CHAPTER 35
THE BENEDICTION
POV: MAE
Two years later.
The piano is in tune.
I had it done in October. A man from Cambridge with a leather bag of tools and a face like a heron came three Saturdays in a row and sat at it for hours with the lid up and the dust sheet folded on the floor, tapping keys and turning pins, and at the end of the third Saturday he played a scale, up and down, clean, and nodded, and said, “She’s a good instrument. Somebody should play her.”
Nobody has.
It’s the first Sunday of Advent. Late afternoon. The snow has started early this year, in November, soft and wet on Louisburg Square, and the music room is full of gray light.
I’m sitting on the bench.
Not playing. I don’t know how. My mother had a keyboard in our kitchen when I was small, a plastic one with batteries, and she taught me three carols with one finger before she got sick, and that’s all I know.
I play one of them now. One finger. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Slow. Wrong on the fourth note.
I hear him in the doorway.
I don’t turn around. I know the step. Heavier now than it was.
He’s thirty-seven. There’s gray at his temples that wasn’t there two years ago.
There’s a second scar over the first one on his face, black thread long gone, a raised white ridge from his lip to his jaw that I kiss every morning before he’s awake.
He doesn’t come in.
“You’re playing it wrong, dove,” he says.
“I know.”
“Fourth note. It’s a D.”
“I know. I’ve been playing it wrong for twenty minutes.” I move over on the bench. There’s room for two. There was always room for two. “Show me.”
He doesn’t move.
I don’t look at him. I look at the keys. Ivory, gone the color of weak tea. Middle C, which I touched the first week I was in this house and heard go sour.
It’s not sour now.
After a long time, he crosses the room.
He sits down on the bench beside me.
He’s so big it creaks. His thigh is against mine. His hands come up and hover over the keys, and I watch them. Big, scarred across the knuckles, a white line on the back of the right one I’ve never asked about. They hover there for a long time.
Twenty-three years.
He puts them down.
The chord is wrong. Loud. He winces. He moves one finger and tries again, and this one is right, a low warm sound that fills the gray room and hangs there.
He plays the carol.
Badly. Slow. Stopping. Starting again. His fingers remember more than he does. Twice he gets lost and I hum the note and he finds it. The fourth note is a D. He plays it right.
At the end of the second verse he misses a whole line, and his left hand comes down on three wrong keys at once, a terrible crashing sound like a tray of dishes going over, and I laugh.
I don’t mean to. It comes out of me, surprised, loud in the quiet room.
He stops.
His hands stay on the keys. He turns his head and looks at me. He looks at me for so long that I stop laughing.
“She used to laugh like that,” he says. “When I missed.”
I put my hand on his, on the keys.
“Then miss again,” I say.
He does. On purpose, I think. Or not. It doesn’t matter.
I laugh again.
***
At five o’clock, the bells ring down on Charles Street for vespers.
We go out through the glass door and the covered passage to the chapel. The snow is coming down on the garden in big slow flakes, and the colored window is glowing, Saint Agnes and her lamb, lit up gold and red against the dark.
There’s a new Advent wreath on the stand by the altar. Four candles. Three purple, one pink. Rosa made it this morning from pine she cut in the garden.
He hands me the kitchen matches.
I light the first purple candle.
We stand in front of it. He’s behind me.
His arms come around my waist from behind the way they always do, and his chin rests on top of my head, on the black lace.
I’m still wearing it. I wear it every Sunday.
Grace’s two pins. Rosa found me a third one in an antique shop in the North End, black enamel, almost the same.
His hands are on my stomach.
They’ve been there more than usual the last nine days.
“Twenty-two days till Christmas,” I say.
“Mm.”
“And about thirty-one weeks till—”
“I know,” he says.
I go still.
I turn around in his arms and look up at him.
“How?” I say. “I haven’t told anyone. I haven’t even told Rosa. I did the test on Thursday. Alone. In the bathroom. With the door locked.”
He doesn’t smile. His face does something much slower than a smile.
He lifts my left hand between us. The ring. Gold, ten onyx beads, his initial where the cross should be.
“Your temperature,” he says. “Nine days ago. It went up four-tenths of a degree at night and it didn’t come back down.”
I stare at him.
“I’ve been watching it every four seconds for nine days,” he says. “I sat in the Crypt on Tuesday at three in the morning and watched it not come down.”
I start to laugh.
I can’t help it. I put my forehead against his chest and I laugh, in his mother’s chapel, in front of the first Advent candle, with his hands on my stomach and the snow falling past the window.
“Of course you did,” I say into his shirt. “Of course you knew before I did.”
“Are you angry?”
I lift my head and look up at him.
Two years. He still has the Crypt. He still has the nine screens.
I know about all of them. The one in the kitchen.
The one over our bed. The one in this chapel, up in the corner by the window, with its little green light.
The ring. The phone on his nightstand, face-up, with my number on it, going up and down all night while I sleep.
I know about every one.
I wave at the one in the corner of the chapel sometimes. When I know he’s down there.
“No,” I say. “I’m not angry.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll always know,” I say. “That’s what I asked for.”
***
Theo stays for dinner.
He’s in the kitchen when we come back in, sitting at the long oak table with a glass of wine, talking to Rosa in bad Portuguese about her grandson, who’s at law school now.
Theo’s gone gray at the temples too. He runs the port with Ronan, and the unions, and Southie, and he’s very good at all of it, and he’s never once in two years sat at the table without his phone face-up beside his plate.
He has it there now.
I sit down across from him. I see the screen before he turns it over.
A map. Boston. A street in the North End, near the water. And on it, a small green dot.
Not moving.
He sees me see it. He turns the phone face down on the oak.
“Who is she?” I ask.
“Nobody,” Theo says.
Ronan, sitting down beside me, doesn’t say anything. He looks at Theo across the table. Theo looks back.
Something passes between them that I recognize. I’ve seen it in a mirror.
“Nobody,” I say. “I remember nobody.”
Theo picks up his wine. He doesn’t answer.
Rosa brings the soup.
***
That night, I go up before him.
He’s in the study with Theo, going over something for the port. I can hear their voices through the floor, low.
I undress. I put on the black silk. I sit on the edge of the bed, the big bed, our bed, with my hand on my stomach where there’s nothing to feel yet.
On the nightstand, there’s a stack of cream cards. Heavy stock. The kind he used to write on. He keeps them there. I’ve never seen him use one since the wedding.
I take the top card.
I take his pen. The black one, from his jacket on the chair.
I write in the careful round hand the nuns taught me. Pressing hard. So the letters dent the paper.
Two words.
I lay the card on his pillow, right where his face will be. Then I turn off the lamp, and lie down on my side facing the door, the way I’ve slept since the cell, one hand under my cheek.
Up in the corner of the ceiling, the little green light blinks.
I don’t pull the covers up.
I leave the card where he’ll find it. Where he’ll pick it up in the dark and hold it to the light from the hall and read it.
The same way I read his, once, in a cell on Adams Street, four times in a row, with my hands shaking.
Mine. Amen.