Chapter 9
Lex
Goodnight Moon
Ihave not read a children's book aloud in my life.
I have, in the last fifteen years, read aloud the following: a federal indictment, in chambers, to a judge who needed it on the record.
A eulogy at my father's funeral, in Greek, that my mother had handwritten.
A Reznikov communications intercept, to my brother, in the basement of Elysium, three months before we killed Viktor.
A list of apartment numbers, to Petrov, on a stairwell in Allston, that we had cleared and were about to enter.
The cumulative volume of text I have read aloud in my adult life would not hold the importance of this moment.
I get to read fill Goodnight Moon to my daughter for the first time.
I follow Maeve down the hall.
She stops at Nora's door. She looks at me. The look is the look of a woman who is about to allow a man she’s not allowed to do any of this to do all of this in a single ten-minute window, and who is doing it because her daughter has asked, and who is, at the same time, watching me with the small careful precision of a woman who is going to revoke the permission if I get any of it wrong.
"Here is how her bedtime goes, and it goes this way because she decided it does, not because I did.
You sit on the floor next to the bed. You do not sit on the bed.
You hold the book. You read the words exactly as they are written.
You do not paraphrase. You do not improvise.
You do not do voices. You read it once. When she asks you to read it again, you say, ‘one more time,’ and you read it once more, and then you put the book down and you say goodnight and you leave the room. I will be in the doorway."
"Yes."
"Do not try to be charming."
"I will not."
She doesn’t raise her voice. She holds my eyes, and there is a stillness in her I am learning to read as the opposite of soft. "This is a thing she’s chosen. I want you to receive it the way she chose it."
"I will."
She opens the door.
? ? ?
Nora is in bed. The book is in her lap. The lamp on the nightstand is the moon-shaped one Petrov bought to match the one in her old bedroom.
The light is low. The walls of this room are the same gray-white as the walls of every room in this brownstone, which was decorated by no one and which is, in the small, careful adjustments Maeve has made in almost forty-eight hours, becoming a room a child lives in.
Nora looks at me. She holds out the book.
I sit on the floor next to the bed. The floor is cold through my trousers. I take the book.
"Goodnight Moon," I say.
She watches me. She’s waiting.
I open the book.
"In the great green room, there was a telephone…” I begin to read to her.
She arranges Brontos under her arm. She settles. The breathing slows.
I read the words exactly as they are written.
No paraphrasing. No improvising. No voices.
I do not, however, read them flat. It's almost impossible for me to read them flat.
I have read out loud to my mother, in Greek, the eulogy of the man we both lost, and I learned at twenty-two that words read flat aloud are worse than words not read at all, and the reading of Goodnight Moon is no different.
Nora's eyes are getting heavy.
"Goodnight, room. Goodnight, moon,” I continue.
Maeve is in the doorway. I feel her there, I don’t have to look to know she’s there. I have been registering her position in every room I have been in for the past three days.
"...Goodnight noises everywhere."
I close the book.
Nora opens her eyes. She does what any toddler would do when they have begun the descent toward sleep and are in need of a piece of information from the adult who is reading to them before they continue the descent into sleep..
"Again," she says.
"One more time," I say.
I open the book. I read it again. I read it slower this time.
The slower is what she wanted. She didn’t ask for slower.
She doesn’t yet have the language capability to ask.
She wanted it read again slower because the second reading of a book she loves is the part where she falls asleep, and she’s used to falling asleep on the second reading, and her body is following the rhythm even though the body in the room delivering the second reading has changed.
By the time I am at the cow jumping over the moon, her eyes are closed and her breathing is the breathing of a sleeping child.
I finish the book and close it. I figure the book has a place on the nightstand that I do not know and I am not going to risk getting it wrong.
I set the book at the foot of the bed.
I stand up, very carefully. I look at her face for a moment.
She’s not asked the question I had been preparing for. She’s not asked if I am going to be there tomorrow. She didn't need to ask. I guess she already decided I would be.
I leave the room, and Maeve closes the door behind me and heads downstairs.
? ? ?
Maeve is at the kitchen island when I come downstairs.
The only light in the kitchen is the streetlamp on the side of the house and the small lamp in the dining room next door. She’s sitting on the stool I have been sitting on for breakfast for three days. Her hands are flat on the counter. Her shoulders are doing a thing I have not seen them do.
She’s crying.
She's crying without a sound. Her shoulders shake, but her breath stays even.
She taught herself to cry like this — silently, so she won't wake Nora — and you only learn that by doing it alone, night after night, for three years.
It is the most controlled crying I have ever seen. It is also the loneliest.
And some of that loneliness is mine. She left first, that morning, before I came out of the shower.
But I am the man who let her stay gone — who told himself he would find her and then let three years go by without trying.
Every night, she taught herself to cry like this is a night I could have been here for, and wasn't. I want to cross the kitchen.
I want to tell her she doesn't have to be quiet anymore.
I don't move. I haven't earned the right to.
So I stand where I am and let her cry in silence, and not crossing that room is the hardest thing I've done in a long time.
I do not move toward her.
My hands stay at my sides. Her name stays in my throat. I don't, in any way, do what I want to do, which is to walk across the kitchen and put my hand on her back the way I have not put my hand on her back in three years.
I stand in the doorway and focus on anything else.
I do my best to ground myself. I’m in the kitchen at 7:54 on a Friday night.I am six-three. The doorway is six-eight. There is a small space above my head between my hair and the lintel that has been the shape of every doorway I have stood in for fifteen years.
She doesn’t turn around. She knows I am there. She’s letting me be there. She’s also not asking me to come closer.
So, I don’t
Eventually, she lifts her hands from the counter. She wipes her face with the heel of one hand. She gets off the stool, turns around, and her eyes meet mine.
"Don't say anything," she says.
"I won't."
"Don't make it a thing., I just need a minute."
"Take it."
She walks past me. She walks up the stairs. She closes the door of the upstairs bedroom very gently behind her.
I stand in the kitchen of the brownstone I have prepared for her, in which my daughter is asleep upstairs.
The woman whom I have not stopped thinking about since our night together has just cried in front of me without permission and asked me, in the only way she knew how, to be the kind of man who could see it without making it about him.
I am going to be that kind of man.