Red Equinox (35 page)

The chamber fell into shadow again as the fire in the ruby faded.

Brooks slid down the wall to sit beside her in the dark at the top of the white stone spire as the first faint suggestion of a sunrise touched the sky on the morning of September 23rd.

What had begun for Becca Philips with a burial, ended with a scattering of ashes.

In the days following the events at the monument, she returned to her warehouse loft and spent most of her time napping with Django, in bed or on the futon. SPECTRA had returned her computer equipment, but she had no desire to look at photos. It was weeks before she had any inclination to pick up a camera.

She had sat for a short debriefing at Government Center on September
23rd; short because Brooks made them stop and release her when it became obvious to him that the questions were causing her too much anxiety. She was sleep-deprived and hungry and didn’t understand what had happened to her, he argued. To her surprise and relief, they listened to him. She caught a look in his eyes that told her he was equally surprised.
Hero
, he kept calling her, and they either believed him or had reason to fear publicity problems, because as they put her in a cab, they told her she would have to come back in a few days for another interview, but that call never came.

When she finally picked up her camera again, it was to revisit the abandoned buildings and out-of-service train tunnels that Rafael had emblazoned with his graffiti art. He had never found a conventional niche at the Museum School, and these crumbling, moldy walls had remained the canvas he was most comfortable with. Becca felt it was her duty to preserve them in her own way. She didn’t bring the IR modified Nikon, but rather a normal digital SLR to capture his work in all of its shocking color.

It turned out to be a bigger job than she first anticipated because she felt compelled to shoot each mural from multiple angles, with close ups and panoramic shots, and in as many different states of light as she could manage. Most of the buildings had sections of collapsed roofing where sunlight or moonlight could find a way through. She also took to carrying high-powered, portable lighting, fitting Django with a set of saddlebags to help ease the burden of gear. The two of them would sit in dank places, eating a picnic lunch and waiting for clouds to shift.

There were fewer clouds over Boston in those first weeks of November, which was odd for the month but seemed to feel right to everyone on the street. Like a cleansing after long suffering. Whether those crisp, sunny days had been bought by sacrifice or were a gift of grace, only a few people knew. And none more than her.

And so she waited for clouds. Waited for them to cover the sun and smooth the sharp highlights on the painted bricks. Waited for them to pass through her heart. But they never did.

The new photos eventually forced her back to the computer and back to her archives. Her journal of the expeditions she had taken with Rafael didn’t provide enough information to pinpoint the weather and time of day when he had painted many of his pieces, and she wanted to photograph each in the closest approximation of the light he had seen as she could manage. The photos she had taken of him working helped her to puzzle it out, and the project occupied her mind and hands and kept her from thinking too much about what might lie behind the walls, or the sky.

Some nights she woke in the deep hours with the fierce imperative burning in her mind that she should destroy every infrared photo she had taken during the crisis and triple-wipe the hard drives. But she couldn’t erase her own memory, so why bother with the computer’s? Even the thought of letting the cursor arrow hover over those folders chilled her. What if she was tempted to open one? What if she opened them all? And what if she saw things in those photos that she hadn’t seen before?

As winter came on with the first flurries, she wore the beetle always and everywhere. Sleeping. Showering. And it troubled her that now, after the monsters had been banished, she was more afraid of them than she had been during that season when they had walked the streets of the city. But there hadn’t been time for fear then, and things you could see would always be less dreadful than those you couldn’t.

She haunted the abandoned places through November, until she could no longer deny that she had all the photos she was going to get and was only lingering to feel close to him, and then she realized how little was left for her in Boston. The prospect of trying to hold her sanity together long enough to finish her degree while her peers—people who listened to Emo and hadn’t lived through hell on earth—critiqued her work…there wasn’t enough Klonopin in the world to get her through that.

She hadn’t seen Nina since the equinox, either. Every time she scrolled past the name in the contacts list on her phone, she felt weird. The relationship had changed, and there was no going back.

By Thanksgiving she was thinking of getting away for a while, and then Brooks called and gave her the excuse she needed and the destination to go with it.

“How would you like to do a job for me? It includes airfare to a sunnier clime.”

“Is this a SPECTRA gig?”

“Sort of.” He paused. “I’ll understand if it would be upsetting for you, but…I figured it might give you a chance to do something you’d want to do anyway. Also, way I see it, we kind of owe it to you.”

“Okay, out with it already.”

“We’ve been back and forth with Rafael’s mother, Estela, in Brazil. Apparently he once told her that he wanted to be cremated. She was against it, would have preferred burial, but not enough to refuse his wishes. The US government is treating him like a fallen hero of a covert war, and we’ve offered to take care of the cremation here in Boston. We would have flown her up for it, but she doesn’t want to come. She only asks that his ashes be taken to Brazil so she can scatter them where he wanted. I’m not trusting an airline with this, and I’m sure as hell not handing it off to FedEx. I thought maybe you could deliver him personally.”

She couldn’t speak for a good minute after that, but the sniffling must have kept Brooks on the line, let him know she hadn’t hung up on him. Finally, she said yes, she would go, if he would take care of her dog while she was away. He told her it was a deal.

*   *   *

Becca didn’t know how to talk to Rafael’s mother on the phone. Even after all that she had been through, the thought of telling a woman she’d never met that she was responsible for her son’s death terrified her more than anything. She hated phones. Having a conversation about anything of significance without eye contact, facial cues, body language…it unnerved her and always had. She could have turned down Brooks’ offer, could have stayed out of it entirely, but she knew she needed to go. Not just to be there when the ashes were scattered, but to face Rafael’s family, to own up to her role in his death and try to explain what he had died for, if that was at all possible, which she doubted. They would likely send her away, cursing and screaming at the Insane American, the art-school slut who must be a delusional drug addict. And she was loath to admit it, but she actually felt better knowing that Brooks had her back. Estela had been in communication with SPECTRA, had already heard some version of the story that lauded Rafael as the hero he was, and had processed it. The woman knew that a friend of Rafael would be sent by the US Government to deliver the urn, and Becca hoped that counted for something.

So she was grateful for the opportunity, but when she met Brooks at the crematorium in Andover, she found that she had little to say to him. Small talk seemed impossible after what they’d been through, and any talk in the presence of Rafael’s body would have been irreverent anyway. She watched the box roll into the flame chamber in silence, and touched the stone in the scarab at her breast while he burned.

In the parking lot Brooks asked her if she wanted to get coffee, and she accepted. At a nearby café, it felt a little less weird that they weren’t discussing Rafael. Becca wrote directions for Django’s care and feeding on a pad she kept in her camera bag, tore the sheet off and handed it to him.

“That’s some dog, you got, Becca. Braver than most people.”

“I think most dogs are,” she said. “They rise to the occasion and put on a tough act no matter what. But yeah, he’s a keeper.”

The silence spun out.

Becca thought about the other occasion they had spent together, in and around a helicopter in Back Bay when the fabric of reality was fraying around them for the first time, and she realized they had nothing normal to talk about whatsoever.

“How’s Tom?” she asked, “That guy in the helicopter you took along for a set of eyes. You keep tabs on him?”

Brooks nodded, fiddled with his watchband. “Yeah, we check up on everybody. He’s good. The drug therapy…Nepenthe, it seems to have worked. None of them remember what they saw, and no one has claimed hallucinations or nightmares in the follow-ups.” He stared at the scarab as he spoke, and she knew he wondered if no one saw anything because of the drug treatment, or because she had banished the darkness with magic she herself still didn’t quite understand.

“He’s uh, he’s going to be a father, Tom. He and his wife are expecting in April. He seems to be looking forward. I’d tell him that you asked after him, but I doubt he’d remember who you are.”

Becca squeezed a lemon wedge into her tea. “Do you think I should have had a dose? They wanted me to, didn’t they?”

Brooks looked out the window. “Yeah, they thought wiping your drive might be a good safety measure.”

“But you intervened.” It wasn’t a question.

He sighed, stared at his car on the street, where the cedar box containing Rafael’s ashes lay in repose behind tinted glass. “When you lose a friend who died a hero, you should get to remember why. Not to mention remembering what
you
did for everybody.”

“You calling me a hero?”

“Somebody has to. Not like you’re gonna be on CNN.”

“Thank God.”

“Do
you
ever think you should have had a dose? You ever want to forget?”

“Yes and no. I want to forget a lot of it, but not all of it. If I’m going to be haunted by it at all, I want to understand at least as much as I do. So I guess I’m stuck with it.

“What about the others? Does Tom seem haunted by it at all, even in a vague way?”

“Hard to say. I didn’t know any of these people before they were witnesses, so maybe he was a little off to begin with, right? Lot of people have some depression, or sorrow in their past. I don’t know, I couldn’t say. Not like the world was a perfect place before the monsters broke through.”

*   *   *

According to Estela Moreno, her son wanted to be scattered at Iguazu Falls, a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the New Seven Wonders of the Natural World. Situated deep in the rainforest on the tri-border of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, the falls were a major tourist attraction with an airport just thirty miles away. SPECTRA offered to fly Becca direct to Foz do Iguaçu International on a private jet, but she politely declined, insisting instead on a flight to the sprawling metropolis of São Paulo, Rafael’s hometown.

She wanted to meet his mother at her home so that the poor woman could decide for herself whether to send her away or invite her on the pilgrimage. It would be a sixteen-hour bus ride from the city to the falls, and that felt right to Becca. Flying in seemed too easy. She wanted a journey. If Estela allowed her to come along, the ride would give them time to get to know each other. And if she were turned away at the door after presenting the cedar box, at least she would leave having seen where he came from.

In the end, her anxiety was unfounded. One look in the woman’s eyes—Rafael’s eyes—told her that she was a welcome guest, and a wish that she had secretly held close was granted in the days that followed when Rafael’s older brother Diego took her on a tour of his earliest paintings, hidden in alleys and behind the buildings of the dirty city.

Becca photographed them all.

São Paulo was much bigger than Boston, but the paintings made her feel strangely at home. The Frias de Oliveira Bridge reminded her of the Zakim in Boston, and the whole trip started to feel like a dream, as if her waking life, her familiar environs had subtly shifted into a parallel world, in which some things were the same, and some were alien, and even those that were the same were somehow alien, and then the appointed day came when it was time to take the bus to the jungle.

She was grateful for the change.

She had tried to talk to Estela about Rafael’s death, but the language barrier made it difficult, and the woman seemed to need little in the way of explanation. She had understood the word
hero
and that seemed to be enough. On the third day, while they ate lunch together in the kitchen, she asked Becca, “You love him,
meo menino?
He love you?”

“Yes,” Becca replied. And that had been enough. Estela took her hand, and squeezed it, and they shared the tears. “We go together,” Estela said. “You, me, and Diego. We go Iguazu together.”

“Thank you.
Obrigado.
”

*   *   *

On January 28
th
snow was falling on Boston, but at Iguazu Falls, summer was just beginning. Becca Philips stood at the edge of a wooden platform overlooking Devil’s Throat, a semi-circle of terraced waterfalls, and the sound of crashing water was a white noise to wash all other echoes from her mind.

Thousands of butterflies, red and black, yellow and blue, dressed in endless variations of markings, hovered around her in the mist, alighted on the railings, and fluttered amid the ash when Estela poured it out into the chasm. For a moment Becca couldn’t tell the difference between ash and mist as he fell.

She resisted the urge to take her camera from her bag. It was too easy to make life smaller by placing a lens between its vastness and her eye. In this moment she wanted no distance, wanted memories, not photos.