Chapter 17
Lex
The Eight Hours
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE EIGHT HOURS
Lex
Eight hours.
I have, in my head, the schedule of the eight hours arranged the way I arrange anything I am going to lose.
I have eaten a meal with the woman in my kitchen.
I have laughed at my daughter. I have washed dishes at a sink with my woman at my side.
I have eight hours left in this house and then I have to put both of them back into the world.
I am going to make the eight hours count.
? ? ?
I take Nora down to the dock at 11:14 AM.
Maeve walks behind us with a coffee. The path from the cabin to the dock is forty yards.
Nora walks the forty yards holding my hand.
Her hand is small. Three of her fingers wrap around my index.
She’s never held my hand before, except yesterday on the porch when I taught her the breathing thing, and the breathing thing was operational.
This is not operational. This is a child holding her father's hand on a Saturday morning at a lake she’s not yet learned to be impressed by.
"What are we doing?" she says.
"We are going to throw rocks in the water."
She stops walking.
She considers this. The consideration is the consideration of an almost-three-year-old being given a piece of news that is genuinely surprising to her, meaning she gives it the gravity of a Supreme Court justice receiving briefs.
"Why?" she says.
"Because it is a thing people do at a lake."
"Why?"
"I do not know."
She accepts this. She continues walking. She takes the answer the way she’s taken every answer I have given her in the last two weeks, which is at face value with the small extending grace of a child who has decided, somewhere along the way, that the man holding her hand is not lying to her.
Maeve, behind us, makes a small sound that is not quite a laugh.
I do not turn around. If I turn around I will lose composure in a way I am not prepared to lose composure. I keep walking.
On the dock I show Nora how to hold a rock.
"Like this," I say. "Flat side down. Pinch the edge."
She pinches the edge of a rock the size of a quarter.
Her tongue comes out the side of her mouth.
The tongue is, apparently, the architecture of full concentration in a person under three.
She pinches. Her grip is wrong. I do not correct it.
I have decided, in this particular case, to teach her badly so that she gets to figure out the right way later, which is, I am realizing, the way my own father taught me to do certain things.
"Now you throw it."
She throws it.
The rock leaves her hand at a forty-five-degree upward angle, executes a small, graceful arc, and lands six inches from her foot in the dirt of the dock.
She looks at the rock.
She looks at me.
"That," she pronounces, "is not a lake."
"It is not."
"Brontos saw."
"Brontos is a forgiving witness."
She nods, satisfied. She picks up another rock.
Behind me on the dock I hear Maeve set down the coffee.
She’s sitting on the cedar boards with her legs crossed.
The light off the lake comes up under her chin and through the dark auburn of her hair, and for the third time this trip I am inside the eight months of memory I have been not-allowing-myself-to-be-inside-of, which is the gala bar in 2022, the green dress, the light coming through her hair the same way the light is coming through it now.
I watch her instead of Nora for a long second.
She catches me. She doesn’t look away. She does what she does, which is to hold my eyes for one beat and then turn slightly away with the smallest possible smile, and the smallest possible smile is doing more damage to me than any of last night's words.
Nora throws her second rock. It also lands in the dirt.
"Better," she informs me.
"Considerably better," I say.
She throws nineteen rocks in twenty-two minutes.
Two of them reach the water. Both barely. One sinks immediately. One bounces once before sinking. The bounce is, in Nora's experience, the most miraculous thing that has happened in the calendar year. She turns to me with her face wide open and yells, "DAD!"
She stops.
Her mouth is still in the shape of the word.
She had not meant to say it. She’s not, in two and a half weeks, called me anything.
She’s called me ‘the friend.’ She’s called me ‘Lex’ once, in the foyer, when Maeve introduced us.
She’s, I am realizing now and the realization is taking the air out of my chest in a way Maeve will tell me about later, been working on the math herself.
She closes her mouth. She looks at me. She looks at the rock. She looks at Maeve on the dock.
Maeve has gone perfectly still.
Nora opens her mouth. "It bounced," she says, in a smaller voice.
"It did," I say. The voice that comes out of my throat is not the voice I expected.
"Did you see it bounce?"
"I saw it bounce."
She holds my eyes for two seconds. The negotiation that is happening behind her face is the kind of negotiation a child does when she’s discovered a word in her own mouth before she’s decided what to do with it.
She’s not going to use it again today. She’s filing it.
She’s putting it on the shelf where she puts the words she’s still working out.
She picks up another rock.
"This one," she says, "is going to be the best."
She throws it. It lands in the dirt.
"That," she pronounces, "was a practice rock."
Behind me I hear Maeve laugh. The laugh is short.
The laugh is not the laugh from this morning at the kitchen sink.
It is a laugh I have not heard from her before, which is the laugh of a woman who has just watched her three-year-old daughter come within one syllable of saying ‘Dad’ and is processing the information by laughing because the alternative is crying on a public dock.
I do not turn around.
? ? ?
Nora naps from 12:45 to 2:10.
During the nap I sit on the porch with Maeve. She’s in a chair. I am in the chair next to her. Our knees are six inches apart. The lake is the lake. Neither of us speaks for a long time.
Then she says, in the small voice she’s using today, "Did you hear it?"
"I heard it."
"Are you all right?"
"I am working on it."
"I do not know what to do with it either," she says. "For what it is worth."
"It is worth a great deal."
She looks at me. She reaches across the six inches and puts her hand on my thigh, just above the knee. She doesn’t move it. She doesn’t stroke it. She leaves it there as the small specific weight that the gesture is.
I cover her hand with mine.
Neither of us says anything else for ten minutes.
? ? ?
Maeve gets a phone call at 2:17 PM.
She steps off the porch into the yard with the phone at her ear.
I watch her through the kitchen window. She’s doing what she does when she’s on a federal call, which is to walk in a small precise circle with her free hand cutting tactical shapes in the air.
The voice is the voice she uses for AUSAs.
I do not hear the words. I do not need to.
She comes back inside seven minutes later.
"Federal prosecutor," she says. "Strategic question on the case. Wanted to know if I had any updated knowledge of the secondary witness's whereabouts. Wanted to confirm my testimony schedule."
"Could I have answered any of that?"
"No."
"All right."
She looks at me. The look is a look I have not yet learned to fully read, but the part of it I can read is the part that says: ‘I have a job. The job is the reason I am alive in the way I am alive. I am not going to lose the job in the next sixty days because of you or because of a man named Nikolai or because of anyone.’
"I will not get in your way," I say.
"I know."
? ? ?
After the call I put Nora down for a second short nap.
She protests for ninety seconds. She’s asleep within four minutes. The Konstantinos genetic capacity for falling asleep when tired is operating at full strength.
I close the door of her room behind me. I walk down the hall. I pick up my phone from the kitchen counter. I walk out onto the porch, and I close the slider behind me.
I dial Nico.
He picks up on the second ring. "Lex."
"Nico. I have something to tell you."
A pause. Then: "All right."
"Maeve's daughter is mine."
The line goes silent.
It stays silent for nine seconds. I count them.
I count them because I am the kind of man who counts seconds when he’s waiting for a verdict from his older brother.
I have not counted seconds waiting for Nico's response since I was sixteen years old and I had to tell him I had broken our father's rule about a thing I will not put on a page even now.
Then Nico says, "How long have you known?"
"Three days. I should have told you sooner."
Another silence. Shorter this time.
"I'm going to be honest with you, Lex."
It is the first contraction my brother has used in this conversation. It is also the first contraction I have heard him use to me in three years. The contraction is the signal. The contraction is the small wound that has just become audible.
"That hurts. We don't keep things from each other. We never have."
"I know."
"Why did you wait?"
I have rehearsed the answer to this question for three days. The rehearsal doesn’t help. I deliver the answer the way a man delivers a thing he’s held privately for too long — without ornament.
"Because I was afraid you would handle it before I could. Because the family architecture would absorb her, and Nora and they would not be ours anymore. Because I needed it to be mine first before it became Konstantinos."
Nico is quiet for a long time.
Then he says, "That's a real reason."
Beat.
"It's not a good enough reason. But it's a real one."
"I know."
"Bring them home, Lex. We'll talk when you're back. The whole family will need to know."
"I know."
"Stavros and Dimitri can wait until tomorrow. Mama needs to be told in person."
"I will tell her in person."
"All right."
Pause.
"Lex?"
"Yes."
"What is her name?"
My throat does something. It does what throats do when a man asks the right question at the right time. I close my eyes for one full second.
"Nora."
"Nora," Nico repeats. The word is careful in his mouth, the way you handle a piece of family China you have not been allowed to hold before. "How old?"
"Two years and eleven months. She turns three this month."
"All right."
"All right."
We hang up.
? ? ?
I stand on the porch.
The lake has not changed. The lake has been the lake for eleven thousand years. The lake will be the lake for another eleven thousand. I am, in this moment, a small specific man on a small specific porch in November, having just told my older brother a thing I should have told him eight days ago.
I think, briefly and against my will, of Cormac O'Brien.
Cormac, who has been picking up his phone in the middle of the day for the last few weeks for a woman whose name he’s not yet said to me.
The men who do not pick up their phones for women have started picking up their phones for women.
Cormac on a Tuesday, half a sentence about ‘the American who keeps calling about my brother,’ which was the closest he’s ever come to admitting that there is a woman in the equation.
I had filed the half-sentence and not pressed.
I press it now, in my head, and I think: ‘good for you, Cormac. Pick up the phone.’
Then I go back inside.
Maeve is at the kitchen island.
She’s making coffee. Her back is to me. She’s heard the slider close. She doesn’t turn around.
I cross the kitchen. I stop on the other side of the island. The marble is between us.
"I told him."
She turns around.
"How did he take it?"
"He’s hurt. He’s right to be."
"And?"
"And he wants us home so the family can meet her. Both Nora and you."
She nods, slowly. "Okay."
I take a breath. "Maeve."
"Yes."
"I want to talk about what comes after grand jury."
She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t look away.
She’s the woman who walked across a consulate room three years ago and asked a stranger about the music.
She’s also the woman who has spent thirty-seven months writing federal briefs alone in a Brookline kitchen with a baby on her hip.
The woman in front of me is both of those women and she’s, in front of me, decided which one of them is going to answer me.
"I want it too," she says. "But I have a daughter who has built her life around a single mother in a one-bedroom apartment. I cannot make decisions for the weeks until grand jury that aren't built around her safety and my testimony. After grand jury, we figure it out."
"After grand jury."
"After grand jury."
"All right."
She crosses to my side of the island. She stops in front of me. She puts both of her hands on the front of my shirt, just below my sternum. Her hands are warm from the coffee mug she was holding.
She kisses me.
Soft. Brief. The kiss of a woman who is telling me that ‘after grand jury’ is a real promise and not a dismissal.
I let her kiss me. I do not try to deepen it.
I do not pull her against me. The kitchen is full of the smell of coffee and the November light is coming in over the lake, and somewhere down the hall my daughter is asleep with a one-eyed elephant under one arm, and I am being kissed in a borrowed kitchen by the woman who has decided to spend the next sixty days surviving with me.
She pulls back.
She looks at me. She says, in the voice she’s been using today, "Sixty days, Lex."
"Sixty days."
? ? ?
9:00 PM.
The cabin is locked. The wood stove is out.
The dishes are washed and put away. Nora is in the back seat of the SUV, asleep against the side of her car seat, Brontos under one arm, the contained, fierce diplomat of the morning's kitchen now reduced to the small soft animal of the late-evening drive home.
The trunk is packed. The lights inside the cabin are off.
I stand at the slider with the keys in my hand.
Maeve is already in the passenger seat.
I look at the lake one more time. Black under a low sky. The dock invisible in the dark. The place where my daughter threw nineteen rocks at the water and reached it twice. The place where I watched my brother say ‘that's a real reason’ through a phone on a porch.
I close the door.
I lock it.
I get in the SUV.
Maeve is looking at me. The dashboard light is on her face.
She’s the woman she’ll be when we get back to Boston, which is a woman with a federal grand jury weeks away and a contract on her head and a daughter she’s built her life around, and she’s also the woman who has just been kissed in a borrowed kitchen, and the two women are in the same passenger seat looking at me.
"Ready," I say.
"No."
"Me neither."
I drive.