31. Cali
CALI
The house is full of food nobody's going to eat.
I wonder who decided that that's what we do in society. Why is casserole the food of death? Somebody dies and people bring baking dish after baking dish full of the stuff.
Todd's coworkers, a couple of the neighbors, a woman from the PTA I've barely spoken to in a year—all of them come with casseroles in hand. There are three dishes on the counter under tinfoil and a fourth in the fridge and a pie somebody left on the stoop with a card I haven't opened.
I don't know what I'm supposed to do with any of it. Who craves casserole after a funeral? Or ever? But they keep coming, so I keep taking them. Now, my counter looks like a church potluck for a party that nobody wants to be at.
The funeral clothes are draped over the banister. Hayden's little gray suit, Isabella's dark blue dress with the white collar, my own black shift I peeled off the second we got in the door. I mean to hang them up, but I can't quite find the energy. It's been a long day.
I feed the kids toast for dinner, and thankfully, they don't complain that it's not Ronan's usual gourmet offerings. Isabella eats hers with the crusts off. Hayden eats his standing up at the counter, quiet, not reading me a single fact about a single fish.
That's how I know he heard the whispers.
He's been too quiet since the treeline. My boy who narrates the ordeals of life on the ocean floor at me without ever pausing for breath has said maybe six words since we left the cemetery. I've been waiting for the inevitable question.
It comes at bath time.
Ronan is upstairs with him. He offered, and I let him, because I couldn't do it—I was down here staring at tinfoil trying to remember how to be a person. So Ronan's up there running the water and Isabella's already down and I'm at the bottom of the stairs when I hear it.
Hayden's voice. He sounds so grown up.
"Did you kill my dad?"
I stop with my hand on the banister, over the bedraggled length of his little black bow tie.
I could go up. I could burst in and manage it, smooth it over, give my boy the answer wrapped in cotton the way I've wrapped everything for him his whole life.
But then, as soon as I start to move, I stop again.
Because he didn't ask me; he asked Ronan. And Ronan deserves the chance to answer.
There's a pause up there. The water's off. I picture Ronan crouched down beside the tub, giving the question the moment of seriousness it deserves.
"No," Ronan says. "No. I didn't."
Another pause. I hold my breath at the bottom of the stairs.
Then, Hayden again: "You're not lying to me, right? You've never lied to me before."
I hear myself in my little boy's question. The hope.
"No," Ronan says, "I haven't. And I'm too old and too tired to start now, especially with the one person in this house who'd actually catch me."
I hear the tub water shift. My boy, deciding.
"Okay," Hayden says. "I believe you."
That's all it takes. Okay. The audit clears. The number comes back clean.
I press the back of my hand to my mouth and retreat into the kitchen so I don't stand there and cry on the stairs where they might hear me.
He'd have known if I lied. They always do. Ronan said that to me weeks ago.
But I mean, c'mon. He's a lawyer. That's literally a professional liar. And one nine-year-old boy, as smart as he might be, is gonna catch him in a fib?
But also, yes, c'mon. Ronan won't let us down.
Not me.
Not my babies.
Not any of us.
I put the toast plates in the sink and busy myself with cleaning them.
I don't turn around when I hear the two of them come down the hall, Hayden in his dinosaur pajamas with his hair wet and combed flat, Ronan a step behind with the towel slung over his shoulder.
Hayden approaches and leans against my side for a second, just like he used to when he was smaller.
I cup my wet hand on the back of his damp head and hold it there.
"Bedtime, superstar," I say.
"Okay. Love you, Mom."
As simple as that, he shuffles away.
I finish tidying up the kitchen and go upstairs, but even after I've wiped off my makeup and changed into pajamas, sleep proves hard to come by.
Ronan isn't sleeping, though we both pretend to for the sake of the other. We lie there being liars about the one thing we're allowed to lie about, which is whether either of us is okay.
Around midnight, I feel him drift for real, finally, worn down past the pretending. His arm is heavy over my waist. I ease out from under it an inch at a time. He doesn't wake, which tells me exactly how far gone he is, because Ronan Akov wakes if the house so much as sighs wrong.
When I'm sure he hasn't stirred, I slip downstairs.
The kitchen's still full of casseroles. The moon is coming through the window over the sink, illuminating the spot where my laptop sits shut on the island.
Next to it is my phone.
I've known there was a voicemail for six days. I've been carrying it around, this little unheard thing, terrified of what it might contain. I told myself I wasn't ready and that I'd know when the right time came.
But there's no right time to hear a dead man's voice, so there's no wrong one, either. Now, it's one in the morning and I'm alone and the house is quiet and there's no reason not to listen.
I sit down at the island. I open the phone. I find the voicemail, the one from DO NOT ANSWER, the little red dot next to it that means unheard.
I press play and hold it to my ear.
"Cal." Todd's voice. A small, shrunken-down version of it. "Hey. It's me. I know you're not gonna pick up. That's fair. Honestly, I wouldn't pick up for me, either, and I'm the guy stuck being me."
There's a sound behind him. A television, maybe, crackling in a carpeted room. It's a motel outside Harrisburg, I know now, though I wouldn't have known if I answered then.
"So. Listen. I gotta tell somebody this, and you're the only person left who'd know the difference between me lying and me telling the truth—" He stops. Breathes. "The guy came back. The one from before. The old one. Russian. He came back tonight."
My hand goes cold around the phone.
"He wanted me to sign something. A statement.
Sworn thing, notary and everything, real official.
Basically, it said that Akov leaned on me, swore he'd hurt me if I talked.
The guy wanted me to swear it was him." He coughs.
"It's not true, Cal. Akov never threatened me.
He looked at me like something he scraped off his shoe, which—yeah that's exactly what I was.
But he never threatened me. This guy, though…
Well, he didn't have to actually say the threat for me to understand what would happen if I don't cooperate, you know? "
The television murmurs behind him. I can hear him swallow.
"I said no this time."
I choke up.
"I don't even know why," he goes on. "It's not like it does me any good.
God knows I've never picked the option that doesn't. But I've done so much.
To you. To the kids. I stole from you and I lied and I—I know what I am, Cal.
I told you that on your steps. And I figured, okay, this one thing, this one thing, I could not do.
I could choose to not help them hang it on a guy who never did it. Even if he's—even if he's got you now."
I'm crying. Silent, my hand over my mouth, bathing in the moonlight.
"So." Todd clears his throat. "If something happens to me—and I do think something's gonna happen to me, Cal; I'm dumb but I'm not that dumb—but if something happens…
Just know that, one time in his whole life, when it counted, our children's father did the right thing.
The brave thing. That's the whole ask. That's all I want them to have. Just that one."
The television. His breathing. Silence. More.
"Don't let them hate me," he says, quiet. The same words. From the sidewalk outside the camp, three weeks ago, in the meekest voice I ever heard from him. Don't let them hate me. I gave him the not-answer then. I let it sit between us and he took it and said that's fair.
A click. The message ends.
The automated voice comes on, cold and pleasant. "To delete this message, press seven. To save it—"
I hang up before I have to make a choice.
Bye, Daddy, Isabella said this afternoon, and dropped a butterfly onto a box. He gets to turn into something better. She was right. She's always right, my girl. She might be smarter than the rest of us put together.
I don't know how long I sit there. Long enough for the phone to go dark in my hand. The crying slows and then stops, leaving me tired but cleansed on the other side of it.
I'm still holding the phone when I hear him coming down the stairs.
But it's not the sneaky footsteps I'm used to. He's running, thudding, not worried at all about being quiet because—
Fuck, is someone in here? Is Lev? Another killer? The fake feds? The real ones?
I'm half up off the stool with my hand reaching for a weapon that isn't there when Ronan comes around the corner into the kitchen and locks eyes with me.
"Cali." He grabs the doorframe. "Navi's awake."
I drop back down hard.
"He's awake," he growls, torn between delight and disbelief.
"Grigor just called. He opened his eyes an hour ago, he's talking, the doctors say he's actually talking, he asked for water, and then—" A hysterical laugh tears out of him.
"The first full sentence out of him, after two bullets and three surgeries and a week of the whole family losing our minds, was, and I'm quoting the man exactly, 'So did our fearless leader finally learn to duck, or does he still catch bullets with his chest like an idiot?’”
And there it is. The stubborn man, the impossible man, the man who took two bullets meant for Ronan and used his last breath before surgery to swear it wasn't him. Awake. Talking. Making jokes.
I'm across the kitchen before I know I've moved. I hit Ronan hard enough to knock the breath out of him. He catches me, folds down over me, and we hold onto each other in the dark by the counter full of casseroles nobody's going to eat.
I feel him shaking, this enormous man, shaking and laughing and crying all at once.
"He's awake," he says into my hair. "I can't believe it."
"And he's already insufferable. That's how you know it's really him." I pull back to look at him. "Get your keys, Counselor. Let's go tell the most stubborn man in New York that yes, you finally learned to duck. He's going to be so disappointed he doesn't get to gloat forever."