Chapter 13
CHLOE
The boys were down. Theo on his stomach with one arm flung over the edge of the mattress in the way that always made me want to slide it back under the blanket.
Owen at the sink in the hall bathroom counting to thirty with the brush like a metronome.
I'd left a glass of water on his nightstand.
I'd checked the lock on the back door twice.
I'd put the dishwasher on the short cycle.
I pulled the front door closed on its slow hinge and came down the four stone steps with my bag on my shoulder.
The cold had teeth tonight. The brownstone block was dark the way it goes dark in the fall here, the sky a low purple over the rooflines, a yellow square of window two doors down where someone was up late with a baby or a deadline.
I had walked down these steps every night since the second week of the search.
The exhaustion in my body wasn't the kind that fixed with sleep.
It was a tiredness that had moved into my bones and gotten a key cut.
That was when I saw her.
A dark sedan was at the curb with its parking lights on.
A woman in a long camel coat was leaning back against the front fender with her ankles crossed and her collar turned up around her jaw.
Her hands were in her pockets. Her face when she saw me did the small fast thing it does when she has been holding still for a long time and the held thing inside her gets to move.
She didn't come to me. She let me come to her.
I took the last step onto the sidewalk and crossed the strip of pavement to the curb on legs I was operating from a slight distance.
"What are you doing here?"
"We found him."
My hand went to the iron railing of the brownstone next door without my deciding it.
The cold of the iron came up through the glove.
My chest did the thing a chest does when air is something a person had been doing on autopilot and is now a choice.
I held the rail. I made the next breath go in. I made it go out.
"So he is alive? Three months, Sienna. Why am I hearing this now?"
"Do not be angry yet. I will tell you all of it. Just walk to the car."
"How am I not supposed to be angry? Sienna. I have been burying him for three months. I told my own mouth I was done crying for him. For me he is dead. I have started over without him."
She didn't flinch. She didn't soften her face or put a hand out. She let me have it. She stood with her back to her own car in her good coat and took every word of it square. That was how I knew the rest of what she'd come here to say was going to gut me.
"He has amnesia, Chloe. He does not know any of us. We only found him after the people who hid him were killed. He is hollowed out. He does not even know his own name without us telling it to him."
The bottom dropped out of every shelf I'd built over ninety nights to hold the grief.
The grief came down off the shelves all at once and pooled at my feet.
My hand went to my stomach. A small wet sound climbed up the back of my throat and I closed my teeth on it before it could become anything that needed witnesses.
"Did you tell him about me?"
"Not yet. It is too much for him right now. He is barely holding up the family information. He cannot carry you on top of it."
"So what am I supposed to do?"
"I am offering you a job. The girl he is taking care of, the one whose grandparents were killed, she needs a nanny.
You are very good at that. He will be on the floor of the case with the brothers inside a week.
You can be near him without being asked to be anything else.
You decide if he gets the truth back, and you decide when. "
"I don't know if I can be in a room with him and pretend I am not in love with him, Sienna."
"I am not asking you to pretend anything. I am asking you to take a job. Think about it tonight. Come to the compound tomorrow morning with your answer."
She closed the two steps between us. She kissed me once on the side of the head, the kind of press a sister puts there when she has used up the words she had and the press is what is left.
She went around the front of the sedan and got in on the driver's side.
The car pulled away from the curb soft, taillights swinging into the dark.
I stood on the strip of pavement between the railing and the gutter. A cab came down the block with its light on. It passed me. It didn't slow. I didn't lift my hand.
I walked.
I don't remember the blocks. I remember the cold against my front and the heat under my coat and the way the air at the back of my throat hurt by the time I came up to the green door of the walk-up with the brass mail slot Mrs. Quinn always polished on the first of the month.
Three locks. Top, middle, bottom. My fingers got the keys in the way fingers do when the head has gone elsewhere.
The apartment was dark. I didn't put a kettle on. I didn't take my coat off. I sat down on the couch in the front room with my hands flat on my knees and let the room hold me for a minute.
Then I put my hand into my coat pocket and took out the pendant.
Jacob's pendant. The small flat bar of gold on its thin chain.
The character for water cut clean through the middle of it.
Soft at the top where the brush had gone wide.
Curved at the bottom where the brush had come back through.
I had carried this thing in my pocket since the morning I had stood on the bank of the road upstate with three women I had not yet known I was about to love and a wreck of metal in the trees and no body, and Sienna had put her hand on my shoulder and not made me speak.
I held it in my palm.
I thought I had cried him out. I was wrong. The thought went through me cleanly and left.
I sat with the stone in my hand and let the breath come down.
I picked up the phone.
Mrs. Halverson answered on the second ring. The small lift in her voice she always had for me was there.
"I have a family emergency. It is going to take me a long while to get back to a regular schedule. I am so sorry. I love the boys."
There was the smallest quiet on her end. I heard a fork against a plate, a chair leg, Mr. Halverson asking who in his low courtroom voice.
"Chloe. You take care of yourself. You come back when you can. The boys will miss you. Thank you for everything you have done in this house."
The phone went warm against my ear. I made the breath go in through my nose so the next word would have a floor under it.
"Thank you."
"You call when you can. Go."
I hung up. I set the phone face down on my thigh. I sat with the weight of it on my leg for a long beat with my eyes on the dark window where the bare branch of the gingko outside cut the streetlight into pieces.
Then I got up. I packed a small overnight bag.
I put the pendant on its chain around my neck for the first time since Jacob had pressed it into my palm at the restaurant and closed my fingers around it himself.
The metal went under the collar of my shirt and lay flat against my skin in the hollow between my collarbones. It was cold at first. Then it warmed.
The gravel under the cab tires the next morning was the same gravel I had heard twice before.
The willow at the bend of the fieldstone wall was bare in the cold, its long thin branches moving in the small wind off the river.
I had the overnight bag on my shoulder and the pendant warm against the inside of my collarbone where it had been for the whole length of the train ride up.
I'd put my hand on it twice through the wool of my shirt and made myself put my hand back down.
The cab dropped me at the front of the house. I paid him. I stood with my bag at my feet and looked up at the door.
The door opened before my foot was on the top step.
Lily, Jade, and Sienna were on the threshold together.
Three pairs of arms again, the way they had been on the bank of the upstate road three months back, except this time they came down the steps to me and this time they held on longer because they had been waiting for me to come back through this door.
Lily hugged hard. She had the small strong arms of a woman who had stood at a barre for twenty years and they closed around my back like a brace.
Jade pressed her cheek to the side of my head and held it there.
Sienna did the squeeze with both hands at the tops of my arms and let go.
I pulled back. I wiped under my eyes with the side of my thumb.
"Where is he?"
"Having lunch with the girl," Jade said. "We told him he is meeting Rhea's new nanny in a few minutes. We did not tell him your name."
"Has he asked?"
"Once," Sienna said. "Mikhail told him the truth that day was already large enough."
I took one breath I had not known I had been holding.
Lily lifted her hand to the side of my face. Her palm was warm and a little rough at the heel from the garden.
"He won't know you yet. The body will know you first. It always does. The heart is not far behind it."
I nodded once because the words I had ready in my mouth were not the right size for the moment.
They walked me down the long hall. The dark wood under my boots, the row of small framed black and white pictures on the wall, the smell of soup from the kitchen, garlic and broth and something green simmering low.
Rhea's voice came around the corner of the dining-room doorway, talking low and serious to her bear about a bus and a man who had let her on without a ticket.
The closer I got to the doorway the more my own legs felt borrowed.
I came through the doorway. I stopped one half step inside it.
He was sitting at the head of the long table with Rhea on the chair to his right.
He was in a soft black shirt with the sleeves pushed back to the elbow.
His hair was shorter than I had ever seen it, cut close at the sides and only a little longer on top, and the new line of it showed the shape of his skull in a way the longer cut had not.
There was a small fading bruise along the side of his jaw I had not known about.
He was laughing low at something Rhea had just said about her bear.
The laugh was smaller than the one I remembered from the morning he had cooked eggs for me in my apartment.
The two-note shape of it was still there.
He looked up.
He saw me.
The face I had been kissing inside my own head for ninety nights was looking at me from across a room with the polite open look a man gives a woman he is about to meet for the first time. The eyes were the same. The mouth was the same. The man behind them did not know my name.
He stood.
"Daniil," Sienna said, her voice level and warm at the back of my shoulder. "This is Chloe. She is the nanny we were telling you about."
He crossed the floor to me. His body moved a half-beat faster than his face did, the way a body moves when something under the floor of the head has noticed a thing the head has not. He stopped two steps from me. He put his right hand out.
I put mine in his.
The contact landed in my chest like the clapper inside a bell. He shook my hand once. The shake was the length of a shake for a stranger, polite and short. He let go.
My vision went soft at the edges and the tears came up before I had decided what to do with them. One slid down the side of my nose before I had my other hand up to catch it.
His face changed. The polite stranger's face went the careful worried shape of a man who does not know why a woman is crying in his hands.
"Hey. Hey, what happened?"
"Nothing. I am just happy to get the job. It is a good job. I am sorry."
He brought his free hand up and wiped the tear off my cheek with the side of his thumb before he had thought about doing it. The thumb knew the angle of my jaw. The thumb knew where the bone went up under the ear. The thumb had been here before and the thumb went the way it had always gone.
I stepped back.
"Don't! I am sorry. I mean. I am okay, sir."
He blinked. He dropped his hand. He looked at his own hand for a second the way a man looks at a tool that has just done something on its own without him.
"Call me Daniil."
"Daniil."
I said it the way a woman says a name she has never said. I said it the way a woman says a man's name when she has been saying it inside her own head for months without permission to say it out loud and the saying of it in the air for the first time costs something.
The girl at the table had a fry halfway to her mouth.
Her dark braid was over one shoulder. Beom-Beom was on the chair beside her with his one ear up.
She had been watching the whole thing without saying a word, the way kids watch the parts of grown-up rooms they know they are not meant to be in the middle of.
"Hi, Chloe. You want to eat? Join us please."
I made the smile come up onto my face because the kid deserved a smile and because there were no other smiles in the room for her right now.
"I would love to."
I crossed to the table. Lily was already at the chair on Daniil's left, sliding it back for me with her hand at the top of the wood the way a hostess does without making a thing of it.
I sat. Daniil sat back down in the head chair one place to my right.
Rhea pushed her plate three inches toward me, lifted three of her fries off the side of it with careful fingers, and put them on the bare wood next to me with the seriousness of an offering.
"You can have these. They are the long ones. The long ones are the good ones."
"Thank you. The long ones are my favorite too."
I picked one up. I would have taken a kidney from this child if she had offered it. I bit the end of the fry. I made my mouth chew. I made my throat swallow. The salt was a real thing in my mouth.
Lily and Jade were in the doorway behind me, not coming in, not going.
Sienna stayed at Lily's shoulder a beat longer and then I heard her step move back down the hall.
Rhea picked her fork up and went back to her chicken with the small careful focus of a kid who has decided the grown-ups are done being weird for the moment.
Daniil was one chair away from me at the head of the table.
His sleeve was pushed up to the elbow and the inside of his forearm was where it had always been.
He doesn't know me. He is here.