“I appreciate what you guys did,” she said.
Jon shrugged, and put his instruments back in the bag. “Are you hungry?”
“Not really,” she said. “And I thought I had to pee, but apparently I just did,” she said, pointing at the catheter bag dangling off to the side, attached to her waist by a belt. She cringed to think of him inserting it. I know people medicine too.
His face flushed crimson. “It was either that or let you soil yourself. Sorry.” They shared another awkward moment as he leaned in and lifted the sheet to remove it. Turning his head to the side, he reached his hand toward the connected tube and pulled quickly, and she gasped in surprise as she felt a stinging pain.
“Sorry again,” he said, but was already placing the catheter into a sand-colored plastic bowl.
“I owe you. I probably would have died out there.” Cocoa purred in agreement.
Jon shrugged again. He didn’t take compliments any better than Ana did, which didn’t surprise her. “I’ll be back in a bit,” he said awkwardly, and was off before she could say anything else.
She hoped he meant it. Ana didn’t want to be alone, even if it meant the company of someone as sour as Jon St. Andrews.
Chapter Thirty-Five: Augustus
Augustus still remembered the day that Ekatherina Vasilyeva showed up at the Deschanel Media Group. Back then, it was still called just Deschanel, and they were preparing to sign a deal expanding the magazine beyond New Orleans. It was 1972, and everything had been so much simpler.
Colin Sullivan, of Sullivan and Associates, had sent her over. An attorney friend of Colin’s, Joseph Connelly, came to Colin asking for help in placing her. Colin arranged the meeting between Joseph and Augustus.
“She came to us as an au pair, but she’s awful with children,” Joseph had said. “With people in general, actually. I think she signed up for this because it’s what all her friends were doing, but it’s really not her thing.”
“Why should I take her?” Augustus had laughed. How did he get talked into relieving another man’s burden?
“Because she is good at something. Math. Accounting, specifically. I put her through business school.“
“You paid for this Russian immigrant to go to business school?” Augustus was incredulous.
“Well, yes,” Joseph had said, nonplussed. “It seemed like the right thing to do for a girl with such talent. Colin says you’re hiring for a junior accountant. I realize you have your reservations, but I can’t recommend her enough, Augustus. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”
Augustus did not just simply take Connelly’s word for it. He called the business school and asked for her records. Back then, things like that were commonplace. Our very best student, they had said. Very quiet girl. Never any trouble. We just hope she can find a company to sponsor her. Would be such a shame if she was sent back to the USSR.
Augustus was just twenty-two at the time. He was the head of his own, expanding, company. His ambitions stretched beyond anything his imagination could yet conjure. But he was still young, and it was this youth that Joseph’s words appealed to. Augustus knew what it was like to have obstacles to overcome on the way to the realization of a dream.
He had hired her without meeting her. When she showed up for her first day, he mistook her for a lost child. She was a tiny thing, with pale blonde hair and big blue eyes. She did not look a day over fifteen, but was nearing her twenty-second birthday, according to the new hire paperwork.
“Pleasure to meet you Ekatherina,” he said, taking her hand.
“Please, call me Catherine,” she replied in a tiny voice. Her accent was strong, but her English was crisp. She’s been preparing for this for years, Joseph had said.
He sent her off to work with the accounting department, and mentally moved on to more pressing matters. It was a pleasant surprise when, relatively soon into her employment, he caught wind of the uproar she was causing. Almost immediately, to the angst of his tenured accountants, she was making suggestions. Proposals that saved the company money, but also ideas on how to wisely expand, and where to invest.
The CFO came to Augustus, complaining. “She is impossible to work with! She has an idea, and expects us all to listen, but if someone else wants to present, she just zones out. You need to talk to her!”
But Augustus challenged, “You need to find a way to work with her, Stephen. Her ideas are better than yours, and that’s just the way it is.”
Catherine was the hardest worker at Deschanel, leaving as late as Augustus each night. He grew used to seeing her in the evenings, and often escorted her out well past dark. Though he asked about her personal life, she would say very little. She didn’t want to talk about her family, or her life back in the USSR.
But Augustus did not get this far by letting things go, so he did his own research.
Catherine had been born Ekatherina Aleksandrovna Vasilyeva, in the middle of the communist reign of the USSR. She applied to be an au pair on the pretense of creating a better life for herself, but her real goal was much larger: to make enough money to send for her family; her mother Elena, father Aleksandr, and her two younger siblings Aleksandr Aleksandrovich and Anasofiya.
Augustus was fascinated by this small, quiet girl who had bravely ventured across the sea, on her own accord, to start a new life. He appreciated and identified with her ambition, but could not penetrate beneath Catherine’s façade sufficiently to relate on a personal level. She was well-guarded, living in fear of being sent back; of being a failure.
I know that feeling as well. Everyone, even my brother Charles, expected me to fail. But I didn’t. You won’t either. He wanted to reassure her, but every time he worked up the courage, there were others around. While Augustus was most confident when in his business element, he respected that she would not want everyone to know her business.
One evening, after everyone else had left, he found her in the office she shared with the other junior accountants, alone and crying. She wiped her face when she saw Augustus standing in the door, but he had already seen it and was determined to fix whatever was amiss.
“What is wrong?” He asked her, several times, before she would answer.
She held up a tiny gold cross that was broken into two pieces. “It was a gift from my Mammochka. It’s all I have.”
He took it from her and studied it. The gold was of inferior quality, and the chain flimsy. He was not surprised it broke, only that it hadn’t sooner.
“I can fix it,” he said, and slipped it into his pocket. Her large blue eyes blinked in surprise at his kindness.
Several days later, he returned it to her. Her eyes marveled, a hint of moisture giving them a nearly luminescent quality. Augustus had not simply repaired the heirloom, he had improved it. In addition to augmenting with extra gold, in the center now sat several brilliant emeralds.
“Your birthstone,” he explained.
“This is too much,” she half-heartedly protested. Tears forged a wet path over her porcelain cheeks to her brilliant smile. She clutched the cross in her hand, the way a child would hold a beloved toy.
“I want to help you send for your family, Catherine.”
Her smile faded and her eyes narrowed. “I’m saving my money for it. I can do it.”
“But I can do it faster.” He didn’t know anything about romance; nothing about sensitivity, nor the subtle language of love. He only knew he was drawn to her. “Marry me, and I’ll do anything for you.”
It took months to convince her, but the following year she accepted his proposal. They were married in a small ceremony at Ophélie. He gave her a third of the company, and made her the CFO, despite objections from his peers in the business community that she was too inexperienced, and that he was thinking with his heart.
Unfortunately, getting Catherine’s family to the States was harder than Augustus imagined. A year into their marriage they had made little progress, and tragedy struck. Catherine’s young sister, Anasofi
ya, died from pneumonia complications, at the age of fourteen. Catherine was heartbroken, feeling that she had abandoned her family, while she enjoyed her new, opulent life.
Soon after, Catherine became pregnant. There was no question that they would name their daughter after Catherine’s late sister, but that offered Catherine little comfort. Her spirit was broken; she was ashamed of her decision to come to the United States, and blamed herself for Anasofiya’s death. She stopped taking care of herself, and the last few weeks of her pregnancy she was ordered to bed rest. She refused.
“If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for our daughter!” He was angry; he could not understand how she could completely shut down…how she could shut him out.
“I don’t want my child born into this world!” She would wander the house in her nightgown, wailing, crying, and cursing the gods. Her blonde hair was a rat’s nest, for she had refused bathing or brushing of any kind. “Rather she be with God than live like this!”
Augustus’ younger sisters, Evangeline and Colleen, answered his call for help. Both had been born with special abilities, like most Deschanels. Both were healers.
“This isn’t a medical issue,” Colleen tried to explain. Both women did their utmost to comfort him, but the situation was beyond hope. “She’s given up on life, Augustus. We can’t fix this.”
“Maybe seeing her daughter will snap her out of it,” Evangeline offered, but behind her words was unmasked skepticism.
“How can you not fix this?” He demanded. “You’re supposed to be healers! You’re Deschanels!”
Colleen shook her head sadly. “It doesn’t work that way. We can’t cure afflictions of the mind and the heart. That’s not magic; that’s a miracle.”
And though Augustus had a skill of his own–the skill of persuasion–he could not pull his wife back to the living either. He endured slowly watching her lose her mind, spiraling further into the hopeless recesses of melancholia.
Catherine died, from severe toxemia a few days after Ana was born. She suffered in silence, said nothing, and died alone. She didn’t want me to call my sisters. She didn’t want to be fixed. She was punishing herself.
Augustus planned Ana’s 16th birthday for weeks. He knew what he wanted to give her, but he was nervous about presenting a gift that had once held such significance. It represented the chance he once took, and the dreadful results of that choice.
He wondered if Catherine would have wanted him to pass it on to their daughter. Whenever Ana asked about her mother, Augustus would say that Catherine was so excited about becoming a mother; that she would sing to Ana in her womb, and make plans for their life once she was born. But none of this was true.
Catherine had cursed her daughter’s existence and threatened to throw herself down the stairs, to end it all. She once tried to stab her belly with a steak knife, and another time he caught her reading the warnings on a bottle of drain cleaner. How much of it had been the melancholy, and how much the real Catherine, he would never know. The truth was that he had never known his wife at all. He had chosen her because of a few admirable traits. In retrospect, it felt more like a business transaction.
That decision affected Ana even today. Ana was smart and focused like her mother, but she also inherited the same darkness that swallowed Catherine whole.
When she was little, he cast himself as the overprotective father, never letting her out of his sight. But as she grew older, he found himself actually encouraging her to go out with friends, including boys. He often found her in her room, writing. Why aren’t you out with your friends? He would ask. She would only shrug, and go back to composing her thoughts.
He wanted to plan something large and exciting for her 16th birthday, but she flatly refused to take part in it. “Dinner, just the two of us would be nice,” was her emphatic request. His guilt for spending so much time at work overpowered his desire to force her into something more social. And dinner would be the perfect chance to give her this gift that he had agonized over.
“I want to give you something,” he began that evening, once food had been served. She was looking at him with her mother’s big blue eyes. He could see both sides of Catherine reflected there; both the light and the darkness. “It was your mother’s.”
An unusual smile spread across Ana’s face as she awaited the gift. He pulled it from his pocket, remembering both the sad look on Catherine’s face when she handed to him, broken, and the light in her eyes when he brought it back, better than before.
Ana walked around to his side of the table and lifted her hair up so he could help her put it on. He fastened the clasp, then kissed the top of her head. She surprised him by turning, wrapping her arms around his neck, and squeezing tightly. It was sweetly reminiscent of when she had been very little.
“This is the best gift anyone has ever given me,” she whispered. She was crying; he could feel the hot tears on the side of his neck. His eyes welled up at seeing this unusual display of emotion from his daughter.
“She would have wanted you to have it, my dear. She loved you so much. Happy birthday, Anasofiya.”
He would give her another gift, though it was one she would never know about. The gift of believing that her mother had loved her with her whole heart and had wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of her life, side by side, with her daughter. He would give this to Ana because to do otherwise would be cruel. And in giving her this memory, he would be doing himself a kindness as well. I will share Catherine as I wanted her to be, not the way she was. We can both remember her thus.
He could not allow himself to dwell on how the melancholia devoured his wife’s soul; her very will to live. He would not compare the circumstances, because then he might find that Ana’s trip to Maine was just another version of Catherine’s wandering the halls in her nightgown.
Chapter Thirty-Six: Oz
“Fuck me sideways, its cold here!” Nicolas exclaimed. On the pier, several heads turned to look, although he was oblivious as always. It wasn’t the first time he had remarked on the climate. He had been griping ever since they stepped off the plane an hour earlier.
“What were you expecting?” Oz asked, his hands deep in the pockets of his new coat. It most certainly was cold. It was never this cold in New Orleans; they were still wearing shorts this time of year. Prior to this, he had never owned anything heavier than a windbreaker. Their first stop had been to a sports equipment store near the airport, to purchase the proper outerwear.
“Do you even know where we are going?” Oz inquired.
“Ozzy, when I need you to know, I’ll tell you,” Nicolas said.
“So…you’re saying you have no idea.”
Nicolas scoffed and looked at him peripherally, trying not to move too much in the cold. “Of course I have an idea. I just don’t know exactly how the idea is going to play out. Humans are a fascinating species like that,” he said with sarcasm.
“Right. Well, should we get something for breakfast then, while the forces of the universes align, or whatever it is that we are waiting for while standing here freezing our asses off?”
They ducked inside the lounge of a hotel near the waterfront and both of their moods improved instantly with the rush of warmth.
On the plane ride to Portland, Nicolas hadn’t said a word. He sat in his seat fidgeting the whole way. First he chewed his nails, then the sides of his mouth, then started with an obnoxious clucking sound effects, prompting the guy in front of them to ask Nicolas to shut up. Your mom likes it when I do that, Nicolas said, but the man in front already had his headset back on, and Nicolas was back to fidgeting with his pen. His focus was all over the place.
On the drive into town, he started going on about the price of gas. Oz let him ramble, nodding occasionally.
This was a good thing for Oz, whose thoughts were also all over the place. Having Nicolas distracted meant that he could disappear into his head without drawing attention to it.
He was thinking about Ana; goin
g further back than that night in Treme. She had always been the girl that all the guys were in love with, but completely afraid of. He saw the haunting intensity behind her eyes, the unspoken thoughts behind her lips, the way she would gaze off into thoughts shared with no one. She was prettier than his Adrienne, but with Adrienne you almost always knew where you stood, and more importantly, where she stood. Only in her more desperate moments did his wife retreat inside herself and shut the world out. Ana always had what seemed like a permanent fortress guarding her thoughts. Some men found that sexy, but Oz found it intolerable.
Nicolas said the two women were a lot alike. Oz couldn’t see it, and Nicolas speculated that was because Oz refused to see Adrienne without taking off the rose-colored glasses first. Oz told him to look in a mirror. Nicolas insisted that he was well aware of Ana’s flaws and he loved her for those, not in spite of them.
“I don’t ignore Adrienne’s issues, if that’s what you mean,” Oz had said defensively.
“Ignore, overlook, pretend they don’t exist. Semantics, Ozzy. When you see Adrienne, you see her potential, and that makes her beautiful to you. You see who she would be if she could get over her shit. When I see Ana, I see that who she is now is who she will always be, and that is what makes her beautiful to me.”
Nicolas was wrong. He did love Adrienne for her faults. They didn’t suddenly spring up overnight. He had loved her for over ten years now, after knowing her since the day she was born. She was the same person now as then, and if he hadn’t loved her for who she was, then he would have walked away a long time ago.
“Love,” he reaffirmed.
“Addiction,” was Nicolas’ answering retort.
Oz realized there was a young woman sitting at the table with them, in the restaurant they had ducked into. Blonde, plain, wearing a nice grey wool sweater, jeans, and riding boots. He had no idea how or when she joined them, but Nicolas had her engaged in conversation.
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