Page 87 of Graceless

"No one gives you your grace, Caterina." He said it to the sky, evenly. "Whatever the chain taught you. You have the most powerful grace there is, and it is yours — no one granted it, and no one can take it. You decide. You love. You make — art, bread, promises, whatever your hands close on. Free will, with no orders behind it. That is your grace. It grew in you, and it cannot be repossessed, because it was never issued."

"And that's what they took from you?"

"Not exactly." His eyes stayed on the stars. "Ours was — different. Ours never included the choosing. Or the making." A pause, and then, level, flat, the register he saves for the true ones: "I can never have a child, Caterina. None of us create. That was never in us to begin with."

It landed in me and went all the way down.

And I sat there in the blanket with the ocean counting, and I let it land, and I didn't say anything, because what was there to say — I'm sorry they built you without the thing I'd have wanted to give you? If that was the cost of him, then that was the cost. I'd done my deciding already. I put my hand flat on his chest instead, over the heart, and left it there, and his hand came up and covered it.

"Then what did they take?" I said, quietly. "If the choosing was never yours. What got taken in that field?"

He looked at the stars a moment longer.

"You are saved by grace," he said. "Say the nuns are right. Say it works exactly as taught. What does saved do, Caterina? What does it get you?"

"It gets you into⁠—"

I stopped.

"No," I said. "No."

"It gets you in," he said. "That is the whole of the angels' grace — the standing. The door. The belonging. Ours was never the choosing; ours was the entry. Granted from their side of the door — and what is granted can be revoked." The flat went all the way flat. "That is what they took in the field in your photographs. They shut the door. We are earthbound, Caterina. All two hundred of us. There is no going home, not ever — not in life, and not after it. The word is exact. Graceless."

The ocean went out black forever, and the stars stood over us the way they stand over everything, and I heard it — all of it, the whole size of it — arrive in me one piece at a time.

Because here is what the nuns did teach me, and it held, it has held my whole life, through the Gowanus and the novenas and the year of candles: you see them again. That's the deal. That's the whole deal. Nonna is not gone; Nonna is ahead. My parents are not gone; they are ahead, at the door, and one day I walk through it and the people I lost are on the other side.

And the man under my hand can never walk through it.

I'm going to die. We settled that on a roof; I made my peace and took my sixty years. But I believed — I realized it only now, holding it, that I had believed it without ever once saying it — that dying was a door we'd figure out like we figured out every other door.

It isn't. My heaven is his exile. Every person I have ever lost is waiting for me in the one place he can never come, and the day I go to them, I lose him — not for fifty years, not for a lifetime.

For good.

I didn't say any of it. He was lying under the stars he used to live above, and he had just handed me the truth in the plain flat voice that costs him, and there is a time for every conversation and this wasn't the time for that one. So I did what we do. I lay back down on his chest, over the heart, and pulled the blankets to my chin, and let him think my shiver was the March.

"Take me home," I said, into his skin. "Slowly. I want the whole boardwalk."

"The whole boardwalk," he agreed, and his arms came around me, both of them, complete.

Raq

She walked the boards inside my arm, warm and slow, talking about churros — where the churro man goes in winter, whether churro men migrate, whether we could follow them — and I answered in the right places, and above her head I read the night.

At the far end of Coney Island, on the roof of the tallest of the towers, something stood against the sky.

Not moving. Not hiding. The patient thing that walked her block for weeks and vanished the day she finished — standing now a mile off in plain view, face toward us, at a distance that is not surveillance but address. We know you see us. Seeing us is the message.

I turned my head north, because by then I already knew.

Camael. Far off, high up, over the city — a stillness I have known since before either of us had a name, standing a watch he was not assigned.

And south, out over the dark water toward the point, faint as a signature at the bottom of a page: the gray one. The one who talks. The one who smiled and sold me nothing.

Three points. North, south, and the tower. Nothing approaching, nothing needing to approach — a triangle drawn quietly around a man and a woman on an empty beach, all of it visible only to me, while she laughed against my ribs about the migratory patterns of churro men.

They were not closing in. They were showing me the shape.