“What? Oh yeah. Yeah, sure. But watch your back.” I heard the scrape of metal—the brakes of a large vehicle, I thought—and Luis said, “I’ll be at Manny’s house. I have to go through things, start figuring out what to do for Ibby.”
“Is something wrong with Ibby?”
“It’s just that the court’s going to have to award guardianship to me for me to keep her. My lawyer says that’s just a formality if Angela’s parents don’t contest it.” He didn’t sound certain of that. “It’ll hurt her if this comes down to a fight.”
Once again, I had no wisdom to offer. Something within me was tired of all the drama, all the emotion, all the humanity of it. That part of me continued to whisper, ever louder, Walk away, Cassiel. You are eternal. They are ghosts in the wind.
Perhaps they were, but if I walked away, they would haunt me.
“I should go see Isabel,” I said. “I promised her.”
“Come over here first. I want to go with you.”
He sounded so quiet, so unhappy, that I felt it necessary to agree. When the call ended, I slid the room key into an interior pocket of my jacket, locked the door, and left without a backward glance. My motorcycle—still gleaming and largely unmarked—glittered in the sunlight a few spaces down. Keys . . . I searched my jacket pocket, found nothing. They were not in the ignition slot.
They’d fallen out at some point. I smiled slightly, touched my fingertip to the ignition, and willed the machine to life. The engine growled, settled to a low, contented purr, and I realized another thing that I had somehow lost during the evening’s festivities: my helmet.
The constant wind tugging at my hair was a new sensation, and I liked it. I liked the blast on my face, the sensation of flying without walls. I attracted stares, of course—why wouldn’t I?—but that was no longer an issue. My nerves prickled as I passed a police car, but they gave me only a flat, assessing glance and did not pursue.
I pulled to a stop in front of Manny’s house and silenced the engine. The street, as always, seemed quiet. There was rarely anyone to be seen in yards or on the sidewalks, even children. The windows, I realized, were all barred. Doors were blocked by wrought-iron gates.
It was a neighborhood of fortresses and fear.
I knocked on the door, and Luis opened it. He took a single second to look at me, and then nodded and turned away, walking into the living room. I closed the door behind me and followed.
In the bright light slanting in the windows, Luis looked infinitely tired. Older than he had only yesterday. He sat down at the table with a pile of papers and idly shuffled through them.
“I’m looking for their life insurance,” he said. “I need to file that for Ibby. Manny told me he had some kind of retirement thing, too. And their bank accounts, I need to freeze those. People sometimes read obits and try to con the banks, steal from the dead.” He shook his head. “People.” The contempt in his voice was almost worthy of a Djinn.
I reached out to the pile of papers, touched edges, and withdrew three sheets. “Insurance,” I said, and laid it in front of him. “Retirement plan. Bank accounts.”
Luis stared at me with dark, empty eyes, then nodded. “Thanks.”
I sat back, hands in my lap. He fiddled with the papers for a few more minutes, then stood up and walked around the room. It was full of things—things, I realized, that would need to have a future, whether that was with Isabel, with Luis, consigned to destruction, given to others. . . . It was a problem I had never considered. Human lives were lost, but the wreckage they left behind had to be managed. Deconstructed.
Another step deeper into the never-ending grief.
“I’m going to keep their papers, their pictures, that kind of stuff,” Luis said. “Anything I think Ibby might want of theirs.”
Would that include the small ceramic angels on the shelf above the television, the ones that Angela told me she had collected over the years? Or Manny’s books? Or the warm woven throw that trailed fringed edges over the arm of the couch, the one knitted by Angela’s mother?
So much. I realized then that Luis had stopped moving, and was staring down at a collection of objects on the battered coffee table in front of the couch.
A book, turned facedown—something Manny had been reading.
A glass with a dried residue in the bottom.
An open bag of animal cookies.
Remote controls scattered haphazardly across an uneven landscape of magazines and newspapers.
Luis collapsed on the couch and put his head in his hands, and his shoulders heaved silently. I felt the storm of emotion from him, dark and heavy.
Walk away, Cassiel. You are not mortal.
I sat down beside him and placed my hand on his back. He didn't speak, and neither did I; the silence stretched for a long time. When he finally raised his head, he took in a deep breath and sat back against the couch cushions. I took my hand away and folded it with its mate in my lap.
“They’re gone,” he said. “I guess it took me a while to really get it, but they’re gone. They’re not coming back.”
I gathered up the cookies and the glass and took them into the kitchen. The cookies went in the trash, and I filled the glass with hot water. A flash of memory overtook me: Angela, standing here at this sink, washing up dishes from the first evening I’d been welcomed here, to this house.
They’re not coming back.
No, they weren’t, and the ache of that was like a constant gray storm inside me. A human might have succumbed to tears.
Walk away.
I yanked open the refrigerator door and began to empty the contents into trash bags. The physical sensations helped fuel a growing tide of what I realized was anger. Anger? Yes, I was angry at them for abandoning me. For leaving behind Luis and their child.
Angry at my own weakness.
“What are you doing?” Luis asked from the doorway.
“Cleaning,” I said flatly, and tossed half-empty bottles of sauces into the bin. The milk was already turning rancid in its carton. “We’re here to clean, yes?”
“Not now. Leave it,” he said. “I need to think about what I’m going to keep.”
“You won’t keep any of this,” I said, and kept pulling things from the shelves. Leftovers, wrapped in plastic, marked in Angela’s clear hand with the dates.
He charged forward, knocking a bottle of Tabasco sauce from my hand, which bounced from the counter onto the hard floor. As it hit, it shattered in a hot red spray. Vinegar stung sharply at my nose and eyes. “Stop!” he yelled. “Just stop, dammit! Stop touching things!”
I shoved him backward, and he rushed toward me again. He drove me back against the counter with bruising force, and his hands grabbed my shoulders. I took hold of his shirt, my fingers wrapping into a convulsive fist, and felt a wild, black desire to hurt him, hurt. . . .
“Stop,” he said, and there was so much despair in the single word that my anger shattered. My fist relaxed, and my hand rested flat against his chest. “Stop, Cassiel. Please stop.”
His whole body was pressed against mine, and the wildness in me mutated, twisted, became something else.
I wanted . . .
. . . I didn’t know what it was I wanted from him. The conflict in his own expression told me he felt the same, torn in so many directions his self-control was tattering like a flag in a hurricane.
His hands slid from my shoulders up my neck, to cup my face. I could feel every rapid pulse beat in his veins, every ridge and whorl of the lines in his fingertips.
Luis’s eyes were huge and very dark, like midnight lakes where the unwary drowned alone.
I knew, in that frozen instant, that the next thing we did would chart the course of our futures, together and apart. This is the moment of choice.