by Megan Hart
“The cable doesn’t work.” A low, husky voice came from the corner of the kitchen. “I guess your brother didn’t pay the bill on time.”
Nikolai had talked to his mother but hadn’t seen her in close to eight years. She had some silver in her hair and a few more lines around her eyes, but the persona . . . that hadn’t changed. Never would, as far as Nikolai was concerned—not unless she had a reason to become someone different, and why would she? Who she was had worked so well for her, all these years.
“Mom. Hi.” Awkwardly, Niko hugged his mother while trying not to drop the egg sandwich. It was a familiar feeling—most interactions with his mother felt like he was performing a strange sort of dance while struggling not to break something. “When did you get in?”
“About half an hour ago. I went first to see Babulya at the home, but she was sleeping. They said I could visit her later. But I suppose that’s good, yes? Means she’s not actively dying anymore. But what do I know? I only took care of people who’d gone under the knife. If I wanted to understand geriatric medicine, I’d have gone to work in a nursing home.”
He kept himself from flinching at the harshness of her words, a habit that hadn’t changed no matter how long it had been since he’d seen her.
“Come close to me. Give your mother a hug.” She opened her arms. Galina had never even visited Russia, but her own voice had always echoed Babulya’s. Turns of phrases, some pronunciations. She sounded like her mother now, but Nikolai knew she was putting it on like she would have tried on a hat.
Despite this, obediently he went. Also an old habit. She smelled the same. Cigarettes, an undertone of cloying perfume, the mints she ate constantly to cover up the smell of smoker’s breath. She felt smaller, though. More delicate. The bones of her shoulder blades jutted, sharp under his touch.
“Good, you found the food. I got here so early, but you weren’t awake yet. I thought I’d surprise you with breakfast.”
“Well, that’s sure different, isn’t it?” The words came out of him before he knew it but, once spoken, couldn’t be taken back.
His mother shrugged and took a seat on the couch, tucking her feet beneath her. “So I wasn’t there to make you breakfast before you went to school, the way Sally Harrison was. I worked, Nikolai. I had to work to support you and your brother. This is an old discussion, isn’t it? Surely you’re too old now to hold on to those resentments anymore.”
His mother had done her share of twelve-step programs, of meditation, of meetings and assessments, and of making amends. She’d disappeared more than once to “communes” and had done a stint or two in both in- and outpatient mental-health facilities. Nikolai had never believed she was crazy, but she’d used it as an excuse for bad behavior more than once.
“Yeah. Sorry. It’s good to see you.” He bit into the sandwich, chewing quickly as he sat in the chair opposite her.
“You’ve grown so handsome. Such a handsome man. You look a lot like your father. Ilya, he’s your Babulya all through, but I thought you favored me, at least when you were a little boy. But now I see your father in you.” She shook a finger at him, but smiled. “He was a handsome man, too.”
Steven Stern had died in a car accident when Galina was pregnant with Niko. He’d seen pictures of his father but had never thought there was much of a resemblance. It wasn’t worth an argument, though.
With a sigh, Galina waved the remote and turned off the TV. “Nothing. Good eggs?”
“Yeah. Great.” His stomach had stopped protesting.
“Next time, I’ll have potatoes to make for the hash browns. Delicious for breakfast. Onions, garlic, the works.”
“Where did you learn to cook like this?” He licked a smear of butter from his fingers.
His mother waved the remote again. “I learned how to make them at the diner.”
“When did you work at a diner?” Niko asked, wary and aware of Galina’s propensity for telling stories that weren’t always true.
“Since last year.” She tossed the remote onto the coffee table.
He’d thought she would say the job had been from her youth, but this revelation totally stumped him. “You’re not working as an RN anymore?”
She looked up from fixing the stack of magazines that had gone askew when she hit them with the remote. “I lost my job at the hospital when they were bought out by another larger one and merged. They moved all the day-surgery patients to the other location. I didn’t want to work that far away. I would have needed a car.”
“Mom . . . what happened to your car?” Nikolai studied her, but her expression gave away nothing.
Galina stacked the magazines precisely, tapping the top of the pile before sitting back on the couch with a satisfied smile. “I didn’t need a car when I could walk to work. And I didn’t have my license anymore. So why have a car? It’s just an expense I don’t need. Upkeep, gas, the insurance. Too much.”
“Why did you lose your license?” This had all the telltale signs of a typical Galina misadventure.
She gave him a long, steady look. “I didn’t lose it. I just forgot to renew it, so it lapsed, and by the time I realized it, I didn’t feel like going through all the hoops to get it back, when I didn’t need it.”
“But . . . you drove here,” he pointed out.
Galina shrugged. “Borrowed the car from a friend.”
His mother had always had her share of “friends.” Nikolai didn’t ask any more questions. The less he knew, the better.
“Well . . . thanks for breakfast.”
She got up to ruffle his hair exactly as she’d done when he was a kid. “Too skinny. You don’t eat enough. Too much time spent in the desert. Not enough time spent with a woman. Unless there is a girl? Oh, is there a nice Jewish girl, ready to make you a dozen babies?”
“Mom. Please.” Nikolai made a face. It wasn’t any more fun to have his mother quizzing him about his love life now than it had been when he was a teenager. There’d been women, of course. Nobody for a while. Nobody permanent.
“At least your brother, he got married. No babies.” She frowned. “I’d be a wonderful grandmother, you know. If either of you gave me the chance. And your Babulya, she would love to have more babies to love. You should think about it, before she’s gone.”
This, coming from the woman who’d told both her sons that if they knocked up any girls, they’d better run away from home, because she wasn’t going to take care of any bastards. Maybe the fact Niko had actually run away from home without getting anyone pregnant had changed her mind. Maybe time had mellowed her. Maybe she was just being Galina.
“Sorry, but I don’t plan on having kids anytime soon. Maybe never.”
Galina put a hand over her heart and shook her head, closing her eyes with a frown. She didn’t say anything out loud. She didn’t have to.
“Morning.”
Both Galina and Niko turned to see Theresa, tousle-haired and wearing a pair of sleep pants emblazoned with cartoon characters that Nikolai didn’t recognize. She yawned and gave Galina a small wave with her fingers half-curled. Galina let out a small, surprised laugh.
“Theresa? My God, it’s you! Look at you. You’re a woman.”
The women embraced—Galina wholeheartedly. Theresa hung back, throwing Niko a look over his mother’s shoulder. He understood her hesitance—there was history there, for sure. He had a bunch of his own.
“What are you doing here?” Galina asked.
“I came when I heard Babulya wasn’t doing well.” Theresa sat.
Galina waved a hand. “Of course you did. Everyone loved my mother, didn’t they? Even the ones who barely knew her.”
“I wouldn’t say I barely knew her,” Theresa replied evenly.
Galina laughed and put a delicate hand to her forehead. “Oh. Foolish of me. I’m sorry. Of course you did. I just had a moment.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Theresa gave Niko a shrug and crossed her arms over her belly.
“I’m g
oing outside for a smoke,” Galina said abruptly and left the living room.
Theresa waited until the sound of the back door had clicked shut before she spoke. “Okay, then.”
“Did you sleep all right?” Niko asked.
She laughed softly. “Yeah. But I woke up in the night to use the bathroom and forgot I wasn’t in my old room, so I miscounted the doors and almost peed in the linen closet. How weird is that?”
“Not the weirdest thing that ever happened in the linen closet, probably,” Niko said dryly.
“What’s going on? Who’s peeing in weird places? Did I miss the party?” Ilya padded into the living room in a pair of faded plaid boxers and nothing else. Saggy boxers, at that.
Niko grimaced. “Dude. Cover that shit up. Nobody needs to see your balls hanging out this early in the morning.”
Theresa snorted laughter behind her hand. She covered her eyes with the other. “Agreed. Get a robe or something!”
Ilya turned, wiggling his ass at the pair of them, much the way he’d done when they were younger. “What? This? What’s wrong with this? You got a problem?”
“Gross,” Theresa said matter-of-factly.
For a moment, it was so much the way it had been during that brief year and a half when they’d all been a family that nostalgia washed over Niko in a rush, almost making him dizzy. If he closed his eyes, he could be sixteen again, just learning how to shave and figure out girls. Before everything had started to change.
A rap on the front door got him to his feet, though it was already opening before he could get to it. More nostalgia when he saw who it was—Allie letting herself in the way she always had when they were kids, running back and forth between their two houses. She’d lived in this house for a time, he reminded himself, watching her.
When she’d been married to his brother.
The house phone rang, distracting him before he could do more than wave a greeting. Yesterday it felt like he and Allie had made a peace of sorts, and he was glad of that. They weren’t kids anymore, and it was stupid of them to hold on to any sort of old grudges. Plus, he felt terrible that she believed he’d ever thought she couldn’t measure up to her sister.
“Oh. Okay, thanks.” Ilya said into the receiver and settled the phone back into its cradle. He didn’t move after that but put one hand on the wall, near the pad of paper with the pencil attached to it by a long piece of string—probably the same pencil that had been there for years. The end of it was bitten, teeth marks clear in the yellow wood.
Alicia had looked like she was ready to say something to Niko, but at the sound of Ilya’s voice, she turned toward him instead. “Bad news? It’s Babulya? Has she taken a turn for the worse?”
Ilya faced them, expression calm. Nothing much on his face at all, as a matter of fact. He barely even blinked when Galina came in through the back door from the yard.
“She’s dead.”
CHAPTER TEN
Then
Theresa heard her father’s voice rising, rising, and he slammed the phone back into the cradle with enough force to send the pencil beneath it swinging hard against the wall. Turning, he caught sight of her standing in the hallway. It was her father there, for sure, but in that moment he wore a stranger’s face.
“What?” Galina came in from the back door, the faint waft of smoke still clinging to her. “Barry, what’s going on?”
He shook his head and jerked his chin toward Theresa, who only wanted to get a drink from the kitchen sink. “Not now.”
She would never figure out what he thought he could do by keeping the news from her, but it didn’t matter because Ilya burst in through the front door, screaming for his mother. Babulya shouted at him not to yell. Barry, who’d always butted heads with Galina’s oldest son, also tried shouting at him, but Ilya ignored them both, stumbling across the kitchen floor toward his grandmother. He nearly knocked her over with the force of his sudden embrace.
“Slow down, slow down,” Babulya said, trying to get him to make sense, but in the babble of words, all Theresa could make out was a name.
Jenni.
Jennilynn had been missing for the past two days. Nobody said it, but Theresa thought most everyone believed she’d run off with one of those older guys she’d been hanging around with. It was what Theresa thought, anyway.
“Go to your room, Theresa,” her father commanded.
Barry tried to wrestle Ilya off his grandmother, who was trying to calm him, but Ilya fought them both. It was a huge, loud tangle of arms and legs and shouting. Theresa couldn’t move, frozen in place, her stomach churning. Something had gone very, very wrong. All she could do was watch as Ilya hauled off and took a swing at her dad, who stepped out of the way without the punch landing. Galina moved in next, grabbing at his shirt, but Ilya wrenched himself from her grip.
Gentle hands and a murmured voice led Theresa away. Babulya sat her in the living room and patted her shoulder, leaning down to look into her face to reassure her that everything was going to be all right. From the kitchen came the sound of breaking glass. Then silence.
“They found Jennilynn.” Babulya’s fingers squeezed Theresa’s shoulder.
Theresa found her voice. “Where is she?”
“She was in quarry.” Babulya’s eyes were bright with tears. She frowned and shook her head, closing her eyes for a moment before looking again at Theresa. “She is gone.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Alicia balanced a pan of ravioli and a tuna-noodle casserole against her chest while she tried to open her front door. Food, so much food. Ilya’s kitchen table had groaned with it, and his fridge had been packed to overflowing, the freezer in the garage stuffed full. That’s what people did when you lost someone: they brought food. Babulya had been well loved in the community.
The service had been nice. Alicia had spent a few hours across the street, but too many people had turned to her to act as hostess for a house that was no longer hers. On the day they buried a woman who’d treated her like family, Alicia did not want to be irritated by anyone treating her like she was still Ilya’s wife, but there it was. That niggling, burning annoyance at the number of people who’d asked her where to find the paper plates or plasticware. Or the trash bags when they were being helpful by emptying the garbage can, and she ought to have been grateful for their kindness.
The fact she still knew where to find everything had annoyed her, too. Hell, she’d found an old bottle of her hand lotion in the bottom drawer of the upstairs bathroom. Still half-full. She’d tossed that in the garbage and spent the next fifteen minutes trying hard not to burst into tears.
It wasn’t that she wished she and Ilya were still together. It wasn’t that she wished they’d never been married, either. It was that there was someone missing here today to mourn the old lady’s passing.
Jennilynn’s memorial service had been held in the same funeral home. People had also brought food, gathering in the Sterns’ house because Alicia’s mother had been laid so low with grief that she’d been incapable of hosting anyone in their house, and Babulya had insisted on doing it for her.
Jennilynn should’ve been here to weep and laugh with them over all the stories they’d gathered to share about Babulya. She would have hunted for extra garbage bags and accepted all the condolence hugs, but in Jenni’s aching, endless absence, that duty had fallen to Alicia, and in that she had also stumbled and faltered, forever incapable of taking her sister’s place.
Now back in her own house, Alicia filled her freezer with food she knew she was never going to eat. She sat down at her kitchen table. She poured herself a glass of iced tea. She checked items off a list one at a time. She moved with stiff joints—robotic—and focused on putting her efforts into action, not emotions, until finally she had no more things to distract her, and she gave herself permission to weep.
No tears came.
Instead, a deep and unsettling exhaustion settled into her with liquid and relentless ease. Filling her up from the in
side, it weighted her bones. It scourged her.
Babulya had reached the end of a long and fruitful life; Jennilynn had never been given the chance. Her death colored nearly every decision Alicia had made after it happened. It had led her down the path to becoming Ilya’s wife, for better or for worse, and though she couldn’t bring herself to regret anything, in moments like this when she looked around at what her life had become, she couldn’t remember what she’d once dreamed of having.
The knock on her back door startled her, but the sight of who’d done the knocking surprised her even more. A tendril of embarrassment at being caught in such a melancholy moment twisted inside her. It might’ve been anyone, but of course it was him.
“Hey, sorry to bother you. I brought . . .” Nikolai lifted the casserole in his hands as though in apology. “We didn’t have room for this, either. Sorry.”
“No, don’t be. C’mon in.” She stood aside, too aware of his warmth as he pushed past her. “You can see if there’s any room in the freezer.”
Nikolai fit the casserole into the freezer and closed it. Turned to her. They stared at each other.
What might she have done with herself had her sister not died?
What might any of them have done?
“I had to get out of there,” she said quietly.
Nikolai scrubbed a hand over the top of his head and gave her a sideways glance. “Yeah. Me, too. I probably could’ve managed to find a place for that casserole over there somewhere. I really just wanted to get out of the house. I wanted to come over here.”
“It’s quieter here.”
“You’re here,” he said abruptly, then stopped.
Slowly, slowly, something twisted and tangled between them.
Did she move? Did he? All Alicia knew was that she was in his arms. The chair she’d been sitting on got knocked over because it had been between them.
