27. Sienna
SIENNA
Cormac fought me on it the way Cormac fights anything, which is to say he did not raise his voice and he did not win.
“It breaks deniability,” he said, in the dark of the clean kitchen an hour before the dress.
“The card is a card. A meet is a confession. If he’s still Doyle’s, you walk into that room and you hand the man everything, all of us, the whole morning, for the price of a conversation you didn’t need to have. ”
“I know.”
“You know, and you’re going anyway.”
I did. And I couldn’t fully explain it to him in words a fixer would accept, because it wasn’t tactical, it was the least tactical thing I’d done in the whole war.
I was about to bet every life I loved on Eamon Brennan making the right choice at a church door, and I could not do that, I found, on the strength of a playing card and a hope.
I’d spent my whole life reading people so I’d never have to trust them, and here was the one time reading wasn’t enough, the one time the plan came down to a thing that lived inside another person where no surveillance could reach, and I had to go and put my own eyes on it.
I had to look at the man who raised me and know, in the animal part that knows things the strategist can’t, whether the uncle who’d taught me card tricks was still somewhere inside the hand that helped burn my family.
Not for the plan. The plan could run on the card.
This was for me. I’d been running from that man’s shadow for half my life, and I was not going to walk into the last room of it without once, just once, standing in front of him on my own two feet and making him look at what he’d done and what he could still, maybe, undo.
“I’m going anyway.”
He stayed on me a moment, his eyes doing the thing they do, running it cold, every way it killed us.
And then he did the thing almost no one who has ever loved me has been able to do, which is understand that some needs are not arguments to be won.
He didn’t like it. He would control it, he said.
His conditions, his room, his sightlines, his people on every door, and if Eamon brought so much as a shadow that wasn’t Eamon, he’d have me out before I finished a sentence.
But he would not stop me. He set the discipline down, for me, one more time, and I felt the cost of it and I let him pay it, because I had spent my whole life not letting people pay things for me and I was trying, lately, to stop.
So there was a room over a shut bakery on a lane in the town, cold, flour-smelling, gray with the morning, and I stood in it in the clothes I’d wear under a wedding dress and I waited for the man who taught me to shuffle a deck.
He came alone. That was the first thing, and it undid a knot in me I hadn’t known I was holding.
No shadow. No hand but his own. Just an old man in a good coat, silver where I remembered him dark, softer through the middle, the face I’d loved before I could spell my own name, and my whole body wanted to run at him the way a child runs, and my whole mind stood very still and catalogued the exits, and I lived in the gap between those two animals the way I have lived my whole life.
“Sienna,” he said. Not princess. He’d retired that word between us the way you retire a knife you’ve cut someone with.
“You’ve your mother’s standing and your father’s stillness.
I used to watch which one would win in you.
Neither did. You learned to hold both at once.
I always wondered who taught you that.” His mouth moved.
“It was me, wasn’t it. God forgive me. It was me. ”
“You held me at my christening,” I said, because I had promised myself I’d say the true things and not the safe ones.
“You sent the biggest wreath. You wept at their graves and I have spent half my life being told your grief was the realest thing in the room, and here is what I came to ask you, the only thing, and I want you to look at me while you answer it. Was it real. The grief. Any of it. Or was I loved by a machine.”
His face broke. Not the actor’s break, the one he’d worn at a hundred gravesides. This was the thing under it, and I had spent a lifetime learning faces at the knee of the man whose face this was, and I knew the difference the way you know your own name.
“It was the only real thing I had left,” he said.
“That’s the horror of me, child. I never once stopped meaning it.
I held you at that font and I loved you like my own, and I already knew what was coming for your family, and I loved you through the whole of it, and I let it happen anyway, because he had a thing of mine in his hand and I was not strong enough.
That’s not a story that lets me off. I know it doesn’t.
I’ve spent every year since learning exactly how much it doesn’t.
” He pressed the heel of his hand to his mouth. “I got your card.”
“I know.”
“You’re offering me a door.”
“I’m offering you the one thing you stopped believing existed.”
He looked at me, and I watched a lifetime of a caged man rise up behind his eyes and press against the bars and not, yet, break them.
“I want to walk through it,” he said, and his voice was barely there.
“You cannot know how badly. To stand up in that church and put my hand on the thing he built me to serve and tip it over in front of God and everyone, to be, for one hour before the end, a man on the right side of a door. I have dreamed it. I have dreamed it the way a starving man dreams bread.” His hand shook.
“But he has a thing of mine, Sienna. Still. This morning. And if I walk through your door and I’m wrong about the timing by a single minute, the thing he has stops breathing, and I will have spent the last coin I own on a gesture.
I don’t know if I’m strong enough. I’ve never once been strong enough.
That’s the whole of my life in a sentence and I’m too old to pretend it’s not. ”
“Then don’t be strong,” I said, and I heard my mother in it, dry where he was breaking.
“Be quick. You taught me that. Whatever he holds, we’ll reach it.
I don’t need you brave, Eamon. I need you at a church at eleven o’clock with your hand near a folio and the nerve to move once.
One move. You spent my whole childhood teaching me you only ever need one. ”
He laughed, wet and awful, and for a second he was the man on the harbor wall with his arm around a girl eating chips, the man I’d loved, the man who was also the other thing, both of them living in the same coat the way they’d always lived in the same coat, and I understood I was never going to get to hate him cleanly and I was never going to get to love him clean either.
He’d taken both. He’d taken the clean version of every feeling I had about him the day he stood at that font and lied with a whole heart.
“I don’t know if I’ll come,” he said. That was the truth and he gave it to me straight, the one mercy he had left.
“I want to. I’m going to spend the next hours trying to be a man who does.
But I’ve wanted to be that man for fifteen years and I never once managed it, so I’ll not stand here and promise you a thing I’ve failed at every day of my life.
I’ll only tell you I heard the door open.
And that whichever way I go, you were the best thing I ever ruined. ”
I did not cry. I’d promised myself that too. I put my thumb to my father’s ring, the anchor, and I looked at the man who raised me and helped murder me and loved me the whole way through, and I gave him the last card I had.
“There’ll be white lilies,” I said. “Banks of them. Funeral flowers at a wedding. They’re for the man above you, so he knows I know.
But you’ll smell them coming up the steps, Eamon, and I want you to smell them and remember you taught me that trick, and decide, right there in the doorway with the flowers in your nose, whether you spent your whole life being the hand.
” I turned to go, because Cormac had given me a time and I’d not make him break more discipline than he already had.
“Or whether, for one hour, at the end, you get to be the man who finally didn’t. ”
I left him in the flour-gray light with his face in his hands, and I did not know, walking down the stairs to where Cormac stood in a doorway holding every exit, whether I had just saved us or killed us all.
That was the thing about a free choice. My father built the whole machine to run on one, and this was the cost of it, the part he never got to feel. You offer a person a door, and then you have to walk away not knowing, and let the not-knowing be the price of having meant it.
I went to go put on a white dress.
And I left the door open behind me.