Chapter 23
CATE
Tara called Thursday night.
"Okay," she said, in the voice she uses for findings.
"Seven letters. Every database I can reach, every catalog, every onomasticon, and two colleagues I trust who think I'm writing a paper.
" A breath. "Nothing. It hits nothing, Cat.
A fully-formed personal name, fluent hand, correct period — and it is written down nowhere that I can reach.
And I want to be precise about what I can swear to: I can't swear it was never written anywhere, ever.
Nobody could swear that. What I can swear is that my reach is the reach — if it existed where scholarship can see, I'd have found its shadow by now. "
"Okay, but — people fall out of records. Fires. Floods. Whole archives—"
"Records fall out of records. One record.
Ten." Paper moved on her desk. "This is every record I can touch, Cat.
As far as anything I can reach says, this is a person who was never baptized, never taxed, never buried, never cursed on a wall by somebody they owed money.
Nobody gets through a whole life without the world writing them down once — unless the world was never given the chance.
Or unless every place it was written is somewhere no one like me can go. "
"So what do we call a name no one ever wrote down?"
"Hidden," said Tara. "I'm not done. This is my white whale now. But I wanted you to know tonight: whatever you found down there, it's outside every record I can touch. And I've never once met anything outside all of them at once."
She hung up first, which she never does.
I stood in the kitchen with the phone in my hand and the basement door in the corner of my eye, and the house felt very small, and the week felt very long, and I'd had exactly enough of both.
"Raq."
He was there before the second syllable finished.
"Get your coat," I said. "I want out. Out of this kitchen, away from that door, for one whole night. I want—" and it came out of me sideways, ridiculous, true — "I want to go to the beach."
"It is March."
"I know what month it is."
He looked at me for a moment. Then something moved through his face that I didn't have a name for — a yes that went deeper than the question — and he took my coat off the hook and held it open, and then he went into the bedroom and came out with every blanket we own under one arm.
"Then we go to the beach," he said. "Tonight I am not spending on walls either."
The boardwalk in March at ten o'clock belongs to nobody.
The rides stood locked in their winter shapes, the Parachute Jump burning red on the off-season schedule, and past the rail the beach ran down black to a white seam of surf. The wind came off the Atlantic like it had been saving up all winter.
It never reached me.
He walked on the ocean side with his arm around me, and the wind hit him and just — ended. Warm the whole way down the boards, warm in an unzipped coat.
"You're doing that."
"Yes."
"You could rent yourself out in January. Bus stops. Little old ladies. You'd never buy your own coffee again."
"I am spoken for."
We went down the ramp and out across the sand, past the reach of the boardwalk lights, to the dark middle of the beach where the whole black ocean went out forever.
He spread the blankets with a watchman's judgment — lee of the wind he was about to become, sightlines to everything — and we lay down in the pile of them with Brooklyn glowing at our backs and the stars out hard and clean the way they only come in cold weather.
I should have been shaking. It was March on the Atlantic and I was in a coat and socks and a man.
I was not shaking.
"This is unfair to every other woman in this city," I said, up at the stars. "They're home with space heaters."
"Come here," he said.
I came there.
He pulled me over him and kissed me like the tide takes things — slow, total, no argument anywhere — and his hands went under my coat, under my sweater, flat against my bare back, and where they moved, heat moved.
"The cold," I said against his mouth. "My clothes. Physics, Raq—"
"Give me the physics," he said, and undressed me under the blankets one decision at a time, and every inch he bared should have burned with wind and burned with him instead.
His palm ran heat down my spine, over my hip, along my thigh — the warmth arriving like something he was writing on me — and I stopped negotiating with March entirely.
"Better?"
"Shut up," I said, and pulled his shirt off him.
He rolled me under him, into the pile, all that weight held on his forearms like it was nothing because to him it is nothing, and he looked down at me in the starlight with the blue turned all the way up.
"I want everything tonight," he said. "Slowly. Tell me yes."
"Yes."
He started at my throat and went down.
He took his time at my breasts until I was pulling his hair and swearing at the sky, and then he kept going, unhurried, mouth and heat, down my stomach, my hip bones, the inside of one thigh — and the March air touched me for half a breath before his mouth did, hot as August, and my whole body arched up off the blanket into it.
"Raq—"
He hummed against me, pleased, thorough, and did not hurry for anyone.
He worked me with his mouth and the surf kept its count and I lost track of which was which — long patient waves, each one closer in, his hands pinning my hips to the earth like I might otherwise leave it, which was a fair assessment — and when I broke the first time I broke loud, no neighbors for a mile, my fingers in his hair, the stars getting an education.
He came back up my body slowly, kissing as he went, and settled between my thighs, heavy and hot, and held there — right there — with his forehead against mine.
"Caterina." Wrecked already, and he hadn't even—
"Now," I said.
He pushed into me in one long slow thick stroke and the sound I made went out over the Atlantic.
He moved like the tide. That's the only honest report — slow, deep, relentless, each stroke arriving all the way and staying a beat before it went, and the blankets held our heat in a pocket of summer while the winter stood around us like a congregation, and I wrapped my legs around him and met him and said his name and other things, less printable, that made the low not-human sound tear up out of his chest.
"More."
"Everything," he agreed, and gave it to me — harder now, deeper, one hand fisting the blanket by my head, the other under my hips, angling me until every stroke hit the spot that whited out the stars, and I felt the iron control in him start to slip stroke by stroke, felt it and chased it, dug my nails into his back and told him exactly what I wanted in exactly the words Nonna's kitchen never heard.
When I broke the second time it took him with me. He came apart with his forehead pressed to mine and his eyes open, blue to brown, my name breaking in half in his mouth, his whole body shuddering into me while the surf counted us home.
For a long time neither of us moved. Steam rose off his back into the March air.
"Physics," I said, when I could.
He laughed — the real one, the rare one, rumbling under my hands — and rolled us so I was on his chest in the blanket pile, one ear on the slow immense heart, the ocean keeping its count, steam actually rising off us into the March air, and I started laughing and couldn't entirely stop.
"What."
"Steam. We're steaming, Raq. On a public beach. In March." I wiped my eyes. "I'm going to light a candle for whoever's on the boardwalk camera. Honest to God, by the grace of—"
—grace of God.
The word went off in my mouth.
I sat up fast, hauling the blanket around me, and the cold took one bite of my shoulders before his warmth chased it off, and I looked down at him lying there under the stars.
"You said they took your grace."
He went still.
"Grace of God," I said. "God gives grace.
Saved by grace. The nuns — twelve years, Raq, the nuns said we need God's grace to be saved, He gives it, it's a gift, it's the whole—" I stopped, because he wasn't looking at me anymore.
He was looking at the stars, and he was too quiet, and I know his quiets now. "What exactly did they take?"
The surf ran three counts.
"No one gives you your grace, Caterina." He said it to the sky, evenly.
"Whatever the chain taught you. You have the most powerful grace there is, and it is yours — no one granted it, and no one can take it.
You decide. You love. You make — art, bread, promises, whatever your hands close on.
Free will, with no orders behind it. That is your grace.
It grew in you, and it cannot be repossessed, because it was never issued. "
"And that's what they took from you?"
"Not exactly." His eyes stayed on the stars. "Ours was — different. Ours never included the choosing. Or the making." A pause, and then, level, flat, the register he saves for the true ones: "I can never have a child, Caterina. None of us create. That was never in us to begin with."
It landed in me and went all the way down.
And I sat there in the blanket with the ocean counting, and I let it land, and I didn't say anything, because what was there to say — I'm sorry they built you without the thing I'd have wanted to give you?
If that was the cost of him, then that was the cost. I'd done my deciding already.
I put my hand flat on his chest instead, over the heart, and left it there, and his hand came up and covered it.
"Then what did they take?" I said, quietly. "If the choosing was never yours. What got taken in that field?"
He looked at the stars a moment longer.
"You are saved by grace," he said. "Say the nuns are right. Say it works exactly as taught. What does saved do, Caterina? What does it get you?"
"It gets you into—"
I stopped.
"No," I said. "No."
"It gets you in," he said. "That is the whole of the angels' grace — the standing.
The door. The belonging. Ours was never the choosing; ours was the entry.
Granted from their side of the door — and what is granted can be revoked.
" The flat went all the way flat. "That is what they took in the field in your photographs.
They shut the door. We are earthbound, Caterina.
All two hundred of us. There is no going home, not ever — not in life, and not after it. The word is exact. Graceless."
The ocean went out black forever, and the stars stood over us the way they stand over everything, and I heard it — all of it, the whole size of it — arrive in me one piece at a time.
Because here is what the nuns did teach me, and it held, it has held my whole life, through the Gowanus and the novenas and the year of candles: you see them again.
That's the deal. That's the whole deal. Nonna is not gone; Nonna is ahead.
My parents are not gone; they are ahead, at the door, and one day I walk through it and the people I lost are on the other side.
And the man under my hand can never walk through it.
I'm going to die. We settled that on a roof; I made my peace and took my sixty years. But I believed — I realized it only now, holding it, that I had believed it without ever once saying it — that dying was a door we'd figure out like we figured out every other door.
It isn't. My heaven is his exile. Every person I have ever lost is waiting for me in the one place he can never come, and the day I go to them, I lose him — not for fifty years, not for a lifetime.
For good.
I didn't say any of it. He was lying under the stars he used to live above, and he had just handed me the truth in the plain flat voice that costs him, and there is a time for every conversation and this wasn't the time for that one.
So I did what we do. I lay back down on his chest, over the heart, and pulled the blankets to my chin, and let him think my shiver was the March.
"Take me home," I said, into his skin. "Slowly. I want the whole boardwalk."
"The whole boardwalk," he agreed, and his arms came around me, both of them, complete.
Raq
She walked the boards inside my arm, warm and slow, talking about churros — where the churro man goes in winter, whether churro men migrate, whether we could follow them — and I answered in the right places, and above her head I read the night.
At the far end of Coney Island, on the roof of the tallest of the towers, something stood against the sky.
Not moving. Not hiding. The patient thing that walked her block for weeks and vanished the day she finished — standing now a mile off in plain view, face toward us, at a distance that is not surveillance but address. We know you see us. Seeing us is the message.
I turned my head north, because by then I already knew.
Camael. Far off, high up, over the city — a stillness I have known since before either of us had a name, standing a watch he was not assigned.
And south, out over the dark water toward the point, faint as a signature at the bottom of a page: the gray one. The one who talks. The one who smiled and sold me nothing.
Three points. North, south, and the tower. Nothing approaching, nothing needing to approach — a triangle drawn quietly around a man and a woman on an empty beach, all of it visible only to me, while she laughed against my ribs about the migratory patterns of churro men.
They were not closing in. They were showing me the shape.
You do not stand three watchers around a thing to catch it. You stand them there so it knows it is held.
She tucked her cold nose against my jaw and said this was the best night of the whole strange year, and I said yes, because it was true, and I looked at the three fixed points of my sky, and I knew — past argument, past appeal, all at once and forever:
I have to let her go.