Eli
866 Words
She found the photograph on a Thursday.
She had not been looking for it. She had been looking for the copy of the Prague contact list she had printed and misplaced somewhere on the working room table, moving folders and papers in the methodical way she moved through most tasks, and the photograph had slid out from between two of Damian's folders and landed face up on the table.
Two boys. The older one was recognizable as a younger version of Damian, the same sharp angles already forming in a teenage face, but with something looser about him than the man she knew. A quality of not yet that the Damian she knew had long since grown out of. He was laughing at something off camera.
The younger boy was maybe fourteen or fifteen. Dark haired, lighter built, with a wide open smile that looked like it was his default expression rather than a response to anything specific. He had his arm around the older boy's shoulders with the easy affection of someone who had never been given a reason not to.
She picked it up and looked at it for a long moment.
Eli.
She set it carefully on top of Damian's folders where he would see it had been found and went back to looking for her contact list.
He came into the working room an hour later. He saw the photograph immediately. She watched him look at it and look at her and she kept her expression neutral and let him decide what to do with the moment.
He picked up the photograph and looked at it for a long time.
"He was seventeen there," he said. "I was twenty two. That was taken the summer before I got properly involved in the business." He paused. "The last summer things were simple."
She said nothing. She had learned when to be quiet around grief.
"He didn't want this life," Damian said. "He was the only person in our family who managed to stay outside it. He was going to study architecture. He had a place at a university in Florence." He set the photograph down carefully. "He was killed because of who I was, not because of anything he had done. Wrong place. Wrong family name."
The room was very quiet.
"I'm sorry," she said. The same words she had said before, simply, because they were still the only useful ones.
He nodded. He looked at the photograph one more time and then put it in the inside pocket of his jacket, close, where it had apparently been living for some time.
"The architecture drawings," she said. "In the corridor. The framed ones."
He looked at her.
"They're his," she said. It wasn't a question.
Something moved through his expression that was more unguarded than anything she had seen from him before. Not quite surprise. The look of someone who had been seen clearly and was still deciding how to feel about it.
"Yes," he said.
She nodded. She turned back to her papers and found the Prague contact list under a Velmora port report and smoothed it out on the table and said nothing else because nothing else was needed.
He sat down at his end of the table and opened his folders and they worked in the quiet room with the afternoon light moving slowly across the board on the wall and the maps of three cities and the architecture drawings down the hall and the photograph in his pocket.
After a while he said, without looking up from his papers, "He would have liked you."
She kept her eyes on the contact list. She felt the words settle somewhere they were going to stay for a long time.
"Tell me about him," she said quietly.
And he did.
For the rest of the afternoon, with the pale light fading outside and the city going about its complicated business beyond the walls of the house, Damian Voss talked about his brother. Not the grief of him. The life of him. The way he laughed too loudly at his own jokes. The terrible coffee he made every single morning with complete confidence. The architectural sketches he left on every available surface. The way he argued about everything with the cheerful certainty of someone who had never once considered the possibility that he might be wrong.
Sienna listened and asked questions and the afternoon became evening and nobody suggested stopping.
When the light finally failed she got up and turned on the lamp and looked at him across the warm circle of it and he looked back at her with an expression that was quieter and more open than she had ever seen on his face.
"Thank you," he said.
She understood. Not for the listening. For the asking.
"You're welcome," she said.
She went to make dinner and he followed her to the kitchen and they stood on their respective sides of the counter and talked about Eli and Velmora and Prague and nothing in particular until the food was ready, and it was, she thought, the most ordinary and the most important evening she had spent in a very long time.
- Writer
