Chapter 12
RAQ
The streetlight stayed dead all night. I stood at the window with the room behind me and the street in my eyes, and I did not see one thing that happened on that street.
She was asleep eleven feet away and I could feel her.
Not hear. Not sense the way I sense a room. Feel — the slow tide of her breathing arriving somewhere behind my sternum, steady, uninvited, the warmth of a sleeping body registering in mine as if her skin were still against it. Every time she turned over, something in my chest turned with her.
I have stood watch on four continents. I have not been touched with any tenderness in longer than this city has existed. I did not know what to do with my hands.
Nothing came. The block thinned toward morning, patient, unspent, and I stood in a dead woman's kitchen with her granddaughter's saints watching me from the wall and no name for what was happening in me.
She woke at seven. No gradient. Asleep, then armed. I heard the quilt thrown back, bare feet on cold floor, and then her voice from behind the curtain.
"You stood there all night."
"Yes."
"At the window. Like a curtain rod."
"The curtain rod faces the room," I said. "I face the street."
Quiet. Then the curtain moved and she came out in my shirt.
Only my shirt. Sleeves past her hands, hem at her thighs, hair a catastrophe, and the marks I had put on her throat sitting above the collar in the gray morning light where anyone could read them.
I looked at the street. The street had nothing in it. I kept looking at it anyway, because the alternative was crossing eleven feet of linoleum and putting her back through that curtain, and something had come to her gate at one in the morning and worked the latch.
She went past me to the stove without looking at me. Close enough that her sleeve caught my arm. Neither of us mentioned it.
She made coffee. The terrible kind, the only kind, the tin with the price sticker worn to a ghost. She poured two cups without asking and put mine on the sill by my hand.
"Keep buying this one," I said.
She stopped with her cup halfway to her mouth. "The coffee?"
"The terrible one. I like it."
Something crossed her face. "Sure," she said. "God forbid you suffer good beans."
She hoisted herself up to sit on the workbench, feet swinging, cup in both hands, and I stopped being able to look at the street entirely.
"Your name," she said. "The real one. Not Barrett. Barrett's a laminate. I earned the real one somewhere around two in the morning, and don't make me itemize where."
"You did."
"So."
"The name is old," I said. "It's in books. Not good books. When you have it, you'll have everything attached to it, and it doesn't come one page at a time. It arrives whole."
"That's a no."
"That's a not yet."
"I don't — what does that even mean?" She set the cup down beside her.
"It's a name, Raq. People are born with them.
Your mother gave you one, and you're acting like I asked for your social security number and a blood sample.
What books? Are you — what, famous? Wanted?
Is there a warrant?" She was building momentum, one bad theory stacking on another because I wasn't stopping any of them.
"Is it a mob thing? Witness protection? Because if you tell me you're in witness protection I'm going to lose my entire mind, I have been feeding a man in witness protection soup—"
"It's not witness protection."
"Then WHAT."
I said nothing.
"You're doing the thing." She pointed at me with two fingers, coffee in the same hand.
"Where every answer is boring so I'll know it's true.
You taught me that rule yourself, first night, on my stoop with a badge in your hand.
I remember everything you've ever said to me, Raq. That's my whole problem. Try again."
I crossed the room.
I did not decide to. I was at the window and then I was in front of her, close enough that her knees came apart to let me stand there, close enough to feel the heat of her through two feet of cold morning, and I put my hands on the workbench on either side of her and gave her the truth in the only size I had.
"When I hand you the name, you'll look it up. You verify things. It's the best thing about you — I've watched you do it to every person in your life." I was close enough to see her pupils go. "What you find will change how you look at me. I've had twelve days of how you look at me."
"That's not possible."
"It is."
"No — Raq." She got a hand around my forearm and held on, and her thumb moved once against the inside of my wrist. "There is no name in any book anywhere that changes how I look at you. Not after last night. Do you understand what I'm telling you? You could tell me anything."
Her breath had gone short. I heard it change. I was close enough to feel the heat come up off her skin, and the air between us was doing what it does when I stop holding it still.
"Whatever that is," she said. Unsteady. "That thing you do. It's not going to distract me. I want a name."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You are. And you know you are." Her hand slid up my forearm. "You've been doing it since the day you walked in here, and I thought I was losing my mind, and I want you to know I'm not falling for it—"
I kissed her.
She made a sound against my mouth and pulled me in by the arm she was holding, and for a while there was no name and no Monday and no thing at the gate — just her mouth, and her hands, and my shirt hanging open on her shoulders where I'd gotten it out of my way.
She broke off first. Forehead against my collarbone, breathing hard.
"That's cheating," she said.
"Yes."
She pushed back off me, both hands flat on my chest, and looked up with her jaw set — and I watched her put herself back together in about two seconds, which is a thing I will never stop finding remarkable.
"Fine. Here's what's happening. Monday. That's the offer, take it or don't. It's Saturday, that's me being generous, and it's a one-time deal.
And then I swear on the saints—" she caught herself at the word, and her mouth did something complicated — "which is insane, since I don't believe in a single one of them, but apparently that's a thing I do now.
I swear on the saints, Raq. I don't know exactly what I'll do if you don't tell me.
But I find things under surfaces for a living, and I will find out what your name is one way or another.
So you might as well agree, because you're not winning this. "
"Monday," I said.
Strange, in my mouth. I could count on one hand the appointments I have ever dreaded, and every one of them was with management. Now there was this. A Monday, in a basement, with a woman in my shirt who was asking me to hand her a loaded gun and trust her not to use it on either of us.
"Good," she said. "Glad that's settled."
Then she took a handful of my belt and walked backward through the curtain, and I went where I was taken.
Nonna's afghan ended up on the floor. So did the shirt.
Afterward she lay across my chest with the afternoon light coming gray through the curtain, drawing something on my sternum with one finger, and I let myself have it: the weight of her, the smell of her hair, the ridiculous industrial hum of a refrigerator in a basement in Brooklyn.
"You're doing the thing where you go quiet and I can't tell if it's good quiet," she said, into my skin.
"It's good quiet."
It was past noon when we came back out. She picked up the two cold cups from the sill on her way past and ran them under the tap.
I made myself look at the street.
My hand hit the window frame.
I hadn't put it there.
And the kitchen was gone.
Hands in water. Not hers — smaller, older, the knuckles swollen, a wedding band worn down to a wire. Steam coming up off the basin. A window above the sink with the light going amber behind it, late light, the end of a day. The smell of something cooking.
Someone humming. Four notes, then the same four notes again.
Sit down. You've been standing all day.
And something in my chest came apart.
Then the linoleum. The empty street. My hand flat on the frame, my whole arm locked.
My body had moved before I did. That does not happen to me. That has never happened to me.
"You okay?" She'd turned, drying a cup, watching me with the eyes that miss nothing. "You went somewhere."
"Old memory," I said, and had no idea whether that was true. "It visits."
"You want to talk about it?"
"No."
"Okay," she said.
She crossed the room and put her hand flat on my bare back, palm across both scars, without looking at what she was touching. She left it there for the length of one breath. Then she took it away, went to her easel, and picked up her tweezers like nothing had happened.
The hands had been small. The ring had been worn down to a wire. I didn't know whose they were.
I put my coat on over nothing and walked the block, because the alternative was standing in that basement watching her work in my shirt.
Donnie was on the stoop in a coat over boxer shorts, going through a handful of mail without opening any of it.
"Didn't hear you leave last night." He let that sit. "Didn't hear you come in this morning, either." His eyes went to the coat, and the nothing under it, and came back up. "Cold out for that."
I said nothing.
Silence is a tool. Most men fill it with whatever they were holding back, and Donnie is most men. He shifted the mail from one hand to the other. He looked at the street. He looked at me again, and whatever he saw made his throat move, and he said it anyway.
"She's had a hard couple years. That's all I'm saying." Faster now. "Guys come around a woman with a house. I've seen it before."
The thing in me that has ended arguments for longer than this borough has had a name came up off the floor and looked at him.
He had no idea. He stood there in his slippers with his mail and told me to my face that he was watching me.
I put it down.