Chapter 27 #2
Dimitri nods. He doesn’t smile. He does what Dimitri does: he stands slightly apart from the rest of us and watches the family hold itself together with an expression I cannot fully read.
I file the expression. I will think about it later.
? ? ?
Cathleen flies back to Florida on Sunday evening. She kisses Nora's forehead at the airport then she kisses Maeve. She doesn’t kiss me, but she does shake my hand, which, from Cathleen Callahan, is, I have learned in forty-eight hours, the highest available endorsement.
She holds my eyes for one second. "Lex."
"Yes."
"You said the words to me before you said them to her?"
"Yes."
"Do not make me the only person who has heard them."
"I will not."
She squeezes my hand once. She walks through security.
? ? ?
A Friday, a few weeks on. Maeve comes home from grand jury prep at 7:42 PM and finds a small black velvet box on the kitchen counter.
Inside it: a thin gold chain. The chain is delicate. There is no pendant. There is no monogram. There is no inscription. The chain is the kind of quiet anonymous gift a man gives a woman when he’s decided that the gift cannot signal anything except that he was thinking of her.
She holds the chain in her palm for a long second.
She walks to where I am at the kitchen island and she lifts her hair off the back of her neck and she says, "Put it on me."
I put it on her.
My fingers at the small clasp at the nape of her neck. The chain settling against the bone at the base of her throat, the small dip there.
She doesn’t ask why.
She doesn’t ask what for.
She wears it to bed that night and doesn’t take it off. She doesn’t take it off the next morning. She’s not, taken it off for any reason. She showers in it. She sleeps in it. She wears it under everything she puts on, every day, the small gold line at the base of her throat.
She tells me a couple of days later: ‘this is the only piece of jewelry I have ever owned that I have not taken off to sleep.’
I love the sound of that.
? ? ?
It is a Wednesday. Nora is at Eleni's for the night because Eleni has been asking for one specific Wednesday a month and we have agreed to the standing arrangement.
Maeve is in the dress Eleni helped her pick at the small boutique on Newbury Street where Eleni has been a customer since 1982.
The dress is a vibrant deep green that brings out her eyes with a zipper that runs up the back.
The zipper has been a running architecture of the evening, because Eleni and Maeve have laughed about it during the dinner, and because Stavros has, at one point during the conversation about whether the zipper is a structural choice or a styling choice, looked at me with the fierce face of a brother who has noticed that his older brother has not stopped tracking the zipper for the last two hours.
We drive home at around 11:00 PM.
In the foyer of the brownstone, Maeve sets her keys in the bowl by the door. She turns to hang her coat. I close the door, lock it and throw the deadbolt. I throw the second deadbolt and throw the chain.
She turns back to me. "Lex."
“Yes Maeve."
"What are you doing?"
"I am unzipping your dress."
She studies my face. She decides what is happening as she turns around and lifts her hair.
I unzip the dress slowly.
Not all the way. To the bottom of her shoulder blades. To the place where I can see the fine architecture of her spine, the one I have memorized in the dark for two months. I don’t pull the dress off or move her toward the bedroom. I do not press myself against her back.
I kiss the back of her neck. Once.
The kiss is not a beginning.
The kiss is a small offering.
The kiss is the kiss of a man telling a woman in the foyer of their house that he’s been thinking about her zipper for two hours and has decided to do something about it that is not sex, just so she knows he’s been thinking.
Maeve leans back against me for one second.
She says, "Thank you."
"You are welcome."
She walks to the bedroom takes the dress off and leaves it on the chair by the dresser. She comes back into the kitchen in pajamas.
We go to bed. We read. She’s reading a book of essays by a Greek American writer Eleni has lent her. I am reading the Sokolov file. We read in bed next to each other for forty minutes. She turns out her light at 12:04 AM.
I turn out mine four minutes later.
She’s already asleep.
? ? ?
Cormac stops by the brownstone the next evening to drop off paperwork from the case. He’s stayed for coffee. He’s sitting at the kitchen island in his coat with a small bag from a bakery on West Broadway, the bakery near his apartment.
Maeve is upstairs giving Nora a bath.
Cormac sets the paperwork on the marble. He looks at me. He says, "Keely is coming to Boston on the seventeenth."
I have not yet heard the name out loud from Cormac. I have heard ‘the American who keeps calling about my brother.’ I have heard ‘the woman from California.’ I have not heard ‘Keely.’
"Keely," I say.
"Keely Walsh. The American I have been picking up the phone for."
"On the seventeenth."
"For four days. To meet the family."
I look at Cormac for a long second.
"That is the brother thing you mentioned in the warehouse."
"It is."
"Padraig knows."
"He knows. He’s in favor."
"Brigid."
"Brigid is in favor. Brigid wrote me a letter when I told her, three pages, in her hand, in which she informs me that an American woman is exactly what is needed in this family."
I do not laugh because I am not a man who laughs at jokes about other people's mothers. I do, however, smile.
"Keely Walsh," I say. "The seventeenth."
"Yes."
"Maeve will want to meet her."
"Maeve will be the first to meet her."
Cormac drinks his coffee. We sit at the kitchen island for a long minute.
Then Cormac says, "Lex. The man you became at the warehouse with Igor Volkov.
The man you became at the holding cell with Marcus Andreev.
I want you to know my brothers know what you did.
Padraig sent me a letter. Padraig says you were the man my father would have been if my father had been Greek instead of Irish. "
"Cormac."
"That is the highest thing my brother says about other men, Lex."
I nod once.
Cormac drinks the rest of his coffee. He gets up. He puts on his coat. He claps me on the shoulder once at the door. He goes.
? ? ?
Two nights before the grand jury.
Maeve and I are on the couch in the living room.
Nora is asleep upstairs. The television is on with the sound off because we have been pretending to watch a movie neither of us has tracked.
The fire is going in the small grate. Maeve has her head against my shoulder. The bandaged arm is mostly healed.
"Two days."
"Two days.You ready?”
"I will be there."
"I know."
She’s quiet for a long second.
Then she says, "Lex."
“Yes, Maeve?”
"Whatever you wanted to ask me. After the grand jury. The answer is yes. It will always be yes.”
I go very still.
"I am not making you wait," she says. "The answer is yes."
I smile, but I don’t do what I want to do, which is to drop to one knee in our living room and propose to her in front of the grate and the unwatched movie.
The proposal is for after the grand jury.
The proposal is for the night I have been planning since I drove home from the warehouse with Andreev in my throat.
It’s going to happen the way I have planned it, with my mother and the ring and the Greek words I have been preparing.
I do, however, pull her closer.
I press my mouth to the top of her hair.
I say, into her hair, low, the only sentence I am going to give her tonight.
"After the grand jury."