CHAPTER 34
Amara
◆
The sign goes up at nine o'clock on New Year's morning, and I make Bea hold the ladder.
She says I should let one of the men do it, because there are three of them downstairs and any one of them could lift a brass plate to a brick wall without breaking a sweat, and she's right, and I do it anyway.
Some things you carry up the ladder yourself.
The plate is the size of a dinner plate and twice as heavy, oiled brass with the letters cut deep so the frost can't fill them and blur them, and it says one word.
Costa.
Just Costa. A name standing on its own, finally shed of the borrowed one I wore over it for so long like a coat cut for another woman's shoulders.
Bea argued me on that for a week, loud, the way she argues everything, and then she cried into a bolt of dupioni when I held my ground, and then she had the plate made the way I wanted it, because that is the kind of friend Bea Marchetti is.
The name is mine. The line is mine. The honor of the man who built a shipping company out of one leased freighter and refused for thirteen years to take the bratva's filthy money is mine to carry now, restored, because his daughter found the seam in the thing that killed him and pulled until it tore.
I set the screws by hand. My breath smokes. My fingers go stiff in the cold before I'm done, and I think, the way I think now: a thimble is its own kind of armor, dented and small, and I have worn one at my throat since I was a girl learning my mother's trade, and a woman can wear other kinds too.
When I come down the ladder the front window of the atelier has caught the low winter sun and gone to gold — the whole frosted pane fired bright and blind as a struck match, the frost-ferns lit from inside the ice so that for a second you can't see the street at all, only light.
I stand on the salted sidewalk with my hands aching and look at it.
The window I kept lit for eleven months on borrowed name and borrowed nerve, burning gold now in my own.
"It looks like the inside of a wedding ring," Bea says, beside me, sniffling, ruining the moment in exactly the way I need it ruined.
"That's the frost," I say.
"That's grace, you cynic. " She bumps my hip with hers, which on me is a substantial collision and on her is like a bird flying into a wall, and she laughs, and I laugh, and far out on the Sound a buoy bell knocks once on the swell — that small cold note that has marked the edge of every winter night of my life in this city, lonely as a thing can be, calling out over black water to whatever's out there that there's a shoal here, a hard place, mind it.
It sounds just the same as ever. Indifferent.
Old. It doesn't care that the line is clean and the man who ruined us is dead and my mother's heart has a new valve sewn into it by Dr. Reyes's careful gloved hands three weeks ago and is beating, this morning, strong enough to argue with Nadia about the proper way to render goose fat.
The cold doesn't care. That's its whole job, to not care. We build the warmth ourselves, on the inside, against it. That's the only way it's ever done.
Inside, the three of them have got into my fabric.
I should have known. You cannot leave Sokolovs unsupervised in a room full of beautiful things.
Gael is up on the cutting table with his bad leg stretched out along it — he's six weeks out from a blade that went in three inches under his ribs where Roman put it because Roman could not get past him to me, and he's healing the way Gael heals everything, badly and on his own schedule and while insisting he's fine — and he has a bolt of new ivory cloth across his lap, the nap turned up, and he's running his scarred palm down it the wrong way and then the right way, watching the color change under his hand from pewter to pearl.
"Velvet," he says, not looking up, "is the only honest fabric you own, you know that?
Brush it one way it's one color. Brush it the other way it's another.
Doesn't pretend. Just shows you, depends how you touch it.
" His gaze comes up then, green eyes bright and absolutely insolent. "You're like that, trouble."
"I'm a textile now."
"You're the good textile. " He flips the bolt so the light slides across it. "The expensive one. The one you keep behind the counter where greedy customers can only look."
"And yet."
"And yet I'm allowed," he agrees, grinning the grin that used to be his armor and is now, God help us all, just his face when he's happy.
He gets to be happy now. It still undoes me, watching him learn it, like watching someone learn to write with a hand that was broken young and set wrong and has only now, late, been re-broken kind and let heal straight.
The bird inked over his heart is hidden under his shirt, his blackwork sleeve running down the arm that holds the bolt, and there's a new pink line under the linen at his side that I stitched myself in the infirmary with my own shears and my own steady hands, neat as a hem, while he made jokes and gripped the table until his knuckles went white and let me see, only at the very end, only for a second, the boy who'd never quite believed anyone would bother to sew the knife back together instead of just sharpening it.
I sewed him back together. I keep sewing him back together. It is the great work of my life and I'd not trade it for any easier one.
Emil is at my long worktable with his ledger.
Of course he is. But the ledger is open to a clean page and he's writing in it with the fountain pen in a hand I know now as well as my own, the slanting precise hand that annotated my dead father's manifests in the margins until the forged berth-assignment confessed itself, the hand that built, column by indexed column, the case that buried Lev Sokolov under his own law.
The same black book. Different work now.
He keeps honest books these days, he told me once, dry as chalk, and then took his glasses off and cleaned them for a long time so I wouldn't see his face do the thing it does when he means something more than he's said.
"What are you costing out?" I lean over his shoulder. He smells like good wool and cold ink. He lets me read it, which from Emil is its own kind of nakedness.
"The restitution disbursement," he says.
"The Pier 9 berths revert to the Costa estate on the fourteenth.
Two impounded freighters, less depreciation, plus the appraised value of the third we cannot recover because Lev sold it through a Maltese shell in April.
" His pen ticks down the column. "I have recovered eighty-one percent of what he took from your father. I do not like the nineteen percent."
"Emil."
"I have indexed contingencies to close it to ninety-three by spring."
"Emil. " I put my hand flat on the page, over the numbers, over the nineteen percent he can't abide.
The needle-scar on my finger is pale against the cream paper.
"You gave me back my father's name. That lives somewhere past your ledger, in a place no column reaches.
Let it sit there unbalanced and leave it be. "
He goes still. The pale ice-blue eyes come up to me over the steel rims, and for a moment — one moment, the only place his control ever breaks — his syntax leaves him.
"There is a column," he says. Short. Fractured.
"I built it. It does not balance. I have stopped trying.
Kotyonok. " The endearment slips out the way it always slips out, against his will, like a confession he didn't authorize, and he lets it stand.
He learned to let it stand a long time ago, that one word he once would have crossed out and now leaves on the page for me to keep.
He caps the pen instead, which for Emil is the same as taking someone's face in both hands.
Mateo isn't in the atelier. I find him on the sidewalk where I'd been, looking up at the gold-fired window and the brass plate over the door, with the cold coming off the Sound and putting color in his face, the silver at his temples bright in the hard new light.
He has Yuri's watch out.
He has it open in his palm, the worn brass case thumbed back, the engraving on the lid catching the sun — the watch he's carried since they buried his father, the watch he set face-up on the table for thirty-five years to mean be careful, we are watched, the watch he gave me in the snow nine days ago in the conservatory with the orchid blooming behind us, saying, in the fewest words he owns, you watch the door now too.
We trade it. It lives in my pocket more days than his now. This morning he took it back to time the drive, the way the careful man always does, and now he stands in the cold holding it open and not closing it, watching my name go gold over my door.
"Pavel's bringing your mother and Bea at five," he says, when I come to stand beside him.
At his shoulder, level with him, where I belong now.
We settled that a long time ago, the wall-man and I, the night I refused to stand behind him and he stood a long time silent in the dark and then said, then stand beside me, God help us both.
God did, as it turned out. Or we did. Same thing in the end.
"And the others?"
"Gael's not to drive. I'll take him and Emil.
" He closes the watch, finally — only to slide it into my coat pocket, his fingers grazing the fine chain under my collar as they go, his thumb passing once over the cold dented cap of my mother's thimble, a thing he does now without thinking, the way you touch a doorframe you've walked through ten thousand times.
"Nadia's killing herself over the goose.
Inés is supervising. There may be bloodshed. "
"There won't be bloodshed."
"There's always a little bloodshed in that kitchen. " His mouth tilts, a crooked tug at his lips. On Mateo Sokolov that is a roar of laughter. "Your mother called Nadia a heretic about the brine."