I put a second sandwich together and lowered the heat before I put it back on the flame. I watched this one more carefully, turning it over when the bread was a golden brown and not burned. By the time I had it finished, the Old Croc cheddar was gone, the plate empty except for two lonely crackers. I’d have offered him more cheese, but the sandwich was done. I plated it and set it down in front of him, trying not to grin as he said, “Smells great, Z.”
I did grin then, because it had been his nickname for me since we were small. Suriel had never liked it, said it wasn’t dignified. She’d always cared more about stuff like that even at eleven.
“Thanks, Lev,” I said, using his old nickname.
He shook his head. “Levi is short enough, Z, maybe someday I’ll earn the other name back, but let’s not jump the gun.”
“Okay . . . Levi.”
He gave me a truly dazzling smile as if I’d done something a lot more special than use his new name. His teeth flashed white and I realized he’d cleaned up everything. It wasn’t that he was dirty exactly, but there just weren’t a lot of places to do a lot of personal hygiene when you were homeless. Especially when you wouldn’t stay in a shelter for long. He had said that the voices in his head were louder indoors, or he was closer to God outside. Either way, I’d stopped trying to help him get a bed in some of the better shelters, and halfway houses were out because he wouldn’t stay on the meds that the newest doctor had prescribed. I wanted to ask if he was on meds now, but it wasn’t a safe question. If he was on meds that worked, I didn’t want to do anything to make him question them.
I put my sandwich on another plate and sat down at the table with him. Sunlight spilled a warm yellow rectangle across the table as we ate. We didn’t talk, but it wasn’t awkward, it felt peaceful. We ate in companionable silence. I normally liked the sandwich, but today it could have been almost anything, and I still would have enjoyed it, because Jamie was there, really there. Not just the shell of his body, but his eyes were lit up, alive and full of humor and joy, and he was enjoying the food in front of him.
I was hungering for the sight of him sitting happily beside me more than any food. How did I ask the questions I wanted to ask without risking raising the shadows inside him?
“I’d forgotten that food could taste like this.”
“Thanks, but it’s just a hot sandwich.”
“It’s not the sandwich, though that was good. It’s like I can taste food again. I can see color and light. It’s like I was trapped in the valley of death and everything was gray and dark. Now I’m out and it’s so much better.”
“How did you get out?” I asked; because he’d brought it up, it seemed safer.
His smile wilted a little around the edges, and the shadows in his brown eyes were there for a second like a flinching, but then he took a deep breath and shook himself like a dog coming out of water.
“Can I have some tea, while I try to explain it all?”
“What kind of tea?” I asked.
“Hot, sweet, like I liked it before.”
I got up smiling and went to the cabinet in the narrow galley kitchen. I got to turn around with a box of Bigelow’s Chinese Fortune Oolong. I’d kept a box of it and made sure it was a fresh box, just in case. I’d kept it the way you’d keep your friend’s favorite whiskey waiting for that one last drink together. We hadn’t been allowed strong drink in the College, though we’d both made up for it once we left. I’d never stayed drunk the way that Jamie had, and I’d never done drugs, but I’d tried most of the things the College of Angels had forbidden us. Teenage rebellion, just done a decade late.
“Real cream, sugar in the raw, right?”
He gave me a big smile. “You remembered.”
“You don’t forget how your best friend likes his tea.”
“I’ve spent so many years drinking and popping and injecting anything, everything, but I could never drink coffee. Even as lost as I was, that still tasted bitter to me.”
“But tea didn’t taste good?”
He shook his head. “Nothing tasted good, but things could taste bad.” Again, there was that shadow across his face.
I put on hot water in a rapid-boil kettle that I’d gotten so I could do tea before I went to work. “I drink coffee at work mostly.”
“Yuck,” he said.
“Yuck? I’ve seen you drink liquor, cheap shit that I wouldn’t clean my gun with, and coffee is yuck.”
“Weird, huh?”
“Yeah, a little. So how did you get back to this, to you, to here?” I asked.
He looked down at his hands spread flat on the table in the sunlight. His hands were clean, but they were also the most tanned part of him, because he’d never worn gloves on the street, but he had covered most of the rest of him. I’d come to hate the old trench coat he’d worn over everything else. Not just because it was stained and smelled bad, but because he huddled in it like a security blanket, and because it reminded me of the wings of angels the way it would flap and billow around him when he was walking fast down the street. It was like a double slap in the face, the loss of him and the loss of being with the angels. Wings weren’t necessary for an angel to translocate; nothing was, they could vanish in the blink of an eye. They could travel back to God, or wherever he wanted to send them, instantly. Yet most angels appeared as human forms with large, sweeping wings big enough to carry a human body upward like an eagle, because humans expected them to have wings. We expected them to be beautiful and to have wings. Only two things weren’t humans projecting onto the angelic: halos of light, where the true forms of angels licked out around the edges, and height. Angels were tall; six feet was short for them. It was as if you couldn’t shrink all that power down enough to be short. There were exceptions, there are always exceptions, but most angels couldn’t squash themselves down enough to look truly human.
“You always were good at that,” Jamie said.
I blinked and looked at him, realizing that I had been thinking more about angels than about the man sitting in my kitchen. “Good at what?” I asked.
“Silence, you could always be quiet and wait for me to talk.”
I wondered how many times in the past my “silence” had been me lost in thoughts like now. I pushed the thought away to look at it later and tried to really be present for my friend. I needed to be here and now.
The timer on the microwave sounded. “Tea’s ready,” I said, and got up to get it.
He smiled, but he was staring at his hands on the tabletop, so I wasn’t sure if he was smiling at that or at his own inner thoughts. One of the things that had made us friends was that he was almost as introspective as I was. Surrie was cautious, but even she told us, “You think too much, sometimes you just have to do things.”
“Whatcha thinking about?” I asked, using the phrase that we’d used when the three of us were younger, before everything went wrong.
“It feels like Suriel should be here to say that, and get us talking instead of just brooding,” he said. His smile somehow was sad now.
I put the tea bags on the spoon rest and said, “She stopped saying it by the time we were fifteen or sixteen.”