Page 55 of Night of Shadows
Soft. Brief. The kiss of a woman who is telling me that ‘after grand jury’ is a real promise and not a dismissal. I let her kiss me. I do not try to deepen it. I do not pull her against me. The kitchen is full of the smell of coffee and the November light is coming in over the lake, and somewhere down the hall my daughter is asleep with a one-eyed elephant under one arm, and I am being kissed in a borrowed kitchen by the woman who has decided to spend the next sixty days surviving with me.
She pulls back.
She looks at me. She says, in the voice she’s been using today, "Sixty days, Lex."
"Sixty days."
? ? ?
9:00 PM.
The cabin is locked. The wood stove is out. The dishes are washed and put away. Nora is in the back seat of the SUV, asleep against the side of her car seat, Brontos under one arm, the contained, fierce diplomat of the morning's kitchen now reduced to the small soft animal of the late-evening drive home. The trunk is packed. The lights inside the cabin are off.
I stand at the slider with the keys in my hand.
Maeve is already in the passenger seat.
I look at the lake one more time. Black under a low sky. The dock invisible in the dark. The place where my daughter threw nineteen rocks at the water and reached it twice. The place where I watched my brother say ‘that's a real reason’ through a phone on a porch.
I close the door.
I lock it.
I get in the SUV.
Maeve is looking at me. The dashboard light is on her face. She’s the woman she’ll be when we get back to Boston, which is a woman with a federal grand jury weeks away and a contract on her head and a daughter she’s built her life around, and she’s also the woman who has just been kissed in a borrowed kitchen, and the two women are in the same passenger seat looking at me.
"Ready," I say.
"No."
"Me neither."
I drive.
Chapter 18
Maeve
What Breaks us Open
The drive back to Boston takes four hours and forty minutes.
Nora sleeps the whole way. Brontos under her arm. Her cheek pressed against the side of the car seat. The dashboard light is the only light. Lex drives with both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road, and his right hand occasionally comes off the wheel, finds my left hand on the center console, and stays there for a long minute before he needs the wheel again.
We talk in low voices.
"Tell me what he said."
"He said, ‘Bring them home.’ He said, ‘The whole family’s going to need to know.’ He said Mama needs to be told in person."
"How is he?”
"He’s hurt. He used a contraction. Nico doesn’t use contractions to me. He used one tonight."
I begin to understand the weight of this once I see Lex's face in the dashboard light, and then I understand. The Konstantinos brothers have a register. Nico breaking it means Nico bleeding.
"I'm sorry," I say.
