CHAPTER TWO
Annie knows this is a mistake. There is nothing to be gained by being here. But again, she is drawn to him, wherever he is, whatever place he inhabits. She is a walking void, a vacuum, and she will always be. He is weight and center and gravity.
And he is in the casket at the front of this sanctuary.
Slipping in like the ghost she was and is and will be, she keeps to the edges of the dank church's great stone forest. Columns thick as redwoods sprout from the floor across the chamber and uphold a ceiling distant as the sky. She glides behind one and uses its concrete trunk as cover. Peeking around, she watches the crowd of a hundred or so pay their respects to him.
Him. He. Hers. Auggie.
No tears breach the barrier of her dry eyes, no salty brine clots her makeup-less eyelashes. There is no her to cry. There is no her to her. Not anymore.
A woman near the front, blonde head ducked and bobbing, is his mother, Annie knows. She is inconsolable, unable to be consoled. Even though the gray-haired man sitting sentinel at her right is trying. Three robust men sit to her left, one in the same mourning posture as his mother. Auggie's brothers, minus the one they lost so many years ago. She's never even met them. Should they run into her on the street, they would never recognize her. Since Auggie never took pictures, she is as anonymous here as she was in Geneva.
No, anonymous is not the right word. Anonymous assumes she is some one, some person, some thing. And she is not.
The service is short, the grief and senselessness too crushing for anyone to bear for more than a half hour. Annie watches as the groups either stroll or stagger out of the church, depending on how close they are to the tragedy. How close they are to Auggie. How close they were.
And she was the closest of them all.
After it empties, she allows the minutes to pass quietly in the cavernous space. It's just her...and him. She futilely wills her heart to physically leave her chest and join him bodily in the darkly lacquered coffin. Annie & Auggie. Auggie & Annie. There is no peace for her, no rest. But at least here, with what's left of him, she feels still. And that will have to suffice.
But when the brothers reenter the sanctuary with the clear intention of taking him from it, a force propels her forward so fast they all turn around in surprise at her stumbling approach. Her eyes are wide and now the tears do rise up in them, from a deeply secret cistern she hadn't known existed. She opens her mouth, but all that leaves it is the moist exhalation from her lungs, the carbon dioxide that is all that's left from her last breath. It may well be the first breath she's taken since the moment the nameless mugger stepped into their path exactly one week earlier, because she doesn't recall having breathed since then.
She knows she must look strange and may even be frightening them. Strapping men all of them, frozen with mouths like "O's" as they take in the brimming eyes, limp hair, dark boots. She's been keeping her hair dark since Hong Kong, unable to live fully in the skin of her previous avatar. She accepted a refurbished passport and driver's license, but in spirit has never returned to Annie Walker. Auggie had accepted this, learned to love the transitional form she indwelled for their brief six months of courageous love.
"Can I help you?" asks the darkest one.
No is the correct answer. So is yes. "I was a friend," is all she can manage.
The brothers regard her with hollow eyes that listlessly reflect her own. The tall one, the one with the glistening tracks running wetly down his cheeks, offers her a moment alone with Auggie before they "remove him." If she had eaten in the past 48 hours, she would have delivered up the contents of her stomach onto the stone floor at his words.
Instead, she makes a sound, a vaguely mammalian grunt, and they take it as a yes. The three of them move as a unit toward the narthex of the building. She watches them plod slowly away, the fatigue as obvious on their shoulders as a yoke, and takes note of a dark-haired woman just inside the doors of the sanctuary. She is watching Annie with startling green eyes, but she blessedly moves to take one of the brothers' arms, the fairest-haired one, as they exit.
It is as hard to walk to him now as it was to walk away from him that night. An orbit encircles him, and she is caught in it. She is whirling elliptically through the darkness around everything he is and was, but unable to change course even a degree, to get nearer to him, or farther away.
Helpless to approach, she wonders idly if he will be buried with his cane. Not the cane, of course. Not the one his fingers clasped loosely as he died, the one that clattered gracelessly to the pavement as the EMTs somberly lifted his broken body. That cane, of course, is nested quietly in the leather folds of the small backpack slung over her left shoulder.
But she wonders if his family placed one of his others with him, one of a half-dozen or so he owned, all unique: either in the diameters of their braided cords, or the number of scuff marks on their flexible tubes, or the ends which resembled either a pool cue or a marshmallow. The artifacts of a disability he no longer has.
But that's not really true, she thinks dully. All dead men are blind.
She hears a groan from the enormous wooden doors behind her and she prepares herself for a clearing of a throat, a scuffing of a shoe. Something these nice Midwestern boys will do to politely inform her that her time is up. That their time is up. Again, and finally.
Instead, though, her ears funnel in the sound of quietly approaching footsteps, the squeaking of hard-soled shoes on the glossy concrete floor. She turns and it's the woman from the doorway, the beautiful, dark-haired one. Annie knows her, but she is sure the woman doesn't know Annie.
"Annie," the woman says soft as a prayer, and it is not a question. Annie's arms go numb with the debilitating, illogical fear that she has been blown. But this is not an op! her logical mind yells at her instinctual one. She imperceptibly clenches her fists at her sides, hidden inside her baggy coatsleeves, encouraging the blood to reenter the tingling cells in her palms and fingertips.
But since she is not Annie anymore, she says nothing.
In place of an answer, she lets her eyes trace over the woman's familiar features. His brother's wife, she'd radiantly smiled from the foreground of a wedding photo Annie had once found in a drawer at Auggie's apartment.
"Did this happen because of his work?" the woman whispers, her tearful eyes twin lagoons of swirling turquoise.
Annie reappraises the woman before her, drawing down her eyebrows in skepticism and uncertainty.
"It's okay," the woman pronounces tonelessly. "I knew."
She knows. So, Annie doesn't have to lie to her. Not that Annie gives a shit anymore what Langley wants. They eviscerated her, mined all the ore and left her stripped and gaping and empty. She hasn't seen or spoken to anyone from the Agency since she and Auggie quit together a week after returning from Hong Kong.
So of course she suspected them when it happened. Unbearable grief and unspeakable loss had bloomed into suspicion and rage. In the end, it would have been better if it had been the CIA. At least there would have been a reason why the beating heart of her existence was silenced forever, locked in a thick wooden box ten feet in front of her.
"No," Annie answers quietly. "We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"We?" repeats the woman breathlessly, and Annie realizes she has unintentionally given something away. "You were there?" she asks, her pretty face twisting into a grimace of pain and shock.
Annie lets her direct gaze answer for her, and the woman's full eyes spill forth a brook of tears.