Chapter 38
ISAAK
Dima takes one look at the two of us coming through the door and decides he has urgent business at Marisol's.
"The lasagna needs supervision," he announces, already grabbing his keys.
Marisol, who arrived an hour ago and somehow knew before I did that I'd want my own house empty tonight, is gathering her bags without being asked.
"Borscht. Pelmeni. With me. You two are getting a sleepover at the loud aunt's, come on.
" The dogs go because Marisol has a way of being obeyed.
At the door my brother stops and grips the back of my neck, the way he did when we were boys, when he was the only soft thing in that house. He doesn't say anything. The grip says it. Then he's gone, the gravel takes them, and the rental goes quiet.
It's just us. For the first time in twenty-six days, no glass, no guard, no clock, no one in the house but my wife.
She's standing in the middle of the front room in the last of the daylight, twenty-six weeks of our children in front of her, watching me the way she watches a horse she's not sure has settled.
"You're allowed to sit down," she says. "You've been standing braced since the yard. Nobody's coming through that door, Isaak. It's just me."
"I know."
"Your body doesn't know." She crosses to me slow. "I watched you clock every exit in this room the second you walked in. The gym did it to you, the wet floor did it to you, a month of sleeping with one eye open did it to you. You can put it down now."
She's right, and the fact that she can see it, that she's read a month off me in the time it takes to cross a room, takes something out of my knees.
"Come here," I tell her, because it's the only order I have left that I want to give.
She comes. I get my arms around her, careful of the bump between us, and she fits her face into my neck.
For a long minute neither of us does anything but breathe.
She smells like home, like the soap she uses, the dogs, a little like Marisol's garlic.
I have spent a month with my face full of disinfectant and other men.
I stand in my own front room and breathe my wife until my hands stop wanting to make fists.
"There he is," she says into my throat. "There's my husband. The shoulders came down."
"You did that."
"I'm very good." She pulls back enough to look up at me, her eyes going over my face, the brow, the gray under my eyes, the month of county food planed into my cheeks.
Her hand comes up and she touches the pale line through my eyebrow with one fingertip, light.
"Show me," she says. "All of it. Every mark.
You promised me at that table, and I'm collecting. "
So I do the thing I have done for no one in forty years. I let her undress me in the daylight and look.
I get the shirt off. She drops it, steps back half a pace to see, and I hold still for it.
Her eyes track down. She lifts my hand to the knuckles first, the two pale seams there, then turns it to find the old split healing at my shoulder.
She doesn't linger on the brow, she's seen it heal week by week through the glass.
She goes lower instead, a yellow-green smudge gone old over my ribs where the tile took me, the places a month of bracing left under the skin.
She finds the old one last. Low on the left, the pale rope of it I've carried since I was eleven, the one she asked about through a sheet of scratched plastic and I finally answered.
She goes down on her knees in front of me, slow, both hands on my hips to steady the weight of herself, and she puts her mouth on it.
I have to put a hand on the back of the couch.
She kisses the old scar, the one my father gave me, soft, with her eyes closed, and I feel it move through me like nothing a month of bracing prepared me for, because no one has ever kissed that scar.
Women saw it and thought war. None of them knew.
She knows. She kisses the thing my father did to teach me what I was worth, and she does it like she's drawing the poison out.
Forty years of a lesson I never questioned cracks down the middle on the floor of a rented house.
"Nora."
"I'm not done." She moves up, still on her knees, and finds the fresh marks, the fight ones. She kisses those too, one after another, the ribs, the shoulder, the knuckles, slow, taking her time. When she gets to the last of them she looks up at me with wet eyes, her chin doing the stubborn thing.
"Who did this to you?" she says, against my skin. "These ones. The new ones. I know it was the men on the wet floor. I want you to say it anyway, so I know you're not making it small."
"Two men the cartel sent." I keep my voice even, because she needs the truth, not the comfortable version. "To make me say where their money was. I wouldn't. So they tried to take it out of my body, and I survived it, alone, because I had to."
"Alone." Her voice breaks on it. "While I sat at a table forty miles away with a bag of quarters."
"You being forty miles away and safe is the only reason I could do it." I get my hands under her arms and bring her up off her knees, slow, taking her weight, because she shouldn't be down there carrying three. I hold her face in both hands.
"I'm going to walk back into that world.
You understand that. The cartel's handled, the charges are gone, but I am what I am, and there are more wet floors out there with my name on them.
That's what you married. I need you to see the marks, know exactly what's coming, and choose it anyway, because I'm done letting you choose me blind. "
She puts her hands over mine on her face.
"I see them," she says. "I've seen them since the first night, the old one, and now all the new ones.
I'm not choosing you blind. I never was.
I chose a man who comes home with scars and tells me where every one came from.
That's the only kind of man I'd have." Her thumb strokes my wrist. "Now stop trying to scare me off and kiss me.
I've been pressing my hand to cold glass for a month. I want the warm version."
I kiss her.
It isn't the way I kissed her the first time, against a door, both of us furious, neither of us willing to be the one who needed it more.
This is the same mouth and it means the opposite.
I kiss my wife slow, in the last of the daylight, with a month of glass between us finally gone, and she makes a sound into it that I have wanted for twenty-six days.
Her hands are flat on my bare chest, warm, alive, and there's no plexiglass to stop them, no horn to call time.
"Bedroom," she says against my mouth. "I'm not doing this on the sofa, he'll know."
"He already knows. He fled the building."
"I'll know, then." She's already pulling me by the hand, and I follow her down the hall of a rented house I'd burn to keep her in.
She's laughing low and wet at something, at all of it, at being alive, pregnant, leading the most feared man on the coast to bed by one finger.
I would give every dollar I have never to lose this sound.
In the bedroom the light's gone gold and low. She reaches for the hem of her dress and I stop her hands.
"Let me," I say. "I've been a month not allowed to touch you. Let me do it slow."
So I undress my wife the way she undressed me, in the gold light, and I look.
She is changed and I haven't been allowed to see the changing up close.
Her body is fuller everywhere, the curve of her low and heavy now, the line where the sun stopped on her arms, the new weight of her breasts, the dark of them changed, the soft give of her hips under my hands.
I move down her with my eyes and then my mouth, slow, learning the new map of her, the places that are different now. She watches me do it with her fingers in my hair and her breath gone uneven.
"You're staring," she says, unsteady.
I press my mouth low, over the curve, and feel the strange firm warmth of her there. "I'm going to stare. Sit down on the bed before your knees give. You run the pace on this one. I'll follow your lead."
"Astride," she says, and there's the laugh again, breathless. "I'll run it. You just lie there and let me, for once in your controlling life."
"I can do that." I lie back and pull her down over me, slow, both hands spanning her hips to take the weight off her.
She lowers herself over me with her palms braced on my chest, her hair down around us both, and she looks down at me in the gold light, my wife, alive, ours.
The wanting and the love are the same thing now. I can't tell them apart anymore.
"Wait," I say, before. I get one hand up into her hair. "Look at me."
She looks.
"I love you." I say it plain, in English, no glass, no Russian to hide in, no horn about to cut it off, the first clean time the words have ever left me toward another living person.
"That's what I said through the glass. That's what I couldn't give you in the yard.
I love you, Nora. I have for longer than I knew what it was, and I'm saying it free, with nothing owed, nobody collecting, because you taught me a thing could be given that way. "
Her mouth opens, then pulls down at the corners, her eyes flooding all at once. Not the careful read, not the stubborn chin. Just my wife, undone, the tears coming, her hand pressing flat over my heart where she can feel it going.
"Finally," she says, falling apart, laughing and crying at once. "You stubborn, gorgeous, impossible man. I've been waiting on those four words through a sheet of plexiglass. Say it once more so I'm sure I heard it right this time."
"I love you."
"Again."
"I love you." I pull her down to my mouth. "I'll say it every day you let me. That's the deal. Nothing owed back."
"Then we're agreed," she breathes against my lips. She's smiling, and I feel it. There's no more talking either of us needs to do.
I don't move first. I let her.