Chapter 9 #3
"The account's closed," Marek said. It wasn't a question.
He could read it off them the way he read everything.
"Both sides. I can see it. You're not two men with a death between you anymore.
You're two men with the same set of enemies, which is nearly the same as love and travels better.
Most people come to me still owing each other something — a debt, a grave, an apology nobody's ever going to make.
You two are square. That's rarer than money, and it's the only thing that makes the paper hold.
" He set down the loupe. "So. I make dead men out of living ones.
It's the only kindness I have left, and I don't hand it out for free, and you can't pay me, so let me tell you what you'll owe instead, because there's always a price and the ones who think there isn't are the ones who end up back in the water.
" He slid two folders across the table, thin, ordinary, the most valuable things Luka had ever seen.
"You owe me your silence and your distance and the discipline to actually be dead.
No calls to cousins. No coming back for funerals.
No account you were owed and never collected.
" His tired eyes moved to Irakli, standing by the door, who'd driven them four hundred miles and was not, Luka understood, coming with them.
"That one stays. That one keeps your ghost. Somebody always has to stay behind and keep the ghost, or the ghost doesn't hold. "
Luka looked at the two thin folders and understood, the way you understand a thing you've been circling for days, exactly what was being offered and exactly what it cost. Not a hiding place.
A death. His own — Luka Beridze, diver, brother, the man with a boat and a stone off Ocean Parkway — was going to stop existing, cleanly, on paper, so that some stranger with his face and a name he couldn't say aloud could go on breathing in a cold town at the edge of the world.
He'd spent two years unable to stop grieving the dead.
Now he was going to become one of them, and let Irakli grieve him, so that he could live.
There was a joke in it somewhere that Dato would have loved and Luka would never get to tell him.
Irakli didn't say anything. He'd watched the tape, three days back, on a drive out of a lockbox on Neptune Avenue — had gone in alone and come out grey and old and silent and had not, since, called Pavel a liar.
He'd seen whatever there was to see. He'd seen his cousin's brother, dying, and the careful killer breaking a rule that got men like him killed, laying a boy out of the water so a family could grieve.
Luka would never ask him what the tape looked like.
Some things you carry so the other person doesn't have to; Pavel had taught him that, too.
"There's a town," Irakli said finally, to Luka, in Georgian, rough.
"Nana always talked about it. North, cold, on the water, nobody there, the priest still says the old words.
I put it in your folder." He looked at the floor.
"So you'd have somewhere with the family in it. Even if you can't ever say the name."
Luka crossed the room and put his good arm around his cousin, his broken one splinted between them, and Irakli held onto him hard, the last of the Beridzes who got to keep their name, the one who'd stay behind and tend two graves now instead of one — Dato's, and the empty one they'd dig for Luka, so the ghost would hold.
Luka thought he should say something — some last Beridze thing, some word to carry his cousin through the years of pretending to mourn a man who was alive and eating soup four hundred miles north.
But he'd never had the words; that had been Dato's gift.
And Irakli didn't need them, because Irakli had spent two years learning to read Luka's silences the way Luka read water, and knew everything that was in this one.
"Live," Irakli said into his shoulder, fierce, the family word, the dead brother's word, passed down the line one more time. "Both of you. Do what he said. Don't make me have buried you for nothing."
***
On the last night before the road, in the room over the laundromat, Luka lay in the dark with Pavel and it was not the boat and it was not the fight; it was the other thing, the chosen thing, the thing they'd have all the cold mornings of the rest of their lives to get better at.
It was slow. It was quiet. There was no grief loose in the room and no account open and no knife in it anywhere, and when Luka put his hand to the side of Pavel's throat, over the pulse, Pavel didn't flinch and didn't offer it and didn't brace — he just leaned into the warmth of it, into the hand that could have killed him and had chosen a hundred times not to, and let himself be held by a man who wanted him to stay, and that was the whole of it, that was the country with no map they'd found their way into: not forgiveness, exactly, which was too small a word and belonged to churches.
Something harder and more daily. Two people who knew the very worst of each other, all the way down, with nothing kept, choosing the next ordinary morning. And the next. And the next.
Luka thought about the boat, and the fight that had turned, and the grief he'd carried in like ballast — and about how sure he'd been, that first grey morning, that he didn't have the arms to hold the wanting and the grave at once.
He'd been wrong about the arms. You didn't hold them in the same hands.
You held the grave in one and the living man in the other, and you kept both, forever, and the keeping was the thing — the keeping was the whole of being alive with a loss in you — and Luka's arms, it turned out, were exactly big enough.
"Say it," Luka murmured, into the dark, into the ink at Pavel's collarbone. "The thing you're bad at. The wanting."
And Pavel — who had walked to a knife in a yard, who had kept the watch, who had given away the last thing that was his, who had learned in one week and one lifetime how to let himself be pulled up out of the cold — Pavel said the most dangerous thing he knew, the forbidden thing, the thing the house had spent twenty years making sure he'd never be able to say, and said it easily now, said it like a man setting down a weight for good:
"I want to live."
And they did.