43. Daniil #2
When she came apart the second time she took me with her, the way it happens when two people decide the very same thing in the very same instant, and I said her name into the curve of her neck like the only prayer I have ever meant, and I felt her break and cling and break again, and somewhere inside her staying the wound that eight months of watching had torn in both of us closed over at last into something built to carry weight.
When it was over neither of us moved, only breathed, her ear over the loud animal proof of my heart and my arms shut around the whole of her the way a man holds the one thing he was never allowed to want and has no intention of ever setting down again.
I have killed men and felt less than I felt lying still in that lamplight.
For thirty years I had believed I was a weapon that had learned to pass for a man.
She had just proven, with her hands and her mouth and her unbearable mercy, that it had been the other way around the entire time.
Neither of us reached for a word for a long time, because some kinds of quiet are too expensive to spend.
"So," she said at last, into my chest. "We're doing this. The whole ridiculous thing. The shop and the baby and the you and the me."
"We're doing the whole thing." I had never once said we about a future in my life. The word came out of me like a foreign coin I had been carrying for years without ever learning what it would buy.
"You do know you've never planned past the next threat in your life."
"I am aware. It is the most terrifying thing anyone has ever asked of me, and I have been asked into a great many rooms." I felt her smile against my skin. "Ask me the rest of it. Whatever it is you're still afraid to."
"What kind of father does a man like you even think he's going to be?" It was not cruel. It was the realest question in the world, and she had bought the right to ask it plainly.
"A frightened one," I said. "Out loud, where the child can see it, the way you ordered on the stairs.
I don't know how to be a father. I know how to keep a thing breathing.
I am going to have to learn all the rest of it in front of a small witness who will remember every single time I get it wrong.
" I turned my head into her hair. "But I already know one thing for certain.
I am never going to watch our kid grow up through a window.
I am going to be in the room. I have stood outside the glass my whole life. I'm finished with it."
She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again the teasing had gone out of her.
"I'm terrified too, you know. Half of me keeps waiting for the part that runs to wake up and start quietly packing a bag.
The part I got from my mother. It's in there.
I've felt it my whole life, sitting by the door with its coat already on.
" She flattened her hand over my heart. "But it isn't awake tonight.
Tonight the part that's awake is the one that wants to build something too big and too heavy to carry back out through any door. That's new. You did that."
"You did that," I said. "I just stopped standing in its way."
"We're going to need a story." She pushed up onto an elbow, and I watched the writer come online behind her eyes, which on Margot looks like a woman deciding to enjoy herself at last. "For the baby.
For your alarming family. For the day this kid looks up and asks how their parents met.
We can't exactly lead with, well, sweetheart, Daddy was assigned to work out whether Mommy was a threat and then surveilled her illegally for most of a year. "
"We could say I came into the shop for a book."
"You did come into the shop for a book."
"Then it isn't even a lie."
"It is the least true true thing I have ever heard in my life.
A man walks into a bookshop, buys poetry, falls in love.
Where's the conflict? Where are the stakes?
That's not a love story, Daniil, that's an errand.
" She dropped back onto my chest in disgust. "Listen to us.
We're lying here trying to build a version of us clean enough to say at a dinner table, and it comes out worse.
It's a worse lie than the truth. Our truth is completely unhinged and it is ours, and I am not trading it for something a stranger would find comfortable. "
She was quiet a moment, and then, because Margot cannot sit inside a tender thing for long without lighting a small fire to feel the warmth of it, she added, "I'm rebuilding the shop, by the way.
I already decided. It's not up for discussion, and I'm not asking permission, I'm informing my," she paused, hunting the word, "my person. "
"Your person will carry every shelf."
"My person will carry every shelf and will not, under any circumstances, install a panic room behind the poetry."
"One panic room."
"Behind the cookbooks, where a panic room belongs.
Poetry is sacred." And that was the moment I knew the two of us were going to survive each other, not the terms and not the vows and not even the child, but the fact that she could make me argue the floor plan of a future I had never once dared let myself draw.
"Then we tell the child the truth," I said.
"We tell the child an age-appropriate truth, on a schedule, with an editor.
And when they turn thirty we hand them the director's cut and a very stiff drink.
" The joke ran out of her slowly, and what was underneath it came up quiet.
"I want them to know their father was a man who couldn't stop looking at the people he loved.
I just want them to get the whole sentence.
Not only the half of it that frightened me. "
I had spent forty-one years certain the watching was the whole of me.
The sum. The sentence, in both senses of the word.
She had just handed me the second half of it, the half I had never once let myself believe was there, and I gathered her in against me in the dark and did not trust my voice to hold for a while.
We lay wrapped together in a room I was never going to manage to keep empty again, and for one entire hour I had no threat to name and nothing to stand guard over and no exit I needed to know, and it came to me, slow and total, that this was the exact thing I had spent my whole life protecting other people's versions of, without ever once being allowed to stand inside my own.
Then the clean phone lit the ceiling, the line only two men alive are permitted to use.
Margot felt the old stillness come into me and lifted her head off my chest. "Work?
" she said, and she didn't sound afraid, which took me apart one final time.
I read it twice. The Pakhan wanted one last meeting.
Grigori was in a cell where the old man's justice could reach him now, but Grigori had spent a lifetime keeping men loyal to him past all reason, and loyal men with nothing left to lose are a loose end.
Loose ends have been my job since before this woman was born.
I set the phone face down against my chest, and I let myself keep three more seconds of her warmth in a room with the lamp still burning, before I got up to go and be, one last time, the thing they built me to be.