Thresholds

by Kate Canterbary

  Andy glanced over at me with a bright smile. "Precious, isn't she?" she said as I leaned closer to hear, nodding in agreement. I didn't have another response. This wasn't the time to mention I was simultaneously terrified that I'd accidentally manhandle our hypothetical future child and wondering when we could get to work on making that child. That, and it was too fucking loud in here for a conversation.

  The room was ten miles past out of control and closing in on mayhem. I couldn't believe Will tolerated this ruckus. I wanted to get in the middle to manage this situation like one of my properties. Everyone needed a task. Something to do. Something to keep them busy because there was no reason for them to be hovering over the newborn.

  "She's going to be a towhead, just like Abby," she continued.

  I nodded again as I stared into her dark eyes. I could drown in those eyes, and I had, more times than I could recount. Andy was home to me. My quiet in a noisy world. My softness when everything was sharp edges and right angles.

  "We should go," I said, my eyes dropping to her lips.

  "Yeah," she replied, mirroring my gaze. "Let them settle in. We'll be seeing plenty of Annabelle soon."

  We pushed through the hive of new baby excitement but not before several conversations with my siblings and Shannon's in-laws. They all wanted to discuss the series of events that brought us here tonight and the surprise arrival of the newest member of our tribe.

  When we finally reached Shannon's side, she beckoned me closer and said, "You've been quiet."

  I nodded—that was all I could fucking do tonight—and ran my finger over Annabelle's downy white-blonde hair. "A lot on my mind," I said.

  "Me too," she said with a watery laugh. "You should get out of here. It might not look like it, but I have this situation under control. It helps that we have a handful of doctors in the family now."

  "You always have it under control," I said. I leaned forward, folding her into an awkward one-armed hug while also holding myself away to keep from smothering the baby.

  When I stepped back, Andy took my place. "You know this isn't a race, right?" she asked. "You don't have to show us all up by popping out five kids before most of us have one."

  I turned to stare at her, at once thrilled and confused by her words.

  "Go home, drink a lot of wine, and enjoy the freedom of being childless," Shannon said. "While you can."

  We made our way out of the hospital and onto the streets. Light, fluffy snow was falling and the air was frigid. The city was calm, almost oddly so. Gone were the ever-present honking horns and the roar of engines, and in their place was a quiet peace that I rarely found here.

  But I wasn't in the mood for peaceful. There was too much on my mind, too many questions in need of answers, and a part of me craved the chaos of rush hour traffic.

  "Let's walk," Andy said, gesturing in the general direction of our apartment. She held her hand out to me, and I took it. I'd always take it.

  Andy was quiet, too. Her long, long hair spilled out of her beanie and her shoulders were drawn up tight to ward off the cold. She stared at the sidewalk and the falling snow, even when I gazed at her for full minutes while we made our way to the North End and up Hanover Street. She knew I was watching, too.

  "Quite the night," I said, starved for words. Even the most banal of them.

  "Quite," she replied, catching my eye with a quick smile. "Annabelle really is a precious baby. Just adorable."

  She turned her face to the sky and snowflakes gathered on her cheeks, her eyelashes, her lips. I watched those tiny crystals land and melt. Just like the moments passing me by, they were here one second and vapor the next.

  "Do you want this?" I asked, running my fingers through my hair. It was damp with snow but I hardly noticed. "All of this? The crazy holiday gatherings and the babies and everything? Do you want it?"

  Andy stopped and stepped in front of me, taking my hands in hers. "Why are you asking me this?"

  "Because—fuck, Andy," I stammered. "Because I want to be married to you."

  Her gaze snapped to mine and her lips parted. "Patrick, you say this as if I don't already know. We've been engaged for thirteen months. What is happening right now?"

  "I want to be married to you," I repeated, a bit more impatiently than necessary. "I know I haven't done any of this right. The proposal—"

  "When you rolled over in bed one morning and said, 'Would you just marry me already?'"

  "Yeah, that wasn't my most eloquent moment," I admitted, shaking my head. "It wasn't what you deserved and—"

  "Would you stop it?" Andy paced away from me. "I deserve someone who loves me as I am. Who adores my raw, imperfect form. That's all I need, and it's all I want. I don't know where you got the idea that eloquence was a requirement."

  "What about Maine?" I asked, staring while she continued up the street.

  "Irrelevant," she called over her shoulder.

  "It wasn't irrelevant, Andy," I yelled, my words echoing off the buildings around us. "It was fucking brutal."

  She stopped, pivoting to face me. "It was brutal. I'll give you that," she conceded, throwing her hands up. "I'm sad. I'm disappointed. I'm confused. My mother said a lot of things that were difficult to hear."

  "And you're wondering whether she's right about any of it," I said.

  "That's what you think?" she asked, a laugh twisting through her words.

  Then she laughed for a full minute. Maybe longer. I wasn't sure because each ripple of laughter hit me like a confusing punch to the gut.

  "Help me out, please," I said. "I have no idea what part of this conversation is amusing."

  "I needed that," she said, brushing tears from her cheeks. "I don't take my cues on marriage or monogamy from anyone but myself. If I didn't want that with you, if I didn't believe in it, I never would've said yes or accepted this." She held up her gloved left hand and wiggled her ring finger. "Now, tell me what's really going on."

  I marched toward her, hating the distance between us, but the ground was slick and I lost my footing. I went down like rhinoceros, a clumsy, fumbling mess. Andy approached me, careful to avoid the iciest patches, and extended her hand. I shuffled to my knees but didn't stand. Not yet.

  "I want to grow old with you," I said, staring into her eyes. "I want you to remodel our place because I bought the apartment across the hall, and you're better at reengineering spaces than I am. I want to share every sunset with you, and every sunrise. I want to restore old homes with you. I can't remember how to do it alone anymore. I want to have entire conversations without speaking a single word. I want to let you drive me mad with that goddamn 'hm.' I want to fuck you in dressing rooms, and anywhere else you'll have me. I want to marvel at your knee socks every day. I want to host parties with you because you love them more than I hate them. I want to have a family with you even though that scares the shit out of me. I want to be the best decision you ever made. I want another ring on your finger and one on mine. I want you to be my wife, Andy, and I don't want to wait one more minute."

  "Hmmm," she murmured, and it killed me. It killed me because that little sound meant yes, no, maybe, and a million other things, but more than any of that, it meant she wasn't giving me a complete answer when I wanted it the most. She winded her way around thoughts, weaving them together slowly, precisely, and never at the pace I wanted. "You bought the apartment across the hall?"

  I blinked up her. "Yes," I said with a fuck-ton of hesitance.

  Andy shook some snowflakes from my hair. "That will be a fun project," she said.

  "Will that be our only project?" I asked.

  She urged me up, her hands gripping my forearms. "Of course not," she said.

  "Give me a date, Kitten." I glanced away, barking out a laugh. "I'd suggest we fly to Vegas tonight but I know you want the whole big traditional thing.”

  “Not necessarily,” she said, shaking her head.

  I reached for her waist, dragging her against me. "Don't you dare lie t
o me. I've seen your Pinterest boards."

  "When?" she cried. "How?"

  "I look at your phone when you're in the bathroom," I confessed. My thumb passed over the band and stone under her glove. "How do you think I picked out this ring?"

  "You really need to think about your stalker tendencies. Lingerie shops. Pinterest boards. It's getting out of hand."

  I shrugged. "Will taught me that trick."

  "That explains a lot," she murmured.

  "Let me tell you what matters to me. I want you happy and I want you to be my wife. Everything else is process. I care only about the product."

  Andy laughed. "I was expecting a hard sell for Vegas."

  "Like I've said ninety-four times tonight, I want to be married to you," I said. "You can have any kind of wedding you'd like. You can also have a flight to Vegas tonight."

  Andy tilted her head to the side, her eyes twinkling as a small, secretive smile pulled at her lips. "What if we did both?"

  Chapter Seventeen

  Wes

  It wasn't the worst of times but this sure as shit wasn't the best of times.

  In the best column, I was listing the nun's habit I nicked out of a countryside convent last night. No one fucked with nuns. Most people avoided eye contact with them altogether. Bad memories of wooden rulers and forced recitation of multiplication tables. This vestment was keeping me off the radar and doing a sensational job of concealing both my beard and my injuries.

  The convent also yielded a pair of granny glasses, tattered scarves, and a small purse loaded with supplies to treat my injuries. Gauze, alcohol swabs, antibacterial ointment, an old bottle of penicillin, a sewing kit, and a pair of needle-nose pliers.

  That was where the best column ended.

  As far as the worst of times went, getting shot was at the top of the list. There was a bullet lodged in my flank and I'd been bleeding, slow and steady, for hours. A cold sweat covered my body, my heart was wobbling in my chest, and I could only see straight if I squinted. That was fucking unpleasant but my only objective was getting to the port.

  I'd spent the night on the run, zigzagging and backtracking to shake the secret police from my tail, and I didn't have the time to dig that son of a bitch out of my soft tissue. There was also the matter of my broken arm and the electrical current burns on my legs but I could manage those. The gunshot wound though, that thing was going to turn septic in a hot minute.

  If those issues weren't enough to earn the distinction of Really Fucking Bad, I had a few more lined up. My CIA handlers had no idea where I was. I hadn't seen my partner Veronica in two weeks, and I suspected she was dead or close to it. My local liaisons were dead, both executed in front of me.

  A hostile foreign government had discovered that I'd been spying on them for a wee bit of time. The same hostile foreign government was pissed that I didn't fold under their charming interrogation techniques. I could only imagine they regarded my exit from their off-book detention facility—and all the guards I took out in the process—as an unwanted aggravation.

  Based on the activity I'd observed as I made my way north toward the Barents Sea, that government had dispatched entire armies to root me out. They intended to find me and make an international example. Regardless of whether they succeeded at nailing my nuts to the wall, they'd also plan some primetime retaliation.

  I went on squinting at the road ahead, breathing slowly and worrying the rosary beads between my fingers to displace some of the pain streaking through my body. If I could get to the port, I could get home.

  I walked with purpose, careful to keep my eyes down and my steps confident. I was playing the part of a local, one who wouldn't normally draw the attention of the heavily armed law enforcement agents on every corner.

  It wasn't supposed to go down this way. I figured that was how all agents prefaced their debriefs of operations gone bad. I wouldn't know. My operations never went bad.

  Until now.

  I'd been working this assignment for almost two years. Two years of cohabitation and marital bliss with a woman. Even if that woman was also a highly skilled operative, it was one hell of a long-running hetero con. Two years of chipping away at Moscow's society circles, playing the part of the eccentric antiquities dealer who also trafficked in weapons of war. Two years of planting seeds and watching them germinate.

  There was no reason for this operation to fall apart weeks before we were due to get out of town. Our work was airtight and the information we'd gathered was solid gold. There were bumps in the road, for sure, but that was the way with every hop. This hop had been one of the good ones. Difficult, exhausting, grueling—but one of the good ones, until I woke up in a dirt-floored dungeon with my hands and feet shackled to an ancient stone wall.

  I stifled a laugh at that. My father liked to say that if you thought an operation was going well, you weren't paying attention.

  I had paid attention. I knew this operation, every corner and seam of it.

  If I made it home, I was certain he'd tell me I hadn't.

  A large family came around the corner, and I spared them a warm glance. "God be with you," I said in Russian, affecting my most provincial accent. Nuns didn't rock the upper-crust city accent I'd employed during my time here.

  They nodded, mumbling the blessing back to me. I hunched into my habit, hoping to obscure some of my height. Nuns weren't six-three.

  My thumb and forefinger rolled to another bead as the pain of bone-on-bone radiated up my arm and into my shoulder. I was furious about that. The motherfucker who broke it didn't know what the hell he was doing. He just wailed on me with a lead pipe as if that was going to yield any actionable information. Talk about amateur hour. I needed the use of both arms right now, and I didn't have it because some foot soldier with anger issues didn't like it when I told him his mother was bad in bed.

  I pressed the pad of my thumb into a rosary bead as a gust of nausea threatened to knock me over. I continued walking, my gaze trained on the stories-high cargo ships and cranes looming tall over Kola Bay. I was almost there, and breathed a small sigh of relief.

  A liquefied natural gas tanker was leaving from Murmansk this morning, one with a crew that knew how to look the other way for the right price. The tanker was set to sail around Scandinavia to the Atlantic, and make several stops along the east coast of North America. If I could get on that tanker, I could send word to my handlers. They needed to pull their operatives out of the country and turn down the volume on current assignments, and prepare for the disproportionate response headed their way.

  I picked up my pace as I marched through the rows and lanes of shipping containers. Unsurprisingly, I was the only nun in sight, a spectacle in a sea of metal and machinery. The roughnecks and longshoremen eyed me as I passed, and I offered the sign of the cross in response. Something about that gesture, coupled with my rosary beads and exaggerated hunch, earned tolerant nods from the men.

  When I reached the far edge of the port, I lifted my arm in greeting to the quartermaster. He eyed me with an appropriate amount of suspicion as I moved toward him. From the habit's deep pockets, I retrieved a small coin purse. It was lined with enough cash to ensure passage to North America, and a little more to keep the questions at a minimum.

  No, I hadn't robbed the convent. Even spies had standards. Most of the cash was courtesy of the secret police I took down on my way out of their black site last night. At the off chance the bills were tagged and traceable, I turned them over in small towns throughout the region. Now, all the money was clean and I was a matter of steps away from surviving the worst of this ordeal.

  "A beautiful day the Lord has granted us," I said to him, that provincial accent heavier than ever. I worried my beads, forcing his attention there rather than my face. "Do you have room for one more?"

  He regarded me for a long minute in which I debated whether I could strangle him without arousing the notice of the other dockworkers and then stow away aboard the tanker. The short answer was
yes, I could do that, but no, it wasn't a wise move.

  "Room," he repeated, pulling the beanie from his head and wiping his hands on the wool. "Headed for America, you know. I have space for one more on deck five, but only deck five. Nothing less."

  In other words, he wanted at least five thousand American dollars.

  I held out the coin purse. "You're a true servant of our heavenly Father, my child." If I hadn't been holding back a roar of pain, I would've laughed at myself. I figured I'd laugh later, when a steady stream of morphine was coursing through my veins and my humerus bone wasn't trying to tear through my skin. I'd laugh about this whole fucking thing.

  Thankfully, the quartermaster wasn't listening to a word I said. He was concerned only with thumbing through the money. He mouthed the numbers as he counted his head bobbing as he neared five thousand. His eyes lit up when he hit six, and then popped right out of his greedy skull when he closed in on seven.

  Every payoff was associated with a moment, a beat where the deal could progress as planned or everything could go pear-shaped. This was that moment. The quartermaster was gripping the cash and sizing me up, debating whether he could shake me down or hold me hostage for more. If I knew his type, I knew he was also thinking about dragging a blade across my throat and throwing me overboard once we left port.

  And there was nothing I could do about it. Couldn't reason my way around it. Couldn't walk away. I had to wait it out.

  He gestured to the medallions hanging from the rosary beads. "Saint Nicholas," he said, pinching one of the charms between his grubby fingers. "Watches over the seafarers, yeah?"

  "The seafarers, yes, of course," I replied. I shook the beads at him. "I've been calling upon Saint Nicholas for safe passage."

  He unzipped his coat and peeled back several layers of thermal shirts to reveal his bare chest. He pointed to an old tattoo. "Saint Nicholas." He tipped his head to the gangplank. "Be well, Sister."