The PowWow

Richard answered the door this time, alone, with the visible weariness of a man who'd been wrestling with questions he didn't have the tools to answer for going on a month now and had started, somewhere in the last week, to look a little bit like he was losing the fight against it.

"Heather's putting Isaiah down for a nap," he said, stepping back to let us in. "He's — active lately. More than usual. Doesn't want to stop moving."

"Kids get like that," I said, which was true and also not remotely what either of us was actually talking about.

We sat in the same living room as before, the same coffee Heather produced a few minutes later before joining us. The house was still quiet, like a held breath. Jacob took the same chair he'd taken the first visit, hands loose on his knees, and waited with the patience of a man who understood that some conversations needed room to arrive on their own schedule rather than being marched into directly.

"Anything new?" I asked, once we'd gotten through the obligatory first few minutes of how's-he-doing.

Richard and Heather exchanged a look — deciding, without words, who was going to carry the next part of the sentence.

"More of the same," Heather said finally. "He talks about it less unprompted now, which I think is good, but if you ask him — if you actually sit down and ask — it's all still there. Exactly the same details. Nothing's faded. If anything he adds small things. Yesterday he mentioned my mother's rose bushes. Said Great-Grandpa Whit told him they used to smell like something specific, some flower Isaiah couldn't name, but my mother's actually allergic to roses. Never grew a single one in her life."

"So that one didn't match," I said.

"No," Heather said. "That one didn't match anything. Which almost bothers me more."

I glanced at Jacob. He'd gone very still in the way that meant he was filing that detail somewhere important, though his face gave away nothing about where. I wondered how full his mental filing cabinet was.

"The advice keeps coming too," Richard said. He rubbed a hand across his jaw, the gesture of a man who'd rehearsed this next part and still didn't love saying it out loud. "Not just my grandfather being proud of him. Actual — guidance. Whit told him again last week, about the money. Said something about not letting it sit still, that money that doesn't grow is money that's dying. Isaiah's eight. He shouldn't know what compound interest is, let alone be repeating financial philosophy like he memorized it from a dead man's mouth."

"Has he ever heard that phrase anywhere?" I asked. "School, television, you talking business on the phone where he could've overheard—"

"I've asked myself that a hundred times," Richard said. "I don't talk shop in front of him. Never have. Heather doesn't either." He looked at his wife, and she shook her head, confirming it without needing to say the words again.

Jacob leaned forward slightly, an ice flow calving from a glacier, the first real movement he'd made since sitting down.

"I want to say something," he said, "and I want you to hear it the way I mean it, not the way it might sound at first."

Richard's jaw tightened, bracing, the posture of a man who'd had a lot of professionals tell him a lot of things in the last month and had developed a reflexive wariness about all of it.

"Go ahead," he said.

"What your son experienced," Jacob said, slow, careful, each word placed the way he placed everything, "was not your grandfather. Was not your great-grandfather. I don't believe Isaiah met the dead."

The room went quiet in a specific way — not offended, not yet, but bracing.

"You don't believe in the afterlife?" Richard asked, an edge creeping into it.

"I believe in it completely," Jacob said. "That is not the question. The question is whether the dead who are with the Lord can be summoned back to speak with the living, and Scripture is very clear that they cannot. Once someone is with God, they do not return. Not to comfort us. Not to advise us. Not for any reason, however loving it might feel."

Jacob had almost used more words than when he told me about the proposal to Naomi. His internal filing cabinet must be overflowing.

"Then what did he see?" Heather asked. Quiet. Genuinely asking, not defending anything yet.

"I don't know yet," Jacob said. "But I know it wasn't them."

Richard sat with that for a moment, and I watched something in him search for a foothold, the way a man does when the ground under a comforting idea starts shifting and he goes looking, fast, for anything solid to grab.

"The Book of Enoch," he said.

I blinked. "The what, now."

"I did some reading," Richard said, a little defensive now, the tone of a man who'd clearly spent some late nights on this and wasn't going to be talked out of the homework that easily. "Enoch. In the Bible — Genesis says he walked with God and then he was not, for God took him. But there's a whole book, an ancient one, that talks about him coming back afterward. Visiting his family. Telling them what he'd seen." He looked at Jacob directly now, something almost hopeful in it. "So there's precedent. Somewhere in our own tradition, there's precedent for exactly this."

Jacob didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice had gone gentler, not softer in conviction, just softer in delivery — the voice of a man correcting someone he genuinely didn't want to wound in the correcting.

"The Book of Enoch is not Scripture," he said. "It was never received as canon by the church, Jewish or Christian, outside of a small handful of traditions that hold a different canon than most of the world does. It contains things that are interesting, and some things that may even carry threads of truth in them, the way old folklore sometimes does. But it is not the Word of God, and building a family's grief on top of it is building on something that was never meant to bear that weight."

"But it's not nothing," Richard pressed. "People wrote it down. People believed it."

"People have written down a great many things," Jacob said. "Not all of it was given by God. That is exactly why we have a canon at all — because the church, guided by the Spirit, discerned which books revealed the signs and prophecies of Christ and which did not. Enoch was set aside. Not because it's evil. Because it speaks of someone other than Christ."

Richard opened his mouth like he had another argument loaded, and then didn't use it. He looked instead at his hands, the posture of a man who'd been reaching for a rope and just been told, gently but completely, that the rope wasn't attached to anything.

Heather was the one who broke the silence. "What do we do, then? Because whatever's happening to him is real. I don't care what it is or isn't — it's real to him, and I can't just tell my son that his grandfather didn't visit him without giving him something else to hold onto."

I leaned forward, because this part I could actually help with. Maybe even with less words.

"Love him the way you already do," I said. "That part doesn't change. He's not broken, and he's not lying, and none of this is his fault — whatever's happening to him is happening to him, not because of him. Keep doing exactly what you're doing there."

"And the rest of it?" Richard asked.

"The rest of it," I said, "I think would help if Isaiah spent some time with a man named Jeremiah. He raised us — Jacob and me both — and he has a gift for helping people find real ground under their feet when everything else has gotten a little slippery. Not to interrogate him. Just to be around him. Let him be a kid around those that know exactly what they believe and isn't afraid to model it by living it."

I think a few files emptied out. Have to start somewhere.

Heather looked at Richard. Something passed between them, wordless, the negotiation of two exhausted people deciding together whether to trust two near-strangers with something as precious as their son's afternoons.

"We'll think about it," Richard said, which wasn't a yes, but wasn't the reflexive no I'd half-braced for either.

"That's all I'm asking," I said.

We stood to leave a few minutes later, and Richard walked us to the door himself, Heather trailing behind with her arms crossed over herself in the way of a woman holding herself together by holding herself.

At the door, Richard stopped, hand on the frame.

"The Book of Enoch," he said, quieter now, more like a man asking a real question than a man defending a position. "You've read it?"

"We have," Jacob said.

"And you don't think there's anything to it."

"I think there are things in this world worth reading," Jacob said, "and things worth believing, and they are not always the same list. Read it if you want. Just don't stand on it. It was never built to hold weight."

“Think of it this way,” I added. “Scripture is the testimony we build our lives on. The Book of Enoch is the book on the nightstand that keeps you up too late asking interesting questions.”

Richard nodded slowly, and something in his face had eased slightly, not resolved, but eased, the particular relief of a man who'd been given an actual answer instead of another question to carry.

We walked back to the car in the heat, which hadn't broken and showed no interest in breaking anytime soon.

"That was good," I said. "The Enoch thing. I wouldn't have known where to go with that."

"Yes you would," Jacob said. "It sounds like Scripture. It uses the right names. That is exactly what makes it dangerous to lean on. You’d have been fine."

I thought about that the rest of the drive — the right names, the right feeling, the comforting shape of something that wasn't quite true wearing the exact right clothes to be mistaken for something that was. I thought about Isaiah's rose bushes that didn't match anything, and Whit's advice about money that dies if it sits still, and a garden with nothing in it but green and white and the vague suggestion of family.

The right names. The right feeling.

I didn't love how familiar that pattern was starting to feel.