Page 122 of Graceless

And then I noticed how quiet he was being, and turned my head — and the wanting went out of me like a tide.

He was looking at the table. Not at me. Perfectly still, and there was nothing on his face at all — the banked thing, the wall, the look he wears when the answer has already been decided somewhere in him and the deciding is not up for discussion.

"Raq."

"Mm."

"What did he mean, whatever you're considering?"

"He is dramatic," Raq said. "He has always been dramatic."

He got up and took my cold soup to the sink and ran the water, and stood there with his back to me, and did not answer the question I had actually asked.

CHAPTER 34

RAQ

The door closed behind my brother, and for a moment neither of us moved.

Then Caterina stood up from the table, steadied herself on the back of the chair, and looked at me the way a judge looks over her glasses.

"I'm going to bed," she said. "You live on the couch now."

She went into the bedroom. She came back with a pillow and the afghan — the ugly one, the one the color of margarine and old rust that her grandmother's sister crocheted before I had a name for either of them — and she threw both at my chest from six feet, hard, and I caught them, because letting them fall seemed worse.

"Caterina—"

"No." She held up one finger. "You don't talk tonight. Tonight you're furniture." She got to the bedroom door and stopped, one hand on the frame, and did not turn around. "Your — what, your brothers, your family — are coming to my street, and I can't look at you. Figure out how you managed that. You've got all night. You don't sleep."

The door shut.

I stood in her kitchen holding a pillow and the ugliest blanket I have ever been sentenced to, and I sat down on a couch built when the bridge was new, for people five feet tall, and I began my sentence.

Her house breathed. The boiler two rooms away, cycling. The refrigerator. The bones of the building settling off the day's heat, tick by tick, joists older than the neighborhood. Above it all, two heartbeats behind one door — hers, slowing by degrees as the anger banked itself into sleep, and under it the quick light running one, the sound that had rearranged every century I had left.

I do not sleep. She knew that. The couch was never about sleeping.

The couch was about the door. She put a door between us and gave me a station on the far side of it, and the sentence was exact, and I lay on my back with my feet hanging over the armrest into open air, under a blanket that reached my sternum, and served it.

At two in the morning she turned over and said something to the dark that was not words.

At three she said a name that was not mine — a man's, old-country, nobody I have ever been told of — and settled.

At four the small heart stumbled once, a skipped step in the rhythm, and I was standing in the middle of the room with no memory of moving before it caught itself and ran on, steady, fine, nothing — and I stood there in the dark with the afghan around my ankles like a shackle and my pulse doing something I have not permitted it in a very long time.

I picked the blanket up. I folded it. I sat back down.

In the morning she came out dressed, moving carefully, and did not look at me while she filled the kettle.

"The doctor said walking is fine," she said, to the kettle. "Short. Flat. No stairs, no lifting, no standing all day at the bench. In case you were planning to have opinions."

"I was not."

"You were. I could hear you having them through the door." She got down one cup — one — and then stood there a moment, and got down the second, and set it on the counter hard, like it had argued. "Sit at the table like a person."

I sat at the table like a person.

She poured for both of us and put a cup in front of me and sat down with hers, and we were at her table, the two of us, the morning after my brother emptied both barrels into her kitchen, and she wrapped both hands around her coffee.