Jenny stood on the far side of the grave with her father and mother. Jenny’s mother had surfaced, though not completely or for long, from her alcoholic submersion. Her father wore a suit that must have been ten or fifteen years old, and he stared at his feet while we said the Lord’s Prayer. They bookended Jenny, who avoided my eyes—or maybe it was Amanda, standing next to me, she didn’t want to look at.
The pastor finished his go forth with God’s peace and we adjourned to the reception hall for finger sandwiches and Kool-Aid in Dixie cups. When I saw Jenny I started toward her but her parents, thin-lipped and sweating, took her arm and steered her away.
She looked back at me once, her expression unreadable.
What I wanted to say to her was this:
Like you, Jenny, I always figured there must be a place in the world for me. You know what I mean. Walking down some street on a winter night so cold your footsteps on the snowy sidewalk sound like glass being ground to sand, yellow light leaking from the windows of the houses of strangers, you catch a glimpse of some sublimely ordinary moment—a girl setting a table, a woman washing dishes, a man turning the pages of a newspaper—and you get the idea you could walk through the door of that house into a brand-new life, that the people inside would recognize and welcome you and you would realize it was a place you had always known and never really left. Like we talked about on Birch Street that one time, remember? The night of the big snowstorm, walking home in the dark after band practice.
The thing is, Jenny, there really is a door like that. There really is a house full of kind and generous voices. It exists, and I was lucky enough to find it. And that’s why I can’t come home and marry you.
I know you think it’s bullshit. I know you think I bought a sales pitch, swallowed a line, joined a cult. You think I gave myself to Tau the way people give themselves to Scientology or Mormonism or the Communist Party. But Tau isn’t like that.
It’s a bright window on a cold night, Jenny. It’s shelter from the storm. It’s everything we envied from the enclosure of our loneliness. It’s what we tried and failed to find in each other’s arms.
These were the words I couldn’t say.
During the hour-long reception my father circulated through the crowd, acknowledging business acquaintances and shaking their hands and the hands of their spouses and children. It was only when we stepped out into another flurry of wet snow that he allowed himself to indulge his grief.
Because he was both stoic and fanatically private, the signs would have been easy to miss. But I saw him turn and look back at the cemetery, where Grammy Fisk’s burial place had become invisible among the ranks of Schuyler’s dead; I saw him mouth something inaudible and swipe the palms of his hands across his eyes. My father talked about his childhood so seldom that it was almost impossible to imagine him having had one—but he had, and Grammy Fisk would have been the heart of it. He had buried his mother today, and with her a little of himself.
We headed back to our cars. I helped Amanda into the passenger seat, then walked over to where my father was still standing. We weren’t a touchy-feely family—Grammy Fisk and Mama Laura had doled out all the hugs any of us ever got—but I was moved to put my hand on his arm. I felt the gnarled density of muscle under his winter jacket. The smell of him was poignantly familiar: the aftershave he habitually used, the greasy black polish he swabbed on his shoes. Melting snow had plaited his hair across his scalp.
He gave me a startled look, then pushed my hand away. “I don’t need your sympathy,” he said. “And I don’t want it. Why don’t you just take your Arab girlfriend and go back to wherever it is you call home?”
So I said good-bye to Mama Laura and Geddy and Aaron, and we drove out of Schuyler late that night. The roads were slick with snow and there were line-ups at every gas station that was open, but we managed to fill up at a truck stop on I-90. “The craziness of the world,” Amanda said as we pulled back onto the interstate. “You know?”
Warring nations, paranoid politics, my fucking family. I knew all about it.
“Before I was a Tau,” she said, “it just seemed so overwhelming. Salute the flag. Praise God. Honor your father and your mother. These big abstractions—God and country and family. They used to have power over me, as if they were real and important. But they’re not. They’re just words people use to control you. It’s bullshit. I don’t need a family or a country or a church. I have my tranche.”
I said, “We have each other.”
“We have more than each other. We have Tau. Which is what makes it okay to admit that your dad is a racist asshole.”
The wind was blowing rags of snow across the highway, and I had to slow down. “Well, he’s more than just—”
“I know, it’s complex. It’s always complex, out there in the world. But the truth can’t hurt us anymore and we don’t have to hide from it. Your dad is many things, and one of them is—”
“A racist asshole?
“You disagree?”
No. The evidence was abundant, and I had seen much more of it than Amanda had.
She said, “How does that make you feel?”
“I guess, ashamed. Embarrassed.”
“Ashamed of what?”
“Do I have to say it? Ashamed of being his son. Of being a Fisk.”
“But you’re not a Fisk! That’s the point. You don’t belong to those people. Their sins aren’t on you. That house is not your home, and Fisk is just your name.”
I drove a while more. The highway was mostly empty, just a couple of semi trailers on the northern horizon, and when the sky cleared I could see a few chilly stars.
“You know I’m right,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “You’re one of us.”
After we crossed the border Amanda took the wheel and I checked my phone for voice mail.
There was a single message, from Lisa Wei.
“Trevor is in the hospital,” she said. “Call me as soon as you can.”
By the time we reached the city limits I had woken Lisa with a callback and managed to get the whole story.
Trev was in a hospital called Sunnybrook, north and east of downtown, and we drove there directly and shared a nervous breakfast in the cafeteria while we waited for visiting hours. Then we made our way to his room.
As early as we were, we weren’t the first to arrive. Damian Levay was already there, standing at Trev’s bedside and saying something quiet and urgent. Trev spotted us and broke into a grin, or what would have been a grin if not for the hardware attached to his face.
Damian Levay was the closest thing our tranche had to a leader, though none of us would have used that word. He was an early adopter, a Tau almost since the first assessments were offered three years ago. He was also lawyer, and in that capacity he had helped Taus all over the city, adjusting his fees to suit his clients’ income. He was full of ideas about the purpose and future of Affinity groups, and Amanda thought he was brilliant. What he had been discussing with Trev was probably the subject of Bobby Botero: it was Botero who had put Trev in the hospital.
Trev’s plan for defending Mouse had been ironclad, except for one thing: it presumed Botero would not continue to harass Mouse if it meant putting himself and his business in mortal danger.