Page 54 of Graceless

"I was in there every week for eleven months. I had a key."

The doors didn't say anything. They never had. I put my hands in my pockets and kept walking — north, off the route, toward 86th, and I understood with every block what I was doing and did it anyway, because somebody had been home the whole time and hadn't come to the door, and there was exactly one door left in the world I believed would open no matter what hour I knocked on it.

Nina opened it in her robe with the chain on — even for me; her mother trained her right — and then off, and she stood in the hallway light with her hair up in the silk thing and took one look at my face.

"Who died," she said.

"Nobody," I said. "Everybody. Two years ago."

And then the first sob came up out of my chest, and I heard it happen, and it didn't sound like me.

Nina pulled me into her arms right there on the step, in her robe, in the cold, and held on, and didn't ask me one single question.

CHAPTER 15

RAQ

The door hit the frame hard enough to move air across the room.

I stood in her studio with my shirt in my hand and a photocopy of my name on the table beside me, and I listened to her footsteps go hard up the sidewalk, and I did not follow.

The house made its noises. The refrigerator. The pipes. A whole small architecture of sounds I had spent two weeks learning the way I learn a street, and every one of them was still going on as though nothing had happened in here.

She was right.

That was the thing standing in the room with me. Not the fear — I had known the fear was coming since the day I took the chair. I had rehearsed the shape of a woman looking at me and seeing a thing that moves wrong. I had not once, in all of it, planned for her to be right.

Somebody was home. Somebody had been home the whole eleven months. She had asked one question, in one sentence, with a paper rattling in her hand — and it was the question I have been not-finishing for as long as I have had a mouth, and she had said it out loud like a woman reading off a bill.

Where were you people when it mattered.

I have stood between people and everything. Fire. Water. Other things like me.

Tonight I was the thing she needed protecting from, and there is nowhere to stand for that.

I put my shirt on.

The muslin was on the floor where she dropped it.

Behind me, uncovered, under a lamp she'd left burning, was the panel.

I have looked at it. Every night I stood in this room after she went to bed, I looked at it. I have stood over that face at three in the morning with the work light off and the street light coming through the bars and given it every hour it asked for.

It gives me nothing.

He is brethren — I know that much past all argument. Not his name. There is a place in me where his name should be, and I have gone to it a thousand times and found nothing standing there.

She got that face out from under four centuries of paint with cotton and patience. I have stood over it every night since and I cannot tell you one thing about him.

I put the muslin back over him.

Then I went out after her.

She walked to 86th Street. I followed at four hundred feet — roofline and shadow, off the route.

Close enough to end anything that came at her.

Everything in me wanted to be on that sidewalk. I have crossed this city in the time it takes a woman to finish a sentence; I could have been at her shoulder before she made the corner. My hands wanted her elbow. My whole body was pointed at her back like a compass and the four hundred feet burned the entire way.