What Comes After: Faultlines Book Two

It was late August, and the AC in the window had been losing its argument with Queens since July, so Charlie had it off and the window cracked instead, the night coming in warm and wet and full of the 7 train two blocks over, somebody's bachata leaking up from the street, a car alarm nobody loved enough to answer. He'd been at it since ten. Chispa sat open on the desk with the score glowing; Celia lay across the unmade bed, out of her case, because he kept picking her up to test a line and then setting her down wrong; the little lamp threw everything gold; and the whole room smelled like the velita Mami had lit on the dresser before bed — wax and that sweet church smell, the Sagrado Corazón flickering on the glass. Bar nine. Two summers. Two summers he'd been losing to bar nine, this one phrase that climbed and climbed, got to the top of itself, and just stood there, stuck, like a kid on the high board who won't jump and won't come down, holding up the whole line. He'd tried everything. He'd reharmonized under it, changed the meter so it had more room, added a note and taken it away and added it back. He'd handed it to the left hand and it sulked; handed it back to the sax and it screamed. He'd played it for Peter once, last spring, and Peter had listened with his eyes closed and then said, "it doesn't want to go up," and Charlie had said "everything goes up there, that's the whole point," and Peter had shrugged with his whole face and said "okay" in the tone that meant no. Tonight, though — eleven-something, half-asleep on his feet, his back killing him and his heart doing its slow stupid thing where it forgot the beat and then remembered too hard — tonight he'd dropped the note. Not changed it. Dropped it. Let the line fall instead of forcing it the last step up. One note, down a third, where for two summers he'd been shoving it the other way. Bar nine breathed. He said it out loud, to nobody, to Celia on the bed, to the Sagrado Corazón. He sang it again, under his breath, just to be sure it wasn't a fluke, and it wasn't; it landed, the whole phrase finally went somewhere and arrived, and a laugh came up out of him high and dumb and delighted. "¿Estás viendo esto? Are you seeing this." He grabbed Celia and played it for real, the line into the resolution, his fingers shaking a little from being tired and from being right, and it was so small. Two summers of work, and the fix was one note, smaller than everything he'd tried; the music had been asking for less the whole time, and he'd been too stubborn to hear it. He was still grinning when his phone lit up against the desk: the Juilliard banner. Your housing assignment is ready. Charlie's stomach did a flip, the good kind for once. Okay. Okay okay okay. This was the other thing, this was the whole rest of his life, and he'd been refreshing the portal for a week like a man waiting on a verdict. He set Celia down — gently this time, he'd learned — and pulled the laptop close and logged in with his thumbs going too fast, mistyping the password once, and the spinning wheel turned and turned. He knew what he wanted. He wasn't even pretending not to. He wanted somebody from Pre-College, somebody from the Saturday people, somebody who already knew — somebody who'd seen him go gray in a practice room and not made it weird, who wouldn't blink at the velita or the rosary on the bedpost or the bag of pills and supplies, who'd hear Mami on speaker at full Rivera volume — all of them at once, Mami and Papi and Sam talking over each other and the TV going behind them — and just laugh and say "hi Mrs. Rivera" into the phone. He wanted a known quantity. He'd spent his whole life being a thing people had to adjust to. Just once he wanted to walk into a room and already be allowed. The page loaded. Roommate: Jacob Keller. Hometown: Baltimore, MD. Major: Classical Piano. Charlie read it twice, then a third time, like the words might rearrange. Classical piano. Classical piano. They'd put him — him, jazz sax, composition, a kid whose whole file, if anybody had ever opened the file, said improviser, sick, needs, complicated — with a classical pianist from Baltimore. Somebody had taken one look at the two of them, or hadn't looked at all, had just dragged a name from column A and a name from column B and clicked submit and gone to lunch. Classical pianists were the most rigid people alive, the ones who flinched if you breathed during a rest, the ones with the metronome where a soul should be. The grin was gone, just gone, like a hand had wiped it off, and something cold came up the back of his neck, because he could see it. He could see this kid. Jacob Keller, Baltimore — the kind of name that came with a lacrosse stick and a summer house, probably blond, probably with a mom who said enrichment. He'd come in with two matching suitcases and a poster already laminated, and he'd take one look at Charlie's side of the room — the sax case, the drum pad, the laptop furred with stickers, the bag of pills spilling its guts, and the candle, Dios, the candle, the rosary, the little Virgen Mami would absolutely tape to the wall before she left because she could not be talked out of it — and his face would do the thing. The polite thing, the closing-door thing, the oh face. Charlie had a PhD in the oh face. He'd been reading it on people since he was seven years old, the exact micro-second a stranger's face decided he was going to be more than they'd signed up for, and he could already see it landing on the face of a boy he had never met. Then there was the speaker. The first time Mami called — and the whole family would come through the phone like a parade, mijo, ¿comiste?, put your brother on, no the OTHER — Jacob Keller would put in his AirPods, real slow, so Charlie couldn't miss it. Charlie was on his feet. He didn't remember standing. The room tilted for a half-second, the same lurch it always gave when he went up too fast, and he put a hand on the desk and waited for it to settle and it mostly did, and he was breathing kind of fast now, talking to himself. "No. No, no, this is — this is so stupid, this is so —" He'd asked. He'd checked the box. There'd been a box, a whole little paragraph, anything we should know, and he'd written it, he'd been honest, he'd put down the health stuff, the real stuff, the stuff that didn't have a name yet, he'd basically held up a sign that said please for the love of God don't put me with somebody who's going to make me apologize for existing, and they'd read it, somebody had read it, and put him with a classical pianist from Baltimore. His phone buzzed. Peter: you up? you got the housing thing yet Charlie was calling before he'd finished reading it, jamming the FaceTime button, pacing the four steps his room allowed, and Peter picked up on the second ring, his face too close to the camera, lamp-lit, in the t-shirt he slept in, the silver ring catching the light where his hand braced the phone. "You got it." It wasn't a question; he'd already read Charlie's whole face in the half-second the call took to connect. "Jacob Keller." Charlie heard his own voice come out high and skating. "Baltimore. Classical piano, Peter. They gave me a classical pianist. From Baltimore." Peter's face didn't move. That was Peter. "Okay." "It's not okay, why do you keep — it's not — coño, you know what kind of person that is? I know what kind of person that is. I've met forty of him. He's gonna walk in with his little laminated whatever and his — and he's gonna see my stuff, all my stuff, the candle, the pills, he's gonna see the pills and know exactly what I am, and Mami's gonna call and the whole familia's gonna be screaming through the phone and he's gonna —" Charlie's hand was going, conducting the disaster into being. "He's gonna get that face. The face. You know the face. And then it's a whole year, it's the whole first year, in a room the size of a closet, with a guy who's already decided —" "Charlie." "— who's already decided before I've even said one word, before I even — I just wanted one, okay, te lo juro, I wanted one thing to be easy, I asked, I literally wrote it down, I wrote it in the box, I told them —" and somewhere in there his chest had gone tight, a band pulling in just under his collarbones, and the words were coming faster than the air to make them, and he noticed it like rain already on him, "— I told them and they didn't even — puñeta, they didn't even read it, nobody read it, nobody ever —" "Hey." Peter's voice changed — dropped, leveled out, got close. "Charlie. Stop talking for a sec." He couldn't, though. The talking was the only thing keeping ahead of the rest of it, and the rest of it was catching up anyway. His heart had stopped doing the lazy thing and started doing the other thing, fast and stupid and too hard, whump whump whump against his sternum so hard he could feel it in his teeth, and the gold of the lamp had gone grainy at the edges, the corners of the room filling up with a fine gray static, and his mouth had gone wet and thick, the warning it always gave right before. No, not that, not now. The nausea rolled up slow and certain from somewhere under his ribs. "Peter." It came out small. "Peter, I can't — I can't get the —" His hand found the desk. The phone in his other hand swung wild, catching the ceiling, then the lamp. "I can't catch it, I can't —" "I know. I see you. I've got you." There was no panic in him, none, just that flat clear steadiness, and Charlie heard the shift in it, heard Peter go into the place he went, the place that had held them together in a hospital parking lot once. "We're gonna do the thing. You with me? Put the phone down — prop it up so I can see you. Hand on your chest. C'mon." Charlie got the phone propped against the lamp base, half of him in frame, and sank back down into the desk chair because his legs were lying to him. He pressed his palm flat over the pounding. "Good. Now you're not gonna breathe in yet. You're gonna let it out first. All the way out, push it out, like you're emptying. Go." He pushed it out. It shook on the way out. "All the way. More. Get the bottom of it." Peter waited, watching, his face filling the little screen. "Okay. Now in through your nose, slow, and I'm counting, and you're not allowed to beat the count. One. Two. Three. Four." Charlie pulled the air in against the band in his chest, against the gray, riding Peter's voice like a railing in the dark. "Hold it. Two. Three. Four. Don't fight it, just hold it, it's just sitting there. Now out, slow, six counts, blow it out like the candle. One, two, three, four, five, six." A beat. "Again. Out first. You know this one. We've done it a thousand times. Out first." They had. They'd done it in stairwells and bathrooms and the back of the M60 and once on the floor of a practice room at one in the morning, Peter's hand between his shoulder blades, counting. His body knew Peter's count the way his hands knew Celia. He breathed out first. He held. He let it go for six, and the static at the corners of the room pulled back a little, just a little, enough to see by. "There. I felt that one. Again." It took a while. Charlie didn't track how long. He just followed the count, in for four and hold and out for six, Peter's voice low and even and not going anywhere, and slowly the pounding eased, walked itself back down into something he didn't have to listen to anymore, and the nausea crested and didn't break and slid back down to wherever it lived, and his hands stopped shaking, mostly, and at some point he'd folded forward and put his forehead down on the desk because the wood was cool and his head was so hot and the cool of it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He lay there with his cheek on the desk, the score glowing six inches from his eye, breathing. "Still there?" Peter said, after a while. "Mm." "You don't have to sit up. Just breathe." Charlie breathed. The 7 train went by, far off. The candle ticked on the dresser. He could see the underside of Celia's neck from down here, the keys, the little dent near the bell he'd never gotten fixed. "Okay," Peter said, and his voice came back up out of the steady place, easy now, conversational, like they were just two guys on the phone at midnight, which they were. "So tell me about the fix." Charlie blinked. "What?" "Bar nine. You've got the look — the one you get right after something finally lands." He made a small sound that on Peter was a smile. "Two summers, man. Tell me what it was." It was such a Peter thing to do, to reach down into the wreck and pull out the one good thing and hand it back to him, that Charlie's throat went tight for a completely different reason. He sat up slow. Wiped his face with the heel of his hand. "It wanted to fall," he said. His voice was wrecked, sandpaper, but it was his again. "The whole time. Two summers I'm shoving it up the stairs, and it just — it wanted to fall. One note. Down a third. That's it. That's the whole thing." He huffed something that was almost a laugh. "You told me. Last spring. You said it didn't want to go up, and I told you that was the whole point." "I remember." "Yeah, well." He picked up Celia, mostly to have her in his hands. "You were right. Don't get a thing about it." "I would never." "You're getting a thing about it. I can see your face getting the thing." "I'm not getting a thing." Peter was absolutely getting a thing, the ghost of it at the corner of his mouth, and Charlie looked at him on the little screen, lamp-lit, patient, the silver ring on his finger where it had been since junior year, where it just stayed, and the thing Charlie never let himself look at directly came up the way the gray had come up, from underneath, without asking. Peter would've been the easy room. He was the room Charlie had been describing, the already-allowed, the known quantity. Peter was at Juilliard too, same building, same fall, two floors and a world away, and they'd put a stranger in the bed across from Charlie because the one person who should've been there wasn't anymore, and that was nobody's doing but Charlie's. He'd been the one to end it. He'd had a hundred reasons, and not one of them held up at midnight in August with his forehead still warm from the desk. If I hadn't. It was the oldest song he knew, and he never played it for anyone. Not for Peter, especially not for Peter, who was on the other side of a screen being kind to him for free, who had every right to be anywhere else and was here, counting. He didn't say any of it. He never would. "It's late," Peter said. "You should drink something with salt in it and lie down." "I know how to be sick, Peter. I've been sick my whole life." "I know you have." There was no edge to it, only the truth. Charlie looked at him. The room had stopped tilting. His heart was just a heart. Down the hall he could hear Sam's TV through the wall, and Mami had left the velita burning, and in two weeks all of this was packed into boxes and hauled across the river to a closet-sized room with a boy named Jacob Keller in it, and Charlie was so tired, suddenly, the good clean tired that came after — the worst of it had passed through him and gone. "You wanna stay on?" Peter asked. "I'm not doing anything. You can just — I'll be here. You don't have to talk." Charlie almost said no, almost did the bright thing, the nah I'm good, go to sleep thing, the not-being-a-burden thing he'd been performing since he was seven. "Yeah," he said instead. "Stay."

The heat came up through the soles of his boots before it ever reached his face. That was the thing about a Baltimore July—it didn't fall on you from the sky so much as rise off the rowhouse brick and the buckled asphalt, soaking up through him until the vest under his uniform sat like a second skin he couldn't shrug off. Nathan had stopped fighting it years ago. He set his pace slow enough that people could see him coming, fast enough that nobody mistook him for standing still. Officer Tran kept half a step behind him, sweating through her collar and pretending she wasn't. She was three weeks out of the academy and still walked like the sidewalk owed her an explanation. "You can ease up," he said, not turning his head. "Sir?" "Your shoulders are up around your ears. Nobody on this block is going to hurt you." "How do you know that?" "Because I know this block." He tipped his chin toward the carry-out on the corner, where the screen door hung open and the smell of fried whiting drifted out warm enough to taste. "And this block knows me. That's the whole job, Tran. Everything else is paperwork." She didn't answer, which he counted as progress. The good ones learned to sit with a thing before they argued with it. "Captain Weston." Miss Delores had come out onto the steps of the carry-out with a dish towel over one shoulder and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and the sight of her loosened something the heat had cinched tight under his vest. She was seventy-one and ran that kitchen like a precinct of her own; she'd fed half this neighborhood through two recessions and one bad winter when the gas company got greedy. "Miss Delores." He took the three steps up to her like a man coming home. Her hand found his forearm and squeezed, the palm dry and papery and stronger than it had any right to be. "You look tired," she said, which was her way of saying she loved him. "I look fifty-two." "Mm. Same thing." She studied his face the way Julia did when she thought he was holding something back, and he stood still under it, because you didn't flinch from Miss Delores, any more than you'd flinch from your own mother. "Those boys leave yet?" There it was. The thing he'd been carrying under the vest all morning, heavier than the heat. "End of August," he said. "Logan down to Howard. Jacob up to New York." "Juilliard." She said the word carefully, like it might break. She'd heard Jacob play once, at a church thing, and she still talked about it. "That child got the hands of God in him." "He does." "And you lettin' him go all that way." It wasn't an accusation. It was a marvel. "He earned the going." He kept it out of his voice, the pride and the dread both. The house was going to be quiet come September—two doors that wouldn't slam. He'd spent seventeen years learning to read Logan through the floorboards, the careful and even footsteps, the lamp clicking off too late, and only these last eight months learning Jacob's—quick, light, always angled toward the nearest exit, bracing for a safety the boy still didn't trust to hold. Now the house was going to teach him a third sound, the sound of neither of them in it. He already knew he wouldn't like it. "You tell Jacob he come to me before he leaves," Miss Delores said. "I'm sending food." "He'd carry it on the train if you packed it." She swatted him with the towel and went back inside. He let himself have the half-second of it—the warmth, the belonging, the old woman who'd known him since he walked this beat as a rookie no steadier than Tran. Then he heard the voices. At the market two doors down, a voice was climbing, sharp, and under it something younger trying to stay low and not managing it. Tran's hand had already drifted to her belt. "Off," he said—quiet, not a request. Her hand came off the belt. "We walk in slow." He was moving already, his stride lengthening while his face went still and open, the way you came up on a spooked animal or a scared kid or any human being whose worst day you'd walked into the middle of. "We don't fill the doorway. We don't raise our voices to be heard over theirs—we wait for theirs to come down to ours. Understand?" "Yes, sir." Hassan had a teenager by the collar of his shirt. The boy was maybe fourteen, all elbows and shame, and there was a sleeve of cookies crushed in his fist like he'd grabbed it on instinct and then found he had nowhere on God's earth to put it. A few people had stopped on the sidewalk to watch, drawn by the heat and the noise and the old human appetite for somebody else's trouble. "Captain—he took it, I saw him, third time this week somebody been—" "Mr. Hassan." Nathan said the name the way you set a flat hand on a table—not loud, just there. "Let go of his shirt for me." Hassan let go. The boy didn't run. That told Nathan most of what he needed. A kid who meant harm ran; a kid who was hungry and ashamed stayed and waited to be told what he already believed about himself. Nathan crouched—the knee complaining, the heat pressing on the back of his neck—until he was under the boy's eyeline instead of over it. "What's your name?" The boy's jaw worked. "Dré." "Dré." Nathan looked at the cookies and not at the boy's face, because sometimes you gave a person somewhere to put their eyes that wasn't yours. "You eat today?" The silence had a particular shape, and Nathan knew the shape. He'd spent eight months in a house with a boy who wore it at the dinner table—who hid food in his room because some part of him still couldn't trust there'd be more tomorrow. A few weeks back he'd driven that boy three and a half hours up I-95 to look at the school that was going to have him, the radio turned low, the two of them facing the windshield because facing each other was still more than Jacob could do. They'd stopped at a diner on Amsterdam Avenue and the boy had gone still over the menu—too many choices and no map for which ones he was allowed to want—and Nathan had ordered for both of them and not made a thing of it. Just handled it, the way you handled a kid who'd learned that saying a need out loud had only ever cost him. In eight weeks Jacob was going to walk into Juilliard and put his hands on a piano in front of people who knew exactly what they were hearing. He'd come up out of a corner not so different from this one. Nathan stood. His chest gave a tight pull as he came up—a fist closing and opening behind the sternum, there and gone. He noted it like weather and filed it, keeping his face exactly where it was. "Mr. Hassan, what's the cookies run?" "That's not—Captain, it's the principle—" "I agree with you about the principle." He did, too; that was the part people never expected, that he could agree with you and still not let you do the wrong thing. "So here's what we'll do." He drew his wallet and laid bills on the counter, more than the cookies, enough for a real meal. "You feed this young man today, on me. And Dré—" he turned back to the boy "—you come in the front and ask, every time. Mr. Hassan's going to find you work. Sweeping. Stocking. You earn it, you don't take it. We square?" The boy's eyes came up at last, wet and furious and ten years old under the fourteen. "Why," he said—not a question so much as a wound. None of the rest of it was for a fourteen-year-old on a hot sidewalk, so he kept it behind his teeth. Somebody had done this for one of his, once. The system built to catch a kid like Dré dropped more than it ever held, and one of those dropped kids was asleep under his roof right now, eight weeks from leaving for a conservatory. "Because I think you're worth the trouble," he said instead. "Prove me right." He walked back out into the heat, Tran trailing, the little knot of watchers already coming apart now that there was nothing left to see—no cuffs, no spectacle, no story worth telling, just a kid fed and a captain who'd known everybody's name. "Sir," Tran said, after a block. "We could've charged that." "We could have." "Then why didn't we?" He considered it, because she'd asked it straight and a straight question earned a real answer. The pull behind his sternum had faded. The boys were home right now, packing—Logan folding things into squares, Jacob most likely at the keys instead of his suitcase, running out the clock on a city he'd survived and was finally allowed to leave. "Because I can charge a hungry kid and clear a complaint, or I can give him a reason to wave at me next year," he said. "I can't do both. The badge'll let you pick the first one all day long. The job's the second one." He glanced at her. "You'll see." She was quiet the rest of the walk-through. He counted that, too, as progress.