Page 35 of Night of Shadows
She turns to pack. I watch her go up the stairs. She’s in jeans and a gray sweater I have not seen her wear before, and her hair is in a braid she’s done in two minutes at the kitchen window using the reflection of the dishwasher, and I am, in this moment, in a piece of trouble I have not yet found language for.
Her bag comes back down at 8:47. She’s packed light. Three days, four maximum. A duffel for Nora. A duffel for herself. And a book, on top, that she’s placed where her hand will find it without looking. The blue spine. The Pride and Prejudice. She’s decided, in the privacy of her own packing, to bring it.
I do not say anything.
She doesn’t look at me.
Both of us register the book. Neither of us names it. Whatever is going to happen with the note will happen in the place we are going, not the place we are leaving.
? ? ?
The drive is three hours and twelve minutes.
Petrov drives the lead car. I drive the second. Nora is in the back with Maeve, in her car seat, asleep within twenty minutes of the on-ramp. Maeve doesn’t speak. I do not speak. The radio is off. The road is wet from a Saturday rain that didn’t finish. The windshield wipers are at the lowest setting because the rain has gone to mist, and the mist is the kind of mist that turns the November woods into something between gray and silver, and I am driving a woman and her almost-three-year-old child to a building I bought when I was thirty-one because I had decided, that year, that I needed somewhere I could not be a Konstantinos for three days.
Maeve watches the woods through the window.
I watch her watch the woods through the rearview mirror.
At minute fifty-eight she meets my eyes in the mirror for half a second. She doesn’t smile. She looks at me the way she looked at me in the foyer when I was correcting her grip. Direct. Considered. Unafraid.
"How much longer?" she says. The first sentence either of us has said since the on-ramp.
"Forty minutes."
"All right."
She turns back to the woods. The voice she used was not her work voice. It was the voice she uses when she’s letting me know she’s alive and tracking and not going to fall apart, which is, I am learning, a voice she uses with me alone.
I have been driven by women looking at me through mirrors before. None of those moments has felt like this one.
? ? ?
The lake house is not large. Two bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen open to a living room with a wood stove, a screened porch on the lake side. Cedar shake. Slate gray. The dock is a hundred feet off the back deck. The lake is one of fifty-three small lakes in this part of New Hampshire, none of them famous, all of them surrounded by trees and silence and the kind of people who do not ask you why you have driven up alone in November.
Petrov has prepared the property remotely. The security system, which I installed two summers ago in a weekend with a man I trust who flew up from North Carolina for the work, is already armed. The porta-crib that Petrov's secondary delivered at 2:00 PM is set up in the smaller bedroom. The pantry is stocked. The wood stove has been lit. The temperature inside is sixty-six degrees and rising.
I sweep the property. Twenty minutes. House. Dock. Tree line. The two access roads. The boat shed. The places I wouldput a man if I were trying to put a man on this property without my noticing, all of which are clear, all of which I know intimately because I have walked them every November for four years.
When I come back inside, Maeve has put Nora down for a late nap in the smaller bedroom. The porta-crib is good. Nora is in fuzzy white socks with the small pink hearts on them. Brontos is under her arm. She didn’t need to be coaxed; she was tired from the drive and went down the way she goes down at home, which is the way a child goes down when she’s decided the room is safe.
Maeve closes the door of Nora's room halfway. She turns. She looks at the rest of the house.
She’s not spoken since the on-ramp.
She begins to walk through it.
I do not follow her.
I stand at the kitchen island and watch.
She walks the way she does everything in a new room, which is to read the room before she decides what to do with it. She goes first to the bookshelves, because Maeve is a reader and bookshelves tell her what she needs to know about a person before that person has said anything. The shelves are full. They are not pretentious, and I have not arranged them for visitors, because I have never had visitors. They are the books I have read here over four years of three-day stays.
Cormac McCarthy.Suttree.Blood Meridian.The full Border Trilogy.
Hemingway. The short stories.A Moveable Feast.
Sebald, well-thumbed.
