42. Can't hold it back any more

“The police came, and told us. Katie and me.  And for a few days I couldn’t believe it: I kept waiting for her to come back, for it all to be a mistake.  I knew it wasn’t, of course.  But I pretended.  I found that having a drink helped me pretend.  Helped blur the edges.  That was how I began.  I’d always liked a drink, but I never wanted more than one when my wife was there.  She made up for it.”

Castle looks at Beckett’s tight jaw and doesn’t dare to touch her again. From the set of her lips, that last is something she hadn’t known.

“But she wasn’t there anymore. For a while, I got through work, but… but everything reminded me of my wife.  I had to block it all out.  Katie had to go back to college, so I could hide it for a time, but then when she came home – saved all her money and came home for a visit after a month – it all came out.”

Beckett remembers. She remembers all of it: the alcohol and the depression and the tears and the accusations and the desperation.  Oh, she remembers.  She’s never been able to forget.

“After that it all spiralled. Katie tried everything she could.  She poured the bottles down the sink, but I hid them and bought more.  She tried to talk to me, she tried to get me to AA.  She cleaned me up and listened to me promise I wouldn’t do it again.  I always did do it again.  I always lied, to everyone.  You do.  You lie to your loved ones.  I lost my job.  One long lunch too many, one time too often I didn’t show up.  Katie cried, and came back home for good, and changed to NYU, and I promised, but I still lied.  It didn’t matter.  Nothing mattered but getting another drink.  I cleaned out my bank account.”

He looks very straight at Julia. “If Katie had been a minor still, I’d likely have cleaned out hers.”  Julia flinches.

“Then I started drinking in public. Got picked up a few times, and a few times more than that.  Katie would come get me, take me home.  Guess you’ve done that?”

“Kate went and found him. She brought him home the first time.”  Jim draws in a breath.  “She went and looked for him for me.  I didn’t know who to call.”

“How often?”

“Twice. But once in the middle you wouldn’t,” she says, accusing again.  “You didn’t help that time.”

“David wasn’t lost that time, he was already at Central Park Precinct,” Beckett reminds her. “You could go get him from there.  He was safe.”  She is not meeting her father’s gaze.  She doesn’t want to see his disgust that she wouldn’t help Julia then.  Destroy his last illusion about who she is.

“Well, anyway,” Jim continues, though it’s obvious to Castle that he is intending to have a father-daughter discussion in the very near future and it is not going to be a happy one, “it didn’t matter what Katie did or said or tried, I wasn’t listening. As long as she was there to bring me home.”  He pauses.

“And then she didn’t. They called her, and she said she wouldn’t come.  Said she couldn’t help me.  I spent the night in the tank.  Not for the last time.  But she walked away from me.”  Beckett is resolutely not looking at anyone.  She can’t bear to hear the break that’s in her father’s voice: the break she’d put there; she can’t bear the memories of him crying and begging till her voicemail was full.  She knows what she’ll see in Julia’s face.  She’s seen it in her own mirror, often enough, she saw it in Castle’s face and she doesn’t need to see it again.  She needs out of here.  This is too much.  Too many memories.  She’d worried about the effect on her father.  She should have worried more about the effect on her.

“I could never do that,” Julia gasps, horrified. “I couldn’t let David…”  Jim looks sadly at her.

“It took me a while. Nearly three years.  But one day I realised that the only way I’d ever see Katie again was if I got dry.  I needed her, but she wouldn’t come if I wasn’t sober.  I couldn’t lose her, too.”

He takes a long breath, and downs the rest of his coffee.

“What I’m saying, is that you have to hit bottom. You have to want something more than you want to drink.  For me, it was my daughter.  But until you decide that, no-one else can really help you.”

He stops. Julia is silent, liquid at the corners of her eyes.  Beckett is frozen-faced and only just hanging on to control, and Castle still and quiet in his corner of the couch next to her.

“But… but… but David’s not like that. He’s not.  It’s just a blip.”  It’s the last straw.  Beckett can’t do this any more.  Julia is wilfully not getting it, and she can’t stand watching this car crash any longer.

“Stop fooling yourself, Julia,” Beckett says harshly. “He was drunk when I came to tell you we’d got the guy who did it.  You called me after Christmas because you couldn’t cope.  You called me again a couple of weeks later, because you couldn’t cope.  Because he was drinking.  He went out to get a drink when you called me because he’d gone out without warm clothing and told you he was just going to the drugstore – and I brought him home dead drunk from Central Park Precinct.   It’s not a blip.  He has a real problem.  You keep calling me because you don’t know what to do.  I’ve told you, and told you, and you don’t believe me.  My dad’s telling you now. You cannot save him by yourself, Julia!”

She stands up, wounded and furious, close to weeping. “You can’t save him at all.  He needs to save himself.  All you can do is protect yourself so that you come out the other side in one piece.  It’s up to you, Julia.  I can’t help you because you won’t listen to me.  Maybe you’ll listen to my dad.  I couldn’t save my dad.  It didn’t matter what I did until he decided to save himself.  I couldn’t save him and neither can you.  You’ll just have to live with it, whatever you decide.”

She takes two swift, slicing strides to the door and is gone. Julia starts to cry.  Jim and Castle exchange glances.  Beckett will have to wait, though Castle’s first, almost overpowering instinct is to go after her, because Castle can’t leave Jim to drown.  That would finish Beckett.  Hard choices, where every answer is wrong.

It’s Castle who starts, sympathy in every syllable.

“Julia, I know it’s hard. But Beckett’s right.  You need to take care of yourself too.  Now, where’s David? Jim needs to talk to both of you.”

“I don’t know,” Julia wails. “He promised he’d be back for lunch and he wasn’t and I thought Kate would help me find him again.  But she won’t, she’s gone.”

“Kate can’t help you any more, Julia. She’s not in Missing Persons, she’s in Homicide.  She’s been risking her career already to help you, and if her boss finds out she’ll be in real trouble.”  Jim flicks Castle a sharp glance.  “Her boss told her not to.  Orders.”  Castle is pretty sure that’s true, because otherwise she’d have gone to get David Berowitz the second time, and she’d never have left O’Leary to it the third.  “You need to call it in to your precinct.  They’ll help you.  Kate can’t, Julia.  No matter how much she wants to, she can’t.” 

I am going to get this through your head, because otherwise you’ll just keep leaning on her and she’s breaking under it: she’s snapping like a dry stick. He only hopes he won’t find Beckett dead drunk in her own chill apartment.  Again.

Jim picks up the tag. “Katie put it harshly, Julia, but however you cut it, she was right.  If David’s gone missing again then you need to call it in.”

“They won’t help. He’s not been gone for long enough.”

“You can still call it in so that if they do pick him up they’ll know to call you. At least then you’ll know he’s safe.”

“Then what? You’re telling me to abandon him.  I can’t do that.  He’s my husband.”  She sniffs, messy tears bleeding down her face.  “I love him,” she mumbles.  “I can’t…”

“Katie loves me,” Jim says firmly. “Maybe too much.  If she’d walked away earlier… let me hit rock bottom… maybe I’d have got cleaned up sooner.  I would never, ever have stopped if she hadn’t walked away.  It was the only thing that did stop me.”  In Jim’s tired, older gaze Castle sees maybe I wouldn’t have damaged her so if she’d walked away sooner.  Because whatever else this meeting has achieved, there is no way that Jim can now think that his Katie is in any way okay.  She’s proven that quite spectacularly.

“What should I do?” Julia asks brokenly.

“Call Al-Anon,” Jim answers. “Call Al-Anon like Katie told you to and listen to what they say.  You’ve got to have someone for you to lean on, because you’ll never survive without it.”  You’re nothing like as strong as Katie, and even Katie’s broken. And I never realised.  Jim keeps his voice calm, sure and positive.  It takes all his remaining calmness.  “We’ll stay while you call Missing Persons, and if you want, we’ll stay till you’ve called Al-Anon.”

“Your friend,” Castle says. “The one who came over Friday night.  Would she come over again?”

“Elaine? Probably.”

“Call her too, then. You need friends.”

Under the unwavering gaze of Castle and Jim, Julia does what they ask. When she’s done, she looks piteously at them.  “Really? Really like that?”

“Yes,” Jim says gently. “Really like that.”  But somehow Castle doesn’t think he’s just talking about himself.

It takes another half hour for Elaine to show up, during which time every footstep in the hallway leaves Julia whipping desperately hopeful glances to the door and turning away, desolate, when no key turns, no knock sounds. By the time there is a knock, everyone’s on edge.  Castle is desperate to go after Beckett, and Jim just looks desperate.  They are only too glad to be shooed out.

“We need to talk,” Jim says. “But not now.  I can’t do it.  I need” – he stops.  He’d been going to say I need to see Katie, but actually he needs to talk to Ed, because for the first time in a long time he isn’t sure that he can say no.

“I’ll stay with you, if you like.” Jim looks at Castle. 

“Stay?”

“Till you’ve got a hold of your sponsor.” Jim’s jaw drops. 

“Uh?”

“I saw a lot of” – Castle stops, and inelegantly continues – “stuff. When I first went mega.  You think I don’t know what you feel like right now?  I’ve got a daughter too.  You want to blot it out till you can deal with it.  Let me deal with it for now.  You make sure you’re okay, and then we’ll see.  If… Jim, if you fall because she’s upset, she’ll never forgive herself.  You’ve got to talk to your sponsor, you’ve got to hang on.  You’re all she’s got.”

Castle’s never been less smooth with his words – but he might never have been more serious, either. He has no compunction about making sure that Jim gets what he needs, because there would be no way back from the other option.  Not for Jim and not for Beckett.  He knows that Jim’s view of his Katie has just fallen to pieces around him and, so much more like his daughter than he knows, Jim is drowning in guilt for not seeing it. 

This hadn’t been anyone’s plan.  But it’s where they all are.  It looks like Castle might be the last man standing, the last bulwark against the surging tide. 

Jim is already dialling when Castle looks back down at his lined, suddenly age-slackened face.

“Ed? Thank God.  Ed, I need to come see you.  Yes, now.  Where are you?  Thank you.  Ten minutes.”  He closes the phone.  “Can I give you a lift?” Jim says.  Castle interprets that more accurately as please make sure I get there okay.

“Sure,” he says. “I’ll get a cab from wherever you’re going to.”

“Then you go find her, Castle. Someone has to.  She needs help.”

There isn’t any talking in Jim’s car, a perfectly adequate if spartan Chrysler, until they’re pulling up at what must be Ed’s place. Castle meditates on how similarly Jim behaves, when hurt, to Beckett: drawing in and closing up. Jim and Katie: two peas in a Beckett pod.  Hiding how they feel from each other so as not to hurt each other, and ending up with both of them worse hurt than if they’d never tried not to hurt each other in the first place.

There is one key difference between them, though. Jim, however painfully, has learned to ask for help.  Beckett has not.

Castle sees Jim into Ed’s small apartment and then turns his footsteps towards the street and a cab back to Beckett’s. He hopes she’s there, because he can’t think of anywhere else to start looking if she’s not.

Beckett had simply had to escape before she fucked up any further and turned on her father. Every lacerating memory of five years of agony had been dragged back up and surrounded her in high definition.  Every last vision and sound of her father falling apart had reasserted itself with appalling clarity; every time she had abandoned and betrayed him.  She can only hear the break and the pain in his voice when he’d said But she walked away from me.  And under that, her own old unhealed wounds: it had taken him five years to love her more than whiskey: she still can’t forgive him for that; still can’t believe that he won’t relapse, that he won’t abandon her as she did him.

She goes home. Where else is there to go but her chill, joyless, lonely apartment with its abstract patterns and interior-designed lifelessness?  She can’t go to the precinct, she can’t ring O’Leary and ask him to search for David Berowitz.  She can’t go anywhere.  She’s not hungry, and her stomach cramps at the thought of food.  She has some water, and for a minute thinks that even that will come back up.  She curls up on her cool bed until the nausea passes, and only then realises that she’s crying: ugly mascara tainted tears staining her pristine pillowcase: black smudges on her linen matching those on her heart.

She doesn’t respond to the knocking, later, nor to the ringing of her phone, nor yet to the message Castle leaves:  I know you’re there.  I can hear the phone.  Open the door and let me in.

She can’t bear to see anyone: she’s broken in public and she can’t face another seeing her own weakness. She couldn’t give compassion to Julia and she deserves none herself.  So, later, after one single text: leave me alone. Please give me space.  I can’t see anyone, she ignores Castle’s two forceful messages on the theme of if you need anything you call me, okay? in exactly the same way, and at the same personal cost, as she had ignored her father’s, all those years ago.  Then, she’d saved herself and let him drown.  Now, she’ll let herself drown.  There’s no reason not to.  She’d seen her father’s horrified face as she’d rounded on Julia.  He hasn’t called, and she knows why: he can’t believe that she doesn’t feel the same way about him.  She sends him one message: Are you ok? Dad, please answer me. There is no answer.

All this time she’s been there for him, been his mainstay, and the one time she asked him to do something that she couldn’t do she couldn’t bear to see it through: couldn’t even hold herself together through his story and then ran out on him.

Abandoned him, just like she had then, and now he’s not answering her.

She drags herself through cleansing her face and body, and finds an unstained pillowcase: forces herself to set her alarm, though she’d rather go nowhere. There have been no more messages or calls.  She deletes the earlier ones, and sends Castle one further text.  I’m sorry, I couldn’t face seeing anyone tonight. Was my dad okay?  He’s not answering me.

The answer is swift. He was okay. Are you okay?

I don’t know, she thinks. I don’t know, and doesn’t answer.

Alone in the unforgiving dark, she pushes herself into chill, unemotional quiet, and thence to sleep. She wakes long before her alarm, and, freed from Montgomery’s dictated leave, simply goes to work.  It’s the one place she can still feel that everything is under her control and that what she does is worth something.

In her enforced absence, another pile of cold case files have grown, fungus-like, on her desk. Without enthusiasm, she begins.   After a while, she makes herself coffee, more for a break than any desire to have anything in her stomach.  Some time after that, the boys roll in, separately but not far apart.  Montgomery appears, and as swiftly disappears to a meeting at 1PP.  It stops him asking questions.  It does not stop Esposito, however.

“Yo, Beckett. Why was Lanie lookin’ for Castle’s number Friday night?”

“Don’t know. Why was Lanie looking for Castle’s number Friday night?”

“Don’t give me that. She was out with you.”

“Oh, that was a question? I thought you were practising for your stand-up routine.”

“Me?” Espo puffs out his chest and strikes a macho pose.  “Yeah, sure.  Headliner at the Comedy Club, that’s me.”

“Target for rotting fruit, more like,” Ryan snips.

“Like you could do it,” Espo flashes back. “You couldn’t find a punchline at a boxing match.”

“Better than you, then. You couldn’t even find the ring.”

The boys descend into bickering and Beckett tunes them out. It takes them some time to realise.

“Beckett?”

“Hmm? Have you stopped fighting yet, or do I need to referee?”

“Never mind that. Why’d Lanie want Castle’s number?”

“No idea. Hey, here’s a thought – why don’t you ask her?”  There’s enough of a Beckett bite on her words for the boys to back off. 

Beckett returns to the paperwork. Her phone remains entirely silent.  She still hasn’t heard anything from her father, and that terrifies her.  As soon as it’s even faintly civilised to do so, she texts him again.  She doesn’t call, in case – so she tells herself – he’s in an early meeting.  In truth, it’s in case he doesn’t pick up.  But she doesn’t let herself think about that.

A short while later, her phone rings. It’s her dad.  She swipes on with trepidation, praying he’s sober. 

“Katie.” He is.  Oh, thank God for that.

“Dad,” she answers, already aiming for the quiet, private space of the back stairwell. “Are you okay?”  No-one – certainly not Ryan and Esposito, whose interestedly flapping ears have pricked up – would have guessed at her inner turmoil.  “You didn’t answer me last night.”  She doesn’t show how terrified she’s been.

“I’m sorry, Katie. I spent some time talking to Ed last night, but I’m okay.  Rick made sure I got there.”  His words pierce her.  Her actions, her decisions – his suffering.  If he’d talked to Ed, he’d been close to the edge.  Close to falling, and all because of her choice to involve him.  “More to the point, how are you?”

“I’m fine,” she says, putting mildly exasperated affection into her tone, as if he were reminding her to be sure to wear a scarf in the cold weather.

“Katie…” The exasperation in her father’s voice is not mild.  “Katie, that is a flat-out lie.  You were really angry with Mrs Berowitz yesterday and I’m” – but she doesn’t let him finish, his tone flicking her on the raw edge of her unacknowledged insecurities and lack of forgiveness: tiredness making old grief and memories sharp, removing her hard-won, years-old control and concealment of all her feelings.

“Yeah. I was harsh with her and it was unjustified and I should have done better and you’re ashamed of me for it.  Well, I’m not sorry.  She needed to hear the truth.  Maybe if someone had told me the hard truth earlier I wouldn’t have wasted so much time trying to save you when I never could.  Maybe I wouldn’t have thought I could be enough if I just tried harder.  Maybe I’d have known that while I was still picking you up when you fell I’d always come second to whiskey.  Maybe I’d have known all of that.  Maybe I wouldn’t still be trying” – she stops dead.  Trying to make sure you never do it again.  Trying to make sure you love me.

“Trying what, Katie?”

“I have to get back to work.”

She cuts the call and crashes down to sitting on the cold concrete stairwell, head on her knees. Her phone rings, and she doesn’t even look at it when she declines the call and turns the phone off for good measure.  In the chill silence, a floor below the bullpen, she simply… goes away, thinking of nothing at all.

All her choices have led her here. She’d tried so hard, and in the end it’s all been just as useless as trying to save him had been, ten years ago.  He saved himself, and she saved herself at his expense, and now both of them know it.