The PowWow

David had gained weight. That was the first thing Naomi said when we walked in, before hello, before anything else — not a greeting so much as a status report she'd clearly been saving up to deliver the second she had an audience, because good news needs an audience or it doesn't feel entirely real.

"Four ounces since Tuesday," she said, and the pride in it was almost fierce. "He's off the feeding tube during the day now. They're talking about a room instead of the unit by the end of the week, if he keeps this up." She had him against her shoulder, one hand cupped over the back of his head the way she'd held him since the day he was born, and for the length of that sentence she looked like a woman with nothing more urgent in the world to think about than ounces.

I let myself have that for a second before the rest of it came back in. I think we both did.

"You look tired," Jacob said, which from him is practically a diagnosis.

"I am extremely tired," Naomi said. "I am also the only person in this family currently allowed to be tired about something ordinary, and I intend to enjoy that while it lasts." She shifted David slightly, and he made a small, discontented sound and settled again, and something in her face did the thing it does whenever he does that — a private, wondering softness that had nothing to do with the rest of the week at all. "How is it out there."

Jacob didn't dress it up for her, which I'd noticed he'd stopped doing sometime around — sometime around the hospital parking lot, if I'm honest, sometime around deciding a wife who does surgery for a living had earned the plain version of things. "Curtis was taken from the office. We were both in the room."

Naomi went very still, the specific stillness of someone doing the math on what "in the room" meant and choosing not to ask the rest of it out loud in front of her son. "I'm sorry," she said, and meant it, and didn't reach for anything bigger than that, because there wasn't anything bigger that would have actually helped.

"We'll manage," Jacob said, "for now," and that was as far as either of us wanted to take it in that particular room, with that particular audience currently working on his own fist with tremendous concentration.

We stayed a while. I held David for the first time since the delivery — he was heavier than I expected, and warmer, and entirely uninterested in the state of the world beyond whatever was directly in front of his face, which struck me as the single most reasonable position anyone in this family had taken all week. Naomi watched me hold him with an expression I couldn't fully read, something between amusement and relief, like she'd needed to see at least one uncomplicated thing happen today and this was going to have to be it.

Jacob and I left a little after eight, once David was down and Naomi was fighting her own eyes to stay upright in the chair beside him, and neither of us said much until we were in the parking garage, which by now had become its own kind of ritual — the last stretch of any hospital visit where the two of us finally said the things we hadn't wanted to say in front of her.

"Say it," I told him, because he had the look he gets when a thought's been assembling itself behind his teeth for the last twenty minutes.

"Count what we actually have," Jacob said, instead of whatever he'd been about to say, like he needed the inventory laid out before he could get to the point of it. "Jeremiah, gone. Rebecca, gone. Roiya, gone since the parking lot. Rachel and Mara, gone. Curtis, gone." He said each name flatly, not for effect, the way you'd read a casualty list because reading it any other way would be worse. "That is not a small list, Levi. That is most of the people either of us has ever actually trusted enough to call for help."

"I know what the list is."

"I need you to actually hear it, not just know it." He stopped walking, which meant I stopped too, both of us standing under a flickering garage light having the conversation neither of us had let ourselves have yet. "Because underneath the list there is a smaller, worse question, which is: what does that leave us. And I have been sitting with the honest answer to that for two days now, and it is this. It leaves us each other. And it leaves whatever we actually managed to keep, out of everything we were ever taught, once nobody was left standing over our shoulder to remind us of it."

"That's not nothing."

"I did not say it was nothing. I said it was what's left, which is a different sentence." He started walking again, slower now. "I keep waiting for someone wiser to walk into a room and tell me what to do next. Jeremiah would have a verse. Naomi would have data. Curtis would have three windows open and an answer inside an hour. And there is nobody left to do that for us right now except us, and I find that terrifying, and I also find — " he stopped again, and this time it wasn't for effect, it was because the sentence had genuinely surprised him on its way out — "I also find that we seem to actually know what to do. Which I did not expect to be true until just now, saying it out loud to you in a parking garage."

I thought about that for longer than it probably deserved. "You've been doing the math on whether they're still alive again."

"I have been doing a different math than before." He said it carefully, the way he says everything he's not yet sure he's earned the right to be certain about. "Ask yourself why Suriel takes anyone at all, Levi. Not persuades. Takes. He has spent years, as far as we can document him, getting what he wants through willingness, through patience, through people choosing him slowly enough that it never looked like force. This is the first time in anything we've ever seen him do that looks like force instead. So either something about him has fundamentally changed, or — " He turned to face me fully. "Or he needs something from us specifically that persuasion can't get him, and the only tool he has left for getting it is leverage. You do not build leverage out of bodies. A dead man cannot be dangled in front of anyone to make them comply with something. Leverage requires the person on the other end of it to still be capable of losing something. Which means every single one of them has to still be alive, or the entire strategy he is running does not function at all."

I stood with that for a second, feeling it land the way true things land, with a kind of quiet weight rather than relief exactly. "You think he wants something from us."

"I think he has always wanted something from us, and force is simply the method now instead of persuasion, because persuasion has apparently stopped working on this family the way it used to." Jacob's jaw did the thing it does. "Which means Roiya and Jeremiah and Rebecca and Rachel and Curtis are not a body count. They are a hand he is building, to hold against our throats later, for something he intends to ask us for when he judges we're desperate enough to give it to him."

"That's not exactly comforting, Jacob."

"It was not offered as comfort. It was offered as reasoning, and reasoning does not owe you comfort, only accuracy." But something in his face had eased anyway, the specific relief of a man who has finally found a load-bearing wall under a floor he'd been afraid was about to give out entirely. "I would rather have a true, terrible reason than a kind, unfounded one. A true reason tells me they are alive right now, tonight, in whatever room he's keeping them in. A kind guess tells me nothing at all."

I was shocked at the sheer number of words my brother had put together. Normally silent, deliberate, and a force of nature, he now expounded straight logic and wisdom. I was grateful for it and the comfort it provided, but still, maybe ten less words would have been about perfect.

We stood there a while longer in that garage, under a light that couldn't decide whether to work, and I found myself thinking about every sermon Jeremiah had ever half-finished at that dinner table, every time he'd said something and then just let it sit there instead of explaining it to death, trusting that eventually it would do its own work in us whether he was in the room to watch it happen or not.

"Ephesians," I said. "Having done all, to stand."

"James," Jacob said back. "Resist him, and he will flee." He almost smiled, the tired, real version rather than the performed one. "Nobody had to remind either of us of that just now. We simply arrived there. On our own, without sitting at Jeremiah’s feet for direction."

"That's the whole point, isn't it. That's what all of it was actually for."

"I believe so," Jacob said, and for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, he sounded like he meant it all the way down rather than saying it because the hour required something to be said.

We got in the Highlander. Neither of us started it right away.

"God will deliver them," Jacob said, into the quiet, and this time it didn't come out thin, or borrowed, or spoken because the shape of the sentence needed filling. It came out the way Jeremiah used to say things, settled underneath instead of balanced carefully on top.

"God will deliver them," I said back, and mine matched it, steadier than either of us had managed the first time we'd said it to each other, in a different parking lot, in a different week, before we'd learned what the sentence actually cost to mean.