“You have to hold still,” said the tailor.
“I have to go.” I stepped off the carpet with the jacket half-pinned to me, and the old man swore, and Pietro looked up, and Sal’s head came around slow, that geological face starting to assemble itself into a question.
“Where?” Sal said.
I didn’t answer him. I shrugged out of the basted jacket and handed it to the tailor and grabbed my coat, and I think I said something funny on the way out, I usually do, but I don’t remember what, because my hands were already cold inside me with a feeling I couldn’t name and didn’t want to, and all of me had turned toward one warm gold window like a body turning toward fire on a cold night.
I couldn’t help it. That’s the truth of it. I couldn’t help myself.
IknewbeforeIparked.You always know before you know.
The light was wrong. Not the warm gold I’d driven toward, not the ovens throwing heat against steamed glass—there was no glass to steam. Where the front window of Filoxenia should have been, where FILOXENIA had been painted in its worn green, there was a sheet of raw plywood, pale and new and ugly, screwed crooked over the hole, and the green letters were broken across it where they’d salvaged what they could and given up.
I got out of the car and crossed the street.
Fuck.
The glass was still on the sidewalk. Some of it. Swept into a pile against the wall but not gone yet, catching the streetlight, and there were fresh screws in the plywood and a tarp folded by the door and the smell—that was the part that put a stone in my chest—the smell of woodsmoke that didn’t belong, that wasn’t the deck oven, that was wrong, charred, chemical underneath. I looked down. Below the plywood, against the brick, low, where you’d set something if you wanted it to climb, there was a scorch. A black fan of it up the wall, two feet of it, the paint blistered and bubbled and then stopped—not spread, not let go, just stopped, scrubbed at, half-cleaned, the edges gone gray where somebody had taken a brush and water to it and got most of it but couldn’t get it all.
I read it the way I’d been trained to read it, and my hands went cold.
This was not a brick through a window in the night. This was like a written warning. Somebody had broken the front, and somebody had set a fire against the wall, low and small and survivable, and somebody had put it out. On purpose. You don’t set a fire and put it out by accident. You set it and you let it take just enough and then you kill it, and what’s left is a sentence, and the sentence reads: see how easy. See how close. Next time we don’t bring the bucket.
I’d carried that sentence to other men’s doors myself, a lifetime ago, in another country, for the family, and I knew the shape of it in my teeth, and I knew exactly who’d written it.
I should have been there.
The thought went through me like a blade goes through—clean, all the way, out the other side. I should have been here, and instead I’d been standing on a square of carpet with pins in my collar making a joke about a frock while a man came down here with a can and a match. I’d let them laugh me into a wedding suit and out of a vigil and this was the cost of it, thisscorch, this plywood, and it was on me, the whole weight of it landed on me at once and I had to put a hand on the brick to take it.
And then I looked through the gap where the door didn’t quite meet the frame, and I saw her, and the blade went deeper.
She was inside. Alone. Of course alone. In that oversize apron, on her knees on the cracked tile, scrubbing. A brush in her hand and a bucket beside her, going at the inside of the wall where the scorch had come through, where the smoke had stained the plaster, scrubbing it in hard tight circles like she could take it back, like enough pressure would unmake it.
Her hair was down out of its scrape entirely, no flour in it now, just down and damp at the temples, and she scrubbed, and she stopped, and she sat back on her heels and pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth, and I watched her not cry—watched her decide not to, watched the whole machinery of the decision happen in her shoulders—and then she went back to the wall.
Her hands were shaking. Even from there I could see it. The brush jumped a little every time she lifted it. But she kept scrubbing, and there was a broom propped by the door for the glass and a roll of trash bags and the tarp folded ready, and she was going to do all of it tonight, every part of it, with her own two shaking hands. I just knew it.
I have never wanted to hurt a man the way I wanted to hurt the man who did this. And underneath that, lower, worse, was a thing the enforcer in me had no use for and the rest of me couldn’t put down—I wanted to be in that room. I wanted to take the brush out of her shaking hand. I wanted to do the wall myself so she’d never have to see it, and I wanted to find whoever lit it and end him, and I wanted, most of all and most uselessly, for her not to be alone, and the wanting was so total it had no exit, it just sat in my chest going warm and sick and unbearable.
I pushed the door. It gave—the bolt was broken too, or she hadn’t bothered, what was the point—and the bell over it gave its small stupid cheerful sound into a room that had no business being cheerful.
She came up off her knees fast. Brush in her fist, the way you’d hold a brush if you wished it were a knife, and her face white and ready, and then it landed on me and the ready went to fury, which I understood now was just the only safe place she had to put fear.
“We’re closed,” she said.
“I saw the—” I gestured at all of it, the plywood, the scorch, the glass, my voice coming out wrong, lower than I meant, the morning man gone. “When did this happen. Tonight? Were you here? Were you—”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m not asking if you’re fine, I’m asking—”
“And I’m telling you I’m fine, and I’m telling you we’re closed.” She set the brush in the bucket. Stood up straight, all five-foot-three of her, between me and the wall like she could hide it, like I hadn’t already read every word of it off the brick outside. “It’s handled. The glass guy comes Monday. The window’s covered. It’s a window. People break windows.”
“They set a fire.”
“It went out.”
“Theyput it out.” I saw it hit her, saw something flicker. “They put it out on purpose. You know what that—”
