Page 69 of Graceless

The work light ticked. The kitchen was very far away, and the ash field was very close.

And then he said it, plain, the way the worst true things get said.

"They took our grace, Cat. That is what they took."

CHAPTER 19

RAQ

She turned the prints face-down.

One at a time, in reverse working order — the field, the scars, the face, the kneel, the hem, the robe — and I let her, because some viewings have to be ended for the bereaved.

She showed me the day.

Not mine. The kneeling one is not me. But I know that ash. I know the kneel — it belongs to no ceremony; it is what is left when the legs stop being consulted. And I know the small pale lights. I watched them rise off brothers whose names I kept. I felt mine go.

Later she slept, one fist in the quilt, her breath keeping its slow human count against my chest, and I lay in the dark and went back to the room.

My day I have. The kneel, the taking, the landing — every procedural minute, mine on demand. So I reached past it, for the reason. The why of me. What I wanted so badly that they took everything for it. Who.

Nothing.

A shape where something stood. Grief with no address on it. Hands, small, in water — whose, I cannot say.

I went back again. Again nothing. I have misplaced nothing in the whole of the record — I can name every cup ever handed to me — and I lay in a basement in Bensonhurst holding a sleeping woman, reaching into my history and closing my hand on air, and until last night I had never once noticed the air was there.

Toward morning I built myself an answer. The general one: we all wanted; I wanted what the two hundred wanted; sentenced with them, correct under the law it came from. Maybe the taking pulls the root of the wanting out with it. Maybe every one of us walks the exile with a room like this and no reason to open the door. That would almost be a mercy.

It did not sit.

Because the hands kept coming back. Small. In water. Not faded the way residue fades — kept, the way evidence is kept. And grief does not attach to nothing. Grief takes an object the way fire takes fuel, and mine burns with no fuel anywhere in the room.

An answer that cannot explain the burning is not an answer.

She stirred against me, and settled, and her heartbeat went on counting the dark, and I lay still and let her have the sleep.

I needed the truth.

And in all the scattered length of the exile, there is exactly one of us I would trust to hand it to me whole.

Toward dawn she rolled over, took possession of my arm, and slept on. I lay still under the weight of her and watched the ceiling go gray, and by the time the first trucks moved on Bay 50th, I had my route.

She was at the counter making the coffee when I came into the kitchen.

“I’m going to see my brother,” I said. “Today.”

She turned with both cups and put mine in my hand.

“Which one — the one who inspects you, or the one who guts fish?”

“The fish. Sar. He came down a different road than I did — his story is his, and someday, if he allows it, I’ll tell you. What matters is this: he is the only one of us I would put a question to.”

“What question?”

“Last night I told you what they took.” The truth, whole, per the terms. “What I cannot tell you — what I cannot tell myself — is why. What I wanted that was worth everything they took for it. I reach for it, Caterina, and the place has been emptied. He is the one I trust to tell me whether that is true of all of us — or only of me.”

She put her cup down. She came across the kitchen and stood in front of me, and she did not touch me, and being stood in front of by her is a thing I am still learning to hold my shape through.