Does He Want To See Me

"How long has that Volvo been out there?"

Rainer stood at the window with the lights off, one finger holding the blind open a half inch. He'd come up the stairs instead of the elevator. He hadn't taken off his jacket. He hadn't said hello either, which Jose had expected, and he hadn't looked at him yet, which he hadn't.

"I didn't see a Volvo."

"Gray. Across the street, two cars down from the hydrant. Headlights off, engine on. I counted the exhaust for four minutes." Rainer let the blind snap shut. "Cops sit lower. That's somebody's friend."

"Camille texted me an hour ago. She knew which building. She knew about the heat."

"She knew about the heat." Rainer finally turned around. His face was gray under the stubble and there was dirt in the creases of his knuckles, old dirt, the kind that doesn't wash out in one night. "That's a love letter, Jose. That's the nicest threat I've ever heard."

"I haven't decided what it is."

"No. You haven't."

He crossed the room and sat on the single chair, the one at the desk, and put his hands flat on his knees. Jose noticed he was rubbing something in his right pocket with his thumb. A coin, maybe. A token. He'd been doing it since the stairs.

"Anything to drink in here?" Rainer said.

Jose looked at him.

"Never mind." The thumb kept moving. "Water's fine."

There was a plastic cup on the sink. Jose filled it and handed it over, and their fingers didn't touch, and both of them noticed.

"You were in the room," Jose said.

Rainer drank half the water. "Which room."

"The prep room. The lid. You photographed a man putting cinder blocks in my brother's coffin and you stood there."

"I told you the box was empty."

"You told me she made sure of it."

"She did." Rainer set the cup on the desk. "She made sure there'd be a funeral. I made sure what went in the box. You can have the credit split however you want."

"At the wedding you said it like it was hers."

"At the wedding I said what would make you turn around." His voice stayed flat. "I'd have said you were a cheat or a thief or a fucking bigamist if it got you to look back. It was a shitty plan. It almost worked."

Jose sat on the bed. The mattress took him lower than he expected and he hated being below Rainer's eye line. "Where is he?"

"No."

"I'm not asking for a visit."

"Yes you are."

"I want to know where my brother is."

"Your brother." Rainer tipped his head. "Your brother was a man in a hospital doorway three weeks before the call, and you hugged him and promised to phone more, and you phoned twice. Twice, Jose. I counted. I counted because I was the one he cried to after."

It landed. Jose let it. There was no point arguing with a number.

"Is he all right?"

"Define all right."

"Is he eating?"

Rainer's mouth did something complicated. "He's eating. He's painting again. Badly. He hates it." He looked at the wall instead of Jose. "He asked me what you wore. At the wedding. I told him a navy suit and he said, of course it was navy."

Jose's throat shut. For a second he couldn't get a word through it.

"Does he want to see me?"

"I'm not telling you where he is tonight," Rainer said, which was an answer, and they both knew it.

"Then tell me what happened that night."

"He was alive when I got there."

"Alive."

"That's what you get."

"That's not an answer. That's a headline."

"It's the one I've got for you." Rainer's thumb stopped moving in the pocket and then started again. "Camille was already gone. I'm not going to pretend I know what she said to him before she left, because I don't, and the day I hear it from her mouth I'll know what she is. But he was breathing. And the first thing I understood standing in that bathroom was that he couldn't be breathing in any record anyone kept."

"Why not?"

"Because somebody was already making a list of what he was worth."

"Who?"

Rainer shook his head once. A small, tired movement. "Not tonight."

"You do this." Jose was on his feet and didn't remember standing. "You decide how much I can carry and then you hand me that much and call it honesty. You've been doing it since we were kids."

"I tried handing you all of it once." Rainer didn't raise his voice. That was the worst of it. "You put it down when it got heavy. You were very polite about it."

The radiator knocked, a second late.

Neither of them spoke through the next one either.

---

The coffee from the machine in the hall was a dollar fifty and tasted like pennies. Rainer drank it anyway. Jose sat on the floor with his back against the bed and a few feet of carpet between them, the way they had sat on the floor of a dozen different houses, waiting for different disasters to finish.

"Camille's mother," Jose said eventually. "She told me about her mother today. Out of nowhere. Nineteen years with a drunk."

"Did you believe her?"

"Yes."

"Good. It's probably true." Rainer turned the paper cup in his hands. "That's why she's good at this. She never needs to lie about the part that hurt."

"You hate her."

"I recognize her." He said it so mildly Jose almost missed it. "There's a difference. I know what it costs to keep somebody alive by deciding everything for them. I know exactly how it looks from the inside. It looks like love."

Jose didn't answer. There was no answer that wasn't about himself.

Rainer's right hand was resting on his knee with the palm turned up. Jose saw it in the lamplight. Both palms, in fact. Blisters across the base of every finger, broken and weeping, and a long raw seam at the heel of the hand where something had rubbed through the skin.

"Give me that," Jose said.

"It's nothing."

"You dug it by hand?"

"The handle split." Rainer shrugged one shoulder. "It was a cheap shovel."

Jose got to his knees. He took Rainer's wrist and turned the hand to the light, and Rainer let him, with the particular stillness of someone who has agreed not to flinch. There was a first aid kit in his bag, the kind a man packs when he expects to need it. He cleaned the seam with the little alcohol wipes and Rainer watched the top of his head the whole time.

"You're better at this than you used to be," Rainer said.

"I've had practice."

"On who?"

Jose didn't answer. He wrapped the heel of the hand in gauze and secured it with tape, and when he reached for the second hand Rainer turned it over himself and held it out.

Their foreheads were about six inches apart. Jose could smell dirt and cigarettes and cheap coffee under it, and under that the thing he'd have known in a crowd of ten thousand. He taped the gauze. He did not let go.

Rainer's free hand came up and stopped at the side of his face. It didn't land. It hung there, an inch from his jaw, wrapped in a bandage Jose had put on, and Jose felt the heat of it and thought, *just do it,* and could not tell whether he was thinking it to Rainer or to himself.

"If I take you to bed tonight," Rainer said, very quietly, "you'll call it grief. And at breakfast you'll be in the shower with the door locked, working out how to explain yourself to her."

"I'm not going back to her."

"Say that again at noon."

"Rainer."

"She's already your anesthetic." The hand dropped. Rainer took the bandaged one out of Jose's grip and curled it against his chest. "I'm not going to be the second dose."

Jose sat back on his heels. His face felt hot and his hands felt useless. He had never in his life been refused by this man. He had been fought, and left, and shouted at in three languages. Never refused.

"That's not fair," he said.

"No."

"You don't get to decide that for me either."

"Watch me." But the words had no edge. Rainer leaned his head against the desk leg and shut his eyes. "I'm tired, Jose. Let me be tired in a room with you for a few hours. Don't ask me for more than that."

They stayed on the floor. Jose didn't ask.

At some point after two Rainer started talking about nothing. The time Elias set the toaster on fire trying to make a grilled cheese at three in the morning, and how long the kitchen smelled afterward. How Maggie never said a word about it and just bought a new toaster on Monday. He was laughing a little when he said it, in that tired, scraped way. Jose laughed too, and somewhere inside the laughing his eyes started to sting and he let them, because Rainer wasn't looking.

At four, Rainer stood up. His knees cracked. He took a manila folder from inside his jacket and put it on the desk.

"Funeral home," he said. "Part of the chain of custody. The rest is in someone's head and he isn't talking."

"Why give me part?"

"Because you're going to go look anyway." He pulled the jacket straight. "You always check the thing you've been told not to check. It's the one reliable trait you have."

"That's your answer."

"That's my answer." He stopped at the door with his good hand on the knob. For a moment he looked at Jose the way he'd looked at him in the church, steady and furious and starved.

"When you're ready to stop lying to yourself," Rainer said, "call me."

He went out. The latch clicked.

Jose crossed to the window. Rainer came out the front door of the building and stood on the pavement for exactly as long as it took to find the Volvo. Then he walked straight across the street to it, unhurried, and rapped on the driver's window with one knuckle.

The glass came down. A man's face, young, startled. Rainer said something short. Jose couldn't hear it. The man's mouth opened, and closed.

The Volvo started and pulled away so fast it clipped the curb.

Rainer stood watching it go. Then he turned up his collar and walked the other way, and he did not look up at the window once.

Jose took the folder back to the bed.

Intake sheets, mostly. A transport log. A photocopy of a signature card with a name blacked out in marker. At the top of the stack, stuck to the first page, a yellow note in cramped blue pen.

The pages were numbered in the lower corner. One. Two. Then five. Then six.

The staple holes between two and five had been torn through, cleanly, recently. Someone had taken pages three and four.

The note read:

*3 and 4 stay with me until it's safe. I'm sorry. I'd do it again.*