Seize the Night

“Does she lie to you?”

“She doesn’t lie to anyone,” I said.

“Between a man and woman in love, no lie is small or harmless.”

“You keep surprising me.”

“My wisdom?”

“Your mushy little teddy-bear heart.”

“Squeeze me, and I sing ‘Feelings.’”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

We were only a few blocks from Lilly Wing’s house.

“Go in by the back, through the alley,” I directed.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a police patrol car or another unmarked sedan full of granite-eyed men waiting for us, but the alleyway was deserted. Sasha Goodall’s Ford Explorer stood in front of Lilly’s garage door, and Bobby parked behind it.

Beyond the windbreak of giant eucalyptuses, the wild canyon to the east lay in unrelieved blackness. Without the lamp of the moon, anything might have been out there: a bottomless abyss rather than a mere canyon, a great dark sea, the end of the earth and a yawning infinity.

As I got out of the Jeep, I remembered good Orson investigating the weeds along the verge of the canyon, urgently seeking Jimmy. His yelp of excitement when he caught the scent. His swift and selfless commitment to the chase.

Only hours ago. Yet ages ago.

Time seemed out of joint even here, far beyond the walls of the egg room.

At the thought of Orson, a coldness closed around my heart, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.

I recalled waiting by candlelight beside my father in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital, two years ago this past January, waiting with my mother’s body for the hearse that would take her to Kirk’s Funeral Home, feeling as though my own body had been broken beyond repair by the loss of her, almost afraid to move or even to speak, as though I might fly apart like a hollow ceramic figurine struck with a hammer. And my father’s hospital room only a month ago. The terrible night he died. Holding his hand in mine, leaning over the bed railing to hear his final whispered words — Fear nothing, Chris. Fear nothing. — and then his hand going slack in mine. I had kissed his forehead, his rough cheek. Because I myself am a walking miracle, still healthy and whole with XP at the age of twenty-eight, I believe in miracles, in the reality of them and in our need for them, and so I held fast to my dead father’s hand, kissed his beard-stubbled cheek, still hot with fever, and waited for a miracle, all but demanded one. God help me, I expected Dad to pull a Lazarus on me, because the pain of losing him was too fierce to bear, the world unthinkably hard and cold without him, and I could not be expected to endure it, must be granted mercy, so although I have been blessed with numerous miracles in my life, I was greedy for one more, one more. I prayed to God, begged Him, bargained with Him, but there is a grace in the natural order of things that is more important than our desires, and at last I’d had to accept that grace, as bitter as it seemed at the time, and reluctantly I’d released my father’s lifeless hand.

Now I stood breathless in the alley, pierced again by the fear that I would be required to outlive Orson, my brother, that special and precious soul, who was even more an outsider in this world than I was. If he should die alone, without the hand of a friend to comfort him, without a soothing voice telling him that he was loved, I would be forever haunted by — ruined by — the thought of his solitary suffering and despair.

“Bro,” Bobby said, putting one hand on my shoulder and squeezing gently. “Gonna be all right.”

I hadn’t spoken a word, but Bobby seemed to know what fears had rooted me to the alleyway blacktop as I stared into the forbidding blackness of the canyon beyond the eucalyptus trees.

Breath returned to me in a rush, and with it came a dangerously fierce hope, one of those seizures of hope so intense it can break your heart if it goes unfulfilled, a hope that was really a mad and unreasonable conviction, which I had no right to indulge here at the end of the world: We would find Jimmy Wing, and we would find Orson, untouched and alive, and those who had meant to harm them would rot in Hell.

16

Through the wooden gate, along the narrow brick walkway, into the backyard where the aroma of jasmine was as thick as incense, I worried about how I was going to convey to Lilly Wing even a small measure of my newfound faith that her son would be discovered alive and unharmed. I had little to tell her that would support such an optimistic conclusion. In fact, if I recounted a fraction of what Bobby and I had seen in Fort Wyvern, Lilly would lose hope altogether.

Bright lights were on toward the front of the Cape Cod bungalow. In expectation of my return, only faint candlelight flickered beyond the kitchen windows at the rear.

Sasha was waiting for us at the top of the back-porch steps. She must have been in the kitchen when she heard the Jeep pulling behind the garage.

The mental image of Sasha that I carry with me is idealized — yet each time I see her, after an absence, she is lovelier than my most flattering recollection. Although my vision had adapted to the dark, the light was so poor that I could not see the arrestingly clear gray of her eyes, the mahogany shade of her hair, or the faintly freckled glow of her skin. Nevertheless, she shone.

We embraced, and she whispered, “Hey, Snowman.”

“Hey.”

“Jimmy?”

“Not yet,” I said, matching her whisper. “Now Orson’s missing.”

Her embrace tightened. “In Wyvern?”

“Yeah.”

She kissed my cheek. “He’s not just all heart and wagging tail. He’s tough. He can take care of himself.”

“We’re going back for them.”

“Damn right, and me with you.”

Sasha’s beauty is not just — or even primarily — physical. In her face, I also see her wisdom, her compassion, her courage, her eternal glory. This other beauty, this spiritual beauty — which is the deepest truth of her — sustains me in times of fear and despair, as other truths might sustain a priest enduring martyrdom under the hand of a tyrant. I see nothing blasphemous in equating Sasha’s grace with the mercy of God, for the one is a reflection of the other. The selfless love that we give to others, to the point of being willing to sacrifice our lives for them — as Sasha would give hers for me, as I would give mine for her — is all the proof I need that human beings are not mere animals of self-interest; we carry within us a divine spark, and if we choose to recognize it, our lives have dignity, meaning, hope. In Sasha, this spark is bright, a light that heals rather than wounds me.

When she hugged Bobby, who was carrying the shotgun, Sasha whispered, “Better leave that out here. Lilly’s shaky.”

“Me too,” Bobby murmured.

He put the shotgun on the porch swing. The Smith & Wesson revolver was tucked under his belt, concealed by his Hawaiian shirt.

Sasha was wearing blue jeans, a sweater, and a roomy denim jacket. When we embraced, I’d felt the concealed handgun in her shoulder holster.

I had the 9-millimeter Glock.

If my mother’s gene-swapping retrovirus had been vulnerable to gunfire, it would have met its match in us, the end of the world would have been canceled, and we would have been at a beach party.

“Cops?” I asked Sasha.

“They were here. Gone now.”

“Manuel?” I asked, meaning Manuel Ramirez, the acting chief of police, who had been my friend before he had been co-opted by the Wyvern crowd.