Iris
The last fifteen minutes of the drive are the same fifteen minutes I've driven a thousand times, only now it all seems so different.
I recognize everything. The bend where the hedgerow leans out too far, the field with the leaning gate, the stretch where the trees close over the road and the light goes green. The gates…
It's me that's different. I left this road eleven days ago with the radio up and my brain switched off, thinking about nothing, because nothing was my favorite thing to think about. The woman coming back sits with her back to the door pillar so she can see both windows at once.
Yakob drives the way he does everything. Precisely, quietly, ten percent under the speed limit, which on this road is a personal insult to my entire bloodline.
"You drive like a retired accountant," I tell him.
"I drive like a man delivering something irreplaceable."
I look out the window so he won't see what that does to my face. It doesn't work. Nothing about me has ever been invisible to him, which is the whole problem, and the whole miracle.
He's been getting quieter since the boat.
Not his usual quiet, which is a companionable thing, a room you're allowed to sit in.
This is the other kind. The kind he had at the beginning, on the vineyard, in the fever, before I knew him.
He's packing himself away, item by item.
I can feel it happening beside me like a tide going out, and I don't know how to stop it.
Every time I open my mouth to try, we get a kilometer closer to home and the words fizzle out because my brain is overwhelmed trying to figure out what to say to my family.
He called ahead from the airfield, four words, a time. The gates swing open onto the long drive and the house comes up out of the trees the way it always does, stone and glass and too many chimneys, my whole childhood arranged around a gravel courtyard.
Every light in the house is on. It's barely past four in the afternoon.
"They'll be in the kitchen," I say. My voice comes out strange.
"I know," he says. "Everything in that house seems to happen in the kitchen. Your brothers briefed me in the study and I could still hear that the kitchen was the central hub of the house."
We come around the last curve and I see the kitchen door standing wide open, propped with Ma’s ancient doorstop. And spilling out of it, down the steps, into the courtyard, is my family.
All of them. Every single one.
Ma is in front and she isn’t walking, she's coming down those steps like a landslide, and behind her the courtyard is filling with brothers and wives and I can hear the screaming through the car window.
My hand is on the door handle before the car has finished moving, which under any other circumstances would earn me a lecture on safety, but Yakob doesn't say a word.
I don't remember crossing the gravel.
But now Ma’s hands are on my face, both of them, hard, her thumbs under my cheekbones like she's checking for marks on porcelain, her stark, tired eyes moving over me at a speed no scanner will ever match.
She doesn't ask if I'm all right. She reads me instead, the whole of me, end to end, and then her face crumples in a way I have never once seen it crumple.
Not at weddings, or at christenings, not ever, and she pulls me into her and says something into my hair in Irish that I don't fully catch but don't really need to.
Then the rest of them hit us like a tidal wave.
Liam gets there first, or maybe Killian, it's impossible to say, because suddenly I'm inside a structure made entirely of brothers.
Someone's arm is a bar across my back. Someone's hand cradles the back of my head the way you hold an infant.
Somebody is talking softly and continuously in Russian, which is probably Killian.
Somebody else's chest is hitching against my shoulder in a way that he will deny until his dying day.
The smell of them, fresh and edged with gun oil and Ma's kitchen, undoes something in me that Sicily never managed to touch.
"You're here," Rafferty keeps saying, like the sentence has a fault in it and needs restarting. "You're here. You're here."
"I'm here," I say, muffled, from somewhere inside the scrum. "I'd like to state for the record that I can't breathe, but I don't care."
A wet laugh goes through all of them at once, the same laugh in five registers, and the structure loosens just enough to let the women in.
Grace, crying without any attempt at dignity.
Katya, gripping my hand so hard her rings will leave grooves.
Tanya, whose belly has gotten visibly bigger in the last two weeks, which does something absurd to my heart, because the world kept going.
It kept going and it waited for me at the same time.
Nadia arrives and doesn't say anything at all.
She just presses her forehead to my temple, and I understand her completely, because three years ago I did the same thing for her, and neither of us needs to translate.
They move me inside the way a river moves a leaf.
I don't walk into the kitchen so much as arrive there, carried on hands and voices.
The kitchen closes over me, warm and bright and loud, smelling of bread and lamb and the candles Ma has clearly been burning around the clock.
Spread over the table is enough food for a party of fifty, because in this family fear has always been fought with food.
And in the doorway of my childhood, half in the last of the daylight, stands Connor with a bundle of pink against his chest.
The room quiets by a degree. Even our family understands some entrances.
"Iris," he says, and his scarred mouth does its best version of a smile, "there's someone here who's been waiting to meet her aunt."
I cross the kitchen on legs I can't feel. The bundle has a face. The face is small and furious and perfect, with a shock of dark hair, and Anya, hollow-eyed and radiant at Connor's shoulder, folds the blanket back so I can see all of her.
"We waited to christen her," Anya says. "We wouldn't do it without you. But she has her name."
"She's called éirinn," Connor says. His voice cracks straight down the middle on the second syllable. "It means peace. We picked it the week you were gone.”
I hold my niece and I cry, and nobody in this kitchen tells me not to, and for once in my life I don't tell myself not to either. I learned that on an island. I learned it on a stone floor in a stranger's arms.
The stranger.
I look up.
He's exactly where I knew he would be, because I've spent real time learning where he puts himself in any given room, and the answer is always the same.
Back to the wall, beside the door, the whole space in front of him.
The Ghost's spot. The kitchen roars and eddies around him and doesn't touch him.
Killian has stationed himself a few feet away, arms crossed, watching him with an expression that hasn't decided what it is yet, and Yakob is enduring it the way he endures everything, without appearing to notice.
While I watch, Liam crosses to him. My oldest brother stops in front of the man who brought me home, and Yakob takes something small from his jacket pocket and puts it in Liam's palm without a word.
I know what it is. I watched it come off the hand it belonged to.
Liam looks at the gold for a long moment.
Something moves through his face, dark and satisfied and as old as our name, and his fist closes around the ring.
He says something to Yakob, quiet, two sentences at most. Yakob answers with less.
Liam holds out his hand and Yakob shakes it once, the entire wordless transaction takes ten seconds.
Then Liam comes back to the light and the noise, and Yakob stays by the wall. The kitchen swallows my brother whole and leaves the man who saved me standing at the edge of everything like a coat someone forgot on a hook.
He's watching me. He's been watching me the entire time.
I'm holding a baby named for peace, jammed between my mother and my sisters-in-law with tears drying on my face, home, safe, loved beyond the wildest belief, and the man responsible is standing at the border of it all like it's a country he doesn't have papers for.
I can see it in his eyes.
I've gotten fluent in him. It took a bullet, a fever, a farmhouse, and the worst week of my life, but I can read Yakob now the way Ma reads a room, and what's written on him from across my mother's kitchen is this: look at where you belong. Look at everything you already have.
He thinks he's just delivering me. Completing a contract. He thinks this is the end.
No. I put the thought into my eyes and aim it at him with everything I have. You absolute idiot. Don't you dare.
I hand éirinn back to Anya. I get one step.
"Iris, love, sit, you'll fall down." Ma's hands, steering me toward a chair. "Grace, the soup. Katya, bread. She's 10 pounds lighter, look at her."
"Ma, I need to—"
"Eat. You need to eat." The plate is already in front of me, and Lorcan has materialized against my side asking if I saw any volcanoes because his da said Sicily has a real one, and Mila is being lowered onto my lap by Grace with the solemnity of a coronation.
Tanya is asking if I can even believe how big she's gotten, and somewhere behind me Killian and Aidan have started arguing about whether the airfield was watched, and the kitchen does what my family's kitchen has done my entire life.
It sweeps me away.
I answer Lorcan about the volcano, trying to make it sound like I was on a holiday.
I kiss Mila's head, the memory of her smothered in strawberries returning sharp and fast. I eat three spoons of soup under Ma's supervision, and laugh at something Grace says.
The machinery of being Iris comes back online all by itself, automatic, easy.
Even as it happens I can feel that it's different now, that I'm doing it and watching myself do it at the same time, from a small quiet distance that came home from the island with me.
And from that distance, I keep my eyes on the door.
He's still there. The relief of it hits me every time I look.
Ma passes near him once with the kettle and slows.
Something crosses her face that I can't name, a stillness, like a woman hearing her own name in a crowd.
Then Nikolai starts wailing and Katya's chair scrapes and the moment is gone before I can study it.
The next time I look, Yakob's eyes are already on me. They always are.
The kitchen is a wall of sound between us.
Five brothers, four babies, one kettle beginning to whistle.
There's no crossing it, not yet, not for another hour at least, and I can see in the set of his shoulders that he doesn't have an hour.
He has minutes. He's already leaving. He's been leaving since the boat.
So I do the only thing I can do across my roaring, blessed, oblivious family.
I mouth it. Don’t go.
Something happens in his face. Nobody else in this kitchen would even see it, but I've had several days of intensive study, and I watch the words hit somewhere that hurts him. He holds my eyes for one second.
"Iris! Iris, the lace." Ma is suddenly in front of me, holding it up out of nowhere, palest cream and impossibly fine, tissue paper and all.
"Antonelli found it and brought it straight to us.
He knew something was wrong. He said—" and her voice fails her, my unbreakable mother, and I'm up and out of the chair and holding her while she shakes, this woman who held all six of us through everything.
I close my eyes and see Mila's dress, the summer, the whole sweet ordinary future that got handed back to me by a man standing beside the door.
We hold each other for a minute.
When I look up, the spot by the door is empty.
I scan the kitchen the way he taught me without meaning to, corners first, then exits.
Nothing. No one. The door to the courtyard stands open on the blue evening, and the gravel outside is silent, and there's no car engine, no footsteps, nothing at all.
Ghosts don't make sounds. It's the entire point of them.
The kitchen roars on around me, laughing and crying and feeding itself, every single person I love inside one warm bright room, and something in my chest that survived a kidnapping, a gunfight, and hiding on an island cracks open along a seam I didn't know I had.
He was real. I know he was real. Liam's fist closed around the proof of what happened.
I stand in the middle of my mother's kitchen, home, safe, surrounded. I stare at the empty doorway, and for the second time in my life I understand exactly what it is to be alone.