“Mutti! Mutti! Bleib!”
I jolted awake in the gray light of a new day to the sound of someone shouting.
Not me this time, though. Yom…
”Mutti! Mutti! Bleib! Geh nicht. Bitte! Bitte!”
I lifted my head to find the most serious and confident guy I’d ever met writhing in bed. Obviously in the grips of some terrible nightmare.
Lydia
“Mutti! Mutti! Geh bitte nicht!”Yom shouted, his voice fractured with desperation, a raw plea in the dead of morning.
Was he speaking—shouting—in German? My chest lurched at the sound of his voice slicing through the early dawn quiet.
I didn’t understand his words, but I didn’t need to. His anguish was unmistakable. Heart pounding, I grabbed his shoulders, giving him a firm shake. “Yom, you’re having a bad dream. Come on, wake up.”
“Mutti! Mut—” His eyes snapped open, and he bolted upright, his breath ragged—the sound filling the small room, harsh and uneven, as though he’d just surfaced from drowning. His lean muscles tensed as though ready to fight, and the morning light spilling through the curtains highlighted the sheen of sweat across his chest.
“Was... Wo... ?” His gaze darted around, frantic, as if he still expected the nightmare to swallow him whole. Slowly, his eyes found me, and he exhaled, his body sagging slightly as he realized he was here, with me, in a Chicago hotel room.
“I am sorry for waking you.” His voice was rough as sandpaper, each word scraping out like it hurt to speak.
I shook my head. “I don’t care about that.” I moved closer, sitting up beside him. “Were you having some kind of nightmare?”
“It is nothing.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Go back to sleep.”
“Are you serious?” Concern twisted into something sharper and way more frustrating. “I’m not just going to roll back over and go to sleep after that. You sounded terrified, Yom.”
A flicker of emotion crossed his eyes—embarrassment, maybe even shame. He turned his head, jaw clenched. “It is?—”
“Something,” I cut in, refusing to let him shut me out. “Not nothing.Something. Obviously.”
He didn’t answer, and for a second, I almost let it go. The morning light turned everything gray and muted, but there was no hiding the tension in his shoulders, the way his whole body seemed to fold in on itself. He was trying so hard to appear unfazed, but I could tell something—some memory—was crushing down on him.
I reached out, gently placing my hand on his shoulder, feeling the taut muscles beneath my palm.
“You said no more misunderstandings.” I leaned in closer, squeezing his shoulder lightly, trying to meet his averted gaze. “That means no more shutting me out.”
Yom drew in a deep, shaky breath, his chest expanding, then deflating as he exhaled, his eyes still averted. His silence stretched between us, the weight of it pressing down on our fragile, new relationship.
Yom’s eyes closed briefly, his brows knitting together as if he were trying to decide whether to say anything at all. Then, just as I started to fear he’d retreat entirely, he spoke, his voice low, almost defeated. “It is old dream. Nightmare, as you say.”
He shook his head. “Christmas morning. My mother’s Christmas—not Russian Orthodox one. She woke me up early because my father said he will be making up work trip excuse so he can spend her favorite holiday with us. She is dressing me in special pajamas with a silly white bear in a red scarf holding a Coca-Cola bottle. She was… very happy.”
A small smile tried and failed to appear on Yom’s lips. “She told me I couldn’t open my presents until he got there. So, we are waiting and waiting. Until the sun is starting to lower in the sky, and my mother is no longer smiling.”
A shadow passed over his face. “She is then grabbing keys to the Maybach he bought for her and taking me to my father’s house in Rublevka—this is very nice neighborhood maybe twenty kilometers from our apartment in Tverskoy District. She is leaving me there on the house’s doorstep….”
His throat bobbed, but when he spoke again, his voice was flat, empty. “Then she is getting back in car, saying I am my father’s problem now since he is refusing for so long to leave his wife—Cheslav’s mother.”
My breath caught, and my chest tightened painfully, disbelief mixing with a surge of protective anger. “Oh my God, tell me she didn’t…”
“I cannot tell you this because she did leave me there for my father and his wife to raise.” Yom’s voice was a dead thing in the room. “But, of course, this is too much to ask of Cheslav’smother. They are sending me to boarding school as soon as it can be arranged. I was eleven.”
“Lydia, baby, I wish more than anything I could stay with you.”The memory of my birth mom whispering that to me before they put her on a ventilator came flooding back. I was nine.
She would have done anything to keep living for me. It was hard to imagine another single mother abandoning her child, no matter the reason.
