Page 29 of Graceless

He stepped back off my stoop. He was leaving. Again. Unbelievably, the man was leaving AGAIN, at speed, like the doorway was on fire and I was the fire, and at the bottom step he paused with his back half to me and said something.

Not to me. Down, and away, at the pavement, at the dark, at nothing — one short phrase, low, in a language I have never heard in my life. And I've heard languages; this is Brooklyn, I've been yelled at in nine of them. This was none of them. This was old the way the panel is old, worn the way stairs get worn — vowels like deep water, one long hiss like a blade drawn slow — and it did something to the animal in me that no language has any business doing: every hair on both my arms stood straight up, and the bones behind my ears went cold, and something at the very bottom of my spine said you have heard this before, which was a lie, which had to be a lie.

Then he was gone.

Not walked away — gone. I was looking at him. Between the bottom step and the streetlight there was a length of sidewalk a man has to cross, and he didn't cross it, he was on it and then the street was empty, and the cold moved into the space where he'd been.

I stood in my doorway holding my heartbeat. The cans were on the step — he'd set them down at some point; I have no memory of it. My mouth felt rewired. My arms would not put their hair down.

It didn't happen, I decided. The kiss happened — fine, adrenaline, two people and a knife and body chemistry, a thing that happens, a thing we would both professionally ignore by morning, I would ignore it first and hardest, I am excellent at ignoring things, I have a system and eleven saints. That was the plan and I was already failing at it, standing there in the cold rebuilding the exact pressure of his hand at the back of my head, when the window went up overhead.

"Caterina." Donnie's voice descended into the night with the joy of a man whose whole year had just been made. "CAT-a-REE-na. I knew it. I said to Joey, I said⁠—"

"Donnie, I swear to God and every saint in my hallway, if you don't shut that window RIGHT NOW I will tell your mother what's actually in your recycling."

The window shut. Not all the way — Donnie never gives you all the way — but enough.

I got inside. I chained the door. And if some sentence tried to put itself together — about the speed, and the eyes, and a language older than churches — I didn't let it finish. Sane women don't finish sentences like that. Sane women take a bath, check the chain, and decide the streetlight was doing something strange, because the alternative is not a thought, it's a cliff.

I took the bath. I checked the chain. I lay under the water stain shaped like Sicily with every hair on my arms still standing, and the last thought that got through before the thinking stopped making sense was the one I couldn't refuse:

He hadn't been talking to himself.

He'd been talking to something.

CHAPTER 9

RAQ

Idid not take the parapet that night.

The parapet looks down on her doorway, and the doorway is where the kiss happened, and I needed it not to have happened, and standing over it all night was not going to accomplish that. I took the roof of the tile warehouse instead, three lots down, where the sightline to her window is clean and the distance is a punishment with a view.

Her light burned until two. The shoulder at the easel, the brush hand, the small motions of the work. I watched her, and I told myself the truths in order, because someone had to, and my brother was not there to do it.

She is mortal. Give her everything, cost her nothing, stand between her and all of it without one misstep for fifty years — and the number is still fifty. I have stood in one doorway longer than fifty years. I have held grudges longer than her whole species holds its languages. Fifty years is a match struck in a field at night, and I have been the field long enough to know what the field does with matches.

Her ask was loud. Every ear in the dark heard a mortal woman throw herself open over Fifth Avenue, and the ones that keep records are still asking what answered. The single most dangerous fact about her is standing in her studio eight hours a day holding a clipboard. Wanting her does not protect her. Wanting her paints her. A thing that is wanted by something like me becomes visible in a spectrum she cannot see and cannot wash off, and everything that hates me — the list is long — acquires, in that moment, one soft place to put the knife.

This is the crime. Not a crime. The crime — the original, the one under all the paperwork. The reaching kind, my brother said, the kind that caused all the trouble in the first place, and he was warning me because he can count. Watchers wanted. That is the whole of the first story, told properly: we were set to watch, and we wanted. Everything since — the wings, the burying, the names struck from the books that survived — runs downstream of wanting. I am the object lesson. I am what the lesson is printed on. And on a stoop in Bensonhurst, a few hours ago, the lesson leaned down and wanted, and the want did not feel like a crime. It felt like a window opening.

I have nothing to offer that a person can live in. No name I can hand her that would not put her on a list. No history that is not a casualty report. No future, in the sense the word carries when humans say it — plans, a shape, more. I have a room with nothing in it and a coat, and until this month that was enough.

Her mouth tasted like coffee and the cold she'd walked home through and the inside of my chest tearing quietly along an old seam.

That truth serves nothing. I put it down.

It got back up. I put it down twice more across the night, with declining conviction.

Her light went out at two. The house settled around a sleeping woman. The thing in the alley did not come.

I stood on a tar roof with my collar up, feeling the shape of her skull against a palm that has broken everything it was ever asked to break and has never once, in ten thousand years, been reached for.

At eight I rang the bell twice.

The door opened the width of her, and she stood in it with her chin already set and a speech already loaded.

"Here's how today works. You come in, you sit in the chair, and we are absolutely not discussing yesterday. Not the street, not the — none of it. And if you say one single word about it, I swear to God, Barrett, I will throw the entire gallon of white spirit at your beautiful head. Understand?"