Page 22 of Night of Shadows
"She’s sure."
There is another brief pause. Then he opens the door.
Chapter 9
Lex
Goodnight Moon
Ihave not read a children's book aloud in my life.
I have, in the last fifteen years, read aloud the following: a federal indictment, in chambers, to a judge who needed it on the record.
A eulogy at my father's funeral, in Greek, that my mother had handwritten. A Reznikov communications intercept, to my brother, in the basement of Elysium, three months before we killed Viktor. A list of apartment numbers, to Petrov, on a stairwell in Allston, that we had cleared and were about to enter. The cumulative volume of text I have read aloud in my adult life would not hold the importance of this moment. I get to read fillGoodnight Moonto my daughter for the first time.
I follow Maeve down the hall.
She stops at Nora's door. She looks at me. The look is the look of a woman who is about to allow a man she’s not allowed to do any of this to do all of this in a single ten-minute window, and who is doing it because her daughter has asked, and who is, at the same time, watching me with the small careful precision of a woman who is going to revoke the permission if I get any of it wrong.
"Here is how her bedtime goes, and it goes this way because she decided it does, not because I did. You sit on the floor next to the bed. You do not sit on the bed. You hold the book. You read the words exactly as they are written. You do not paraphrase. You do not improvise. You do not do voices. You read it once. When she asks you to read it again, you say, ‘one more time,’ and you read it once more, and then you put the book down and you say goodnight and you leave the room. I will be in the doorway."
"Yes."
"Do not try to be charming."
"I will not."
She doesn’t raise her voice. She holds my eyes, and there is a stillness in her I am learning to read as the opposite of soft. "This is a thing she’s chosen. I want you to receive it the way she chose it."
"I will."
She opens the door.
? ? ?
Nora is in bed. The book is in her lap. The lamp on the nightstand is the moon-shaped one Petrov bought to match the one in her old bedroom. The light is low. The walls of this room are the same gray-white as the walls of every room in this brownstone, which was decorated by no one and which is, in the small, careful adjustments Maeve has made in almost forty-eight hours, becoming a room a child lives in.
Nora looks at me. She holds out the book.
I sit on the floor next to the bed. The floor is cold through my trousers. I take the book.
"Goodnight Moon," I say.
She watches me. She’s waiting.
I open the book.
"In the great green room, there was a telephone…” I begin to read to her.
She arranges Brontos under her arm. She settles. The breathing slows.
I read the words exactly as they are written. No paraphrasing. No improvising. No voices. I do not, however, read them flat. It's almost impossible for me to read them flat. I have read out loud to my mother, in Greek, the eulogy of the man we both lost, and I learned at twenty-two that words read flat aloud are worse than words not read at all, and the reading ofGoodnight Moonis no different.
Nora's eyes are getting heavy.
"Goodnight, room. Goodnight, moon,” I continue.
Maeve is in the doorway. I feel her there, I don’t have to look to know she’s there. I have been registering her position in every room I have been in for the past three days.
