—
They spent the next few minutes discussing Izzy’s plans for moving Preston’s rehabilitation. Nikki had researched a few options online, and tried to get her aunt to consider different scenarios—in case Preston didn’t recover as quickly as Izzy hoped. But with the immediate danger passed, her aunt didn’t seem interested in revisiting the fear of the past two days.
“You’re so much like your mother,” said Izzy, her gaze soft. “If you could only see how alike you two are.”
“That’s a nice way of saying irrationally stubborn,” Nikki said.
Izzy laughed.
“No. I mean—practical, logistical. And clever enough to bury the pain. Clever enough to distract us. To keep us from the truth. Beatrice hid inside her games, her intrigues…so that we wouldn’t see her grieve.”
“I saw her grieve,” Nikki said.
She would never forget the howling, the rage, the fierce isolation.
If the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness!
“Too late, the dam finally broke,” Izzy said. “It had to, didn’t it? And when she lost Adriano…oh, Adriano. Beautiful boy!”
Her eyelids fluttered and closed, her right hand moving in the air as if to music, before coming to rest on her heart. She stayed like that for several breaths, then shook her head.
Her eyes glistened as she examined her cup.
“Beatrice always covered her pain,” she said. “Always. You know, she was only seven when our mother left.”
Nikki nodded. She’d heard the story. As a child it induced terror torealize that a mother could simply walk away from her children and never return.
“I was four years old. I cried for days,” Izzy continued. “But Beatrice seemed to switch off. She was a Stoic. I think she was trying to protect me. She invented a secret language just for us, so our father wouldn’t know what we were saying.”
The secret language of Beatrice and Izzy had forever infuriated the young Nikki.
“She taught Adriano,” Nikki said. “But she wouldn’t teach Gianni or me. We went crazy, trying to figure it out.”
“Of course I can teach you—it isn’t that complicated.” Izzy gave a sad smile. “That was your mother: a different language for each person in her life. She and I wrote all our letters in code. Never stopped. It got me into trouble once—in the nineteen eighties. In Prague. I was going to perform Rachmaninoff. They were inspecting my luggage and found a letter from Beatrice. Fortunately, it wasn’t the nuclear launch codes. Just an update on you kids.”
Izzy chuckled.
Nikki’s relationship with her mother felt unfinished, as if she’d saved her thoughts and questions for some later time, when the wounds had healed and each could finally be what the other needed. That moment never arrived.
“When Durant said Mom was something special,” Nikki said, “do you think it had anything to do with languages and codes—her cryptology job in the navy?”
“I wish I knew,” Izzy said with a sigh. “Oh, but she had a gift for languages! Always brilliant at French and mathematics. I remember when Beatrice became fascinated by the Cyrillic alphabet. One of our father’s colleagues was an expat from Moscow—helped her learn Russian. Set her up with a pen pal: his nephew in the USSR. I was so jealous whenever she got one of those letters—the thin paper and those stamps! Of course, with McCarthy and the Red Scare, it wasn’t the best time to be friends with a Russian. But they were just kids.”
She sipped her tea. “Oh, it’s gone cold.”
—
They made their way back up to Preston’s room and were there when he returned from his scan. He’d shed his earlier exuberance, but gave a tired smile.
“You both look so concerned,” he said. “ ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ ”
After his rally, his energy and attention faded and he slept. A woman from social services visited and discussed his move to a rehabilitation facility.
At Nikki’s urging, Izzy took a cab home for a rest and shower.
—
At 15:45, Nikki received a text from Ethan with the name and address of a restaurant. He wrote,I’ve done your bidding, she-who-must-not-be-resisted. Eight-o-clock.
