The PowWow

I went to see Rachel every day.

I need that counted in my favor, because there's a lot that won't be, and this is one of the few things I did in those weeks that I'd do again exactly the same. Every day. Morning if I could manage it, evening if I couldn't, and if the day had gone sideways enough that it was almost tomorrow before I got free, I went anyway and sat with her while she pretended she hadn't been waiting up and I pretended I couldn't tell. She said several times that it wasn’t necessary, but acquiesced when I reminded her that I loved her and my place was at her side.

I want to also tell you the truth about where my mind went while I sat there, because a confession that only includes the flattering parts isn't a confession, it's a press release.

It went to the wall.

Not the whole time. Not even most of the time. But it went, in the gaps, in the quiet stretches while Rachel worked a crossword or dozed against the arm of the chair, and it went to the same place every time it went, which was the corner of my apartment with the red string, and it asked the same question every time it went there, which was: what's new. 

And the answer was the thing that was slowly driving me out of my mind.

Nothing was new. That was the state of my great and holy hunt after three months. I had a wall the size of a confessional and the sum total of what it had produced was the growing, grinding, sleepless understanding that a man Rachel had called smoke was, in fact, smoke, and that you cannot build a case out of a conviction, no matter how much red string you own, no matter how many nights you spend tying it. The board hadn't moved in weeks. And a board that doesn't move is just a mirror you've drawn a man's face on.

So I sat with Rachel, and I loved her, and part of me was in the corner of the apartment the whole time, and I told myself that finding Hawk was loving her, that the two were the same errand, and I got very good at not asking myself the follow-up question, which was whether I'd know how to stop hunting him even if she walked into the room on her own two feet and told me to.

That was where I was the Thursday I actually went to dinner.

I hadn't been in five weeks. Rebecca opened the door before I knocked — of course she did — and she didn't say anything about the five weeks, just put both hands on my face like she was checking I was all there and then pulled me inside toward the smell of a pot roast that had clearly been started with the specific faith that I'd show. She'd set my place either way. She always set my place. I'd learned a long time ago that the empty chair at Rebecca's table wasn't an accusation, it was a standing invitation that never once got rescinded. Though the empty space next to mine was heart wrenching.

Roiya's place was set too. Roiya's place was empty. Nobody said anything about that either, but Jeremiah's eyes went to it once, briefly, then over to where Rachel usually sat, and then went back to the table.

Mara was there.

She'd become a fixture over the last couple of years, the way people did in this house — quietly, without any single day you could point to as the one she'd stopped being a guest. The dye was long gone; her hair was its own color now, whatever the Lord had originally issued her, and she wore it plain. She helped Rebecca in the garden most weeks. She had a stillness about her that hadn't been there when I first met her, back when she was a frightened kid holding a card she'd been smart enough not to take, and she'd kept the thing that had made her smart enough — the discernment, the ear for a wrong note in a room full of right ones. She'd been able to feel something off about Devin Cross when grown adults couldn't. That gift hadn't gone anywhere. If anything, sitting for two years in Jeremiah's counsel had honed it.

She was quiet through most of dinner. She got quieter toward the end, in the way of a person working up to something, and Jeremiah — who missed nothing — set down his fork and gave her the room.

"You've got something," he said. Not a question. An opening.

Mara turned her water glass a little, and I thought, with a small cold drop in my stomach, of Rachel doing the same thing over a different table, and filed it, because filing was all I did now.

"Have you seen the new art?" she said. "Downtown. It's — it's everywhere all of a sudden. The murals, the big one on the Whitfield building, the gallery on Sixth that used to be a bank. Everybody's talking about it."

"Silas Auren," Jeremiah said.

I looked at him. That was fast, even for Jeremiah, and there was a weight in how he said the name, like he'd already had it in his mouth for a while and hadn't decided yet what it tasted like.

"You know him," Mara said.

"I know of him. He's been the only thing anyone in this city can talk about for a month. Gallery openings people line up around the block for. Prints in every coffee shop. A mural downtown that the mayor's office is calling a gift to the city." Jeremiah folded his hands. "Tell me what you saw."

Mara took a second.

"It's beautiful," she said, and the way she said beautiful had a bruise on it. "That's the first thing. I want to be fair to it, because — it's not ugly, it's not creepy, it doesn't look wrong. It looks like the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. I stood in front of the big one for I don't even know how long. I didn't want to leave. It was like being thirsty and the painting was water."

"That's not a complaint," I said, before I could stop myself. The investigator in me had woken up an inch. "A lot of art is supposed to do that."

"I know." She looked at me, and there was no defensiveness in it, just that steady watchfulness. "That's why I almost didn't say anything. But I watched the other people. That's the thing. I watched what everybody looked like when they walked away from it." She paused, hunting for it the way Isaiah had once hunted for the word delphinium, except there was nothing borrowed in Mara's hunting, just a kid trying to describe something real that didn't have a shelf to sit on. "They looked full. Like they'd gotten something and they didn't need anything else. And then they were — colder. To each other. There was a man who dropped his whole coffee right at the exit and nobody moved. Nobody. In front of the most beautiful thing in the city, nobody bent down. They just stepped around him and looked at their phones, and half of them were looking at pictures of themselves they'd just taken in front of it."

The table was quiet.

"I felt it pull at me too," Mara said, quieter now. "That's the part I keep coming back to. It wanted me to keep looking at it, and it wanted the looking to be — enough. Like there was nothing past it worth turning my head for. And something in me said no. I don't know how else to say it. Something in me said don't, the exact same way it said don't about the card, all those years ago." She looked at Jeremiah. "So I came to you. Because you're the one who told me that feeling was worth trusting."

Jeremiah didn't answer right away. He had the look he got when something had just clicked into a slot he'd been holding open, and I watched him turn it over with the same care he'd once turned over the letters G61 on a pavement.

"'Because that which may be known of God is manifest,'" he said, mostly to himself, "'for God hath shewed it unto them.'" Then, to the room: "Romans. Paul's writing about people who could see the truth in everything God made, and who took all that glory and aimed it the wrong direction. 'They changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator.'" He looked up. "Beauty that makes you look at the beauty. And then at yourself. And never once past either one."

"You think it's him," I said. I didn't say the name. I didn't have to. Everyone at that table had learned to hear it in the shape of a sentence.

"I think," Jeremiah said carefully, "that a gift this large, arriving this fast, doing this to a whole city at once, is exactly the kind of thing I've learned to walk toward instead of away from." He looked at me, and something in his face was asking a question that had nothing to do with Silas Auren. "The question is who's able to go look."

And there it was — the old machinery, the case landing on the table the way cases had always landed on this table, Jeremiah finding them and the rest of us going to see what there was to see. Two years ago I'd have already been reaching for my keys.

I felt the pull of it. I want that on the record too. Some part of me stood up straight for the first time in months, recognized the shape of a real thing, a wrong thing, the kind of wrong I was actually built to walk toward.

And then the black hole in the back of my skull, the one that had eaten the filing cabinet and the warehouse and everything else, exerted its gravity, and I thought — God forgive me, but I thought it, clear as a bell — this isn't Hawk. And the standing-up-straight part of me turned back to red yarn on a wall board.

"I'll look into it," I said. Which was true, and which I meant at about sixty percent, okay forty, and which was going to turn out to matter a great deal more than the rest I was holding back for a phantom.

I brought it to Rachel the next morning, mostly for something to talk about that wasn't the chair.

I did not expect what happened. It was as though she took her first breath after being dead.

I gave her the short version over coffee at her kitchen table — the art, the ubiquity, Mara's read, Jeremiah's Romans verse, the thing about the dropped coffee and the phones — and I watched something come back into my fiancée's face that I hadn't seen in three months, and I hadn't understood until that exact moment how much I'd been missing it.

She sat up. Actually sat up, in the chair, her spine doing the thing it used to do across a monitor in a dim IT room the first week I knew her, the posture of a woman who has just been handed a problem worth being alive for.

"Silas Auren," she said, and she was already reaching for the laptop on the counter, already rolling herself the two feet to get it, waving me off when I moved to help — I've got it, Levi — and there was no edge in the I've got it this time, none of the flat resentment she'd been arming that phrase with for weeks. Just a woman getting her own laptop because her hands worked and her mind worked and by God at least those two things still answered when she called them.

I understood it then, watching her. Medical leave had taken more than her legs took from her. It had taken the badge, the desk, the whole apparatus that stood between Rachel and the question she'd been dodging since the parking lot, which was who am I if I'm not the person who catches them. Three months of physical therapy and lowered counters and a city full of stairs had answered that question in the cruelest possible way, over and over: you're the woman in the chair. And here, sliding across her own kitchen table, was another answer. A better one. An old one. A rope thrown to a drowning woman, and she took it the way the drowning take rope, with both hands, desperation, and no intention of ever letting go.

"There's a pattern to how fast this happened," she said, already typing, already three windows deep, already the detective. "Nobody's everywhere in a month organically. Somebody bought that. Gallery space, mural permits, the coffee-shop prints — that's a distribution network, that costs money, and money leaves a shape. Get me whatever Curtis has on the funding and I'll tell you if the shape is normal."

"You want to work it," I said. Stupidly. Grinning like an idiot.

"I want to work it." She looked up at me, and for one whole unbroken second the walls weren't there — not down, exactly, but with a door thrown open in them that I could see clean through — and she was just Rachel, sharp and alive and hers again, mine again, the woman from before the lantern light. "Don't look at me like that."

"Like what."

"Like you just got something back." She turned back to the screen, but her mouth was doing the thing, the almost, the one I'd spent two years learning to earn. "Get me the funding, Levi."

I sat there for a second and I let my heart do what it wanted to do, which was warm all the way through, because this — this was the first genuinely good thing that had happened in the apartment, her place, or anyone's in three months, my Rachel with a rope in her hands, hauling herself up it hand over hand.

I let it warm me.

And then, because I was who I'd let myself become, I felt the other thing move underneath it, patient and cold and gravitational, the thought I couldn't fully turn off even in the middle of the best moment I'd had all season: that Curtis's funding-shape work would take a day, maybe two, and that in that day, maybe two, I could run down the Delridge cousin I'd been circling, the three-degrees-of-nothing thread, because the board hadn't moved in weeks and something, something, had to move.

Rachel had found a reason to still be who she was.

I let it warm me for exactly as long as it took to start planning around it.

Then I promised to get with Curtis and I drove home, and I stood in front of the wall.