Page 68 of Night of Shadows
I am thirty-one, and I have been a litigator for seven years, and I know what ‘work’ means in a man's mouth on a morning when his daughter is in a stranger's vehicle.
I let him use the word.
I had a choice this morning. Do I go with him into the field, or do I stay at the brownstone with Eleni, Konstantinos, and four Konstantinos soldiers, and an open laptop full of case notes I will not read? The choice was real, and I decided to stay, because I am not useful in the field. I do not know how to track a vehicle or how to interrogate a contact. I don’t know how to put my body between my daughter and the men who took her. I’m barely holding on as it is.
I stayed.
Eleni is on the couch in the living room of the brownstone. The Konstantinos family doctor, a man named Theodoros who has been treating Eleni since 1989, came promptly and assessed the head wound. He gave her three stitches and a mild sedative, which she didn’t want but accepted. Now she’s sitting on the couch in a borrowed sweater of mine and her own slacks, because she refused to come here in her bathrobe. Her eyes are very tired. She’s not slept.
Neither have I.
"‘Theé mou’," she says, every twenty minutes or so, looking at her hands.
It means ‘my God.’ It is one of the Greek phrases I have learned in the last two weeks, in the small, careful pieces I have been collecting from Lex and from the words Eleni said to Nora yesterday afternoon. I have been building a private architecture of Greek the way I built a private architecture of motherhood thirty-seven months ago, alone, slowly, by pieces.
Eleni doesn’t know I have been doing this.
She’s going to find out, eventually, and when she does, I am going to give her the gift of my having done it on purpose. But not today. Today I am using the Greek for the only thing it is currently useful for: to say ‘I am here’ in a room with a sixty-eight-year-old woman who needs to know I am here.
"‘Eímai edó,’ Eleni," I say back. ‘I am here.’
She lifts her face from her hands. The look she gives me is the look of a Greek mother who has just heard her own language come out of the mouth of an Irish woman who is the mother of her granddaughter. The look I am going to keep in a small box in my chest for the rest of my life.
"You are learning," she says, in English.
"I am learning."
"Lex doesn’t know."
“No, he doesn’t yet.”
She nods, slowly. The nod is that of a Greek matriarch entering into a conspiracy with the woman who will eventually be her son's wife.
"Good," she says. "That is good."
? ? ?
At 9:47AM, my phone rings.
The screen says ‘Mom.’
It is Tuesday morning. Cathleen Callahan, retired librarian, currently in a one-bedroom apartment in a Tampa retirement community where she’s lived since the divorce six years ago, is calling for the Tuesday morning grandmother check-in she’s done every week of Nora's life since the week Nora was born. The check-in is a thirty-minute video call. Nora wears whatever she’schosen to wear that morning. Cathleen wears a cardigan and her reading glasses, and shows Nora the Florida birds at her bird feeder. Nora reports the week's developments to her ‘gran.’
Cathleen doesn’t know that her granddaughter is currently in a stranger's vehicle somewhere in central Massachusetts.
I stare at the phone. I cannot pick up.
If I pick up the phone and I open my mouth to my mother right now, what will come out of my mouth is the sentence ‘Mom they took her,’ and after that sentence I will start screaming, and I won’t stop. And my mother, who is sixty-three and has a heart that the cardiologist has been watching for two years, will hear her thirty-one-year-old daughter scream into a phone and she’ll get on a plane to Boston. Then I will spend the next seven hours managing my mother instead of waiting for the phone to ring with the call from Lex.
I cannot afford to manage my mother today.
Tomorrow.
I will call her tomorrow. I will lie. I will say Nora has a cold, I will reschedule Sunday's video call, I will buy myself some days. I won’t tell her any of what is happening today until the federal case is concluded and possibly never.
The phone goes to voicemail.
Twenty seconds later, the voicemail icon appears.
