The Meq (30 page)

Carolina decided to leave the house as it was and clean up in the morning. She suggested we all gather in the kitchen around the long table, which we did, and Owen Bramley immediately began a long explanation for their late arrival, which was not unusual. Since I had known him, he had never been anywhere at the time he was expected to be there. “When I heard the news from Carolina about Solomon,” he said, “I was damn near inconsolable. However, when she mentioned that you were already in St. Louis”—and he nodded at me—“then I remembered that Ray had asked me to wire him if I ever heard you were back in the States. I had trouble with a man in Boise, but after I told him . . .”

As he rambled on, I looked around the room. Ciela was busy at the stove, oblivious to the fact that anything at all was out of the ordinary. Nicholas stayed close to Carolina, first standing, then sitting beside her. He was still sorting through new realities and fears though he was handling it well. Without warning, his world had assumed a missing daughter, a pregnant wife, a dead friend and mentor, and now his kitchen was full of beings out of some fairy tale he might have read to his daughter. He listened to Owen Bramley, but rarely looked at him. In fact, neither of them looked very long or very often at the other, but they were always more than cordial to each other. Owen Bramley mostly paced as he talked, wiping his glasses when he paused. I’m not sure what Nicholas thought of Eder. He might not even have thought of her as Meq, even though he knew she was Nova’s mother. He would have seen a woman, about Carolina’s age, with slightly exotic features, who could easily have been from Spanish Town on South Broadway. I know Carolina was fascinated with her. This was the first time she had ever met an “adult” Meq. And Nova broke her heart when she handed Carolina a carefully wrapped bundle of sprigs, saying, “It’s Solomon’s seal. It’s a herb that will come back every year and bring back the memory of your missing friend.” When I heard her voice, I knew I’d heard it before, recently. She was the younger sister. She was the one I had heard talking about the Ferris Wheel. She had been blocks away and probably talking to Ray and I had heard it. I knew then that I must harness my new “ability.”

Ray was Ray and his presence felt good. He’d found a spot on the countertop instead of a chair and sat there with one leg pulled up against his chest and one leg dangling, swinging back and forth. He was smiling, winking at me, and making faces at Nova, who ignored him. Domesticity had only changed one thing that I could see; instead of wearing his bowler, he was twirling it on his finger. Watching him, I made a decision. I decided not to tell him about the “Pearl,” about Zuriaa. I don’t know why, maybe I thought I had to know more, more of the truth, before I told him. I have never known why we sometimes decide on behalf of the ones we love what they should and should not know. It is a mistake. In the end, we are all found out. I glanced at Nova and marveled. It was apparent she had a quick intelligence and an innate capacity to focus and concentrate, read between the lines of the moment. She was listening to Owen Bramley, but I could tell she was more aware of Carolina, and even me, as I watched and thought about her. Owen Bramley was just finishing his long tale. “So in the end,” he said, “even with the additions, the solution lay in packaging, not logistics.” I had no idea what he was referring to, but then he suddenly changed the subject and said, “By the way, Carolina, where is Li? And where is Star? For God’s sake, I have only seen her in photographs.”

Carolina looked at Nicholas, taking his hand, then she looked at me, wondering what to say. It was impossible to keep it hidden any longer.

“The Fleur-du-Mal kidnapped her,” I said. Eder let out a small gasp and glanced at Ray, who returned her look and dropped his smile, confirming something between them. Even Carolina looked a little stunned. She had never heard me refer to him by name. I went on, “I don’t know why he has taken her, but I have an idea. I am going to New Orleans tomorrow. That is his home, of sorts, and that is where I will find her . . . and him. Li has disappeared.”

Owen Bramley stopped pacing. “Who in the hell is the Fleur-du-Mal?” he asked.

I looked at Eder first, then Nova, then Ray. He shrugged his shoulders. “You got the stage, Z, tell the man,” and he waved his bowler in front of him as an introduction. I glanced again at Eder and she nodded her head slowly. This was reckless, maybe even dangerous to her. She had never before shared information like this with the Giza. To her, we were still Meq, even the worst of us, and our safety had always been our silence.

“He is . . . one of us,” I said. “He is one of our kind, but he is also different. He is supposedly an assassin by trade and has been for a very long time. He might, he probably does, have a vendetta against me. All I know is, he has Star, he’s responsible for Solomon’s death, he killed Carolina’s sister and Mrs. Bennings”—and I paused, looked at Eder and Nova, thinking of Baju—“and he may have been behind some other things. I don’t know.” Eder gave me a quizzical look.

Owen Bramley took his glasses off, wiping them furiously and looking back and forth between Carolina, Nicholas, and me. “Did Solomon know this Fleur-du-Mal?” he asked.

I looked at him. Until then, I hadn’t thought about it. “No, why?” I asked.

“Because if he had, this would make more sense. But it does not, it does not make a damn bit of sense. Why haven’t you brought in the police on this one?”

“You know better than that, Owen.”

“But this is Carolina and Nicholas’s daughter! For Christ’s sake, Z, this is not Vancouver!” Then he stopped as if he’d been shot or had shot himself. His freckles all merged into one red blotch and he looked at Eder in panic. “Eder,” he said, “I’m sorry, I never meant—”

“It is all right, Owen. I know what you meant,” Eder said evenly.

“Vancouver?” Carolina asked. “What’s Vancouver?”

“That’s where my papa was killed,” Nova said and all eyes in the room looked to her, even Ciela’s. Nova looked back, one by one, into each and every face. The only sound I could hear was the hiss of a gas jet from the stove behind Ciela. In those few, strange, silent seconds, something happened to everyone in the room. Through the innocence and wisdom of Nova’s eyes, we all drank from a common pool, a quiet place of loss and restoration, and realized one by one a common trust and hope. Without having to say a word between us, we became what Eder said had only been legend—a family—an extended family of Giza and Meq. Not a family formed through time, geography, and circumstances, as we had with Kepa, but a family of strangers, formed in a few moments with love and blind trust.

Nicholas stood and cleared his throat. He put his hand on Carolina’s shoulder and spoke to Eder. “I don’t know if you were planning on staying in St. Louis or not, but if you are, then Carolina and I wouldn’t have you stay anywhere but here. You, Nova, Ray, and you too, Owen, if you have to,” he said, but he wasn’t looking at Owen or even Eder, he was looking down at Carolina. “We’re going to have another baby in the spring. I won’t have our baby being born in some big, empty house. No, ma’am, I won’t have it.”

Carolina looked up at him and smiled. “I agree,” she said.

Ray jumped down from the counter and pulled a chair up next to mine. Owen Bramley sat down too, next to Nicholas. “How do we find Star?” he said. “What can I do?”

Ray said, “Get me and Z to New Orleans.” Before I could say or do anything, he added, “You’re gonna need me, Z. It’s my town.”

So we sat at the long table making a plan and setting up a network of communication. Owen Bramley assured me I would have no problems traveling to New Orleans now or at any time in the future. And I could stay anyplace I chose. Solomon had left me a quarter of his estate and it was so well invested and diversified, he said I would only get richer. The other three-quarters had been willed equally to Owen himself, Carolina, and Star. “A bank account will be set up for you in New Orleans in a matter of hours,” he said, “and there is no need to worry about your youthful countenance. Not with this much money.”

I asked him if he still had the name and address of the French photographer on board the ship in Vancouver. He said he probably did, he’d have to look, and asked what that had to do with finding Star. I told him I wasn’t sure, maybe nothing, and I felt Ray watching me, wondering the same thing.

Then I asked if there had been any word from China and Owen Bramley said he’d received one telegram with one line from Sailor, which he couldn’t figure out at the time, but it said, “Have lost Zianno—gone searching.”

Finally, after a long day and night, Carolina called a halt to the gathering, saying she was exhausted, mentally, physically, and spiritually. Nicholas put his arm around her waist and asked Ciela to show everyone to their rooms. Carolina said, “Don’t leave before I say good-bye, Z.” I watched her walking away and I said, “We’ll find her. I promise.”

But there were no good-byes. I sneaked into Ray’s room at dawn and woke him up with my hand over his mouth. I whispered, “Let’s go,” and within minutes we were out of the door and standing under the stone arch in the driveway, shivering. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees and it had begun to rain again. The seasons were changing. Ray pulled his bowler down low over his eyes. All he said was, “Damn, Z.”

I noticed two huge wooden crates stacked under the arch, side by side. As we passed them, I asked, “Yours?”

“Don’t ask,” he said. So I didn’t.

Our train snaked its way down through Missouri and the eastern edge of the ancient Ozark Mountains. The rain stayed with us the whole trip and once, during a stop in the lowlands of Arkansas, I asked Ray if he could tell how long it would last.

“No, Z. I got no idea.”

“But you can tell when it’s coming, you can ‘listen’ for it, right?”

“No, it don’t work like that, either.”

“Well, how do you know then, what makes it happen?”

“I don’t know. I never have. I just sorta get a vision. I see the whole thing at once and I know when and where it’s going to change. I sorta see the mind of the storm, I guess. But I can’t tell where it’s going after where I see it. I only know what I know close-up, like somebody’s face right up against you. You see them real good, but you can’t see anything else around them.”

“And you can’t do it on purpose? You can’t will yourself to see something?”

“No, I don’t have nothing to do with that.”

I looked at him a long time while both of us stood there on the end of the platform like two kids, two brothers or cousins, watching the rain and waiting, waiting for something.

“Do you ever think it’s a curse?” I asked him. “Not just being the ‘Weatherman,’ but the whole thing, being Meq, I mean.”

“No, I try not to think about it like that.”

I put my hands in my pockets and turned to look at the flat cotton fields surrounding the station. I felt the Stone that I still carried there, cold and silent. It never gave me a reason or an answer. “I wish I felt about us the way Sailor or Geaxi does,” I said.

“You sure you want to?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I feel these days.”

He bent down and picked up a penny from the platform in front of him. He turned it over in his hand, then tossed it side-arm through the rain somewhere deep into the cotton field. “You ain’t lived as long as they have,” he said. “Give yourself another hundred years and then ask yourself how you feel.”

When we boarded the train and were back in our seats, he turned to me and said, “By the way, are you gonna tell me or not?”

“Tell you what?”

“Did you find her? Did you find Opari?”

“Yes and no.”

“Yes and no?” He paused, looking at me with streetwise eyes that had seen every kind of bluff and con there was. He took his bowler off and adjusted what was left of the brim, then set it on the seat next to him. I watched him, then turned and looked out of the window at the flat land and flimsy shacks that reminded me of ones I’d seen up and down the Yangtze. I turned back and told him everything, the whole story, and I told him as rapidly as I could, so that when I left out the part about Zuriaa, I hoped he hadn’t noticed. And I told him about the “Honeycircle” and everything that happened there. And then I told him that I was going to kill the Fleur-du-Mal as soon as we found Star.

Ray picked up his bowler again and examined it carefully, looking for any imperfections, of which there were many, and then slowly set it on his head at just the right angle. He looked straight at me with clear green eyes. “Well, Z,” he said. “It seems like that son of a Carthaginian’s got it comin’.”

I almost laughed out loud. “Where did you hear that phrase?” I asked him.

He looked back with a blank expression, then we both sniggered and started to laugh together, loud and long enough to draw attention from the other passengers. “I heard Kepa say it,” he finally answered. “I thought it kinda rolled off the tongue.”

I laughed again and then asked him about Kepa, Miren, Pello, and the others. He said Kepa was still as strong as barbed wire, but he and Pello were worried about the future of the Basque way of life in the territory. More and more, the sheepmen were being forced off free-range land. They had formed mutual aid societies in Boise and other places, but Kepa was not optimistic. I asked him if that had anything to do with him bringing Eder and Nova to St. Louis and he said no, that had been Eder’s idea. Nova would begin the Itxaron the following year and Eder wanted her to know more about the world than just the high desert and the womb of protection that Kepa and his Basque tribe provided. When Ray mentioned Nova, I noticed his concern for her was as great as Eder’s, maybe greater, but he agreed that she should live among the Giza and learn their ways. He said he thought Nova could “see things,” but he didn’t explain it further and I didn’t ask. I did ask if Eder had told him anything of Unai and Usoa, since he had never met them and it was they who we would seek first in New Orleans. He said Eder thought the Wait had taken its toll on them. They had been together so long, she said their only thoughts were for each other.