Almost To The Altar

by Neesa Hart

  “Pop criticized everything I did. We’d never gotten along well, but after Maks died, things seemed to explode. I couldn’t replace Maks, but that’s what Pop wanted. We weren’t even allowed to talk about Maks around him.” She met Wil’s gaze. “Sometimes I wished I’d been the one who got killed.”

  “That’s not-”

  She shook her head to interrupt him. “You were the only one I could talk to about Maks, about how much I missed him, and how much my father hurt me. When I was twelve and you were fifteen, I kept thinking if I could just get you to love me, everything would finally be all right.”

  Wü flinched. “Elsa-”

  “Let me finish. You wanted to know, so know. There I was, twelve years old, walking around with this horrible guilt, thinking I was responsible for my brother’s death, and even my own father blamed me for what happened.”

  “He didn’t blame you,” Wil insisted. “It was an accident. He knew that. He just didn’t know how to deal with the pain.”

  She ignored him. “I had to fight for everything. I had to fight for friends. I had to fight to fit in. I had to fight to graduate. I had to fight for grades. I fought for my scholarship, and my college degree, and to get into law school. And on top of all that, I had to fight for the love of my own father. Every day after school, I came home and swept out his butcher shop.”

  She brushed an errant lock of hair off her forehead. “You know, one of the only times I ever remember my father showing me anything but indifference or disdain was shortly after he bought the butcher shop. I’d come in from school, and before we did anything, he’d put a nickel in the jukebox so I could stand on his feet and learn how to dance.”

  At the memory, a wave of sadness caused tears to sting the backs of her eyes. “But that was before Maks died. Every day afterward, I walked out of one world and into another. Every day, the only thing I had that seemed real to me was you. When Maks was gone, you stepped into his shoes for me. I loved you, Wil. I always loved you.”

  She started to cry now, and she wiped the tears with the back of her hand. “By the time I was eighteen and you were twenty-one, I didn’t think a part of me existed without you. You were a junior at Northwestern, and I had just gotten a scholarship to the University of Illinois. You kept telling me that things were going to turn out okay, and I kept believing you.

  “You told me things would be different when I got to college. It wasn’t supposed to be so hard anymore, but it was. I was still the Russian girl with the funny name and the parents who barely spoke English. I worked twenty hours a week and carried a full course load, and still couldn’t make myself fît in. I got turned down for sororities. I had people send me nasty letters and accuse me of being a communist. I even got a couple of threats.”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw him tense. “You never told me.”

  “When I was with you, I didn’t want to talk about any of that. You were the only person in the world that made me feel content. I was so busy, and working so hard, we only saw each other on breaks. I didn’t want to spoil it by whining.”

  “I never imagined you weren’t happy.”

  “With you, I was,” she said quietly. “That’s all that mattered. After you graduated, everything changed. That summer before you went to Harvard to get your M.B.A.— I’ll never forget that. Having you love me was like having my world completed. I loved you so much. I didn’t care what happened, or how long we had to wait. I was ready to go to the end of the world with you.”

  “Except to Massachusetts.”

  At his quip, she gave a halfhearted laugh. “Want to know something?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “The only reason I didn’t many you that summer was because of my scholarship. If I’d gone to Harvard with you, I’d have had to give up my scholarship. My whole life, I’d been somebody’s financial burden. I didn’t want that to happen to you and me.”

  “It wouldn’t have been a burden, Elsa.”

  “To me it would have. I was terrified that you’d start to resent me the same way Pop did.”

  His mouth pressed into a tight line. “He never resented you.”

  “It felt like he did.” She shook her head when he would have argued. “When you left for Massachusetts, I thought I was going to die. I did the only thing I knew to fill the void. I increased my course load, and my work load, and buried myself in schoolwork.”

  “That’s why you graduated in three years.”

  “Yes. I went to summer school every year, just to avoid having to live at home. The first summer, you worked coop in the city, and we didn’t see each other much. The sec-!!ond year, you were offered that job, and we both decided you should stay in Boston.”

  “I still wanted to marry you.”

  “I know, but your career was taking off, and you needed time to concentrate on that.”

  His laugh was harsh. “I concentrated so hard, I practically let it kill me.”

  She ignored that. “Pop and I had grown even farther apart, and I couldn’t stand being there with him. I kept holding on to the idea that soon I’d be with you, and none of it would matter. When I turned twenty-one, you gave me that Pierce-Arrow hood ornament.”

  “With that stupid card.”

  “It was a nice card. I still have it. How many women have a man tell them she’s pierced his heart?”

  “How many men are lovesick enough to put something like that in writing?”

  “Not many. That’s why I loved it. We’d become lovers the summer before, but the day you gave me that hood ornament, that’s the day I let you have my soul. I’d never been happier in my life.”

  When Wil didn’t respond, Elise continued. “For the first time, things seemed to be going my way. My relationship with Pop was still rocky, but he seemed proud that I was going to law school. He actually told me the day I left that he thought Maks would be happy for me.

  “When I got to school, things were better,” she told him. “Part of it was just maturity. I was older, and I was with older people. I was secure in our relationship, and I didn’t feel the need to compete so hard anymore. I started to make new friends, to set goals. After almost twenty years, I felt like I’d found my niche.” She stopped, feeling more than a little foolish for the way she’d rattled on. Once the words had begun, they’d tumbled out, one after the other, in an unstoppable flood. She felt vaguely like a sinner in confes-!!sion.

  “Is this where you tell me what happened that day at the butcher shop?” Wil prompted.

  She nodded. “I got my notice that I’d passed the bar that day. It was a Friday afternoon, and you were on your way from Chicago. I had told you I was expecting the letter that weekend, and you were coming home to either celebrate or console me. I went by the garage first, but you hadn’t arrived yet, so I went to tell Pop at the butcher shop. When I walked in, I went through the usual routine. I put on my apron and started sweeping out the back. He was with a couple of customers, and didn’t come back to see me right away. When he got there, he made some comment about how pleased he was that his daughter, the soon-to-befamous lawyer, still knew how to use a broom. I handed him the letter from my apron pocket and kept sweeping.”

  Elise paused, momentarily overcome by the force of the memory. Her father had glanced at the letter, at first not understanding what it meant, then finally realized that she’d passed the bar and was now eligible to practice law in Illinois. For the first time in years, he’d hugged her. It had felt so good, so right to be there and share that moment with him. Bellowing up the stairs, he’d called her mother down to look at the letter. Nikki had come racing into the shop.

  Elise squeezed her eyes tight to keep the tears from falling, then continued with the story. “He read it, and once he understood what it meant, he was ecstatic. He called Mama downstairs, and started to read the letter out loud to her. That’s when he noticed the name.”

  Wil’s fingers tightened on hers. “The name?”

  She glanced at him in s
urprise. “That’s what started the argument. You don’t know, do you?”

  “I want to hear this from you first. I’ll tell you the way I heard the story when you’re done.”

  Frowning, she continued. “He got angry. Mama kept trying to calm him down, and I kept trying to tell him it didn’t mean anything. He wanted to know why I couldn’t be a Krestyanov and be a lawyer. He just kept yelling at me about how I’d turned my back on him, and on my family. And then he told me I’d betrayed Maks’s memory.”

  She fought a brief war with a fresh surge of tears, and won. Barely. “That was the last straw, Wil. I was twentyfive years old, and I couldn’t keep accepting responsibility for Maks’s death. I was so upset. I didn’t know what else to do. I ran all the way down the street, and I was so relieved when I saw your car parked in front of the garage.”

  “I had just gotten in,” he remembered.

  “And I needed you. I needed you so much. I was crying so hard, it took you twenty minutes to get the story out of me. By the time I finished explaining that Pop had practically thrown me out of the house, you were staring at me like I’d grown a second head.”

  Wil felt her hurt. His reaction that day had been rash and, to Elsa, irrational. She couldn’t possibly know how the emotional turmoil he’d struggled with for the past five years had affected him that afternoon. Since the day he’d made love to Elsa, he’d walked around in stark terror that something was going to keep them apart. Knowing she loved him had seemed too good, too potent, to last. He’d been seized by an almost uncontrollable urge to bind her to him in every way imaginable. When she refused to marry him, wanted to wait, he’d spent five long years in terminal terror.

  Always Maks’s memory had hung over them, like the sword of Damocles.

  By the time she passed the bar, Wil had begun to believe they could have a future. He’d convinced himself that he could carry the truth about Maks to his grave, if only he had Elsa to chase away the fear. When she forced him to choose between her parents and her, that hope had been destroyed.

  He doubted she’d ever fully understand his rejection until he told her about Maks. The irony of it twisted his stomach into knots. Once again, Maks had left him help-!!less.

  With a grim sigh, he realized that all he could do, all he would do, was try to explain that he hadn’t been rejecting her that day. It had been the choices she’d made, the ones he’d feared making himself. “I’m going to try and explain something to you,” he told her, “and I hope we’ve come far enough that you’ll try and listen to me.”

  She turned to stare out the window once more. He saw her shoulders slump forward. The defeated gesture made his chest hurt. Slowly, lest he startle her, he pressed her hand to his chest. Elsa tensed, but didn’t pull away. “My mother died when I was so young, and after Maks, well, your mother needed another kid to take care of. I became her son. She became my mother. You were my family. I couldn’t choose between you.”

  “I never asked you to.”

  “I didn’t feel like you’d left me any choice. I kept thinking I could fix it,” he told her. “If I just worked hard enough at it, I could fix it. All I had to do was make you and your father see reason.” Gently he tugged on her hand until she faced him. Tears had left streaks on her face, and he ached to pull her into his arms. “When I went to talk to your father the day you left, I’d never seen him so upset. He kept telling me how you’d betrayed him, how you’d told him you were ashamed of who you were, and what you’d come from. He told me you’d insisted that you wanted more out of life than he could ever give you, that he’d failed you.”

  Elsa gasped. “Wil, I never—”

  He squeezed her hand to interrupt her. “I was angry, and frustrated, and the people around me were hurting.”

  “And you believed him,” she said.

  All too clearly he remembered the night Andrei had put away a bottle of vodka while telling Wil about Elise’s actions and about how much he missed Maks. Dear, sainted Maks. Wil beat back a bitter wave of anger. Releasing a long breath, he said, “I kept telling myself that I didn’t let anybody hurt my own people. I didn’t want to believe him, Aina.”

  Elise’s shoulders jerked with the force of a sob. “But you did.”

  “What was I supposed to think? You were barely speaking to me, and Andrei, he seemed so—defeated.”

  “I never said those things. I can’t believe he told you that I did.”

  “He was drunk. He was devastated.”

  “And his command of English has never been that good. You shouldn’t have taken his word so quickly, Wil. No wonder you turned on me.”

  He gave her a pained look. “So why don’t you tell me exactly what you argued about?”

  “You still don’t know, do you?”

  “No. Andrei never talks about you. Your mother, she and I have spoken about it, but not about the argument. Every time I brought it up, she said it was between you and your father.”

  Beside him, he heard Elsa draw a deep breath. “The day I got my notice that I’d passed the bar was the first time my father found out I’d legally changed my name from Elsa Krestyanov to Elise Christopher.”

  Wil glanced at her in sharp surprise. “What?”

  She nodded. “It almost seems silly, doesn’t it?”

  “You changed your name? Legally?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It just seemed easier that way.”

  “That’s what the argument was about?”

  “Yes. Believe me, you’re not the only one who wants to know how something like that could cause an entire family to crumble.”

  “I can’t believe he never told me.” He fixed her with a hard look. “I can’t believe you never told me.”

  “You didn’t ask.” He heard the bitter note in her voice.

  “Your father’s a very proud man, Elsa. Surely you knew something like this was going to hurt him.”

  “I don’t know what I thought. I was young. I was ambitious. It wasn’t a conscious thing on my part.”

  “If you’d known he would react the way he did, would you have done it?”

  Elsa seemed to think it over. “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “If I had it to do again, I don’t know whether or not I’d make the same decisions.”

  “Why do you think your father told me what he did?”

  “Because he knew you’d believe him,” she said.

  The harsh statement wounded him. “I don’t think so. I think he was too ashamed to tell me the truth.”

  Elsa’s eyes registered her hurt. “It’s not like I went out and defamed my family honor, Wil.”

  “He thought you did.”

  “And I could never make him understand that I hadn’t done it because I was ashamed, or embarrassed.” With a soft groan, she buried her fingers in her hair. With her elbows braced on her knees, she looked weary, as if the weight of the memories had drained all the life from her spirit. “God, this is such a mess.”

  “Elsa,” he said, laying a hand on her knee. “He’s hurting, too.”

  She didn’t try to deny it. “In fairness to him, I don’t think Fop was reacting to the fact that I changed my name. I think he was reacting to the fact that we’d argued for almost twenty years. He’d never forgiven me for Maks’s death, and I’d never forgiven him for wanting me to take Maks’s place. The argument that day was the end result of a lot of bitterness and hurt.”

  Wil contemplated the information, thought about Andrei’s harsh words, about his anger, and found the resent-!!ment he’d felt toward Elsa for so long begin to ebb away. In its place was a sickening sense of guilt, and the first bitter taste of anger toward the man who had misled him. He’d believed Elsa’s father. When Andrei told him the story of the argument, he’d believed him. For years he’d respected the older man like a second father. At the time, Wil had been so frustrated with the way Elsa had virtually fled, he’d let his temper override his common sense. It was no wonde
r she felt like he betrayed her. How could he have been such a fool not to trust her? “I didn’t know. My God, you have to believe me. I assumed—Oh, hell, I don’t know what I thought, but I had no idea that’s what happened.”

  She leaned back in her chair again, studying him with a contemplative gaze. “I felt so hurt that night. I needed you so much, and the few times I tried to talk to you, you were so angry.”

  He shook his head. “I was a fool.” Warily he met her gaze. “And. I hurt you, Elsa. I never wanted to.”

  She ignored the soft confession. “No wonder you were so surprised when you picked me up on Friday.”

  “Does my father know what happened?”

  She shrugged. “He knew I’d changed my name. I’m not sure if he knows anything about the argument or not. Jan has a remarkable capacity for understanding.”

  At the bitterness in her voice, regret flooded his soul. “We wasted ten years, Aina.”

  “Time seemed to slide by while I wasn’t watching,” she said. “That first year, I kept trying to call, to send letters, anything to get Pop to talk to me, but he wouldn’t. He’d completely withdrawn from me. It was like living through Maks’s death all over again. After that, I gave up. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Because he didn’t have answers, because both of them were worn out from the long-overdue conversation, they lapsed into silence. Wil leaned back against the couch with a weary sigh.

  “We’ve really made a mess of things, haven’t we?”

  “I guess. But it’s in the past now, Wil. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “I don’t want things to end like this.”

  “Wil, I-”

  He couldn’t stop himself from raising his hand to her face. “Aina, if you believe one thing I told you tonight, I want it to be that I never intended to hurt you.”

  “I know.”

  “But I did. Deeply. What would I have to do to make it right?”

  “It’s not a matter of making it right, it’s just a matter of forgiveness.” She glanced at her engagement ring. “I have a new life now. I’ve put the past behind me. It’s time you did that, too.”