Page 114 of Night of Shadows
Brontos accepts the greeting with his characteristic dignity.
Nora hands Ms. Fitzgerald the school bag. "Daddy signed the museum thing."
Ms. Fitzgerald looks at me. The look is the careful look of a daycare teacher who has been processing the addition of a ‘Mr. Konstantinos has been monitoring her sign-in routines for the last couple of months and has concluded that the addition will land. "Thank you, Mr. Konstantinos."
"Thank you, Ms. Fitzgerald."
Nora pats my cheek with her mittened hand.
"Have a good day, Daddy."
She walks into the classroom. She doesn’t look back.
I stand in the foyer for ten seconds.
Then I walk home.
Maeve is in the home office when I get back.
She’s at the desk in jeans and one of my sweaters, the dark gray one she wears now, the laptop open, three binders stacked at her elbow, her reading glasses on, the small frown she gets when she’s deep in the work she’s been doing for forty-three hours. The home office is warm. The radiator is running. The light at the window is the flat gray of the morning sky.
I bring her coffee.
I set it down on the desk. She looks up. The frown softens.
"How was the walk?”
"Brontos is going to the Children's Museum on Friday."
"Brontos is excited."
"Brontos has been excited since Wednesday."
Maeve smiles. Small. Real. Then her face does the particular thing it has been doing for the last six days, which is what comes when she remembers tomorrow.
I pull a chair over. I sit down across from her. I say, "Tell me what you are doing today."
"Final pass on the Marchetti sequence. Klein wants me to run it cold one more time without notes. After that, the chronology. Then the names. Then the dead-informant description. Then I am going to take a long bath and stop thinking until tomorrow."
"All right."
Long pause. Maeve looks at the binder. Then she looks back at me.
She says, "Lex."
"Yes."
"I cannot tell whether I am scared or whether I am just tired."
"Both," I say.
"Yes. Both."
"How do you walk in?"
She says it almost as if she’s asking herself, but the phrasing of it has the precision of the question she’s been carrying for six days, and the question is for me.
I take a breath. I have been thinking about this question since the kitchen six days ago, when she said, ‘I want this to be over.’ I have been thinking about it on the drive to my mother's apartment yesterday morning. I have been thinking about it last night while she slept against my ribs.
