Page 97 of Graceless

"You lawyered me."

The refrigerator hummed. The saints kept it to themselves.

"You knew. You knew it could happen, you knew what it would be if it did, and you couldn't lie to me — you can't, it's on the pad — so you built me a true thing with a hole in it and let me grieve for you. You let me feel sorry for you." My voice didn't crack. "And then you decided. For both of us. For all three of us, you enormous coward."

I picked up the note. Eight words, careful hand, squared pen.

I didn't burn it. Burning is for things you're done with.

I folded it once and put it in the drawer with the saints' things — the relic, the Lourdes water, the objects of unanswered prayers — and I shut the drawer, and I stood in my kitchen with my hand on my stomach, on the thing no clause had priced, and I said the last entry of the night out loud, to him, wherever in the dark he was standing his ridiculous watch:

"You're going to want a better lawyer."

CHAPTER 27

RAQ

The man came at the woman with a box cutter, on Vernon Boulevard, at two in the morning, sixteen days after I left Bay 50th Street.

I took the blade first. Then the wrist that held it, turned until the ground seemed like the reasonable place to go, and he went there, and I stood over him while the woman got her car door shut and her engine started and her taillights all the way to the corner.

The man looked up at me from the pavement. Whatever he saw, he stopped moving entirely.

"Go home," I said.

He went. They always go. I stood on Vernon Boulevard in Queens with a box cutter in my fist, folded it closed, dropped it down a storm drain, and walked back to my roof.

That is what I am now. Nobody has assigned me a watch since the fall — the watches were always mine, chosen, stood over whatever I could not help loving. For a season that was one door on Bay 50th Street. Now it is a warehouse roof on the creek, sightlines to nothing I love, a borough where nobody knows me, and I stand it every night, all night, correcting the night's small errors, because the alternative is thinking, and I have every age of the world in practice at standing, and none at all at this.

Sixteen days.

I did not count the hours anymore. That is a lie, and the pad taught me not to keep false entries: I counted every hour. Three hundred and eighty-four of them, each one arriving like a man paying off a debt in pennies, and somewhere in the three hundredth I understood that the counting was not discipline. It was the watch. The only one left to me. I could not guard her door, so I guarded her hours, from a roof in Queens, uselessly, the way the stone angels over Greenwood guard the dead.

The number I killed in the first hour.

The insurance line, the one on the card in her kitchen drawer — I stood on the warehouse roof with the phone in my hand while the ink on the note was still newer than the hurt, and I disconnected it, and dropped the phone after the box cutter's cousins into the creek. Not to hide. Nothing about me is reachable by telephone. I killed it because she would call it — I knew she would call it, once, maybe twice, angry, to say the things the note deserved — and if it rang in my hand, if her name stood up on that screen, I would answer, and if I heard her voice I would be on her stoop before she finished the first sentence, and the whole architecture would come down for the price of a ringtone.

A man building a wall does not leave himself a gate.

I have regretted very few of the ten thousand years. I entered that one in the pad under costs, and the entry is not closed.

On the seventeenth night I broke the perimeter.

I had drawn the line at the bridge — nothing south of it, nothing near the D, nothing within reach of the pull — and I held that line for sixteen nights, and on the seventeenth I stood at the rail with the tide going out underneath and told myself a Watcher verifies. A plan you do not verify is a prayer. I was going to check the block once, at distance, at speed, and come back over the water, and I would not slow down, and I would not stop.

I stopped.

Four rooftops off Bay 50th, behind the chimney line, in the exact dark where a patient thing once stood watching what I loved. Her block lay below me as it has lain every night of its hundred years — the stoops, the bathtub Madonnas, the el two streets over combing the quiet — and her windows were lit.

Both of them. Kitchen and studio, gold at the edges of the shades, ten o'clock at night.

And Nina's car was at the curb.

I know the car. It has double-parked outside her door a hundred Sunday mornings with the horn going. It sat under the dead streetlight now with a container lid on the dashboard, and while I watched, the kitchen shade moved with shapes — two of them, back and forth, a working rhythm, a kitchen being used by women who know it — and once, briefly, the shapes stopped in the middle of the room and became one shape — two people standing together because one of them needed holding up.

Then the light over the stoop came on. Nina came out with her coat over something soft, stood on the top step, and looked at the street.

Not a glance. A look. Up the block, down the block, at the parked cars, at the dark under the dead light — a long, deliberate look. Then she went down to the car, and drove off toward the avenue, and the stoop light burned behind her, and above it the kitchen light went on burning too.