Chapter 17 Tobík
The air has weight this morning. The honeysuckle stretch smells like honeysuckle and the coffee shop stretch smells like coffee and the flower stand woman near Piedmont Park is setting up her buckets.
Five days since the message. Seven sentences. The last one said Take care of yourself and the voice behind it wasn’t his.
I haven’t replied. I don’t know what language I would use.
The flower stand woman sees me before I see her. Her arms are full of sunflowers taller than her head.
“Morning, honey.” She holds one up. “You look like you need it.”
“Thank you. I am fine.”
“Baby, I didn’t ask if you were fine. I said you need a sunflower.” She puts it in my hand. Wraps my fingers around the stem. “Take it. No photo today. Just take it.”
“I do not need a photo every time.”
“You take a photo every time. That’s how I know something’s off.” She tilts her head, the way she does when she’s deciding whether to push. She decides not to. “Go find Bagel. He’s been looking for you.”
I hold the sunflower at my side and walk. Something in me has gone quiet and the city hasn’t noticed, which is either the cruelest thing about a city or the kindest.
Bagel spots me from fifty yards. Claire is holding the leash with both hands and losing. He reaches me and sits on my left foot, his full weight, committed, vibrating. I scratch behind his ears.
“He missed you yesterday,” Claire says. “You didn’t come.”
“I was not feeling well.”
“You okay, sweetheart? He gets worried. Not that he understands days, but his body knows the schedule. Tuesday came and went and he kept looking at the path.”
“I am sorry I worried him.”
“Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to him.”
“Bagel.” I hold his face in both hands. His tongue finds my wrist. “I am sorry I did not come. I will try to be more reliable.”
“He forgives you,” Claire says. “He forgave you the second he saw your shoes.”
I stand. Bagel’s weight lifts off my foot and the lightness where the weight was is its own kind of absence. The joggers pass. The Beltline curves ahead through trees that are doing what they’ve been doing since June.
I skip the coffee shop. Jordan will ask me something kind and I will have to assemble an answer in English and today I do not have the pieces.
My apartment is quiet. Quiet used to be mine. Now it’s just empty.
My phone has a message from Tomá? sent days ago. I haven’t opened it. The preview says Call me when you’re ready and the timing tells me enough. Damián’s message and Tomá?‘s message arrived the same day. That isn’t a coincidence.
The bookshelf across the room filled with books. All those stories about people who carry the truth alone until they can’t.
There’s a knock on the door and I open it. Marchetti. He is holding a paper bag and a coffee.
“You missed skate,” he says.
“I told you I was not feeling well.”
“You told me that yesterday. And the day before.” He holds up the bag. “Soup. The place on Peachtree. You said it was kind seven months ago and I wrote it down.”
“Marchetti, you did not need to bring me soup.”
“I did, though. Because you missed skate twice, which has never happened, and you haven’t posted anything on your not-so-secret Instagram account in four days, which Thompson noticed because Thompson notices everything.
” He steps past me into the apartment without waiting.
“Thompson wanted to come too but I told him I’d do recon first.”
He puts the bag on the counter. He sees the sunflower lying beside it and looks at me.
“You have a flower.”
“The woman at the stand gave it to me.”
“The woman at the stand always gives you flowers. You always take a photo. You didn’t take a photo.”
“Not everything requires documentation.”
He opens the cupboard and finds a tall glass and fills it with water. He puts the sunflower in the water and sets the glass on the counter near the window where the morning light is coming in.
I watch him do it. My chest does something I don’t try to name.
“Eat,” he says. “When you’re ready. It holds for an hour. I asked.”
He sits on the stool at the counter. The stool Damián sat on when I made him coffee. Marchetti does not know this.
“I’m not going to ask what’s wrong.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m not going to ask because you’ll tell me when you’re ready and if you’re never ready that’s okay too. Thompson and I have a theory but theories aren’t facts and we aren’t detectives.”
“The soup is very kind, Marchetti.”
“The soup is just soup. I’m the kind one.
” The Marchetti smile, the one that fills a room without asking whether the room wanted to be filled.
“Eat the soup. Come to skate tomorrow. Text Thompson back because he’s about to send a search party and Davis will be involved and you do not want Davis involved. ”
“I will text Thompson.”
“Good.”
We sit for a moment. The morning light is on the sunflower and the sunflower is in the glass and the soup is on the counter. Marchetti is not filling the silence. He is sitting in it, which is the rarest thing Marchetti does and the most generous.
“Marchetti?”
“Yeah.”
“The books you gave me. At training camp. The first one and every one after.”
“Yeah.”
“I have read all of them. In most of them there is a person who is carrying a truth that would change everything if they said it out loud. I have been reading about those people for nine months. I have been studying their patterns and their courage and their mistakes.” I look at the sunflower in the glass.
“I am not sure when I stopped being the reader and became the character.”
He looks at me. The man who gave me a romance novel at training camp and changed how I see things and does not know it.
“Hájek.” Quiet, which is the Marchetti equivalent of shouting. “The characters always figure it out. That’s the whole point of the books.”
“The characters are braver than I am.”
“The characters aren’t real. You are. Real is hard. Real counts more.”
He stands when I don’t say anything else and I follow him to the front door.
“Whatever it is. You don’t have to carry it by yourself. That’s what a team is.”
He reaches out and squeezes the back of my neck. Quick. Two seconds. Then he is gone.
My neck is warm where his hand was. Tomá? used to do that.
When I was twelve and he was deciding whether to scold me or feed me, he’d put his hand on the back of my neck and the deciding would happen and then he’d feed me.
I haven’t felt that from him since I was twenty.
I’ve been missing it without knowing what I was missing.
A man who fills a glass with water for a flower. A team that notices when I am gone.
I open the soup. The first bite is warm in the plainest way, the kind that comes from broth and someone carrying it across the city because they noticed you were missing.
The sunflower is in the glass and the glass catches the morning light and the petals are open.
I pick up my phone. I open Tomá?'s message.
Call me when you're ready.
I type. My hands are steady. My chest is not.
I'll come to you. Tomorrow. There are things I should've told you a long time ago.
I press send. The message goes out into the city where my brother is, somewhere in a hotel in Midtown. My brother who decided what Damián was allowed to mean to me when I was sixteen. My brother who has been wrong about it for six years.