He went to the stove and wrapped his arms around her. “Elv,” he said, his voice broken in a way that surprised her.
“I don’t want her to have a father with a fatal flaw,” Elv said reasonably.
“Got it.”
“Seriously.”
HE SERIOUSLY TRIED. He stopped going to bars, stopped seeing old friends with whom he had only one thing in common. But one day Elv went down to the laundry room and there he was with his brother. He and Michael had only one thing in common as well. She knew what they were doing down there.
“You’re kidding me,” she said.
“It’s not what you think. I’m just lending him some money because he happens to be broke. Anyway, he’s still my brother, right?”
Elv had other things to think about. Natalia had sent two tiny, beautiful sweaters, one white and one yellow, both made of fine merino wool, dotted with mother-of-pearl buttons. Soon after, Natalia sent a blanket she’d knitted out of a marmalade-colored cashmere. She was knitting like a madwoman, out on the bench under the chestnut tree, in the red parlor during a rainy afternoon, in her bedroom late at night. It had been so long since there had been a baby to be overjoyed about. Elv sent photos of herself pregnant and glowing. They wrote back and forth, considering names. Elv wanted a strong name, but something unique. Natalia suggested choosing a name that would work for the rest of a child’s life, not too girlish, but not too grown-up. The baby would be born in the summer, and Elv vowed they would come to Paris soon after. Maybe then Claire could forgive her.
Natalia had written in one of her letters that she was worried for Claire. She wrote that she had seen a demon in the hallway hovering near Claire’s bedroom and perhaps that was the cause of Claire’s great unhappiness. It sounded silly. The superstitions of an old woman with poor eyesight. Other people might have thought she was crazy, but Madame Cohen had believed her, and Elv did as well. She herself had often spied something in her own kitchen when she came for a glass of water in the middle of the night. It was probably a moth, like the onerous thing her grandmother said Madame Cohen had caught with flypaper. These stories made Elv nervous. She feared bad luck might be tapping at her window. She decided to set out salt in the corners of the room, as her grandmother said Madame Cohen advised. She dragged over a chair in order to reach the cabinet above the refrigerator. That was where the salt was kept, but she found more than that. She found everything he was hiding from her. She took it all down the hall to the incinerator.
She heard him rumbling around in the kitchen that night. But he never said a word about what she had done. He took a shower and came to bed. If he was back to his King Kong habit, he’d be sick and she’d know and they’d have to deal with it together.
“You wouldn’t lie to me, right?” Elv asked him. It was snowing. All the lights were turned off, but the world outside was bright.
He took up more than his share of the bed, but Elv didn’t care.
“Define lie,” he said.
They both laughed.
“I’m not stupid,” Lorry told her. “I heard what you said.”
“Repeat it.”
“No fatal flaws.”
“And you’ll tell me the truth.”
“I’m madly in love with you.”
“Very good,” Elv said. “I knew you were smart.”
When she woke the next morning, he was gone. She stayed where she was. She felt her love for him in a place that was so deep she was sure most people wouldn’t understand it. By the time it had grown light, he was back. He shook the snow off, took off his clothes, got back in beside her. He had brought her a bunch of roses wrapped in brown paper, the kind they sold outside the market. She told herself that was the reason he had left their bed, to walk through the snow in the pale light, to bring her roses, despite the weather, to come back to her when she needed him most.
HE WAS LATE one Friday night. It was cold, the middle of February, and she was three months pregnant. They had painted the second bedroom a creamy yellow that reminded Elv of the heirloom tomatoes her mother used to have in the garden. She remembered all of their names: Livingston’s Golden Queen, Jubilees, yellow Brandywine. Elv had found a cookbook in a junk shop that included the first written recipe for tomato sauce, published in Naples in 1692, a Spanish-style concoction made with thyme. Her mother would have gotten a kick out of that. Elv was fixing the sauce for dinner, to be served with homemade pasta. She had been surprised to discover she could cook; it came to her naturally. She added tomatoes to just about everything. It had become a joke between her and Lorry—her new addiction, her fatal flaw. “Oh no, baby,” she teased him and said what she always told him, “that would be you.” She thought it was sunny enough on their little terrace to start a container garden in the spring; tomatoes and nothing else. She’d eaten so many already that she wondered if their baby would have red hair, if she’d have a preference for that color and if they’d have to repaint the nursery.
It was 1:00 A.M., then it was 2:00. Elv didn’t eat the dinner she’d prepared. Her nerves were shot. She wished she still smoked. She wished she could sleep. She wished he hadn’t left in the first place, kissing her, telling her he’d be back for supper. Lorry didn’t answer his cell phone, so she bundled up and went down to the closest bar, a place called MacDougal’s that was open after hours. No one had seen him, so she went back home. Snow had begun to fall. It was a bleak, cold winter. The sky was always black. The roads were probably bad. She called around and woke up several of his friends, men she didn’t like or trust. Most of them didn’t answer the phone. The one who did told her not to worry.