Chapter 18
CATE
We surfaced, eventually, because Nina's veal existed and I am my grandmother's granddaughter. I reheated it at nine o'clock and set it in front of him on the good plates, and across the steam I collected on my promise.
"Questions," I said. "I told you. But before I ask one more thing — I need a promise. You're going to tell me the truth. Always. Even when you don't want to. Especially then."
He put the fork down.
"I cannot make that promise."
The floor tilted under the whole conversation. Twelve hours of everything, his vow still warm in my ears, and this is where he balks?
"Why the hell not?"
"Because my word is binding." Flat. Absolute.
Not an excuse — a fact, the way the stove is hot is a fact.
"Not the way yours is, Caterina. When I give my word, it does not bend, it does not expire, and it does not care what it costs either of us.
So I do not hand it around. And some things are too dangerous for you to know.
If I promise you always, the promise will one day put something in your hands that kills you. I will not build that."
I was quiet for a minute. I flattened both hands on the table, and I looked at him — at everything I now knew was sitting across from me on a kitchen chair — and I made the oldest decision there is, which is to trust the thing you love, on purpose, with your eyes open.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. Then here's what I want instead. You don't lie to me. Not ever. Not once. And when an answer is dangerous, you don't dodge — you say that one's dangerous, and I decide if I want it anyway."
"No."
"Raq."
"The first part you have." He didn't raise his voice, and somehow it filled the room anyway.
"No lies. Not ever. That word I will give you, and you now know what my word is.
The second part — no. I will not hand you what can get you killed, no matter what you decide.
Not for your autonomy. Not for your anger.
Not for anything. What I will give you is this: everything I can, the moment I can.
And when I hold something back, I will tell you I am holding it, and I will tell you why. "
"You'd give your word? The binding kind?"
"It is the only kind I have."
I looked at him a long moment. It wasn't everything I'd asked for. It was better — because it was true, and he could keep it.
"Deal," I said. "Ask you everything, no lies ever, dangerous ones get named. Now eat your veal."
"Ask." He picked the fork back up, and he ate what I fed him, all of it, and he answered everything.
Then I got to the one I'd been building toward the whole time, the one every other question was scaffolding for — and I found I couldn't just fire it across the table like the others. Some questions you don't ask a person. You ask permissionfirst.
"I want to ask about the scars," I said. "About what happened. And you can tell me if tonight isn't the night. That's allowed under the deal — you name it, I wait."
"Ask."
"You're sure?"
"Caterina." Quiet. "Ask."
I kept my hands still on the cup, and I made it as gentle as a true question can be made.
"Who took your wings?"
He looked away.
He looked away — the creature who had held my eyes through every terrible question all day, who watches me the way lighthouses watch water, broke and looked at the wall, and the kitchen got very small around it.
"The ones we answered to," he said, to the wall.
Then he came back to me, and the flatness was back on, but I'd seen it go off, and we both knew I'd seen it.
"Who they were — who held the blade, whose order it was — that lives inside the most dangerous answer I hold, and I am not opening it sideways tonight. Ask me the rest."
I let it go. For now. And I asked the rest.
"Then Enoch. Tara's book. It says you were set to watch, and you came down because you wanted." I watched him. "You stood in my studio two nights ago and didn't correct it."
"The buried book is the true one. That's why it's buried." He said it flat. "There was no battle. No banners. There was wanting. And there was punishment for wanting. That is the entire history of the fall, and everything else anyone has ever painted on a ceiling is what got painted over it."
"Punishment," I said. The word sat on the table between us like something that had crawled up out of the drain. "For wanting."
"Yes."
"Wanting what?"
"What you had." No hesitation on that one — the wanting of the two hundred was apparently a fact he could hand straight across the table.
"All of you. Everywhere. Every night we stood the watch.
Lives. Tables. Doors that close with someone on both sides of them.
Being in the world instead of posted over it.
Being tired at the end of a day because the day had you in it.
" He was looking at my hands when he said the last part.
"And love. Not the assignment kind. The kind that picks one face out of all the faces, and stays.
We watched it happen below us every night of the world, Caterina, and we were built to want nothing, and the builders were wrong. "
My hand moved before I decided anything — across the table, halfway to his, and stopped there, palm down on Nonna's wood.
An offer, in the middle. He looked at it for a long moment, and something in his stillness changed grain, and he did not take it, and I understood that too: not yet, not in the middle of this. But he kept it in reach.
Punishment for wanting. I put it in the drawer where I keep the true things, and felt how much bigger it was than the drawer.
"Wait." It arrived out of nowhere, the way the true gaps do, while I was stacking the plates. "Where do you live? All these weeks — you're here at eight, you're under the streetlight at midnight. Where do you go, Raq?"
He looked at me, and did not answer, and the not-answering was the answer.
"The doorway," I said. "The roofline. The circuit. That's — you don't go anywhere. There's no apartment. There's no anywhere."
"There is a post," he said. "There has always been a post. It is enough."
"It is not enough." Something in my chest did a thing I didn't have time to supervise. "Standing outside all night like a fire hydrant is not an address."
"I don't feel the cold, Caterina."
"That is not the point and you know it." I put the plates down, because this needed both hands.
"And hold on — never? You've been here since before Rome had plumbing.
You never once kept an apartment? A house?
A kick-ass loft in Manhattan, something?
That can't be true. That long, and nowhere, ever? "
"It was not always true." He was quiet a moment.
"I have kept rooms. Houses. Land, once, for a long stretch — I was good at it.
A home is a place you keep what you want, Caterina.
And nothing about me ages, and everything about everyone else does.
You furnish a life, and you watch it empty, and you leave it, and you do it again, and again, and at some point the keeping stopped making sense.
So I stopped. A post asks nothing. A post holds nothing. A post cannot be emptied."
I stood there with my dish towel and my heart breaking in a brand-new place.
"And now?"
"Now there is a house I stand outside of."
"No," I said. "Now there is a house you live in."
He went still.
"You're staying here. I'm not taking no for an answer, so don't bother building one.
And don't make it weird — yes, I know we haven't known each other long enough to live together, I can hear Nina already, believe me.
But this—" I waved the dish towel at the table, the night, the whole impossible inventory of him "—is not exactly a normal situation. So you'll stay. And you won't argue."
He said nothing.
He said nothing in a way that had a great deal in it, and I decided it was agreement, because deciding is a thing I'm good at.
"Good. So. Since you're staying — we're going to have some house rules."
"Rules." His mouth did the eighth-of-an-inch thing, closer to a real smile than I'd ever seen it get. "I am older than Rome. As you said."
"And you're going to have house rules. Just shut up and listen.
" I swatted his enormous shoulder with the dish towel on my way past, and got the legal pad off the counter, and slapped it down between us, and said, "House rules," in Nonna's exact cadence, because in this house that phrase has a liturgy.
Then I clicked the pen, and looked at the yellow page, and it stopped being funny, because there was one thing I actually needed in writing.
"First. And this one's serious."
No disappearing, I wrote. The pen pressed too hard on the period.
"If you go, you say you're going. Even one word. I've done the other kind." I didn't look up. "It's not negotiable and I'm not discussing why."
"I know why," he said, quietly, and didn't make me discuss it. "Agreed."
After that they came easy, half of them laughing, all of them true.
No lies, not ever — his word, the binding kind.
Dangerous answers get named. I decide what I take; his line stands.
Nights inside the house, like a person — it's March, and Donnie upset is a public-address system.
Sunday is Nina's, and you'll eat, I don't care what you run on.
He watched the list grow with an attention that had no business making the kitchen feel warm.
"Anything for you?" I asked. "It's your house too, now."
"One thing." He'd been ready. "When I say run, you run.
No questions, no rolling pin, no forty-dollar solvent cans.
There may come a moment when the distance between you and a door is my whole world, and in that moment you are not a negotiator, you are the thing I cannot do this without.
" He said it flat, the way he says the true ones, and the flatness put the cold down my arms, because a man who moves the way he moves was telling me there were things on the board that made him count doors.
"You explain after," I said, when my voice came back.