The PowWow

Thursday came, and it came with peace, and I'd been gone from peace so long I almost didn't recognize it walking in the door that Rebecca opened before Rachel and I could knock, of course.

The house was home again. Warm lamplight, the baked smell Rebecca still dismissed as nothing special, the quality of a space that knew it was a home and behaved accordingly. My place was set. My place was always set. But this time I was in it, on time, showered and rested and there, and I understood — settling into the chair I'd left empty four Thursdays running — that being in your seat at a table that never stopped saving it for you is its own kind of grace, one I'd spent a whole season too proud and too broken to accept.

The case was won, and you could feel the win in the room, quiet and clean. Silas Auren had sent a card — an actual card, hand-lettered, the man could not help but make even a thank-you note beautiful — and in it he'd written that he'd begun the work of taking his canvases back, one at a time, and that it was the hardest and best thing he'd ever done, and that he'd found a small church that didn't know who he was and liked it that way. Jeremiah read it aloud and set it on the mantel, next to the others.

Because there were others. That was the thing that got me, sitting there — the mantel had a small collection now, cards and notes and photographs, a quiet gallery of its own. Mara, who was at the table, who was family, who'd once held a card she was smart enough not to take. Word from Fletcher, who was still going to his appointments, still going with his four brothers-in-arms, still learning to receive. A note, months old, from a pastor named Vale who'd rebuilt something small and true out of the wreck of something large and false. A circle of the already-rescued, the fruit of years of walking into rooms that didn't want light — most of them people Suriel had used and discarded, and every one of them pulled back out and handed home. Silas's card just made the collection one larger.

I looked at that mantel a long time. It helped, later, with the part that didn't have a card on it.

Jacob and Naomi sat across from me in two chairs, and looked like one person.

I don't know how to describe it better than that. They weren't touching, particularly, weren't doing anything you could point at — they just occupied their two seats the way a single thing occupies space, finishing each other's reaches for the salt, tilting toward each other by some gravity that had stopped needing permission. One flesh. You could see it now, plain, the thing Scripture means by it, and I thought about how far Jacob had come from a man on a gym floor learning the difference between having strength and being had by it, and I had to look at my plate for a second.

At the head of the table, Jeremiah was making a nuisance of himself in the direction of his wife. He'd been married to Rebecca longer than I'd been alive and he still watched her cross a room like it was the first good thing he'd seen all day — when she was looking, and, I caught it twice, more tenderly when she wasn't. In the kitchen he teased her without mercy and stole bites off the platters before she could set them down, and she swatted at his hand and called him an old fool and neither of them meant a word of the swatting, and that, right there, forty years in — that was the whole sermon. That was worship pointed the right direction, up and out, from God running downhill into a marriage, and back up to the God who built it. I'd grown up watching it and I'd never once, until that Thursday, understood how much I'd been watching.

And beside me was Rachel.

Still in the chair. She came to Thursday dinner in her wheelchair, the same as she'd come for months. The healing that had started in her living room was coming the way real healing comes, slow, in inches, a few trembling steps between the counter and the couch, a little more each day, a promise being kept on its own schedule and not mine. Physical therapy actually enjoyed and looked forward to. Some Thursdays down the road she'd walk into this house on her own feet. Not yet.

And it didn't matter. That was the glory of it. She was still in the chair, and she was not in a prison anymore, and there is all the difference in the world between those two things. The altar was gone. She'd stopped bowing to the chair, stopped letting it tell her who she was, and with the idol torn down what was left in that seat was just Rachel — lively, funny, wholly herself, trading jokes with Naomi across the table fast enough that I lost the thread of half of them, glowing with a joy I'd been terrified I'd never see again. At one point she reached over and took Naomi's hand and apologized, quietly, one more time, for the cabinet and the coffee mug and all the sharp weeks when the chair had been an idol and she'd swung it at the person who'd given up a month to help her. Naomi said of course, and meant it, and squeezed her hand, and that was that.

She was Rachel. My Rachel, my fiancée, restored and radiant in a wheelchair at my family's table, and I sat there and felt my heart do something that should probably have required a doctor.

But not everything at that table had a card on the mantel.

Roiya's place was set. Roiya's place was empty. It had been empty at the alley when the cuffs came off and she'd walked away into the dark with disappointment cooling on her face, and it was empty now, and no one knew where she was, and everyone knew who had her.

And Curtis was there, at the table, and Curtis was gone.

He sat with us and he ate what Rebecca put in front of him and he answered when spoken to, and none of it reached his eyes. The man who narrated his own keystrokes had gone quiet in a way that had nothing left of fury in it, only grief, the specific hollow grief of someone who'd loved a person all the way and watched something reach in and start hollowing them out and had not been able to stop it. He'd said no to her, the one time it counted, and it had cost him everything, and he'd have paid it again in a heartbeat and it still wouldn't have been enough. He kept glancing at the empty chair. We all did. But Curtis glanced at it like a man watching a door he'd give his life to have somebody walk back through.

We talked about it, once the plates were cleared. Plainly, the way this family had finally learned to do everything.

We'd been the case this time. That was the thing we made ourselves say out loud. Every other time, across every other book of our lives, there'd been a client — an outsider, a stranger, a story that came to Jeremiah's door with a wrong thing and let us walk toward it. Not this time. This time Suriel hadn't sent us a case. He'd made us one. He'd reached past the door and into the house and worked us like clay, almost all of us, every private fault line — my grief, Rachel's chair, the strain in every seam of this family — and he'd done it not to win a gallery, which he'd handed us like a coat, but to take a daughter of this house out from under its roof one degree at a time while we congratulated ourselves on the painting.

I prayed about it before Jeremiah closed us. Out loud, which I don't always do — but I'd learned some things about what I owed this table. I prayed with everything I had, direct and purposeful, no hedging, real repentance for the whole ruined season, for the wall and the meanness and the doors I'd left standing open, and then past the repentance into the asking: for wisdom to rebuild. To rebuild me, and Rachel and me, and the frayed places I'd worn in every one of these people, and the wider circle my long blindness had let go untended. Give me the wisdom to put back what I let get broken. I meant it all the way down. It was the truest prayer I'd prayed in a year.

Then Jeremiah closed us, the way he'd closed a thousand nights in that room, and he gave us the only cure there has ever been for any of it.

"We keep making the same mistake," he said, hands folded, unhurried. "Every idol in this whole long trouble was the same idol wearing different clothes. Levi's wall. Rachel's chair. Roiya's fists. Silas's mirror. Every one of them a heart curved back in on itself, worshipping the creature, worshipping the wound, worshipping the self — and there is only one cure for it, and there has only ever been one, and it is not complicated, though the Lord knows it is hard." He looked around the table, at every one of us, and last and longest at the empty chair. "You turn it back around. You take the love and the worship you've bent inward and you point it up, at God, and out, at each other, where it was always meant to go. That's it. That's the whole of it. Off yourself. Onto Him. Every time. For the rest of your life."

He bowed his head, and we bowed ours, and he thanked God for the win and the wine and the woman healing beside me, and he asked, without flinching, for the strength that the next part was going to take.

Because the next part had already started.

Our sister was out there in the dark, cuffed to a chair none of us could see, and the hands on her weren't Byron Hawk's, and the war for Roiya — the real one, the only one that had ever mattered, the one Suriel had been fighting the whole time we thought we were solving a case — had only just begun.

I stayed after the others drifted toward coffee, and I said my own prayer, quiet, just me and Him, the way I'd learned to again on a wheelchair ramp in the dusk.

Lord. Grant me strength. Grant me discernment. I'm going to need both, more than I ever have, because this fight isn't like the others. 

The others had all been out there. On the horizon. A client's house, a gallery, an archive, a stage — somewhere you drove to, walked into, brought the light, came home from. Something you could stand outside of and look at.

Not this one.

This one was already inside. Suriel wasn't a shape on the horizon anymore, a thing you went to meet. He'd come all the way in, past the tape, past the door, past every wall we thought we had — into the house, into the family, into a chair at this very table that should have had our sister in it.

The enemy wasn't out there.

He'd been in the house the whole time.

Grant me discernment, Lord, I prayed, and I looked at the empty chair, and I did not look away from it. With your grace, we're going to go get her back. Thus ends book 8