Page 108 of Graceless

A long silence. Then, almost too quiet to catch: "I'm sorry."

I lay there and looked at the ceiling I'd already counted.

"Say what you're sorry for."

"I am sorry that you are frightened."

"Wrong." I sat up. "Try again."

The pause on the other side of that door went on a long time.

"I am sorry that you are in this house."

"But you'd do it again."

He didn't answer.

"Say it, Raq. It's the only true one you've got. You'd do it again tonight."

"Yes," he said, through the wall. "I would do it again tonight."

"Then don't say sorry to me. Sorry is for things you'd undo." I lay back down and pulled the blanket up. "Go stand outside."

I heard him go.

And I talked to the six weeks instead, under my breath.

"I am going to tell you about your great-grandmother's house. It has eleven saints on the walls. The kitchen has a table that seats four but has fed thirty. There is a woman named Nina six blocks away who is going to love you past all reason, and she has a daughter named Gina who is going to ask you every question she's been saving, and there is a stoop with a light on a timer that your great-grandmother put in and nobody has ever changed the bulb schedule because nobody would dare."

I stopped, because my voice was cracking, and I was not going to crack in this house.

"We're going home," I said. "That's all. We're going home."

By noon the next day I had counted the nails in the ceiling. Forty-seven. I was lying on the bed on my back with my hands folded on my stomach doing it a second time, to check, when I heard the door.

He came in and set something on the table and went out again without a word.

I gave it ten minutes, because I was not going to move for him. Then I got up.

A sketchbook. Hardbound, cold-press, the good kind. A box of pencils — Faber, full range, the exact set Sal keeps in the flat drawer and lets nobody touch. Somewhere on this island, at dawn, he had walked into an art supply store and bought the correct pencils.

I sat down and opened it to the first page and my hands started before I decided anything, because that is what hands do, and I drew the saints.

I don't even believe in the saints.

I drew them anyway.

All eleven. In order, left to right as they hang, from the door around to the window — Anthony first because he is first, then Lucy with her plate, Rita, Jude in the middle where Nonna moved him the winter she got scared, all the way around. I got the crack in Rita's frame. I got the way Lucy's gilt is worn at the bottom corner from sixty years of somebody's thumb.

It took most of the afternoon. When I finished I tore the pages out one at a time and taped them to the stone wall with medical tape from the kit under the sink, spaced right, at the right height, in the right order.

He saw them that evening through the window. I watched his eyes go down the row, one to eleven, and stop.

He came to the door.

"You put them in order."

"That's where they go."