by Laura Gibson
“You can keep it then. And do this.” Cas pushed, nonchalant in his business offer. “Sell your own as Anna, and sell mine as Alice. I don’t want Anna.”
“I don’t think you heard me, I’m not gonna do it.” Anna’s glare deepened.
“I heard you.” Cas nodded, and leaned over, grabbing a folder that had been lying on the bed, “I just don’t believe you.” He flipped through some pages, “Still paying off that debt from the rehab clinic?”
Anna felt herself full on glare at him, “That’s not really any of your business.”
“You’re not a junkie anymore, are you?” Cas boldly surveyed her with the harsh eyes of a critic.
“I feel like you already know the answer to that.” Anna stared at him, she had spent a good deal of time covering that whole thing up. Being addicted to painkillers wasn’t something she was proud of. She didn’t even feel like the same person anymore.
“You’ve always been a fan of escapism?” Cas raised an eyebrow.
“I fractured a rib when I was sixteen, it was an accident and they gave me hydrocodone. Honest mistake.” Anna shrugged, “I don’t find it relevant.”
“Everything is relevant, Alice.” Cas drummed his fingers on his chin before leaning forward, “How would you like to make that part of you go away though? Really go away?”
Anna must have let something escape because then Casimir smiled.
“No more high school degenerates for you, Alice, you’ll be selling to the best of them. Senators, CEOs, anyone who is anyone.” Cas looked as content as the cat who got the canary.
“What’s my cut?” Anna swallowed, knowing this was a bad idea, knowing and doing it anyway. She’d be a junkie till the day she died.
“What do you want it to be?” Casimir Volkov replied, his blue eyes flashing with something like friendship.
Chapter Four
February 3rd, 2007
Charleston, West Virginia
Rhett
Jane was troubled. Rhett had sensed the coming melancholy for some time now but he had hoped that she would be able to pull herself out of this one on her own. He didn’t want to have to see her hospitalized again. That was heart breaking the first time, and he was afraid of what it would do to him the second time.
Rhett knew he couldn’t force Jane to live. He couldn’t make her be happy, but he hoped he could help. He had hoped that his love could prove her worth. But how did you prove someone’s worth when they already decided they had none? How did you make someone look in the mirror and acknowledge the fact that they were someone worth loving?
It was better when her mother was alive, but now that she was gone it seemed that Jane had fully given into the depression that hovered over that family. The family that Rhett loved almost as much as his own, or more.
Even as a child Jane was cursed with a despondent disposition, but Rhett loved her despite it. He saw the beauty in her, the parts that could make the earth shake and the world tremble with its passion. He hoped long ago that she could harness her internal power and become the force of nature she was created to be, but something always held her back. Like a dark cloud on the horizon that stopped someone from fully enjoying a beautiful afternoon. They would stand in the sun, but they wouldn’t feel its comforting warmth. They were merely waiting for the darkness to cover them once more.
Before he left for work that morning, he had gone to her running path and looked to see if he couldn’t find any trace of the missing woodchuck. It’s small corpse was a little ways off the path, having been torn into by wild animals and the remains left to decay out in the open. Surrounding the carrion, Rhett saw the unmistakable prints of a wolf. Rare in these parts, but not so much that he would find it unusual. A call to animal control let them know of the predator so close to suburbia and then he was off to work, deciding not to tell Jane about Alphie.
It would only make things worse. Bad news always seemed to do that. Predicted or unpredicted, it didn’t matter. Bad news sent her spiraling out of control, at least what little control she had.
Now Rhett was parked in the driveway to his small house that he shared with Jane and stared in at the box of dishes sitting by the door. With a sigh and a rub of his face, Rhett got out of the car and wondered what had set her off this time.
It was always something. Something a healthier person would see as innocuous, she would take as a terrible slight to her very character and spend the next few weeks getting over it.
Rhett knew she was getting worse, not better, but what was he supposed to do? If he moved on, she would have no one. She would have nothing and he would be left feeling more guilty than before. Right now he was tired, but he was doing the right thing, and that, more than anything else, propelled him forward.
Opening the door to the kitchen, Rhett was engulfed in the aroma of a dish he only got to enjoy every few years. The meal known as Pelmeni was something Jane’s mother had taught her to make before she passed away and Rhett would be lying if he didn’t say it wasn’t one of his favorite foods. But with the Pelmeni came the crash.
The truth was, Jane only made Pelmeni when she was feeling particularly manic, a kind of mania that she didn’t easily come down from. In a few days she would crash, and he would have to take time off work to help her get back on her feet.
Pelmeni was always the indicator. It reminded her of her mother and her brother and everything she was forced to leave behind when they fled their homeland.
“Smells good in here.” Rhett smiled at the woman he loved and tried not to think of the tragedy that was about to happen.
He often wondered if she knew. If she knew her own patterns or pitfalls, if she recognized what she was doing to herself, but he never asked. He was afraid of what asking would do to her.
“I realized I hadn’t made it in quite some time.” Jane was beaming with pride as she unlatched the locks on the bread maker, “I also have fresh bread.”
“I love it when you make Pelmeni.” Rhett came up behind her and put his hands on her hips, placing a soft kiss on the side of her neck.
Quickly Jane ducked away from him, embarrassed by the physical affection and Rhett had to swallow his sigh before she caught it. More than anything else, Jane hated to be touched. It was difficult for her to allow human contact and Rhett was almost certain that if they didn’t know each other as well as they did, she would never allow him to share the same bed.
“Well, its almost ready, so you can wait in the dining room.” Jane moved the main course onto a serving platter Rhett didn’t recognize and he frowned.
“Did you buy new dishes today?” He cleared his throat.
“Yes.” Jane sidestepped around him, avoiding eye contact now.
“How much money did you spend?” Rhett followed the line of questioning before he could stop himself. When she got into these moods their bank account always seemed a little more barren than before.
Jane flashed him a look that told him she felt bad about it. Rhett bit the inside of his cheek and decided not to push further. The fall was going to come regardless, but he’d rather not be the reason for it. Not tonight.
“It looks nice, sweetheart.” Rhett changed the subject and went into the dining room, waiting for her. Waiting for everything to be normal again.
“Did you do any painting today?” Rhett called from the dining room, examining the expensive looking china sitting before him. She had even gone as far as to get new water glasses to match and little tea cups. They didn’t even drink tea.
“Not today.” Jane called back, busying herself in the kitchen, “I decided to run errands instead since I wasted so much time earlier this week.”
She emerged from the kitchen with a plate of Pelmeni and a full bread basket. Rhett noted the bandage on her hand. “Did you hurt yourself today?”
Jane forced a laugh and set down the food, “Yeah, clumsy me, I didn’t use a hot plate and I burned myself.”
Rhett frowned, “Do you need someone to look at it?”<
br />
They both remembered the blister she had allowed to fester for a week before he finally forced her to go to the doctor, something she still denied needing even though the flesh had begun to rot. He supposed it was another part of her thinking she was worthless to the world. It wouldn’t matter if she allowed something to become infected because she didn’t matter.
“No.” Jane tried a playful frown, “It’s just a burn.”
Rhett raised an eyebrow but said nothing to the contrary. He wasn’t going to argue with her. Not on Pelmeni night.
Rhett cut into the bread covered meat and smiled, remembering the first time Jane tried to explain to him that Pelmeni was a type of dumpling. To him, dumplings had never come full of meat and not in a soup, but Jane was adamant, it was a dumpling.
They had even looked it up online and Jane crowed with satisfied laughter over the fact of being right.
“I think this is your best batch yet, honey.” Rhett nodded, going back for more only minutes after receiving his first helping.
Jane smiled at him from her spot at the table and he noted that she was barely touching her food.
“Is something wrong?” He asked, knowing that he had already asked her too many questions for her to respond well.
“Just not that hungry.” Jane made a face and pushed her plate away.
“It’s great though.” Rhett tried to prod her back into eating something.
Jane sighed and Rhett knew it was all over. He had lost and she was falling right then and there.
“I’m worried about my brother.”
Rhett swallowed, praying that it wouldn’t end badly this time. The last time she had said she was worried about someone was right before her mother died. It took everything Rhett had to pull her back from the cliff, and even then he knew her brother played a bigger role in her recovery than he did.
If she was worried about him now and something happened to him, Rhett wasn’t sure how Jane was going to take it. It could be that damned proverbial straw he knew was coming.
Aboard the Reliant
Kaliningrad, Russia
Kelly
They were still in port but Kelly wished they were far away from Kaliningrad and the man known as Casimir Volkov.
What did Casimir know? He wasn’t a part of Kelly’s life, he couldn’t make judgement calls like that. By refusing the job Kelly was doing him a favor, really. Kelly had no business making that kind of money. With a heavy sigh, Kelly wished for a second that he had taken Casimir up on his offer. He wouldn’t mind making that type of cash. It was there for the taking and the Lord only knew how much he really just wanted all of his financial problems to be over.
He was a Hill after all. Scraping by, everyone pitching in to pay the bills, and that was when his dad could hold a job longer than a month which had been a rarity since Kelly turned fifteen and was old enough to work as a grocery bagger. Tobias Hill had a hard childhood, his mother had told him, he deserved some slack. But Kelly wasn’t the forgiving type. You couldn’t wash away your troubles, and those that loved you shouldn’t let you either.
Love wasn’t something that should cover a multitude of wrong doings and then pretend that those selfish aspects about a person’s character were alright. That was called enabling and Kelly had sworn to never do that. He respected his father too much in the beginning to let it go and now he was too bitter to go back and really forgive him. Kelly knew that Anna was better off with her own mindset, kill or be killed.
“Forget them,” Anna had whispered harshly one night after Kelly had broken down and told her that he couldn’t watch his father destroy himself and watch his mother let him. “They’re not worth your time, Kelly, you’re so much better than that.”
In that moment, Kelly had wanted to believe her because he knew that she was the one with the highest probability of succeeding in life, the one with the most level of heads on her shoulders.
But he had still tried to change his parents. He tried desperately to make them see that what they were doing wasn’t healthy and it wasn’t right. Their self imposed ignorance was what drove him away. Now, they all still lived in the same house, but they were strangers.
Tobias spent most of his time in a bar downtown that seemed to not mind thta he didn’t have a penny to his name. And his mother did whatever it was that she found interesting, whatever she could do to forget the fact that Tobias was killing himself and her children blamed her for it.
Angry, Kelly rubbed his face and tried to look at the positives in his life. Were there any positives? He was supposed to be smart. Stupid smart. The kind of smart that important people kill for, but he didn’t know how to use it to his advantage. He didn’t know how to make people listen to him. That’s all he really wanted. He just wanted people to care about what he had to say.
Casimir Volkov cared, Kelly reminded himself with a snort. He cared so much he wanted to pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars to do whatever it was that he was offering.
Maybe it wasn’t the worst idea in the world, Kelly reasoned. How bad could it really be? Customer Relations? That didn’t sound too bad.
Feeling his chest tighten with anxiety, Kelly decided to go on deck to smoke before dinner, before anyone else had a chance to talk to him.
The air hadn’t changed at all since Kelly’s first attempted cigarette break of the day and he breathed it in heavily, feeling the foreign oxygen coat his lungs and cool him down. Life was getting far too complicated for a man like Kelly. Time was rough on him and he was only eighteen. He wasn’t optimistic about it, but he had thought that he had a little bit more living to do before he fucked everything up for good.
Footsteps walked up behind him and Kelly didn’t bother putting out his cigarette, he knew it was Ryan. What did Ryan care if he smoked or not? He always look down on Kelly no matter what. At the end of the day it mattered for shit.
“You seem to be smoking more lately.” Ryan pointed out, not really saying anything with his observation.
“Just a bad habit, I guess.” Kelly inhaled with a shrug and flicked the butt into the ocean.
“Have fun counting dead animals?” Ryan’s hands were in his pockets and Kelly stared at him, trying to figure just why Ryan was even bothering with a conversation. He was very much okay with the idea that they hated one another, wasn’t Ryan?
“Shoulda been there.” Kelly let the sentence tumble out of his mouth before he really had a chance to stop it, “Got offered a job.”
Kelly watched Ryan’s face spark with something that could be taken as jealousy. He ran a tan hand through golden curls and looked out into the harbor like he was thinking of something important.
“What kinda job?” Was the only question that followed his silent contemplation.
Kelly shrugged again, “I don’t know, something to do with customer relations or some sort of bullshit.”
“Wonder why he asked you.” Ryan’s words were not a question but a statement, a statement that Kelly could understand. There was no reason to offer Kelly a job, there never had been. He wasn’t reliable and he brought nothing to the table. He didn’t want to be his father, but it looked like that was how he was going to end up.
“Said he thought I was smart.” Kelly’s laughter was low and cynical, as if he didn’t need anymore reasons to hate himself.
“His brother is fucked.” Ryan seemed to agree with Kelly’s assessment of himself and moved the conversation forward.
“How do you mean?” Kelly thought of all the different insults Casimir had carelessly hurled in his brother’s direction.
“Like, he’s crazy.” Ryan laughed, “I think he has brain damage or something.”
Kelly found himself frowning at nothing in particular, he might have brain damage. The way Casimir talked about Mikhail it was real possibility. “Weird.”
“Yeah. Plus he does a shit ton of drugs.” Ryan’s eyes were wide as he stared at nothing, the surprise of his information playing out on his own face.
Ryan turned to Kelly, “So did you take it?”
Kelly swallowed, “The job?”
“Yeah, the job.” Ryan lifted his chin, studying his cousin with a critical eye.
“No.” Kelly shook his head, “I didn’t want it.”
Kelly saw the hunger in Ryan’s eyes, he was still jealous of the fact that Kelly had been offered the job, even if he had turned it down. Ryan still believed that whatever a Hill was offered, it should only be a Prescott’s leftovers. Not the other way around. Prescotts were kings and Hills were nothing, that was the way it had been his whole life. Why would anything change now?
It had clearly bothered Ryan though, to see Kelly getting offered something that he couldn’t have. It reminded him that he was human and that other humans make errors and forget who he is.
Kelly swallowed and wondered if he should light another cigarette.
“Did it pay a lot?” Ryan feigned interest in the job itself, when all he really wanted was to know whether or not Kelly turned down a good financial standing, something that would put him closer to being next to Ryan.
Kelly shrugged for the third time in their short conversation, “A decent amount, I guess.”
“Decent? What’s decent?” Ryan's nostrils flared with impatience and frustration.
“More than I make now.” Kelly wouldn’t give the satisfaction of information. It was his knowledge. Ryan didn’t need it.
“Talking to people who buy dead animals?” Ryan was suspicious of Kelly’s lack of participation.
“Guess so.” Kelly lit that second cigarette now and exhaled, feeling good about himself for a moment.
“Wonder why he didn’t talk to my dad about it, or me.” Ryan put his large hands on the rails and leaned back, his anxiety playing all over his features.
Kelly leaned on the rail as well and crossed one leg over the other, looking at Ryan and taking a drag, “I guess he did. Bill reccomended me.”
