This is what Marina Yaganishna does at the AA meeting.
She introduces herself to everyone.
Tries to act like she doesn’t know anything at all about bottle-red-haired-child-spoiling-Mom Cathy, or beauty-queen-for-Jesus Laura, or toilet-plungered-Art-Garfunkel Jim, Lexus-lawyer Jim, Saint Bob, or any of them.
She eats half a doughnut, gives Anneke the other half, watches Anneke eat two more.
Anneke has put on a little weight, but she carries it well.
Anneke is happy.
When Chancho speaks, Marina dims the good Presbyterian fluorescents above their yellowing Presbyterian screens, then brightens them again, stopping before they pop. He cuts his eyes to her, but she just looks back at him with those calm, tilted blue icon eyes of hers.
Chancho speaks.
“I used to be in a lotta bad stuff, down in Texas, Mexico. Since I was a kid, drinkin’ beer and raicilla, which is made from agaves but not like the stuff they give the tourist but the stuff somebody made at home. Always in trouble. Most of the boys in my family, they went to guns and drugs, and I did too, at first. Bad stuff, bad stuff. You see it on the news now, how bad it’s got, but it’s never been good. I got out of Matamoros, went up to Houston, still got mixed up too much, drinkin’ Shiner was okay but cocaine and tequila and whiskey, I ruin my boxing. Got arrested. Went to Austin and started getting clean, workin’ in a garage, but was still too close to it all. Met my wife, Consuela, married her, almost got happy but addiction don’t let nobody be happy. I hit her not one time but two times, and she shouldn’t’a stayed, but I thank God every day she did. Said she had people up north and why didn’t we come up here, get away from all that. I said okay. It was good. I got eight years sober now, and I know it don’t never go away. My family come up, some of them still in the life I was in, and it was hard to say no to some of the stuff they wanted me to do with them. But I did. I said ‘My food is your food, and stay as long as you want, but don’t you bring that in my house.’ So some of them got a hotel. Maybe I should have warned you if you was gonna stay in the Days Inn in Oswego not to tell nobody to turn the music down if you heard accordions or somebody singin’ about corazón. All Mexican songs got the word corazón. I think it’s a law. Anyway, the temptation was on me, ’specially around my cousin Julio, who got good shit, the best in Chihuahua, and he’s a fun dude, too. But I was drivin’ down 104 to the Days Inn thinkin’ maybe just this one time cause I ain’t seen these muchachos since back in the day, and Consuela won’t never know, you know how that song goes, and no sooner had I thought that than BAM! Out pops this dog, an I almos’ hit him, he glance off the tire. He’s a old dog, too, vet thinks he’s between eight and ten years old. Been on his own for a while, all dirty, got some mange and fleas, lotsa fleas. But I didn’t know about that yet. If I’d’a known how much he gonna cost me at the vet, I mighta not take him. So I pull over and pick this chingado dog up, take him to the hotel with me, and all the dudes were drinkin’ and smokin’ and snortin’ and effin’ with his ears, he look like a beagle, with a white smutch on his face like a máscara. And you can go ooooooo in his face an’ he’ll howl back at you, too. Anyway, I think God sent me that dog to remind me. So I kept him. My buddy An’ . . . Marina. My friend Marina, you just met her tonight, she’s a friend’a Andrew’s, she said she thinks his name was Caspar because of that mask. But I want to call him Ocho because he remind me not to blow my eight years. But he answers to Caspar, guess she was right. But I call him both. His name is Caspar Ocho Morales. Good name for a fighter. Good name for a dog.”
134
“I don’t want to do this. But I have to. He’s dangerous, even without her, if he is without her. It’s not just revenge, although I suppose there is an element of that. I hate what he did. I miss Radha.”
Marina is sitting on her leather couch, her ash-blond hair up in a samurai bun, speared by a cherrywood fork. She wears a light gray wool sweater she just got at the mall. Anneke took her shopping. All her clothes are new, except the Japanese robe.
The hammering from the roof has stopped. The contractors are lunching in the yard, gobbling down subs from the Oswego sub shop. This was the first, best chance she had to Skype with the overweight but oddly handsome man in California.
San Francisco.
[email protected].
“I understand she was good,” the man says.
“She was. But she said you were better.”
“We’ll see.”
“You’ll help me?”
Sealiongod nods, smiling a little.
“I’m feeling patriotic. Let’s do this.”
He’s still young. He enjoys this shit.
Like Radha did.
Andrew-in-Marina just feels ill.
135
Yuri sits at his computer, the cat purring on his lap. The cat with the upside-down tail. Yuri nurses a glass of powdered cherry drink and vodka, his upper lip stained with a faint, reddish mustache.
“What’s this?” he says.
An e-mail from Marina Yaganishna.
He doesn’t want to read it—Baba Yaga has left him alone for months, and he fears this communication from her daughter might herald new demands, new threats, more bad dreams. But not opening it could be much, much worse.
Could it be spam?
An attachment titled Naughty boy gets stoned with Santa suggests it is.
And it’s only September.
Christmas already?
Maybe he won’t open that.
No, he decidedly will not open the attachment.
He reads the e-mail.
Yuri,
Open this attachment immediately.
—Marina
Yuri opens the attachment.
A video.
Marina sits before a television screen, wearing only a Japanese robe. The right-pointing delta of the start symbol goads him. He clicks it. The beautiful woman in the Japanese robe animates, speaks.
American-accented Russian?
“Yuri. Watch the screen. My friend in California put this together for me. I want to thank you for what you did in Chicago. To the witch Radha. Watch!”
Turn it off, Yuri.
But he can’t turn it off.
Baba will know if he doesn’t watch it.
He instinctively hides his teeth with his hand.
The television in the video comes on.
An old man with a short, white beard is sitting on a sled, behind reindeer. He wears the red hat and robes of Father Christmas, his hat garnished with holly and pine. He is preparing to read a story to a group of bouncy little children. Snow behind him.
This doesn’t look like California.
“Michael. Michael Rudnick,” Marina says.
The old man looks confused for a second, then looks at Marina.
Nods.
Closes the book.
The bouncy children have all gone still, frozen in place while the Santa-man continues to move.
A trapdoor?
Who is this old fucker?
“Michael, the man I want you to wish a Merry Christmas is in that camera.”
Father Christmas nods.
Smiles.
Looks at the camera.
Speaks English.
“Ho Ho Ho! You’ve been a very naughty boy, Yuri. It is Yuri, right?”
Turn the computer off!
The man’s eyes flash.
A loud CRACK fills Yuri’s apartment.
The cat is caught leaping, turns to heavy Vermont granite in midair.
Lands with a loud CRASH!
Breaks in half.
Yuri is frozen reaching for the mouse.
His momentum carries him forward, topples him into his computer, destroying and toppling that.
The man downstairs bangs against the floor
in protest.
A woman next door shrieks at Yuri, her voice scarcely muffled by the plaster.
“I’m tired of your noises, Yuri! Go to bed! Go to bed! Go to bed!”
Coda
St. Petersburg, Russia.
November.
The Singer Café on the second floor of the Dom Knigi bookstore on Nevsky Prospect.
A troika of women sits jet-lagged in the warm, green room while outside the sky threatens to spit snow again, as it did all the rough ride down to the Pulkovo airport this morning.
“We’re not here for magic,” Marina Yaganishna says.
“I know. But, what, are we just going to leave it here?” Anneke says, tucking the last corner of her tuna sandwich in her mouth.
The red-haired girl with the scarred nose and cheeks looks out the window, looks at the Kazan cathedral down below. She has spoken rarely since they got on the plane at JFK; she stirred from her heavy-lidded Xanax-and-vodka-induced stupor only long enough to change planes in Moscow; she hated the plane, hated everything about it, made it clear that she would rather overdose than be awake knowing she was over the ocean.
She doesn’t like water now.
Or seafood.
She nearly vomited the first time she saw a mussel.
“I have been to this church, I think,” she says in Russian, pointing down at the cathedral, which bears more than a passing resemblance to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
“Speak English, please,” Marina says to her.
“Why? You claim to speak Russian.”
“I do.”
“Like an Ohio housewife,” she manages in English.
“And when you speak Russian you sound like a spoiled tsarina who needs a whipping.”
Nadia smiles at that.
She looks at Anneke now, stirring her hot chocolate with chili. The chocolate is so thick it barely runs off the spoon.
“I have been to this church,” she says in English. “There are statues of generals from Napoleon’s inversion.”
“Invasion is what I think you want to say,” Anneke says.
“It was a bit of an inversion,” Marina says.
“Thank you for including me,” Anneke says to Nadia, trying not to sound like a smartass—it isn’t lost on her that she may be speaking to the last living person who saw prerevolution St. Petersburg, but she needs to make her point to Andrew (she has trouble calling him Marina). She swivels her gaze to Marina Yaganishna. “But the book. Really, are we just going to leave it here?”
All three of them look at the book now.
It appears to be a Soviet-era book on trees, complete with greasy plastic cover and line drawings of leaves and happy Soviet children playing in the woods, although their playing always looks like building or marching. Andrew sees past the book’s disguise immediately. Anneke takes a few blinks. Nadia can’t see what it really is. Not yet.
Andrew reads the actual title again.
“Magical Gardens: How to Make Anything Grow Anywhere. With a Discussion of Healing Herbs and Poisons. 1913.”
This is a handwritten book bound in brown leather with yellow stitching.
“I just don’t see the harm in buying this and bringing it back.”
Marina looks at Anneke over her glasses.
“You don’t see the harm because you didn’t have to get out of the Soviet Union with magical books after being brutalized by a witch.”
“I have been brutalized by a witch.”
“You have been gently brutalized by a witch for a very short period of time. And it had nothing to do with books.”
“Menopause isn’t going easy on you, Mr. Blankenship.”
Marina laughs despite herself.
“Just get the damned book if you want it. You’re a grown-up.”
“I was going to. How’s the chocolate?”
“Spicy deliciousness. Try it.”
Anneke’s spoon floats down.
Nadia dips into it, too, her expensive perfume filling Anneke’s nose.
Can’t call her fish-cunt anymore. She smells better than I do.
Marina looks at the cathedral now, too.
“When I was here, that was a museum of atheism.”
“You’re shitting me,” Anneke says.
“Nope. They had a big statue of Lenin, monk’s penance chains, lots of anti-religious quotes. One of the guides told me they toned it down. Used to have a painting called Christ the Oppressor. Thumbscrews and all that, too, but it didn’t play well with visitors.”
“Lenin was a pig. I can’t believe they named my city after him,” Nadia says. Her voice is different now. Softer, even when she says harsh things. She has lived with Anneke and Marina for two months now as they figure out what they all are to each other. Anneke and Marina are lovers, more frequently than they were when Andrew was Andrew, but there is still something cautious, reserved about it. It took them more than a month even to kiss.
Nadia has a boyfriend, Chancho’s handsome, beard-rubber-banding employee, Gonzo. Not as smart as Nadia, but really handsome.
Voice like molasses.
She met him while bartending at the Raven on Bridge Street in Oswego.
She is not luminous, but Anneke is teaching her magic anyway, hoping she’s got the brains and persistence to plod her way into magic.
It is slow, slow going.
“Anyway, maybe herbs and shit are this one’s bag. She’s not getting the stone and rock thing at all.”
“I hate the rock spells. I feel like a rooster pecking at a pearl,” Nadia says.
Then she brightens, sits upright.
“We have to go to the summer gardens!” she says, wide-eyed. “There is a statue there. Krylov, the writer for children. My father used to read me fables under his statue, using animals’ voices! ‘The Cat and the Cook’!”
This is the most animated either of them has seen her in Russia.
This is why they came.
“I remember,” she says.
Then she takes both of their hands, looks at each of them in turn.
Although she occupies the same shell, she is unrecognizable as the monster that drowned Mikhail Dragomirov and so many others.
She’s a warm-blooded young woman, little more than a girl.
When she speaks they don’t know if she means them or St. Petersburg.
It could be them.
They have become an odd sort of family.
An odd sort of coven.
Nadia cries when she says it.
“I’m home.”
Acknowledgments
I hope my agent, Michelle Brower, isn’t getting tired of my sincere thanks, but she earns them again and again with her advocacy, positivity, and good counsel. I am also grateful to Sean Daily at Hotchkiss and Associates for fielding endless naïve questions about the film and television industry, and to Tom Colgan, editor and friend, for his faith in me. His assistant, Amanda Ng, is so competent, professional, and effective as to be almost invisible; but I conjure her to thank her here. Naomi Kashinsky and her father, Alan, were invaluable to my Russian research, as was Ambassador Robert Patterson, who was in Moscow around the time our protagonist would have visited that city on his way to a very poor foreign travel experience indeed. Captain K. R. Kollman, USMM, was in the right place at the right time to assist me with questions about Coast Guard procedure. Steve Townsend was my chief Enon resource. My good friend Eric Brown, poet, father, musician, and the unofficial Mayor of Yellow Springs, Ohio, makes a cameo here; thanks to him, as well as to Dino for use of his bathroom. Cookie and Gene Schoonmaker-Franczec shared their Sterling, New York, home and stories with me; Cookie’s studio served as the model for Anneke’s, but I’m pretty sure all similarities between them end there. Thanks to readers/listeners/supporters Kelly Cochran Davis, Patrick Joh
nson, Dan Fox, Ciara Carinci, Angela Valdes, Cyrus Rua, and Elona Dunn, but especially to Jennifer Schlitt and Noelle Burk, whose early enthusiasm for this story affected its trajectory in all the best ways.
A special thank-you to director Gary Izzo, who has been quietly pursuing comedic and artistic excellence in the woods of Cayuga County, New York, for more than thirty years now; had he not first cast me as a Bless the Mark player at the Sterling Renaissance Festival in 1992 (and many times since), I never would have come to the beautiful hills, cliffs, and farmland that compose West Central New York, I never would have joined the strange and wonderful tribe that gave me so many enduring friendships, and you would not be holding this book.
Finally, thanks to the Burly Minstrel, Jim Hancock, whose ready guitar and mellow voice provided the soundtrack to a great many heartbreakingly beautiful sunsets on the very same McIntyre Bluffs that figure in this story.
I am blessed in my associations.
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