Things
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TV Shows: Person of Interest
Rating: G.
Time Frame: Approximately one year after Episode 5.13.
Disclaimers: The characters and universe of Person of Interest are entirely the property of the creators. I own nothing. I hope they do not object to me playing with their action figures for a while. The fact that I want to write a fanfic using the characters and established plot lines means that I am thoroughly engaged with their creation, and have nothing but the highest level of respect and appreciation for their work.
I hope you enjoy it.
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The building was quiet. The lack of noise was not unusual for a weekday afternoon. Most people were working, and the few tenants who were either unemployed or had the time off were frequently out of the building at this hour of the day. Apartment 5A was quieter than most. The only noise to be heard was a quiet background movement of air through the ventilation system, and the periodic click and hum as the refrigerator cycled on.
If anyone had been home, they might have heard a single muted ping from the elevator in the hallway as it came to a stop on 5A’s floor. Footsteps approached the door, and a key scraped in the lock. The door opened, and a man and a woman stood in the hallway, holding hands and looking in. The woman gave the man’s hand a reassuring squeeze, then used the combined grip to encourage him to move forward.
Harold Finch took several steps into the apartment and paused there, waiting. Some portion of his psyche irrationally expected the air to smell stale and for every surface to be coated with dust. The loft had been uninhabited for close to a year, and undoubtedly would have been in that condition if he had not arranged for someone to check on it once a month, and for a cleaning service to stop in periodically. The air was clean, every surface gleamed, and the single large room smelled of wood polish overlaid with a wafting metallic hint emanating from the air conditioning.
And there was no sense that anyone had ever lived here. The apartment looked and smelled as though it was waiting for a new owner. The sights, sounds, and smells whispered out a tale of emptiness and abandonment.
Harold stayed where he was and continued to listen. Every fiber of his being wanted to hear footsteps coming up the hallway from the bathroom or the clatter of a utensil being set down in the kitchen as someone moved to see who had come through the door. The apartment remained silent, confirming that he would never hear those particular sounds again. The ache inside his chest underwent a transformation. It changed from the futile desire to learn that it had all been a bad dream, to an equally unrealistic yearning to go back in time in order to change the events that had led to this particular moment.
“Are you sure you want me here? Would it be easier if you were alone?” Grace took a single step through the door and waited there, not quite inside and no longer entirely in the hallway.
“Please stay,” he said. “I’d prefer not to do this alone.” He took her hand and encouraged her to step all the way inside.
They continued to hold hands and moved around the apartment without purpose or urgency. Harold led the way, drifting from one spot to the next, letting the fingers of his free hand drift along walls and across a variety of surfaces. He had come to make sure everything had been removed and to say one last goodbye to the unit’s former tenant before he allowed the lease to expire. He stopped occasionally for no other reason than to stand close to Grace, to concentrate on her presence, and to allow the sense of loss to subside. He had to be careful not to think of the sacrifice that had allowed him to be here on this day with Grace by his side. If he allowed his thoughts to head in that direction, the emotional discomfort got worse instead of better.
Their progress came to a halt when he reached the louvred doors that at one time had hidden a small but ridiculously well-stocked armory. The only other time he had looked inside, it had been loaded with a wide array of weapons and ordinance. Harold carefully pulled his hand free of Grace’s, opened the door a few inches, and checked inside. The closet was empty.
“Is there something embarrassing in there? Something he would not have wanted you or me to find?” Grace said.
Her question summoned up a smile. “I doubt John ever owned anything like that. He was not the type to own things, let alone possessions that would cause him embarrassment.” He explained about the armory, and that several months earlier, he had asked Sameen Shaw to clear out not just the armaments, but the entire apartment.
“You did not trust her to take everything?” Grace said.
“Wherever Ms. Shaw is concerned, the concept of trust but verify is advisable. I was verifying.”
They separated then. While Harold began going through drawers and closets, just to be sure nothing had been inadvertently left behind, Grace wandered over to the long stretch of windows along the wall and looked out at the scenery surrounding the building.
Shaw had been thorough. Everything was gone. Clothing, all of the electronic devices that Harold had provided, the contents of the refrigerator, anything that John Reese had acquired over the four years he had lived here had been removed. The cleaners had taken care of the rest. Every drawer was empty of even bits of lint and dust, the cabinets in the bathroom stripped and gleamingly clean, the kitchen immaculate. Harold did not know whether to be relieved or grief stricken. The two desires were inextricably tangled in both his head and his stomach. The logical side of his nature had not expected to find a goodbye note from Reese. The part of him that missed a good friend had hoped for some last piece of evidence that a decent and good-hearted man had resided here for a time.
“Harold? What’s this?” Grace said. She was standing in front of one of the windows that did not extend all the way to the floor and therefore had a windowsill. She turned with a small cardboard box in her hands. “It was in the corner here.”
No name on it. No instructions for its disposal written on the side or the top. Just a plain cardboard box with a lid. Harold wondered if it was something Reese had left behind, or if Shaw or the cleaning service had forgotten it. He took it out of Grace’s hands, and carefully removed the lid.
At first glance, it looked like it was nothing more than a boxful of trash that someone had forgotten to throw out. Tattered pictures, a sheet of notebook paper with a drawing, newspaper clippings, scraps and bits. He examined some of them more closely, and recognized some of the objects. As he continued to delve into the chaotic assortment, he slowly began to realize that this was not detritus. The box had not been a catch-all where Reese had emptied his pockets of useless items. The preservation had been deliberate. John had chosen to save each piece of the collection because they were meaningful to him.
Harold tilted the box from side to side, allowing the collection to shift around. The miniature landslide alternated between revealing and hiding what was gathered there, in the same way that good and bad memories often took turns coming to the forefront of a person’s recall. As he did so, the realization settled in that a single small box held the sum total of John’s personal possessions. This was all that was left of John Reese. He set the box down on the desk. He did not want to look at the meager remains of one man’s life.
“Harold?” Grace said in the hushed voice reserved for cathedrals, museums, or graveside services.
“There should be more. His life stood for so much more than this. John deserves a monument, not a box full of—” He could not bring himself to finish the sentence. He resorted to gesturing toward the collection of litter and what for the most part looked like discarded objects.
“You miss him,” she said.
His throat was tight and ached painfully, ruling out the possibility of a spoken answer. Harold had to settle for nodding.
“Come sit with me.” Grace picked up the box, walked across the room, and sat down on the foot of the bed. Harold did as she asked, and settled beside her.
She looked into the box, smiled, and pulled out a tattered, saliva-stiffened dog toy. “Bear,” she said.
“Bear,” he said, and was swamped by a roiling mixture of memories going back to the day Reese had introduced him to the dog. Good memories. Joyful moments, instances when Bear had amazed or produced an awe-struck burst of pride, the sense of security whenever the Malinois was beside him, ferocious displays of loyalty and protection, and the moments when Bear had gamboled about in the library, puppy-like, celebrating the rare moments when Reese had bestowed some attention on him.
The grief-generated emotional ache returned to his chest. “He always loved John the most.”
Grace set the dog toy aside, and retrieved another item from the box. It was a slip of paper with a phone number written on it.
“Zoe Morgan’s cellphone number,” Harold said.
She had taken Reese’s death hard. She had visited the one place that to her had represented an enduring memorial to John Reese—the sidewalk with the unobstructed view of the Chrysler Building where he had once ‘proposed marriage’ to her—then she had disappeared from New York City for several weeks. If she had grieved, she had done it privately and in a location that was not associated with her life, her business, or Reese.
Grace continued to take items out of the box, always with respect, as though handling religious artifacts, and held them until Harold offered up an explanation. A photograph of Joss Carter. A small newspaper clipping that included an alphabetical listing of recent graduates from Marbury High School in Brooklyn. The article had been cut off just below the name Taylor Carter. A picture of Lee Fusco in a hockey uniform, with the ‘C’ denoting the team captaincy on his jersey. A scrap of fabric that had been torn from a plaid shirt.
“Detective Fusco,” Harold said. “He started a fight with John one night.”
“And won?” Grace said.
“No, he lost, but John was always impressed that he managed to land several punches. Whenever he mentioned that fight, he would start with a look of pleasure and end with the words, ‘He’s tough.’”
The piece of fabric was set aside with the same reverence as the items that had preceded it.
Grace continued to delve into the box. Items emerged one at a time, accompanied by an aura of patience that invited Harold to contribute explanations, memories, or brief anecdotes. Most were mementos of people they had worked with from time to time, such as Leon Tao, Megan Tillman, and even Carl Elias. To Harold’s surprise, more than half were from people they had helped over the years. With rare exceptions, they were items that no one would consider worth keeping. The collection arranged on the bed began to resemble the hoard of a magpie. Small trophies, useless fragments of larger objects, pieces of memorabilia that most people would have tossed into the trash.
Whether by design or coincidence, the final three items were the ones that held the most significance. Third to last to emerge was a faded and slightly tattered photograph of a man and woman sitting together at a table, smiling, relaxed, very much in love, and unaware of what life held in store for them. Harold simply shook his head. He couldn’t bring himself to say their names. The woman had died years ago and the man in the army uniform had gone by another name at that time.
Second to last, Grace selected a single intact, unfired bullet. For once, she turned to look directly at Harold, puzzled by its inclusion in the boxful of memories.
The lump in his throat returned. The best he could produce was a ragged whisper. “When I found him, John was contemplating killing himself. He continued to carry that for a long time. I’m not quite sure why or precisely what it meant to him, or when he stopped carrying it.”
All he knew was that it was somehow linked to a turning point in Reese’s life, when he had found a purpose to his life, as Harold had once suggested. That single moment in time had ultimately turned full circle and had led to John’s death. The constriction in his throat threatened to either strangle him or move him to tears.
Grace’s fingernails scratched lightly at the bottom of the box for several seconds before she managed to snare and lift out the final item. It was a business card. On one side were the words Universal Heritage Insurance, and one of his many false identities, Harold Wren. Grace flipped it over. The reverse side read ‘810 Baxter St., Apt 5A’.
“That’s your handwriting,” she said.
“It was how I let him know that I had arranged this apartment for him.”
Harold explained how up until then, Reese had been living in a cramped and shabby one-room apartment on the sixth floor of a walk-up where the tenants on each floor shared a single bathroom. He could have afforded far better than that, but he hadn’t cared about his living conditions. He had barely begun to care about life itself at that point.
Reese had kept the card as a memento. The fact that he had kept it at all meant that it had some emotional significance.
“So little. John once said that he didn’t have any things that he cared about.” The ache in his chest redoubled, threatened to constrict around his heart until it stopped.
Grace leaned her shoulder against his and gave him a gentle sideward nudge. In contrast to how he felt, she was smiling. “Harold, my love, you are easily the smartest person I have ever met, but on delightfully rare occasions, almost always when dealing with human behavior, you also have the ability to miss the point entirely.”
The love in her voice took any sting out of the accusation. “Explain it to me,” he said.
She gathered up the bits and pieces one by one, and replaced them in the box with care. “These are not things, dear heart. Each item is a person. You told me that yourself. As I took each item out of the box, you did not begin by describing what it was or why John kept it. Not once. Every single time, you began by saying a name.” She paused, giving him time to consider what she was saying, then continued. “This box is a collection of the items that John valued most. People.”
He remembered the day he had convinced Reese to work for him. Based on Reese’s reaction, he had always believed that the words ‘I think all you ever wanted to do was protect people’ had been the turning point, the moment when the opportunity he had presented to Reese had overcome his lack of interest. Protecting people had done the trick.
Harold took the box out of Grace’s hands and carefully explored the contents again. His perception began to change as he went through the collection a second time. He began to see what Grace had described.
What he was holding was not a simple hoard of worthless mementos. It was a tribute to John Reese’s life. The box held a casually curated testimony of his five-year effort to save the lives of people who were often innocent of wrong doing, victims in every sense of the word, while also working hard to redeem his own soul.
“You succeeded, John,” Harold said quietly.
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The End
