🌁 chapter seventeen: a cage went in search of a bird [let me be your ghost]

“A cage went in search of a bird.” -Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

“A cage went in search of a bird.”

-Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight | chapter nine | chapter ten | chapter eleven | chapter twelve | chapter thirteen | chapter fourteen | chapter fifteen | chapter sixteen

He didn’t speak to me for four days.

Not a freeze-out, nothing as warm as anger. He was simply gone—to the city before I woke, back after midnight, if he came back at all. The library stayed dark. The interviews came off the calendar without explanation, which meant with explanation, and Hayden’s voice when she called to cancel them had something new in it that was worse than the old frost. Caution. Even she could smell that the weather over the estate had changed, even if no one but Eze and I knew why.

I stayed. He hadn’t told me to go, and I understood, the way you understand a held breath, that leaving would answer a question he hadn’t finished asking.

So I lived inside the silence I had earned. I ate Tini’s food at the long table alone, and she occasionally came out to heap more onto my plate, which from Tini was a wellness check. I walked the cliff path where he had kissed me and closed my eyes, feeling the wind caress me the way he had that night. I slept two doors from an empty room—he wasn’t even sleeping at the house—on the floor again, because the bed had been a hypothesis and the hypothesis was suspended pending review.

And I wrote his book.

That was the perversity of those four days. With everything else stripped away—the cover blown, the wire dead, no more drops going to any blue mailbox, because I had stopped, I had simply stopped, let Matthew make of it what he would—the only thing left standing between me and the silence was the actual work. So I did the actual work. I wrote the chapter about a boy at a lake in Hokkaido being blamed for a tipped canoe. I wrote his mother’s funeral, and the friend who held him up through it, and I cried over my own legal pad like an amateur, and kept writing. Every page was an apology I didn’t have the standing to say out loud. I wrote forty of them, finishing them in the candlelit kitchen and forgetting my legal pad on the creaky old table there.

On the fourth night, at eleven, the library lights came on.

I stood in the library doorway for a long moment before he looked up. He was in the fireside chair with a folder on his knee and four days of the city on his face, and the fire was lit, and two glasses stood on the small table, one of them poured.

“I read your forty pages,” Eze said. “Tini pulled them off the kitchen table and had Xavier give them to me. She thought I should see what you were doing while I decided what to do with you.” He looked at the fire. “The funeral chapter. That’s her, Lola. That’s her, Lola, whole, and you never met her, and I don’t know what to do with the fact that the person who saw my mother clearest came here wearing a wire.”

“Eze—”

“Pack a bag.” He stood and handed me back my legal pad, and his eyes, when they finally landed on mine, had made some enormous decision I couldn’t read the terms of. “We fly at five. There’s something my father built that you need to see. And then we’re going to find out, once and for all, what side you’re on.”