The night is enormous. The moon shimmers on the sea, the olive trees a speckled outline against the sky. There's an old hoe in the lean-to with half a handle, and I take it to the crooked tree at the terrace edge and I dig. Not deep, but deep enough.
I put it in the ground. I fill the hole, set a stone on top, and stand there over a Sicilian's finger under an olive tree, and that's when it comes for me.
Not the way it came for her. Nothing about me is loud. They burned that out early. It comes the way deep water comes, no waves, only weight, and I sit down on the terrace wall because my legs inform me it's that or fall.
Twenty years.
Twenty years I've been telling everyone I'm dead. Handlers. Targets. Mirrors. It was a good cover, the best I ever built, and like every good cover I lived it until it lived me. Dead men don't grieve. Dead men don't want. Dead men can't have anything taken from them, and I built that man the winter I dropped a can of kerosene in the snow and ran toward smoke, when running wasn't enough. I decided nothing would ever be taken from me again, because I would never have anything to take. Simple. Load-bearing. Twenty years of surviving on one frozen conclusion.
And it held. That's the obscene part. It held through everything, through blood and years and rooms I don't revisit, but it couldn’t hold through one week of Iris Orlova.
She asked me who I was like the answer might be worth something. She said my name until it started to mean me again. She put her hands on every scar I own and asked for the story behind it and accepted the scant amount of information I was willing to part with. And this morning she came apart and let me hold her. Me. These hands, and when it was over she didn't flinch from what she'd shown me. She fell asleep against my heart like it was the safest place on the island. Like I’m the safest place she knows.
Nobody held the boy.
That's the thought that finally shakes something loose, sitting on a wall above the sea in the dark. When it happened, when I stood in the snow in front of what was left, there were hands on me. Pulling me back. Restraining. Efficient. Nobody held on. Nobody said,you're safe now, I've got you.
My face is wet.
I sit with the observation the way I'd sit with any anomalous reading. My face is wet, my breathing is off its count, and there's a pressure in my chest like a hand opening after being fisted for so long the tendons forgot they had a range. It doesn't hurt the way I always assumed it would. It hurts the way her hands hurt on the wound. The ache that means knitting.
So I grieve. There's no better word and I've searched. For Olya, and her dreams cut short. For my mother. For the boy who ran, the one I've spent twenty years despising for being too slow, who was sixteen and alone and did the only thing he could think of, which was to die standing up and keep walking. I let him sit next to me on the wall. For the first time in twenty years, I don't send him away.
That's the thing about ghosts. We haunt ourselves long before we haunt anyone else.
The olive trees move. The sea works at the island the way it has for ten thousand years.
Here is the decision, then. I lay it out the way I lay out any operation, because it's the only language I have.
I finish the job. A boat, a truck, a plane, a kitchen door. I deliver her, take the balance of the fee, and be a rumor by morning. She grieves, briefly, because that’s who she is, and then that family closes around her and her life resumes. Warm. Loud. Full of people who never once made her wash blood out from under her nails. The ghost goes back to the dark which asksnothing of him and never has. It's a clean exit. I've made it after every job for twenty years, and it kept me alive, if that's the word for what I was doing.
I don't know how to be alive. That isn't self-pity. It's an operational fact. I have no biography, no papers that are true, no small talk, no idea what a man does with his hands in a warm kitchen if there's no weapon in them. The dead man is the best thing I ever built and the only thing I know how to be.
The moon has moved by the time I go back inside. I bar the door. I check the slat. Old habits, and those I'll keep, whatever else I become, because whatever else I become will be standing between her and every door she ever sleeps behind.
I take my post in the chair. Then I don't.
I move the chair. Two feet, angled, so that it faces the cot as much as the window, splitting my attention in a way I have never once split it in my professional life, and I sit where I can watch the track and her face through the bedroom doorway at the same time.
Three nights ago I told the dark I would never be able to resist the gravity of her. I said it like a man reporting a malfunction.
I sit here in the last of the night, hands steady now, watching her hand hold the morning, and I realize I don’t want to resist it. I want to be pulled into her orbit.
Iris
I open my eyes to the pale, early morning light, and the world has been rinsed.
That's the only way I can describe it. The light through the shutter slat is the same clean stripe, the olive trees are conducting the same argument outside, and I am lying on the cot in the same borrowed shirt, but everything looks the way stones look after rain. Sharper. Truer. I cried out twenty-seven years of ballast on that kitchen floor and apparently what's left of me is buoyant.
The chair has moved.
It used to face the window, the track, his whole body aimed at the outside world like a drawn bow. Now it sits two feet over, angled, splitting its attention between the door and me. He's in it, awake, and when my eyes open, his are already there.
"You moved the chair," I say. My voice is wrecked from yesterday. I sound like a woman who smokes forty a day.
"Yes."
"Any particular reason?"
