CHAPTER 25 #2
He won't sit still. Emil proved his uncle murdered a father with a number small enough to hide in a heartbeat, and a man who'll do that does not wait politely for a Council date.
Emil's hand goes still on my belly. Mateo's breathing changes. Even Gael lifts his head.
"It does," Emil says, like a man laying a card face down.
"Nine days. I have run them. I am not going to run them in this bed.
There is a kitchen in this house, and bread in it, and one morning where everyone you love is alive and on the right side of the wall, and I have calculated that we are permitted to spend it.
" His thumb resumes its slow sweep across the give of me.
"The math says the morning is ours. I would not lie to you about a number. "
"No," I say softly. "You wouldn't. " It's the one promise he keeps without fail. Of all the gifts these men have given me, his is the strangest and maybe the dearest: the whole truth, clinical and complete, every time, even when a lie would be kinder. The truth is its own kind of holding.
So I stay. Gael ends up with his head pillowed on my round hip narrating, in a low filthy reverent drift, a list of my body's offenses against his peace of mind — these thighs, malyshka, these thighs are a crime, I've thought about them while doing genuinely terrible things and lost the thread — until I cuff him gently and he catches my hand and kisses the needle-scar across my left index finger, soft, like it's the most precious thing on me.
Emil lies indexing the displacement of warmth.
Mateo lets the weight of me be the only weight he's ever carried gladly.
The snow stays held in the sky. And I lie in the gray morning bracketed by the three deadliest men in Cape Brevik and I am not afraid, and the not-being-afraid is the loudest thing in the room.
Eventually the body has needs the soul would rather ignore, and there's a house, and there are nine days, and a woman has to get up sometime.
I'm the one who breaks it, because I'm the one with the iron in her the morning hasn't softened all the way out.
I slide out from under the burn-scarred arm — Mateo's hand opens to let me go, deliberate, a man teaching himself to release what he wants to clamp down on — and I pull on Gael's discarded shirt because it's nearest and it smells like him, gun oil and cedar and the cold, and Gael makes a wounded noise at the sight of me swallowed in it that I file away for later use.
"Nadia'll have tea on," I say. "I can smell the bread from here."
I can. It's come up through the bones of the old house the same as it does every morning, Nadia's domain announcing itself two floors below — yeast and char and the dark good bitterness of black tea — the smell of this house actually being a house.
Sokol House is stone and money and three generations of falcon-blooded violence.
The kitchen is the only room in it that was ever just warm.
I stop at the conservatory on my way down.
I don't mean to. My feet take me. The glasshouse is cold this morning, the gray light coming flat through the wet glass walls, the long benches of Katya's orchids standing dead and frost-stripped where they've stood for twelve years, blackened canes and the small mummified ghosts of flowers that died the winter she did.
No one in this house clears them. They're a grief no one will sweep up, and I used to find that unbearably sad, and now I find it almost holy — a house that won't pretend its dead away.
And the one. The single survivor among the frost-killed, waxy and blood-dark, the orchid that for reasons no one can name kept itself alive in the cold glass while everything around it gave up.
I've stood here in front of it before, Emil beside me the first time, the two of us circling each other like wary instruments.
I check on it now the way you'd check on a stubborn old relative.
There's a bud.
I go still in the cold. A new bud, low on the living stem, a pale knot tight against the dark — pale as the unfallen sky, a small hard fist of a thing that wasn't there a week ago. The one orchid in Katya's dead garden has decided, in the deepest part of the cold year, to try again.
I stand in front of it in Gael's shirt, the cold steel of my mother's thimble resting under my collar, and hold one finger a breath shy of the bud, hovering, and I think: the house can still grow something.
After all of it — the fire and the murder and the ruin and the long frost — the glass still holds one living thing, and the living thing is making a bud.
"You and me both," I tell it, and go down to the warm.
Nadia is at the scarred oak table when I come in, and she takes one look at me — swallowed in a man's shirt, my hair a chestnut wreck no pencil could save, my mouth still soft from a morning I won't be explaining — and she says nothing at all about any of it.
She just rises, sets down the loaf she's turning out of its tin, and pours.
Copper everywhere, catching what gray light there is.
The kettle steaming. The bread cooling in a row, dark-crusted, smelling like the inside of a good memory.
Black tea the color of a strong decision going into a thick white cup, and she presses the cup into my two hands and folds my fingers around it, warm against warm.
This woman has fed and washed and buried three generations of dangerous men and learned the one thing none of them ever did, which is that you hold a person by handing them something warm and letting the talking wait.
"Sit, child," she says. So I sit.
I wrap my hands around the cup. Outside the kitchen window the cliff falls away to the Sound, the water flat and pewter, no boats.
Upstairs, three men are surely back asleep in a heap, because the second I left that bed the warmth went out of the equation.
My mother's heart is beating clean across the water.
There's a bud on the one orchid that lived.
And I notice, the way you notice a stitch finally lying flat after fighting you all day, that I'm sitting in a kitchen in the house of the family that ruined mine and I am not, in any part of my body, on guard.
"I stopped bracing," I tell Nadia. It comes out of me almost frightened, the way you'd report a symptom.
"Somewhere in the last weeks I stopped. I keep waiting to find the place I'm braced and it's not there.
I walked through that whole house this morning and I wasn't holding myself ready for a single thing. " I turn the cup. The steam climbs.
"My whole life I thought being wanted was the same as being used.
That softness made you the one who got left behind.
And I came in here a bargain, and I keep expecting the trapdoor, and it doesn't come.
That can't be right. I read where things tear.
I'm good at it. And the tear in this isn't anywhere I look.
" I hear the fear in my own voice and I let it stand undressed.
"What kind of fool stops bracing in a bratva? "
Nadia sits down across from me. She's sixty-two and she's seen everything and her hands, when she folds them on the scarred oak, are a working woman's hands, like my mother's, like mine.