Chapter 16
Maeve
Pancakes
Iwake alone.
For one second I am six years old, in my parents' house in South Boston, and the bed is the wrong bed, and the sheets are the wrong sheets, and the man who is supposed to be next to me is not next to me, and I have a half-second of the kind of fear that wakes you completely before you have remembered what room you are in. Then I remember.
Then I hear my daughter’s voice from the kitchen.
"Brontos cannot have syrup. Brontos is an elephant. Elephants do not eat syrup."
Then a man's voice. Low. Patient. The voice of a man who has decided, in this moment, that the rest of his Saturday is going to be a conversation about elephants.
"What do elephants eat?”
"Grass. And flowers. And sometimes bananas."
"Then we'll get him a banana."
I lie under the sheets, and I listen. The fear that woke me has emptied from my chest, and something else has filled the space. I do not have a word for that something else yet, but I know what it is.
It is the sound of my daughter explaining elephant biology to the father she doesn’t yet know is her father, and the father, who knows perfectly well that she’s his, is doing what fathers do: taking the assignment seriously.
I get out of bed.
My T-shirt is somewhere on the bedroom floor. I do not remember where. I find Lex's T-shirt instead, dark blue, soft from many washings, smelling like the cedar of the closet and the bergamot of him. I pull it on. It hits me mid-thigh. I don’t bother with anything else.
I walk down the hallway and stop in the kitchen doorway.
Lex is at the stove.
He’s in sweatpants and nothing else. The scars I mapped at midnight are visible in the gray morning light, the long one down his ribs, the bullet on his shoulder, the small one I traced with my mouth at four in the morning. He’s holding a spatula.
He is, I realize after a long second of looking at him, doing what he does at the dining-room table when he’s reviewing a document.
He’s bringing the same precise attention to the small thing in front of him that he brings to the large things in front of him.
He’s decided, this morning, that the small thing in front of him is pancakes.
Nora is on a kitchen chair pulled up to the counter.
She’s in her dinosaur pajamas. Her hair is sticking up on one side from sleep.
She has Brontos under one arm, and she’s holding the other hand out, palm up, in the gesture of a small magistrate explaining a ruling.
There is a banana on a plate next to her.
There are pancakes on a second plate. The pancakes are small.
They are slightly burnt at the edges, like a man who has not made pancakes recently and is concentrating very hard.
Nora sees me.
She says, in her morning voice. Conversational. The voice of a child who has been there for hours and is filling in on the late arrival on what she’s missed.
"Mama. The friend is making pancakes."
"I see that."
Lex turns.
He sees me in his t-shirt in his kitchen at the lake house with our daughter on a chair beside him and his half-burnt pancakes between them, and he gives me the look of a man who memorized me last night and is checking, this morning, that I am still real.
The check takes him three full seconds. He doesn’t blink. The spatula is suspended over the pan. The pancake is browning.
"Lex. The pancake."
“Got it.”
He turns back to the stove. Flips the pancake. The flip is professional. Of course, the flip is professional. He’s a man who doesn’t do anything at less than full attention. The pancake lands centered in the pan, and he stands there with the spatula and covers his face.
Then, without turning, in the voice he uses for me alone, he says: "There's coffee."
"Thank you."
I cross the kitchen.
The floor is cold under my bare feet. The coffee maker is on the counter to his left.
I have to walk past him to get to it, and as I pass him, my hip brushes the side of his thigh, and his free hand comes out.
The one not holding the spatula. His fingers graze the back of my wrist. It is not a grab.
It is not a hold. It is the briefest possible contact, and then it is gone, and he’s back to the pancake, and I am at the coffee maker.
We do not look at each other. But we both register it.
Neither of us says anything because Nora is six feet away, narrating something to Brontos.
I pour the coffee.
Lex has put a clean mug next to the pot. Cream is in a small pitcher, sugar is in a bowl with a small spoon. He’s set up the coffee station for me the way you set up a thing for a person you have been quietly preparing to share a kitchen with.
My eyes flood for one second.
I refuse to let them spill. I add cream. I sip. The coffee is exactly the right strength.
"You remembered."
Lex doesn’t turn around. "I remembered."
“Thank you.”
Lex says, over his shoulder, "Three pancakes or four."
"Three."
"Three." He plates three pancakes onto a plate that is not the slightly burnt plate. These pancakes are golden. He’s been practicing while I’ve been sleeping.
The first batch was for Nora, who, at almost three, doesn’t yet adjudicate pancake quality with the seriousness of an adult. The second batch is for me.
He sets the plate at the small kitchen table.
Nora looks at her own plate. Looks at mine. Looks back at her plate. Says, with the fierce diplomacy of a child who has noticed that the grown-up has been given the better thing, "Mama, your pancakes are neat."
"They are."
"My pancakes are also good."
"Your pancakes are also good."
"Brontos likes the burned parts."
"Brontos has good taste."
Lex makes a sound at the stove that, I realize after a second, is a laugh. It is small. He’s clamped down on it, but it has escaped. I look at him. He’s his back to us, and his shoulders are shaking once, and then they still, and then he’s back to flipping the next pancake.
Lex Konstantinos has just laughed at our daughter.
I sit down at the table. We eat.
Lex turns off the stove and sits down across from me with his own plate.
Nora is between us. She’s decided that the morning's task is to feed Brontos a piece of banana every third bite of pancake, and she narrates this to all of us.
To Brontos most of all. She narrates it with the gravity of a woman performing surgery.
Lex listens. Eats. Looks at me over Nora's head. Looks back at Nora. Looks at me.
"Brontos is being good," Nora informs the table.
"Is he?” Lex says.
"He’s being patient about the banana."
"That is hard for elephants."
"Yes." Nora considers this. Considers Lex. Says, "Do you know elephants?”
"I have not met an elephant in person."
"Brontos says you can meet him."
"I would be honored."
She holds Brontos out across the table. Lex sets down his fork. Takes Brontos with the seriousness of a man being handed a thing of weight. Holds him properly. Hands him back. Nora nods, satisfied.
"He likes you," she pronounces.
"I am glad."
Lex's eyes meet mine over the top of her head.
Outside, the lake is silver.
The water is gunmetal under a low gray sky. The trees on the far shore are bare and dark. The wood stove down the hall is still putting out heat. The pancakes are good. The coffee is good.
My daughter is across from me, using a plastic fork to feed her stuffed elephant a slice of banana, and the man across from me is watching her with the face of a man who has, over the course of fourteen hours, become a different man.
None of us say it.
I do not say it because I am afraid to. The shift between yesterday morning and this morning is the kind of shift that, once named, becomes a thing the room has to manage, and I do not want this room to have to manage anything.
I want the pancakes and the lake and the silver light and my daughter's banana negotiations and the man across the table whose foot, under the table, has come to rest against the side of mine.
Lex doesn’t say it because, I think, he’s doing what Lex does: rebuild the architecture of his own interior in real time and not look at the construction directly.
Nora doesn’t say it because Nora is a toddler and pancakes are happening.
It is the most ordinary breakfast I have ever eaten in my life.
It is also the most extraordinary.
? ? ?
After breakfast, Nora wants to color.
Lex finds her crayons in the bag I packed yesterday morning in a different lifetime.
He sets her up at the coffee table in the living room with three pages of an animal coloring book, the wood stove warm at her back.
He kneels next to her for a moment to confirm color choices.
The giraffe is going to be purple. This is non-negotiable. Then he leaves her to it.
He comes back to the kitchen. I have started the dishes.
He picks up a towel. Stands beside me at the sink. I wash, he dries. We work in silence for a long minute. The water is hot. The plates clink against each other in the rack. Outside, the lake has not changed.
Inside, Lex is six inches to my left, and his right shoulder is touching the side of my left shoulder, and his presence in this small domestic act is doing something to my chest that I do not have language for.
Lex says, quietly, "Maeve."
"Yes."
"I do not know how to do this."
"Neither do I."
"Then we figure it out."
“I want to.”
He sets the towel down. Steps behind me. His hands come to my waist, slowly, and he pulls me back against his chest. I let him. I close my eyes. The water is still running in front of me. I turn it off.
His mouth comes to the side of my neck.
Not a kiss exactly. Something quieter. The press of his mouth against the place under my ear where his breath was last night, and his arms at my waist, and his sternum against my back, and Nora in the next room loudly explaining to Brontos that giraffes are sometimes purple in real life if you look hard enough.
"Maeve," he says again, into my neck.
"Yes."
"Thank you."
"For what?”
"For being here when I came out of the bedroom this morning."
My eyes flood again. This time, I do not bother stopping them. He cannot see my face. I let it happen against the steam still rising from the empty sink.
"I was always going to be here, Lex."
"I know."
"You are the one who came out first."
"I was hungry."
I laugh. Small. Involuntary. The first laugh that has come out of me since the gun teaching scene at the dining-room table: since I started being a different woman than the one who walked into that building two and a half weeks ago.
He laughs against my neck. The laugh is warm.
The laugh is raw, real, and wonderful. The laugh is the laugh of a man who has just discovered that he can laugh in his own kitchen, at the side of a woman’s neck, on a Saturday morning, and the discovery, I can feel it through his sternum, is undoing him.
"Lex?"
"Yes."
"You are getting better at this."
"At what?"
"Saying things."
He doesn’t answer that in language. He turns me, slowly, around in his arms. Wet hands at my hips. He looks down at me. I look up at him. The gold eyes are doing what they do, the small architecture around them softening, almost glowing.
He kisses me.
Soft. Brief. The morning version. He pulls back. I pull back. We do not press for more. There is a child in the next room negotiating purple giraffes.
? ? ?
His phone buzzes on the counter.
He hears it before he turns. His face changes in the half-second before he picks the phone up. It is the change I saw at the dining-room table when the package came for him, which is the face of a man whose work has just walked into the room he’s been pretending was a sanctuary.
He picks the phone up. He reads.
I watch his face.
"Nico," he says.
"What?"
"They have a lead on the mole. He wants me back in Boston tonight."
My chest tightens. I knew this was coming.
I knew it was coming the moment I walked out of the bedroom this morning.
I have known it since the drive up here.
The lake house is borrowed. The lake house was always borrowed.
The lake house is a forty-eight-hour parenthesis in a life that is not, at present, parenthesis-shaped.
I make my voice the voice it needs to be.
"How long do we have here?"
Lex looks at the clock above the stove. Then at me. The gold eyes are, for one second, the eyes of a man who is calculating the number of minutes between this moment and the moment he’s to put our daughter and me back into a moving vehicle and drive us back to a house with reinforced windows.
"Eight hours."