Chapter 33 #2
"You were asking him." I looked at Raq, and Raq looked back at me, and the blue was banked again and his hands were on the table and he had not said one word since he sat down. "Go ahead, Cam. Ask him. Let's all find out together."
Cam turned to his brother.
"Well," he said. "You have not once told me I am wrong."
"You are not wrong."
"Then tell her."
And there it was. Everything hung on it — Cam waiting, my heart going in my throat, and beside me the man who had already done this once, who had picked me up off my kitchen floor four days ago and had all the proof in the world that he could do it again any time he decided the reason was good enough.
Raq set his cup down.
"It is not mine to decide," he said. "Ask her."
Cam went completely still.
"I beg your pardon."
"You heard me. It is her body, her house, her life, and her child.
" He did not raise his voice. "I did what you told me on that roof.
I took her. I put her where nothing could hear her, exactly as you said, and I was proud of myself — and she bled on a stone floor forty miles from a hospital because of it.
That is what your plan costs when a man who loves her carries it out.
Not a proceeding. Not a docket. Her blood, on a floor, forty miles from help.
" A pause. "So no. I will not tell her anything. Ask her."
"Baraqiel, she is a mortal woman—"
"She is the one who is pregnant," Raq said. "Ask her."
Cam turned in his chair, slowly, and for the first time all night looked at me like somebody he had to talk to.
"Very well. Caterina Fontana. Will you come."
"No."
It came up out of me the way your hand comes off a hot pan.
"You have not heard the details."
"I don't need them. A quiet room somewhere far away with a doctor who doesn't ask questions.
I've had the four-day version." I put the cup down.
"My grandmother bought this house with money she made sewing.
She held it through her husband dying, my parents dying, four recessions, and a stroke that took her whole right side — and every single person in her life told her exactly what you're telling me.
Somewhere safe. Somewhere easier. She learned the stairs again instead.
It took her a year." My eyes were doing something and I let them.
"She died in that room over your head, in her own bed, with her people around her.
That's what I've got instead of a religion.
"So no. I'm not having my child in a room somebody picked for me because I'm the least powerful thing at this table.
I'm having it here, on this street, with Nina six blocks away and a doctor on 86th who's known me since I was nine.
And you can tell whoever writes the list of what's permitted that they can go to hell.
All of them." My hand was steady, which surprised me more than anything else that night.
"If they come, they come. They can come up those stairs like everybody else. "
Cam stood up.
"You have no idea what you are refusing," he said. "You have been sleeping beside a ruin and you think you have taken the measure of us."
And then he opened his wings.
They came out of nothing and they filled my kitchen — not folded, not tucked; filled it, ceiling to floor, the far one going through the doorway into the studio and the near one crossing the whole width of the room a foot from my face.
Not white. Not feathers, or not only feathers: the light came off them the way light comes off water at the end of the day, and the color kept deciding — bronze, then a gold with no warmth in it, then something at the edge that my eye could not hold and kept sliding off, the way you can't look directly at the filament in a bulb.
They moved slightly, the way a sail does when nothing is happening.
The air in the room went thin and cold and smelled like the inside of a church in January, and my ears popped.
And him in front of them.
You do not get to see something like that in a lifetime and I saw it over a bowl of soup.
He stood in my kitchen with the light off those wings on him and he was — beautiful is not the word; beautiful is for things that are trying.
He wasn't trying. He was made, and everything human I have ever found handsome turned out to be a rumor about him: the line of the jaw, the height, the shoulders under that coat, the terrible symmetry of a face nobody carved and nobody bred, that has never once been tired or sick or afraid of a bill.
Every saint on my wall is a bad photograph of this.
Sixty years of Nonna's holy cards, the panel downstairs, all those years of nuns — all of it, every image anybody has ever made of them, was somebody remembering this badly.
It went through me like a hand around the spine. My eyes filled. That's a physical fact and I'm not going to be embarrassed about it; you don't get a vote when something like that opens up two feet from your face.
He watched me feel it. He had done it on purpose, and he watched me feel it, and he waited for what always happens next.
Beside me, Raq had not moved at all. He was looking at his brother with something I could not read and did not have time to.
I put my spoon down on the table.
"They're beautiful," I said. My voice came out wrong — shaky, wet, an octave off, and I let it, and I kept going anyway. "They really are. Nothing anybody made comes close." I got my breath. "The answer's still no."
Nothing moved in Cam's face.
"Sit down or put those away," I said. "You're going to knock over my saints."
Beside me, Raq made a sound.
I turned my head. He had one hand over his mouth and his shoulders were going, and then he gave up entirely and laughed — the real one, the rare one, the low rolling one I have heard maybe four times, out loud, in his brother's face, in a kitchen full of wings.
"Baraqiel."
"Put them away, Camael." Still laughing. Wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand like a human being. "You heard the woman. The saints."
"I am attempting to convey the gravity of—"
"She told you to mind the furniture." He sat back in his chair with his hand over his face, and his shoulders were still going. "All the ages of that speech, brother, and this is the first time I have ever enjoyed it."
For a second I thought Cam was going to take the roof off the house.
Then something went across his face — something almost human, some old exasperation with a much younger brother — and he made a small disgusted sound, and the wings folded down into nothing between one blink and the next.
The air came back. The room was just a room with three people in it and a stove.
"Do you know what she sounds like," he said, to Raq.
"Yes," Raq said, still grinning, and it took years off him.
"Of course you do."
He stood and put his coat on, and at the stairs he stopped with one hand on the rail.
"Then hear the rest of it, since apparently in this house information is a beverage that gets served whether one wants it or not.
"When it happens, you will know. The lights go first — they take the current with them, block by block, it cannot be helped; the borough will call it a brownout and by morning it will be an argument with Con Ed.
Everything down here that is not human will feel it and go flat and still, and I do mean everything, including the thing under the fish market, including me.
Nobody looks up. Nobody stands up. Nobody speaks. "
"How long?" I said.
"Minutes. It will feel considerably longer.
" He looked at me. "Be in this house. Be in the back room, away from the street.
All the lights out. Do not go to the window, Caterina — and I understand that I am telling a woman whose entire profession is looking closely at things not to look, and I am telling you anyway.
They are not accustomed to being seen. Being seen makes them curious, and there is nothing on this earth you want less than that. "
"And what do we do?"
"Nothing," Cam said. "There is nothing to do.
That is what I came to tell you. There is no plan, there is no arrangement, there is nowhere in this city I can put you that they will not pass over — that is why I wanted you out of the city, and you have declined, and so what is left is this: you will sit in the dark and be quiet, and they will pass over, and everything depends on what they decide they saw. "
He went up two steps. Stopped again.
"And you." Not turning around. "Baraqiel. Whatever you are considering right now — don't."
He did not wait for an answer. The door shut, soft, the way a courteous man closes a door.
I sat there a minute with my hands around a cold bowl.
My whole body was still vibrating — geared up for a war that never came, every nerve dressed for battle with nothing left to fight — and twelve inches to my left sat the one outlet on earth I wasn't using.
He was heat all down my left side without touching me.
He was always heat. I drank my cold decaf and stayed furious.
And then I noticed how quiet he was being, and turned my head — and the wanting went out of me like a tide.
He was looking at the table. Not at me. Perfectly still, and there was nothing on his face at all — the banked thing, the wall, the look he wears when the answer has already been decided somewhere in him and the deciding is not up for discussion.
"Raq."
"Mm."
"What did he mean, whatever you're considering?"
"He is dramatic," Raq said. "He has always been dramatic."
He got up and took my cold soup to the sink and ran the water, and stood there with his back to me, and did not answer the question I had actually asked.