The PowWow

Chapter One - One Light

The surgical waiting room on the fourth floor of St. Andrew's had been built by someone who understood that the people in it would not be looking at the walls, and had furnished it accordingly — a framed lighthouse, a framed field of wheat, a clock that told the truth without any particular mercy about it.

A little after eleven the family filled the room, and not one of them was dressed for it.

That was the first thing anyone passing in the corridor would have noticed. Jacob Yaats occupied two chairs and most of a third with the geometry of a very large man who had folded himself down as small as he could go, and he was still in his wedding shirt, collar open, the tie gone somewhere between the garden and the ambulance and not missed. His feet were bare on the linoleum, which no one had mentioned and no one was going to. Beside him Naomi sat in white — a coat over the dress, somebody's coat, too small across her shoulders, and she had not taken it off, because taking it off would have meant looking at the dress, and she was not ready to look at the dress.

Jeremiah sat across from them with his hands folded in his lap and his head bowed, and he had been that way long enough that a nurse had checked on him twice. He was not asleep. Rebecca sat beside him with one hand on his knee and her eyes open, watching the corridor the way she watched doorways, as if she could hear something coming that the rest of them couldn't yet.

Roiya stood. She had not sat down since they arrived. She stood near the window with her arms crossed and her jaw set and her phone, for once, dark and forgotten in her pocket, and every so often she would move — to the water fountain, to the far wall, back to the window — the restless circuit of someone whose body did not know what to do with the fact that there was nothing to do.

Curtis had brought coffee no one drank. He had found the machine down the hall and returned with as many cups as his hands could carry, set them on the low table with the careful precision he brought to everything, and then sat with his own going cold in front of him, saying nothing, present in the way he had learned to be present over the last two years.

And Levi paced.

He had been pacing since the doors closed. The length of the room and back, the ring in his jacket pocket knocking against his ribs with every turn, a small hard weight that had been the best news of his life hours ago and had become, somewhere in the transit to this floor, the spear in the side of Christ. He had wept early — hard, without dignity, the way a man weeps when the thing he loves is behind a set of doors he cannot go through — and then the weeping had dried up somewhere in the second hour, the way a well dries up, leaving something worse behind it. A flatness. A held breath that would not release.

Jeremiah had tried once to get him to sit, a hand extended toward the empty chair beside him, and Levi had looked at the chair and then at Jeremiah with an expression that made the older man withdraw the hand gently and say nothing further. Some things you let a man carry standing up, because sitting down would ask something of him he did not have to give.

Twice the surgical doors opened for other families. Twice the room's collective attention snapped toward them and then let go, the exhausted disappointment of people who have learned that the doors opening is not the same as the doors opening for you.

The third time, it was for them.

The surgeon came out still in her cap, mask pulled down under her chin, the tired directness of a woman who had been on her feet for hours and had learned that the kindest thing she could do with news was not decorate it. Her eyes found the room. Naomi was already standing. Naomi had been on her feet before the surgeon had fully cleared the doors — because Naomi read faces for a living, read the small architecture of what a body was about to say before it said it, and something in her had gone very still and very quiet the moment the woman appeared.

"She came through," the surgeon said. "She's alive. She's stable."

The room broke — not into sound, but into motion, a dozen small releases at once, Rebecca's hand pressing flat against her own chest, Jeremiah's head coming up, Curtis exhaling like a man who had forgotten breathing was optional. Levi stopped pacing. Stopped entirely, mid-stride, as though the sentence had reached into him and switched off the thing that had been driving his legs since arrival.

Naomi did not move. Naomi was watching the surgeon's face, and Naomi already knew there was a second half.

"The round caught the spine," the surgeon said. She said it plainly, without hurrying and without dragging it. "Lower thoracic. The damage is extensive. We did what could be done tonight, and there will be more to do, and I won't stand here and tell you things I don't know yet — but I want you to hear this from me clearly, tonight, so you're not hearing it for the first time from a chart in the morning." She let it sit for exactly the length it needed. "It's very possible she will not walk again."

The relief and the sentence arrived in the same breath, and the room did not know which one to hold.

Rebecca made a small sound. Naomi's hand found Jacob's and closed around one massive finger, and Jacob's other hand came up and covered both their hands, and he did not say anything, because there was nothing that two words could do to this and Jacob knew the difference between a silence that helped and one that only filled space.

Levi sat down.

Not into the chair Jeremiah had offered — into the nearest one, the one his legs happened to be beside, folding into it the way a building folds when something load-bearing gives out. His hands went to his face. He was grateful. That was the strange, splitting thing of it, the thing that would take him a long time to understand and longer to forgive himself for — that in that first moment, under the grief and inside it, the loudest thing in him was gratitude, pure and total, she's alive, thank You, Lord. She's alive. 

But the gratitude did not have the room to itself.

Because underneath it, quiet, patient, already finding its footing in the dark the way certain things do, something else had begun. Not grief. Grief he would have known what to do with. This was colder than grief and more organized, and it had a shape, and the shape was a man in a parking lot who had never once been where anyone could reach him.

Levi sat in the fourth-floor waiting room of St. Andrew's with his face in his hands and his fiancée behind a set of doors she might never walk back through, and while the rest of the room turned toward the Lord, some part of him — small, and getting larger — turned somewhere else, and began, very quietly, to make a plan.

Jeremiah was watching him.

Of course he was. Jeremiah watched the way Rebecca listened, and what he saw in Levi's bent shoulders made him bow his head again, but the prayer he prayed this time was not the one he had been praying for the last three hours.

Lord, he prayed, keep him. Whatever is starting in him right now — keep him. 

The clock on the wall told the truth. It was 11:52.

None of them went home that night.

One Light 

Three months later.

I'll be honest with you about the three months, which is that I don't have them.

I know they happened. I have the receipts — a calendar that says spring became summer, a beard I apparently decided to grow and then decided, with equal conviction and no memory of either decision, to shave. I have a physical therapist's number in my phone that isn't mine, because Rachel gave it to me during a week I don't remember to hold onto for a week I don't remember planning for. I have four missed Thursday dinners, which I do remember, because Rebecca keeps count the way the ocean keeps count, patiently and forever, and because Jeremiah left me a voicemail after the third one that I have listened to eleven times and not once called back.

The rest is fog. Snarky fog, I want to be clear — I didn't stop being me. I still had opinions about the weather, which spent the summer doing an apology tour for its behavior in the spring and overshot into a heat that made the pavement editorialize. I still narrated the world to myself in the running commentary I've never been able to shut off. It's just that somewhere in there the commentary picked up an edge it didn't used to have. A little more teeth. A little less mercy. I noticed it the way you notice a draft in a house you've lived in a long time — not right away, and then all at once, and then you stop noticing again because noticing doesn't fix the window.

The apartment didn't help.

Jacob's things were gone.

Not in the sense that anything was wrong — in the best possible sense, the sense that a man marries the woman he loves and moves into the life the two of them are building and takes his half of the shared world with him, which is exactly what you're supposed to do, which is the whole point. Jacob and Naomi had a place across town now, small and clean and full of light, and I'd been there twice, and both times Jacob had stood in his own kitchen with the particular quiet wonder of a man who still couldn't quite believe the Lord had been that good to him, and both times I'd been genuinely, completely happy for him.

But he took his half of the apartment when he went, and his half of the apartment had been the half that kept the whole thing standing.

His bookshelf was empty. His side of the closet was empty. The corner where he used to pray by the window in the mornings was just a corner now, floor and baseboard and a rectangle of slightly less-faded paint where something used to lean. I hadn't moved anything into the gaps. Three months and I hadn't moved a single thing into the gaps, which — if I'd been paying the kind of attention I pay to everyone except myself — would have told me something. A man leaves the holes where his brother used to be exactly as they are, doesn't fill them, doesn't paint over them, walks past them forty times a day, because filling them would mean agreeing the brother was gone, and some agreements you refuse to sign even when they've already been signed on your behalf.

So the apartment was mostly empty.

Except for the corner I'd been filling.

I want to describe it the way I saw it at the time, because the way I saw it at the time is the whole problem, and if I clean it up for you now I'll be lying, and I've done enough of that with myself.

At the time, it was a workspace.

The east wall of the living room, the one that got the good light in the mornings, the one Jacob used to pray against — I'd cleared it and I'd made it useful. There was a map of the city, and there were photographs, and there was a timeline running left to right across the plaster in my own handwriting, every date marked, every gap in the dates marked too, because the gaps were where he'd been and the gaps were the point. There was string. I'd like to tell you there wasn't string. There was string, red, running from a booking photo to three map pins to a partial address that had been cold for four months, and I'd tied every length of it myself, at night, with the specific patient satisfaction of a man doing the only thing that made the inside of his own skull quiet.

Byron Marcus Hawk. Thirty-four. Considered armed and dangerous. Smoke, Rachel had called him, once, in a dedicated room at the precinct with a wall that looked — I did not think about this, I refused to think about this, I filed it so deep the filing was its own act of violence — a wall that looked exactly like the one I was now building in my own living room.

He did it. I knew he did it.

I want to be precise about the nature of the knowing, because it mattered then and it matters more now. I did not know it the way I know things — the way I know a fight before it happens by reading the half-second of intention before it becomes movement. That kind of knowing is built out of evidence. It has a floor under it.

This knowing had no floor. This knowing was a decision I'd made in a plastic chair on the fourth floor of St. Andrew's and had been reinforcing every night since, and the wall was the reinforcement, the wall was me pouring a floor under a conclusion I'd reached before I had any right to it. Byron Hawk was the man Rachel had been hunting the night everything was still whole. Byron Hawk was still free. Byron Hawk was the shape my grief could close its hand around, and grief that can't close its hand around something eats the hand instead, and I'd decided — in that chair, in that first splitting moment, under the gratitude and inside it — that I was not going to let it eat mine.

Ballistics had never matched a weapon to the round that hit Isaiah. Byron's gun had never been recovered. And the round that came out of the dark at Jacob's wedding, past the lantern light, into the woman I was ten seconds from spending the rest of my life with — that round had a casing and the casing had a story and the story did not, as of this morning, have Byron Hawk's name anywhere on it.

None of that touched me. I want you to understand how completely none of that touched me. I'd built a career on the difference between what fits the evidence and what fits the fear, I'd said it out loud to Rachel in an IT room years ago — I believe what fits the evidence — and I stood in front of a wall that fit nothing but the fear and I felt, looking at it, the closest thing to peace I'd felt in three months.

That should have scared me. It didn't. That's the part that should have scared me most.

I thought about Rachel while I looked at it, which I did every morning, the coffee going cold in my hand the way Jacob's used to go cold, a thing I'd inherited without asking.

Three months in a chair. There were mornings that were bad and mornings that were less bad and, lately, a few mornings that were almost ordinary, and there was a version of the future taking shape that had ramps in it and a lowered kitchen counter in it and a whole vocabulary neither of us had needed before and both of us were bitterly, instantly fluent in now. I knew the complexity of it. I'd read more than she knew I'd read. I understood, in a practical way you understand a thing you've decided to build a life around, what the life we'd have was going to ask of both of us that the life we'd planned would not have.

And here is the thing I knew, all the way down, the one true floor under everything else in me those three months:

It didn't matter.

Not it doesn't matter that she's hurt — of course it mattered that she was hurt, it mattered so much it had rearranged the furniture of my soul. I mean the chair didn't change the arithmetic of it. I loved her. I needed her — and I'd stopped, somewhere in the last year, being embarrassed about the word need, stopped pretending I was too self-contained to require another person the way Jacob had stopped pretending, the way Jeremiah had never once pretended in forty years of orbiting Rebecca like she was the thing the sun apologized to. Chair or no chair, walking or not walking, Rachel Stryker was who I wanted across the table for however many decades the Lord saw fit to give us, and the ring was still real, and it was still in the drawer by my bed where I'd moved it the night I couldn't stand to have it in a pocket anymore, and I was going to ask her, properly, when the world stopped being on fire long enough for the question to mean what it was supposed to mean.

So there it was. The two things that had the whole of me those three months.

The woman I loved, in a chair, in a life I was going to build with her no matter what it cost.

And the man who put her there, on a wall, in red string, in a corner where my brother used to pray.

I stood in the empty apartment and looked at the second thing considerably longer than I looked at the memory of the first, and I did not notice that I did it, and I did not notice what the not-noticing meant.

My phone buzzed on the counter.

Roiya. One word: Dinner Thursday. You're coming. Not a question, which was fair — Roiya had stopped asking me things a while back, the way you stop asking a door if it's going to open when it's been shut on you four times running. There was an edge to her texts lately too, I'd clocked it and filed it, a hardness that hadn't been there a year ago, and some tired part of me had thought, in a rare moment of looking at somebody who wasn't Byron Hawk, huh, she's angry at something, wonder what, and then a car horn or a case file or the red string had pulled me back and I'd let the thought go the way I'd been letting every thought go that didn't have his name on it.

I looked at the text. I looked at the four unfilled Thursdays behind me. I looked at the wall.

I typed I'll try, which we both knew was a no wearing a nicer coat, and then I deleted it, because Roiya deserved better than a no in a nicer coat, and I typed I'll be there, and I meant it about sixty percent, which was up from recent averages and which I decided to count as progress.

Then I looked back at the corner.

There was a lead I'd been circling for two days — a cousin of a Delridge associate, three degrees of nothing off the timeline, the kind of thread that Curtis, if I'd asked him, would have run down in an afternoon and handed me with a professional caveat that it was probably nothing. I hadn't asked Curtis. I hadn't asked anyone. That was new too, and I noticed it the way I'd been noticing everything about myself lately, which is to say from a great distance, through glass, like a man watching somebody else walk toward a door he already knows is locked.

I stood there a second longer.

Somewhere in the back of the warehouse where I used to file things — and it had stopped being a filing cabinet a long time ago, and then it had stopped being a warehouse, and now, three months in, it had become something much simpler and much worse, a single dark room with a single lit lamp, one light, pointed forward, nothing else in it worth looking at — somewhere back there, a small voice that sounded uncomfortably like my own said a sentence I'd said to Rachel once, in a quiet office, holding her hand while the tip line didn't ring:

Somewhere along the way it stopped being something you were doing, and started being something that was doing you. 

I heard it.

Then I filed it, in the one room, behind the one lamp, in the dark where it couldn't get any light on me.

And I picked up the red string, and I got back to work.