The PowWow

The porch light was the first thing I noticed, three streets out, before I could even see the house it belonged to.

"Did somebody upgrade the wattage on that thing?"

"I did," Jacob said, from the driver's seat, not remotely embarrassed about it. "Considerably."

"It's visible from orbit, Jacob."

In the seats behind us, Rachel and Naomi laughed. David burped.

"I am aware of exactly how visible it is. That was the point." He didn't elaborate further, and he didn't need to. I understood it the same way I understood everything else about my brother lately — some decisions don't need to be defended out loud, they just need to be made, and lived with, and occasionally driven past at night so you can see for yourself that they held.

The house itself looked, from the street, almost exactly the way it always had — which was its own kind of miracle, considering what the place had looked like three weeks earlier. New siding, matched close enough to the old that you'd have to already know to look for the seam. The porch rebuilt board for board. Rebecca's reading lamp back in its window, and I happened to know, because Jacob had told me, that it was the actual lamp, salvaged and rewired rather than replaced, because some things in that house were apparently non-negotiable.

We got out of the Highlander and walked to the house and the door opened before we could knock, Jeremiah grinning at us.

Thursday dinner. The first one back at the actual table instead of a hospital cafeteria or a borrowed kitchen, and from the driveway I could already smell it through a window somebody had cracked for exactly that purpose — something with rosemary in it, and under that, unmistakably, two entire pot roasts working at once, because Rebecca had apparently decided that if she was going to feed this family again for the first time in a month, she was not going to do it by half measures.

Mara was already there when we came in, curled into the corner of the couch with a mug of something and Jeremiah's old Bible open on her knee, looking more like herself than I'd seen her look since her door got a hole put through it. She caught my eye and smiled, small and real, and I understood that was as much conversation as either of us needed to have about it right then.

Curtis had Roiya's feet in his lap on the other end of that same couch, working some kind of absent, proprietary circle into her ankle with his thumb while he argued with her about something on his phone, and I noticed — the way you notice things about people you've spent years around — that neither of them had bothered putting more than a foot of actual space between themselves since the field. I didn't say anything about it. Some things you let keep happening quietly instead of pointing at them.

We sat down to more food than eight adults and one infant had any real chance of finishing, and Jeremiah stood at the head of the table the way he always does, and waited for the room to actually go quiet instead of just quieter, which took slightly longer than usual, because apparently almost losing everyone makes a family louder about getting it back.

"Lord," he said, and put one hand on the back of Rebecca's chair and the other flat on the table, "we are going to do this properly tonight, because I don't believe we have thanked You properly yet, not all the way through, not by name." He looked around the table before he closed his eyes, which was new, or at least new to see him do out loud. "Thank You for Roiya, who came back to this table once already under her own strength and lost nothing of that when she was taken a second time. Thank You for Curtis, who I understand did not stop working even when there was nothing left in front of him to work with, and who I am told built something useful out of grief instead of a wall. Thank You for Rachel, who keeps finding my son whether he is standing or not, and for Mara, who this family has been allowed to watch grow up out of darkness and into Your light. Thank You for Rebecca's hands, which fed all of us tonight the way they have fed all of us for longer than some of you have been alive. Thank You for David, who I understand has already demonstrated an alarming grip strength, and for Naomi and Jacob, who are going to need every bit of Your patience raising him that You have previously extended to raising them." A small ripple of laughter went around the table, and he let it, and waited it out with his eyes still closed. "And thank You for Levi, who I understand asked You a very hard question in a field three weeks ago and got an honest answer instead of an easy one, and is, as far as I can tell, still standing because of it. Amen."

"Amen," the table said back, not quite together, which somehow felt more honest than if we had been.

I will not attempt to describe everything that got eaten that night except to say that both pot roasts did not survive it, and that Curtis went back for a third helping of something with a straight face and no apology, and that Roiya laughed at something Rachel said hard enough that she had to put her fork down, and that for about ninety minutes, at that table, in that repaired house, under that absurdly bright porch light, nothing in the entire world was trying to kill any of us, and we were allowed to simply notice that and let it be enough.

We moved into the living room once the table had mostly emptied itself, the way we always do, and Rebecca had coffee going before anyone had to ask her for it, and something with cinnamon in it besides, specifically for Roiya, who took the mug from her with both hands like it was something considerably more valuable than hot chocolate.

David was down in the portable playpen Naomi had started bringing to Thursday dinners, working with tremendous, focused seriousness on a small stuffed lamb that Jeremiah had apparently bought him the week he was born, and I watched, not for the first time, as one of his fists closed slowly around it and the whole toy simply gave, seams and stuffing rearranging themselves under a grip that had no business belonging to something that young.

"He's going to need sturdier toys," I said.

"He's going to need a sturdier house," Jacob said, watching his son with an expression I still didn't entirely have a word for — something between pride and quiet, permanent vigilance, the specific look of a man who has already decided he will spend the rest of his life a little bit afraid and a little bit amazed by the exact same thing. Naomi sat on the arm of his chair with one hand resting on his shoulder, watching David with the particular clinical fondness of a woman who still, after everything, found her own son's biology the single most interesting subject available to her, and I thought, watching the two of them, that they had landed somewhere good, somewhere earned, on the other side of a delivery room that had nearly cost them everything before any of this had even properly started.

Rachel found the couch, and then found me on it, folding herself into the specific space along my side that had apparently been reserved for her the whole time whether I'd known it or not, and we sat like that for a while, not talking, just present, which after the last month felt like its own kind of luxury.

"We need to get married," she said, eventually, not looking up from where her head was resting against my chest.

"We're already getting married,” I said. “I proposed properly and everything. There was a whole thing."

"I mean soon. Actually soon. Not someday-soon." She sat up enough to look at me directly, and there was something in her face that made my stomach do the specific drop it does when I think she's about to tell me something's wrong. "As soon as we can reasonably manage it."

"Why the rush," I said, careful, already running through every threat I could think of that might still be out there, every loose thread neither of us had actually closed. "Is there something you're not telling me. Is there a reason."

She looked at me like I'd said something both very sweet and very stupid, which is, I've found, an expression she wears often enough around me that I should probably stop being surprised by it.

She pointed, instead of answering, across the room, to the playpen, where David had finally defeated the lamb entirely and was now regarding the wreckage of it with what looked, unmistakably, like satisfaction.

Then she settled back against me, and closed her eyes, and said it plainly, the way she says the things she's most certain of.

"I want one of those. With you. My husband."