by Cassia Leo
New Orleans. And I am in Maine. And I have been asleep for—what did he say?—over a week? Shit.
Ana wanted her own bed, her own surroundings. She needed to feel in control even to breathe, and had not gained her beloved sense of control since awakening.
She remembered that accident from her youth, that horrible accident. I don’t understand how your daughter can sleep for a week and wake up perfectly fine, the doctor kept saying.
Do you remember sleeping for a week, Ana? her father had asked, when they were home again.
No, Daddy. The doctor’s questions had terrified her.
Don’t be scared, darling. It’s how your body protects itself against bad things. You go to sleep, and when you wake up, you’re all better. That’s not so scary, is it?
No, I guess not...
Jon was still staring at her, but when she started to take heavy breaths, he moved to sit on the edge of the bed and began examining her. He had his hand on her forehead, then pulled a stethoscope out of the nightstand. His close proximity was worsening her physical reaction. Go away, go away, go away. “Go away!”
He sat back, blinking. He is so strange. “I have medical training,” he explained, his eyes pleading for understanding. “I’ve been taking care of you while you were asleep.”
“You’re a vet,” Ana panted through her panic attack. Her toes were curling harder and her tongue was fixed to the roof of her mouth. Breathe.
“I know people medicine too,” Jon insisted. “I trained for years with my father. It’s a long story.” He sat back further, allowing her space. “We didn’t know when you were going to wake up. He would have been here, but he went to get food. I’m sure if he had known you were going to wake up he would have waited—”
She cut off his rambling. Jon was as terrible at small talk as she was, but that didn’t make it easier for her. “He?”
“Finn. My brother.” He looked concerned, as if he might need to ask if she knew her name and who was currently president.
“Oh.” Of course. Finn. Things were still fuzzy, but the connections were coming back. “I had been coming here to return his keys…”
“When you fell?”
Ana looked at the bed. “I guess that’s what I did.”
“You don’t remember?”
“It’s not that I don’t remember, but it happened so fast.” The rocks were slippery and the snow was whipping around her so furiously she couldn’t see her hands in front of her anymore. Her breathing was rapid again, and this time he didn’t ask for permission. He propped her head back up, offering her some more water, and then coaxed her, “You have to breathe.”
No shit.
Ana curled her toes tighter and slowed her breathing, forcing herself to calm down. She didn’t want to pass out again in this house.
“I should go,” she said, pushing herself up.
Jon laughed. It sounded unnatural coming from him. He was looking down, trying to hide it.
“Is that funny?” she asked, offended.
“No, it’s… here, let me show you something.” He came to help her out of bed. She wanted to refuse, but was still shaky and didn’t want to humiliate herself by falling on her face in front of him. He walked her to the window and her breath caught in her throat as she looked outside.
“Holy… mother of…” She started to fall, and Jon’s arms quickly righted her again.
“Yeah,” Jon said. “Over two feet deep. Roads are closed, the ferries are shut down, and we ran out of food because the storage tanks spilled.” He helped her back to the bed. She hated feeling weak, but appreciated the strong arm. “That’s why Finn went to get food.”
“How is he out getting food if the roads are closed?” Ana asked, as he helped lower her back onto the bed. For as much as she had wanted out of the bed, she felt exhausted and relieved to be back in it now. Then Cocoa jumped on to the blanket, startling her. She gasped as she saw, with relief, how nimble and healthy she looked. The cat rubbed up against her and purred loudly. Ana ran her hands over her soft fur, feeling a lump rise in her throat. He did this, and he’s been caring for her ever since.
“He took the snowcat.” Jon frowned, and Ana could see this disconcerted him. “If he doesn’t make it back tonight, we can expect him tomorrow.”
She didn’t say anything. These guys knew their snow. Certainly more than she had when she foolishly risked her neck to deliver some keys, of all things.
Jon pulled out a leather doctor bag and she resisted the urge to chuckle. I didn’t know those existed outside the movies.
She tried to sit still while Jon checked her pulse, her eyesight, her reflexes, and what seemed like a hundred other things. He asked her a series of questions to test her memory. Growing in confidence that Jon was trying to help, she was patient with the, perhaps overly thorough, exam.
“You seem to be okay,” he said, perplexed, as if he was expecting her to have no heartbeat, or be speaking in monosyllables. “I’ll have to monitor you, of course, but...” He was still touching the side of her head again, checking her neck, the base of her scalp. She wondered if maybe he wanted something to be wrong.
She noticed the large medical books lying open on the desk across the room. Or maybe he’s realized that I’m doing a heck of a lot better than I should be. Whether he had or not, Ana knew she needn’t explain it. He would never believe the truth even if she told him.
“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 already did,” she indicated 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. 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. 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.
***
35- AUGUSTUS
Augustus still remembered the day that Ekatherina Vasilyeva showed up at the Deschanel Media Group. Back then, they were preparing to sign a deal expanding the magazine beyond New Orleans. It was 1972, and everything had been much simpler.
Colin Sullivan, of Sullivan and Associates, had sent her over. An attorney friend, 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 Soviet 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 simply take Connelly’s word for it. He called the bu
siness 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 hope she can find a company to sponsor her. Would be such a shame if she was sent back to the USSR.
Augustus was twenty-two at the time and it was this youth that Joseph’s words appealed to. He knew what it was like to have obstacles to overcome on the way to the realization of a dream.
She was hired without an interview. 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. Nearing her twenty-second birthday, according to the new hire paperwork, she didn’t look a day over fifteen.
“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.
