Both women release sharp breaths. “Lord almighty,” Mae says. “What you do with that?”
“I used to kill people.”
Mae nods. “The city girl. They called you an angel? I’ve heard—Junior’s let a few things slip. That’s … well, none of my business, I know, but I say it is a shame to do evil with the Lord’s gifts.”
Pea slides her fingers into the dirt. “All right. But is it always evil, Mae? Killing?”
Mae stops short and then laughs. “Well. Got me there, girl. Some men…”
“Some men.”
A pause. “You ain’t going to do anything to my boy, are you?”
“Not unless he tries to hurt me first. Or Dev.”
“Your man? Davey?”
A smile thin as a knife edge, but her voice oddly thick: “My man.”
But Phyllis is nobody’s woman. And the threat that brought me here is just ash against my fingertips. Who could have made it—the mother? Or the angel?
“My boy’s got ideas, but he’s got no reason to hurt you or yours. Now, the Bells, that’s another story. Thank the Lord for Ben Craver, or I don’t know what I’d do.”
“The Bells? Not a lot of love for them in this town, is there?”
The woman presses her palms into the dirt.
“Tell me something, city angel, you ever been a maid? Cleaned a white man’s house?”
The city angel moves so they’re shoulder to shoulder. “No,” she whispers, so I can barely hear. “No, I ain’t never, but I’ve heard.”
And so they remain for five seconds, ten. Pea’s face is gilded with morning light.
Up the hill someone rings that brassy bell six times. The mother jerks, and Pea stands up, looks over, and sees me.
We walk back the way we came. She laces her hand in mine and takes us unerringly down the wooded track that was once so familiar to me. It leads to the meadow with the swimming hole and the sweet mulberry tree, where I used to hide for hours from Bobby and his gang. I haven’t been back since they spent two days dredging the river to find the body of a young boy, bloated and blue.
“I found your name,” she says, “carved into the tree.”
“Just my initials.”
She shakes her head. She hasn’t combed her hair in days. The woolly curls shine rust in the sun, they stick out like spring shoots in a hedge. The lines by her eyes deepen as they look at me and then around the green. She pulls off her boots and sticks her feet in the watering hole, clear and spring-fed. I am in the grip of her, and of memories of who I was before I met her. She hasn’t said a word about what I overheard. She doesn’t seem to care. But she does.
“So how did you know?” I ask.
She dribbles a handful of water down the back of her neck. I swallow. “It’s the sort of place you’d find, and the sort of place you’d love. You dreamed a lot when you were younger. I did too, you know. But in Harlem it’s hard to find a private place. If I’d been here I’d have found you, too. Or you’d have found me. We’d have carved our names in the tree and gorged on honeysuckle and mulberry…” She looks over her shoulder at me, with a small, embarrassed smile. “Take your shoes off, Dev. The water’s nice.”
I take my shoes off and kneel behind her and pull her against me. Her sigh bows out against my sternum. Those uncombed curls catch on my stubble and tickle my lips. The clean scent of her, hair oil and garden dirt, shakes me with memory.
Thomas Pullman fell. And yes, I watched. But for Pea I killed, for her I returned here, for her I would—I am afraid that I would—do anything at all.
“If you wanted,” I say very softly, “I would let you.”
She turns abruptly in my arms. She kisses me with her lips and then with the cold barrel of my gun.
“You fool, Dev.” Her finger is so still on the trigger I imagine the smell of burning powder. “Still think I’d do it?”
Her eyes, dark as the bottom of the sea. Her heart, exposed beneath my hands as no one’s should be. I have been too much in the habit of imagining her because I know her better than anyone.
I pull the gun from her hands. I put it in the grass behind us and wipe her eyes.
“Damned fool,” she says, shaking. “That’s what that was? You felt something by the River House? Do you want me to kill you? Because I wouldn’t, even if you asked. I wouldn’t, even if you were dying anyway, even if you begged me. Oh, there’s someone I wouldn’t mind killing up on that hill, but it sure as hell ain’t you, sweet fool.”
The boys in the clearing, laughing when they thought they’d caught me again. All the people Pea killed for justice, while I knew Victor’s scheme and did not tell her. Karma is both patient and inevitable. It will catch me one day. Perhaps I did hope it would be Pea who delivered me back to the wheel of rebirth.
“Someone wants to kill me,” I say.
“Probably that damned boy.”
“I don’t think so.”
She shrugs. “Then we’ll find him, whoever he is. I won’t let you die either, Dev.”
“Is that a threat?”
With just a twist of her body she tips herself into the spring and takes me tumbling with her. The water is deeper than it seems from the edge, nearly fifteen feet of frigid stillness, rock shrouded, sacred. Pea kicks off the bottom, knocking the loose stones against one another. I stay below. Watch sun streaking past her
