CHAPTER 18 #3
He comes against her hip with her hand on his jaw.
Stefan comes inside her with the cord at her throat.
Alexei comes inside her with his ringed thumb pressed flat to the iliac.
I come inside her last, the watch on the bedside table, off my wrist for the first time in eleven years, my palm at her sternum below the medallion, her left hand still on the carved double-eagle at the headboard above us.
The double-eagle has warmed under her palm. The carving is room temperature on the wing she holds and cool everywhere else. Her hand has held that wing for forty minutes.
I think the irony of the eagle. The Romanovs were not those Romanovs.
My family came out of a Murmansk fish-cannery in nineteen-twenty-two and bought the name.
The irony is in the wood under her hand.
The knowing waits its turn — later, in daylight, when the words can hold it.
Tonight the eagle is hers and the wood is hers and the bed is hers and the four of us are hers in as the protocol named.
"State presence."
Gabriel. He has asked the closing question. He is the one who built the count and he is the one who closes the room.
She breathes. Her heart eases. Her breathing finds its length again. The chain at her throat catches the firelight.
"Still here."
The room exhales. The fire takes a long breath through the flue. Stefan's cord falls back to his wrist. Alexei turns the ring once on his thumb. Gabriel's hand goes flat against the inside of her left thigh and rests there. My palm is at her sternum. The medallion under my palm.
Gabriel speaks one word.
"Bath."
---
Stefan rises first and crosses to the en-suite and turns the water on. The clawfoot tub is deep enough for her collarbones. He measures temperature on the inside of his right wrist as I would — the cardiac surgeon's trick, the wrist over the palm. He nods at me from the doorway. The water is right.
Alexei lifts her. He has her in both arms, the cardigan from the chair tucked around her shoulders as he carries her, the medallion at her sternum, her left hand off the headboard for the first time in an hour and laid against the side of his neck. He carries her to the tub.
I watch over. I have always watched over.
I am the chief and the chief watches over and the chief tonight has been at her left breast and between her thighs and inside her and the chief is at the door of the bath now with his hand on the jamb.
Gabriel is behind me, still in the threshold. He carries the towels.
Stefan lowers her into the water. Alexei sits on the floor at the head of the tub with her ankle in his right hand, the ringed thumb against her instep.
Gabriel kneels behind the tub and pours water from a heavy ceramic jug over her hair, slow, the jug moving four times.
He washes her hair with the unscented Castile bar he brought from the loft.
Stefan hand-feeds her water from the heavy crystal glass.
The medallion stays at her sternum the whole time; none of us moves it; we have all learned. She closes her eyes.
She stays awake in the bath, floating. She breathes at twelve. I time her against the wall clock above the tub. Twelve, twelve, twelve. Stefan counts in fours under his breath. Alexei holds, past counting. Gabriel washes in silence.
We dry her at twenty-three minutes past midnight. Stefan towels her hair. Alexei towels her shoulders. Gabriel hands the small white robe to Stefan, who slides it onto her with his hands going slow at the shoulders. I lift her from the floor of the bath and carry her the eight feet to the bed.
She sleeps the second she is horizontal.
The fire has burned down to coals. The cashmere throw goes over her.
Gabriel settles at her right side, his hand on her right wrist where the pulse is steady at the radial.
Stefan and Alexei lay the futon out below the bed's end and stretch down onto it together — Stefan's cord at his wrist falling against the floor, Alexei's ring on his thumb resting on his own chest. They sleep where they can hear her breathing.
I stay standing.
---
Zero-three-thirty.
The fire has gone to ash with a single ember at the centre.
The radiator hisses. The foghorn off Brighton Beach calls once, twice, three times in the slow cycle.
I cross to the south window and stand with my hands at my sides.
The boardwalk is empty. The sea is a black plate.
The far foghorn calls back. The two horns talk to each other across the bay in the four-count that has been there since I was a boy.
Long. Pause. Long. Thirty years of counting them alone.
Behind me in the bed she breathes at twelve.
Gabriel's hand on her right wrist. The radial under his fingers steady.
Below the bed on the futon Stefan and Alexei breathe in their own slower fours — Stefan's at fourteen, Alexei's at sixteen.
They have slept three hours. Gabriel's hand has held the radial the whole time.
My heart settles. My breathing goes quiet. The Patek is on the bedside table. I check it past needing to. Zero-three-thirty-one. The watch is one second fast against the wall clock in the kitchen four floors down. I will reset it in the morning.
Twenty-three years of five-hour nights, and tonight I am about to break that. I am about to sleep beside her in this house in the bed I asked Stefan to commission. The eagle on the headboard has her handprint on it. The handprint is the protocol's first signature in this room.
I think the word peace and I think the word choice in the same breath. Tonight is the first time those two words have lived in the same breath in my head. The protocol named them. The room named them. Elena named them.
The foghorn calls again. Long. Pause. Long. The far horn answers. The sea is the sea. The boardwalk is empty. The house is full.
I keep her name behind my teeth. I say it once in my head and let it stay there.
Elena.