Page 69 of Night of Shadows
I open it. The transcript shows under the icon.
‘Hi sweetheart it's me. I was hoping to catch the two of you on the call this morning but I see Nora must be at daycare. Tell her gran misses her. Brendan would have loved that little redhead, you know. He used to sit at the Black Rose with Cormac O'Brien and tell him about his great-niece in Boston who was going to be the family's first lawyer. I think about that sometimes. Anyway. Call me when you can. Love you, love that baby.’
My eyes flood. I close them.
If I start crying right now Eleni will see and Eleni cannot see, because Eleni is held together by my being held together. I am held together by Lex being out in the field where I cannot see him, and the architecture of this morning is a series of women holding each other in place and I cannot crack the architecture because of a voicemail.
I put the phone face down on the marble.
? ? ?
Eleni stirs on the couch around 10:30.
She doesn’t get up. She turns her head and looks at the ceiling for a long moment, and then she says, in English, in the voice of a woman who has decided that the silence in the room has gone on long enough, "Maeve."
"Yes."
"Tell me something about her."
I cross from the kitchen to the couch. I sit down on the floor next to where she’s lying. I pull my knees up. I think for a moment about what to give Eleni, what is the right small thing to put in this woman's hand right now.
"She names everything," I say.
"What do you mean."
"Brontos has a name. The bowl she eats cereal out of has a name. The basil plant on the kitchen windowsill has a name. The plant is named ‘Basil,’ which she doesn’t yet understand is a joke."
Eleni laughs. The laugh is small. The laugh is the first laugh she’s made today and it comes out of her face like a thing that has been waiting to be allowed.
"Greeks name everything also," she says. "My mother had a name for the spoon she used for soup. The spoon was named ‘Anna.’ I do not know why."
"Tell me one more thing about her."
"My mother."
"Yes. About your mother."
Eleni is quiet for a long second. Then she says, "She would have liked you."
My eyes flood again. I can’t let them spill. I take Eleni's hand on the couch above me, and I hold it in both of mine.
"Tell me about Lex when he was small," I say. "While we wait. Anything."
And Eleni does.
She tells me, in low fragments, with pauses for breath, about Lex at four years old refusing to wear shoes for an entire summer. About Lex at seven smuggling a stray cat into his bedroom for nine days before she found out. About Lex at eleven reading the ‘Iliad’ in Greek to his grandmother on the porch because his grandmother's eyes had gone bad. About Lex at twenty-one, three days after his father's funeral, sitting at this kitchen table in this apartment in his suit at 3 AM and crying without making any sound, and Eleni standing in the doorway and not interrupting him because some things, she tells me, a Greek mother knows not to interrupt.
She tells me these things for forty minutes.
I hold her hand the whole time.
I do not look at the phone.
I am, given a gift I didn’t know I was going to be given on the worst day of my life, which is the gift of meeting the boy Lex used to be, told to me in the voice of the woman who raised him.
Eleni stops talking around 11:20.
She closes her eyes. Her breathing evens. The sedative has finally caught up. I stay on the floor next to the couch with herhand in mine for another ten minutes, until I am sure she’s asleep.
