, financially, far better off than the real mother. She works two jobs in trying to keep him, and I don't believe her court meetings are going well. Can you do it?"
It almost didn't sound like a question - Reynard wanted a good answer. And when Reynard wanted good answers, he often got them.
GRAY: It would be a familiar story to any family-familiar legal team in the country. Children were an echo of the people who created them, but more malleable, formless. Able to take on the characteristics required - no, needed by those demanding a facsimile of someone else. Or so it was thought. A dead father, a mother-in-law who thought that a wealthier upbringing was payment enough for expecting a child to grow up and replace a dead man. It was a story Gray had heard before. It was a story she told often in court, drawing attention of a judge to the heavy expectations and burden laid on a child by the adults around them.
There was a long pause. Notes scribbled across yellow paper, haphazard, almost drunken lines of writing as she constructed the skeleton of this woman’s story; flesh would come with details. The acrimony of grief, the scraped savings to pay for clothes, toys, building a martyr. Two jobs spoke of no money, no money for decent counsel. This would be a favor. An expensive favor.
“I’m loaded up with pro bono, Jasper.” Beat. “She means a lot?”
REYNARD: He bit back the immediate instinct to offer up money. Reynard was a man who paved his path of good intentions with cobblestones of credit cards and cash - he lavished women with attention and gifts and favours, which played the gentleman's part well enough. It was how he played nice. In his own way. But if he could talk Gray into accepting one more pro bono (exploitation or not), that would be ideal.
"She does." Quickly realising that clipped words weren't quite right for this situation, he tried to make them genuine. Try soft. Try emotion, despite the fact that it felt forced on his tongue. "Insofar as I could be said to be seeing anyone at the moment, I ... believe you could say that I'm seeing her."
GRAY: “A single mother, Jasper?” Pause. Time taken to register memories flowing back. Of all the people. He has left his own alone, but this one means enough to allow him to hold onto her son. It is not difficult to talk Gray into pro bono; it is why she does not take calls from old friends, or acquaintances, the moment she hears the hint of wheedling in a voice, down goes the phone. Already strategy is racing through her mind, anticipation, adrenaline kicking off.
“I’ll do it.”
REYNARD: There was a shell-shocked pause.
Thankfully, visuals did not transfer over the phone; neither did facial expressions, nor the torrential outflow of thoughts that crashed through Reynard's mind. All Gray would hear was a certain pause, and a certain conspicuous lack of breathing before he remembered how. It was after that wry question of hers. He could hear that infuriating edge of knowing in Gray's voice, the arch of a familiar eyebrow and the skepticism and the questioning tone, all at once. He'd gotten used to not hearing that. No one ever questioned him.
A single mother struggling to raise her lone son, and he hadn't noticed the similarities. Oh, fuck me sideways.
When his lungs finally saw fit to return with ragged breath, Reynard sounded almost as unruffled as before. Almost. "Good. Thank you. Her name is Jessica Winters. Also a tale."
GRAY: Something is wrong. Something, because there is an absence of sound. People are rarely silent and when reticent, the noises they make speak for them. The hiss of breath, the tapping of fingers, anything but nothing. But. He speaks, and it is as if nothing has happened, just a pause in the conversation as normal as anything. As if Gray simply could not hear. But. The name. A name that reminds.
“I’ve seen her name,” she says. Bitter, Rose said, embittered by life and no wonder if this is her story. Her words are careful when written as if considered before committing herself. Like Jasper, Gray thinks with dawning realisation that this is a touch more serious than calling up an old acquaintance about a potential new girlfriend. No. Neither seem the type to commit lightly. Her head aches with this; it is too late in the evening for flooding realisations and epiphanies regarding people out of touch.
“Tell her to contact me,” Gray says, and her voice is distant once again. Emotionally detached, as if this were any other client, any other request. But it isn’t, it is something that has buried itself, all spines, in the back of her head and will not allow itself to be removed.
REYNARD: That distant lilt in the voice was something they both had in common now, tone all detached to betray the fact that it really wasn't at all. It was closer to home than it should have been.
So if Gray's head ached, then Reynard's pounded and creaked and groaned under the weight of his own realisation - that was another familiar undercurrent to their friendship, somehow prevailing even though the friendship itself had terminated. They used to tackle problems together. They used to bend their minds towards solving every problem from homework to familial distress to the city's sociopolitical issues. Reynard kneaded his forehead slowly, fingers pinched and eyes closed, and he pondered how things change.
And how some things don't.
"I'll pass it on. I believe she'll be grateful for any help you can give. It might be like pulling teeth with her sometimes," another dry laugh, "but then again, you're presumably used to that, having gone with this line of work."
GRAY: He has changed unbelievably, and while Reynard might be contemplating how they have changed and yet stayed the same, Gray can only think of how different he is, how cut off from the life she knew he lived if he can be ‘seeing’ a single mother without acknowledging the existence of his own. It drives home to her heart, breaching defences through the hole that is Reynard’s own, created when he was a boy, before the defences themselves were built that doorway existed. This is not just another case, not another family’s happiness or sorrow. As it thrills through her there is just the inexplicably clear knowledge that this, this is why she chose this line. To help, to help that same boy and mother locked into battle. This is Jas-and-his-mother, again and again and this time, oh this time, it can be altered.
Her voice echoes her new excitement, a vague throb of renewed energy however hard she tries to repress it, feign disinterest. “Yes, of course. If she doesn’t get in contact, I’ll write a letter. If you could get the name of her previous counsel, I can get the records. And the names of the lawyers representing her mother-in-law. Make sure Jessica knows that if there is any legally-orientated correspondence, or even personal that touches upon custody or visitation, I need copies.” Gray is readying herself for battle, and the weapons are being prepared.
REYNARD: And now they're left to parley administrative details, and she speaks a legal language of her own, just like his vocabulary of scalpels and aortas and anaesthetic; it's a recurring chord. Emotion boils away, leaving fact.
Just how it goes.
Where: His apartment, and her office.
What: A phone call, in which Reynard exploits some old connections to help win a certain woman's custody battle.
When: Evening, sometime after this exchange with Jess.
REYNARD: If Gray had spent some time idly knocking around Reynard's name in Google, he returned the favour doubly tonight. Not only did the man look up his old friend, but he pried into her firm, clicking through Featherstone & Janson's website on a vague quest for clues - before finally, in an unwavering hand, he copied down a certain string of numbers.
Reynard paused to take a long sip from the whiskey glass in front of him. The liquid loosened his tongue, warmed his throat and left little wet rings on the coffee-table, but at the moment, he wasn't one to notice. This woman had expectations of him, and that was dangerous territory when he had absolutely no inclination of living up to those expectations. She wanted them to be friends, like they'd been twenty years ago. She expected - probably even wanted - the gaps of decades to simply melt away and leave them where they used to be.
He, on the other hand, had no such intention. But for the sake of achieving a desired objective, well. He could play along.
When he dialed the number, his hand did not shake. When he spoke, his voice was like marked steel.
"Gray?"
GRAY: The call clicked through to her desk, a silent glowing flash on the base of the phone itself. Unobstrusive; being able to see that another client was waiting while her current sniffled into a handful of soggy tissue was invaluable when charging by the minute. Now the phone was almost buried beneath a wealth of papers, the yellow parchment colour of legal briefs and the crisp laminated card packets of official crime-scene photographs, their contents concealed with proper stamps as though the legalities of how to handle them would make the contents less shocking. It was seven o'clock according to the discreet clock that sat on the corner of her desk; an hour after the receptionist had left her desk.
The legal blotter lay to one side, it happened she laid down her pen, massaged fingertips against her temples hoping to relieve the oncoming headache of hard, clogging unhappiness, heart-sickness at this case's content. Her eyes felt raw and itchy with reading, she squeezed them shut, blinked. Noted the soft blare of the red bulb and picked up the handset, glancing at the clock automatically; note the time of the call, fifteen minute increments, $50 per fifteen minutes. Time expensive, even on a phone call. Paid for the lavish surroundings, the opulent comfort of a cell in which to imprison herself for daring to care about the rest of the world.
"Adams," she said, cold. Impersonal. Go away, was implied. Intruding. "I'm afraid business hours have concluded. You'll need to call back."
REYNARD: Off-hand: "What if this isn't about business?"
His voice wouldn't sound familiar, of course. There's those pesky twenty years to account for, and age and distance between them. Though he's just on the other line from her, Reynard is, in many ways, an entire world removed.
GRAY: She paused, confusion. This place, this office, has been clearly ordered. Life has been clearly ordered, into boxes and compartments of cases and notes and files and telephone calls. Truth be told, little in her life is beyond business. Work bled through into her personal life long ago, the two can no longer be separated. Gray looked at the phone again; deceptively mild for such a bomb about to detonate her carefully constructed, delicate reality. Tapped her pen in irritation against the cramped handwriting that covered her pages.
"I don't think I follow." Careful, but a low growl of annoyance only partly concealed. She disliked interruptions at the best of times, and now is not one of them. The intrusion has awoken her from the quiet absorption of work, stirred her from complete immersion and reminded her, both appetite and the grainy feeling as she rubbed at her eyelids, that she is not inhuman, capable of running on nothing. Without the quiet masculine voice on the end of the phone-line, inevitably, she would have returned. Now she cannot, and that discomfort spills into her voice.
REYNARD: There's something vaguely discomfiting about Reynard in general; it's hardly a surprise that her structure crumbles around him. He makes an art out of it, after all, and prides himself on the effect. So it was with a certain ease in movement that he paced his cold and inhuman living room (cushions carefully arranged on the sofa; television turned to the news but muted; lights lowered and dim); briefly, he glanced out of the window, looking down on New York sprawled out before him, all faint lights and emptiness.
It was an appropriate backdrop to the scene.
"It's me," he announced, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "Reynard. Jasper."
GRAY: The pen drops from her fingertips. Mount Blanc (she's done well. Well enough for the sort of pen to produce and hand to clients with the faint smile of earning more per annum than they do) and it rolled over the page, gold nib coming to rest against the word 'expired'. The jolt has loosened the ink (an old pen) and a pool of black engulfed her notes. With a phone-call, Jasper Reynard has managed to absorb both five minutes of bankable telephone conversation, and twenty minutes at least of reading notes. It's oddly apt. He managed to absorb a great deal more, the last time they spoke.
"Oh," she managed, with a strangled noise as her sanctum is invaded sharply by her own life, clouded by it like ink stirred into water. "Jasper." The stilted calm of her voice is something perhaps she ought to be proud of. It's better than the wild hysteria as to why he's bothered to phone. Blessed clarity comes a moment later; girl did manage the last twenty years without him, after all. Grown up. "How surprising. A phone-call?" Undercut with sharpness. Unrecognisable in the friend she used to be, but then, their friendship disappated long years before. "I merit that. Well well."
REYNARD: "Yes, well. Now that you've flounced back into my life again, I thought it might be worth a phonecall to check in."
It was a lie. Claiming that this was a personal matter had also been a lie. Reynard had gotten progressively better at those, until his entire existence seemed a subtle layering of them: a delicate construction of half-truths and deceptions and appearances. This call would, presumably, tax those skills to their utmost.
GRAY: "I'm working." Clipped, an echo of quiet tiredness in her voice, perhaps, behind the quick lack-of-words. Doesn't waste them these days. Doesn't waste her time either; Gray has been let down before, whenever reliant on someone else's good will, their benevolence. Those walls of hard-constructed time and futile railing still crumple in the face of someone who was there before the rot set in. Gray leant back against the back of the chair, closed her eyes against her cynicism, took a breath. Caution.
"Really. Got the impression my presence was no longer welcome. Impression." Voice dry as bone. Not impression. More blunt, pressing fact. But there's hope, hovering - gossamer thin and frail in the background. Hope, Gray normally quashes in light of actual understanding. Way the world works, the failure of hope in the face of everything against it. Still. He has the upper-hand. He pre-dates that understanding.
REYNARD: There was a bit of a pause now. Some might have taken it for an emotional stagger, and in the old Jasper, it might well have been. Reynard, on the other hand, simply needed time for the cogs to turn: to think and assess, and to judge the best course of action. He was playing a dangerous game here, in which other people were his ivory pawns. It was a game he was used to.
"I may have a problem on my hands, Gray. You know how difficult it is for me to admit that."
His words were delivered carefully, each one dropping into place like puzzle pieces, eggshell-fragile. There was an exquisite battle of choice behind every last syllable, and Reynard was entirely in control throughout. "And I had the impression you may be able to help."
Beat.
"For old time's sake."
Ouch.
GRAY: "Oh." Flat, dead tone. It is surprising how many old friends have crawled out of the woodwork since her name has been in the press. Gray was flushed with champagne and congratulations on a successful result, a high profile case in which the settlement was vast and fair when the first phone call rang through to her assistant. An old college friend - acquaintance. Oozing flattery as she begged a 'little favor'. The requests for 'little favors' have exponentially increased against the square meters of her office-space.
How unlike Jasper to conform. A favor. Help. She'd never managed it before. Why would now be different?
"What is it you want." It's not a question. More a resigned understanding that someone else wishes to take. She's keeping whether or not she'll give, to herself. "I'm very busy, Reynard."
REYNARD: He barely suppressed a yawn, pressing the heel of his hand against his mouth before continuing. "I thought it might be the first step towards reconciling our differences, and seeing one another in a new light. For example, I'm not used to this new lawyer side of you, and you're unacquainted with the- Jas who goes to medical conferences."
Reynard was still keeping some of the cards to himself. He hadn't yet openly said what he wanted.
GRAY: "Oh." Uncertain now; none of them began that way. It was always heavily unsubtle congratulations, followed up by a 'I don't suppose...?' Pregnant pauses abunded in Gray's life these days. She rescued the edge of a photocopied statement, the information deemed unsuitable for the prosecution, scored out in startlingly heavy black marker. It was dripping ink now; like blood, she thought oddly, and shook her head to clear it.
"How do you intend to go about this?" She doesn't need to use finely crafted phrases, laced with tact in this phone conversation. It is almost a relief to be rude. "A new light." The tone drips something close to sarcasm.
REYNARD: "I looked at your firm's website, but one can't expect their own self-praise to be accurate. Tell me, Gray, are you a good attorney?"
GRAY: "No," she says, sharply. Correcting misapprehensions, and the idea that the firm would flatter her. Pander to the ego like that. "I'm the best." Said simply.
REYNARD: I'm the best. Reynard absorbed those words for a moment, ruminating and rolling them over his tongue-
"Is that some swagger I detect? I must admit, I like this new side of you, Gray."
GRAY: Swagger? She doesn't like that; the intimation that her pride is undeserved. She shakes her head, and there is a moment's disconcertion as she realises she's arguing with the telephone, where no one can see.
"And you? Are you a good doctor?" Throwing the challenge back on him.
REYNARD: "Well, I've made mistakes. I'm only human, after all." The failure with Vi came to mind, but Reynard brushed the memory aside just as easily. "But I am a damn fine surgeon, and vascular surgery takes several extra years of specialisation. It seems we make quite the successful pair, eh?"
There was a tight-lipped non-answer somewhere between the lines there. Success, unfortunately, is sometimes relative.
GRAY: Successful in what. Her life has become a filing cabinet. A pile of manila folders. The agony and the ecstasy of other people's lives, neatly ordered into the alphabet, and grateful women who send photographs of smiling children. And yet. It is a measure of success the young Reynard would recognise, Gray thinks. Wealthy enough to afford New York real estate, and to buy (with a mortgage) the biggest property in their home town. By children's measures, she is successful indeed. And there is something he is not-saying with his pride at being a surgeon.
"Apparently so," she agrees. "Making a difference. Both of us."
REYNARD: "Very true."
Making a difference. Right. Those words tickled a faint memory nestled somewhere in the deeper recesses of his mind; it reminded him of old dreams and ambitions that he'd discarded long ago. When the man's tale realisation came (a decade ago now - had it really been that long?), it had not been quick. It had not been pretty. Blood and knives never were.
But he had adjusted. Not only had he dragged himself raw-boned and tight-lipped through med-school, but to the very top of his class, even while he made peace with that dark and troublesome pit inside him (or so he believed), and Reynard did, yes, consider himself a resounding success.
"Now I'd like to harness that ability to make a difference. I'm making this call for someone else. She needs some legal help. Custody issue."
Heartbeat.
"She means quite a lot to me."
GRAY: Ah. The request comes, after the 'catching up'. She has expected something; rarely do people call without something on their minds beyond collective admiration of achievements, after all. Even Jas. Still, there is a blunted sort of stab of disappointment, and a moment in which to shake herself. It doesn't matter. Jasper is different, he always has been. And this is a request, rather than a do-or-die determination to help him; it has a beginning and an end. It can be done. She can do it, she can help.
The word 'custody' is like a bell; Pavlov's dog. The legal pad is drawn across the desk, pen poised, hovering. And the small pause, that means a world. A reminder that she holds only a few puzzle pieces of Jasper's life now, when trying to make sense of the picture he presents these days. Someone who means something.
"Details, please," she says, all business. Shutting down the possibility of being hurt that these reminiscings possibly made her believe this phone call had another purpose. "You say custody. Father? Family? State?" No possibility whatsoever. All business, all the time. That's right, that's familiar.
REYNARD: He stopped his pacing, briefly, to flick the off-switch for the television. This conversation had just become a hell of a lot more interesting than the muted news.
"The father died last March. There's a mother-in-law-" Abruptly, Reynard cut himself off and chuckled, with a gravel voice and a laugh like crackling cinders. It was jarring. But then his voice flattened out again, all back to crisp and painful sombreness: "Sorry. It's just so ironic. Evil stepmothers and mothers-in-law seem a dire concern in this community. Either way, she would be the one jostling for custody of the son. The mother-in-law is, financially, far better off than the real mother. She works two jobs in trying to keep him, and I don't believe her court meetings are going well. Can you do it?"
It almost didn't sound like a question - Reynard wanted a good answer. And when Reynard wanted good answers, he often got them.
GRAY: It would be a familiar story to any family-familiar legal team in the country. Children were an echo of the people who created them, but more malleable, formless. Able to take on the characteristics required - no, needed by those demanding a facsimile of someone else. Or so it was thought. A dead father, a mother-in-law who thought that a wealthier upbringing was payment enough for expecting a child to grow up and replace a dead man. It was a story Gray had heard before. It was a story she told often in court, drawing attention of a judge to the heavy expectations and burden laid on a child by the adults around them.
There was a long pause. Notes scribbled across yellow paper, haphazard, almost drunken lines of writing as she constructed the skeleton of this woman’s story; flesh would come with details. The acrimony of grief, the scraped savings to pay for clothes, toys, building a martyr. Two jobs spoke of no money, no money for decent counsel. This would be a favor. An expensive favor.
“I’m loaded up with pro bono, Jasper.” Beat. “She means a lot?”
REYNARD: He bit back the immediate instinct to offer up money. Reynard was a man who paved his path of good intentions with cobblestones of credit cards and cash - he lavished women with attention and gifts and favours, which played the gentleman's part well enough. It was how he played nice. In his own way. But if he could talk Gray into accepting one more pro bono (exploitation or not), that would be ideal.
"She does." Quickly realising that clipped words weren't quite right for this situation, he tried to make them genuine. Try soft. Try emotion, despite the fact that it felt forced on his tongue. "Insofar as I could be said to be seeing anyone at the moment, I ... believe you could say that I'm seeing her."
GRAY: “A single mother, Jasper?” Pause. Time taken to register memories flowing back. Of all the people. He has left his own alone, but this one means enough to allow him to hold onto her son. It is not difficult to talk Gray into pro bono; it is why she does not take calls from old friends, or acquaintances, the moment she hears the hint of wheedling in a voice, down goes the phone. Already strategy is racing through her mind, anticipation, adrenaline kicking off.
“I’ll do it.”
REYNARD: There was a shell-shocked pause.
Thankfully, visuals did not transfer over the phone; neither did facial expressions, nor the torrential outflow of thoughts that crashed through Reynard's mind. All Gray would hear was a certain pause, and a certain conspicuous lack of breathing before he remembered how. It was after that wry question of hers. He could hear that infuriating edge of knowing in Gray's voice, the arch of a familiar eyebrow and the skepticism and the questioning tone, all at once. He'd gotten used to not hearing that. No one ever questioned him.
A single mother struggling to raise her lone son, and he hadn't noticed the similarities. Oh, fuck me sideways.
When his lungs finally saw fit to return with ragged breath, Reynard sounded almost as unruffled as before. Almost. "Good. Thank you. Her name is Jessica Winters. Also a tale."
GRAY: Something is wrong. Something, because there is an absence of sound. People are rarely silent and when reticent, the noises they make speak for them. The hiss of breath, the tapping of fingers, anything but nothing. But. He speaks, and it is as if nothing has happened, just a pause in the conversation as normal as anything. As if Gray simply could not hear. But. The name. A name that reminds.
“I’ve seen her name,” she says. Bitter, Rose said, embittered by life and no wonder if this is her story. Her words are careful when written as if considered before committing herself. Like Jasper, Gray thinks with dawning realisation that this is a touch more serious than calling up an old acquaintance about a potential new girlfriend. No. Neither seem the type to commit lightly. Her head aches with this; it is too late in the evening for flooding realisations and epiphanies regarding people out of touch.
“Tell her to contact me,” Gray says, and her voice is distant once again. Emotionally detached, as if this were any other client, any other request. But it isn’t, it is something that has buried itself, all spines, in the back of her head and will not allow itself to be removed.
REYNARD: That distant lilt in the voice was something they both had in common now, tone all detached to betray the fact that it really wasn't at all. It was closer to home than it should have been.
So if Gray's head ached, then Reynard's pounded and creaked and groaned under the weight of his own realisation - that was another familiar undercurrent to their friendship, somehow prevailing even though the friendship itself had terminated. They used to tackle problems together. They used to bend their minds towards solving every problem from homework to familial distress to the city's sociopolitical issues. Reynard kneaded his forehead slowly, fingers pinched and eyes closed, and he pondered how things change.
And how some things don't.
"I'll pass it on. I believe she'll be grateful for any help you can give. It might be like pulling teeth with her sometimes," another dry laugh, "but then again, you're presumably used to that, having gone with this line of work."
GRAY: He has changed unbelievably, and while Reynard might be contemplating how they have changed and yet stayed the same, Gray can only think of how different he is, how cut off from the life she knew he lived if he can be ‘seeing’ a single mother without acknowledging the existence of his own. It drives home to her heart, breaching defences through the hole that is Reynard’s own, created when he was a boy, before the defences themselves were built that doorway existed. This is not just another case, not another family’s happiness or sorrow. As it thrills through her there is just the inexplicably clear knowledge that this, this is why she chose this line. To help, to help that same boy and mother locked into battle. This is Jas-and-his-mother, again and again and this time, oh this time, it can be altered.
Her voice echoes her new excitement, a vague throb of renewed energy however hard she tries to repress it, feign disinterest. “Yes, of course. If she doesn’t get in contact, I’ll write a letter. If you could get the name of her previous counsel, I can get the records. And the names of the lawyers representing her mother-in-law. Make sure Jessica knows that if there is any legally-orientated correspondence, or even personal that touches upon custody or visitation, I need copies.” Gray is readying herself for battle, and the weapons are being prepared.
REYNARD: And now they're left to parley administrative details, and she speaks a legal language of her own, just like his vocabulary of scalpels and aortas and anaesthetic; it's a recurring chord. Emotion boils away, leaving fact.
Just how it goes.