Page 65 of Night of Shadows
That is how long it takes to drive from the brownstone to Mama's apartment in pre-dawn traffic. I do the drive in twelve. The streetlights are on, the city is gray, the SUV is mine, and Petrov has cleared the route already. Petrov has been in his job for twenty-two years, and he doesn’t call me at 5:47 AM with the wrong voice for any reason except the one happening right now.
Maeve is in the passenger seat.
She’s not asked me what’s happening. She got dressed in ninety seconds. She put on jeans and one of my sweatshirts and her boots, and she didn’t stop to put on socks, and she got in the SUV, and she didn’t ask, because she’s read my face and the face is the answer.
Her hands are pressed flat against the tops of her thighs.
She’s holding them there to stop them shaking. I can see the tendons in her wrists from the dashboard light because she’s pressing down hard enough that the skin on the backs of her hands has gone white at the knuckles.
I do not speak.
I can’t. If I open my mouth, the speech that comes out will be one of two things. It will either be a sentence I cannot afford to say in front of her, which is ‘it is one of two emergencies, and either one of them I will not survive,’ or it will be the Greek prayer my grandmother taught me at six years old, which has no English translation and which my mouth has not formed in twenty-six years.
I continue to drive.
Maeve looks straight ahead. The dashboard light is on her face. She’s the woman she’ll be at the end of this hour, a woman who has just been told her daughter is in trouble. And she’s also the woman she was three hours ago, which was the woman who told me she would do this every time. The two women are sitting next to me in the same passenger seat.
At minute eleven, I reach across the console.
She lets me take her hand.
I hold it for the rest of the drive. Neither of us speaks. The hand is cold and steady.
? ? ?
Konstantinos security is already in the lobby of the Beacon Street building.
Six men. Petrov mobilized them the moment he made the call. Two extras Cormac sent last night are still here, the nightshift two from before midnight, standing with the pre-dawn six. They part to let us through. None of them speaks. They have been told what has happened.
The face of every man in the lobby is the face of a man whose family business has just had its sanctuary breached. A face I have seen exactly twice in fifteen years.
Cormac O'Brien is in the elevator vestibule.
He’s come from Brookline at high speed in his own vehicle. He’s wearing the coat he wears when he’s not slept. His face is that of an Irish brother arriving at the family’s worst hour, the face of a man who is not a Konstantinos but who has, somewhere along the way, decided he’s going to be in the building when this happens.
"Lex."
"Cormac."
"Just got off the phone with Ronan. He’s on a flight. He’ll be here by tonight."
Ronan, who is in Galway with our mother, who has not left Ireland in four years. Ronan doesn’t come to American problems. However, Ronan, who has, at six in the morning, Galway time, decided to come to this one.
"Tell him not to–"
"He’s on the flight. He’s not asking permission."
I nod once.
Cormac steps aside. We go up.
The door of Mama's apartment is open.
Petrov is in the doorway. He steps aside. His face is the face of a man who was on the perimeter when the breach happened on the inside, and he is, in his own architecture, going to spend the rest of his life in the corner of his mind where he’s filed this morning.
Inside the apartment.
The lamp by the couch is on. Mama is on the couch. She’s in her bathrobe, the navy one she’s worn for ten years, and she’s holding a kitchen towel folded into a square against the side of her head above her left ear. The towel is white. The towel is no longer entirely white. There is a small dark stain on the carpet at her feet where the bleeding was bad before someone put the towel in her hand.
