Chapter 14
CATE
He was on the stoop when I came up the block, which he never is — he is inside things or across from things, the man does not loiter — and the sight of him standing there in the last of the light, waiting, told me he'd been counting the day down the same way I had.
I let us in. I put Tara's folder on the kitchen table, on top of the mail, like it was mail.
I hung the good coat. I did not work; there was no work left in my hands.
When it got dark we were both still standing in my studio with the muslin-draped panel between us like a witness under a sheet, and I said:
"It's Monday."
"Yes."
"So here's how I'd like to do this." My voice came out steady, which cost me, and I spent it anyway.
"I've had two weeks of boring answers. They were good boring answers — they held, every checkable one of them held, and I checked.
And underneath every single one of them there's been the other thing, the thing that doesn't check, and we've both been living with it in this room like a leak nobody wants to call about.
Fifth Avenue. The knife on 25th. A phone that rang half a ring.
So." I crossed my arms so he couldn't see my hands. "You said not yet. It's yet."
Something in his face let go. I want to be able to describe it and I can't — it wasn't relief and it wasn't dread; it was the look of a man setting down a weight he'd been carrying so long that the setting-down hurt worse than the weight.
"Where would you like me to start," he said.
And because I am who I am — because the armor doesn't come off just because you ordered it to, it comes off last, it's always the final thing out the door — I heard myself say, in my best insurance-adjuster deadpan:
"Where are your wings?"
It came out as a joke. I had meant it as a joke.
And then it was in the air between us and it wasn't one, and I heard it the way he must have heard it, and every hair on my arms went up. I hadn't known that was in me. I'd have sworn on the saints there was nothing under that sentence but sarcasm and bad sleep.
He didn't laugh either.
"I'm not a man," he said.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. See, this is the part where you tell me you're a Mason."
His mouth did the almost-thing it does, and for one second we were us again — the two-cup operation, the arrangement — and then it was over and he said it anyway.
"I was made before your species had language. I was set to watch you. I came down, and I stayed down, and I have been on this earth ever since." He said it the way he says everything, flat as a form letter.
I looked at him.
"No," I said.
"Cate—"
"No. Absolutely not." I was almost laughing again, and it came out wrong. "That's — Raq, that's crazy. That's a crazy thing to say out loud in a basement. You've been sitting in that chair for two weeks. You drink terrible coffee. You have a jacket."
"Yes."
"So say a real thing." My voice climbed and I let it.
"You want to tell me you're ex-something, fine.
Government, mob, whatever it is you don't say — I have run every scenario, I have theories, I've had two weeks and a very good imagination.
Pick one. Pick any of them. But don't stand in my grandmother's house and tell me you're—"
I couldn't say it.
"—that."
"I know how it sounds."
"Do you? Because from here it sounds like the thing men say when the real answer is worse."
He looked at me for a moment.
"You should sit down," he said.
"I'll stand."
"You'll want to be near the bench, then."
"Why—"
And then the air did the thing.
The blur. The lurch. The gap where the world's spine should be, the thing my stomach had met twice before and my brain had overruled both times — and he was at the far wall, by the sink, standing exactly as still as he'd been standing, and no part of the room remembered him crossing it.
My body got there before I did. My hip found the workbench, my hand found the edge of it and gripped, and something older than I am — older than language, the thing in the spine, the thing that kept my whole species alive long enough to invent doubt — stood up inside me and said what it has always said in the presence of a thing that moves like that. It did not say wow. It said run.
I didn't run. I stood with the bench biting my hand and my heart going like the whole percussion section falling downstairs, and I watched him not move, and the fear arrived — all of it, finally, two weeks of it, all at once.
He watched it arrive. He did nothing to stop it — no you're fine, no step toward me.
He stayed against the far wall, as far from me as that room allowed, and did not move at all.
"Once more?" he said. Quiet.
"No." My voice had gravel in it. "No. Once did it."
I got my hand off the bench. Flexed it. Put it back.
"I know exactly what I'm going to do tonight," I said. "I'm going to lie in that bed and tell myself it was adrenaline. Adrenaline does things to time. Everybody knows that, it's a whole—"
"It doesn't."
"I know it doesn't."
The refrigerator cycled. Somewhere above us Donnie's television was arguing with itself.
And then something happened to me that has happened maybe four times in my life, and every one of them was in front of a painting. The fear went somewhere. Not away — down, filed, out of the working area. And what came up in its place was the thing I am actually good at.
I have two weeks of evidence in this house.
"Take your shirt off," I said.
He went very still. "Cate."
It was a warning. Quiet, and not for himself.
"Off." My voice came out level and strange, my hands-are-steady voice, the one I use over a panel with a scalpel in my hand. "Now."
He took his shirt off.
I made myself look at it properly, the way you look when it's your job — the whole field, corner to corner, no flinching at the interesting part.
Two scars. Long, low, symmetrical, running from the shoulder blades to mid-back.
Old. Silvered. Clean — not the mess a blade leaves, not the pucker of a burn. Even. Worked.
Then I walked past him. Not ran — walked, on legs that belonged to somebody else, across the room to the easel, and I took the muslin off my client's five-hundred-year-old panel and dropped it on the floor.
The kneeling angel. The ash-gray robe. The face that has been coming up out of the dark under my hands for two weeks, weeping, looking straight out.
And the bare shoulders. And the two long marks where wings root.
Different face. Different man — I know that face better than my own now, I've had my eye three inches from it under a loupe. It is not his.
Same scars. Same place. Same length.
"They took them," I said.
Not a question. My voice was doing something I didn't authorize.
"Yes."
Then I walked to the kitchen table and picked up Tara's folder off the top of the mail and took out the photocopy. Chapter six. The roster. Twenty officers, transliterated by a dead man in 1912, footnoted, ordinary as a union roll — the column I had folded closed on the train.
His back. The panel. The paper in my hand.
I stood in the middle of the room holding all three at once and the floor went out from under the whole day.
I turned around with the paper in my hand.
"Your name," I said. "Whole. Now."
He looked at me the way he'd looked at me through the four-inch gap on the first night, like a man reading the only line on the form that mattered.
And then he said it — one word, and the room seemed to lean in to hear it, and I swear the work light steadied, I swear the house held its breath, three generations of Fontanas in the walls going quiet at once:
"Baraqiel."
I didn't move. Then I looked down at the paper in my hand, and I ran my finger down the column I hadn't let myself finish on the train — past Semyaza, past the names like weather — to the ninth name on the list.
Baraqijal.
Ninth of twenty. A chief of ten.
Baraqijal. Baraqiel. The same name, written down by a man in 1912 working out of a language nobody has spoken in three thousand years — in a book they buried outside the Bible, on a photocopy that had been sitting on my table since four o'clock next to the Con Ed bill.
I put the paper down because it was rattling.
"That's you." The steadiness was gone; something else was arriving in its place and I didn't recognize it yet.
"Chapter six. The Watchers. The ones who — Tara said.
They were set to watch, and they came down, because they wanted—" I looked up at him.
"The book they buried. You're in it. You're not in it like a myth is in it, you're in it like a man is in a phone book. "
"It gets several things wrong," he said. "The spelling. Some of the numbers." A pause. "Not the charge."
"Say the word."
He didn't.
"Say it, Raq. You've had two weeks and a photocopy and a paycheck out of me, and you're going to make me be the one who says it in my house?" My voice was not doing what I told it. "Fine. Angel. You're an angel."
"I was."
"And now?"
"Now I'm what's left."
And that — that flat little accounting, delivered in my kitchen by a thing that used to be an angel — that is the exact moment the other thing arrived, and I found out what had been walking up my street toward me all day.
It wasn't fear. Fear had come and gone and left its deposit.
Because if he was real — and he was standing there with his ruined back and his buried name, real as taxes — then it was all real.
All of it. The whole thing I'd handed back across a hospital-grade year of watching the strongest woman in Bensonhurst come apart one system at a time.
Somebody had been home. And on Fifth Avenue in March, a woman who hadn't asked for anything in two years threw one wordless flare into the dark over a traffic accident — one, unaddressed, not even words — and got this.
A miracle with a clipboard, standing in my basement, drinking my terrible coffee.
"Cate," he said, and his voice had changed, and he did not finish the sentence — and the not-finishing was suddenly the most unbearable thing in the room, because it was the same silence I'd been getting since the day he walked in, and I had thought it would end tonight.
"I lit every candle that parish had." It came out low, which surprised me; I'd have bet on shouting.
"Every one. For a year. You want the inventory?
Tuesdays and Fridays, Our Lady of Solace, the rack on the left, and when the rack on the left was full I did the rack by the Pietà, and the year she got really bad I was in there so often Father Bonanno gave me my key, because he got tired of letting me in at midnight — a key, I had a key to the building, like staff.
" My voice stayed low and it stayed level and it was the worst sound I've ever made.
"Novenas. The whole cycle. I did Lourdes water, I did the relic they keep in the drawer, I did every degrading transactional thing a scared woman can do in that building, and I did it for eleven months, for the best person either of us has ever met — and she died anyway.
Slow. In pieces. And nobody came to the door.
" I pointed at the window, at the street, at the general direction of Fifth Avenue and everything above it.
"And I run one red light and the sky sends you? "
He didn't move. He took it the way a wall takes rain.
"She begged, at the end." I hadn't planned to say that.
I have never said that. "Not for herself — she was never once for herself — she begged for me, that I shouldn't have to see it, and I stood in that room and told her somebody was listening.
" The low thing in my voice finally cracked, and what was under it wasn't louder.
It was smaller. "And somebody was. That's the part — you understand that's the part?
I could live with the empty sky. I'd made my peace with the empty sky, the empty sky and I had an arrangement.
But you're standing here, which means it was never empty.
Somebody was in there. Somebody heard her.
Eleven months of her. And the answer was no.
" I looked at him. "The bus rated a miracle. Nonna didn't."
He didn't say anything. He stood there with his hands open at his sides, and it was me still talking, quieter now, all the way down at the bottom of it:
"So you tell me. You were one of them. You were on the inside of it."
I looked at him, and I let him see the whole face — the one from over Nonna's dresser, the one nobody gets.
"Where were you people when it mattered?"
The silence went on so long the refrigerator cycled twice.
"I don't know," he said, at last, and it was the flattest and the truest and the most useless thing he had ever handed me, and he handed it to me the way he'd handed me every boring answer, like a man who would not build me something interesting even now.
"I have been asking a version of that question longer than your species has had writing. "
"Ask louder," I said.
And I snatched my coat off the hook and I walked out, and I slammed the door behind me.
He didn't follow me.
I walked down the block at nine o'clock at night by myself and nothing came after me and nothing was standing anywhere it shouldn't be. The doorways were empty the whole way up the avenue. All of them.
I checked. I hated that I checked, and I checked.
I went past the parish. I didn't plan the route; the route was in my feet, eleven months of it.
Our Lady of Solace stood over the avenue with its doors bolted and its stone the color stone goes at night, and the candle-glow was doing what it does in the blue window, the low red flicker, somebody's racks burning on the automatic devotion of strangers, and I stopped on the sidewalk and looked at the doors I used to have a key to.
"I was in there every week for eleven months. I had a key."
The doors didn't say anything. They never had.
I put my hands in my pockets and kept walking — north, off the route, toward 86th, and I understood with every block what I was doing and did it anyway, because somebody had been home the whole time and hadn't come to the door, and there was exactly one door left in the world I believed would open no matter what hour I knocked on it.
Nina opened it in her robe with the chain on — even for me; her mother trained her right — and then off, and she stood in the hallway light with her hair up in the silk thing and took one look at my face.
"Who died," she said.
"Nobody," I said. "Everybody. Two years ago."
And then the first sob came up out of my chest, and I heard it happen, and it didn't sound like me.
Nina pulled me into her arms right there on the step, in her robe, in the cold, and held on, and didn't ask me one single question.