Page 51 of Night of Shadows
"It is not."
"Brontos saw."
"Brontos is a forgiving witness."
She nods, satisfied. She picks up another rock.
Behind me on the dock I hear Maeve set down the coffee. She’s sitting on the cedar boards with her legs crossed. The light off the lake comes up under her chin and through the dark auburn of her hair, and for the third time this trip I am inside the eight months of memory I have been not-allowing-myself-to-be-inside-of, which is the gala bar in 2022, the green dress, the light coming through her hair the same way the light is coming through it now.
I watch her instead of Nora for a long second.
She catches me. She doesn’t look away. She does what she does, which is to hold my eyes for one beat and then turn slightly away with the smallest possible smile, and the smallest possible smile is doing more damage to me than any of last night's words.
Nora throws her second rock. It also lands in the dirt.
"Better," she informs me.
"Considerably better," I say.
She throws nineteen rocks in twenty-two minutes.
Two of them reach the water. Both barely. One sinks immediately. One bounces once before sinking. The bounce is, in Nora's experience, the most miraculous thing that has happened in the calendar year. She turns to me with her face wide open and yells, "DAD!"
She stops.
Her mouth is still in the shape of the word.
She had not meant to say it. She’s not, in two and a half weeks, called me anything. She’s called me ‘the friend.’ She’s called me ‘Lex’ once, in the foyer, when Maeve introduced us. She’s, I am realizing now and the realization is taking the air out of my chest in a way Maeve will tell me about later, been working on the math herself.
She closes her mouth. She looks at me. She looks at the rock. She looks at Maeve on the dock.
Maeve has gone perfectly still.
Nora opens her mouth. "It bounced," she says, in a smaller voice.
"It did," I say. The voice that comes out of my throat is not the voice I expected.
"Did you see it bounce?"
"I saw it bounce."
She holds my eyes for two seconds. The negotiation that is happening behind her face is the kind of negotiation a child does when she’s discovered a word in her own mouth before she’s decided what to do with it. She’s not going to use it again today. She’s filing it. She’s putting it on the shelf where she puts the words she’s still working out.
She picks up another rock.
"This one," she says, "is going to be the best."
She throws it. It lands in the dirt.
"That," she pronounces, "was a practice rock."
Behind me I hear Maeve laugh. The laugh is short. The laugh is not the laugh from this morning at the kitchen sink. It is a laugh I have not heard from her before, which is the laugh of a woman who has just watched her three-year-old daughter come within one syllable of saying ‘Dad’ and is processing the information by laughing because the alternative is crying on a public dock.
I do not turn around.
? ? ?
Nora naps from 12:45 to 2:10.
