The Cloud

51

We wait a minute in silence.

“Which one do you think is his?” asks the henchman.

Arms crossed, he’s looking through the trees at the St. Francis Woods mansions. This is where Gils must live. So we met here because it was convenient for the executive, and not because it was a secret execution spot?

“I’m freezing,” Faith says.

“Then go.”

“We can go?” she asks.

“It’s a free country.” He half laughs. He likes saying this.

He turns and starts walking south, making crunching noises as his boots hit the concrete at the cross’s base. Presumably, he parked at some other access point. He pauses and turns back.

“I’m sorry I hit you so hard. I thought you were trying to steal from the company.”

It feels coached. He disappears into the wind.

“Let’s go,” Faith says.

I try to swallow and nearly choke from dryness.

“Nathaniel. It’s cold.”

A pigeon swoops from the treetops and pecks at some unseen snack at the base of the cross. It sails off again, its off-white feathers blur with the sky behind it and I wonder if the concussion is beginning to reassert itself. Then I realize why I’m so blurred. It’s not my brain but my eyes. They are filled with tears, blazing hot grief. A drip, a stream, cascade. Sobs.

I see Isaac, pale, bundled, not bundled, actually, shrouded. His weakened mother could not sustain him in utero. I’m in a trance when they show his lifeless body to me and wonder if I’d like to say goodbye. I look down at him and then at the nurse, clenching her teeth, holding it together, much more than I’m able to do.

Time passes, drizzle comes in and out, Faith finally speaks again. She says she needs to check on her nephew, Timothy. I stand and I find myself straining to look at her. It’s not that I don’t trust her, though I don’t. I don’t want to make full contact with her because it will mean acknowledging that I’m part of this world still, that what I’m experiencing now-the loss-is real.

She tries to take my hand and I neither resist nor embrace her. I stand. I turn. I feel a muddy patch beneath my feet, the ground indenting, my heart with it. I know the symbolism of this walk, back to the inherited Audi, on with life. Polly got two fortune cookies, both empty, like her future and Isaac’s future, our future. The one I embark on with my next step.

“Please tell me what’s going on,” Faith says.

In my right hand, still clenched, I feel the metal object that Faith handed me and that I’ve forgotten about entirely. I open my hand and see, as I’d expected, a pocketknife, a modest weapon that Faith had imagined for who knows what purpose. It falls into the mud.

I take the next step.