Chapter 7
Lex
The First Days
She’s on her mother's hip when they come down the stairs.
The hip is the standard transport for a child of her size.
I know because I have watched my brother's wife carry their child the same way for nine months and have observed that this is how a Greek-American mother holds a Greek-American child, and I now understand that this is not regional but maternal, and that the woman coming down the stairs of my brownstone in the morning has been doing this for thirty-six months and is about to put my daughter down on a stool at my kitchen island.
I’m at the stove.
The cereal bowl is on the island. Dry, in a bowl, with a spoon, Maeve told me to put in, even though she doesn’t use it, because the spoon is in the bowl as a principle, I guess.
The cereal is the cereal Petrov bought because his nieces eat it.
The bowl is one of three I found in the cabinet last night, and I rejected two of them because the third had a small painted yellow flower on the lip.
I’d decided, at 5:00 in the morning, that this was the bowl a small girl would prefer.
I don’t turn around when they come into the kitchen. I can’t yet.
I keep my back to the stairs. I make myself small in the room.
I am six-three, and I have not been small in a room in a long time, but I try my best to make myself small now.
Because the woman whose terms I agreed to last night told me Nora would decide what she thinks of me, and I am going to give my daughter the maximum amount of space to decide.
"Good morning, Bug."
Maeve's voice. Behind me. She uses a soothing tone I have not heard her use before, the kind a mother uses with a child who is still half-asleep. The tone is several degrees softer than her real voice and is doing the work of bridging the small body from upstairs to downstairs.
"Mama."
The first word my daughter has ever aimed at me.
My right hand on the kettle handle has stopped being steady. The hand is mine, but somehow feels foreign at the moment. I close it into a fist around the handle, lift the kettle, pour hot water for the second cup of tea I am making this morning, and still I don’t turn around.
"Bug," Maeve says, gently. "There is a friend in the kitchen who is staying with us for a little while. Do you remember I told you a friend was coming?"
"Yes."
"His name is Lex. He’s going to make you breakfast."
There is a long pause. The pause has the texture of a small girl studying a stranger from her mother's hip. I keep my back turned. I pour the water. I set the kettle down.
"Hi, Lex," my daughter says.
I turn around.
She’s on the stool at the kitchen island.
Maeve has set her there. Brontos is in her lap.
She’s in dinosaur pajamas, in fuzzy white socks with small pink hearts on them that I didn’t see her wear yesterday, and that have presumably been packed by Maeve at four in the morning.
Her hair is exactly the color of mine in a baby photograph my mother keeps in her hallway.
Her eyes are the gold of every Konstantinos who has ever lived, the gold of my father, the gold of my brother, the gold she could only have inherited from me.
She’s studying me.
She’s studying me the way her mother studied me three years ago across a room. Calmly. Without alarm. With the deliberate stillness of a person who has decided to take the time the situation requires.
"Hi, Nora," I say.
I do not crouch down to her level. I had thought about this last night and decided not to.
Crouching is a thing strange men do to ingratiate themselves with children, and it sets off the wrong instinct in the children who notice.
Nora is going to notice. I stay at my full height.
I keep my hands visible on the island. I push the bowl of cereal across the counter toward her at the speed of a man simply passing something to another person, not the speed of a man trying to make it happen.
She picks up a wheat square. She puts it in her mouth. She chews.
She watches me while she chews.
She does not know what she has just done, how could she?
That is what takes the floor out from under me — that she said it the way another child might say the sky is blue, with no idea that she has handed me, over a bowl of dry cereal at 6:23 in the morning, the one fact I spent the whole night refusing to let myself hold.
She is mine.
Visibly, permanently mine, in a way no court order and no three years of my absence can argue with, and she has confirmed it without knowing there was anything to confirm.
It goes through me clean, the way a round goes through drywall, no exit I can find.
I fight to keep my face still. It is the hardest operational thing I have done in a very long time, and I have done some hard ones.
Maeve, behind her, has gone very still.
I don’t look at Maeve. I look at my daughter, who is two years and ten months old, studying my face over a yellow-flowered bowl of dry cereal with a spoon she won’t use, and I say the only thing I can say.
"You have mine."
Nora chews. She thinks about this.
"Okay," she says.
She takes another wheat square. She’s, apparently, done with the topic. She turns to her mother. "Mama. Brontos wants milk."
She’s just ended the most consequential conversation of my life with a five-letter word and a pivot to a stuffed elephant. I'm going to need a moment.
I take it standing up at the kitchen island while my daughter discusses dairy with her mother.
"Brontos doesn't drink milk, Bug."
"He wants to try."
"All right. We can ask Lex."
Maeve's eyes meet mine. The look is brief. The look does seven things in two seconds. It says ‘she just talked about your eyes and you survived it’ and ‘I saw what your hand did on the kettle’ and ‘I am still in charge of what happens in this kitchen’ and ‘thank you for not crouching.’
"Brontos can have a small saucer of milk," I say. "On the counter. Where Brontos can think about whether he likes it."
Nora considers this. She accepts it. She slides off the stool, grabs Brontos by his trunk, and walks Brontos around the kitchen island to inspect the saucer of milk I have just poured him.
She’s barefoot now, the white socks abandoned next to the stool, which I would learn, later, was a Nora pattern and not indecision.
She offers Brontos the saucer. Brontos declines. She nods solemnly.
"He doesn't like it."
"That was a brave thing to find out," I say.
She looks at me. Then she does what every Konstantinos child has done since 1923 in Náxos, and which my mother still does at sixty-seven. She nods once, with her mouth slightly turned down at the corners, the small ceremonial nod of a person who has acknowledged a serious comment seriously.
Then she takes Brontos and goes to find a spot on the kitchen floor in a patch of sun.
Maeve and I stand on opposite sides of the island. Neither of us speaks. The kettle is making the small ticking sound a kettle makes when it is cooling. Nora is on the floor, explaining to Brontos, in a voice meant only for him, that milk is not for everyone.
"Lex," Maeve says, very quietly.
“Yah?”
"Sit down before you fall down."
I sit down on the stool across from where my daughter was sitting six minutes ago.
? ? ?
My phone buzzes at 6:37 PM.
Nico. I take the call in the small office Petrov cleared for me yesterday. I close the door. I keep my voice low.
"You said you would brief me fully today."
"Tonight. After she’s in bed."
"After who is in bed?"
There is a beat. The beat is the second time in twelve hours I have given Nico information without meaning to, which is a track record I do not have with him in any other context.
"The witness, Nico."
"Lex. Do I need to come over there?"
"No."
"Are you compromised?"
"Operationally, no. Emotionally, yes."
It is the most honest sentence I have said to my brother tonight. I hear him absorb it. I hear him decide not to press. and hold off on a question because he can hear in my voice that the answer is something I am not going to be able to give him over the phone.
"Tonight," he says. "I will come to the brownstone. We will talk in the office. You will tell me everything."
"All right."
"Lex."
“What?”
"Whatever it is. We have time."
He hangs up first. I stand in the small office, and I think about my daughter on the kitchen floor, explaining milk to a stuffed elephant.
I sit down in the desk chair because Maeve was right, because if I do not sit down, I am going to fall down.