Page 142 of Night of Shadows
She says, "Daddy."
I say, "Yes, ‘agápi mou.’"
"A baby?"
"A baby."
"For me?"
"For all of us. The baby will be your brother or your sister."
"Brother or sister?"
"Yes."
Pause. Nora considers this with the gravity she brings to all important new information.
Then: "Will the baby share Brontos?"
The kitchen breaks. Cormac is hooting. Siobhan is crying with laughter. Eleni has both hands over her mouth.
I say, very seriously, "That is a question for Brontos."
Nora says, "Brontos says yes."
I say, "Brontos is generous."
Nora pats my cheek with her small hand. She says, "Okay, Daddy. The baby gets Brontos sometimes. Not all the time. Sometimes."
She climbs back down. She returns to her dinosaur toast. The negotiation is concluded.
I look at the room.
Every person I love. In one kitchen. Around one table. In a house I used to come to alone.
My face does what it does.
Epilogue
The Wedding
One Year Later
Brigid Arrives
Eleni
She comes through the international arrivals door at Logan at 4:47 in the afternoon.
I have been at the airport since 3:30. I have been at this gate since 4:10. I have been on my feet for the last forty minutes because Greek mothers of a certain generation do not sit while waiting to meet the woman they have been writing letters to for seven years and three months. Cathleen O'Brien is beside me in a navy coat with her hands folded. Maeve is at home with the children because Stefanos is five months old and a nap was non-negotiable. The arrangement is that I will meet Brigid and bring her back to my apartment for coffee before the rehearsal dinner.
The doors open. The arrivals come through in clusters. I am looking for an eighty-two-year-old Irish woman with a cane.
She comes through without a cane.
She comes through on the arm of a tall priest in a black cassock who I will later learn is her nephew Ciaran, who has been a parish priest in County Mayo for nineteen years and who has flown across the Atlantic with his aunt because Brigid O'Brien has spent the last six months telling everyone in Dublin she was going to Boston for a wedding even if it killed her. She’s in a green wool coat the color of the Irish countryside. Her hair is white. Her eyes are the eyes of a woman who has been writing to me since 2019 about the lives of grown children, the small specific weather of Galway, the names she’s not been allowed to speak aloud about a brother in a bar in Charlestown.
She sees me.
