The PowWow

Jacob was still praying when I got back.

I checked my watch.

Two hours.

I set my keys down quietly and stood in the doorway between the entry and the living room, looking at my brother positioned by the window the way he always was, head bowed, hands loose, barefoot on the hardwood.

Two hours was not unusual for Jacob. Jacob prayed the way other people breathed — regularly, naturally, as a baseline condition of existing. But there was something in the quality of this particular two hours that I'd been carrying since morning, the same thing I'd been carrying since the alley, since the rolled shoulders, since the zero word count that had started the morning after the double date.

I crossed the room quietly and knelt beside him.

He didn't acknowledge me. Eyes closed. Whatever was happening in that prayer was happening at a depth that apparently didn't register ambient brothers as relevant input.

I looked at his feet.

At some point in two hours of kneeling, the blood flow to those feet had to have become a topic of medical interest. I found myself briefly and absurdly wondering at what stage the pins and needles started for a man built like Jacob, and whether the Nephilim heritage included any circulatory advantages, and whether —

I stopped.

I was doing this because I didn't know what else to do. Running observations about Jacob's feet because I was trying to figure out what was wrong with the rest of him and not getting anywhere.

I bowed my head.

Closed my eyes.

“Lord,” I said, in my normal voice, which was not Jacob's voice and had never pretended to be, “Grant me discernment. And discipline. He's my brother and something is wrong and I want to help him and I don't know how. Guide me. Please.”

I finished. Opened my eyes.

Jacob was looking at me.

"Are you mocking me?" he said.

The question landed with genuine uncertainty behind it, which told me more than the question itself. Jacob had never once in his life needed to ask me that. He knew me. The fact that he was asking meant he was somewhere so far inside whatever he was carrying that he couldn't read the room anymore.

I was really worried now.

I sat back on the floor and crossed my legs. Studied him.

"Why would I ever do that?" I said. "Especially now." I kept my voice level. Even. "Your faith in the Lord I would never interrupt. But this isn't that." I paused. "You're carrying something and you won't talk to me. And He doesn't seem to be answering you." I held his gaze. "Remember Nathanial? You were missing something then too. Let me help you. With the Lord's guidance."

Jacob looked at me for a long moment.

Then he deflated.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just — the thing that had been holding him in that particular posture for two hours released, and what was left underneath it was my brother looking like the world had been placed on him personally and had not been removed.

I was more worried now than I'd been thirty seconds ago.

He talked in pieces. The way Mara had talked in the morgue — fragments with spaces between them, the spaces doing as much work as the words. Halting. Several pauses that stretched long enough that I thought he'd stopped. Whispered words that required me to stay very still and very quiet to catch.

The previous night. After dinner. After the river and the moonlight and the comfortable rhythm of an evening that had felt like something safe enough to stop guarding against.

He and Naomi.

It had happened. Jacob knew it was wrong. He couldn't explain the moment it stopped being something he was preventing and became something that had already happened. The guilt had arrived simultaneously with everything else and had not left.

He finished.

Looked at me.

I was sitting with what he'd said. Waiting. The way you wait when someone tells you something significant and you want to make sure there isn't more before you respond.

There wasn't more.

The silence stretched.

"That's it?" I said.

The incredulousness was out before I'd approved it — a reflex from somewhere that had been bracing for something considerably larger. A cancer diagnosis. Jeremiah. Something with permanent structural damage attached to it. I'd been sitting there prepared for the worst thing and what had arrived was —

Jacob's eyes changed.

I recalculated the distance between us and the nearest wall and determined that I had made a significant error.

"Jacob — " I said immediately, both hands up. "Jacob. I'm sorry. Forgive me. That was wrong. I didn't — I lost the weight of it for a second and that's on me, not you. I'm sorry. Please don't — I'm sorry."

The anger didn't fully arrive. It rose and then receded, which was almost worse because it meant he didn't have the energy for it.

He looked at the floor.

I waited until the room settled. Then I said, carefully, "Can I ask you some things?"

He nodded once.

"Do you care for her?"

A pause. "Yes."

"Do you love her?"

Longer pause. Something moved across his face. "I don't know."

"Did you hurt her?"

"No." Immediate. Certain. The first thing he'd said without hesitation.

"Does she know you're wrecked over this?"

He looked up. "She was — she didn't — " He stopped. Reset. "I don't know what she knows."

I nodded. "Why does this cause so much despair for you?"

The anger came back then. Small. Controlled. But present.

"Because I sinned," he said.

I held his gaze. Kept everything in my voice as level as I could manage.

"No," I said. "Because you sinned. And you liked it."

Jacob lay back on the floor.

Just — down. Flat on the hardwood, staring at the ceiling, the full length of him stretched out like a man who had been standing for a very long time and had decided the floor was the only honest response to gravity.

"I did," he said. Quietly. "But it was wrong."

"Yes," I said. "It was." I let that sit. "But Jacob. We're descendants of the Nephilim. We carry something extraordinary. But we are still human. Still flawed. Still falling short of the glory of God." I paused. "Along with your prayer — repent. Confess it to Him specifically. Name it. Don't just carry it, confess it."

"I have." The words came out with a force that surprised me — not quite a shout but close enough that I registered the distance between us and held my position. "I've confessed it. I've prayed. I've been here for two hours and — " He stopped. The force drained out of it. What was left was quieter and considerably more frightening. "I can't hear Him."

I waited.

"He won't talk to me." Jacob's voice dropped to something that barely carried across the room. "What if He doesn't know me anymore?"

The room was very still.

I looked at my brother lying on the floor of our apartment, carrying the weight of one night and a silence he couldn't explain, and I understood completely.

Not the theology of it. The feeling of it. The specific terror of a man whose primary relationship is with God suddenly unable to feel that relationship's response and interpreting the silence as abandonment rather than what it actually was.

"Jacob," I said.

He looked at the ceiling.

"When did this happen?" I said.

"I told you. Last night."

I let a moment pass. Just long enough.

"Who," I said, very quietly, "was it that performed an exorcism in the name of the Lord. Recently."

The ceiling held Jacob's attention for another second.

Then he closed his eyes.

Not the closed eyes of prayer. The closed eyes of a man who has just seen something he should have seen earlier and is taking a moment with the recognition of it.

I said nothing.

I didn't need to.

The apartment was quiet around us. The morning light had shifted to afternoon without either of us noticing. Somewhere outside a car passed and was gone.

Jacob breathed.

I waited.

He got up, enough to move forward to his knees again, then reached one huge paw out to me and pulled me back to my knees next to him.

“Lord,” he said. “Thank you for my brother. Thank you for the wisdom You give him, and for Your shepherding. Forgive my sins. Please bless Levi.”

He finished and I looked at him. “Thanks.”

He stood and offered his hand, which I took and stood next to him.

“So,” I said. “Um. Was it good?”

Jacob turned to me with the small smile I’d been longing to see again.

“I can still put you through the wall, if you’d like.”