Page 36 of Night of Shadows
And the small stack at the end of the second shelf, the one I didn’t arrange to be visible, which is a stack of poetry. Mary Oliver. Marie Howe. A Wendell Berry.What the Living Doon top because that is the one I read in October when I have drivenup alone, and it is the only book I have ever read that has made me unable to leave a room until I had finished a poem.
Maeve stands in front of the poetry stack for a long moment.
She doesn’t touch the books.
"Mary Oliver," she says. The first thing she’s said inside this house.
"Yes."
"Marie Howe."
"Yes."
"Wendell Berry."
I did not put the poetry where it could be seen. I put it at the end of the second shelf, two of them spine-in, because a man in my line of work does not advertise the books he reads when he cannot sleep. She found it in under a minute. Of course she did — she has been finding the parts of me I keep hidden since the night she crossed a room to do it. She turns to look at me across the room. “You read poetry in November,” she says. It is not a question.
"I do."
She turns back to the shelf for one more second, the way you turn back to a thing you have just understood, and then she moves on.
She walks to the kitchen table. The half-finished puzzle. Two thousand pieces. A map of the Greek islands. The Cyclades, the Dodecanese, Crete in the south. I have been working on it for three years, an hour a night when I am here, and it is half done because I have spent half of those hours putting pieces in and the other half taking them out and starting that section over because I am, in private, a man who doesn’t mind doing a thing badly the first time if it means I will do it well the second.
She studies the puzzle. She doesn’t touch it either.
She turns. She walks to the windowsill. The framed photograph. My mother, taken in 1986, the year beforeeverything. She’s twenty-eight years old. She’s laughing at something my father has said off-camera. The photograph is the only one I have of her in which she looks like she didn’t yet know what was coming. I keep it here because my mother doesn’t know about this house, and because the photograph is a version of her that nobody alive has seen for forty years, including her.
Maeve stops in front of the photograph.
She looks at it for a long time.
She turns. She comes back across the living room. She passes the bookshelves and the puzzle and the wood stove. She comes to the kitchen island where I am standing. She stops three feet away from me.
"Lex?"
"Yes."
"I have just walked through your interior."
"I know."
"Did you intend that?"
"No."
She doesn’t say anything else. She crosses to the wood stove and stands in front of it with her back to me, warming her hands. I stand at the kitchen island and watch the back of her, and I think, in a Greek I have not let myself think since the first time I saw her, in the language my mother taught me when I was four, the wordsmátia mou.
My eyes.
I do not say it. I have not earned it. I think it. Maeve doesn’t hear it. The air in this house, however, has heard it, and the air in this house is going to remember it for as long as I am alive.
? ? ?
My phone rings at 4:42 PM.
It is Nico. The number is the encrypted line. The line he uses when the call cannot be missed.
I take it on the screened porch. I close the slider behind me. The lake is gray. The wind has dropped. The porch is sixty-one degrees and falling.
