Page 45 of Night of Shadows
I have not yet decided what to call whatever has filled the space he left.
I will. I have time.
Right now, what I have is a woman asleep on my chest, my daughter asleep down the hall, the wood stove ticking as it cools, and a thing I am afraid to lose for the first time in fifteen years.
That is enough for tonight.
? ? ?
At 1:23 AM I get out of bed.
I move slowly. She doesn’t wake. I pull the blanket up over her shoulder. I pull on the trousers I left at the foot of the bed. I do not put on a shirt. I do not put on shoes.
I walk down the hall in the dark.
The smaller bedroom is at the end. The door is half open, the way Maeve closed it before dinner. I push it the rest of the way open with one hand, slowly.
She’s asleep.
She’s on her back. Brontos is under her arm. The fuzzy white sock with the small pink hearts on it has come off her left foot in the night and is wedged under the bumper of the porta-crib. Her hair is the dark brown of mine in a baby photograph my mother keeps in her hallway. Her mouth is open, the small fraction of an inch. She’s breathing the way a child breathes when she’s decided her room is safe.
I stand in her doorway for thirty seconds.
She doesn’t know I am her father. She knows I am the man named Lex who reads her ‘Goodnight Moon’ and puts her snow boots on her at 4:00 AM and lifts her into a car seat that was the right car seat for her age and weight.
She’s decided I am acceptable. She hasn’t been told yet that I am her father. She’ll be told. I will be the one to tell her, when Maeve agrees, and the conversation is going to be the most important conversation I have ever had with another human being, and I have no idea how I am going to say it. That’s a thought for another time.
I close the door of her room halfway.
I walk back down the hall.
Maeve has rolled onto her side in my absence. She’s put her hand on the place where I was. She’s still asleep. She’s reaching, in her sleep. I climb into the bed beside her.
She murmurs in her sleep. She finds my chest. She puts her hand back on my sternum. She doesn’t wake.
I pull her against me.
I keep watch until the first light comes in over the lake, and then I will keep watch through the morning, and I will keep watch every night for as long as I have the privilege of being the man in the bed with this woman and the man in the house with this child, and I will keep watch for the rest of my life, because a man who has just been given a thing he had stopped allowing himself to want doesn’t, for any reason, fall asleep on it.
Outside, the lake is black.
Inside, she breathes against my chest.
For now, it is enough.
Chapter 16
Maeve
Pancakes
Iwake alone.
For one second I am six years old, in my parents' house in South Boston, and the bed is the wrong bed, and the sheets are the wrong sheets, and the man who is supposed to be next to me is not next to me, and I have a half-second of the kind of fear that wakes you completely before you have remembered what room you are in. Then I remember.
Then I hear my daughter’s voice from the kitchen.
"Brontos cannot have syrup. Brontos is an elephant. Elephants do not eat syrup."
