Chapter 22
Maeve
The Wait
This is the worst day of my life.
That sentence has been true four times in my thirty-one years.
The first was the day my father told my mother he was leaving, and I was eleven and I sat on the stairs and counted the cracks in the banister so I would not have to listen.
The second was the day I learned I was pregnant in a Brookline drugstore bathroom three years ago and stared at the second blue line on the test for nine minutes because I could not, with my hands, put the test in my coat pocket.
The third was the day my uncle Brendan died, fast and unfair, of a heart attack on a barstool at the Black Rose at three in the afternoon.
Today is the fourth.
Today is already worse than the other three combined, and the day is not over yet.
It is 9:14 AM. My daughter has been gone for five hours and twenty-two minutes.
Lex is hunting.
That is the verb. He used a different verb when we left Eleni's apartment building at 6:32 AM. He used the verb ‘work,’ which is the verb operational men use when they are about to do violence and do not want the woman they love to be inside the violence with them.
I am thirty-one, and I have been a litigator for seven years, and I know what ‘work’ means in a man's mouth on a morning when his daughter is in a stranger's vehicle.
I let him use the word.
I had a choice this morning. Do I go with him into the field, or do I stay at the brownstone with Eleni, Konstantinos, and four Konstantinos soldiers, and an open laptop full of case notes I will not read?
The choice was real, and I decided to stay, because I am not useful in the field.
I do not know how to track a vehicle or how to interrogate a contact.
I don’t know how to put my body between my daughter and the men who took her. I’m barely holding on as it is.
I stayed.
Eleni is on the couch in the living room of the brownstone.
The Konstantinos family doctor, a man named Theodoros who has been treating Eleni since 1989, came promptly and assessed the head wound.
He gave her three stitches and a mild sedative, which she didn’t want but accepted.
Now she’s sitting on the couch in a borrowed sweater of mine and her own slacks, because she refused to come here in her bathrobe.
Her eyes are very tired. She’s not slept.
Neither have I.
"‘Theé mou’," she says, every twenty minutes or so, looking at her hands.
It means ‘my God.’ It is one of the Greek phrases I have learned in the last two weeks, in the small, careful pieces I have been collecting from Lex and from the words Eleni said to Nora yesterday afternoon.
I have been building a private architecture of Greek the way I built a private architecture of motherhood thirty-seven months ago, alone, slowly, by pieces.
Eleni doesn’t know I have been doing this.
She’s going to find out, eventually, and when she does, I am going to give her the gift of my having done it on purpose.
But not today. Today I am using the Greek for the only thing it is currently useful for: to say ‘I am here’ in a room with a sixty-eight-year-old woman who needs to know I am here.
"‘Eímai edó,’ Eleni," I say back. ‘I am here.’
She lifts her face from her hands. The look she gives me is the look of a Greek mother who has just heard her own language come out of the mouth of an Irish woman who is the mother of her granddaughter. The look I am going to keep in a small box in my chest for the rest of my life.
"You are learning," she says, in English.
"I am learning."
"Lex doesn’t know."
“No, he doesn’t yet.”
She nods, slowly. The nod is that of a Greek matriarch entering into a conspiracy with the woman who will eventually be her son's wife.
"Good," she says. "That is good."
? ? ?
At 9:47AM, my phone rings.
The screen says ‘Mom.’
It is Tuesday morning. Cathleen Callahan, retired librarian, currently in a one-bedroom apartment in a Tampa retirement community where she’s lived since the divorce six years ago, is calling for the Tuesday morning grandmother check-in she’s done every week of Nora's life since the week Nora was born. The check-in is a thirty-minute video call. Nora wears whatever she’s chosen to wear that morning.
Cathleen wears a cardigan and her reading glasses, and shows Nora the Florida birds at her bird feeder.
Nora reports the week's developments to her ‘gran.’
Cathleen doesn’t know that her granddaughter is currently in a stranger's vehicle somewhere in central Massachusetts.
I stare at the phone. I cannot pick up.
If I pick up the phone and I open my mouth to my mother right now, what will come out of my mouth is the sentence ‘Mom they took her,’ and after that sentence I will start screaming, and I won’t stop.
And my mother, who is sixty-three and has a heart that the cardiologist has been watching for two years, will hear her thirty-one-year-old daughter scream into a phone and she’ll get on a plane to Boston.
Then I will spend the next seven hours managing my mother instead of waiting for the phone to ring with the call from Lex.
I cannot afford to manage my mother today.
Tomorrow.
I will call her tomorrow. I will lie. I will say Nora has a cold, I will reschedule Sunday's video call, I will buy myself some days. I won’t tell her any of what is happening today until the federal case is concluded and possibly never.
The phone goes to voicemail.
Twenty seconds later, the voicemail icon appears.
I open it. The transcript shows under the icon.
‘Hi sweetheart it's me. I was hoping to catch the two of you on the call this morning but I see Nora must be at daycare.
Tell her gran misses her. Brendan would have loved that little redhead, you know.
He used to sit at the Black Rose with Cormac O'Brien and tell him about his great-niece in Boston who was going to be the family's first lawyer. I think about that sometimes. Anyway. Call me when you can. Love you, love that baby.’
My eyes flood. I close them.
If I start crying right now Eleni will see and Eleni cannot see, because Eleni is held together by my being held together.
I am held together by Lex being out in the field where I cannot see him, and the architecture of this morning is a series of women holding each other in place and I cannot crack the architecture because of a voicemail.
I put the phone face down on the marble.
? ? ?
Eleni stirs on the couch around 10:30.
She doesn’t get up. She turns her head and looks at the ceiling for a long moment, and then she says, in English, in the voice of a woman who has decided that the silence in the room has gone on long enough, "Maeve."
"Yes."
"Tell me something about her."
I cross from the kitchen to the couch. I sit down on the floor next to where she’s lying. I pull my knees up. I think for a moment about what to give Eleni, what is the right small thing to put in this woman's hand right now.
"She names everything," I say.
"What do you mean."
"Brontos has a name. The bowl she eats cereal out of has a name. The basil plant on the kitchen windowsill has a name. The plant is named ‘Basil,’ which she doesn’t yet understand is a joke."
Eleni laughs. The laugh is small. The laugh is the first laugh she’s made today and it comes out of her face like a thing that has been waiting to be allowed.
"Greeks name everything also," she says. "My mother had a name for the spoon she used for soup. The spoon was named ‘Anna.’ I do not know why."
"Tell me one more thing about her."
"My mother."
"Yes. About your mother."
Eleni is quiet for a long second. Then she says, "She would have liked you."
My eyes flood again. I can’t let them spill. I take Eleni's hand on the couch above me, and I hold it in both of mine.
"Tell me about Lex when he was small," I say. "While we wait. Anything."
And Eleni does.
She tells me, in low fragments, with pauses for breath, about Lex at four years old refusing to wear shoes for an entire summer.
About Lex at seven smuggling a stray cat into his bedroom for nine days before she found out.
About Lex at eleven reading the ‘Iliad’ in Greek to his grandmother on the porch because his grandmother's eyes had gone bad.
About Lex at twenty-one, three days after his father's funeral, sitting at this kitchen table in this apartment in his suit at 3 AM and crying without making any sound, and Eleni standing in the doorway and not interrupting him because some things, she tells me, a Greek mother knows not to interrupt.
She tells me these things for forty minutes.
I hold her hand the whole time.
I do not look at the phone.
I am, given a gift I didn’t know I was going to be given on the worst day of my life, which is the gift of meeting the boy Lex used to be, told to me in the voice of the woman who raised him.
Eleni stops talking around 11:20.
She closes her eyes. Her breathing evens. The sedative has finally caught up. I stay on the floor next to the couch with her hand in mine for another ten minutes, until I am sure she’s asleep.
Then I go back to the kitchen.
I add ‘call mom back’ to a list in my head that has nothing else on it.
? ? ?
11:23 AM. Lex pings me.
‘Working it. I'll call you when I have her.’
I type back: ‘Okay.’
I do not say ‘I love you.’ I do not say ‘be careful.’ I do not say ‘come home.’ I say ‘okay,’ because in the days I have known the man, I have learned that what he needs from me when he’s in the field is not the maintenance of our emotional connection.
What he needs from me is the knowledge that I am where he left me, that I am holding the line at the brownstone, and that I am not going to demand anything from him until he calls.
I open my laptop, but I don’t work. The laptop is open because if I close it, I will start screaming.
? ? ?
3:08 PM. Lex calls.
I pick up before the second ring.
"They are trying to negotiate," he says.
His voice is the voice he uses when he’s about to do something he doesn’t want me to know the details of. The voice is calm. and the voice of a man whose discipline is the only thing keeping him from saying the version of this sentence he wants to say.
"Negotiate for what?”
"Money. The men who took her were Reznikov contractors, but they have gone independent. This was not sanctioned from above. They decided my daughter was worth more to them than the job they were hired for, and now they want me to pay to get her back."
"Pay them."
"I would. They are not asking for money I can wire. They want a face-to-face."
My chest tightens. "Don't go alone, Lex."
"I won’t. Cormac is with me. Declan is on the way."
"Lex."
"Yes."
"Bring her home."
"I promise I will."
He hangs up.
? ? ?
Six o'clock comes. Then seven. Then eight.
Eleni has fallen asleep against the arm of the couch. Theodoros came back at 6:30 and gave her a second mild sedative because she had not slept and her blood pressure was that of a sixty-eight-year-old Greek woman whose granddaughter is missing and whose son is in the field.
He carried her gently to the guest room and put her in the bed in her clothes because she was already asleep when he picked her up.
The Konstantinos family doctor, of thirty-seven years, is carrying his patient down the hall with the grave reverence of a man who has watched her bury a husband and is not going to let her bury anyone else today.
Now I am alone in the kitchen.
My phone is face down on the marble. I have not heard from Lex in three hours and seventeen minutes. The last text was at 4:51 PM. ‘Closer.’ One word. The word came in, and I held my phone, read it, and put the phone face down again.
Petrov is downstairs. Two soldiers in the hallway upstairs. The brownstone is quiet.
I have not eaten since five this morning, when I had two bites of a piece of toast Theodoros made me and could not swallow the third.
I sit at the kitchen island.
I look at the phone.
Then the phone lights up.
I do not breathe.
I turn the phone over.
Lex: ‘I have her. We're coming home.’
I read the sentence three times.
I read it a fourth time to make sure the words are not rearranging.
I set the phone down on the marble. Very gently. Like, the phone might break if I put it down too fast.
I stand up and walk to the half-bath off the kitchen.
I throw up.
I rinse my mouth at the sink. I splash water on my face. I look at myself in the small bathroom mirror.
The woman in the mirror is the woman who has been holding the line at the brownstone for thirteen hours and forty-six minutes, and she’s also the woman whose daughter is alive, and she’s also the woman who is going to need to be at the door of this house when the SUV pulls up because the daughter coming home is going to need her mother at the door.
I come out of the bathroom.
I pick up the phone.
I type back: ‘Drive safely.’