She rested her cheek against my thigh for a second, eyes closed, breathing.
"Was that okay?"
I dragged a hand over my face. "Sweetheart, you have got to be careful what questions you ask me at five in the morning."
"It's after five?"
"It's something in the neighborhood."
She crawled up the bed, slow, the sheet sliding off her, and tucked herself back under my arm where she'd been before I'd dropped off. She was warm. She smelled like sleep. She smelled, faintly, like me.
I held her there.
"Is this heaven?" I said it softer than I meant to.
"What?"
"Nothing. Talking to myself."
"Tommy?"
"Yeah."
"Go back to sleep."
"Yes, ma'am."
I closed my eyes.
I didn't go back to sleep right away.
I lay there in the gray pre-dawn with her against my ribs again and I thought about home, about my mother.
It came out of nowhere and not out of nowhere.Heavenhad triggered it, probably.Heavenwas a word my mother used. She didn't use it the way preachers used it—she used it conversationally, the way some people usedfineorhopefully.You boys are a heaven on earth when you're being good.That biscuit is heaven, Tommy.My mother had her own dictionary, andheavenwas one of the words in it that she'd used.
I wanted my mother to meet Rebecca Lynn.
I had to take her to Marfa.
I had to take hersoon.
I didn't have a logical reason. I had a chest reason. The chest reason was that some piece of me that did not consult my brain on these things had decided that the only way to make this real—the only way to take Rebecca Lynn from the warm bright temporary thing she was now into the permanent thing some part of me had already started to plan around—was to put her in front of the woman who'd made me. To watch and see if my mother's face registered Rebecca's face. To stand in the doorway of a memory care unit in a West Texas town with a girl on my arm and let my mother do the thing my mother did, which wasseepeople, and let her see this one.
I needed it.
I needed it the way I'd needed peace on a roof in Southeast Asia, and I'd waited a long time for that, and I wasn't waiting that long for this.
I had to do it soon.
That was the other piece, and it was the piece that made the gray pre-dawn feel sharper than it should have felt.
There was a clock running.
I didn't know what was on the other end of it. I knew Craine was on it. I knew the men in the unmarked Tahoes were on it.I knew whatever Lucas hadn't told me yet—and there was alotLucas hadn't told me yet, including whatever was in the grin he'd given me at Dominion Hall when I'd asked if we'd met—was on it. I knew my brothers were off the board and were going to come back on the board at some point, and the world they came back to was going to be a different world than the one they'd left, and I was going to have to be in fighting shape for it when it happened.
Heaven was a thing on a clock.
I'd known that all my life and pretended otherwise.
