The kitchen window is dark now. Whoever was awake at two has gone up to bed, and the house sits in the last of the night looking exactly like what it is, a fortress that grew a family, stone and timber with bicycles in the grass. Somewhere behind those walls she's sleeping. For Twelve weeks I have been eliminating the rot from her life. I stand in the cold looking at a dark window and I finally let myself ask the question I have been outrunning across two continents.
If the work is done, what am I now?
The Ghost had an answer. The Ghost was the work, and when the work ended, he dissolved until the next deposit, a rumor between jobs. But I gave the Ghost to her on a hillside in Russia,standing on the grass where my mother's kitchen used to be, and the man left over doesn't dissolve.
The sky is going gray in the east. In an hour the kitchen will light up again, and Saoirse Orlova will start the daily routines, and the house will begin its enormous, ordinary noise. I know every beat of it now, I lived inside it for ten minutes and I have been homesick for it ever since.
There are things a man should be able to say when he walks through a door like that one, and I'm still learning the words. But soon. For the first time in twenty years, I have somewhere to be.
I look at the dark window a moment longer.
"Soon," I tell her, quietly, in Russian, across two hundred meters and twelve weeks and everything I haven't earned yet.
Then I go, and it occurs to me somewhere in the dark between the trees and the car that this is the last time I will ever leave this place unseen.
The next time I go to that house, I'm going to the front door.
Iris
There's a picture in my hand and I can't put it down.
I've been trying for three days. I set it on my nightstand and take it back before the lamp goes off. I prop it against the sugar jar while I make tea and then pick it up again before the kettle finishes, because apparently even the sugar jar can't be trusted with it. It lives in my cardigan pocket now.
It's not even a good picture. Twelve weeks and three days of person, rendered in gray static, a little bean of a human with a nose that the sonographer swore was a nose and that I privately think might be a smudge. The women of the house passed it around the kitchen like a relic. Ma held it the longest and said nothing at all, just pressed it flat against her heart and said a silent prayer before reluctantly handing it back to me.
My brothers know now. We told them after the scan, once there was a picture to show them of their niece or nephew. Killian stared at the grainy image for a full minute and then announced, hoarsely, that the baby had my chin, which is not information a twelve-week scan contains. Aidan started a list of names and was banned from the list by unanimous vote before he reached the Cs. Connor hugged me so carefully, you'd think I was made of glass. Rafferty asked, once, quietly, whether there was anyone he needed to find.
I said no, and he looked at me for a long moment and let it go, which cost him something, and I love him for paying it.
Liam said almost nothing. That's the part I keep returning to. Liam, who watches the house even when he's watching the television, who has spent the last few days rebuilding the estate's security from the wiring up for reasons nobody will explain to me, took the scan picture in his big careful hands, looked at it, looked at me, and said, "Right." Just that.Right. And then he kissed the top of my head like he did when I was seven and went out to the garage. Grace watched him go with an expression I couldn't read, which frightened me more than shouting would have.
So that's where we are. Saturday morning, half ten, the kitchen briefly mine because Ma is with Tanya, helping with the newest member of the family. I'm at the counter with a cup of tea going cold and the photograph propped against the teapot where I can see it, and I'm talking to it quietly, because that's a thing I do now.
"Your grandmother thinks I don't know she's knitting," I tell the grainy bean. "Everyone in this house thinks I don't know things. It's genuinely insulting."
The bean declines to comment. It's very like its father that way.
And there it is, the thought I ration. I allow myself thoughts about Yakob in small amounts, the way you'd take something strong for pain, because if I let it run loose it goes everywhere. This picture is the only thing in the world that is his and mine together. Not a memory, which fades and edits itself. A thing. Gray and white and real, printed on glossy paper. Proof of everything that happened. Proof that he walked away a lifetime ago and left something of himself behind that no amount of time can take back.
Someone knocks on the front door.
I straighten up so fast my tea slops onto the counter.
Nobody ever knocks. The front door of the Orlov estate sits behind a wall, a gate, a camera system my brother has spent the last few days turning into something out of a space program, and a rotating cast of large men with earpieces.
Guests are announced by radio before their car finishes the drive. Deliveries go to the gatehouse. The priest calls ahead. In twenty-seven years I have heard that knocker used maybe a dozen times, and at least four of those were Rafferty locked out in just his socks.
The knock comes again. Unhurried. The sound of a man with nowhere else he intends to be.
I'm still staring down the hall when Liam appears at the other end of it. He's come from the study, in his shirtsleeves, and he isn't hurrying either. That's the thing that turns my heart over before anything else does. My eldest brother heard an unannounced knock at his front door, and he is walking toward it like a man expecting the post.
He stops at the mouth of the hall. He looks at me. There's something working behind his face, something he's holding back with determination, and underneath it, so faint I might be inventing it, the ghost of the smile he used to get when we were small and he knew where the Christmas presents were hidden.
"It's for you," Liam says.
I don't remember crossing the hall. I know I do it, because the door gets closer, and Liam swings it open just as I reach it. Some distant sensible region of my brain observes that I'm still holding the photograph, that I should put it in my pocket, that I should check my hair, that I should assemble my face into something that isn’t desperate hope. I don't do any of it.
Yakob is standing on the step.
