what the blood remember

Chapter Four: Small Wrongnesses

It took three months for the wrongnesses to add up into something Elijah couldn't ignore, and the trouble was that none of them arrived big enough, on their own, to demand attention. They were the kind of details a person only assembles in hindsight, each one small enough to wave off in the moment and only alarming once laid end to end, like a string of pearls that looks unremarkable one at a time and becomes, strung together, unmistakably a necklace.

There was the mirror behind the bar, tarnished and old, that had been there since before Elijah worked there — a fixture, decorative, useless for anything but atmosphere, the kind of thing regulars used to check their hair and nobody else ever really looked at twice. He caught himself checking it once, out of nothing but habit, expecting to see Marcus at the far stool the way he always was on Thursdays. The stool was there. The drink was there, dark and untouched, exactly where he'd left it. Marcus was not.

He turned around fast enough that a rack of clean glasses rattled against the bar mat. Marcus was exactly where he'd been a second ago, watching him with that same careful attention, entirely present, entirely real, one eyebrow raised slightly at whatever had crossed Elijah's face.

"You alright?" Marcus asked.

"Fine," Elijah said, and made himself smile, and told himself the mirror was old and cloudy and the bar was dim and he was tired, all of which was true, none of which explained the particular, specific absence he thought he'd seen.

There was the food. They'd started having dinner sometimes on his nights off, at a place on St. Claude that did red beans the old way, Monday food any day of the week, and Elijah noticed, slowly, over several meals, that Marcus ate — cut his food into careful, even pieces, brought fork to mouth at a believable pace, chewed and swallowed with the exact correct mechanics of a man eating a meal he enjoyed — and yet three weeks running Elijah realized he could not actually remember watching a single bite disappear. He'd look down at his own plate to season it, or glance up to answer a question, and when his eyes came back the level of food on Marcus's plate would have dropped in a way that matched the conversation's pacing a little too neatly, like a magic trick performed just outside the edge of where a person happened to be looking.

He tried, once, to watch on purpose — kept his eyes fixed on Marcus's fork through an entire exchange about Denise Arceneaux's latest classroom cross-examination — and somehow, despite his best effort, lost the thread of it anyway, distracted by something Marcus said or the particular way the candlelight caught his jaw, and looked down again to find the plate three bites further along than it should have been. He decided, that night, driving home with the windows down against the heat, that he had simply never been as attentive as he liked to think he was. He did not entirely believe himself.

There was the cold. New Orleans in August was an assault, a wet suffocating heat that had every living soul in the city sweating through their clothes by ten in the morning, air thick enough to wear, and Marcus's skin, when Elijah's hand brushed his reaching for the same door handle outside the restaurant, was cool as a glass of water left out overnight on a marble counter. Not clammy. Not sick. Simply, evenly cool, the temperature of a man who had never once in his life needed to sweat through a Louisiana summer, and Elijah pulled his hand back a half-second too fast to pass for casual, and Marcus noticed him notice, and neither of them said anything about it.

There was, too, the way Marcus never once appeared in a photograph. Elijah caught this last, and it embarrassed him afterward how long it took — three separate attempts at a picture, a birthday dinner for a coworker where Marcus had tagged along, a second-line where the whole crowd had crushed together for a group shot, a selfie Elijah tried to take of the two of them on the porch one evening with the haint-blue paint glowing gold in the sunset behind them — and every single time, something interfered. A thumb over the lens. A sudden gust that made Elijah blink at the wrong moment. The porch photo came out with Elijah smiling alone into a frame that seemed, for no reason he could name, to end just short of where Marcus had been standing, as though the camera itself had quietly declined the assignment.

Elijah was not a stupid man. He noticed things. It was, his grandmother said, the family gift and the family curse — the Freemans had always paid too much attention, always seen more than was comfortable to see, and it had made undertakers and ushers and teachers out of generations of them, people whose eyes stayed open when everyone else's instinct was to look away. He came from people who sat with the dead for a living and had learned, over generations, not to flinch from what other folks preferred not to notice.

He did not say anything. Not yet. He told himself he was waiting for a reasonable explanation to present itself, some ordinary account of a strange, careful, cold-skinned man who never finished a drink and never quite got caught eating and never once came out clearly in a photograph and made a twenty-two-year-old trumpet player call him "sir" out of some instinct older than politeness.

He was not waiting for a reasonable explanation. He knew that, somewhere under the part of himself that kept filing things away under *later*. He was waiting to see how much he'd be willing to accept before the wrongness outweighed the wanting, running some quiet internal ledger the way his grandmother's ledger books had once recorded the city's dead — patient, careful, unhurried, in no rush at all to reach the bottom line.

He did not yet know the answer was: quite a lot.