Alexandra thought of telling Jeremy, so she did not tell Jeremy when Ray Gutierrez called to accept her case. She knew it was only the urge to deposit some of the unseemly, febrile nerve knocked through her. The irony, of course, was she would have told Shel if what she had to tell wasn’t that she was seeking him.
Because Shel was a person who had shared whispers with her. They had whispered to hold out the loud pronouncements: who they were, what was wrong. They had known what people said about them and their church bin clothes, what people said about their mother. But in whispers they had had a secret from their mother and from everyone else, and it was that they were better people than they looked, that when one day they left that place, and they would, they would, they would be even better, alchemized.
There was combustion to his talk, punk rock. He burned up with shunting past idols. But, too, sometimes she would, when they were young, see her brother across a way asking the direction to a store or if he could sit down, and though he was the older, an awful tenderness colonized her in the tectonics of his face altering, surprised to be the recipient of kindness, decency. It was never something she could have mentioned, but she wanted to be someone in his life who made him less surprised by the absence of malice.
It was this thought, this hope, that had made her a little short of breath on the call. Alexandra’s cheeks—she had felt the pink on them. “Remind me how long since he disappeared?” Ray Gutierrez had asked.
“He didn’t disappear,” Alexandra said. “He is simply appearing where I don’t expect.”
And so she had continued. She had more to tell, and Ray Gutierrez listening nearly forgave something of the past, made it sit differently. She was involved in the process of finding. Ray Gutierrez was. And as a result she would not need to think every time news broke, a shooting, a terrorist attack, that if Shel had been there, she’d never know. She could imagine a family again, and she could remember that Shel had once told her bad luck did not run in sprees.