Page 53 of Graceless

Ninth of twenty. A chief of ten.

Baraqijal. Baraqiel. The same name, written down by a man in 1912 working out of a language nobody has spoken in three thousand years — in a book they buried outside the Bible, on a photocopy that had been sitting on my table since four o'clock next to the Con Ed bill.

I put the paper down because it was rattling.

"That's you." The steadiness was gone; something else was arriving in its place and I didn't recognize it yet. "Chapter six. The Watchers. The ones who — Tara said. They were set to watch, and they came down, because they wanted—" I looked up at him. "The book they buried. You're in it. You're not in it like a myth is in it, you're in it like a man is in a phone book."

"It gets several things wrong," he said. "The spelling. Some of the numbers." A pause. "Not the charge."

"Say the word."

He didn't.

"Say it, Raq. You've had two weeks and a photocopy and a paycheck out of me, and you're going to make me be the one who says it in my house?" My voice was not doing what I told it. "Fine. Angel. You're an angel."

"I was."

"And now?"

"Now I'm what's left."

And that — that flat little accounting, delivered in my kitchen by a thing that used to be an angel — that is the exact moment the other thing arrived, and I found out what had been walking up my street toward me all day.

It wasn't fear. Fear had come and gone and left its deposit.

Because if he was real — and he was standing there with his ruined back and his buried name, real as taxes — then it was all real. All of it. The whole thing I'd handed back across a hospital-grade year of watching the strongest woman in Bensonhurst come apart one system at a time. Somebody had been home. And on Fifth Avenue in March, a woman who hadn't asked for anything in two years threw one wordless flare into the dark over a traffic accident — one, unaddressed, not even words — and got this. A miracle with a clipboard, standing in my basement, drinking my terrible coffee.

"Cate," he said, and his voice had changed, and he did not finish the sentence — and the not-finishing was suddenly the most unbearable thing in the room, because it was the same silence I'd been getting since the day he walked in, and I had thought it would end tonight.

"I lit every candle that parish had." It came out low, which surprised me; I'd have bet on shouting. "Every one. For a year. You want the inventory? Tuesdays and Fridays, Our Lady of Solace, the rack on the left, and when the rack on the left was full I did the rack by the Pietà, and the year she got really bad I was in there so often Father Bonanno gave me my key, because he got tired of letting me in at midnight — a key, I had a key to the building, like staff." My voice stayed low and it stayed level and it was the worst sound I've ever made. "Novenas. The whole cycle. I did Lourdes water, I did the relic they keep in the drawer, I did every degrading transactional thing a scared woman can do in that building, and I did it for eleven months, for the best person either of us has ever met — and she died anyway. Slow. In pieces. And nobody came to the door." I pointed at the window, at the street, at the general direction of Fifth Avenue and everything above it. "And I run one red light and the sky sends you?"

He didn't move. He took it the way a wall takes rain.

"She begged, at the end." I hadn't planned to say that. I have never said that. "Not for herself — she was never once for herself — she begged for me, that I shouldn't have to see it, and I stood in that room and told her somebody was listening." The low thing in my voice finally cracked, and what was under it wasn't louder. It was smaller. "And somebody was. That's the part — you understand that's the part? I could live with the empty sky. I'd made my peace with the empty sky, the empty sky and I had an arrangement. But you're standing here, which means it was never empty. Somebody was in there. Somebody heard her. Eleven months of her. And the answer was no." I looked at him. "The bus rated a miracle. Nonna didn't."

He didn't say anything. He stood there with his hands open at his sides, and it was me still talking, quieter now, all the way down at the bottom of it:

"So you tell me. You were one of them. You were on the inside of it."

I looked at him, and I let him see the whole face — the one from over Nonna's dresser, the one nobody gets.

"Where were you people when it mattered?"

The silence went on so long the refrigerator cycled twice.

"I don't know," he said, at last, and it was the flattest and the truest and the most useless thing he had ever handed me, and he handed it to me the way he'd handed me every boring answer, like a man who would not build me something interesting even now. "I have been asking a version of that question longer than your species has had writing."

"Ask louder," I said.

And I snatched my coat off the hook and I walked out, and I slammed the door behind me.

He didn't follow me.

I walked down the block at nine o'clock at night by myself and nothing came after me and nothing was standing anywhere it shouldn't be. The doorways were empty the whole way up the avenue. All of them.

I checked. I hated that I checked, and I checked.

I went past the parish. I didn't plan the route; the route was in my feet, eleven months of it. Our Lady of Solace stood over the avenue with its doors bolted and its stone the color stone goes at night, and the candle-glow was doing what it does in the blue window, the low red flicker, somebody's racks burning on the automatic devotion of strangers, and I stopped on the sidewalk and looked at the doors I used to have a key to.