Page 139 of Night of Shadows
"Yes."
I don’t speak for a full minute.
Maeve doesn’t press. She’s lived with this knowledge for three days. She’s had time. The time has been hers. She’s now sitting up against the headboard of a lake house bed I have not slept in for nine years, in one of my t-shirts, with the small yellow lamp casting light on the side of her face, waiting for the man who can find words for what she’s just put into the room.
I get out of bed.
I walk to the dresser in my boxers because the cabin is cold, and I have not turned on the small electric heater yet. I open the second drawer down. The drawer where my father kept things in 1994 when he came up with my mother for their anniversary and where I have kept things since I inherited the lake house. Inside the drawer, in the back corner, is a bottle of bourbon I bought in 2018 and have not opened. I take it out. I take two of the lake house tumblers from the small bar by the door.
I pour two fingers of bourbon. I bring the glass and the bottle and a second empty glass back to the bed.
I hand Maeve the bourbon.
She takes it. She looks at it. She looks at me. She starts to laugh.
I realize what I have just done.
I say, "I am sorry. That was. I am not."
Maeve, laughing now, takes the bourbon and sets it on the nightstand. She says, "It is okay. You are processing."
"I gave my pregnant wife bourbon."
"You gave your pregnant fiancée bourbon. There is a distinction. I am going to enjoy it later as a story I tell our daughter."
"Maeve."
"Sit down, Lex."
I sit on the edge of the bed. I look at her. She’s been holding this for three days. I have had it for one minute. The asymmetry is a thing I am going to have to find language for at some point but not at 10:51 PM in a lake house bedroom with the lamp on and the lake outside the window.
My hand goes, careful and deliberate, to her stomach.
She covers my hand with hers.
Her stomach is the same stomach it was at 10:23 PM when I was standing on the dock with Nico. She’s eight weeks pregnant. There is nothing to feel. There is nothing externally differentabout her body that I can detect. But my hand is on her stomach, and her hand is on my hand, and there is something in there now that has been there for eight weeks and that nobody knew about until three days ago and that, when it arrives, will be the second child Maeve and I have, and the first child Maeve and I made together.
I say, "Three years ago, I was in this lake house alone. I came here to remember how to be a person. I could not."
Maeve says, "I know."
"Now you are in this bed. With our baby. With Nora down the hall, asleep with my mother. With my brothers in the next room."
She says, "Yes."
"I get to have this."
She says, "You get to have this."
I lean forward. I put my forehead against her stomach. She threads her fingers through my hair. I stay there for a long time. The lake house is quiet. The lamp is on. The curtains move.
Then I say, into the soft fabric of the t-shirt against her stomach, in Greek, "‘Geia sou, kardoúla mou.’"
Maeve doesn’t speak for a long second.
Then she says, "Lex."
I lift my head. I look at her.
