Iris
I finish the dress on a Thursday morning, and sit with it in my lap for a long time after the last stitch. While ever there has been one more stitch to sew, I have had a reason not to do the thing that seems to scare me more than being locked in a cell in a foreign country.
There are no more stitches. The gown, pale cream and impossibly fine, took forty hours of my hands and a hundred years of Antonelli lace. I fold it into its tissue the way Ma taught me, sleeves in first, folded in half, and I carry it downstairs like it's the excuse it absolutely is.
The kitchen at ten in the morning belongs to my mother.
This is not a schedule anyone wrote down; it's simply a law of the house.
The wives scatter to their own corners with their babies and their work, the brothers are wherever brothers go to loom over things, and for two hours Saoirse Orlova has her kitchen to herself.
I stand in the doorway with the tissue parcel against my chest. She's at the counter with her back to me, sleeves pushed up, working a dough she doesn't need to make because there's enough bread in this house to fortify a village. She doesn't turn around.
"There's tea in the pot," she says.
Not coffee. Tea. And she made two cups' worth; I can see the second cup already sitting out by the good pot. My heart starts going like a stolen car again, because my mother doesn’t do anything by accident and has not done anything by accident since roughly 1987.
"I finished the dress," I say.
"Wonderful," she says in a way that doesn’t quite feel like she is genuinely pleased, then she turns around, wiping her hands on her apron.
Her eyes do the thing they have done my entire life. The thing that reads a room end to end, and then they do something worse. They go soft. My mother's eyes going soft has ended stronger people than me.
"Sit down, sweetheart."
I sit. She pours the tea. She sets the cup in front of me and then she sits too, across the corner of the big table, close enough that our knees touch, and she folds her floury hands and waits.
I open my mouth to lead with something manageable, something with a joke stitched to the front of it, the way I lead with everything.
What comes out is, "Ma, I think I'm pregnant."
The kitchen clock ticks. Somewhere above us a floorboard creaks, the house going about its business, oblivious.
My mother doesn’t gasp or put her hand to her chest. She looks at me with those soft knowing eyes and she says, quietly, "I know, darling."
"You... how could you possibly."
"You've poured four cups of coffee down my sink this fortnight thinking no one saw. You sleep like the dead and eat like a bird and your mind has been elsewhere…but not there." She is referring to Sicily, and she would be right. I’ve barely thought about that since realizing I might actually be pregnant. All I’ve done is cry about Yakob walking away when I thought I was enough to make him stay.
“Was it one of the men?” she asks as gently as she knows how while holding herself together with every ounce of strength she has.
“No!” I blurt. “No, nothing like that.”
She reaches over and closes both hands around mine on the teacup.
I haven’t cried in front of my mother since I was fifteen years old.
I have cried near her. I have had shining eyes at weddings and let a few tears go at the homecoming, holding éirinn, surrounded, safe, performing even my relief.
But I have not once, in over a decade, sat in front of any member of my family and come apart.
I buckle.
It comes up from somewhere below the floor, and there's no dignity in it, no single beautiful tear.
I cry the way I did on the floor of the tiny farm house on Lipari, without any attempt at management, my face in my hands and my shoulders going, and Ma is out of her chair and around the table before the first sob finishes and she gathers me in the way she gathers her grandbabies, my face against her apron, her hand in my hair, and she doesn't say hush.
She has never once in her life said hush.
She says, "There it is. There it is, my love. Let it come."
And it comes. All of it.
"He left," I hear myself saying, into flour and cotton, and my voice sounds nothing like my voice.
"Ma, he left, he stood in that doorway and I asked him not to and he left anyway, and I don't, I can't..." The words keep breaking off at the edges.
"I don't even know his last name. Isn't that...
I'm having a baby with a man and I don't know his last name, I don't know what country he's in, I don't know if he's alive, and everyone thinks I'm grieving Sicily, and I let them think it, because how do I say it?
That the worst thing that ever happened to me is that the man you all hired did his job perfectly and then disappeared.
Because disappearing is what he does, it's the whole point of him, and I knew that, I knew it the entire time, and I went and, and—"
"And you fell in love with him anyway," Ma says.
"I fell in love him anyway." It's out before I can soften it into something survivable. "I check every room I walk into, and he's in none of them, Ma. He's in none of the rooms, and I'm so tired of looking and hoping."
She holds me and rocks me, this small ferocious woman, and over my head I hear her exhale slowly, the way she does before she decides something.
"He'll have his reasons," she says at last, carefully, like she's picking her way across stones.
"Men like that always think leaving is a kindness.
They're always wrong, but they don’t know.
" Something old moves under her voice, something I'm too wrecked to chase.
"But we're not going to build the next chapter on that. We're going to build it on you."
I don't hear the door. I never hear the door anymore unless I'm listening for it, and I feel Grace before I see her, her arms coming around me from the other side, no questions, folding into the hug like she was always part of it.
When I lift my head her face tells me she's heard enough.
She doesn't say congratulations and she doesn't say oh no.
She just kisses my temple and stays there with her arms around me.
Katya arrives four minutes later, allegedly for a bottle warmer, takes one look at the arrangement of us, and abandons the task.
She wedges herself onto the bench on my other side and grips my hand hard enough that her rings leave grooves in my skin, again.
But that’s how Katya says everything important.
"Whoever needs killing," she says against my hair, "we won't even tell the guys. We'll do it ourselves."
"Nobody needs killing," I manage, wet.
"Disappointing,” she grumbles. “The offer stands."
Tanya comes in with paint swatches she no longer needs and leaves them on the counter where she drops them.
Even though she is nine months pregnant, she gets down on her knees in front of me, takes my face in both hands, and studies me with those sharp eyes.
I see her figure it out. Her whole face changes. "Oh," she says. "Oh, Iris."
Anya slips in without éirinn, which means Connor has the kids and Anya came running, and she doesn't try to reach me through the wall of women, she just puts her hand flat on my back between Grace and Ma and leaves it there, a small steady weight, and says something soft in Russian that I don't understand and understand completely.
Nadia comes last. Nadia always comes last and always at the right moment, and she doesn't say a word. She works her way into the circle the way water finds a level, and she presses her forehead to my temple, exactly the way I once did for her two years ago, and the circle closes.
Seven women around one kitchen chair. My mother's hand in my hair, Grace's arms, Katya's grip, Tanya on her knees, Anya's palm, Nadia's forehead.
Somewhere in this house five large men are stomping around entirely unaware that the true government of the family is currently in session, and I sit in the middle of it, red-eyed and blotchy and emptied out.
I cry a while longer because it turns out there's more, and they let me. Nobody tells me to stop, and nobody makes it smaller than it is, and nobody, God bless every one of them, says everything happens for a reason.
Eventually I surface.
"Right," I say. My voice is a ruin. I use it anyway.
"Thank you. All of you. I mean it, I don't have the words for what I mean, which you know is serious, because I always have the words.
" A ragged laugh goes around the circle.
"But I need you to hear the next part just as well as you heard everything else. "
They wait. Even Katya waits, and waiting is not her wheelhouse.
"I'm going to be okay," I say. "Not today.
Today I'm a disaster, and I've decided to be gracious about it.
But I will be okay, and I need all of you to actually believe that, not nod at it.
I survived a kidnapping. I survived a cell and an escape that could seriously be its own action show.
I can survive a broken heart; women do it every day with less backup than this.
" I look around the circle. "And surviving means living.
Which brings me to the part you'll like less. "
Ma's eyes narrow a fraction. But I know she already knows.
"I'm going into town this week," I say. "I’ll make an appointment with the doctor, and then go to lunch, and possibly buy something impractical, because I'm about to spend eighteen years being practical.
And I'm going alone. No Killian parked across the street pretending to read a newspaper upside down.
No Aidan three tables away in a restaurant he'd never eat in.
No convoy. I love my brothers more than my own life, but if one more of them trails me to the shops I am going to lose what's left of my mind. "
"Iris," Grace starts, gently, "after everything, they just..."
"I know what they just. And for six weeks I let them, because they were frightened, and honestly, so was I.
" I put my hand flat on the table, steady.
Steady hands, stolen-car heart; it's how I seem to be built now.
"But the men who took me are gone. You've all heard the same whispers I have.” I take a breath, willing the fresh wave of tears away.
“I'm an adult. I'm about to be someone's mother. It starts now."
Silence. Katya looks like she's suppressing applause. Tanya is openly failing to suppress it.
It's Ma who settles it, the way Ma settles everything, with seven words and a tone that closes the file. "You’re right," she says. "I'll deal with your brothers."
Relief washes away weight I didn’t know I was carrying. "Thank you."
"You'll take your phone, you'll tell me the shops, and you'll be home for dinner because you know there’s no saving food where your brothers are concerned.
" She picks up her own cup at last, and over the rim of it her eyes find mine, soft and fierce at once, both things forever.
"The rest is your own life, Iris. It always was. We were only ever minding it for you."
Later, when the circle has loosened into ordinary noise, hot tea and warm bread, I stand at the sink rinsing my cup, and I catch myself doing it. Looking at the last place I saw him. The doorway to the courtyard stands open to the bright afternoon.
I put my hand low on my belly, just for a second, where nobody but the women who already know can see.
The doorway is empty.
But I'm not.