Dennis Lehane - Moonlight Mile

She fingered the cross a couple of times, pushing it up the table a few inches.

“What do the inscriptions mean, do you know? I can’t read Russian.”

“Even if you could,” I said, “they’re not in Russian. That’s Latin.”

“Fair enough. You know any Latin?”

“I took four years of it in high school but all I retained is about enough to read a building foundation.”

“So, no idea?”

I held it in my hand. “A little. The one up top reads Jesus, Son of God, defeats .”

She frowned.

I shrugged and racked my brain a bit. “No, wait. Not defeats . Crushes. No. Wait. Conquers. That’s it. Jesus, Son of God, conquers. ”

“What about the bottom one?”

“Something about a skull and paradise.”

“That’s the best you can do?”

“I took my last Latin class ten years before you were born, kid. My best ain’t bad.”

She poured herself more tea. She held the cup in both hands and blew on it. She took a tentative sip and then placed the cup back down on the table. She sat back in her chair, her eyes on me, as calm as ever, this serious child, this marvel of self-possession.

“It doesn’t look like much, does it?”

“It’s the history that gives it its worth. Or maybe just someone deciding it’s worth something, like gold.”

“I never understood that mentality,” she said.

“Me, either.”

“I can tell you, though, that Kirill’s already lost too much face over this to let any of us live. Certainly not me.”

“You been reading the papers lately?”

She looked over the teacup at me and shook her head.

“Kirill’s hitting his own product too much. Or he’s just having a full-on mental breakdown. He might wrap one of his cars around a pole at a hundred miles an hour before he ever gets around to you.”

“So, I’ll just wait for that day.” She grimaced at me. “And even if, let’s say, everything goes according to this fairy-tale scenario that Yefim-Yefim, yes?-outlined for you?”

“Yefim, yeah.”

“So, okay. We live, Sophie lives, your family lives. What about her?” She pointed down the table where Claire sat, strapped in her car seat, wearing a tiny pink knit hoodie and matching pink sweatpants, her eyes closed to slits. “They take her into their home, Kirill and Violeta, and pretty soon she’s not just the idea of a baby. She’s an actual baby. She cries at inconvenient times, she screams, she howls when her diaper’s wet, and she shrieks-I mean, like an electrified banshee-when you change her top because she hates having anything covering her face and you can’t remove a top without covering her face, at least not the ones I have on hand. So they take her, these psychotic children in middle-aged bodies, and let’s say they get past all the inconveniences and total lack of sleep that go with having a baby in the house, twenty-four-seven. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. You don’t think Kirill, who’s now lost massive face, power, and respect because he got his own black-market baby stolen from him and he couldn’t get her back-you’re telling me he’s not going to resent that child? Kirill, who, as you said, is having some sort of psychotic meltdown lately? He’s not going to come home some night, amped up on Polish vodka and Mexican cocaine, and bludgeon that baby when she has the temerity to cry because she’s hungry?” Amanda threw back her entire cup of tea like it was a shot of whiskey. “Do you really think I’m giving my baby back to them ?”

“It’s not your baby.”

“That social security card you saw yesterday? That wasn’t mine. That was hers. I already have one with the same last name. She’s mine.”

“You kidnapped her.”

“And you kidnapped me.”

She’d never raised her voice, but the walls seemed to shake just the same. Her lips trembled, her eyes grew red, tremors raced through her hands. Outside of highly controlled fury, I’d never seen her show emotion.

I shook my head.

“Yes, you did, Patrick. Yes, you did.” She sucked wet air through her nostrils and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “Who were you to say where my home was? Dorchester was just where I was born. I was Helene’s spawn, but I was Jack and Tricia Doyle’s child. You know what I remember about that time when I was so-called kidnapped ? For seven perfect months, I didn’t feel nervous or anxious. I didn’t have nightmares. I wasn’t sick, because when you leave a house where your mother never cleans and there’s roaches and roach bacteria everywhere and rotten food fermenting in the sink-when you leave a place like that, you tend to feel better. I ate three times a day. I played with Tricia and our dog. After dinner, every night, they dressed me for bed and then brought me to a chair by the fireplace-seven o’clock on the dot-and they read to me.” She looked down at the table for a moment, nodding to herself in such a way I doubted she knew she was doing it. She looked up. “And then you came. Two weeks after you returned me to Dorchester, and a DSS caseworker had cleared Helene to raise me, you know what happened at seven o’clock?”

I said nothing.

“Helene had spent the day drinking because she got stood up on a date the night before. She put me to bed at five o’clock because she was too far in the bag to deal with me anymore. And then at seven o’clock-on the dot-she came into my bedroom to apologize for being such a bad mother, feeling all sorry for herself and confusing that with empathy for another human being. And while she was apologizing, she puked all over me.”

Amanda reached out and pulled the small teapot to her. She poured the rest of it into her cup. She didn’t have to blow on it as much this time.

“I’m-”

“Don’t dare say you’re sorry, Patrick. Spare me that, please.”

A long, dead minute passed.

“You ever see them anymore?” I asked eventually. “The Doyles?”

“They’re prohibited from having any contact with me. It’s a provision of their probation.”

“But you know where they are.”

She looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “Tricia did one year in jail and got another fifteen probation. Jack got out two years ago, after ten years in prison for reading me bedtime stories and giving me proper nutrition. They’re still together. You believe that? She waited for him.” She looked at me with shiny, defiant eyes. “They live in North Carolina now, just outside Chapel Hill.” She pulled her hair from its ponytail and shook it violently until it hung straight down beside her face again. From back in its shroud, her eyes found me again. “Why’d you do it?”

“Bring you home?”

“Bring me back.”

“It was a case of situational ethics versus societal ones, I guess. I took society’s side.”

“Lucky me.”

“I don’t know that I’d do any differently now,” I said. “You want me to feel guilty and I do, but that doesn’t mean I was wrong. If you keep Claire, trust me, you’ll do things that make her hate you, but you’ll do them because you’ll believe it’s for her own good. Every time you say no to her, for example. And sometimes you’ll feel bad about it. But that’s an emotional response, not a rational one. Rationally, I know damn well I don’t want to live in a world where people can just pluck a child out of a family they deem bad and raise a stolen child as they see fit.”

“Why not? That’s what the Department of Children and Families does. That’s what the government does all the time when they take kids away from bad parents.”

“After due process, though. After checks and balances and diligent investigation of the charges. You, on the other hand? One day your uncle Lionel snapped when your mother left you in the sun all afternoon because she was drunk. She took you home when she should have taken you to an emergency room, and Lionel came up to deal with your cries. He called a cop who was known for kidnapping kids he felt lived in unsafe environments, and they kidnapped you. No due process for your mother-”