by Cole McCade
Joseph didn’t answer. There was nothing to answer. But the silence was unbearable, thick and choking and vibrating with a tension that had heat, as smothering as the blanket of summer and wrapping them up together, punctuated only by the clink of the coffee pot and the rattle of spoons against ceramic. For a moment Walford remained warm at his side—but then he pulled away, his movements too quick, as he crossed to the refrigerator and retrieved the creamer. Joseph sighed, thunked the carafe back into the coffee maker, curled his hands against the edge of the counter, and closed his eyes.
“She said she loved you,” he ground out.
“What?”
“When she called, that last time.” Joseph forced himself to open his eyes, to look at Wally, to watch the color drain from his already pale face until he took on a blue tinge and clutched at the refrigerator door. “Willow told me to tell you she loved you.” Joseph clenched his fingers against his coffee mug, letting it bolster him, anchor him against the prickle of guilt he shouldn’t fucking be feeling. “…I never did.”
Wally’s fingers went loose on the refrigerator door, one at a time, and when the last fell away he just sank, barely angling himself so that one of the kitchen chairs caught him, the chair legs scudding and squealing against the floor. He looked down at his hands, hanging limp between his knees, then looked up at Joseph and offered a watery smile that turned his eyes too bright.
“It…you’ve had a lot on your mind,” he said faintly. “A lot to deal with.”
He had. But Joseph wondered if that was the truth of things, when deep down part of him had rankled that when she was in trouble, Willow had called everyone but him. First Maxi, after she’d seen something that had frightened her. Then Wally, after she’d been kidnapped. Never her own damned father. She’d always tried too hard to shelter him, but he’d thought when it came down to it she’d known—she’d known—
He was fucking there for her.
And she’d turned to someone else. To the man who had tried to take her from him in the first place, as if Wally knew the first thing about being a father.
Maybe that was why Joseph had held back that one little detail. Out of jealousy. Spite. And no matter what old hurts he harbored, that wasn’t who he wanted to be.
But “Yeah,” was all he said, before hiding behind a burning sip of scalding coffee.
That silence again. That silence that didn’t know if it wanted to be angry or bitter or completely damned tired. Joseph settled at the table with his coffee; Wally fretted a bit, then rose and finished making his own, pouring it full of a nauseating amount of creamer and sugar when Joseph liked his black and tarry-thick. Together they sat in the predawn hours and drank coffee without words, each looking down into their cups. Now and then Joseph stole a glance at Wally from the corner of his eye.
And now and then he caught Wally looking back, before they both averted their eyes.
Joseph’s coffee was nothing but a cooling skim in the bottom of his mug before Wally spoke. “Thank you,” Wally said, and set his mug down with a quiet tink. He had the oddest, most particular way of holding it, in both hands with the handle facing outward and his thumbs and first three fingers precisely framing it, both pinkies extended, his movements delicate. “It eases my soul a touch, to hear that. You didn’t have to tell me.”
“Yeah. I did.” If only to ease his own conscience. Joseph tossed down the last swallow of his coffee, then stood, dropped the mug in the sink, and filled it with water before retrieving his crutch from the counter. “You wanted to show me something.”
“Oh! Indeed.” Wally perked, smiling brightly and pushing to his feet to add his mug to Joseph’s in the sink. “Simply let me fetch my shoes.”
He turned to nearly dance out of the room, leaving Joseph staring after him. The man was fucking mercurial, this spinning and twirling carousel of whims, and sometimes—most of the time—he threw Joseph for a loop. He’d forgotten the oddities of life with Wally, the sheer intensity of it, catching him in this strange and gentle hurricane.
But that intensity faded, as Wally paused in the kitchen door. He glanced back, and that uncertain look returned, that youthful strangeness. He curled his hand against the doorframe, biting that pretty pink lower lip. “I…would you rather walk, or fetch a taxi?”
Joseph blinked. An odd flush went through him, something like pleasure, warm in his chest. “Walk,” he said, then cleared his throat and looked away. “Thank you for remembering to ask.”
“Tell me when I do wrong and I’ll try to do better, Joseph,” Wally said softly. “If you want me to do better.”
Did he?
Did it really matter, when sooner or later Wally would follow in Miriam and Willow’s footsteps, and leave?
Joseph shrugged stiffly. “Just get your shit and let’s go,” he said.
“I…all right.”
Still that wanting, in Wally’s eyes. But whatever Wally wanted, he didn’t ask for.
He only nodded, bowed his head, and slipped from the room.
* * *
DEW WAS COMING DOWN IN A near-solid haze, scented of overripe grass and some strange nebulous thing Joseph could only call sky, by the time Wally slipped into his polished, slick shoes and led Joseph from the house with an almost forced merriness. Joseph let him chatter for a solid half-hour as they walked through the Nests district, answering with grunts or noncommittal sounds in pauses that required a response—and Wally seemed content with that. As if he had a desperate need to fill the silence between them, whether he was rattling on about making frittatas for breakfast when they got home—it’s not your home, it’s mine, it’s mine and Willow’s—and dreading year-end inventory at that weird little shop of his, or muttering about how much he really needed to one day get around to reorganizing the store front to leave a little room to breathe, let alone move.
In his own way, Joseph understood, even if he’d halfway tuned Wally out by the time the sun crawled over the horizon, reaching up with spindly arms of gold and dragging itself up past the ragged-edged silhouette of Crow City’s eastern districts. Sunrise was always a broken thing here, when that great golden eye opened balefully to highlight the poverty and squalor and degradation economic downturn had created across more than half the city. It was only in sunset that Crow City glittered as if pretending to be whole, when the sun sank behind the shimmering western spires of Blackwing Downs and shone off the slick, cool towers of high-rise hotels where even now, Miriam was likely lounging in a lush penthouse suite, not thinking of waking for hours still.
Stop it. Stop thinking about her.
He hated that every time his mind began to idle, his thoughts drifted to Miriam. Analyzing everything, hating her, loving her, asking himself why over and over again when she would never come back to tell him. Maybe even she didn’t know the why; maybe it was just in her nature.
Or maybe she’d lost interest the first time when, while he’d been tangled in bed with her, his hand had spasmed and refused to obey him, and she’d pouted and sulked while he’d stared at his trembling, prickling fingers with the uneasy realization that it wasn’t an ordinary cramp making his bones curl until his hand twisted into a crone’s pointed claw.
His leg jerked even now, a cramp locking in his calf, and he swore and swung his crutch from under his arm with a practiced movement. He had it down, now; he knew that feeling, that mixture of muscle atrophy and nerve damage that sometimes made for a cocktail of fucking shit, and he barely missed a step before he had his arm in the crutch’s cuff, his hand gripping the brace, and the rubber tip planted firmly against the ground, pushing himself back upright. He was already catching his balance before Wally noticed, pausing mid-stride and looking at him with a wrinkle in his brow.
“Are you all right…?” he asked tentatively.
“Yep.” Joseph didn’t stop, leaving Wally behind several steps as he levered forward on his crutch. “Happens.”
Wally’s footsteps pattered after him, rushing and quick, th
en settled into stride next to him—then matched his pace without a word. Joseph was grateful Wally didn’t say anything, and let him have his pride. For long moments the only sound between them was the thud of his crutch’s tip and the faint hiss-squeal of the shock-absorbent springs inside, and Joseph hated it. As if his illness carried on a conversation without him, while Wally’s incessant rambling had disappeared. Joseph would welcome even that, to drown out the crutch’s voice.
“For some reason,” he admitted, “it always happens when I think about Miriam.”
“Hm?” Wally glanced at him. “I don’t understand.”
“Cramps. Spasms. Other symptoms.” As if to reinforce his point, the hand gripping the crutch lanced with pain, then dissolved into needles; his fingers tried to go lax, but he grit his teeth and forced himself to hold his grip, forced himself to keep going. Everything, with him, was a struggle of will—from keeping himself on his feet to keeping himself talking when of all people, Wally was the last person who needed to hear this. These…these confessions, a weakness of a sort that had nothing to do with his body and yet somehow everything to do with it. “Stress aggravates multiple sclerosis. Effects of cortisol on the nervous system. I won’t bore you with all the medical crap, but…” He pressed his lips together. “I was thinking about Miriam.”
“Oh.” Wally clucked his tongue with a sigh and, lacing his hands together behind his back, looked up at the sky, its colors reflecting back on his pale, narrow face and shining in the hollows of his cheeks. The morning was all gold, right now—gold while blue and pink and violet tried to break through with scratching fingers. “I haven’t heard from her in over a year. The last time I tried to reach her, I got her receptionist.” He snorted. “Rude bird, that one was.”
“I wasn’t asking. I know better.”
Several steps passed before Wally looked down from the sky—and looked at Joseph instead, searching so deep Joseph felt naked, standing exposed beneath the summer morning sun.
“You’re still in love with my sister, aren’t you,” Wally murmured. His voice cracked on love, and something prickled on the back of Joseph’s neck, something that made his heart beat faster and his breaths come short and his tongue turn thick and clumsy.
“I don’t know.”
Wally’s brows knit. He cocked his head, lips parting, then looked away. Something indecipherable flashed across his face, there and gone again, a ghost of emotion—yet it was the first honest bit of Walford he’d seen in a long time, beyond that practiced, merry brightness.
And he found himself aching to know what it was. What it meant.
Wally peeked back at him from under his lashes and touched his arm gently, contact that sparked hard enough to knot Joseph’s stomach up until it was tight and painful and trembling.
“This way,” Wally said, and turned to lead him around the corner, onto a narrow side street.
That side street opened up onto a back road in the Ravens, lined with abandoned storefronts sprouting grass and vinework and humping tree roots through their walkways and windows and open brick faces. Cracked, pitched sidewalks made for rough going when Joseph’s gait leaned more and more to one side, and his crutch now and then slipped on a loose pavement square—but Wally promised “Not far now,” and so Joseph leaned hard on the rubber tip and made sure to test each sidewalk square before he set the crutch down firmly in place.
Through warrens of burnt-out, broken-down streets, past dirty children playing in empty lots occupied only by the fire-scarred husks of building frameworks. Joseph had gotten used to living poor, living rough in the Nests on his disability checks and Willow’s low-wage jobs, but the life he knew was nothing compared to this. Nothing remained, here. Nothing but a few tattered scraps, people hanging on to what was with no hope for what could be. He averted his eyes from one little girl sitting on a wooden porch stoop with no house attached to it, her tiny brown face smudged, her cheeks chubby, her front tooth cracked in a gap that she endlessly picked at. She was playing with her friends, tossing jacks with a dirty, grubby rubber ball, but her gaze held him, silent, asking.
Asking what are you doing here, where you don’t belong?
The only well-maintained building they passed was a garage with Blackbird Pond on an engraved, hanging wood sign over the door, and even that had been shut up, the lights dark, the doors chained and padlocked. But beyond the garage, Wally led him toward an enormous expanse of lots surrounded by chain-link fences covered in green canvas construction tarp; over the fences, past the overgrown trees ringing the lot, Joseph glimpsed scaffolding and hints of once-bright colors and strange shapes, eroded and dusty and faded by the sun.
Wally strolled along the fence, running his fingers over the links in the chain until they popped against his fingertips and made the canvas ripple. Then he stopped at one of the support poles, and pulled back carefully. Someone had cut the fence where it met the post, invisible unless one knew to look; Wally peeled back the chain link to create a gap large enough to duck through, then glanced back down the street with a mischievous smile, eyes twinkling.
“Hurry, before someone sees us.”
Joseph eyed him skeptically, then shifted his crutch to angle it across his body and bent to duck through the gap, pushing the canvas aside and edging through. He nearly fell on the other side, but snared his fingers in the fence and pulled himself up until he found his balance and braced himself again. Wally ducked through after, laughing as his pants leg caught on one of the clipped metal ends of the fence links, and tugged it free before quickly flipping the canvas closed.
“Oh my,” he said with an exaggerated gasp, and pressed his hand to his chest. “I dare say I quite feared for my life. Any moment the police might have snatched us up for trespassing.”
Joseph eyed him flatly and turned away, looking out over the construction site—only for his breaths to still as he found himself staring at a forest of strange creatures, things half-built out of steel rebar and PVC pipe folded into wireframes, spaced among empty frameworks that promised the shadow of buildings. If asked to describe any one of the structures, he wouldn’t be able to; they were less recognizable things and more the ideas of things, waiting to take shape and yet still evoking a haunting sense of something familiar, something he knew with his bones, in the part of himself that would know the scent of wet earth even if he lost his sight; the part of himself that would crave the sensation of touch on his skin even were he broken beyond repair.
These were creatures of blood, he knew. Blood and earth, and they weren’t his blood and yet still he understood, should they ever come to life, that they would move to the drumbeats of the Sun Dance the hinóno’éí danced each year, as if they danced for an end to every summer that ever was.
He tilted his head back, following the glint of strengthening morning sunlight along a rusted curve that suggested the spread of horns, wide and reaching over a dozen feet. “What is this?”
Quiet footsteps brought Wally to his side; Wally looked up, pale face contemplative while his arms folded over his chest. “It was intended to be the beginnings of a museum district, before the economic collapse,” he murmured. “An architectural history of the Arapaho Nation. A reminder of where this city came from. Its roots.”
Unease ate at Joseph, warring with a quiet reverence, mingling with raw appreciation; back when he’d still been fit to work the nine to five, this would have been the kind of project he’d have loved, and a pang of envy curled in the pit of his stomach. “We don’t belong here.”
“Perhaps not,” Wally said. “But once, someone meant these things to be seen. To be known. To be loved. So perhaps for a few minutes, we might be permitted to see. To know. To love from a distance, and do so with respect.”
Joseph shook his head. “I don’t understand. Why did you bring me here?”
“Because it’s a reminder that anything can begin again.” Wally turned his head enough to catch Joseph’s eye, dark gaze knowing. “Just because the city had
to walk away from the project doesn’t mean the pieces aren’t still here, waiting to be picked up again. There’s beauty here, waiting to be reborn. There’s wonder and history sleeping in whispers under the dust.” His flowing, rolling voice wove a spell, lulling, hypnotic, turning decrepit ruins into wonder. “Perhaps the sun and rain, wind and earth have worn away at what pieces there are…but the longing behind their original placement still lives. The people who wanted this, who needed this, left pieces of themselves behind in this place.” He smiled wistfully. “I think it reminds me, too, that longing is important.”
“Longing?” Joseph repeated.
“Wanting something. Anything. Needing something to the point that everything you do, you do so that you might one day take another step closer to that thing.” Pretty pink lips curved. “A raison d’etre, my friend. We all need one.”
Joseph caught himself lingering on the softness of Wally’s mouth. Always so soft, as if there wasn’t a hard bone, a mean bone in Wally’s body, everything in him giving and yielding as if he meant to empty himself out until he had nothing left. And Joseph wondered if, when he’d finally poured out every last drop, nothing would remain but the real Wally.
As long as he’d known the man…he had no idea who that might be.
He tore his gaze from Wally’s mouth. He shouldn’t be damned well thinking about its softness, its ripeness, the rosy plushness of his upper lip, with that particular dip that made the upper lines flare out in an ornately styled, graceful bow waiting to shoot the arrows of low, pleading words.
What in the actual fuck, Joseph.
He glowered at a gridwork of iron struts that might one day have been a tree. “What’s your reason, then?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been wondering that since two thousand and five. Looking, even. Even if it’s been little more than a holding pattern, I’ve been looking.” Wally unfolded his arms; his hands fell to his sides, and the back of one brushed Joseph’s knuckles, leaving the fine hairs standing up and his skin tingling. “What’s yours?”
