Chapter 2 - THE GHOST IN THE KITCHEN
“Where did you get this?”
Gabriel’s voice didn't carry. It didn't need to. It had that specific, localized pressure of a diving bell descending into deep water; everyone in a thirty-foot radius felt their ears pop.
I didn't move.
The tray of linens in the pantry alcove seemed miles away now—a different life, lived by a different girl who didn't know what a Caruso looked like when he stopped being a politician and started being a predator.
“It was in a box,” I said.
My mouth felt as dry as a brick.
“A box,” Gabriel repeated. He took two steps toward me. The crowd parted before him like water before the bow of a tugboat. Nobody wanted to be within three yards of his shadow when the temperature dropped like that. “In Poughkeepsie? In a thrift store on Main Street? Or did you pull it out of the rubble behind the old river terminal after the fire in ninety-six?”
“It was in my mother’s trunk,” I said.
The lie tasted like copper.
It wasn't my mother’s trunk. My mother had died of lung cancer in a trailer park outside of Binghamton with forty-two dollars in a coffee tin and a stack of overdue electric bills.
The box had come from an attic in Beacon. A small, water-stained cardboard carton left behind by a girl who had gone out for cigarettes in a snowstorm twenty-eight years ago and never came back to claim her shoes.
Gabriel stopped three feet from me.
Up close, he smelled of cold tobacco and expensive laundry soap. His eyes weren't gray; they were the color of lake ice three days before it breaks—dark, mottled with green, and deep enough to drown a team of horses.
“Nora,” he said, and my real name—not the shortened version I used on applications, but the full three syllables my grandmother used when she thought I was stealing apples—sounded like a curse word in his mouth. “Nora what?”
“Nora Sullivan,” I said.
“Sullivan,” he murmured. He tasted the name the way a chemist tests an unknown compound on the tip of a tongue. “There hasn't been a Sullivan in the district since old Pat Sullivan went down with the Mabel G. in seventy-eight. You aren't from Beacon.”
“No.”
“Then you’re from the south side of the river.”
“Newburgh,” I admitted.
He looked down at Lucy, who had stopped dancing and was now standing by his knee, staring up at the silver medal in his fist with the simple, greedy curiosity of a child who thinks all shiny things belong in a pocket.
“She has Nadia’s eyes,” Gabriel said.
It wasn't a question. It was a statement of geological fact, like saying the Palisades were made of trap rock.
“A lot of kids have brown eyes,” I whispered.
“Not like that,” Gabriel said. He crouched down—his knees cracking with a dry, small sound in the silence of the hall—so that his face was level with Lucy’s. “Nadia had a habit of looking at people as if she were trying to remember where she’d buried their grandfather. Your girl does the exact same thing.”
“She’s five,” I said, my voice rising toward a crack. “She’s just a kid. She doesn't know anything about ninety-four.”
“Ninety-four was a bad year for the family,” Gabriel said softly. He didn't take his eyes off Lucy’s face. He reached out with one massive, calloused index finger and touched the blue cotton strap of her dress where I’d mended it with gray thread because I didn't have any blue left. “Nadia ran off with a boy who drove an ice cream truck and smelled like diesel. My father had him put on a freight car heading north toward Montreal before the snow melted. Nadia came back three days later without the boy and without the medal.”
He stood up.
He looked at Julian, who was trembling so hard his silver-plated tray was rattling like a tin cup.
“Clear the room,” Gabriel said.
“Sir?” Julian choked out. “The board members—the European delegates are—ī”
“I said clear the room, Julian.”
Gabriel didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. Within forty seconds, the string quartet had packed their violins into their velvet cases with the frantic speed of people fleeing a sinking ship. The assemblymen drifted toward the side exits like smoke through a screen door. The women in silk and diamonds didn't walk; they vanished, their heels clicking on the marble until the heavy oak doors swung shut and the great bolt dropped into place with a hollow thud.
We were alone in the South Saloon.
May you like
Just Gabriel, the rain against the glass, the dead smell of burnt wax from fifty chandelier candles, and my daughter holding the hem of her mismatched dress.
“Nora,” Gabriel said, turning to face me with the medal still clutched in his palm. “You didn't come here to fold napkins. Did you?”
