"I am so sorry, Marcus. What is her name?”
"Anya."
"I will be thinking about her."
He looks up at me with the look of a man who has been told a small kindness by another parent in a hallway. The look of a man who is being held together by very little.
"Thank you, Mrs. Callahan. That means more than you know."
I nod. I move on. I get the coffee. I file Marcus Andreev under the column in my brain that is ‘the people in this building I might trust.’ He’s been in that column since my first week in this building. He’s in it more firmly today.
? ? ?
Afternoon.
Lex drives Nora and me to Eleni Konstantinos's apartment.
The apartment is on the third floor of a building on Beacon Street that has been quietly Konstantinos-owned since 1987. The hallway smells like cardamom, lemon, and candle wax.
Eleni opens the door before Lex knocks. She’s been waiting at the door. She’s in a navy dress and small gold earrings, and her hair is in a precise gray bun. Her face, when she opens the door, is the face of a Greek mother who has been told what every Greek mother lives in hope of being told and is now, this afternoon, going to meet the proof of it.
She doesn’t speak immediately.
She looks at Lex. Her eyes go wet. She doesn’t let the tears spill. She nods at him once.
Then she drops to her knees in the foyer to be at Nora's eye level.
Nora considers her gravely. Brontos is under one arm. Nora's free hand is in mine. She’s in the red wool coat I bought her in October, and her hair is in two small, uneven braids that Lex did this morning at the kitchen table while I was on a call. She is, I realize as Eleni studies her, the smallest possible human in the foyer of this apartment.
Eleni says, "Hello, ‘koukla mou.’"
Nora says, "That is not English."
"It is Greek. It means ‘doll.’ It is what we call a small girl who is loved."
Nora considers this. She looks at Lex. She looks back at Eleni. She says, "Are you Daddy's mama?”
Eleni's face does what Lex's face has been doing for two weeks; the architecture under the skin is rearranging in real time.
Eleni doesn’t let it crack. She’s sixty-eight years old and has buried a husband and a child, and she’s the discipline of awoman who has decided what she will and will not do in front of a granddaughter she’s meeting for the first time.
"Yes," she says. "I am. I am your ‘yia-yia.’"
"‘Yia-yia’," Nora repeats. The Greek lands on her tongue with the small, careful seriousness she brings to all new words. "‘Yia-yia.’"
"That is exactly right."
Nora hands Eleni Brontos.
"You can hold him," she says.
Eleni takes the elephant in both hands. She holds him like a woman holds a christening gown. Her hands are steady. Her face is doing what it is doing.
"He’s a fine elephant," she tells Nora.
"He’s missing one eye. And his trunk is mostly stuffing."
"Then he’s lived an interesting life."
