I can tell by the change in her breathing, the way it slows and deepens, the slight heaviness of her against my side, that she has stopped holding anything up.
Her hand is resting on my chest, and I look at it in the dark, the plain gold band on her left hand catching what little light comes through the curtains from the city below, and I lie still, and I let her sleep.
I have spent thirty years building something.
Every decision I have made, every room I have walked into, every man I have trusted and every man I have not, every piece of the structure I inherited and the larger structure I built on top of it, all of it has been constructed by a man who told himself he was building for its own sake because there was no other reason that made sense to him.
I look at the ring on her hand.
I look at the ceiling.
Somewhere in this woman’s body, two children are growing that are going to come into a world I have spent thirty years making dangerous, and I’m going to spend whatever comes after makingit safe enough for them to exist in, which is a different project entirely from anything I have undertaken before.
I am aware, lying here in the dark with Elena’s hand on my chest and her breathing slow and her weight against my side, that I am not afraid of that project.
39
ELENA
Mara answersthe door in Danny’s borrowed robe with her left arm in a sling and Danny standing behind her in the kitchen holding a spatula with the expression of a man who has decided that feeding someone is the only useful thing he can do in a crisis.
“He’s made me four meals today,” she says, by way of greeting. “Four.”
“She keeps saying she isn’t hungry,” Danny says, without turning around. “She’s lying.”
I look at Mara. She looks at me. She’s pale still, moving carefully, but her eyes are doing the thing they do when she’s fully present and paying attention, and the relief of that, her standing in this doorway being herself, moves through me from somewhere behind my sternum.
“You told him,” I say.
She glances back at Danny. “I told him.”
“And?”
“And he cried,” she says, at a volume Danny can absolutely hear, “which was very inconvenient for both of us.”
Danny says something in response that makes her laugh, and she winces at the laugh. I reach out and squeeze her good hand, and she squeezes back, and we stand there for a moment in the doorway, saying nothing, which says everything.
My father is in the garden when I arrive in Queens.
Not doing anything, just sitting in the chair he moved outside sometime in autumn, wrapped in his coat, his face turned up toward the pale winter sun with his eyes closed. He hears the gate, opens his eyes, looks at me, and smiles.
He looks like himself again.
Not the tired, careful version of himself I’ve been visiting for months. The real one, the one with the warmth in his face and the straightness in his shoulders and the attention he has always given me, full and unhurried, like I’m the only thing in his line of sight worth looking at.
I sit on the step beside his chair, and he puts his hand on top of my head the way he did when I was small, and I let him.
“Tell me about him,” he says.
“Papa.”
“I have been patient,” he says. “Tell me.”
I look at the small garden, the bare winter beds, the fence that needs painting. “It started as an arrangement,” I say. “A solution to several problems at once. His and mine.” I pause. “I didn’t expect it to become what it became.”
“Which is what?”
I think about Roman on the couch, sayingI am in love with youwithout apology, without decoration, just the words placed between us, like something he had been carrying for a long time and had decided to put down. I think about his hand over mine in the car. His mouth on my forehead before he left the hospital. The plain gold band he slid onto my finger in a room full of men who looked like movie villains, and the steadiness of his hands when he did it.
