Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“I DO NOT care for ultimatums,” Anax growled at her, down there in that basement that was only half below ground. Right then he felt as if they were stuck in a pit that got deeper by the moment.
Or perhaps he was the only one stuck—and it was quicksand.
Because Constance was changing, right there before his eyes. She looked as bright as that smile of hers. As if the sun poured in and lit up only her and near enough to blinding.
She aimed that smile at him, though there was still that challenge in her fascinating gaze. “How fascinating, when you so enjoy delivering ultimatums to others.”
The man he usually was would have responded to that at once, and in a manner calculated to end the conversation in his favor, but he...couldn’t. It was the quicksand. Or it was her, and the faith she put in him to become...something other than who he was.
He wanted to tell her that was impossible. That he knew who he was and that was trouble—
But Constance did not seem inclined to stand about, watching a man go to war with himself. Her smile never slipped as she turned away and glided back up the stairs toward the rest of the house.
Leaving him there beneath her house in Iowa, of all places. To figure out what his next move should be.
To figure out who he really was, once and for all.
His mother had cast less light on the subject than he might have wished.
Who among us cannot find a monster deep within? she had asked, with an expression as close to sad as he’d seen it in years. She had leaned a bit closer, there in that tiny church. This is the real trouble. You choose, Anax. We all choose. So if you look in your mirror and see a monster looking back, it is not your father. It is you.
Thank you for this pep talk, he had replied dryly.
Evgenia had laughed. I have never been that kind of mother, she’d said. But you should know that it is a gift, that the thing you fear most is in you. That you have chosen it, in one way or another. Because what you choose you can change.
He thought about that now, in this lonely basement with discarded bits of furniture and windows blocked in by drifts of snow. He thought about the particular despair of having choices and all of them bad. Or with unknowable outcomes.
Anax had not taken a leap of faith in a long, long time.
He thought about other things, too. About indulging his temper, his fury at her dictates. About how he could do that and claim it was justified. About storming away from this place, but what would he gain from such a display?
It would not give him more time with his daughter.
And it most certainly would not give him his wife.
Anax stood there in this quicksand of his own making, aware that he was breathing too heavily. That his blood was rushing too hard, too fast, too intensely through his body. And he understood that the truth of the matter was that he wanted the same things that Constance did.
The only difference was, he was the one who needed to provide those things, and he was not certain he could. He was not sure he was able.
He wasn’t sure that she truly thought they could happen either, those rose-colored dreams of the life they could live together. The difference between them was that Constance chose to hope that the things she wanted were possible.
Anax had somehow lost his ability to do the same.
It was that thought that animated him, washing away all that quicksand.
Because once, when he’d had far less than he did now and no reason at all to believe he could change his life in the slightest, he had hoped he could. He had decided he would , and thrown himself into it. He had not been afraid of failure—and that was a good thing, because he had failed again and again.
The difference was that younger, hungrier version of Anax had taken each failure as a lesson. As an opportunity to shoot even higher the next time.
Was he prepared to admit to himself that the fortune he’d amassed and the empire he’d built was more important to him than his family?
In what way, he asked himself then, are you any different from Paraskevas? He used alcohol. You use money.
After he thought that, in precisely those words, he had to stay there a minute with that thundering, pounding thing going wild in his chest.
His heart, he supposed.
And though it felt like it was breaking, he had the strangest notion that what it was really doing was working .
At last.
Because Constance was his family. Natalia was his family. He had always treated his family the way he treated his mother and sister. Close enough to care for, but distant enough to make sure that he could get away with the kind of care that came in the form of financial support and little else.
He had assumed that was how they all wanted it. That the arm’s length version of familial harmony suited them all, when it occurred to him only now that it was him. It suited him.
Because he thought he could control it. And they’d let him.
Or rather, they’d allowed him to do what he liked and had maneuvered around him. Anax had always considered his mother and sister disrespectful and troublesome, in their different ways, as they each pretended to listen to him and then did as they liked.
It only dawned on him now that perhaps he had been the disrespectful troublemaker all this long while.
“I’m sorry,” he blurted out to his sister when he called her, still down there at the bottom of Constance’s house.
“I beg your pardon? Who is this? What have you done with my brother?”
“I think I have not been the best brother to you,” Anax said stiffly, ignoring her incredulous, amused tone. “That has only very recently become clear to me.”
Vasiliki was silent for a long, long while. He heard a voice in the background and almost smiled, because he recognized it. But he did not ask after Stavros. She would tell him if she wished.
“Thank you,” Vasiliki said to him, after some while. “I think that you have always been the best brother but this is because I, naturally, have always been the very best sister possible.”
“That is the truth,” Anax agreed.
They quickly turned to business matters, but he thought she sounded as rough-voiced as he did when they ended the call.
And then he stood there in that basement a bit longer, because he did not have the slightest idea how to go about proving that he could be the man that Constance wanted him to be. Over the course of the next two days, if he wished to meet her deadline.
But one thing Anax knew he was good at was the impossible.
He walked up the stairs into the kitchen. He had the strangest sensation that he was catapulting back through time to this same town a year back, when he had opened that door to the church and stepped inside to a place that was warm and bright and filled with emotions he did not understand.
This felt very much the same. Now, as then, he found Constance immediately.
She was at the stove, stirring something in a big pot. Maria was singing to the baby, who sat in a high chair and was making a mess of what he assumed was a dish of pureed carrots, given the shocking orange color. Outside, the snow was beginning to fall again.
No one was cowering about. There was no whispering, no covert glances, no jostling for position—because there was no one in this room playing the part of a ticking time bomb. No one had to creep around, hoping not to cause the next explosion.
This, a voice in him whispered, is what family is supposed to feel like .
And maybe that was the point of all of this hope . All these messy, quicksand-like emotions that served no purpose except to lead him here. To a moment like this, when he could decide who he was.
So in that moment, though he had no idea how to do any of the things Constance wanted from him or even if he could , Anax took a leap of faith.
He closed the basement door behind him and he walked into the kitchen. He shrugged out of his jacket that was far too stuffy for the moment at hand. He nodded at Maria, and took the spoon from her that she was using to feed Natalia.
And then he played the role of the father.
Anax had observed the men in this town in all his previous visits, and had often thought it was like visiting a different planet. But he had visited, and he had studied, so he knew how it was meant to go. He’d known a lot less when he’d decided to jump face-first into finance.
That night, he took a page from Constance’s book and made certain he had the appropriate costume for the part. A flannel shirt. Jeans and clunky boots. In fabrics he could not recommend, but certainly would not make him stand out—a common complaint in this town, as he knew very well.
When he came down from the room that he had always taken as his when he was here, both Maria and Constance stared at him like he was some kind of apparition, which he chose to interpret as a round of applause.
He pretended he didn’t see it, either way. He went to his daughter instead, whisking her away from the commotion as Maria set about serving dinner to play with her instead. So that when it was time to sit around the table, she was tired enough to allow it.
That night, he crawled into bed next to his wife and pulled her up against his body.
“We are not having sex,” she told him fiercely. “It’s too confusing.”
“Whatever you wish, koritsi ,” he replied, like the angel he was not. And he did not convince her otherwise, as he knew he could. But he also did not leave.
And they slept like that, tangled up together, as if they had never spent a night apart.
That, too, felt like hope.
In the night, he heard Natalia making noise. He went in to soothe her, shooing Maria back to her bed when she came in. And when the baby would not settle, he brought her into the bed he had left, where Constance was stirring.
“Is she all right?” she asked, instantly awake and alarmed.
“We will sleep together,” he told her gruffly, and lay the baby down between them, where he and Constance curled around her like they were making her a crib of their own bodies.
And in the morning, they were woken up by a delighted Natalia, who squeaked and crawled all over them and made it clear that as far as she was concerned, this family thing was heaven.
That next day, he trailed along as Constance went and saw her friends. They all greeted him with wide eyes and some suspicion, so he did his best to be charming. He spoke to their husbands. He was halfway through a discussion with one man, the genial Mike, before he realized that the man was discussing a backyard grill with the intensity that Anax himself reserved for high-level corporate negotiations.
He drank mass-produced beer. He made encouraging noises when sports were discussed.
“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” Constance asked as they walked back in the cold, with more snow coming down. He watched his daughter try to catch snowflakes with her tongue. Then he looked at his wife.
“I am blending, koritsi . Was this not what you wanted?”
“I’m not sure I wanted the one and only Anax Ignatios dressing like a country song,” she muttered.
“I will take that as a resounding show of support for this costume, thank you,” he said blandly.
The next day was Christmas Eve. He took it upon himself to go out and find the Christmas tree he’d heard Constance tell Maria would be too much trouble. He brought it home and set it up in the living room, so that Constance could play happy carols and bring out boxes of decorations, all of them careworn and handmade.
They made her eyes shine, so he hung them without complaint.
He spent some time in the kitchen that afternoon with Maria, attempting to learn her tricks with dough and pie filling, though his creation was more theoretical than anything else.
Still, he felt a bizarre shock of pride when his wife deemed it delicious.
And that evening, they made their way to the tiny church where he had first laid eyes on Constance a year ago. This time, Anax sat with his daughter in his lap, and his wife sat beside him, no longer the Virgin Mary, Mother of God. This year the role was played by a young girl with several pillows stuffed beneath her shirt.
And he was not sure he heard a single word of the service.
Because something was building up inside of him, like a terrible song he was not at all sure he could keep within his chest. By the end of the play, he thought it might have leaked into his bones, and he was surprised that he could stand.
When everyone started filing out, he did the best he could to keep up conversation with that strange old shopkeeper and the rest of these villagers who clearly did not know what to make of Constance, Natalia, or him.
Though he also made certain that if they had anything barbed to say, they said it to him—because, as ever, it turned out that most people were far more comfortable saying such things to women.
Maria took Natalia as they started back toward the house, out there beneath that wide-open sky. Anax took Constance’s hand as the snow began to fall again, and kept her from going after them.
“It is Christmas Eve,” he said.
“I know it is.” She frowned at him. “Are you sorry you’re here?”
“Constance.” He shook his head. “Do you not understand? Do you not know how much my time is worth?” When her frown deepened, he growled at himself and pushed on. “There is nothing that I can give you that is more precious to me than my time. And if I’m honest, I expected to hate every second of this. But I was willing to do it for you.”
She was fully scowling, then. “That’s not really what I was looking for from this experiment, actually.”
“If this is what you wish, what you truly want, then we will stay here,” he told her rashly. But even as he said it, he realized he meant every word. “I can work from anywhere. If you want to live here, then it will happen. We will raise Natalia in this place, as you were raised. Because if she grows up to be like you, then I must assume that she will be perfect.”
Constance looked as though she had started to respond, but then his words penetrated. “Perfect?”
He moved closer, as the snow floated down all around them, a hushed carol all their own.
“A year ago this night, I told myself that the reaction I had to you was simply because I knew you were carrying my child,” he said, his voice quieter. But no less intense. “But that is not so. How could it be? Because you are like your name, Constance. You are steady. You are you, no matter what.”
“Ask around and you might discover that many folks around here do not consider that a plus,” she said.
He only shook his head, watching snowflakes melt against her freckles. “I cannot bear to be without you. It is torture. I will not suffer it again.”
And he watched her as she breathed in deep, then let it out, making clouds in the cold night air.
“You don’t have to,” she whispered. “Anax. You never have to, if you don’t want to.”
“My chest hurts,” he told her, because it did. Because he ached. Because he was wearing a costume but had never felt more like himself. “My heart pounds all the time as if I’m dying, and yet I live. After that night in Athens, I saw my physician, certain that something was wrong with me, but he said I was in perfect health.” He let his mouth curve when she looked as if she might argue. “It’s you, Constance. You do this to me. You make me feel—”
But he couldn’t seem to form the words to that terrible song that got louder and louder inside him by the moment—
“I think you are in love,” she said softly. She took his hand, though it was covered in a glove and she pressed it to her own chest. And somehow Anax was certain that he could feel that same hammering from beneath her ribs, though they were separated by layers of fleece and down. Constance smiled, and it was brighter than any high noon. “Ask me how I know.”
He let the song take him, then. He let the melody crash into him. He let it rush all over him and do as it would.
Once again, he leaped out into nothingness, hoping against hope that he’d figure out how to fly on the way down.
“I don’t know how to be in love,” he told her, with a deep urgency that felt like a part of the song and its own song, too. “I don’t know how to feel the things that other people feel. I’ve always seen them as weaknesses. They were beaten out of me when I was young.”
But she didn’t take that as the warning it was.
“Says the man who keeps his sister close to him, closer to him than any other person alive.” Constance laughed. “And who, according to your sister, visits your mother regularly. I think you do know how to love, Anax. You just don’t know what to call it.”
“I will call it whatever you want me to call it,” he vowed. “I have built empires already, Constance. I will build you whatever you like. You can call it whatever you wish. I will do anything, as long as you’re with me.”
“Anax,” she began.
“Just tell me what you want.” And it was possible he was begging. Something he did not think he’d ever done before. Still, the shock of it did not stop him, because nothing could matter more than this. Why shouldn’t he beg? “Please, Constance. Only tell me and I’ll make it so.”
She looked at him for a long moment, out there in such a dark, cold night. There was one streetlight down near the church, and it glowed. There were some twinkling lights on the trims of the buildings, only the twinkling visible through the snow.
But otherwise, it was as if they were the only two people alive in the world.
Anax was sure that he could handle it, if so. Because she was all he needed.
Just Constance, because from Constance came everything else that mattered.
She looked at him, then she smiled, that great, big, beautifully bright smile that made everything all right. It was like hope on earth and joy to all, like the words of the carol the congregation had sung on its way out of the church tonight.
It wound its way into that great song inside him and made it sweeter.
“What I want is simple,” she told him, and she swayed closer to him as if she thought the snow might steal her words away. “What I want is for you and me to live happily ever after, Anax. Forever.”
He pulled her closer then, and he held her the way he wanted to hold her for the rest of his life. And he smiled down at her, because he knew that given a task, he would not simply complete it. He would ace it.
And he would learn how to sing that song, at the top of his voice, if it killed him.
“Consider it done,” Anax vowed.
And then he took his wife by her hand and walked her home.