Chapter 24
Maeve
Daddy
Ihave been at the front window for two hours.
The window is the bay window in the front parlor of the brownstone, a Brookline Victorian feature. Tonight, I am a woman at a front window. The streetlights are on. The curb is empty. The Konstantinos detail in the lobby has been silent for nineteen minutes. Petrov is downstairs at the door.
Eleni woke up at 9:47 PM. She’s in the kitchen with a mug of tea I made her about fifteen minutes ago. She’s not asked me to come away from the window. She knows.
At 10:14 PM, headlights turn onto the street.
The SUV pulls up at the curb.
Lex gets out of the back seat.
He has Nora in his arms.
She’s awake. Her small head is against his shoulder.
Her hair is on one side from sleep. Brontos is pressed between her chest and his coat.
She’s wearing the dinosaur pajamas she wore to Eleni's.
The dinosaur pajamas have a stain on the front I cannot identify from here, and her face, when she lifts it for one second, is the face of a child who has spent fourteen hours in a vehicle with strangers and is, processing the experience by being absolutely still in her father's arms.
She’s alive.
She’s alive.
I do not run.
I want to run. I want to throw the door open and pull her out of his arms and clutch her to me and never let her go and break apart in his foyer where the Konstantinos detail can see me.
I want all of these things, and I do not do any of them, because I am not going to be the kind of mother who takes her daughter from the man who brought her back.
The taking is his to give. The receiving is mine to wait for.
I walk slowly to the front door. I open it before he reaches the top step.
Lex is on the threshold.
His coat is wrong. His left sleeve has a dark patch on it that is not from the bandage on his upper arm. The fabric of his coat smells like a smell I will not let myself name yet.
The gold eyes are doing what the gold eyes do, only the version I am seeing now is the version I have not seen before. The version of a man who has crossed the line he’s been waiting to cross and is bringing home the daughter he crossed it for.
Nora lifts her head from his shoulder.
She sees me.
She doesn’t smile. She doesn’t say anything. She reaches.
Lex hands her to me.
I take her.
Her weight in my arms is the weight of every minute of the last fourteen hours, and it is also the weight of my daughter. Her small hands come up around my neck, and her face goes into the side of my neck, and she clings.
She doesn’t cry. She’s too tired for crying. She just clings.
I hold her close to me, but I don’t speak.
Lex is two feet away. He’s stepped just inside the door.
He has not closed the door behind him. He’s watching me with my daughter in my arms with the attention of a man who has decided, at the threshold of his own house, that he’s not going to enter the moment he just made possible.
He’s going to stand at the door and let it be ours.
I hold Nora for a long time.
I have no idea how long. The clock in the hall will tell me later that it was four minutes and seven seconds. Four minutes and seven seconds is the longest interval in my life. Four minutes and seven seconds is not enough.
Eleni is in the kitchen doorway.
She’s come from the kitchen and stopped at the threshold. She’s in her bathrobe. Her hand is at her mouth. She’s making no sound.
I look at her over Nora's head.
Eleni nods, once.
I nod back.
Then I say, quietly, into Nora's hair, "Bath. Then bed."
Nora makes a small sound against my neck. The sound is half agreement and half exhaustion.
I carry her down the hall.
Lex stays in the foyer. He doesn’t follow. He’s decided, somewhere on the drive home, that he’s not going to push for any part of this homecoming that has not been offered. The bath is mine. The bedtime will be mine until and unless Nora calls him to it.
? ? ?
She sits in the warm water with Brontos on the edge of the tub, watching her, because she won’t be in a bath without Brontos as supervisor.
She’s quiet. I wash her hair with the same shampoo I have used on her hair since the week she was born, the small green bottle on the shelf, the smell of it in the bathroom steam is the smell of every bath I have given her for years.
She watches me wash her hair.
She’s not crying. She’s processing.
After a long time, she says, "Mama."
"Yes, baby."
"The car had a smell."
My hands stop in her hair. I make them keep moving. "Tell me about the smell."
"Like the cleaning lady's spray."
"At daycare."
"Yes."
"All right."
She’s quiet again. The shampoo runs down her temple. I rinse it carefully with the small plastic cup that has been on the edge of the bath since she was nine months old.
"Mama."
"Yes."
"The cough man was crying."
My hands keep moving. "Which man?"
"The driving one."
"What was he crying about?"
She thinks about this. She thinks about it for a long second.
"He said sorry. Two times."
I don’t look at my own face in the mirror across the bathroom because if I look at my own face in the mirror across this bathroom, I am going to do a thing that will scare my daughter, and I am not going to do that to my daughter tonight.
I say, "Did anyone else say sorry to you?"
She thinks about it. She shakes her head. Wet hair against her shoulders.
"Brontos was scared," she says.
"Was he?"
"Yes. But he was brave."
"Brontos is very brave."
"I know."
She smiles for the first time. The smile is small. The smile is the fierce, specific, private smile of a child who has just told her mother the worst thing she’s had to tell her, has decided that the telling is enough, and is done with the telling.
I lift her out of the bath.
I wrap her in the big blue towel.
I dry her gently.
? ? ?
Clean dinosaur pajamas. Her purple snow boots are set by the front door for tomorrow because tomorrow is supposed to be a normal day, and I am, in this small action, telling the universe that I have decided what tomorrow is going to be, even if the universe disagrees with me.
I carry her down the hall to her bedroom.
Lex is in the doorway.
He’s been waiting there. He’s not come in. He’s been standing in the doorway in his coat with the wrong sleeve, watching me carry our daughter from the bathroom to her bedroom.
Nora sees him.
She lifts her head from my shoulder. She says, "Daddy."
Mid-sentence. Not as a question. Not as a recognition. Like breathing. Like she’s known the word her whole life, and the saying of it doesn’t require ceremony.
The word is small. The word is casual. The word ends me.
My knees go weak. I steady myself against the door frame. I am still holding her. I cannot drop her. I can feel my own breathing go, and I make it come back because Nora is in my arms, and the woman who is holding her is going to keep her steady.
Lex's face.
I am watching him from a distance of three feet across the threshold of our daughter's bedroom.
He doesn’t drop to his knees.
He wants to. I can see he wants to. He doesn’t, because Nora is half-asleep against my shoulder, and a man dropping to his knees in front of a child who has just been kidnapped is something that will scare her.
Lex has decided in the last twelve hours that he’s not going to be a thing that scares her.
He walks across the room. He stops two feet from me. He holds out his hands. I hand her to him.
Nora goes into her father's arms with the small, soft surrender of a child who has decided that the negotiation between bath and bed is over, and she’s being delivered to the place where she’s going to sleep.
Lex holds her.
Then he says, low, into her hair, in a voice that is the voice of a man making a vow he’s had loaded in his chest for twelve hours and is finally allowed to deliver, "I'm here, ‘agápi mou.’"
‘Agápi mou.’
My love.
It is the first translated Greek endearment Lex Konstantinos has used out loud in this room, and it is not for me. It is for our daughter. He’s called me ‘eísai diki mou’ twice in this lifetime, both times into my hair, both times untranslated. He’s not yet given me a Greek word for love.
Nora gets ‘agápi mou.’
I file that in the column of my brain titled ‘Things Lex Has Not Yet Said to Me But Has Said to Our Daughter,’ and I file it without grief, because a man who can call his daughter ‘my love’ the night she comes home is a man who is going to call his wife ‘my love’ eventually, and I am a woman who can wait.
Lex carries her to the crib. He puts her down gently. Brontos goes beside her. Lex stands looking at her for a long minute.
Nora is asleep within a few minutes.
? ? ?
Lex turns off the lamp. We walk out of the bedroom together. He pulls the door almost shut, leaving a gap of two inches. I leave because Nora can sleep with the hallway light coming through the gap, but cannot sleep without it.
In the living room, I sit on the couch.
My hands are clenched in my lap.
I have been holding myself together for fourteen hours and forty-seven minutes, and I can’t do it any longer. I do not want Lex to see the stopping. I do not want anyone to see it. I want to go to the bathroom and stop holding myself together in private and come out clean.
Lex sits next to me.
He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t speak. He sits at a careful distance, the same distance he’s been keeping all night, the distance of a man who has decided he’s not going to take anything that has not been offered.
I look at my hands and say, "She's okay."
"She's okay."
"I heard her say it."
"Yeah."
"Lex."
"Yes."
"Hold me."
He pulls me to him with his good arm, without speaking.
I press my face into the side of his throat and I let go of every piece of held-together I have been carrying since the dawn phone call, and I cry without sound, and Lex's hand comes up and covers the back of my head, and his face goes against the top of my hair, and we sit like that on the couch in the brownstone with our daughter asleep down the hall and the city outside doing what the city does.
I fall asleep against him.
I do not know I am falling asleep until I have already fallen.