37. Preach
Chapter thirty-seven
Preach
Nova
The chapel.
I came up through the hatch and Bishop's hand found mine and pulled, and I was on the chapel floor, and the first thing I saw was the stained-glass window on the left wall — amber and red, intact, the morning light through it unchanged from the morning I'd first sat in this pew months ago.
The second pane had the rifle-round hole from three days ago.
A clean circle of clear sky visible through it where colored glass used to be.
The chapel had held.
The second thing I saw was Preach on the floor.
He was at the right pew — seated against it with his legs extended, which was the position of a man who had sat down because standing was no longer available to him and who had positioned himself the way he positioned everything: with awareness, with purpose, with his back to the wall and his eyes on the door.
Hawthorne was beside him on one knee. Two wounds: one in the shoulder, the jacket pressed against it dark and wet, and one lower, in the abdomen, which Hawthorne was holding with both hands pressed flat and there was nothing left to press.
I went to my knees before I had decided to.
Preach looked at me.
Riley Walsh. Who had gotten his road name as a joke in the founding years — a quiet man named Preach, that irony — and who had lived into the name by becoming the person in this compound who observed things without comment and understood everything he observed.
Who had said one sentence to me on my first night here, he'd know you, and I had thought about it for the entire length of what came after.
Who had been Eduardo Santos' best friend for thirty years and had spent the ten since his death keeping candles lit in a chapel and watching three boys grow into the men Eduardo had decided they would be.
He had been watching the door when they came through.
His hand came up to my face. Cold — the specific cold that isn't temperature but something the body does when it is resolving its accounts.
"Little Santos," he said.
"I'm here," I said.
I pressed my hand over his.
"He'd be so proud." The words came with the deliberateness of a man managing breath carefully, giving each sentence full attention the way you gave full attention to things you only had one chance to say.
"Tell them — tell the council—" His hand settled against my cheek, the grip of it weaker than it had been.
"He wanted OKC. He wanted family bigger than this room.
He always said a club was only as big as the family it made, not the territory it held.
" A pause. "Tell them that. Tell them what it's for. "
I took his hand between both of mine.
"I'll tell them," I said. "I promise you."
He looked at me with the eyes of someone who has been saying goodbye to things for a long time — not the panic of it but the practiced knowledge of it, the way a person looks when the goodbye isn't a surprise, when they have been holding a thing for a decade and have made their peace with the moment of putting it down.
"He said to hold her," Preach said. "The night you were born.
I was in the waiting room. I was always the one he called first. He came out at four in the morning and he said, Riley, she has her mother's mouth and my grandmother's eyes and I don't know what to do with the feeling.
I told him what Carmen told him. I said: You hold her, Ed.
That's what you do. You hold her and you don't let go. "
His eyes found mine.
"He meant to hold you longer," he said. "I watched those boys every year thinking about how he would have—" He stopped. The pause was different from the deliberate pauses. The body's vote. "I'm glad you came back. I want you to know I'm glad."
His hand in mine went still.
I sat on the chapel floor with Riley Walsh's hand between my palms and the amber light through the windows and the smell of old candle wax and the quality of a room in which something irreplaceable has just stopped.
I let myself cry.
Not the managed kind, not the quiet kind I'd been doing in hotel bathrooms and in the small hours of the morning since February, the grief I administered to myself in measured doses because there was always something else to do after.
This was the kind that came from the place below all systems. The place where a girl of twelve had lost her father and had spent ten years building a structure around the absence, and the structure was finally solid enough to hold the grief as grief rather than architecture.
My father's best friend had watched those boys for ten years and waited for me to come home.
I had come home.
I did not hold back. The chapel held me. This was what chapels were for.
Colt came in from the front door.
He saw Preach. He went still.
The stillness that Colt Reeves went to was not ordinary stillness, it was the stillness of a man who had been a sniper for eight years and had learned to hold the body completely motionless while the mind ran its full calculation before permitting any visible response.
His face did not change. His hands went to his sides.
His jaw set. He looked at the body and then at me and back at the body, and whatever was happening behind his eyes was not something he was going to show in this room.
He was not going to cry. He was not going to break.
He was going to stand there and hold it until he could be alone with it.
I had learned that about him. I had learned that his grief went into his body, into his hands, into the locked jaw, into the particular controlled violence of a man who needed to hit something and was not going to.
He was going to stand there and look at Riley Walsh's body on the chapel floor and hold a decade of grief against its arrival.
Bishop and Diego came in through the side door, together.
Hawthorne stood.
The four of them arranged themselves around Preach and around me, and the chapel held all of us, and nobody said anything.
This was the founding generation saying goodbye.
This was the founding generation down to its last member standing.
Hawthorne, who had been here since 1998, who had counted votes and had his relationships and had gotten me into the council room.
The only original founding-era member left who would see what came next.
My phone buzzed.
Rosa.
I answered. The chapel was quiet. I didn't move from the floor.
"I've heard," Rosa said. Her voice had the specific register she used when she was managing the thing underneath the voice. "I'm already in the car."
"Don't—"
"Nova." Her voice. "I will be there by morning."
I pressed my free hand against my eyes.
"Okay," I said.
She hung up.
I sat with it.
Vance had fled. The compound had held. Vance's loyalists had broken when Colt's counter arrived because Vance had underestimated something he had been underestimating for ten years: that the people Eduardo Santos had built weren't held together by fear or money but by the specific weight of who Eduardo Santos had been to each of them, and that weight did not depreciate.
He had run north. For OKC, where he thought he still had allies, where he thought the network still held. He did not know about Rome Castillo. He did not know about the federal case. He did not know that he had already lost.
I looked at the chapel.
I looked at Riley Walsh.
I looked at the photograph of Eduardo Santos, my father, seventeen-year-old Colt, fourteen-year-old Diego, and Bishop not yet in the picture, taken sometime in 2003, years before Bishop arrived, on the wall where it had lived for more than twenty years.
"We go to the council Wednesday," I said.
My voice was steady.
I did not make it steady. It was. The room had made it, and Preach had made it, and the ten years that had produced this morning had made it. I had not come home to fall apart in the room where my father died. I had come home to finish what he started.
The chapel had the quality it always had in the hour before dawn, the specific dark that was not the same as the darkness outside, the interior dark of a space that had been holding its breath for ten years and was now approaching the moment of exhale.
Preach's candles were on the table beside me.
The wax had pooled and resolved and pooled again through the vigil of a man who had been maintaining this practice since before I was born, the maintenance of a small ongoing ritual in the belief that the ongoing ritual mattered whether or not anyone was watching.
Someone had always been watching. Preach had known this. He had lit the candles anyway.
My father had died in this room.
In three days, the thing he had died for would be completed in his name, in front of the national council, with the founding document as the instrument.
I had come home to finish what he started.
"We finish it there."