“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 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 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 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 her pain 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, 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 the keepsake into his pocket. Her large blue eyes blinked in surprise at his kindness.
Several days later, he returned the cross 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. 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 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, Anasofiya, 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 they would name their daughter after Catherine’s late sister, but that offered 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, not understading 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. The 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 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 chose 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. “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 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 the necklace 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 with the clasp. He fastened the sturdy lobster-claw, 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 normally reserved 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 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. Nor would he compare the circumstances, because then he might find that Ana’s trip to Maine was another version of Catherine’s wandering the halls in her nightgown.
* * *
36- OZ
“Fuck me sideways, it’s 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, and entirely unlike the weather 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 retorted.
“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 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 returned 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 he could disappear into his head without drawing attention to his mental absence.
He was thinking about Ana, going further back than that night in Treme. She had always been the girl 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 most 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 he was well aware of Ana’s flaws and 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.
“I don’t think in terms of limitations,” Nicolas was saying, leaning over the table in her direction. Oh, this act. The tough, no-nonsense, rogue without a cause.
“That’s a great philosophy to live by,” she was saying. Oz thought her head might fall off from all the nodding. She was trying to be coy, but was clearly already hooked. Why does this always work? “But Mother Nature is one hell of a force to reckon with.”
Nicolas sat back in his chair, unperturbed. His hair hung down into his eyes in messy waves. “People are cautious. And they should be. The cost of human life is… far… too dear,” he was saying, sounding not unlike William Shatner. Oz bit his lip, studiously focused on the bread and butter, trying not to give in to laughter.
“But,” he continued, leaning forward again, “caution is for the masses. Caution is—how should I say this?—smart, and it should be followed. Most of the time.” She was hanging on every word. “Rules are made for wise reasons, but every rule has an exception. I know that someone will be willing to take me to Summer Island. And if good sense gets in the way, cash is always a worthy motivator.”
She frowned. “How much cash?”
Nicolas sat back in his chair again. His bored expression implied he was done with the conversation, but Oz knew better. This was where she was about to get reeled in. “If you haven’t figured out by now that money isn’t an issue for me, then I doubt you can be of much help.”
She looked around, then lowered her voice, leaning forward. “I need to know some figures. I can’t ex
actly go to my father and ask him to turn the ferry lines back on.” She looked around, lowering her voice. Ah, so Nicolas did have a plan. The daughter of the man who runs the ferries. Slick. “But I do know some fishing boat captains, and a couple of them… well they might be interested if the price made it worth the risk.”
Nicolas and the young woman transitioned to full whispers after that and Oz only picked up bits and pieces. No matter. Nicolas would be filling him in soon enough. She left, returning ten minutes later, and they resumed their whispering.
Oz looked out the window at the grey, hazy skies and he could see nothing farther out than the docks. He’d be seeing whatever was beyond soon enough. He wondered again where Ana was, what she was doing. If she was okay. He tried not to think about how she would feel upon seeing him. There was a sinking shame anytime he thought about her leaving her home and friends so she could put his filthy mind at ease; how he had let her. He could have called, or written, asking her to come back... he could have done many things that he didn’t do. It’s why I’m here now. It matters. It has to matter.
“We’re in business,” Nicolas said after the girl left. “We leave tomorrow.”
That was easy, Oz thought as they finished their breakfast.
* * *
37- ALEX
Alex heard Finn before he saw him. The snowcat rumbled from a distance before the headlights flooded Alex’s back room. He worried for a while that Finn might have gotten lost, or broken down somewhere, so he was relieved, in a sense, to finally have him arrive.
He had time to think, and had decided what he wanted to do. Although the phones were down, Alex’s radio still worked. But contacting the sheriff was out of the question. Sheriff Horn had been a good friend of Andrew St. Andrews. The man was blindly protective of both boys, and was certainly not fond of Alex. He had no close or trusted friends on the island. He had half a mind to call the Coast Guard, but their first call would be to Horn, and then Alex would get an earful, or three. Horn would want proof, and Alex had none, other than his gut feeling.
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