45. Margot
MARGOT
We rebuilt the shop's shelves first and then us, in roughly that order and with roughly the same amount of swearing.
It turns out a bookshop is mostly an act of faith held up by lumber.
You clear the char and the wet black ruin down to the brick, and you stand in the empty shell of the only home you have left with your hands on the small hard swell of your belly, and you decide, against every reasonable instinct, to fill it back up with paper again.
Then the whole block shows up with hammers, because a neighborhood that would let you do that alone was never a neighborhood in the first place.
"I want to be very clear that I am not crying," Birdie announced on the first morning, standing in the wet ruin with a crowbar she had no idea how to use and safety goggles she absolutely did not need.
"I am a professional. This is a professional's face.
Where do you want the fiction section? That's a genuine question, and I have also just started crying. "
"By the window," I said. "Where it always was."
"Copy that. Fiction goes by the window and stays there forever, so that people walking past at night can see other people inside choosing to feel things on purpose.
" She wiped her face with the back of a work glove and left a streak of soot across it like war paint.
"God, Josie would have hated how sentimental we are being about her deathtrap of a building.
Let's build it back exactly the way she would have hated. "
Mateo ran the espresso like a field kitchen.
Old Pham turned out to have been a carpenter in another life and a country, and he took one look at Daniil's careful, catastrophic joinery and gently, wordlessly, took the drill away from him.
Birdie made a schedule nobody followed and a playlist everybody fought over.
And Daniil, the most feared surveillance operative this city has ever produced, a man who once dismantled a rival network with a laptop and a lie, met his true and final adversary, and its name was flat-pack shelving.
"There are two screws left over," he said, standing over the fourth unit with the particular stillness he used to save for men he was about to hurt.
"There are always two screws left over."
"That is not structurally acceptable, Margot. Two screws are load-bearing somewhere in this design. I have accounted for every screw."
"Did you read the manual?"
He looked at me the way you look at a person who has suggested something obscene. "I do not need the manual. I have reverse-engineered arms shipments. This is a shelf."
"So that's a no."
"It is a shelf, Margot."
Two hours later the shelf was, against all of physics and most of my expectations, a shelf, and it was also very slightly haunted, listing a single stubborn degree to the left like a man who has been in one too many fights.
Daniil regarded it with the grim satisfaction of a soldier who has taken a hill he will now have to hold forever.
Hemingway climbed to the top of it immediately, because Hemingway has spent his whole life waiting for high ground from which to judge us, and he settled into a loaf and oversaw the rest of the operation with the flat contempt of a foreman who has seen better crews and expects to see worse.
"Your cat does not respect the workflow," Daniil informed me.
"He's not my cat. He's Josie's cat. He came with the building and the trauma.
" I handed him a level, which he did not need and would not use.
"And he respects you now, by the way. That loaf on your crooked shelf is the highest honor he gives.
He tried to take your eye out of your head two months ago.
Now he sleeps on what you built. In cat, that's a wedding toast."
Something moved across Daniil's face that I have learned to watch for, because he still does not have many words for the large feelings and so they surface as weather instead.
He looked at the cat up on his listing shelf in the half-built shop, and then he looked at me, and I watched a man who spent thirty years certain he would die alone in a cold car do the private arithmetic of a person realizing, in real time, that he had somehow been let inside.
The days took on a shape I had not had since before Josie died, which is the shape of being expected somewhere by people who would notice if you failed to turn up.
Mateo started saving me the first cortado of every morning without being asked.
Old Pham taught Daniil to sand a board with the grain instead of against it, and Daniil, who takes instruction from no living soul, took it from Pham, because Pham reminded him of no one and wanted nothing from him and simply knew how to make a rough thing smooth.
The baby became a public works project. Everyone had an opinion about the name, and not one of the opinions was worse than Luka's, who phoned twice a week from his grim new life as the family's reluctant ghost to lobby, with real menace, for his own.
The scan was the following week, and it undid him more completely than the fire and the guns ever had.
I had thought, going in, that I would be the nervous one.
I am the one growing a stranger, after all.
But Daniil sat in that dim room holding my hand in both of his, and when the technician turned the screen and the small gray blur of our whole future resolved into a shape, a curled comma of a person with a flicker at the center of it going far too fast, I felt the man beside me stop breathing entirely.
"That is the heartbeat," the technician said.
He did not say anything. Daniil, who always has the last cold word, who talks men out of their own lives, said nothing at all.
He just looked at the flutter on the screen with an expression I had never once seen on him, not in the shop and not in the dark and not in bed, an expression with no guard on it anywhere, and a single tear went down the side of his ruined, beautiful, dangerous face, and he did not wipe it away, because I think he had genuinely forgotten it was allowed to be there.
"It's fast," he finally said, wrecked, reverent. "Is it supposed to be that fast?"
"That fast is perfect," the technician said, and she smiled the smile of a woman who has watched a great many terrifying-looking men fall apart in this exact chair.
In the car afterward he held the little printout in both hands the way he had held it the first time, like it might detonate, and he did not start the engine for a long moment.
"I want to say a thing," he said, staring through the windshield, "and I need you to let me get all the way to the end of it before you make a joke, because I can feel you loading one."
"I would never."
"You are physically incapable of not. It is one of the reasons.
" He breathed. "For eight months I watched you and told myself it was work.
Then I told myself it was protection. It was neither.
It was that you were the only warm thing I had ever found, and I did not know how to get near it except through a lens, because a lens was the only way anyone ever taught me to love, from a distance, where it stays safe and it stays mine and it never gets the chance to leave.
" He turned the printout over in his hands.
"I am telling you this because I need you to know that I understand what I did.
It was not romantic. It frightened you, correctly.
And I would do almost anything to have met you like an ordinary man across a counter, with none of it behind me. "
I let him get to the end of it. I did not make the joke, though he was right that it was loaded, because sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a person who is finally telling the truth is to make them a room big enough to say all of it.
"Here is what I have decided about it," I said, when I was sure he was done.
"And I have decided, which matters, because deciding is the whole of what I get to do now.
You watched me from the dark because it was the only way you knew.
It was wrong, and it scared me, and it is also the reason you were on that street the night a man came through my back door, and it is the reason I am alive, and it is the reason this," I put his hand flat on my belly, over the fast small future, "gets to happen at all.
I am not going to pretend the watching was good.
I am done letting it be only the worst of what happened.
It is going to be a complicated thing that turned, because you let it turn, into the reason I know I will never be unseen again. "
He looked at me like I had performed surgery on him with a kind word, which, in fairness, I had.
"So here is the new arrangement," I said, because I had thought about this, on the sleepless nights, the way I used to plot books.
"You are allowed to watch me. I am giving it back to you, on purpose, as a gift instead of a theft, and that is the only version of it that gets to exist in this family from now on.
You watch me because you love me and because I said you could, out in the open, where I can see you do it and hand you a coffee for your trouble.
The watching is not yours anymore because you took it.
It is yours because I gave it to you. Do you understand the difference? It is the entire difference."
"I do," he said, in the voice he uses for the truest things, the one with no performance left in it at all. "I have understood it since the doorway. You just gave me permission to survive knowing it."
We drove home. He used his blinker, which he does now, every time, with a pointed and loving precision, because it is the smallest way he has of telling me that he will follow every rule I set for the rest of his life, even the ones about traffic, especially those.
The shop reopened in stages, the way a person heals, one shelf at a time.
The community kept coming, long after the heavy work was done, because they had discovered what Josie always knew, that a bookshop is not really about the books.
It is about having somewhere to be a person out loud, next to other people being people, with the option of a story if the day gets too heavy to carry unassisted.
On the last afternoon before we hung the new sign, I stood in the middle of the shop with my hand on my belly and Hemingway asleep on his crooked shelf and the smell of fresh lumber and old paper starting, finally, to marry, and I looked around at the impossible place we had built out of ash and stubbornness and the specific love of a whole ridiculous block of people.
And I caught him watching me across the half-built shop, from over by the poetry, where he always ends up, tools forgotten in his hands, his whole guarded face gone soft and open in a way it only ever goes for me.
A season ago that look would have been a thing done to me, from a distance, in the dark.
I would have felt the prickle at the back of my neck and written it off as author's paranoia.
Now I know exactly what it is, and where it comes from, and that it is mine, given and received in the light, with the door unlocked and the sign about to go up.
This time it is only love. I smile back, and I take the watching for my own.