8. Storage
STORAGE
EMILIA
His shadow arrives before he does.
One lamp in the study. The brownstone is silent except for my breath, which I am not letting out evenly. The book in my hand is open to the page where my mother's name lives in his handwriting.
"I would not have chosen tonight for this."
His voice is the wall-voice, softened by weariness. The tone of a man who has been awake too long to lie.
The turn comes slowly. He stands in the doorway, dressed as he was when he went to bed, which is to say, not much. His bare feet rest on the wood. The look on his face is one I have not seen.
"What is this?” My voice is that of a woman who has been a writer for a decade and knows what a question without a question mark sounds like.
"That," he says, "is one of yours, the first edition. The one that went missing."
"Why is my mother's name written in your handwriting in the margin of my book?”
A long beat. The wrong kind of beat.
"Bring it," he tells me. "Come with me."
"Where?"
"Storage."
The word sits between us the way the basement did this morning. Heavy. Different on his tongue.
He turns and walks. Following him is the next step, because no version of this keeps me.
The handle that would not turn for me turns for him. The stairs descend into a room darker than the kitchen, then darker still, then to a door that is also unlocked. Behind it is what he calls storage.
Not a cellar. A room.
A long table runs its length, set up for a man who needs floor space to think. A bookshelf along one side, six file boxes labeled by year on a steel rack, and a board on the far wall with photographs and lines drawn between them.
On the table, in a small stack, are the rest of my books.
Behind them, in two boxes side by side, are what look like every interview I have ever done, every panel, and every recorded reading I have given.
On the board: names, locations, dates. A timeline that begins thirty-four years ago, five years before I was born.
The breath in my chest goes nowhere. The book in my hand remains where it is.
He crosses the room without touching me. The chair he pulls out is at the end of the long table.
"Sit down, please. I am not going to lie to you, and I am not going to soften the blow."
Sitting down is the easier of the two bad options.
From the stack, he lifts one. The Last Saint, the church-funeral novel from three years ago. Tabs line the page edges.
He places the book in front of me. "You wrote this three years ago."
"Yes." The word leaves before it is decided.
He turns to a marked page. He reads aloud, very evenly, the way I read my own pages when I am trying to hear them.
"The kneeler on the third pew was cracked. She knelt anyway. The wood gave a sound she felt in her sternum. Above her, on the sixth-pew wall, the water stain was the shape of Sicily, ragged and brown."
The reading stops.
"You wrote that from research," he says, in the tone of a man who has already taken the bet and lost it.
"I wrote it from imagination." The denial is automatic.
"The kneeler on the third pew is cracked. The water stain on the sixth pew’s wall looks like Sicily. The lock on the sacristy door sticks when the humidity is high. Saint Agnes, in Brooklyn. The church where my family has held its baptisms and funerals since before either of us was born."
Saint Agnes is a name I do not know. The novel calls the church Saint Cecilia's, after the famous one, for no other reason. No other reason I can name.
"How?" The word comes out without breath. "How could you..."
He does not let me finish.
"That church is real, Emilia. The kneeler, the stain, the lock, all of it is real."
Without pause, another book. Another tab. Another marked page.
"This one. Letters from the Wall. Five years ago. Page 142."
He reads.
"The garden behind the house had cypress along the north fence, planted twice as tall as the wall meant to hide them. The gravel sounded like rain beneath her feet. At dusk, the jasmine opened the way it had for three generations."
The reading stops again.
"That is the south garden where your mother grew up. The cypress trees are still there, and the gravel remains unchanged. The jasmine still opens at dusk, as it has since the estate was built."
The cypress trees in my novel are the same as those in the photograph on his wall. The garden in my novel is the same garden. My mother is the woman in the photograph, wearing a dress I do not recognize, in a place I have never been.
"I have a list," he continues in the same level voice. "Places, people, details. Forty-seven of them. All from the life your mother lived before she became your mother."
Overhead, the light is yellow. The board is covered with photographs, including one of my mother.
Crossing to it costs the kind of energy that no longer feels available. One foot at a time.
The dress is one I have not seen since I was small. The cypress behind her is not the one I grew up with. She is standing on gravel that, even in the photograph, sounds like rain.
He has come to stand behind me, his hand finding the small of my back the way it has since the brownstone door, and the gentleness of it in this room is the cruelest version of itself.
"Your mother grew up here," he says, very quietly. "In that garden. In that house. She left it when you were small. She did not tell you, because the not-telling was how she kept you safe."
She had a mother and a father, a brother, and a name before she was Marchetti.
"What was her name?"
He takes a breath before he answers. "Not tonight, Emilia."
"That is the cruelest answer you have given me in this room." The words come out flat.
"I know."
Putting it together is the work my brain refuses to do for half a second, then does anyway.
The chair is closer than I thought. That’s what happens when I sit in it. The book is on the table. One of my hands rests on the wood, his on the back of my neck, very light, the way you might cradle something to keep it from falling.
"How long have you known?"
His answer is immediate, the way truths are. "I suspected the first week. Confirmed it ten days ago. The woman who is having you watched has been looking for someone like you for a long time. I came to your door at four a.m. because she had gotten closer than she should have."
"You have been..." The sentence will not finish.
There is no softening in him. "I have been collecting evidence that you are who you are. Yes."
Its honesty is the kind that does not soften the blow. Honesty has not been practiced in this room for some time.
"Why now? Why this room?"
Something crosses his face, gone before it can be read. "Because there is a woman in this city who is going to come for you, Emilia. Because the daughter of the woman in that photograph is the prize she has been hunting. Because the only way I can keep you alive is if you know who you are."
What I have just heard cannot be unheard.
The chair I am sitting in is the chair of a woman who slept with him last night because he asked her to. The chair I am sitting in is the chair of a woman who has spent more than a decade writing things she should not have been able to write and who has been collected.
"You slept with me before you told me."
He does not look away. "Yes."
The next words come from a place steadier than I am. "That is something you did. On purpose."
Between us, the look holds. "Some of it was on purpose. Some of it stopped being on purpose three weeks ago."
Behind the wall-voice, the man has decided to accept whatever I am about to do to him without arguing. The hand at the back of my neck is still as light as it was, no longer doing the work of comfort.
Standing up costs energy that does not return.
"Emilia." When he says my name, it is the wall-voice, cracked. "The guest room is on the second floor at the back. The bed is made. The block is still mine. You are not in danger in this house."
He has prepared a guest room. It has been ready for me longer than he admits.
"Don't talk to me right now."
There is a moment when he could have argued. He does not. "Okay."
Walking out of the cellar is the hardest thing I have ever done. The first step up does not break me. The second does, but by then the body is already on the third step, and that step carries it whether the woman is ready or not.
The kitchen is the same as it was three hours ago. It does not know what has happened and has not been told.
Upstairs, the guest room is on the second floor at the back.
The bed is made. There is a glass of water on the nightstand that has been there since before I arrived.
He prepared this room as an option, which tells me everything I did not want to know about how long he has been thinking about this moment.
The duffel I packed three days' worth of clothes into is in his third-floor bedroom, next to his shoes. The book that started this is in my hand. The pen from nowhere is in my coat pocket.
It is the heavy one, the kind that fits the hand like it was poured. A year in the coat, since the morning, a plain manila envelope with no return address arrived in my mailbox.
The pen from nowhere is the kind of object a mother leaves for a daughter as she is preparing for something.
In my hand now.
It still fits.