Byrne pulled over in front of the foster home, put the car in park. Out of habit, he scanned the two side mirrors and rearview. No gangbangers on the corner. Maybe the word had gotten out.
‘I know it’s not your birthday for a few weeks, but in case I don’t see you, I wanted you to have this.’ Byrne reached into the back seat, brought forward the wrapped package. He handed it to Gabriel.
The boy beamed. ‘What is this?’
‘See, that’s kinda the point of the wrapping paper. You’re not supposed to know until you open it.’
Gabriel smiled, tore into the paper. Byrne watched the boy’s face as he turned the book over and saw the title:
FORGOTTEN PHILADELPHIA:
LOST ARCHITECTURE OF THE QUAKER CITY
Gabriel started thumbing through it. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘This is really cool.’
Byrne was a bit worried about giving an eleven year old boy a book on architecture. He seemed to genuinely like it.
Gabriel stopped on a page with a photograph of the original Chestnut Street Theater. He turned the book so Byrne could see the picture.
‘Maybe I’ll do something like this some day,’ Gabriel said.
‘Maybe.’
‘I mean, you never know, right?’
‘No,’ Byrne said. ‘You never know.’
With Gabriel safely inside, Byrne thought about their time together, and what the future might hold. He wondered when Gabriel would learn of the scholarship fund that had been started for him, a trust that, coincidentally, was opened for the exact same amount recently taken from a North Philly drug dealer named Carter Wilson.
Allegedly taken, Byrne amended.
After sustaining his near fatal wounds, Byrne had been unconscious for eighteen hours, his mind misted with dark dreams, dreams that told him the visions — the premonitions and intuitions that had haunted him for more than two decades — were not quite done with him. Beneath it all he heard the echo of those five words, spoken by a madwoman.
You are the last saint.
Byrne eased into traffic, then turned onto Sixth Street, the glow of Center City before him like an armor of light, thinking:
No, Ruby Longstreet, I am not a saint, not by a long shot. Saints are blameless and pure. Saints are people like Father Thomas Leone.
I am just a man.
I am a guardian.