Chapter 37
Lex
The Lake House, Again
Two weeks after the proposal. Friday afternoon.
Stavros is absent. Declan is absent. Dimitri is absent.
Stavros and Declan have been working a Belov-connected shipping manifest in New Bedford for nine days.
The manifest is the operational lead, Petrov surfaced after Karpov's arrest. Stavros sends regular snarky updates from a motel he describes as ‘a place I am going to write a Yelp review for that ends my career.’ Declan sends none, because Declan doesn’t text.
Both will return to Boston in three days.
Dimitri is running point on the Sokolov investigation directly with Petrov.
He’s been at it for two weeks since the night of the proposal.
He has not come to a family dinner in fourteen days.
He’s not returned my calls in eleven. My mother has stopped asking after him, which is what my mother does when she’s decided that the brother in question is doing the work the family needs and is not to be interrupted.
I worry about Dimitri. Quietly. Privately.
The way I have worried about Dimitri since approximately 1997, when he was eight years old and our father took him to the warehouse in Allston for the first time and he came home that night and didn’t speak at the dinner table.
Dimitri has been quiet ever since. The quiet has been deepening since the night of the proposal.
I do not know what he’s doing on the Sokolov work.
I trust him with it. I do not have to know.
? ? ?
The lake house at 4:23 PM has changed.
It has not physically changed. The porch is still gray-painted boards.
The screen door still sticks at the hinge.
The dock still goes out forty feet over the water and turns left for another twenty.
The cabin still smells like cedar and damp wool and the slow specific accumulation of a house that gets used six weekends a year and is otherwise empty.
What has changed is who is in it.
My mother is in the kitchen with Maeve. Eleni Konstantinos has not been to the lake house in many years.
She came once with my father long ago, before he was killed, and she’s not come back.
She told me on the drive up that she had been waiting to come back and had decided, on the morning of the proposal, that she would wait no longer.
She’s currently teaching Maeve to make ‘spanakopita’ the proper way, which involves a phyllo-dough technique I have never seen Eleni execute on anyone before and which Maeve is absorbing with the careful focus of a woman who has decided she’s going to learn how the Konstantinos women cook.
Nora is on the dock with Cormac.
She’s throwing rocks. Cormac, six-foot-four Irish boss, has discovered that throwing rocks in lakes is genuinely fun.
He’s been throwing rocks for an hour. Nora has been throwing rocks for the same hour.
Cormac is teaching her to side-arm the flat ones, so they skip.
Nora's skips are at zero. Cormac's are at four.
Cormac is celebrating each of Nora's non-skips as if they were six-skip cathedral throws.
I am on the porch watching.
The water is gray under a low gray sky. The trees behind the cabin are bare. The bones of the branches stand against the late-winter light. A thin crust of old snow at the edges of the path. The air smells like wood smoke. Someone two coves over have the wood stove going.
Maeve comes out onto the porch with a coffee and hands me one. She’s in jeans and one of my old fishing sweaters, and the engagement ring on her left hand is the bright weight that has been catching my eye for two weeks straight.
She says, "Your mother just told me my phyllo is acceptable."
"Acceptable from Eleni is praise."
"I know. She also told me my technique is ‘Irish but improving,’ which I think was a compliment."
"That was a compliment."
She sits beside me on the porch swing. The swing creaks in the way I have heard it creak for fifteen years. The creak is the sound that means I am at the lake house, and it sounds different now that Maeve is beside me on the swing than it has sounded any of the other times.
? ? ?
Mid-afternoon. Cormac and Nora come back up from the dock. Nora is up to her knees in water because she stepped into it while trying to retrieve a particularly fine rock. Cormac is wet to the elbows because he tried to retrieve her. They are both laughing.
Maeve sees Cormac roll up his sleeve to wipe lake water off his forearm. The scratch from Ch 31 is a faint pink line now, almost healed. Two and a half weeks past the original three stitches.
Cormac sees Maeve see it. He says, in the tone of a man delivering a punchline he’s been waiting for, "The scratch."
Maeve says, "I see it."
Cormac says, "I am going to tell my future wife the story of how I got it."
Maeve says, "Cormac, you do not have a future wife."
Cormac says, "Yet."
He says it warmly. Nora, who has been listening to this exchange with the gravity of a person under three who has decided the adults are doing something interesting, says, "‘Theíos Scratch.’"
The porch breaks. My mother, who has come outside with the second tray of ‘spanakopita,’ laughs hard enough that she’s to set the tray down. Cormac falls back against the porch rail as if shot. Maeve is laughing into her coffee.
"‘Theíos Scratch,’" Cormac says, recovering. "I will accept the title with honor."
Nora, satisfied: "‘Theíos Scratch.’"
It becomes the running joke of the weekend.
? ? ?
Nico and Siobhan arrive at 8:14 PM with Sofia asleep against Siobhan's shoulder.
The baby is nine months old now. She sleeps through the carry from the SUV to the bedroom Eleni has prepared with the portable crib.
Siobhan stays with her for ten minutes. Then she comes out into the living room and Nora climbs her like a tree.
Dinner is at the lake house table at 8:47 PM.
Eleni at the head. Stavros's chair is empty. Declan's chair empty. Dimitri's chair is empty. The empty chairs are not pointed out, but I notice them, and my mother notices them, and I see Nico's eye go to the place where Dimitri would sit and then come back.
Cormac, with the careful tact he’s been hiding behind his clown brand for two weeks, says, "To the brothers not at the table.
Stavros, who is currently writing a Yelp review of a New Bedford motel.
Declan, who would not be answering his phone if I called him right now, which is why I am not going to call him.
Dimitri, who is doing the work the family needs. "
My mother says, "‘Stin ygeiá mas.’"
Nora, on her telephone-book chair, says, "‘Steeneeahmaz.’"
We drink.
We eat. The lamb Stavros sent up via courier this morning, the ‘spanakopita’ Eleni and Maeve made, the small Greek salad with the olives my mother carries from Boston in a Tupperware container because she doesn’t trust the olives at any grocery store within fifty miles of the lake.
The lake house dining room smells like lemon and oregano.
The candles are lit on the table. My mother insisted.
I look at the room.
Maeve in the chair I used to sit in alone.
Nora on Eleni's lap eating bread off Eleni's plate. Sofia in a highchair next to Siobhan, who is feeding her mashed sweet potato. Nico across from Maeve, listening to her tell a story about a deposition she did three years ago. Cormac at the foot of the table making my mother laugh. Eleni in her chair, the matriarch of three generations of Konstantinos women, in the lake house she’s not been to in eleven years.
I think: ‘I am alive. I am here. Thank you.’
I do not say it out loud. I do not need to.
? ? ?
After dinner, after Nora has been put to bed in the small guest room with Brontos, after Sofia has been fed her last bottle and is asleep in the portable crib in Nico and Siobhan's room, after the dishes have been done by Stavros's absent direction (Eleni and Maeve at the sink, me drying, Cormac putting away because he’s the only one tall enough to reach the high cabinet), Nico comes out onto the dock with me.
It is 10:23 PM. The lake is dark. There is a moon, three-quarters, low. The boards under our feet are cool.
We stand at the end of the dock looking at the water.
Nico says, "Ten months ago this lake house was your hiding place."
I say, "I know."
"You do not hide anymore."
"I do not."
"Mama is happy."
"I know."
Pause. The water laps against the pilings under the dock. A loon calls from somewhere on the far shore.
Nico says, "You are going to be a husband. You are going to be a father on paper. You are going to be everything I was afraid you would never let yourself be."
I say, "Do not make me cry on a dock, Nico."
He laughs. He says, "I will not. But I want you to know I am proud of you. That is all."
I do not speak for a long moment. The loon calls again. Closer this time.
I say, "Thank you."
He nods. We watch the water.
After another long minute, I say, "How is the family business?”
Nico says, "Active. Sokolov is bigger than we thought. Dimitri has been working it for two weeks. He’s going to need help soon."
"I am here."
"I know. But the help he’s going to need is not your kind of help. He’s going to need someone who can play a long game. Someone who can be unreadable. That is not you. That is him."
"Dimitri."
"Dimitri."
Pause. The moon is on the water. The dock creaks under us in the way the lake house dock has creaked for fifteen years.
Nico says, "You should go up. Your fiancée is waiting for you."
I say, "My fiancée."
"Get used to it."
"I am working on it."
He puts a hand on my shoulder. He squeezes once. He walks back up the dock toward the cabin.
I stand at the end of the dock alone for one more minute. The water laps. The loon calls. The lake house is the lake house. I have been coming here for fifteen years, and tonight is the first night the lake house has been a home instead of a refuge.
I walk back up the dock.
? ? ?
Maeve is already in the master bedroom.
I have not slept in the master bedroom at the lake house since 2017.
I slept in the second bedroom every time I came up alone, because the master felt too big for one person, because the master had been the room my parents shared when they came to this lake house in the 1990s before my father was killed, because I had been the person who could not be alone in a room a married couple should occupy.
Maeve is in the master bed in one of my old t-shirts.
The lamp on the nightstand is the small yellow one I bought in 2014 and never replaced.
The light is warm. The window is cracked open, and the smell of the lake is in the room and the curtains are moving in the way curtains move in a lake house at 10:43 PM in February.
She’s sitting up against the headboard. She’s reading. The book is open on her lap. The ring catches the lamplight as she turns a page.
She looks up when I come in.
She says, "Lex."
I say, "Yes."
"Come to bed."
I undress. I get into the bed. The mattress is the lake house mattress, which is firmer than the brownstone mattress, which I am only now noticing because I am the person I am in a marriage and is noticing mattresses in the way men who have been married for fifty-two years notice mattresses.
Maeve sets the book aside. She turns toward me.
The lamp casts the small yellow light on the side of her face.
She says, "Lex."
I say, "Yes."
She says, "I am pregnant."
I go very still.