CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

The replacement car was a black sedan. The driver didn't ask any questions and, when the partition was raised without being asked, he did exactly the right thing. They sat down at the back and the city through the window was coming closer in a very particular way it must have been the way the city comes closer when it is the place you are returning to after having done something difficult piece by piece building up, until it is the complete and overwhelming fact of home.

Adrian actually had been talking even before the car came. And he was not talking in the way he usually talked, not in the complete precise information-organized sentences, but in the rather loose way of someone who, after being taken to an unexpected place in their own story is quite unexpectedly, finding that this place is accessible.

Back then he was twelve years old. February had been very cold in the Hudson Valley: three snow days during which the Westchester estate was covered with snow and the roads were closed, while outside the windows there was a kind of silence which was so complete that not even a city's silence could be compared to it. The household had boiled down to the bare necessities: warmth, food, and the certain kind of closeness that people experience when they are cooped up together and trying to make the best out of the situation.

"Marco had a library, " he said. "He has always had a library - the east wing, floor to ceiling, with a rolling ladder on a brass rail. He had been collecting since before he was married and the room smelled of paper and leather and the specific smell of books that have been read many times. He maintained a fire all through winter and there were chairs around it and it was the kind of room where you could disappear for an afternoon and nobody would be surprised if you were still there at midnight."

Aria shifted her body a bit and looked at his face. Under the moving light of the highway, he looked different than the way he looked in the penthouse, the reflection of the city moving on his face changing showing her different versions of a single person.

"I simply could not sleep, " he said. "I had been with the Morellis for maybe a year at that time. And so I was still I still had the bag packed, in a way. Not literally any more, but I hadn't fully arrived. I was still running on the belief that the only right thing to do when you get something nice was to not let yourself want it, because the very moment you want it is the very moment that it can be taken from you."

He was still for a moment. Aria was silent.

"I went to the library at four in the morning. I decided to get a book at random, since I couldn't force myself to read the ones I had. It was a history of Roman military campaigns not something I would have chosen on my own, just the thing I happened to find in the dark. I read the whole book before I even realized I had fallen asleep. It was about forty-five minutes and I woke up at nine in the morning and Marco was in the other chair.

How long was he there?" "I don't know. He had a book of his own and a cup of coffee that were still there and there was a cup of hot chocolate on the side table next to my chair that was still warm which meant he had not been there very long, but I have sometimes thought since that he might have been there for a while and refreshed it. He did not say." Adrian's jaw moved in the particular way it moved when something was affecting him more than he wanted to show. "He asked me what I thought of the book. I told him I did not understand why the Roman generals kept making the same tactical errors when the errors had already been demonstrated to be fatal. He said that was a very good question and we should discuss it."

"And did he know the answer?" A pause.

"He did not know a great deal about Roman military history, " Adrian said, and what was in his voice was so close to dry amusement that she kept perfectly still not to interrupt it. "He possessed the books. He was a fast reader. He assembled an explanation that was largely plausible and partially invented and delivered it with complete authority, and I was a twelve-year-old that was impressed and did not think to verify it." "What did he say about the errors?”

"He pointed out that sometimes generals who had been through multiple battles ended up mistakenly equating their personal survival with being invincible. The fact that they had won before, they could not see or understand how the new situation was different from the old ones. He claimed that it was the very nature of experienced persons to err in such a way. Not that they were ignorant but rather their mistake was that they wrongly applied the knowledge that they had gained with great effort." A short silence. "For something he was inventing more or less, it was pretty clever, actually."

"Perhaps he wasn't entirely inventing it, " Aria suggested.

"Perhaps not." After a short silence, he said, "He also mentioned that Hannibal's war elephants were trained to sense treachery. Still, to this day, I have not been able to find any evidence of this. Most probably, it was a fabrication."

Aria stiffened her lips. "I am quite sure that if anything, it was Hannibal's elephants that had the ability to detect treachery."

"You do not have a single point to justify your opinion, do you?"

"I do not. But it does make the story more appealing, does it not?"

He met her eyes. Her face expressed something that she had been longing for and trying to conceal all this time it was not a mask of friendliness; it was not an attempt to create a friendly impression; it was simply a demonstration of the real thing, as natural and spontaneous as the change of one's facial expression when it is not under conscious control.

"Give me one more, " she said.

"Another tale."

"I know that you still have at least four lying inside of you. I can read you."

"You really cannot read me like that."

"That is why I have so much information about you, " she replied. "More than you really like to admit. One more story."

He was silent for a few seconds. The city was getting nearer, they could see it through the window. Then, with the distinctive gesture of someone deciding to share a long-guarded secret, not because it was dangerous but because it simply had never seemed like the right time to give, he shared another story with her.

The second one was about being fifteen and finding out that the suit Marco had bought him for a school event was three inches too short in the legs because he had grown four inches in four months and nobody had noticed, and Elena had taken apart the hem and re-sewn it at eleven-thirty the night before the event with the focused concentration of a woman who was not going to let a suit be the thing that stood between her son and his dignity.

"She stayed up, " Aria said.

"She stayed up, " he confirmed. "She even told me that when she was sewing, the suit with the extra length looked better anyway, that I was going to be very tall, and that tall people have a responsibility to use their height for good since it would be such a pity to waste it."

"She was right."

"She is right about most things, " he said. "She is even right about things she has no idea of, which I have always found a bit scary."

Aria smiled. Her laughter echoed throughout the car; it was a warm, unguarded laugh, and she heard him, next to her, create a brief auditory expression that was deep and slightly impressive. It was the sort of sound produced by someone who was laughable with the person's own laughter, loved it and was changed, but still did not know what to do about it.

She thought you laughed. Almost. You came very close to laughing.

She thought: heard it completely sooner or later. I am going to give it time and one of these days I will be hearing it, and I think it will be worth all the things that have been before it first.

The vehicle came to the city. The chauffeur steered the jam on the bridge with the calm control of one who has been doing this for years. The penthouse came into sight, the doorman, and the routine of coming home.

And she thought: home. I have even begun to refer to it as home.

She thought this in a hushed and hesitant manner, just like you think of something you are hardly willing to say out loud. She put it together with the ochre note and the yogurt and the replaced chair in the folder she had called: things that are changing whether or not I am ready for them.

She thought that probably this is the only truthful category for any of it.