The PowWow

I drove to Rachel's like a man driving to his own sentencing, which is to say too fast and then, for the last four blocks, absurdly slow, as if the car could stall the thing my whole life now depended on.

My snark came back on the way over, it had been gone — the real thing, not the acrid stuff I'd been swinging at people like a bat — and somewhere around the second red light it came back online like a pilot light catching, and I found myself narrating my own cowardice to myself in the old voice. You've faced down a Fallen angel four times, Levi. You watched your brother suplex a man through a demonstration of pride. And here you are white-knuckling a steering wheel because you have to knock on a door. Very impressive. Truly the strong one. It was good to have him back, the voice. It meant somebody was home again who wasn't just teeth.

It did not, however, make the walk up the ramp any shorter.

I stood at her door and I made myself a promise before I knocked, the kind you make when you've finally understood the size of what you've wrecked. Whatever this took. However long. Whatever it cost me in pride or comfort or time — I would do it. I'd abandoned her inside the worst season of her life. I was going to spend whatever I had to spend to make that right.

Then I knocked, because promises are cheap until a door opens.

It opened.

Rachel sat in the frame of it in her chair, and she looked at me for a long second, and her face did a thing I'd have to spend a while unpacking. The first layer was cold. Fair enough. I'd earned the cold, earned it a machine-comment and a dozen turned-down evenings and three months of a man staring at a wall. But under the cold — and I saw it, the machine was running clean now, and it caught what the cold was sitting on top of — under it was hope. A small, guarded, badly-defended hope, the kind a person tries not to have because they've priced out what it costs when it goes wrong.

That hope nearly took my legs out from under me right there on the ramp.

"Levi," she said.

"Can I come in."

She looked at me another beat. Then she backed the chair up to make room — smooth, easy, the movement costing her nothing it would have cost her three months ago, though I only half-clocked that, filed it in the good drawer for once — and she said, "You'd better."

I came in. I closed the door behind me.

And then, before I'd planned to, before I'd decided to, before any part of the careful speech I'd built in the car could deploy — I went down onto my knees on her living room floor.

She turned the chair around. I heard the wheels. I couldn't look up yet.

"Levi." Different now — startled, a little alarmed. "What are you — get up. What are you doing."

I couldn't. That's the honest thing. I'd have needed a whole man to get up and I wasn't one yet, I was a man in the middle of becoming one again, and the becoming had put me on the floor and it was going to keep me there until it was done with me.

It came for the second time that day. I'd wept in Jeremiah's living room not an hour before and I'd have told you I was wrung out, that there couldn't be more, and I'd have been wrong, because the grief at Jeremiah's had been for God and for myself and this was different, this was for her, aimed straight at the person I'd hurt, and it came up out of me like it had been waiting behind a door I'd finally stopped holding shut.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Rachel. I am so sorry."

"Levi—"

"No, let me—" I got the heels of my hands against my eyes and made myself say the true thing, the whole ugly shape of it, out loud, to her face. "I pushed you away. Three months, I pushed you away, and I told myself I was doing it for you, that finding him, hurting him, making somebody pay for what happened to you — I told myself that was love. That it was the only thing I had to give you, so I'd give it, I'd give it harder than anybody ever gave anything." My voice broke on it. "And it wasn't love. It was the exact opposite of love wearing love's coat. Hawk shot you. And I —" I made myself finish it. "I left you alone in the worst thing that ever happened to you, so I could go chase the man who did it. He took your legs, Rachel. And while you were learning how to live, I took everything else. I hurt you worse than he did. He put you in a chair. I left you in it by yourself."

The room was very quiet.

Then, from above me, I heard her let out a breath that had a crack running through the middle of it.

"Yeah," she said softly. "You did."

She didn't soften it. That was Rachel. She looked down at my wrecked face turned up to hers and she agreed with me, because the wound was deep and pretending it was shallow would have been its own kind of insult, and I loved her so much in that second for not lying to me that it hurt worse than the true thing had.

"You want to know the part you're going to hate," she said. And she reached down and took one of my hands off my face and held it, in both of hers, in her lap. "You did to yourself the exact thing I did. A year ago. In that room at the station." Her thumb moved over my knuckles. "You remember what you told me? You sat me down in front of my wall — my Byron wall, Levi, the same man, you built a shrine to the same man I did — and you told me that somewhere along the way it had stopped being something I was doing." Her eyes were wet now too. "And started being something that was doing me."

My own words. Handed back to me across a year, gentle, from a chair, by the person I'd said them to, who'd needed them then and had kept them, it turned out, the whole time, so she'd have them ready for the day I needed them worse.

"It ate you," she said. "The way it ate me. I watched it do it and I couldn't get to you, because you'd walled me out, same as I walled you out, and the only difference is I had love to talk me down and you never let anyone in.”

And then we were both just crying, her hand around mine, the two of us in the middle of her living room finally, finally pointed at the same grief from the same side of it, and it broke in me like a fever breaks — I felt it go, felt the thing that had run me for three months lose its grip all at once, the black hole collapsing in on its own emptiness, the wall in my apartment becoming, in the space of a held breath, exactly what it had always been: cork and string and a man's misplaced heart.

The fever broke.

I need to be careful how I say the next part, because I didn't understand it until much later and it cost us. The fever broke. The obsession broke. But the thing that had lived underneath the obsession — the rage, the raw red original thing, the part of me that had stood in a lit gym with my hand an inch from a man's throat and wanted — that didn't break. It only lost its throne. The idol came down and I thought that meant the whole temple was empty, and it wasn't. Something was still in there, dethroned and quiet and patient, sitting in the dark where the wall used to be.

She shifted her legs in the chair and took a firmer grip on my hand. She held my hand through all of it, and steadied me.

She was steadying me. 

I thought — kneeling there, coming back together, my hand in both of hers — I thought we were holding each other. I thought this was the two of us climbing out. It wasn't. It was her, on her own strength, from her own chair, reaching down and holding a drowned man's hand until he got his feet back — the way she'd learned to do everything now, from below, from the chair, doing the heavy thing while everyone assumed she was the one being carried.

And she was doing it, I would understand far too late, precisely because she'd decided to let me go. She wasn't holding my hand to hold on. She was holding it to make sure I could stand without her before she stepped back. She was steadying the man so the leaving wouldn't knock him down. That's what her love had curdled into by then, the beautiful terrible sacrificial wrong of it — a woman using the last of her grip to make her own absence survivable.

I felt loved. I was loved. I just had the direction of it wrong.

I stayed a long time. We talked, really talked, the way we hadn't in a season, and somewhere in it I finally said the thing I'd owed her for weeks.

"The art case," I said. "What you did. From here, from the chair, with a laptop and a phone — you built something a task force couldn't have built. You put Suriel's own name at the root of it. Rachel, you were magnificent. I should have said it the day you did it and I was too far gone to see straight, so I'm saying it now. You're the best investigator I've ever worked with. Standing or sitting or any other way."

She smiled. She thanked me. It was real; she meant it.

And I was so lit up with the relief of finally saying a true good thing to her, so certain I'd just handed her something that mended a piece of it, that I did not see the small thing move behind her eyes when I said from the chair. Did not see that I'd praised the wrong thing — that I'd told a woman grieving her legs how impressive she was from the chair, how good she was at the thing she could still do sitting down, and that every sentence I'd built to lift her up still had the chair sitting right there in the middle of it, load-bearing, inescapable, the way it was load-bearing in every sentence of her whole new life.

I'd affirmed what she could do. She was mourning what she was. Those aren't the same wound, and my bandage was on the wrong one, and I was too busy being proud of finally reaching for a bandage at all to notice it hadn't landed.

I drove home lighter than I'd been in three months, certain I'd started to fix it.

I'd fixed something. Just not the thing she was actually bleeding from.

And behind me, in a chair, in a quiet apartment, the woman I loved kept steadying herself for a goodbye I still couldn't hear coming.