“It is all right, Owen. I know what you meant,” Eder said evenly.
“Vancouver?” Carolina asked. “What’s Vancouver?”
“That’s where my papa was killed,” Nova said and all eyes in the room looked to her, even Ciela’s. Nova looked back, one by one, into each and every face. The only sound I could hear was the hiss of a gas jet from the stove behind Ciela. In those few, strange, silent seconds, something happened to everyone in the room. Through the innocence and wisdom of Nova’s eyes, we all drank from a common pool, a quiet place of loss and restoration, and realized one by one a common trust and hope. Without having to say a word between us, we became what Eder said had only been legend — a family — an extended family of Giza and Meq. Not a family formed through time, geography, and circumstances, as we had with Kepa, but a family of strangers, formed in a few moments with love and blind trust.
Nicholas stood and cleared his throat. He put his hand on Carolina’s shoulder and spoke to Eder. “I don’t know if you were planning on staying in St. Louis or not, but if you are, then Carolina and I wouldn’t have you stay anywhere but here. You, Nova, Ray, and you too, Owen, if you have to,” he said, but he wasn’t looking at Owen or even Eder, he was looking down at Carolina. “We’re going to have another baby in the spring. I won’t have our baby being born in some big, empty house. No, ma’am, I won’t have it.”
Carolina looked up at him and smiled. “I agree,” she said.
Ray jumped down from the counter and pulled a chair up next to mine. Owen Bramley sat down too, next to Nicholas. “How do we find Star?” he said. “What can I do?”
Ray said, “Get me and Z to New Orleans.” Before I could say or do anything, he added, “You’re gonna need me, Z. It’s my town.”
So we sat at the long table making a plan and setting up a network of communication. Owen Bramley assured me I would have no problems traveling to New Orleans now or at any time in the future. And I could stay anyplace I chose. Solomon had left me a quarter of his estate and it was so well invested and diversified, he said I would only get richer. The other three-quarters had been willed equally to Owen himself, Carolina, and Star. “A bank account will be set up for you in New Orleans in a matter of hours,” he said, “and there is no need to worry about your youthful countenance. Not with this much money.”
I asked him if he still had the name and address of the French photographer on board the ship in Vancouver. He said he probably did, he’d have to look, and asked what that had to do with finding Star. I told him I wasn’t sure, maybe nothing, and I felt Ray watching me, wondering the same thing.
Then I asked if there had been any word from China and Owen Bramley said he’d received one telegram with one line from Sailor, which he couldn’t figure out at the time, but it said, “Have lost Zianno — gone searching.”
Finally, after a long day and night, Carolina called a halt to the gathering, saying she was exhausted, mentally, physically, and spiritually. Nicholas put his arm around her waist and asked Ciela to show everyone to their rooms. Carolina said, “Don’t leave before I say good-bye, Z.” I watched her walking away and I said, “We’ll find her. I promise.”
But there were no good-byes. I sneaked into Ray’s room at dawn and woke him up with my hand over his mouth. I whispered, “Let’s go,” and within minutes we were out of the door and standing under the stone arch in the driveway, shivering. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees and it had begun to rain again. The seasons were changing. Ray pulled his bowler down low over his eyes. All he said was, “Damn, Z.”
I noticed two huge wooden crates stacked under the arch, side by side. As we passed them, I asked, “Yours?”
“Don’t ask,” he said. So I didn’t.
Our train snaked its way down through Missouri and the eastern edge of the ancient Ozark Mountains. The rain stayed with us the whole trip and once, during a stop in the lowlands of Arkansas, I asked Ray if he could tell how long it would last.
“No, Z. I got no idea.”
“But you can tell when it’s coming, you can ‘listen’ for it, right?”
“No, it don’t work like that, either.”
“Well, how do you know then, what makes it happen?”
“I don’t know. I never have. I just sorta get a vision. I see the whole thing at once and I know when and where it’s going to change. I sorta see the mind of the storm, I guess. But I can’t tell where it’s going after where I see it. I only know what I know close-up, like somebody’s face right up against you. You see them real good, but you can’t see anything else around them.”
“And you can’t do it on purpose? You can’t will yourself to see something?”
“No, I don’t have nothing to do with that.”
I looked at him a long time while both of us stood there on the end of the platform like two kids, two brothers or cousins, watching the rain and waiting, waiting for something.
“Do you ever think it’s a curse?” I asked him. “Not just being the ‘Weatherman,’ but the whole thing, being Meq, I mean.”
“No, I try not to think about it like that.”
I put my hands in my pockets and turned to look at the flat cotton fields surrounding the station. I felt the Stone that I still carried there, cold and silent. It never gave me a reason or an answer. “I wish I felt about us the way Sailor or Geaxi does,” I said.
“You sure you want to?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I feel these days.”
He bent down and picked up a penny from the platform in front of him. He turned it over in his hand, then tossed it side-arm through the rain somewhere deep into the cotton field. “You ain’t lived as long as they have,” he said. “Give yourself another hundred years and then ask yourself how you feel.”
When we boarded the train and were back in our seats, he turned to me and said, “By the way, are you gonna tell me or not?”
“Tell you what?”
“Did you find her? Did you find Opari?”
“Yes and no.”
“Yes and no?” He paused, looking at me with streetwise eyes that had seen every kind of bluff and con there was. He took his bowler off and adjusted what was left of the brim, then set it on the seat next to him. I watched him, then turned and looked out of the window at the flat land and flimsy shacks that reminded me of ones I’d seen up and down the Yangtze. I turned back and told him everything, the whole story, and I told him as rapidly as I could, so that when I left out the part about Zuriaa, I hoped he hadn’t noticed. And I told him about the “Honeycircle” and everything that happened there. And then I told him that I was going to kill the Fleur-du-Mal as soon as we found Star.
Ray picked up his bowler again and examined it carefully, looking for any imperfections, of which there were many, and then slowly set it on his head at just the right angle. He looked straight at me with clear green eyes. “Well, Z,” he said. “It seems like that son of a Carthaginian’s got it comin’.”
I almost laughed out loud. “Where did you hear that phrase?” I asked him.
He looked back with a blank expression, then we both sniggered and started to laugh together, loud and long enough to draw attention from the other passengers. “I heard Kepa say it,” he finally answered. “I thought it kinda rolled off the tongue.”
I laughed again and then asked him about Kepa, Miren, Pello, and the others. He said Kepa was still as strong as barbed wire, but he and Pello were worried about the future of the Basque way of life in the territory. More and more, the sheepmen were being forced off free-range land. They had formed mutual aid societies in Boise and other places, but Kepa was not optimistic. I asked him if that had anything to do with him bringing Eder and Nova to St. Louis and he said no, that had been Eder’s idea. Nova would begin the Itxaron the following year and Eder wanted her to know more about the world than just the high desert and the womb of protection that Kepa and his Basque tribe provided. When Ray mentioned Nova, I noticed his concern for her was as great as Eder’s, maybe greater, but he agreed that she should live among the Giza and learn their ways. He said he thought Nova could “see things,” but he didn’t explain it further and I didn’t ask. I did ask if Eder had told him anything of Unai and Usoa, since he had never met them and it was they who we would seek first in New Orleans. He said Eder thought the Wait had taken its toll on them. They had been together so long, she said their only thoughts were for each other.