The PowWow

“Should we have called Rachel for this?” I asked.

Jacob looked at me, then back to the road. “You didn’t ask her yesterday when you went down there.”

“Well, there might be a need for her if the husband is there.”

"It's a family matter," Jacob said.

I thought about it for a moment. "Yeah," I said. "It is."

That was the whole conversation. We drove the rest of the way in the comfortable quiet of two people who had resolved something without needing to make much of it.

We parked in the same spot I had used three days ago. Down the road, far enough, the Highlander unremarkable among the other cars on the street. The house looked the same — ordinary, tended, a normal house on a normal street with a driveway that currently contained the problem.

Royce's car. In the driveway. We had hoped for a window when he wasn't there.

I looked at the driveway. Then at Jacob. “Rachel?”

"We wait," Jacob said.

I nodded. Looked at the driveway again. Looked at the house. Looked back at the driveway.

"We could—" I started.

Jacob looked at me.

"We could say we're from — some kind of survey. Door to door. Neighborhood thing." I heard it as I said it. "No. That's — we'd have to have materials. Clipboards. Something."

Jacob said nothing.

"We could park further down and come from the other direction, which changes nothing about the fundamental situation but might—" I stopped. "No. That also doesn't help."

Jacob shook his head. Slowly. The head shake of a man with infinite patience and a finite supply of siblings.

"We could just wait," I said.

"Yes," Jacob said.

"Which is what you said."

"Yes."

I looked at the driveway. "I think I'm hyperventilating a little."

Jacob reached over and put his hand on my shoulder. Not a pat. Just his hand, resting there with the weight of someone who understood that some moments needed an anchor before they needed anything else.

He looked at me until I looked at him.

Then, quietly:

"Create in me a pure heart, O God," he said. "And renew a steadfast spirit within me."

Psalm 51. Not recited — the way Jacob never recited anything. Placed. With the certainty of a man who had found the right tool for the right moment and used it without ceremony.

I let it land.

"Pray with me," he said.

I bowed my head. He did the same.

I prayed with him, because he was right. I asked for a pure heart going into whatever the next hour held. For the steadfast spirit the psalm asked for. For Roiya, who didn't know we were parked down the road from her house and didn't know anyone was looking, and for the right words when the door opened.

When I lifted my head the hyperventilating had stopped.

Not because I had managed it. Because something else had arrived and there wasn't room for both. A calm that isn't the absence of feeling but the presence of something larger — purpose, maybe, or the peace that comes when you have put what you're carrying into hands that can hold it better than yours can.

I sat with it. Jacob sat with it too.

The Highlander was quiet. Jacob was patient. I was patient in my way — by running through every remaining scenario and arriving, each time, at the one where we waited. Royce's car in the driveway. The morning going about itself around us. The street unremarkable, the house unremarkable, everything ordinary except for the two of us sitting in a car with a piece of paper that had changed everything.

Mid-morning, the front door opened.

Royce came out. Professional clothes — the put-together of a man who understood that appearance was a kind of argument and had decided to win it. He moved toward his car without hurrying, without any awareness of the Highlander parked down the road, without looking at anything around him. A man either unaware of his surroundings, or so certain of control that he saw no reason to check them.

He got in the car. Backed out of the driveway. Drove in the opposite direction.

We watched him go.

"Twenty minutes," Jacob said.

We waited twenty minutes. Eternity might not be quite as long as we waited.

Then we got out of the car.

The walk to the door was shorter than it felt. The Calling arrived before we reached the front path — not the full frequency of close contact, but the leading edge of it, the awareness of proximity to kindred blood. I glanced at Jacob. He had felt it too. He didn't break stride.

I reached for the door.

It opened before I knocked.

She was there.

Everything I remembered from the Highlander the last time — the height, the broad shoulders, the long dark hair pulled back with practical efficiency — confirmed at close range and then some. Up close the Calling was immediate and mutual and entirely unmistakable. The same frequency I had felt in the car, now at full volume, recognizing and being recognized, the tuning fork finding its note in something that had been waiting to resonate.

She felt it too. I could see it — the slight widening of her eyes, the particular disorientation of someone who has just had a sensation arrive that they have no category for and no way to account for and no framework to put around. She looked at us the way you look at something you know before you understand why you know it.

She looked at me. Then at Jacob. Then at me again.

"I don't know either of you," she said. Her voice was steady, which told me something about her. "But why do I know I know you somehow?"

I looked at Jacob.

Jacob looked at her with the quiet certainty he brought to things he had already understood — things that didn't require his processing because they had arrived already whole.

I looked back at her.

"Because you do," I said. "Can we come in?"

She stood in the doorway for a moment. The expression of someone making a decision they can feel the weight of — not reckless, not blind, but making it anyway because something in her has already decided even if the rest of her is still catching up.

She stepped back from the door.

We went in.